The Fall Busyness

The month of back to routine, the month where every activity starts and everyone seems to be going in different directions. It can feel chaotic, I often feel like I am running around without my head as they say trying to bring it all together and make sure everything is organized. I know I am not alone in that this time of year- especially if you have littles or kids to also account for. Often this busyness can leave us feeling disconnected from life, from self, from our loved ones. It can feel like we are trying our best and doing all the right things and taking our kids to the right places and activities - school, sports, extra curriculars. And sometimes there can be this feeling that you feel more distant, disconnected, a bit lost even.

The thing is our nervous system is not designed to keep this fast-paced, often high-stress lifestyle for the long term. We need pauses, spaces of slow, of where it seems like maybe we aren’t doing much - we need these spaces to integrate for our system to move toward more of a parasympathetic space, our littles and kids need this too. They also need slowness, and intentionality, and time to connect quietly to themselves, to their caregivers, to nature, to life.

When we keep ourselves and our families running in high gear we can often exist in a sympathetic charge for a lot of the time - telling our body we need to be on alert and our nervous systems are working harder than they need to be to try and keep up. Taking intentional rest is not a fad, or a buzz word but necessary for our nervous system to find some regulation, we need the space to ride the wave back down, we can’t just keep going up and up and up.

The key word also being INTENTIONAL rest, which is different from numbing out and checking out (which can serve their purpose too). But slow quiet time of connection. So think about as you're planning your month of back to everything and then somewhere can you put in pockets of intentional connection - cuddling with your animal or a loved one, drinking tea and watching the clouds, where can you create this connection with your kids. Meeting them where they are at - reading or going for a nature walk and marveling at all the beauty you find. These spaces tell their nervous systems they are safe too, they can let their guard down and connect to themselves to you to life on a deeper level.

Wishing you a soft return back to it all this September.

What is a regulated nervous system?

Somewhere along the way we’ve adopted this notion of regulating our nervous system. But the implied meaning is to regulate is to be calm, to be grounded, to be calm. But that's only part of the story.

Regulation is to have access to all parts of the nervous system

That means you have access to yes the calm the grounding the connection, and you have access to the energy, the anger the fight, the flight. Both the parasympathetic charge and sympathetic charge

It would be a sign of an unhealthy and unregulated nervous system if you reported feeling calm and grounded all the time - it may suggest you are actually living in more of a freeze state - which can happen without us really realizing it.

A healthy nervous system has appropriate responses in life scenarios - when it's a situation that should cause anger and outrage you feel that, when you have time to be quiet and rest, that your nervous system also moves there. Through life and traumas these responses can become skewed. We may have a hard time resting when we have time for it so we just keep ourselves busy never really slowing down, we can feel a lack of response or even a larger response in situations where maybe should cause anger - we can not respond at all or have a larger response than seems appropriate - but all of this gives us information about your nervous system and its patterns and where you are existing.

Of course it's all nuanced and individual - but a healthy regulated nervous system has access to all parts - its whole and fluid - it's not just calm, or grounded.

Maiden to Mother

A collaborative art project

I remember after Jude was born I spent a great deal of that first year in postpartum depression. I had experienced a death of self and the grief of it was overwhelming, the initiation from maiden to mother left me grasping for something, anything to hold onto. I was confused and felt so alone in my experience. Why did it seem no one was talking about the transformation of self, of who they were, and how they were navigating it? I found the mom conversations revolving around the baby and development and all these things that we are supposed to be doing or our babies are supposed to be doing. But there was no space for me to find community or connection in a way that supported my personal rebirth.

This is the basis of where my motherhood work comes from. Of bringing the awareness and focus on to you as a mother, as a woman, and where you are, what you are experiencing, how you are shifting and transitioning and experiencing the whole of it all.

My current offerings of Mother Gathering create community and space for just that.

And

It also stemmed a creative art project that I am working on with Deanna.

Maiden to Mother

A photographic and written piece on the journey of maiden to mother.

We are currently accepting applications from women who want to be a part of this project.

We will be photographing each woman and sharing a piece of their writing of what that journey was or is to them.

All the pieces collected will be brought together in a coffee table book of sorts.

