ReMothering with Clara Belize Wisner

**this is an adaption of piece I wrote in May 2024 on Mothers’ Day. It’s updated and tweaked to include new ideas, thoughts, perspectives I’ve had since then. Hope you enjoy this version on Mothers’ Day 2026Today, on Mothers’ Day, (and honestly all my days) I have been thinking about our relationship to Mother.As I wrote the cards I sent to my mother and my mother-in-law I was struck by the continuum of mothers who allowed me to become a mother.If either of those two women had not become mothers I could not be the mother I am today. And if their mothers before them had not become mothers… and on back. This is the red thread. The mother line. The line of the blood. Fun fact: only women and their children live on Earth. Parent Blaming There is a trend in the collective of parent-blaming.There is a trend of looking at the way we were parented and holding it to a current standard and calling it ‘toxic’ or ‘traumatic.’This is not to say some of us weren’t hurt by our mothers. It’s not to say they did it all right. It’s definitely not to say we should lower our standards for motherhood. It’s not to say it was ok. You may fully deserve to be victimized by the way you were mothered.You may legitimately and fully be a victim of your mother’s pain. You can experience this as true. You are allowed to. And I hope you really do feel it because the only way to not pass it on is to feel and integrate your experience.When one person in unwilling to feel their pain, they will put it on the people around them. This is an energetic law. Sometimes the most vulnerable people are the easiest targets for passing down pain. An awful truth of humanity is the unprocessed pain we are all walking around with and subject to. But, when we are fully grown adult women, it’s time to stop asking “Why did my mother do this to me!?”And start acknowledging, “Wow. My mother was in a lot of pain.”It’s not even necessarily about forgiveness (although, remember, forgiveness isn’t for the other person, it’s for you), it’s about realizing that people, even our own mothers, are multifaceted beings.They could have a part of them that deeply loved us, but another part that was deeply wounded and instead of feeling, integrating, and dealing with that wounding themselves, they passed it on. This is how pain works. It moves through families until someone is willing to feeling it. It may be we were just innocent bystanders of their wounding.So many women were/are just surviving. The saying goes, “You cannot teach a starving man about God.” And you cannot expect a woman stretched to her physical, mental, and emotional limits to process or integrate generations of trauma and pain. Acknowledging this doesn’t make it ok that we were hurt. It just takes out the blame and the shame. Mother Wounding Holding a grudge towards our mothers, I believe, results in holding a grudge against The Mother. The Mother can hold it.However, holding this grudge will result in our mommy wounds being played out with other people in our lives.If you find yourself constantly looking for approval and validation from, or you’re constantly in conflict with, women you perceive as more powerful than you, you may have some mother wounds.If you feel like you cannot open, reveal yourself, or connect with people who deserve your trust and vulnerability, that could be rooted in mother wounding.If you feel like you can’t nourish yourself, don’t take time rest and fill your own cup, feel very uncomfortable simply being, feel a lack of innate worthiness, that could be related to your relationship with the Feminine principle or The Mother.When I read Elayne Kalila recent article, What Happens When the World is Motherless, I was struck in the gut by a few of her descriptions of what it feels like in the body to be motherless. Here are the quotes about that especially pinged for me. “You have never once in your adult life laid your head in someone’s lap and been stroked until you fell asleep.When you are sick you manage it. You order the soup. You cancel the meetings. You text your mother an update if you have one. Nobody comes.When you cry, you cry alone, usually in the bath, usually at night, and you clean yourself up before you come out.Your own mother is aging and you do not know how to be near her grief, or your own, so you phone once a week and keep it light.We do not know how to grieve, or how to descend, or how to rest, or how to belong.We are ashamed of what makes us alive.”The reason our mothers were/are in pain is because of a lack of what I’ll call the mother nutrient or feminine nourishment. The same reason we feel pain and hurt in this place because we were/are missing that too.See how the solution is not pointing fingers? It’s not making them see their mistakes. It’s not holding on to all the ways we were hurt as if holding on to to our hurt will save our life.The solution is to feel our pain. To let it move through us. To be with it. To orient to the Great Mother as mother. To let ourselves be seen by those that can be trusted with our vulnerability. To reveal ourselves to ourselves first. To reach into our hearts and remember we belong here. To allow ourselves the simple joys of living, mothering, and nature. What I do want to invite is an appreciation for all that was overcome for us to exist as we are, the mothering we received and the mothering our mothers received, from the women in their lives, from their aunts, and from the Earth. Everyone has dealt with some pain. Everyone alive has prevailed over something awful in their life time.For those of us who are also mothers ourselves I want to point to the joy of our own motherhood that we would not be able to experience without the life of our mothers and grandmothers before us.Respecting Our Mothers You exist because they exist/ed. This is the level of respect and honoring for all mothers that this day invites us in to.Humanity is messy. It is complex and nuanced.I have the experience that the harder I am on the world, the more I judge and find wrong in it, the harder I am on myself. The more I judge my own choices. And the more I judge myself.There is so much joy available in motherhood if we move away from this harshness. There is so much depth available when we’re willing to go into the darkness and look at what’s there. There is so much beauty in feeling these soft warm small bodies on ours. The little voices figuring out how to communicate and be heard.Can we let that open us a little wider today?And if you don’t have children, can you let your little one feel your joy at being the one that gets to hold her now? Can we all lean on female friend or friends to hold us in our grief? To share in our joy? Can we let ourselves our be mothered? Can we mother those around us? Can we let the tasks list, the exhaustion, the ideas of should, the ways we are doing it all wrong, go today and drop in with our children/inner children and feel the pure joy that lives there?Our creations! The creation of mothers back and back until the beginning of time!It is awe-worthy. It is worth celebrating.Thank you to the Mothers.Thank you to The Mother.Thank you to my mother.Thank you to my husband’s mother.Thank you to all the mothers that hold me and mother me while I mother (because we NEED that so much).Thank you to my grandmothers and my great grandmothers and on back.May we all find our joy in mothering today. And if not, may we start to get clear on the changes we need to make in our lives so that our joy can shine through.Because a mother’s joy will heal all wounds.Happy Mother’s Day to all.I would love to her from you in the comments or by replying:What is your relationship to mother?What brings you joy in motherhood? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

I woke up at 5am this morning unable to turn my mind off and go back to sleep. Thoughts and feelings of rage, helplessness, heartbreak, and deep, deep concern for humanity swimming in my mind. I am writing this maybe a little more activated than I would normally would write something for the public because, generally, I don’t believe the world needs more activated people writing things out into the void. But there is something here I need to say that I haven’t said before.I am surrounded by great men. The men in my life are exemplary humans. They love me, protect me, respect me, and want the fiery truth of my womb as well as the soft nurturance I can offer. The men in my life love me, Clara, as a human being. To say I am grateful for them isn’t even to touch a fraction of how I feel towards them. I weep tears of unending thanks thinking of all they offer and do for me. I have daughters and I am so glad they have such good modeling of what men are and can be.My Rage & MotherlessAnd, so much of the pain, rage, and heartbreak I feel is because of things men are largely directly responsible for. The news about the 62 million visits to this site called Motherless where men drug their wives (their wives and the mothers of their children) and rape their unconscious bodies and film it so other men can watch. There are 20,000 videos like this on the site. There is a direct link to a telegram group where men can trade dosage instructions. This isn’t on the “dark web,” this was just right out there on the internet. Anyone could have accessed it: motherless .com. I think part of the reason I am so disturbed is the name