October is Pituitary Awareness Month and whilst last year I wrote vulnerably about my experience of Living With a Prolactinoma, this year I wanted to mark this event by inviting Bec Wallis, an empowered birth keeper and healer, onto my blog to discuss how we can come home to our bodies and Mother Earth through the way of the womb.
I have a very complicated relationship with menstruation and I live with the trio of a Prolactinoma, PCOs and Endometriosis.
As a result of living with these conditions, I never started my periods properly. And at this time in life, I still have no regular monthly period despite 10 years of medication to treat all of the above with their endless pills, potions and incredibly invasive treatments.
This lack of the seemingly ‘normal’ 28-day cycle, coupled with intense pain and a myriad of other hormonal complications, has left a scar of me being deeply unconnected with my soul femininity that has plagued me throughout my teens and twenties.
However as I look back on my Living With a Prolactinoma post from last year, I realise how much I have changed in just a year. I am no longer at war with my body. I meet it with love even when the most heartbreaking and insidious symptoms arise. I marvel at it working so hard to keep me here. Even when I do bleed now, it’s nothing short of a blessing, including whatever else may come with it.
It has felt like a true homecoming and there are so many parts of this conversation with Bec that has helped to further heal my body, heart and soul.
Throughout this year I’ve really wanted to just bathe in the medicine of healer’s like Bec that can impart their wisdom and alchemy into my imagination. I want to learn, unlearn and sit at the feet of anyone who has teachings for me so that I can just receive it all into my bones.
In acknowledgement of this, and my desires to have this space holding for me, it has allowed me to have a much needed break from posting too much about my own journey. So today, I, like you, am here to listen and be held in the womb of love, understanding and transformation from Bec.
This conversation feels like a reclamation. So, grab your favourite nourishing beverage and take some time to absorb this wisdom. You can either read the transcript or you can listen to the audios directly from Bec on the journey of her own healing and her adventure into the ancient craft of midwifery as a birth keeper and doula.
Hi Bec! Thank you so much for your time. Please can you give my readers a quick introduction to you, where you live and what you do?
So thank you so much for having me and inviting me into this beautiful space. It’s so lovely to connect with you and I’m so grateful for this connection.
My name’s Bec and I am originally from Liverpool however for the past few years I have been travelling around Asia and living amongst beautiful people from all around the world.
Now I’m settled in Glastonbury after about seven years, finally putting in roots to this beautiful space which lies upon the deep ley lines of the Earth, which is the heart chakra of the Earth.
I’m so grateful to be here and I’ve already been so caught up in all the beautiful energy from this place. I feel like I’m really being held in an energetic womb of love and the energy here that is actually really similar to Bali. I don’t know whether you or any of your readers have been there before but it’s really magic.
Now I’m here I really am just embodying and soaking in all of the beauty here and coming home to myself and my journey that has been into the Duola realms of birthing and helping both women and men, birthing their babies and coming home to the most empowered place they they can to journey into the process of the rite of passage that is birth and childbirth.
I now offer womb healing. This is to help people journey to deeper connections into their womb space to release emotions from this place and come home and meet themselves or come home to their bodies so they can learn to work not from the mind, or things we’ve learnt such as ‘this is what we need to do’ and ‘this is how we’re meant to live, in this masculine, energetic society’. But that we’re able to really tap into the feminine and be able to work from there.
The true essence of the divine feminine is to tap into our intuition and the wisdom that we hold within our wombs. So this is really powerful for people who are feeling a disconnect from themselves, wanting to process emotions, to learn about themselves and release and embody their true power.
I also offer birth guidance and attend births for women and men to have, and experience, the most empowered birth that they can. And also bringing couples into it as well. To really allowing ourselves to just embody the primitive raw essence that is birth and do it in a safe and supported environment where they feel this isn’t just something that happens to their body, but rather it’s something which is profound and an experience to embody the beautiful journey to meet your baby.
You’re a Trauma-informed Doula Guiding women to experience empowered Pregnancy and Birth with a deep connection to their bodies. Can you tell my readers all about this unique spiritual path?
Well, I feel like this is a beautiful question. Thank you for asking me this.
So truly I think one of the most profound things that has happened to me that has really brought me on this journey was the death of my dad. I didn’t know this at the time, but through the death of him, emerged the rebirth of me. And through his death, it has really brought me to a deep understanding of myself and it still does all the time. And I’m like, fuck, so many things are coming through that wouldn’t have come through if he was still here.