Creating an art piece that represents various experiences of this deep transformation, in hopes that when other look at it and read it they may see themselves in another or feel less isolated in their own experience.

If you are interested or have any questions please reach out, we would be honored to have you.

Management Strategies vs Nervous System Regulation

I've been fascinated and doing a deep dive this year around management strategies vs actual nervous system regulation. Coming from the yoga and meditation space this has absolutely blown me wide open.

I want to start by saying management strategies can be such a beautiful and powerful thing, life saving and life giving. I think these strategies have an important time and place, and I am unsure if we ever get to a place in life where we don’t/won't rely on them at least a little bit. But I do believe through somatic experiencing and actual nervous system regulation and integration we will need these management strategies less and less and instead of them being life lines, maybe they can have a different life giving intention around them and can be for joy instead of survival. 

Some examples of management strategies that I use or even teach are yoga, breathwork, meditation, tapping, venting, cathartic experiences… and many many more we can also lean on not so supportive management strategies such as wine, substances, mindless scrolling….. 

We are human beings and like I said management strategies are a beautiful and often life saving thing, they are also something to get curious about. 

We often move into management strategies at times of overwhelm, feeling frazzled, ungrounded, angry, distraught, grief stricken. And we often find that they give us some type of relief, there is some pay off that we get from it. But often it is a short term relief, we feel better for a few hours or maybe for a few weeks, but then we may find we need these management strategies to reground and resettle again, and the cycle can continue. 

So yes we feel some temporary relief from our management strategies such as breathwork or tapping, but it's not actually regulating or allowing the nervous system to fully regulate. 

We look at the activation of our  nervous system like a wave. We become activated and the crest rises and as we deactivate it comes back down. We often lean into our management strategies in a higher state of activation - after completing a few minutes or maybe an hour of the management strategy (including venting and catharsis) we may feel some relief, we have moved down the wave and have had a slight deactivation, but we have not come all the way to the bottom of the wave and completely deactivated and regulated our nervous system. So our nervous systems are actually still in a state of activation - though yes it may be slightly less activated - which is what creates the feeling of relief. 

And in many moments in life relief is such a beautiful and life saving thing. 

And when we utilize somatic experiencing and are guided in an intelligent and methodical way we can come into activation and follow it all the way back down deactivating without using management strategies. Completing a cycle of activation and deactivation. Which actually then supports a regulated nervous system, and we are allowing the nervous system to move in the way it was intended to, in and out of activation and deactivation on its own. When we work with somatic experiencing and completing cycles of activation and deactivation the nervous system learns and creates new opportunities and creates new possibilities that things can be different. That perhaps we may need our management strategies less frequently. Our nervous system now has a greater capacity and ability to choose something different, breaking our habits and patterns. 

On being okay…

I remember sitting in my therapist's office years ago saying I just want to feel okay.

I just want to feel an underlying feeling that everything is okay.

Things felt like they were always tumultuous, I would have moments of highs and underneath it was a feeling that everything was constantly falling apart and that I was not okay and I felt like I was never going to be okay. 

It would take me years before I started to find this feeling of okayness, but I did and I do. 

Somatic Experiencing was where it all shifted for me. After six months of consistent sessions, I realized I could feel that sense of okayness, that yes life would be a constant ebb and flow but I felt a genuine feeling that I would be okay no matter what. That I was starting to feel more than okay with who I am, and how I see the world, and how I experience this life. This was vastly different from my previous feelings that I was somehow always in the wrong and no matter what I did I was not enough. 

I didn’t know that this feeling of not enoughness and shame stems from the nervous system experience and from childhood. That working with somatic experiencing and unraveling my nervous system opened me up to more possibilities and a greater felt sense that I am okay, that who I am is okay. 

So yes some days I feel angry and frustrated, and I want things to be different, and these are all signs of a healthy nervous system reacting to the amount of stimulus around me and under it all I have a knowing that I am okay, and that though that may seem like a simple and small shift it has completely changed my life. 

Life is meant to be felt in our bodies.

Life is meant to be felt in our bodies

However through our lifetime of experience, we may have learned that it’s not ok to be in our body, maybe it's not safe, comfortable, or available. 