of this site. As that’s it, exactly: this is motherless behavior.All of this riding on the coattails of the Epstein files which showed us just how rampant the objectification of girls and women is among the elite and even the most “spiritually evolved teachers.”To quote Sophie Strand’s recent article, Do You Think I’m Being Overly Dramatic, “Every ten minutes a woman or girl is killed by her intimate partner or family member. Every 1.3 minutes a woman is raped. Every nine minutes a child is abused. These numbers are conservative and likely much, much higher. All accounts of sexual abuse are underreported.”The sex trafficking. The prolific use of porn and sex dolls. The disrespect of aging women. The obsession with keeping our bodies and faces young, perky, and childlike, so that we can use our ‘youthful-sexual-attraction’ like a currency. The ‘marriage benefit gap’ eg women who are coupled with men have across-the-board worse health outcomes than single women, whereas men have much better health outcomes when they are coupled with women. Why would this be? Because women are literally giving their life-force to their male partners.It is so easy to get entirely swallowed up in the disturbing-ness and hopelessness of these statistics. And yet, even in my grief and heartbreak, I know better than to let my mind follow the path these statistics would have it go down. I let myself feel the grief. I let myself feel the rage. I let myself feel the hurt, ache, and sickness. But, I am committed to not getting pulled into the vortex of stories and comparisons that could so easily make me hate and distrust all men.We are all Suffering The truth is, even though men are directly responsible for motherless . com and all that it represents, the problem itself is not men. No. We are all suffering; some as the victims and some as the perpetrators. We are all sick. We are all motherless.These raping men, overtaken by domination-based power, hatred and violence, these men, are indeed motherless. And, they were little boys at one point. They were malleable, sensitive, gentle, innocent, babes. They were toddlers, learning how to move in the world. They were teenagers growing up in a society that praised only patriarchal strength and endless productivity. They grew up in a society where the degradation and objectification of the Feminine was common practice. They were raised by human mothers who wouldn’t allow their pain. They were raised by men who didn’t protect their innocence.I am not defending what these men did or how they acted. I would never defend the full grown adults that make evil choices. I know at some spiritual level they will absolutely get what’s coming to them. They live in their own personal hells, I have no doubt. I have zero impulse to save them from any of the consequences of their actions. I have zero impulse to psychoanalyze any of it away.We need to make strong, swift, public, unforgiving, persecution, and examples of these men.This is what The Mother would do. She would say:No. Enough. This will stop.The Motherless world needs The Mother, for all of us.It’s not about vindication or punishment, it’s about what we are willing to allow.I am also thinking of the mothers who look the other way when they know or suspect their children are being abused. I am looking at the mothers who abused their own children. I am looking at the women who helped ‘groom’ children or participate in the industry of sex trafficking. I am looking to all the women who perpetuate their own objectification. I am looking to the women who are so angry, they can’t see how there are also pixels within them that have allowed the creation of the motherless world we now live in. I am looking at the way motherless women can’t trust their blood, gnowing, and No.When I hear of men acting like this I can’t help but ask, “Where are their mothers?” And that is why the name of the site struck such a chord with me. This is not to put the blame on their mothers or to transfer any responsibility to the victims of these kinds of men. Not at all. Please be victimized. You are a victim of something sick and disgusting. Feel your pain. Feel your rage. Let it rip through you. I will hold space for you in all of the grief, pain, and suffering. I will cry and rage with you, as my body and soul have also been affected by these types of men.But what can we do to make sure this stops happening? Is it to give up and not trust any man? Is it to refuse to offer our love, our nurturance, to opt out of heteronormative dynamics all together? I would understand if a woman answered yes to these questions, truly.However, it is not my path to eject my participation. My path is relational. My path is to call the Feminine principle forward and hold it in my tissues and bones. To call the Tower Feminine, the Mature Feminine, The Mother, forward in the face of all this motherless-ness.What I Want to Ask Men If I have anything I want to ask of the good men out there; it is, of course, to speak up when they see women being objectified in ANY way. To stop falling into their fragile ego concerns of judgements and use their precious, righteous, beautiful masculinity for change; internally and externally. To care for the women in their lives like they are sacred and holy. To appreciate the humanity behind every woman. To see every women as a sacred vessel of the divine. To hold us in our grief, anger, and heartbreak without feeling as if we are personally accusing you of being evil, as you have the capacity for. I want to ask the men out there reading this to see our bodies as the body of God. Just as I want them to see their own bodies as the body of God.But mostly what I want to ask these good men wiling to do ‘the work’ is that they look within the deepest, darkest, most slimy corners of their psyche and bring to light to the parts of themselves that hold the possibility of this wretched behavior.To get to know the parts of themselves that are capable of murder, rape, degradation, domination, and perpetration of all kinds. To really look at the parts of themselves that want bald pussies, fake boobs and flawless skin. I want these men to stop watching porn, definitively, and forever.I want these men to create brotherhoods built on true protection of the Feminine principle. To share their darkest corners with other men who will hold them accountable to their actions. I want these men to get to know Her love. I want these men to become Mothered.What I Am Asking of MyselfI am expecting the same of myself. To really get to know my darkness so that it cannot drive me. To constantly be willing to bring my darkness out into the light with people, teachers, mentors, and practitioners that can hold it and hold me as I feel. To build the container of my true Self up so that I can hold the paradox of my “badness” and “goodness” with conscious awareness so that I can make the choice which part of me leads.I ask myself to love the men in my life ferociously and completely. To see them as warriors of light. To remember their preciousness. To see them through the eyes of the Mother, when I have the capacity to. Denial is not the answer. Outrage can be and is appropriate, but it is not the final destination. It cannot be, because if it is, then what is happening will keep happening.We do not change this motherless world through blame and shame. We change it through recognizing where the collective disease lives within ourselves. We change it through seeing where the poison lives in us and bringing the light to those places. The antidote is not suppression, it is letting the light in to our darkest corners.We end this sickness by saying, “No. More,” and being willing to experience the death of the identify that comes with it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

A popular spiritual teacher, Mami Onami, recently wrote an article about how she identified, and has subsequently stopped; “emotional eating.” She also posted on instagram about how all spiritual practices praise “fasting.” And how using food ‘as relief’ makes you fat. I have been enjoying following this woman because I love women who are not afraid to look unhinged or crazy. I love an expressed woman. I love when people just say what they think. I find such a relief in knowing I can trust someone to just say the thing. Most women I know could use a lot more raw, full expression. That being said, I am an expressed woman myself. I have some strong thoughts and opinions on this concept of ‘emotional eating,’ and the spiritual connection to food, so I will also go ahead and share my unhinged beliefs here. Most Health Aware Women are Under Eating The truth is: most health-aware women are under eating. I see it again and again in my practice. Women come in to work with me. I have them track their food for 3 days. The majority are eating well under 2000 calories. Most women are under the impression they need to eat less or at least ‘control’ the types of food they’re eating a lot more.The rhetoric that people are overeating is everywhere. The collective idea of good health is that you are pure, worthy, and immaculately disciplined if you can survive off salad and green juice. This is not true. Our bodies need fuel to LIVE. Our bodies need calories, balanced macronutrients, and plenty of micronutrients to produce energy, rebuild our tissues, operate our immune system, sleep (yes! You need energy