Pregnancy

If you’re just arriving here, you’re invited to read the series in sequence: Introduction, Preconception, Conception, and When Conception Doesn’t Happen before this one. This is part one of Chapter Two.

When I found out I was pregnant, I was completely surprised.

I knew the conditions of that night were powerful, and we were open to the possibility, but I was in awe and shock that life was actually growing in my body.

I had never been pregnant before, and didn’t know what to expect. As I mentioned, I was staying with my sister when I found out, helping her in her first few weeks postpartum. Here we were together, learning about how to care for a newborn when I learned in just 9 months I would also become a mother. With nearly a decade between us, this unexpected timing became a tender new way for us to meet each other not just as sisters, but soon as mothers.

What to Eat in Pregnancy?

In the first couple months I learned I desperately needed to shift my diet.

At the time I was eating mostly vegetarian (with occasional fish or chicken), after years of being strictly vegetarian. I had not eaten red meat in 11 years. So I was pretty surprised when one night I had a dream I was playing soccer on a field and kept struggling to run and keep up with the ball. I walked off the field and someone handed me a plate of filet mignon.

I knew how to listen to the signals of my body at this point, and this was a pretty obvious one. I decided to trust the guidance of my dreams.

So the next day, I went to a local market for lunch and filled my to-go container with the red meat available: meatballs from a grass-fed local meat source. As I integrated red meat back into my diet, I felt more satiated, less nauseous and more grounded. My favorite pregnancy foods became spaghetti bolognese with ground beef, buffalo burger patties, and on rare occasion, filet mignon.

This was a lot to wrap my mind around, ethically and spiritually. I did my best to surrender to the process and listen to what my body and baby needed during pregnancy and breastfeeding. It took about two and a half years after my baby was born to shift back to a mostly vegetarian diet. I recognized that my body needed to become more resourced and do a lot of replenishing the stores of nutrients I had lost through the journey.

If you find yourself pregnant, I invite you to listen to your dreams and intuition. The more you listen to it, the stronger it will grow, the easier it will be to take action, and most likely you’ll feel so much better for it.

“Morphogenetic” or “Morphic” Fields

As pregnancy continued I was surprised at how often people wanted to tell me what I could and could not do.

There seemed to be a whole lot of rules for pregnant women: no sushi, no deli meat, no hot tubs being a few I heard.

There were a whole lot of stories and beliefs I thought I had no choice but to subscribe to.

I told myself I could no longer travel as freely, I would need to take off a pre-determined amount of time from work, and in general would need to “give up” quite a lot to make space for this new being in my life.

Well it wasn’t long into that way of thinking where it made me feel like a victim.

For sure, there were choices I wanted to make, like being close to my midwives and having regular prenatal care and being close to my family so we could share this time of pregnancy and having a newborn together, but there were also some beliefs that I knew did not resonate and I needed to release.

For example, I discovered it was more valuable to see close friends in person than it was to worry every day about getting COVID. I decided it was more important to travel and see my best friend for a mother blessing ceremony she wanted to create for me than it was to avoid all airports. I discovered it was more important to me to connect with my husband at a beautiful hot spring (and listen to my body, and drink lots of water) than it was for me to avoid all hot water.

There were ways I could navigate “the rules” by listening to my body and intuition.

I needed to find my own inner compass and trust within myself, instead of blindly following other peoples directions.

And some would say, this is one of the first initiations into motherhood, because once that baby is here, we have to navigate a whole world of “shoulds” when it comes to parenting. Listening to our intuition in pregnancy becomes the foundation for listening to our intuition once we are a mother.

All these beliefs around what one should or should not do around pregnancy is what I would call a morphogenetic field.

Scientist and researcher Rupert Sheldrake uses this term to describe when a group of people subscribe to certain belief systems or ways of being. For example, when enough people believe pregnancy is inherently fragile or dangerous, that belief forms a kind of collective template. Suddenly, everyone seems to be repeating the same cautions and limitations as if they are universal truths—whether or not they’re actually grounded in one’s personal reality.

Every community has its own collective memory, shaped by the stories and expectations that get repeated over time. These narratives form a kind of energetic template that many of us subscribe to without realizing it.

So being pregnant, I was suddenly plugged in to a field of people that were subscribing to certain beliefs about pregnancy.

And we don’t have to agree to those fields and ways of being if they do not resonate, but it does require us to be cognizant and make choices from a place of inner trust.

It’s certainly not easy to overcome those fields, especially when it comes to the medical system and deciding where to birth. It takes a lot of trust in our inner knowing to carve out a different path.

So what does carving your own path to motherhood, or anything for that matter look like?

Where are you blindly subscribing to beliefs in your life that you know no longer resonate?

Where have you been overriding your own inner knowing?

For me, it looked like hiking and skiing and traveling and choosing to birth my baby at home.

And it may look very different for you.

What’s important is that we continue to carve out our own path guided by our intuitive choice, not solely based on what other people expect of us.

It’s about finding the freedom to make choices based on our inner wisdom and being guided by the peace, joy, and calm that arises from living from that place.

…Stay tuned for next week where I will share about a Birthing From Within class I attended, where I learned about the myth of the Goddess Inanna…