Through experiences that have created trauma in the body, our body has learned very skilled ways to stay alive and survive and be as comfortable as possible. But often these ways of coping leave us checked out, in a state of hypervigilance, or wondering if we are even really worth it. 

Through the work of somatic experiencing, we slowly and methodically move toward healing - to wholeness to connecting to self. To create a felt sense of safety within ourselves so we can learn and understand how to be in our body, to feel our way through life, and stay connected to who we are, to our innate wisdom and knowing that exists within us all. 

We are able to fully be here for our life, to experience joy, beauty, and awe, and to hold those even through the depths of grief, and challenges that will arise from time to time. 

This life is incredibly precious - and it’s never too late to be fully in. 

How somatic experiencing change my life

I started seeing a Somatic Experience Practitioner over two years ago. I knew after about six months that I wanted to dive deeper into this work, that this work was impactful and I needed to learn about it. 

I showed up to my first few months of sessions hardly functioning, my son was a year and a half old and I had just experienced a missed miscarriage at 12 weeks, as well as other factors and family experiences happening not to mention we were in a tense time as a society. I was deep in grief, overwhelm, exhaustion feeling like I had absolutely nothing left to give to anyone. 

In my first session I could hardly speak, as soon as I had stopped moving and slowed down even just a little bit I came completely undone, and couldn't even articulate what I was experiencing. After about 6 months I really started to notice a difference, it felt like I was actually processing my grief and anger instead of just pretending it wasn’t there. 

After a year of seeing my Somatic Experiencing Practitioner I realized that this was the first year I hadn’t experienced depression or anxiety in decades. Yes there were still challenges, and heartbreak, and feelings of uncertainty, but they didn’t catapult me into a depression or full of anxiety like they had in the past. My insides feel different as if they had rearranged themselves. I could experience the full range of emotions without the tailspin of feelings of worthlessness, and complete freeze and overwhelm, or feeling the need to be hypervigilant and control absolutely everything and everyone around me, constantly worrying and feeling as if I was screwing everything up, feeling that I didn’t deserve anything or anyone. 

I had changed, shifted. And I don’t know if it was truly fully noticeable to everyone around me as I was usually good at masking what was going on - but I felt it. I felt different. Lighter, like it's easier to breathe and even though I knew life would still be hard at times there was this knowing that I could navigate it, which was very different from the feeling of I can’t do anything. 

There is a greater ease, a quality of deeper connection and understanding myself. Of knowing what a boundary feels like in my body and having the ability and capacity to set and hold boundaries in my life, an ability to care for myself on a whole new level. Instead of trying to please everyone all the time and put myself through insane discomfort to keep others more comfortable I started caring for myself, this is part of real and honest self care. Telling others no, standing up for myself when a line was being crossed, not forcing myself to be in situations that hurt me just to keep the peace. It is not always graceful and without fumbles but it comes with alot of grace and understanding for myself. 

I continue to see a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner regularly, it has shifted so much for me in the past two and a half years. And this also fuels my passion for sharing this work. 

I am currently taking clients for individual Somatic Counseling. If you are curious if this could help you please feel free to reach out and book a free 30 minute consultation. 

Individual Somatic Counselling Sessions…

I recently finished my Diploma of Applied Counselling and Psychology Specializing in Addictions and I am also certified in Somatic Experiencing. I am currently booking into the fall for individual sessions for Counselling and Somatic Experiencing. I work with them as a combination as healing happens through integrating our experiences through our nervous system.

Somatic Experiencing is the practice of healing trauma through the lens of the nervous system. Trauma is anything that is too much, too soon, or too fast. Our Nervous system reacts and often in our life and day to day we do not have time to complete the nervous systems response to the stimulus. Which then stays in our nervous system, contributing to feelings of overwhelm, stress, anxiety, and depression. Through Somatic Experiencing we give the nervous system space and time to move through the incomplete responses and integrate the experience. Supporting our nervous system in being able to regulate more easily, and helping us to feel more connected to self, grounded, and settled.

Each individual session is about an hour in length. We take our time to check in with you and your body, and allow your nervous system to guide us into the work that needs to be done.