to sleep well!), think, and detoxify our bodies. Eating less food does not make you better or more worthy. Eating only vegetables does not make you more pure. Denying your body’s needs is not a badge of honor. It’s the exact road that leads to the destination of depletion, burnout, and massive dysregulation. We under eat, try to willpower our way to greater purity (eg skinniness) and then wonder why we start getting mysterious symptoms in our 30s, have no energy, and constantly feel overwhelmed by the demands of regular life. I talk about the importance of eating enough constantly on my instagram, on this recent podcast with Olivia Lara Owen, and in the Grounded Nutrition class I just taught (you can get the replay for free here). The Truth About Cravings So many intense cravings come from micronutrient deficiencies, eating too little calories overall, or eating inconsistently (which can easily cause minor to major binging and restriction cycles). Yes, there may be an emotional component to these cravings, but I implore you to work with your nourishment on a deeper level before assuming you just need more ‘willpower’ or your desire to eat is somehow not rooted in your physical needs. If you do struggle with binging or ‘emotional eating’, how has relying on willpower worked for you so far? Most people who do struggle with emotional eating have tried a million ways to use willpower to stop it. I am so familiar with this myself. I know the attempted tight gripped force to the falling-off-the-wagon-shame-and-punishment wash and repeat cycle so well. It was my story for years. Some more useful and pertinent inquiries to ask yourself are: * Have you actually focused on getting 100% of your micronutrients from your food? * Do you eat defined, hearty, macronutrient balanced meals at regular, consistent intervals? * Are you sure you eat enough for the energy demands of your unique life? * Are you eating enough carbohydrates to fuel ovulation, thyroid function, and brain activity? (This minimum is around 180g of carbs per day for women, which is 2 medium sweet potatoes + 1 cup orange juice + 1 cup blueberries + 2 cups rice or MORE over the course of a day). If you aren’t answering yes to these questions, then I would definitely focus on these before I would worry about trying to eat less or control your ‘emotional eating’. Emotional eating does exist. I’m not saying it doesn’t. But what most people think is emotional eating is just the body trying to meet its needs. The body never lies. If the body is asking for something there is a reason for it. That reason may be emotional, but it could very well be physical. This is where people assume it’s emotional and don’t consider what it actually takes to fuel a body well. When your body is fueled really well consistently, cravings are drastically minimized. I, personally, rarely have cravings for anything. I get hungry. I eat a lot of food. That’s it. I, of course, have preferences. I like certain foods, but mostly I am totally happy just eating a lot of really good quality, solid, even, boring food. What if You’re Simply Not Hungry? So what if binging isn’t your issue? What if you know or you suspect already you don’t eat enough? What if you’re just not hungry? In the article, Onami, says her realization about emotional hunger versus physical hunger came after she got a two day stomach bug and lost weight because she wasn’t eating.Not eating increases stress hormones. When we are sick our body may need to reroute some energy or clear the stomach to do the work it needs to do to rid itself of the bug, but this will raise stress hormones. The best thing we can do when we’re sick is hydrate and try to nourish ourselves as best we can. When stress hormones rise hunger decreases. Stress hormones also reduce our perception of pain. Stress hormones make us a lot less sensitive to our body’s needs overall. This is actually their evolved function. Stress hormones can function a lot like an upper. We feel ready to take on the world! We can actually feel really good in a manic sort of way. Especially when we figure out a way to get an even higher dose of stress hormones (like eating a lot less than we’re used to). Stress hormones are an awesome evolutionary adaption to needing energy when there wasn’t food available. So that we can go find food. This adaption wasn’t meant to be a place we live in permanently, but this is where we may find ourselves when we chronically under eat. If you tend to just ‘not be a big eater,’ or have trouble feeling hungry, especially when you haven’t eaten for long periods of time (like in the morning, for example), this is an indication your stress hormones are probably high. If our stress hormones are high, we actually can’t really trust our hunger cues. We should never ‘force’ ourselves to eat food, however, we do need to stop the stress hormone cycle and remember to fuel our bodies. What Onami’s whole article sounds like to me is someone who is just revved up on stress hormones. Running on stress hormones is expensive. It is like taking a loan out of the bank. Eventually, you will have to pay that money (energy) back.People are different, have different stories, backgrounds and constitutions. Some people can withstand a ton of ‘running on stress hormones,’ others are more delicate and sensitive and will feel the effects much sooner. For everyone, there will be a reckoning at some point. It could be the vegetarian, super health conscious, marathon runner who drops dead at 55 because of a heart attack and everyone is so confused because “they were so healthy!”. It could be the midlife health crash and insomnia after a lifetime of pushing beyond our body’s limits. It could be fertility challenges. It could be crippling depression or anxiety. It could be lots of little things: digestive distress, thyroid issues, injuries, low energy levels; death by a thousand paper cuts. These seemingly unexplainable or non-sensical health issues can actually be very well be explained by living in a low energy availability (LEA) state and physiological high levels of stress, for years and years of our lives, thinking we are doing the ‘right health thing’ by eating as little as we can. In this lifetime, the body will always win.The Elephant in the Room… The elephant in the room is: eating as little as we can goes along with endeavoring to be as skinny as possible. Why are so many people under eating? Well, because they don’t want to gain weight, of course! I also don’t want you to gain fat, but I do want you to stop prioritizing the slimness of your body over your own nourishment. Eating enough to fuel your energetic needs should not make you gain weight. In fact, eating enough to fuel our energetic needs is when we get to really heal and build our resilience. There are plenty of ways to nourish yourself well and fully without packing on a ton of excess fat. Fat is protection. If you do gain a lot of fat just by eating enough calories for a grown woman then this is a sign your metabolic function is low and you may need to go through a slow, methodical, reverse dieting process to rebuild your metabolic health. This would involve increasing your food intake very incrementally over a long period of time (could be years). Your body will be happiest at a weight that makes you feel nourished, safe, grounded, and full. When you focus on nourishment, you will have the body your Soul belongs to. Not some skinny replica of someone else’s body, while feeling miserable. Spirituality and FoodThis brings me to Onami’s assertion that all spirituality praises and encourages fasting. It is true there are lot of spiritual practices that involve fasting. But fasting intentionally for a spiritual purpose is very different than just trying to eat as little as possible all time. If a woman wants to fast as a spiritual practice then let her go to a cabin away from all her daily duties, work, children, and home so she can really experience the spiritual aspect of it. Asking a woman to fast while she is working, caring for children, working out, and holding a home, is not what the spiritual sages had in mind. It’s beyond our body’s capacity. Most of the extreme fasting-as-purification ideas are just more ‘masculine-ascension-based-spirituality’ and puritanical dogma disguised as spiritual wisdom. We have taken so much out of context and forced it through a patriarchal lens that removes the muck of the matter (on all accounts). Fasting was done, but for short periods of time, not indefinitely. The needs of the body are looked down upon as nasty, dirty, and animal-like. There is this idea we need to separate from our body’s needs because they are somehow below us. This is the exact seed of the demonization of feminine. Matter comes from the Latin word ‘mater,’ meaning mother. The goddess cults that existed before patriarchal religion worshiped grains, honey, and milk. If fasting is part of spirituality, feasting is just as much a part of spiritual celebration. The body, the Earth and the Mother were worshipped as the source of all. Sex and food were honored, revered and held as sacred. This is the kind of spirituality that has been demoted for thousands of years and I, for one, am ready for it to make its comeback. I am not interested in anymore tight-gripped, white-knuckled sanitized, puritanical spirituality. I am more interested in the spirituality that makes my very body sacred. I am interested in how Spirit wraps and penetrates into every cell of my being. I am interested in the descension process that brings me deeper into matter, Mother, and this numinous human experience. I am interested in living embodied. I am indeed a spiritual being having a human experience, I believe that wholeheartedly. And with that, I believe my body is housed within my Soul and part of it. I believe its needs are holy. I believe eating is a practice of communion with the forces that created me. I believe me caring for my body with enough food, loving touch, connected sex, and attentive guardianship is my prayer and part of the legacy I leave behind. I believe this kind of spirituality is what women need to be encouraged to remember, not encouraged to figure out how to bypass their hunger cues so they can be a skinny b***h. If you’re interested in true nourishment and how to center and orient toward it, join us in Deep Nourishment. We have officially started already, but the past call replays are up and it’s designed to be self paced. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

