Episode 130: Who am I now? Navigating Transitions with Jessie Harrold
Today on the Everything Belongs Podcast, Madison is in conversation with Jessie Harrold.
Jessie Harrold is a coach and doula who has been supporting women through radical life transformations and other rites of passage for over fifteen years. Jessie works one-on-one with women and mothers, facilitates mentorship programs, women’s circles and rituals, and hosts retreats and wilderness quests. Jessie is also the author of Project Body Love: my quest to love my body and the surprising truth I found instead, as well as the forthcoming title, Mothershift: Reclaiming Motherhood as a Rite of Passage. Jessie’s work has been featured in Spirituality & Health, Green Parent, Expectful and Explore Magazine. She is also the host of The Becoming Podcast. Jessie lives on the east coast of Canada where she mothers her two children, writes, and stewards the land.
“The work I do dances across and blurs the lines between science and magic, the personal and political, exploring life transition and rites of passage through the lens of ancestral wisdom, adult development psychology, ecopsychology and feminism.”
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In this episode we talk about:
Matriessence - biological, social, economic changes when we become mothers
Identity shifts when one becomes a mother
Mental illness as the only right of passage, postpartum
Who guides you as a mother? Who guides you in your rites of passage?
Grief, leaving behind a former self and being initiated into a new self.
Learning to be with the loss of who we used to be
Being in the liminal spaces - being in the in-between.
The importance of letting go of control
What might matriessence and rite of passages look like for non mothers?
The heroine's journey
Acorn theory
Using creativity to make meaning and inform our lives
The changing relationship to your body post-motherhood
How your body “belongs to someone else” in a sense, or is at minimum, shared with another being in many ways
Supporting secure attachment when the mother isn't secure yet herself
The bodily experience of sustaining other bodies constantly
How does the biological instinct to be a mama blend, define and negate modern expectations of the femme/womb body in a postmodern environment?
How do biology and social dynamics influence an individual versus a group?
The experience of loss of self with the addition of child/children
Grieving process of losing the old self
Keeping the creative self intact
Who am I now and where do I belong?
