Today I went to a wonderful Gathering of Tribes event at Emma Cannon‘s Chelsea clinic to commemorate Baby Loss Awareness Week. Emma Cannon is an acupuncture and women’s health and fertility expert, and someone who I’ve long admired and turned to in times of confusion and chaos on the fertility journey. She has featured in my What’s in Your Toolkit series. She is full of wisdom and practical realistic tips to help you on your fertility journey. In particular, for me, I have found her to be an amazing resource when it comes to building up body and mind after miscarriage.
This is indirectly a blog post continuing my Model Method Online programme review – as one of the contents of the Model Method goody box is Anna Kessel‘s book Eat, Sweat, Play. Everyone, women and men, should read this book. It is the first time I’ve read such a hard hitting and no holds barred account of women’s place in sport and how often society is tipped against us due to our sex and propensity for becoming mums at unfortunate times in our sporting careers. How girls are dissuaded from getting sweaty and fit because the focus is on aesthetics and being pretty at all times, and not getting “butch” and muscular. How motherhood is HARD on your body and it’s something that male athletes simply do not have to overcome. But most viscerally for me, Anna describes her experience of miscarriage… I had tears rolling down my face as I read it as so much of her experience tapped into my own, and the physicality of it being something that isn’t easy to share and lighten the load of.
I felt similar feelings today as some amazingly brave and powerful stories were shared of baby loss and the emotional and physical trauma that it has involved. I met and shared stories with Elle from Feathering the Empty Nest about her loss and how her body and mind is still recovering from the ordeal of the past 18 months, and how she is trying to forge a positive path of hope in her life, moving on with the memory of her lost baby accompanying her positively as if in a kangaroo pouch, rather than away from it.
Marina Fogle, cofounder of The Bump Class, spoke eloquently about her baby loss and how society generally is inadequate at dealing with grief, loss, motherhood. She has shared her thoughts on using exercise to move through grief in this wonderful article.
And it was wonderful to have a chance to meet some inspiring experts in the field of health, wellness and healing such as Nutritionist and Life Coach Pandora from Rooted London.
There’s a wonderful community out there, on social media and in blogs, to access shared experience and empathy, to be a chorus of voices in the darkness. But today showed that actually nothing can beat meeting up in person, talking with your fellow humans, hugging and sharing stories, There’s a very different energy talking to someone in real life as opposed to within the rectangle of your phone or tablet. So, make a commitment for yourself that you will seek out your tribe, share you stories and allow others to share with you. Lighten the load and break down the taboos. Be vulnerable.
There was a circle of light at the end with a womb healing from Chloe Isidora. Around the circle we each shared a word we wanted others to take from the event. The circle of words was:
LOVE – HOPE – GRATITUDE – CONNECTION – SHARING – HEALING