Last Friday I came down with quite an intense cough; tons of congestion, runny nose, sore throat, and general malaise. When I was 8 years old I started to come down with repeated respiratory infections. I would get these epic sore throats and coughs. I would cough all through the night, unable to sleep. My coughing fits sounded like a dying dog and frequently ended in me almost throwing up. My abs would be so sore the thought of coughing made me cry, but I would still uncontrollably hack away. I would get so embarrassed in school because of these fits that any time I needed to just clear my throat I would have crippling anxiety. Asthma was suggested by a doctor. I had an inhaler that felt like it saved my life a time or two. Point is; I have a history with coughing and respiratory illness. Around 20 years old, well into my self-abuse via food restriction, substances, and alcohol, I got Scarlett Fever (yes, like what the pioneers used to die from). I guess you can get this if you let Strep Throat go untreated (and also binge drink and don’t feed yourself while you have it). After that, I did a bunch of “research” on my own and decided to get my adenoids and tonsils removed. I reasoned this would solve my seemingly unending issues with respiratory ailments. After the preliminary appointments with an ear, nose and throat doctor I found out I had insanely huge adenoids and tonsils, probably from a life time of mouth breathing and my genetic facial structure (another rabbit hole I’ve been down but won’t go down right now). The removal of my huge adenoids and tonsils actually worked for me (although it’s not necessarily what I would recommend knowing what I know now). I haven’t really struggled outside of a yearly cold since the removal. However, in the last four months I have come down with two pretty severe nose/throat/lungs illnesses where I’ve lost my voice. This most recent one being very reminiscent of my early days with the coughing fits that just won’t quit. In the world of Mineral Nutritional Balancing (MNB) there is a concept called “retracing.” According to Dr. Paul Eck (the grandfather of MNB): “Retracing” refers to a temporary return to earlier physical or emotional states during a healing program—especially when following a carefully designed nutritional protocol based on hair tissue mineral analysis (HTMA).In Eck’s framework, retracing happens because the body is correcting deeper imbalances in reverse order of how they developed. As metabolism improves and mineral patterns normalize, the body may “revisit” past stress patterns, toxins, or weaknesses.The retracing concept holds: * Healing is not linearThe body doesn’t simply move forward into better health. Instead, it often unwinds layers of dysfunction, moving backward through previously adapted states.* Old symptoms can reappear temporarilyA person might experience past issues—fatigue, skin eruptions, emotional states, or even infections—that had seemingly resolved. In Eck’s view, this is not regression but evidence of deeper correction.* Mineral patterns drive the processAs key minerals (like calcium, magnesium, sodium, potassium, copper, and zinc) rebalance, enzyme systems and glandular activity shifts. This can reactivate stored metabolic patterns.* Detoxification is involvedRetracing often overlaps with the release of stored toxins (especially heavy metals), which can temporarily stress the system and mimic older symptoms.* A sign of progress (if managed correctly)Eck said that retracing should be mild and self-limiting. Strong or overwhelming symptoms suggest the protocol may be too much for the person. How I think about this is: the body is basically replaying old imbalances and issues so that it can heal and resolve them more completely. As I’ve been laying awake in the midst of these unrelenting coughing fits I have had crystal clear memories of similar nights as a child. It feels almost like I’m literally touching those past times again. It’s like the experience of the symptoms themselves are creating a wrinkle in time. I definitely don’t believe time to be only linear. I’ve had too many mystical experiences where I’ve experienced connection with my past or future self in the present moment. My reality exists in cycles and spirals, not straight lines. This isn’t the first time I’ve experienced retracing viscerally, I’ve been on a MNB protocol for about 3.5 years (off and on), but this is the first time I’m really seeing how we can truly rewrite our stories through this process, if we’re willing to experience our recurring symptoms in a new way.When I started getting these coughs as a child I remember feeling that my vulnerability (sickness) was a problem. The coughing all night was not fun for my parents (as a parent.. I know this to be true). I know my parents were worried about me and also very inconvenienced by my needing to stay home from school, go to the doctor, etc. I got the message, “You’re not as lovable when you’re sick.” As I am retracing this illness, I am being faced with the part of me that was cut off from love for being vulnerable, and this, right here, is what I get to rewrite through the wrinkle in time created by my recurrent symptoms. There is no blame here. As a parent, I really understand how there is sometimes a limit to how sympathetic and nurturing we can be when we’ve been kept up all night and we have work to do in the morning. We do our best. I’m sure my parents did their best. We do not get out of life unscathed. This is an unfortunate truth. However, as adults, we do get to choose how to see our symptoms. We get to choose how to be with them. I am now an adult. And, I have little hurting parts in me locked away in compartments. We all do. We don’t have to go digging around for these locked compartments (please don’t, they are locked away from a reason), but when one presents itself to us through a symptom or a memory or a process we are in; this is when we get all of our mature adult hands on deck, use our tools, feel our feelings, get brave and courageous, fall apart, and, ultimately, bring this part home. This is when we get to integrate that part in a way that makes us more whole. Healing is being on our own side. Or, as my mentor Coly Vulpiani says, “Healing is complete and radical self acceptance.”Recurring symptoms do not have to be a hamster wheel of frustration, panic, and urgency. They can be an invitation into a wrinkle in time. When was the first time you had these symptoms? What was going on in your life? What were you learning or being shown? If you’re interested in Mineral Nutritional Balancing you can always book a connection call with me to talk about how it might serve you. In Deep Nourishment | A Course in Foundational Care for the Female Body we will go over the basics of mineral nutritional balancing and how you can work with remineralization to heal and rewrite your body’s story. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

Is there such a thing as eating too much fat?I know the dietary fat conversation has gotten a little confusing.I thought fat was good? I thought we needed all the animal fats for the nutrient density? I thought we needed it for our hormones? I thought I should put enough butter on my bread I can see my teethmarks when I bite in? Yes! We absolutely do need fat. Good animal fat is soooo nutrient dense. And BECAUSE of how dense it is; it can create sluggishness in an already slowed down system. And, this is part of why we need to bring a little more nuance into the conversation.I do not want to add to the noise of extremes and pendulating dietary trends. I do not want to encourage anyone to do anything that doesn’t feel good in their body or shy away from anything that IS feeling good in their body.BUT, if you feel like you’re doing all the things and still don’t feel quite right.. there could be some wisdom in this more nuanced discussion of dietary fat intake.If you want more of this practical, non dogmatic, grounding back into the basics of nutrition for women check out:Deep Nourishment | A Course in Foundational Care for the Female Body.We will get into more of these nuances. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