Of course, I miss him every day and wish that he was still here. I know that everything that I’m experiencing is off the back of the loss of him in my life is bringing me closer to myself. And I think every experience I’ve had since then has really shaped my spiritual journey. More than I probably even understand.
Through my relationships, to my spiritual practises. One of the big ones for me was my yoga teacher training after I got diagnosed with my Psychosomatic Disorder where I was really struggling to meditate. It’s something I’ve been doing for years but I was feeling a lot of resistance and I was getting a lot of jaw pain when I was meditating. I knew I really had to start doing more embodiment practices.
I started doing yoga and I did my yoga teacher training in India and met my body in ways that I didn’t know I could possibly even imagine doing. In meeting my body it brought up and released so many profound things for me and it showed me things about myself and how actually my body is working for me and not against me. Because of all my physical symptoms, I was like, ‘why does my body hate me? What is happening to me?’
It really just showed me actually that this isn’t the case, actually, it is just when these things appear in my body, it’s actually just being like paired back. We need to look at something here. So to even have that realisation changed everything for me.
Off the back of that was when I was in that space in India by the river Ganges in Rishikesh where I met lots of beautiful people and one of them had spoken to me about the Doula journey because I’d always wanted to do midwifery, but it just didn’t sit right with me. The alignment of Midwifery was to do with hospitals and it was very hospital bed based.
So I spoke to one of the girls on the course about it, and she said, ‘what about doing Doula work’? And I was like, ‘what is this’? I researched and was like, oh, my gosh, this is me! This is exactly what I should be doing. And so I found myself off the back of a Full Moon ritual I went to booking a course in Glastonbury in January.
Very synchronically, my course happened to be on the date of my dad’s birthday and I got the sixth place. Six is my number and all these beautiful things happened for me that just meant that I ended up in Glastonbury on this course.
I have never felt more passionate about something in my entire life and always knew that I was meant to do something that meant something to people. But I just didn’t know what.
I really found that when I went to my training. It all kind of happened that now I now live with my Doula trainer so I’m in her wisdom constantly, which is just magic.
It was never my plan to move to Glastonbury, but here I am. It’s all fallen into place for me. Very perfectly so it’s just been so profound.
Embodiment practises have been a huge part for me. An ecstatic dance and connecting to people through soul gaze, which is a process of doing an eye gaze and with another person and just truly finding myself being mirrored through the eyes of another person and realising that we are all so connected and also connected to the Earth.
I am the tunnel for light language, which is a practise of burying my roots of my womb deep into Mother Earth. I have words and sounds of music that flows through me. They are not mine and it’s something I’ve only just recently started sharing about, but it’s been very interesting.
I did a Tantra activation a few weeks ago where I spoke to a beautiful lady who I’d worked with when I was staying in Bali and I did a Tantra activation with her and the light language flowed.
What I didn’t know is that she was also a channel and she started channelling and we had a conversation that was not a language from this Earth. I know that it’s going back to my ancestry because I’ve done a lot of ancestry work and it’s all to do with and warriors and tribes and people who lived off the earth and people who used to gather in Red Tents when women would bleed. It’s all very synchronistic and it will make so much sense.
Just when I allowed myself to open up that portal to my womb all this magic of my true essence came to flow through me and my soul spoke to me and is still speaking to me through profound realisations.
Plant medicine and veganism opened up everything for me. Through veganism my connection to the Earth became much stronger and through working with Plant medicines such as Kambo, Sananga and San Pedro the journey to myself just skyrocketed. The journey to the Earth and through that process, I’ve heard my soul speak for the first time in my life.
I’ve got goosebumps now talking about it, because it’s not actually anything that’s outside of me, it’s all things that are within me that I’ve just now had an outlet.
I’m only at the beginning of tapping in because I know there is immense wisdom within me and within every single human on this Earth. And we are just taught not to trust them. And it’s not our fault that we feel such disconnect. But it is our responsibility to come home to ourselves.
What offerings or practices do you offer to help women become more empowered and reclaim this deep connection back home to our bodies?
So I offer one to one womb healing and the journey that I offer is called ‘Returning Home’ and it is about tapping into the womb space and cultivating that connection that we have been taught not to listen to.
Everything we’ve learnt in this society is about being disconnected, not trusting our bodies, and it’s about undoing that and allowing us to feel empowered and trust in ourselves and feeling at home in our bodies and just tapping into that space before we make big decisions. Before we do things, and just saying, how does this truly feel? What is my soul truly calling for? So it’s a six-week journey but I offer for women’s bodies to truly journey and just cultivate a sense of deep trust.
