(*Please note that the full article has been published in October 2018 issue of ROAR, Fierce Feminine Rising Magazine)

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I ask you to meet yourself with kindness in this moment. Put your hand over your heart, breathe deeply and send love to yourself. I know how much you need it. Lean softly into the calm intuitive wisdom of your centre. Affirm to yourself: I am worthy, simply because I exist. I have a right to be here, simply because I breathe. I am whole. I belong. I am enough. I value myself. I love myself. I accept myself as I am.

Say these affirmations as many times as you need to. Let the medicine of these words seep like healing honey into the depths of your soul. Now think of one kind or healing thing that you can do for yourself right now, and then focus on allowing yourself that loving gift today.

 I see it every day – women who feel broken, worthless and betrayed by their own bodies. They are hurting, all the while making their best effort to smile, to heal themselves and the bodies that they feel stuck in. They are nursing their broken hearts on the path to fulfil their deepest desire, the path to becoming a mother. I understand what it is like to grapple with the experience of being a childless mother. I know first-hand how easy it is to turn the war inward, to internalise the sense of failure that you feel for not being pregnant and not yet having created the family that you long so deeply for. A simple thing – you tell yourself – that any woman should be able to do effortlessly. And in a society whose patriarchal gaze places little value on our empty wombs, one where your success is quite often still defined by whether or not you are married and how many offspring you are able to produce, how could you feel any differently about yourself?

“It takes years as a woman to unlearn what you have been taught to be sorry about.” ~ Amy Poehler

In my case, it took hitting rock bottom at mid-point of what has turned out to be bumpy 6-year long TTC journey for me to see this reality clearly. Somewhere between descending the downward spiral of depression and trying to keep breathing through grief, uncertainty and shame, I started to see how my perceptions of my situation and of myself were harming me. As my longing for motherhood remained unfulfilled, I’d allowed myself to be defined by a growing sense of inadequacy. In addition, not meeting the social expectations of what a woman my age ‘should be’ eroded my self-worth. At my lowest point, I found myself at a crossroads – either I would continue on a very painful path deeper into the abyss of negativity, or I could rescue myself …

READ THE FULL PIECE IN THE OCTOBER 2018 ISSUE OF ROAR, FIERCE FEMININE RISING MAGAZINE…CLICK HERE

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