I have been circling around, feeling into, digesting, metabolizing, holding in my prayers the events happening in Iran and Minnesota in my own way over the last few weeks. I do not consume news on a regular basis through any channels (other than reading my local newspaper weekly) because: 1. I have a very sensitive system and I know myself well. I’m not afraid of ‘dysregulation’ but I am solidly aware of how much I can actually hold within my body without going unconscious. I am in a season of life where I have young souls to shepard and my solid, stable presence is needed here, at home. As Mother Theresa said, “You want to change the world? Go home and love your family.” I take this very seriously. 2. My personal life, the way I live, how I spend my money, the work I do in the world, and the way I hold myself, is my activism. It is how I use my energy to create the world I would like to leave my children. I am very clear and very passionate about this. As I’ve heard credited to Marion Woodman (although I don’t think she originated the quote) “the personal is political.” I truly live by this concept in so many ways. My way of living and being is my rebellion. However, it can feel a little off in some way to be posting about my business and little memes about nourishment when it feels like the world is on fire. The Two CampsThere is one camp that says, “Be professional.” This voice says, “You don’t need to weigh in on every political disruption.” “No one cares what you have to say about politics, just stay in your lane.” This voice is the voice of business as usual. This doesn’t feel attuned to the thread of Truth and authenticity I aspire to uphold. And yet, it is exhausting and not necessarily in service for me to add my voice to the cacophony of enraged and disembodied voices. There is another camp that seems to be more prevalent these days in the social media sphere: “Share every single thing you think.” It’s become fashionable and popular for anyone with a social media account to share their political views perpetually, at all hours, and without discernment or consideration. In fact, for some (and I’m so glad this is not my readership) not sharing your political views or stance is akin to sin. The threat of ‘silence is compliance.’As always, the Truth is somewhere in the middle. It’s not ok to float right over all the atrocities and current events and act as if nothing is happening and just go on posting about my offerings. It’s also not ok for me to lose my s**t and report every single thing I think and feel when it isn’t related to what I’m in the public eye sharing about.Wide Open Heart, Big F*****g FenceMaybe surprisingly, I think of myself as a private person. I would not have social media at all if it weren’t in service to The Mother for me to do so. I don’t always want the attention on me. I can be comfortable in the confident leader role and I can also be comfortable as the quiet, back-of-the-room observer. I have a very big, robust, and strong fence around my heart because of how open, soft, and sensitive my heart is. As Danielle LaPorte says, “Wide open heart, big f*****g fence.” I keep my inner circle very small, on purpose. It’s taken me until my late 30s to get comfortable and clear with this.I share a good deal about my personal life, but anything I share is for the specific purpose of teaching on a larger theme. I am not just sharing my life to share my life. I am sharing my perspective/experience to illustrate a universal deeper meaning. That’s the way my writing and expression works. I show what I would like to teach with my beingness. I become the lesson. However, this doesn’t mean I share anywhere near the majority of my unique and personal process. I am also a messy, unsure, hurting-at-times human, after all. My messaging politically has been consistent throughout my whole tenure being in the somewhat public eye. I belong to neither side. I identify with neither side. On a personal level, I agree with one side on some things and I agree with the other on others. I am on the side of humanity, and that is a not a political party. Something I read today hit home: “Love your neighbors more than your government.” I am on the side of humanity, of love, of courage, of beauty, of the thread of organic Life. Always.Separation Has Always Been the True Enemy Separation has always been the true enemy in my eyes. Atrocities happen. They happen for no good reason. I would never try to explain away or gloss over pain, suffering, and real injustice. My spirituality doesn’t avoid the dirt. It is about brining the Soul into the dirt, the body, the matter. Not in a “lets make meaning out of this” way, but in a way that honors the organic and God. A long time teacher of mine, Coly Vulpiani wrote recently:“What if the quality of energy we are expressing in the name of justice is actually feeding the very atmosphere we are trying to change? Not because our concerns are wrong. But because of the quality of consciousness we bring to them matters…. In times like these what we are becoming matters as much as what we are resisting.” What we are becoming matters. This is the creator’s focus: in the face of atrocities, what and who am I becoming? What am I embodying with my actions, words, and thoughts? We are creators and artists. Each and every one of us in a co-creation with our reality and those around us. This isn’t woo woo mumbo jumbo. This is quantum entanglement. This is the field within which we all abide. How we show up matters. The “quality of consciousness” we bring to a situation matters. We cannot fight violence, disconnection and insanity with violence, disconnection and insanity. As Martin Luther King said: “The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."We don’t have to go out and hold signs on the streets to be activists. We can if that feels right for us. We don’t have to call our senators. We definitely can and should if that’s what feels right for us. We don’t have to ‘be political’ in any way shape or form to be advocates for the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible. We do need to love each other. Truly love. We need to become the people that can do conflict differently. We need to bring integrity and coherence into our work, our homes, our relationships, the places we spend our time, where we put our attention. We need to clean up where we’re sitting. The personal is political, after all. For me, this looks like a very deep and personal practice of prayer. I spend precious time each morning with my attention on all the pain and hope emanating from Iran. I send the freedom fighters my energetic support. I allow myself to reach into the hearts of the people in pain and offer them my love. I pray for the souls of the people in the regime causing the hurt to wake up to their own despair and feel it. I pray for Trump and ICE agents and the families being torn apart. Sometimes, I breathe in the agony and suffering into the alchemical energetic chamber of my heart and breathe out love. I do this over and over again. I use my attention and intention to bring coherence to the field within myself and the one we all inhabit.I am reminded of the poem, Call Me By My True Names by Tich Nhat Hanh. I remember that one being’s ache is my ache. Make Art with Our PainWe need to make art with and from our grief, our misery, our fear, and our suffering. People always lament, “What can I do!? I just wish I could do something!” This is what we “do.” I am not saying every person needs to become a painter or a sculptor, but in the broader sense of artist, as in making something that is uniquely yours and did not exist before you came to be on this planet. Maybe it’s taking a walk every morning and dancing with the sunrise. Maybe it’s the way you chat with a stranger at the grocery store. Maybe it’s baking biscuits for your new neighbor. Maybe it’s writing poetry or love letters. Maybe it is making an epic protest sign and holding it in the freezing cold. Maybe it is writing a post on social media. Make whatever it is with your whole heart, the grief, the rage, the hopelessness included. I believe this to be the greatest act of resistance. I can never pretend to understand why the atrocities happening in the world happen. I would never desecrate a mother’s or a father’s or a child’s or a friend’s pain by trying to explain it away. I do encourage all of us to express ourselves through art. To make our pain known through an act of creation. To let ourselves and our pain be seen, heard and felt through our unique extension of ourselves and our love out into the world. Please, let us know in the comments, what are you creating? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

