Unhooking From Spirituality, Conscious Mothering and Personal Branding
So I can wholeheartedly, unapologetically BELONG TO MYSELF
Hello friends, if you’re new here, welcome. I’m Sarina, Mother, writer, artist and somatic-based mentor. I write to hold us to a truer, braver expression of ourselves. For more, check out my Hero post.
The agony of feeling like I didn’t belong plagued me ever since I can remember.
I tried so hard to fit in, adopting beliefs and styles, forcing bigger smiles, overextending to be ‘kind’, depleting myself and becoming disillusioned and lonely in the process.
When I was pregnant I felt more at home and powerful in my body than ever.
I was guilt-less with boundaries, my discernment and intuition was heightened.
I knew exactly how I was going to birth and didn’t bend to any pressure as a ‘higher risk’ woman (just because I was 39).
A primal badassary in me wasn’t just activated, it was re-ignited.
It had always belonged to me, but I’d abandoned it constantly to not cause trouble and to fit in.
Now I challenge all assumptions and pressures of ‘how we are supposed to behave’, and anything that burdens me, I unhook from, one by one.
This is the way I get to belong to myself.
My spiritual saccharine era is well and truly over.
I’m more than done with trying to act and sound more evolved than I am.
I’m more than done with taming and shaming myself in the name of ‘spirituality’,
Where I shaved off my edges and held my tongue, and placed ‘non-judgment’ on a pedestal it didn’t ask to be on.
Then judged myself when I couldn’t perfectly conform.
Finally, I remembered that at the unsmothered core of me, is the intelligence of my aversions - the eww factor, the ick that tells me, ‘This person’s full of shit.’
I remembered that judgement can actually serve me.
Ohh how I bored myself stupid with abstract flowery language that avoided what I actually want to say!
My 80-year old self will wet her nana knickers when she remembers all this.
It was like this tacit agreement, in which we all talk around the edges of the actual.fucking.point.
When we were all just gagging for light some relief,
Like a great big belly laugh from a totally inappropriate joke, the ones we forget we actually get to make
-minus any superstition about the kind of karma we’re creating.
How bloody refreshing it is to engage with people who are not ‘on the spiritual path’, who are just kind and generous and funny and yes, they might say something that would make a ‘conscious’ person recoil,
but isn’t their purpose to show us how uptight we are?
Now that I’ve unhooked from how-I should-behave-as-a-spiritual-woman, I have a helluva lot more energy for LIFE.
I’m here to belong to the unapologetic pulsing paradox of my humanness.
And do spirituality on my own terms.
Before I finally belonged to myself as a mother, I made motherhood so much harder than it already was.
I was caught up in trying to get it right, caught up in ‘healing’ and needing to break cycles.
I abandoned my intuition, constantly overriding it with ‘how I should be better’ and exhausted myself daily.
I was unknowingly complicit in the systemic, collective unworthiness that taught mothers not to trust themselves; that they better outsource their answers.
The same collective unworthiness that encourages us to culturally homogenise our parenting, where we’re all going round saying the exact same thing to our kids.
Like bloody robots.
Children are no fools. They feel us in our words, or they don’t.
They feel our hearts engaged, or they don’t.
No parenting script is gonna save us from the necessary initiations of fucking up, and the necessary repair process.
Each time I recited a script to my about-to-lose-it toddler, there was a murmur of self-betrayal.
I wasn’t belonging to myself, as an individual, or as a mother.
My authenticity was traded for trying so hard to be some kind of revolutionary mother.
I didn’t trust that who I was, was enough.
Now, unhooked from caring how it looks to others in the playground or the café or the supermarket, I mother from the expression of exactly where I’m at, mostly calm and kind, sometimes cracking.
Because my daughter doesn’t need a model for I’m-trying-so-hard-I’m-dying-inside, she needs a model for a woman who embraces her brilliance and beauty as well as her mess.