In the Doula realms, I offer support throughout pregnancy and birth. We use different modalities, such as embodiment practises, meditation and some Tantric work that comes through by connecting to partners and to yourself.
It empowers you to be able to make decisions in alignment about what feels good for you. Not what we’re told ‘should’ feel good, or not what we’re told we ‘must’ do or ‘mustn’t’ do because each path is so unique to each person.
So it’s really about tapping in and asking ‘what would feel most empowering for me?’ and then cultivating that wisdom to know that is what we can experience.
That is truly what my offer can give to people, it’s that inner knowing and guidance, the support and safety, and also having the exact birth we want. Even if the birth doesn’t go exactly to plan, and what your birth preferences are, you can truly be okay with whatever experience you have because whatever experience you have, you can still make it your own.
It’s about informing, educating and supporting in safety, in love and really tapping into what the person in question would like to experience. And really knowing that that is something that can be true. It’s not just something that we want and we go, ‘oh, I hope it happens.’ No, we can experience that no matter what.
Our birth story isn’t just about us it’s about the baby as well. The baby may have a plan that is different than our plan. And that’s okay because every birth is sacred and every birth is beautiful. It’s just about making people feel safe and empowered on their journey and connected and really present with the whole experience of overcoming any fears around birth. And any potential things that could come up, that may come along with unfavourable or difficult emotions, we can really heal through that.
When we allow ourselves to feel deeply connected to our bodies our spiritual gifts open to us and we become naturally more in tune with the rhythms and cycles of the universe. Can you guide my readers through how they can start to connect to this magic, even when menstruation can be a painful thing to experience with PCOs and similar conditions?
So a powerful way of really connecting into our cycles is through the Earth, the universe and the Moon. The natural cycles of our body. If you are someone who has a monthly bleed or an irregular bleed, it’s really potent to tap into what it is that our body is trying to tell us.
Everything that happens in our body are messages that are trying to tell us something. Our body wants to work with us. It doesn’t want to work against us. It’s about really coming to be aware that menstruation, or our moon cycles, and our bleeding, has been something that we’ve really been taught is a thing we have to deal with.
Like when you look at things like advertisements, even if you Google things about periods and menstrual cycles, you’ll see memes and write-ups and things that people have written up like, ‘I’m bleeding. Why do I have to do this? Men don’t have to experience this’ and men do experience this too. Men can bleed too and it’s really important that we acknowledge that.
If we really can tap into that space and be okay with where we’re at, and we can then listen to our bodies rather than trying to constantly try to fix. When we listen to our body, it wants to tell us something, our it’s telling us what our body wants to journey.
From there we can truly heal and create a better relationship and understand why things are happening the way they are. I truly believe that our body contains an imprint of how we mentally and emotionally show up in this world. It’s not always linear, it can be a deeply emotional journey but it is a journey that is truly beyond words when you make that connection with yourself or come home to yourself. It is absolute magic.
So what I would recommend to really start building that relationship with yourself and with our bodies is to lie down and bend your knees whilst putting your feet flat on the Earth. Allow the knees to drop out and then place your hands onto your womb space. Next, just start to breathe really deeply and connect into that space. Notice what comes up in your body. You can put on some beautiful music on or light some candles, and cultivate that loving connection that you want to feel with a lover, how you want to feel with the Earth, and how you want to feel within yourself.
It’s not something that will come through straight away, especially if you’ve been very disconnected with your body. It’s is a journey and it is something that we must continuously show up and do whether it’s 5 minutes a day or twice a week.
However much you can manage it, just breathing into this space and just asking, ‘what needs to arise today? What do I need to know right now? Then journaling on it. It might be something like ‘I don’t know why Larry from Year 6 has popped into my head’ but it’s all relevant!
When we start writing and start expressing ourselves, nuggets of wisdom constantly flow through and everything starts to make sense. It doesn’t have to make sense in the words that you write. You can just jot things down or you can speak out loud. Or you can discuss it with a close friend or a partner.
But once we start connecting to this it’s magic. Through our cycles, once we start to understand what happens to our body when we bleed, it is profound. Because every time we bleed, it is a true gift that we are able to release.
Before we bleed, I know a lot of people, we call it PMS (premenstrual syndrome) but this term doesn’t resonate with me because we’re not suffering from something. It’s not a syndrome. What happens in our premenstrual cycle is that it illuminates the veil between our subconscious and unconscious mind. It’s why we experience sensitivity like deep emotions that may come up alongside things we’ve been struggling with that maybe are more at the forefront of our mind. We may feel that we become more reactive to it.