“There is no coming to consciousness without pain.” - Carl JungI’m writing this in the first few days of 2026. It has not been an easy transition. I haven’t had anything drastic externally happen to me or my family, although I have had two very tragic events happen to people adjacent to me. My personal life has been nothing but really quiet, sweet and simple. And yet, so much inside me is moving. Like the tectonic plates within my reality are lifting, shuddering and re-jiggering. When an unconscious aspect of ourselves and our patterns comes into our conscious awareness, it can feel like it threatens the very fabric of our reality. I have felt this the last couple weeks. I can feel my reality changing, at its very core. We have a few options when we’re feeling like this: 1. We can deny it. Try to push the uneasy feelings underground. We all will do this for awhile. It’s human nature to deny change. I personally don’t know anyone who feels a whisper of change on the horizon and just willingly surrenders to it right away without any denial. But, the longer we shove it away, the more uncomfortable it gets. It’s like trying to hold a lid on boiling water, eventually it’s going to spill and get all over everything. We can find all sorts of ways to release a little steam here and there. so we can play dumb about the awakening for a long time. We can deny anything is off or needs adjustment. We can stick our fingers in our ears and say, “LALALALALA,” for quite a long while. We can get really distracted and pulled into all sorts of side quests that take us away from the actual realization our Soul is pointing us towards. Nothing is wrong with this. It’s all part of the process. It takes so much courage to be truly honest with ourselves. 2. We can fight with it. Then, eventually we are no longer able to deny it any long. We become aware something needs to change. And then we fight it. We resist it. We don’t believe it’s possible. We don’t see a way to make the change or integrate the realization. A friend of mine said when speaking about realizing what we must change, “Anything but that. I can do anything but that.” This is how awakening can feel, “I could literally do anything but that.” So we fight. We claw at the walls. We resist the sensations, feelings, despair, honesty, vulnerability, and weakness that comes with change. Most of the time, we have be beginners again. There is a way awakening will always bring you back to square one. Being a beginner isn’t fun for most people. This is also totally normal. We can’t stop fighting until we’re ready to stop fighting. It’s all part of the process. It takes real courage to lean into the despair and not fight with it.3. We can surrender. We can have faith. We can move into the awakening willing to be carved, changed, and trusting that all it brings is for our and everyone else’s highest and best good. Any difficult experience we are having/have had is an opportunity for an awakening. The most truly faith-filled people I know are the people who have been through unthinkably difficult experiences and come out the other side with more grace, wisdom, and faith in some guiding force that is beyond our comprehension. This doesn’t have to be a religious faith. This isn’t always the same faith I have. However, I do not know a way to truly get through the arduous and stripping-away task of awakening without it. You need a tether into something bigger than you. Our small human minds cannot weather the immensity of our Soul’s tasks, desires and journeys without a tether to some meaning outside of our small selves.This is why throughout human history, you will always find faith, spirituality, and a relationship to something mysterious and unlimited at the center of the human condition. Faith doesn’t give you a reason for all the awful things that can happen in the world. Nothing can. Faith doesn’t tie our lives up in a pretty bow. Faith doesn’t mean there is a big daddy in the sky coming to save you. Faith means you can say yes to your Soul. It means you can take a leap into the unknown, knowing whatever happens, you’ll be caught. It takes a lot of courage to have faith. Faith doesn’t make awakening easier. Knowing that you’ll be caught doesn’t actually make the jumping into the abyss any more comfortable. There is still crippling fear. There are still nerves. There will be more despair just around the corner. There are still all the parts of you who don’t have faith or who need to “see it to believe it.” We are not all one way. “I am large. I contain multitudes,” as Walt Whitman said. The big misconception is that faith will somehow save us from pain. We think if we have faith, we’ll be able to just “give it all to God” or breeze through our challenges with a smile and a wink. This hasn’t been my experience of faith. I know for me, personally, I have a deep, deep practice of faith. Faith is the foundation upon which I live and know myself and I have never come to the precipice of a big change, transition or awakening in my life without feeling completely and totally terrified. Faith simply gives me something to practice while I’m in the midst of pain and unknown. Once I’ve stopped denying. Once I’ve stopped fighting, and trust me, I do plenty of those, I come back to this statement: “God/Source/Universe/Guiding Light, I don’t know what to do here. Help me. Show me.” And then I wait, open. A teacher of mine asked me recently, “Did God ask you to do this?”This could be one way to determine if we’re denying, fighting or surrendering. If God didn’t ask us to do what we’re doing, we’re probably not in a pose of surrender.I’ve been practicing. What is God asking me to do? Did God ask me to do this? We will each have our own unique ways of connecting with God/Source/Higher Self. For me, I have come to know when I drop down below the static layer of life and busyness and drama and my own patterns, I tap into a deeper knowing. This where God “speaks” to me. For me, this requires a quiet mind and somewhat settled body, which can be hard to come by, but is maybe the most important thing I can give myself, and ultimately it is a choice I make, to listen or not to listen. I know I need to have a sense of unattachment to the outcome or information I will receive. It’s like listening carefully to someone, but with your whole body instead of just your ears.Sometimes, in this space of listening, I get nothing. Sometimes I get something like “not yet” or “it’s unclear” or just “be still.” It’s not always a definitive, satisfying answer.For the past few weeks, the only thing God has been asking me to do is one thing: write. And it’s the last thing I want to do. When I sit down to write I am plagued with the idea I have nothing of value to say or that no one cares or that it’s too much to even try. My Soul doesn’t care about any of these excuses, but my human mind does. But, it’s the only thing that is clear: Write. Write. Write. Write and take care of myself. Write and take care of my children. Write and sleep. Write and eat. Write and read. Write and pray. And…I haven’t done it. That’s how this works. We can also know exactly what we need to do and not do it. It is no small thing to be honest with ourselves. We will avoid it in every way possible because “there is no coming to consciousness without pain.” There are many parts of ourselves (for good reason!) that want to avoid pain at all costs. Avoid the discomfort. Avoid the shake up. Avoid the unknown. Avoid the raging, the grief, the hurt, the things that we’ve been trying so hard to keep down under the surface. The amount of energy that it takes to keep things at bay is vast. It is big. And when we finally turn towards them (which is what writing does for me) it can feel like we are never going to be able to turn away. Here I am, finally, after months of denying and fighting, I am writing. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

My Recent ExperienceOver the weekend, I spent 4 nights in Mexico participating in Moondance with over 300 other women. Moondance is an indigenous ceremony where women opt to not sleep, fast, and dance and sing under the full moon for 4 nights. There are a lot of other aspects and details to it, but ultimately it is a prayer circle for the healing of the Feminine principle. For me it was a way to connect with a time before women we were thought of as the ‘weaker sex’, a time when women were respected for their spiritual connection to the power of creation and manifestation. A place where women’s strength is trusted, exalted, and fully experienced. We sacrifice our comfort to deepen our attention on our prayers and make them sacred. Prayers for ourselves and our families. Prayers for our relationships and relations. Prayers for our lands and Earth. Prayers for our ancestors and legacies. Prayers for conscious change and remembrance. Prayers for all creatures, plants and the elements. As I am taking space and integrating what was a deeply alchemizing and profound experience for me, I am seeing the power of women remembering their strength. Damsels There is a strong collective story so many women play into of the “damsel in distress.” On a symbolic level this story says that women are weak, powerless, and need a man or something to save them. This story says physical strength trumps spiritual strength. This story says logic trumps intuition. This story says mental academia trumps embodied experience. This story says winter is bad and summer is good. This story says death is scary and to deny/erase it. This story says faith is only for those who are impractical, dumb and delusional. This story says money is worth more than integrity. This story says our difficulties in life are victimization not initiation. The Feminine does not need saving. She is the creator and the destroyer. We, the beings that are the altar through which spirit comes into form, do not need saving. We, the beings that raise up the next generation of humanity in spite of wars, famines, unthinkable abuse, and dangers beyond comprehension, do not need saving. We, the beings that give of our bodies so that Life may continue forward, do not need saving. We, the beings that die and