These sessions are slower paced than traditional therapy, but that is the pace of healing, especially through a nervous system lens; by slowing way down.

Book your session by emailing hello@katiejolicoeur.ca

or

my experience of somatic healing…

There has been a lot of talk lately around somatic healing, from me, maybe from others. I love somatic healing and all that it has brought to my life, and my understanding of self, and I couldn’t wait to learn more and how to support others through their own healing journey.

I started seeing a somatic practitioner/therapist in December of 2020. I had experienced my first pregnancy loss at 3 months pregnant and to me, it didn’t feel like losing a pregnancy it felt like losing a baby. The grief was all-consuming and I was unable to do much, I was hardly surviving. I knew I needed support to navigate how I was feeling but wasn’t sure where to go since my therapist I had been seeing was on mat leave. One of my friends suggested I try seeing a somatic therapist, so I booked my first appointment.

I showed up to her office and sat down, in a freeze state I explained briefly everything I had gone through in the last year, (there was more than just a loss of a baby) In order to even talk about it I had to be tuned out and shut off, it was all too traumatic and painful to be in it in any way. I was scared to feel it.

She explained to me a little about somatic therapy and I was vaguely familiar with some concepts as I had taught yoga from a nervous system-based lens. But even knowing cognitively the process would be slow, like really slow, It didn’t stop me from feeling incredibly frustrated. I couldn't just be over it and move on.

I began seeing my somatic therapist on a regular basis, about every two weeks for many months. It took a while before I noticed much of a difference, but over time I was starting to feel myself, I was still there, I could connect back to myself again, and after a while, I began to feel better than I have in years. It was not a magic pill that took it all away but we slowly and intentionally started to heal my nervous system, to move out of freezing and toward finding safe places in my body to exist. I was beginning to feel and acknowledge the pain I felt and see the beauty of life at the same time. When we are living in survival mode we do not often have access or very little access to holding the both and the and.

This past year I have moved through many more ups and downs. I continue to see my somatic therapist on a regular basis, I do not escape grief as I am a human being and we will not go through life without experiencing grief, sadness, and challenges of varying degrees. But my nervous system is different, I have more capacity, I can lean gently into the pain a little more and find safe spaces within myself more often. I don’t know or even think it is possible to be healed completely. I think it's a lifelong journey as life never stops moving, but I am healing. I can feel it, the sensations in my body are different, my reactions are different, how I live and my values have changed and are changing. There are physiological changes that have happened in my nervous system and it makes life feel better than I could have imagined. Even in the depths of sadness and anger when I still feel some fear of being consumed by it all, I know I can go in gently, titrate the edges of it and notice if I can go there safely, and even understand what that means to me.

I write this in a heavy heavy time, personally and in the world, my heartaches, I feel like I am barely surviving but I know that I am navigating better than I would have been a year ago. And that is the beauty of this work. It's human work.

what is somatic healing?

Somatic is relating to the body, our body,  to become more in tune to our innate wisdom the body holds.

Somatic healing is a way to heal trauma through the body, specifically through the nervous system. 

Trauma happens based on our perception of an event that feels too much, too fast, too soon. Our nervous system response and reaction to this event can get thwarted and then trapped within our nervous system and our body. When our nervous system is unable to have the full response and reaction it wants to we can not process the event properly. It can keep our nervous system in a state of hyperarousal or dormant. Causing us to have or feel and experience a variety of symptoms both physically, cognitively, and emotionally. 

Sometimes what may cause trauma for one person will not be traumatic for another person. Our personal perception of the event has a lot to do with it, along with the other events that may be happening in your life that have been affecting your nervous system, like chronic stress. 

When trauma happens our body and our nervous system can hold on to the reaction that got thwarted or wasn’t able to be processed.

By working with the somatic experience we begin to tune into the sensations in your body and allow you to tune into them, to sit with them, to follow them. Sometimes the sensations may move or change, or become more or less intense, sometimes there is emotion or story tied to them, and other times there isn’t. But we are making space for your nervous system and body to have and complete the reaction it didn’t get to complete. This begins to create  space in the nervous system as well as a new nervous system pattern. 