This is because our body, our minds and our spiritual essence is allowing us to come up with whatever is no longer serving us and with what we need to release. When we can be aware of this and go, right, this is what’s coming up for me before my bleed, I now know what I need to release, we can release that in our bleed our body sheds with us.
So when we bleed it’s also symbolic. And when we bleed, we can connect that with the New Moon, the Dark Moon, that is a time to rest and contemplate what has gone on.
Our bleed is also represented in the season of Winter. So in Autumn, the leaves are starting to fall, and we’re wanting to be around warmth and really coming home to ourselves. Then Winter comes, we start shedding, and when we bleed, it’s about releasing, resting and letting go.
If we can tap into this cycle and tap into the energy of Winter, the energy of rest, and listen to what our bodies need, then it will really help us to release.
Then after winter comes Spring when we start to feel refreshed and our energy starts to build in time for the Summer when we ovulate. The Summer ovulation is the Full Moon. The full power and energetic imprint of the divine feminine rising from within us. Everything we see in nature truly is a symbol for what we experience in our bodies.
So this is our seasonal moon cycles, even looking at plants and how the flowers blossom and then come back. And also butterflies, how they emerge, fly and then fall, and their life is all about death and rebirth. And similarly, every month that we bleed we have a chance to rebirth.
Every bleed is the death of who we are and the rebirth of the person we will become. When we become that person with each moon cycle, we are a little bit wiser and a little bit lighter. It’s just a beautiful gift that we are able to truly embody and physically shed and release the things that are no longer serving us.
When you tap into that power of physically being able to bleed to release and shed and express it is profound. Then every cycle is the potential of new life. That’s why we bleed so that we can potentially birth new life. So every bleed is literally an opportunity for us to grow and prepare for a child’s birth, which is why they really can come together. And through tapping into the womb space and our cycles this can then lead onto childbirth if people want to journey with that.
If you’re reading this and you’re not someone who experiences a bleed monthly, or you’re in your wisdom phase of menopause, you can truly tap in by using the Lunar cycles. I would also say it’s really powerful to track your cycle. Even writing a word down a day of what emotions are coming up. Are you feeling energetic, do you feel emotional and what emotion is coming up? It’s about really allowing yourself to just sit with that and contemplate, alongside doing your 5 minutes of womb meditation. It all comes into together and it’s all interconnected and intertwined as we are with the Earth, the cycles of the moon and the energy of this Earth.
Have any fears, obstacles or unexpected surprises showed up along the way as you have worked on facilitating this work? And from rising into priestesshood?
So many fears obstacles and surprises have shown up for me as I’ve started doing this work and experiences as well. It’s just been really profound.
Through my mental health journey, I was so disconnected from my body and I have experienced and have been diagnosed something called Psychosomatic Disorder, which means that when you suppress emotions to such an extent, they start coming out as physical symptoms.
So for me, I would experience sensations in my body such as panic attacks, leg pain, irregular periods and spasms in my hands, legs, vertigo and a number of different things that I still sometimes experience.
We are all on this journey and its not linear and there’s no end goal. It’s just meeting myself where I’m at. When I’m truly becoming aware that my body is releasing these things for me, that I felt I was unable to subconsciously release that I wasn’t even aware of, its changed my whole life, and I’ve met myself in ways I didn’t even know I needed to.
This is such deep work and most of the people that I have met don’t really enjoy their periods, they feel disconnected and sometimes even have hatred towards their period and that time of the month. The feelings that they experience, and we’re taught, is that that ‘it’s not normal’ and you hear sometimes women get spoken to like, ‘don’t go near her she’s about to bleed so her emotions are all over the place’, but no, it’s a sacred thing. If we can start embodying that ourselves, honouring and being grateful for the process that we can have within us, then other people can start seeing it differently too.
We are in a time when the feminine is rising and the energy that’s happening in this world is coming to the forefront, and it’s time to awaken the healer, the shaman within us within our womb space because that’s where she resides, and she is there and all we have to do is listen if we know how.
So the obstacles I faced a lot of past trauma, a lot of unhealed emotions have come up for me which I’ve been journeying with and still am. To do with ex-relationships, childhood emotions and abuse. So many things have come up for me. I didn’t expect it to be so profound and so life-changing and it really has been.