bleed only to be reborn, every single month, do not need saving. Women are strong. And yet, it is not a dominating kind of strong. It is the strength of the Earth, who will always hold you, no matter how high up in your tower or how deep in the ground you are. It is the strength of spirit, in form. We may not have the brute physical strength that men have, but, weaved into our very bodies, we have a strength that comes from our connection to nature, cycles, creation and destruction. So many of us have forgotten this strength. It’s like this strength has been put to sleep, lulled into a drowsy, comfortable, slumber, and we have forgotten who we are. I can’t help but think this is partly due to how few contained and guided initiations we have in modern life. Instead of owning our power, we waste our energy comparing ourselves to others. Instead of owning our power, we use up our energy tearing down other women. Instead of owning our power, we park our energy by agonizing and ruminating over our unworthiness. What if we remembered we are all the daughters of Creation, Herself? Sisters to each other?How do we remember this? Initiation We remember through initiation. We remember through seeing and watching ourselves approach, cross, and be transformed by thresholds. Facing our fears and experiencing our own strength, not with force and gritting our teeth, but through surrender. Initiation demands that we put our small minds to the side and walk, willingly, into the flames. So many of our built-in initiations in life have been corrupted and stalled. Menarche is shamed and rushed through unceremoniously for most young girls. Childbirth and pregnancy has been medicalized and pathologized. Menopause also pathologized, stalled and stopped completely if possible. Death is only spoken about in whispers and swept away as soon as possible. Even our monthly cycles and bleeds, which can be mini initiations, are expected to be hidden, kept under wraps, and largely experienced alone and ignored. If you feel shame or confusion about any of these initiations there is a great likelihood it has been stunted, stalled, or is incomplete. We can also have plenty initiations that are unique to us, through life events, painful experiences, and coming up against the dark, unknown and mysterious. Initiations shape us. They change us. They allow us to become. They allow us to experience Feminine strength which is directly connected to our embodied experience of Creation.Cultures that still have a connection to the natural world as sentient and alive in and of itself, revere the Feminine principle. They revere matter as holy, because they know all things are imbued with spirit. They would create containers and rituals that would complete the initiation of a woman into her power and connect her to all those before her through all time (like the 40 days sitting in practice post childbirth, for example). Tyson Yunkapora (aboriginal philosopher and writer) says, “You know a culture is really domesticated when the women are considered weaker.” Women’s strength has almost been forgotten in the Western world. We infantilize women and call it femininity. A woman is not meant to be held as trophy or an object of sexual satisfaction, this is perhaps the biggest travesty of our modern times. A woman has access to creation and destruction. She has access, through her very physical form, to the forces of nature. Her value is not in how small her waist is or how big her lips. Her value is in her beingness, the radiance of God that shines through her eyes. Her very aliveness and her ability to allow that aliveness to flow through her, unimpeded, is what feeds the world. Women do not need to be saved; from men, from the world, from corporations, or from the Patriarchy, women simply need to be fully and completely initiated, because then they save themselves and their families and the world. When a woman truly experiences her strength she will no longer feel the need to subvert her power through looking for saving, comparison, or validation. A woman’s strength does not come from gritting her teeth and getting it over with. It doesn’t come from what or how much she produces or how much she can ‘do’, it comes from her ability to sit in the dark, with herself and for herself. If you feel called to explore this concept of initiation I am going to be speaking at a 3 day online gathering called INITIATION next weekend October 19th at 1pm Mountain Time alongside some other incredible women who hold deep wisdom about this concept of initiation as well. You can get more information and register here. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

I am about to embark on a great adventure. Eight nights away from my girls and husband. Traveling internationally alone. A ceremony that involves days and nights of not eating, not sleeping, and lots of sweating. As I sit here staring at my mostly packed suitcase full of camping paraphernalia and gear that I hope will bring me some semblance of comfort in the potentially blistering hot sun or freezing cold rain, I feel a familiar vulnerability. There is a voice in the back of head saying, “You know you don’t have to do this, right? You know you could just stay home, sleep in your beautiful organic bed and bedding, holding your little girls hot, curling, little hands? You could stay in close proximity to the safe, solid, refuge of your husband’s body? You could eat wholesome food and wake up rested, regulated, to the cacophony of the Sandhill Crane migration happening right outside your bedroom window? Life is so good here You could just not go. You know that, right?!”This is a voice of reason, it’s true. I am choosing to do this hard thing. I am choosing to fly thousands of miles away from my home, my land, my people, my comfort, to experience something that will most likely be quite rough, difficult, involve big physical challenges, and be wildly outside of my preferences. And the truth is, I don’t have to do it. I could simply stay home. I could stay comfortable. Life would probably stay pretty good. Since the moment I heard my Soul call to attend this ceremony, my personality has had all sorts of judgements and fears about it. For almost a year I have been having dreams revolving around this ceremony. Dreams filled with fear, anxiety, confusion, mystery, as well as expansion, newness, and potential transformation. I don’t have any expectations of this experience. I don’t have high hopes or any lofty ideals I’m hoping to bring to fruition. I don’t feel better than anyone who hasn’t/won’t do something like this.I am not one to fantasize much. I’m generally quite optimistic and always operate from a mindset of abundance, but I also really value boots-on-the-ground realism. I’m hesitant to jump into things because when I decide to do something, I generally do it well and do it fully committed; both feet first. I wish I could be more “type B” sometimes, but I would hate to be unprepared. So, here I am staring at my suitcase. I have and am prepared. I have agnoized over the packing list. I have contemplated a lot of possible scenarios. I have gone through all the things I need to do ad naseum. I have prepared my family, our home, and our village of helpers and supports for my time away. I have asked my community for prayers and well-wishes. I think about how many times in my life have I stared a suitcase with similar thoughts of “you don’t have to do this” swimming through my head. I felt simliarly when I went to South East Asia by myself when I was 20 years old, before readily available GPS, smartphones, airbnb or uber. I remember feeling deeply afraid, heartbroken, and alone. I was meant to go with a boyfriend who had broke up with me seemingly out of the blue before the trip. I ended up getting a tape worm and almost dying by myself in a hotel room, but alas, I prevailed. This trip built my confidence to navigate the world by myself on practica, l as well as spiritual levels. I remember the agongy of will I or won’t I go, before I travelled to Africa to live in Zambia for 2.5 years as a Peace Corps volunteer. I could write a whole memoir about that experience, but let’s just say it deeply shaped and softened me. It humbled me, physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. I remember a deep tension before leaving to Japan, again, by myself, the very start of over a year of living nomadically. Little did I know as I stared at my suitcase then, that I was mere months away from my entire world as I thought I knew it, crumbling. And yet, again, I survived, and I am so much richer in heart and Soul than before this experience. It’s sexy and flashy to say, “Do the things that scare you!” “Get out of your comfort zone!” But the things that scare you are scary for a reason. Simply doing the things that scare you does not guarantee you won’t find yourself hallucinating with fever in a hotel room, alone, in Thailand. It does not guarantee you won’t get your heart shattered.These voices that want you to stay home and stay safe, aren’t wrong. They are taking what has happened in the past and applying it to the future. What else can we be expected to do, really? How else would we learn? This morning the voices urging me toward comfort were loud. They had been arising before, but I had been shoving them down, sticking them in any nook and cranny so I could get on with my preparations. But