If we think of our nervous system on a spectrum: high end being fully activated - you are in a survival reaction, the low end being grounded and neutral- where your nervous system is online but you are able to be calm grounded in your body and your nervous system can react how it needs to in a healthy way, we usually land somewhere in between. If we have dealt with a traumatic experience and or chronic stress we will exist higher up the spectrum of our nervous system being activated. We work towards existing in the lower end of the spectrum where you are grounded and feel safe but your nervous system is available to react into fight, flight freeze if needed. (and we are human so that doesn’t mean we are calm and never get activated, a healthy nervous system is able to react, and engage, and then deactivate)

By working with somatic experience and becoming aware of the sensation of your body and your nervous system you are allowing your nervous system to move further down the scale, you are letting your body and your nervous system react how they wanted to or needed to and that drops you further down the spectrum allowing for more space in your nervous system. Which then gives you more capacity for life, to handle stress but also to feel joy. 

This practice has been one of the most life-changing experiences for me over the last year. I am still human and experience the stresses of life, but it’s less often I get fully activated and triggered into an extreme fight or flight or freeze response over things that may be used to. I have more ability for new nervous system patterns; that I may be activated but I don’t “go offline”. That instead of being triggered into a freeze response I can stay a little more present and work through the challenge at hand. I have more knowing that I am going to be ok. 

It feels hard to explain the depth of this work in a short space of a blog post, but it really has brought me more capacity for life,  joy, and hope, and a greater ability to handle stress. 

healing the mother…

The space of remembering self, a purposeful remembering. That yes we mother and we love and we give but we must first do this for ourselves. That to flourish we must know ourselves and heal ourselves, we are not simply our labels but innate and beautiful beings that are worthy of our own love. 

By healing ourselves, we heal our children, we heal our mothers. We mend generations of traumas. We set free our mother and her mother and her mother before. 

We feel into our creativity, our knowing, our fire, we stand grounded in who we are, 

We are healing the mother. 

dining room table

I've been searching for the perfect dining room table. 

One that will hold family and friends that are family as we fill our souls with good food and laughter. 

But today I paused as I looked at our dining room.

An old wooden table with painted blue legs. 

Your mother gifting it to us when we left home at 21. 

Your family sat there while they shared stories of their days before us. 

We have shared this table with our family, our friends, our baby. 

Rings from cups left behind after long nights and early mornings. 

Memories from every apartment and house we've kept over the last decade. 

Laughter felt and hard conversations had.

I’m no longer rushing for a new table.

back to school…

I say I am going back to school, but I never really did a lot of post secondary schooling. I never knew what I wanted to be when I grew up and I wasn't super excited about school. So I dabbled a little in some postsecondary, and eventually found my way into a yoga teacher training, and the rest they say is history. 

But as I dove deeper and deeper into my yoga teaching career the more I wanted to learn. The last 4 years I have been throwing the idea of going to school around, I applied for a few different courses, and the timing never really felt right, until now. 

I am enrolled in my diploma of applied psychology and counselling, I start this month. I am also taking my Somatic Experiencing Practitioner alongside it. Healing our nervous system from trauma feels like a necessity to me. 

I have been seeing an SEP (Somatic Experiencing Practitioner) since December of last year. 

I have found healing in ways I wasn't aware I needed, or knew I was capable of. This practice of slowing down and listening so intently to my body has had profound healing for me. I have never felt this good, I would dare to say ever in my life. That doesn’t mean things don’t get hard sometimes, that's life. But I feel as if I have the capacity to hold it all, the both and the and. The beauty and the pain, and allow myself to process, to be with it both. I feel I have accessed magic in a new way. 

So with both of these programs I know my whole world is about to be blown open, and I am ready. I am ready to be here, to learn, to grow and expand. And I know that means my offerings will change and grow and deepen alongside it and my work moves in this direction. 

I can’t wait to share more with you as I learn, and bring forward some new offerings moving into the new year.  

Sending love. 

Katie

intentional rest

Back in June I had decided to take a few weeks off of teaching. I knew I needed more but I was afraid to ask for it, to say it out-loud. I, like many of us base some of my self worth off of my productivity. How much I am able to do and how much work I am doing. I have old beliefs that rest is somehow less than, that taking time off somehow makes you weaker. I learned that you are supposed to push through, and now I am working on unlearning this. Yes there are times we need to be determined and work through and sometimes push through, but I have been through burn out a few times to know that often leads to a place I don’t want to go. 