Since stepping into my Priesthesshood, I have been open to a world of sisterhood, support, love and once we actually tap into this space within ourselves, of loving our bodies and loving our cycles, or even just creating that space, because it can take a long time sometimes. But just appreciating what is happening to us, and understanding what we’re experiencing can truly empower you in every aspect of your life.
What routines and rituals for the soul do you practise each day/on a regular basis that help you feel connected to both yourself and the world around you?
So every day I will do a ritual of womb meditation. I do about 30 to 40 minutes of womb meditation every day and womb pulsating where you tap into the pulse, or the heartbeat of your womb and see what needs to arise.
I practice yoga, daily when I can, which is normally quite a slow Yin practice. That’s because I’m very fast-paced and I like do to everything 500 mph so it really grounds me and just reminds me to connect into my power and my body’s wisdom.
I practice Uddiyana bandha which is a practice of abdominal locking so, to look internally within the stomach and womb space and activating the power that we would never normally tap into. That’s something that’s been part of my daily practice.
Also having a green juice in the morning and drinking lots of water. And just really asking myself what do I need? Also, I have a big love of burning sage and incense and I do a lot of chanting and Oracle readings and shamanic work with shamanic instruments such as rattles and drumming to disperse any stuck energy within my womb space and heart chakra.
I am currently microdosing some San Pedro which is the grandfather cactus plants of the Earth and it is a heart-opening medicine which just allows me to always come back to the heart and work from that centre rather than an outside source.
Also going out into nature is something I do every day. I put my feet on the Earth, grounding into Mother Earth and just connecting back to her. And it’s something we can do simply without even people being aware of. Just taking off shoes and socks off and just walking on the Earth and feeling how she feels. Our hands to the Earth and just saying thank you, and you know people like ‘oh, it’s so hippy’, but it doesn’t have to be. She actually is medicine. She gives us everything we need in this life. I’m so grateful to her.
I also work a lot with the elements, so everyday I will speak to the elements of Earth, Air, Fire and Water, and calling the energies of North, South, East and West. It changes daily what my routines and rituals are. Some days I work with Goddesess and other days I work with Shamanic energies or just the elements and it’s just a really intuitive thing. But connecting to the Earth and meditation and an embodiment practise.
I dance a lot as well it’s really profound. Journaling is also something I do daily and mirror gazing. So really looking into your eyes and saying what needs to come up today.
So that’s a lot of routines and rituals but some of the ones I do they’re not linear, they do change depending on how I’m feeling and where I am in my cycle.
I just meet myself where I am and do whatever I need to do that day. I get that answer by asking my womb space, and by asking myself, what I need right now? What does my body need?
Describe your perfect day:
My perfect day would be to wake up with beautiful sunshine. To wake up really early in the morning before the world wakes and go outside, to be naked and just grounding down into the Earth.
Then meditating and really connecting to the womb space, doing embodiment practices and just being present with myself. And feeling in alignment and knowing that the people around me are in alignment with who I am.
Describe yourself in 3 words:
To describe myself in three words I would say: Open, kind, and earthy.
Finally, Bec, what is your one wish for the world?
My one wish for the world is truly for people to stop rejecting parts of themselves. To know that it’s not our innate soul purpose to reject ourselves, it’s to embody ourselves and tap into the true power that we hold. And when we heal for ourselves we heal our ancestral lines, we heal for the children that come after us, and we heal for the world.
And I wish for more people to embrace the divine feminine that is rising. That’s why now is such a potent time to do so. Because the feminine is rising and if we can tap in and take responsibility for our own healing in our own way, and in our own journeys, it starts a ripple effect. Through the work that we do spiritually, and in the self-development world, we can truly heal the Earth.
♥♥♥♥♥♥
I truly cannot thank Bec enough for this beautiful, raw and deeply inspiring conversation that I hope touches as many heart and soul’s as possible.
2020 has been a year of shedding what has been. To think that so much of this knowledge is centuries years old and to me, it all seems so new. How does that also make you feel? That this alchemy and potency has been hidden from us all this time?
My biggest takeaway was that I feel like I will never see bleeding in the same way again. The opportunity for constant renewal is a revelation to me and so deeply powerful.
Fundamentally, when we start to unravel the medicinal emotion in our bodies, it can lead to us becoming even more deeply connected into our sacred vessel. And when we allow this empowerment to flow through us, and we meet our inner feminine, well, who knows what magic we can do in the world? And who knows what life will birth us in return?
I would love to hear from you and hear about any takeaways or downloads that came to you through this medicine.
Once again, I am beyond grateful to Bec for her heart, her vulnerability and for making this world the most enchanted and wondrous place to be.
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