I know when I am starting to feel short, and anger is bubbling beneath the surface that I am taking on too much and something somewhere has to shift. So this summer I decided to step away from teaching yoga for a little bit to try and create a bit more space. It felt like weird timing and from the outside didn’t make sense. The studios were just opening up again after over a year of being shut down more than being open. But I knew if i didn’t take some space I would begin to burn out. 

The thing is intentional rest is still challenging, I am working through it on a regular basis. Moving through old outdated beliefs, and feelings of shame and guilt when I do take a stand for myself and take intentional rest. I am learning how I make it more of a regular practice and not just something I do when I feel a burnout coming on. 

So I am stepping out of the busy competition and I am moving toward soaking in all of life. I don’t want to sit and compare how busy my day was. I want to sit and talk about the magic in the world and in us, the things we long for and all we are grateful for.

embodied storytelling…

As a movement and meditation facilitator for over a decade one of my greatest gifts is supporting people in coming in to their bodies, in connecting with self. This is where my love lies within photography as well, is guiding you to connect with self on a deeper level and capture your true self, and allow you to tell your story instead of being told something that doesn't fit. I don’t pose people in a generic one size fits all way but instead allow the natural intelligence of your body guide the way. In our session together we will ground together in meditation, in conversation, before moving into our photography session.  

When we are able to connect to our body we are moving toward and into a parasympathetic state. A place of rest, calm, grounding, from this place is where we can truly access self. Our honest self, the self that exists at centre. When we feel connected we can see the beauty and the magic around us and within us. This is where we create from. From this embodied place we can share your story of truth together. 

What you get:

Pre session connection with me to make sure we get the most out of our time together 

A pre recorded meditation 

1 hour photography session 

Your choice of 20 high resolution professionally edited photos from a gallery 

Investment $295 

Option 2 

Pre session connection with me to make sure we get the most out of our time together 

A pre recorded meditation 

1 hour photography session 

Full gallery of High resolution professionally edited photos (minimum 40 photos) 

Investment $495 

I have a longing for deeper connection. Of really taking the time to get to know people and their stories. I want to know what lights you up, and what your magic is. I want to know where you see the beauty that exists in this world, and if you can hold the realness that life brings. I want to tell your story through photos. Stories of resilience and expansion, stories of your heart. 

These sessions are open to anyone and everyone, individuals, couples, ect… 

As my business continues to morph more into a true representation of who I am, I continue to be so grateful for you joining me on this journey and I look forward to continued connection. Sending all the love. 

Xo 

granny making coffee…

Sometimes in life we are reminded how finite our experience is. How everything we do is of importance. Is significant. I have decided to bring my camera everytime I go to visit my Granny, I want to look back and remember it all. How her kitchen looked, the mess of papers on the table. Her cigarette burning between her fingers. Her half smile when she laughs at your jokes. How she makes her tea, or sometimes her instant coffee. This is meaningful. For its these little daily actions we remember the most about people. That and how they make you feel. 

My granny has dementia, and is starting to forget more and more. Even her younger memories are becoming blurry and she's too tired to remember. So I sit, and joyfully answer the same two questions and listen to her same sassy remarks. And it feels comforting. And I wish she knew on the days she's too tired that she doesn’t have to talk at all. That I am at ease drinking tea with her in silence as I study her face, and the way her hands work. 

I hope in my photos to capture the nuances  in how she makes her coffee and how I always felt safe and comfortable at her tiny kitchen table as I watched her. 

Because these are the moments that are significant.

harsh reminders to self..

Lately I've been so trapped in the worry. The frustration, the walls of what will other people think about me, say about me. If I don’t show up this way for this person and this way for the next, they might not accept me, or love me. 

And today I snapped. Im exhausted. I am tired. I feel overwhelmed trying to be all things to everyone else and nothing to myself. 

I was harshly reminded to come back to self. To care for self, to nurture self, and the rest will flow. That it’s not my responsibility to separate from self to make others more comfortable or happy, or to appear more acceptable, to find some kind of approval. 

The fear of misstepping, or saying the wrong thing is paralyzing, but if I am connected to self and living from truth there is freedom. There is a kind honestly that exist there.

So today I cried, in shame and in guilt and I wondered how I forget this so often, how many times do I need to be reminded and remember. Connect to self, care for self. Through space and time, and nature, and things that are good for my soul. 

That fitting in is not the same as belonging. And first I must belong to myself. 

To remember that I am enough and I don’t need to bend a certain way to somehow be more. That I can take up space as I am and love myself for it. And in turn that allows me to love others where they are at. 

The reminder to turn inward, to find stillness, to get quiet and listen. 

That's where the magic lives.

grief.

TRIGGER WARNING: miscarriage

for months I have been searching for the words to write, and how to piece them together in a way that felt softer. That didn't seem so raw and sharp. but this experience was just that, raw, and sharp, and painful. in the fall i lost a baby. I was 3 moths pregnant when I found out my baby no longer had a heartbeat. that my baby inside my womb was no longer living. there was no warning signs, they just stopped living. I guess we never really know why, we tell ourselves so many things to try and stop the pain, but it doesn’t really help.

its been months and only recently has the pain subsided, but its not totally gone, I don’t know if it ever will be. I still cry when I think about my baby I never got to hold, it still causes my heart to break with every new pregnancy and baby announcement I see. i’ve been told all of the things from others to try and bandage my pain, “you’ll have another one” “you’ll get your rainbow baby” “you have a happy and health boy at home”

some of these things true, but most said out of others discomfort when I share about my loss. I share because I am not alone in this experience. there is so much shame and stigma around something so out of a persons control. this is not to compare heartbreak for we all experience something so different. but to also bring attention to how we expect mothers to just get over it and move on. “how dare you still be sad about your loss months and months later.”

we process the grief, the trauma in our own time.

so I support myself in this season of life, and part of that is writing. so I write and I share, in hopes someone feels less alone on their experience.

xo

katie

a poem:

My belly was supposed to be round. I was supposed to feel tired and uncomfortable from carrying you in my womb for 9 months.

But instead my insides are empty

and I’m tired from carrying the grief of loosing you.

magic & ease

I am not one to set resolutions and over the years I have tried to create more tenderness with myself in this achievement orientated world. Of course I still have things I am working towards, and goals, but I am letting go of attaching the feelings and emotions I want to feel to those specific experiences. The once I get here I will feel this, kind of thinking. Because trust me once you get to that place, you will still feel the same as you do now, maybe a moment of something else, but mostly the same.

So this year, I came up with words. Words to guide me in moments of overwhelm, or unsteadiness, when I am not feeling sure.

MAGIC & EASE

Words to use daily. This does not mean that in every moment of everyday I will experience these feelings, but in a single moment of everyday I hope to. To remember the ease in letting myself cuddle my son a little longer before putting him to sleep. The ease in conversation with loved ones, the ease that exists within myself, and the first few sips of coffee. The magic in our everyday experiences, our physical body is pure magic how it operates. The magic in the trees, and the moon and the stars. The magic in connection, and community, and creativity.

These words offer my more grace, and love too slow down a little. The space for self exploration and healing. They give me permission to do things for fun, for play, because I want to. To remember that there are no coincidences and to remember to listen.

So my start to the year has been slow but intentional. The work I am doing and offering coming from deep love and understanding. The space for me to heal, to seek support for my growth. And the ability to be creative, to create because I want too, because creativity helps me in seeing the magic in this life.

moving toward the light.

i created this website from an inspired place, from feeling. this year has been particularly hard for most of us, and i feel like i got the shit kicked out of me.

it seemed like every time i was beginning to feel grounded, excited, i would be challenged. some stories i have shared and will share, and some are not mine to share.

but i have been brought to my knees in grief and in those moments life just kept showing me how beautiful it is over and over again. it's weird and strangely comforting that we often experience both significant pain and tremendous beauty at the same time.

so I allow myself to feel it all, and i move toward the light.

i feel grateful i am in a place where i can choose.

So i am here choosing light and rearranging and recreating new offerings to support you in choosing light too.