this morning, I also remembered, these voices are here to protect me. These parts want to protect me from the shock, pain, sudden change, THE UNKNOWN, and that is ok. I am so grateful for these parts. Afterall, they have done a really good job. I am safe. Generally, I think people really need to get a lot more comforatble with the mundane. I think most people would benefit from just sitting their ass down, so to speak, and being still. I think the majority of women in a similar demographic as me, would actually benefit from a lot more simple, consistent, safe, and ‘boring’ living. Feeding themselves three nutrious meals a day, getting enough sleep, and focusing on what relaxes them and brings them pleasure. I believe this is what most of us need, most of the time. However, there is also Soul work and Soul nourishment to be done. There are times when we need to take a leap of faith. There are times when we need to throw ourselves into the black unknown. There are times when we need to shake our life up and put ourselves in the way of transformation. A little known piece here is we don’t need to go looking for it. Stay with the basics. Perpare yourself for the call. It will find you. It will be clear when it’s clear. It won’t be urgent or desperate. It won’t be an “I need that!!” of the small mind. It won’t be confusing. It will feel like bell is ringing your entire body. Resonance.When I feel that resonance, I have learned, you simply must say yes, you go no questions asked, you follow that thing. It doesn’t mean it isn’t going to take you to the brink of annihilation, it probably will, but what is available on the other side, is an entirely new way of being. What is on the other side, is something you cannot even fathom from this side and that’s precisely why it is so terrifying. And if you feel that resonance and you say no, the thing will keep knocking, it will get louder and louder and harder to ignore. You don’t need to worry or fret about missed opportunities. You will be presented with many. What do I do with these terrified, protector parts that keep applying the past to the future in the face of a resonant Soul call? When I remember to stop trying to make the voices go away or being completely identified with them, I go on a walk with them. I give them my full attention. I turn towards them instead of away. I allow them to tell me what they’re worried about. I ask them what they want me to know. I ask them where they came from. I take the time and space to really listen, just like I would listen to my daughter if she was scared about something. When they have told me everything, I tell them thank you. I tell them I appreciate you. I tell them, I see you and what you do for me. I tell them, I hear you and I really value your insights. I tell them, we are safe. I tell them, I know this is scary and we don’t know what is going to happen, and I have got this. This is what we’re doing. Soul leads my life. It’s ok for you to be scared. My Soul can take it from here. A Soul-led life most definitely requires we do the things that scare us, but it doesn’t mean we leave our scared and protector parts in the dust. We can still love them, appreciate them, and listen to them. We can still remember they are parts of us and deserve acknowledgement, hearing them out, and respect for their learned wisdom.In these moments I always think of the Rumi poem, The Guest House. This being human is a guest house.Every morning a new arrival.A joy, a depression, a meanness,some momentary awareness comesas an unexpected visitor.Welcome and entertain them all!Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,who violently sweep your houseempty of its furniture,still, treat each guest honorably.He may be clearing you outfor some new delight.The dark thought, the shame, the malice,meet them at the door laughing,and invite them in.Be grateful for whoever comes,because each has been sentas a guide from beyond.Doing the things that scare us does not mean we ignore the parts of us that are scared. It means we walk alongside our fear. We acknowledge and honor our fear, while courageously leading with the resonance of our Soul. What scares you? What are you resonant with, but the ‘voices of comfort’ are loudly discouraging you to do? Use this inquiry as a journal prompt, comment below, or hit reply. I would love to hear if you want to share. This is a public episode. 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It is with great tenderness and genuine humility that I would like to introduce the new title and energy of this space: ReMothering. Up until now this publication has been called Matriarch, which is a powerful word and symbol. Matriarchal energy is compelling, intense, passionate, and refined. Matriarch has a true Queen current. I love it. Holding this formidable Mature Feminine energy in the world is definitely part of my unique medicine.However, this spring and summer have brought so much to the surface. This has been a time of reckoning and revelation for me, as for so many of you I am sure, because we are connected. I have softened in ways I didn’t expect. I have been humbled in ways that were ultimately quiet and gentle, yet profound. So much of my personal experience with awakening before these recent months has come through suffering. I have experienced awakening through big life experiences that were painful, shocking, and violent. I have experienced awakening through feeling so deeply uncomfortable in my body and life that if something didn’t change I would have had to end my life. I have experienced awakening through substance abuse and self harm. I have experienced awakening through fighting with myself so much that ultimately I had no other choice than to surrender. These were all experiences I am deeply grateful for as they led me to who and where I am today, but they were all severely excruciating processes. But the last few months have been the first time I have felt like I was simply blooming. No force. No excess pain (still plenty of pain, as “there is no coming to consciousness without pain,” Carl Jung), but no unnecessary suffering. It has been a gentle opening to something different and completely new.The Matriarch wasn’t the archetype that carried me through me this one, it was The Great Mother or the Collective Nurturer, as I have called her before. ReMothering isn’t a static word or concept. It’s a verb. It implies an ongoing process; maybe a process we can experience in our own individual ways as well as together. I know in my heart, womb, and Soul that the world needs more Mothered Mothers and Mothered Women. I call this the Mother-Continuum. Whether you’re a daughter, a daughter who wants to be a mother, a young mother, a seasoned mother, a grandmother, and beyond; you are on the Mother-Continuum. If you are not a mother yourself, you have come from a mother and that’s all that matters here. We are recognizing of the legacy of the Love of The Mother that sustains us all. We all deserve to feel the complete but unintimidating, huge but gentle, unshakable and unconditional love of The Mother. We can all remember how to access this simple and stable love within our own bodies, offer it to ourselves first and foremost, then offer it to our loved ones and eventually out into the world. This is my intention with ReMothering. Creating a space rich in the love of The Mother, so that it may nourish those that come into contact with it. This isn’t just all touchy-feely new-age gobbly gook, The Mother knows about practicality. She is a master of the systems and structures that hold us in the rhythms that nurture and feed us. So, this space will have some very clear deliverables. As a free subscriber you will receive these personal essays and recordings of me reading my personal essays. As a celebratory gift for the launch of the ReMothering, for the next month I am also offering all free subscribers my Deep Nutrition Framework, which is a prioritized list of what to focus on when it comes to building a diet and lifestyle that nourishes you and the people you love on all levels. As a paid subscriber for $7/month or $77/year you will receive my essays, Deep Nutrition Framework, as well as: * My newly updated Meal Planning Guide (with lots of easy, simple, deeply nourishing recipes for the whole family). * Monthly (at least) Nourishing Tips, Metabolically Supportive Recipes, Meal Plans, Rituals and Ways of Connecting to the Seasons, Nature, and Your Body. * ReMothering Village subscriber chat, where you can share pictures of the food you cook, recipes, parenting tips, gratitudes, personal shares and anything that you feel pertains to this ReMothering process. I am envisioning this being a place where we can crowd source ReMothering resources, practices, food info, parenting ideas, tools, and provide sacred witnessing, reflection and mirroring to each other. Thank you for being here. I am available for any questions or clarifications you might have.I appreciate your time and energy here, immensely. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

I have been contemplating the real meaning of humility. I see such a lack of genuine humility in the wellness/personal development spaces. As a provider in this space, especially on social media, there is an omnipresent drive to position yourself as the one who ‘knows.’ You need to have a hook— a way to grab peoples’ attention in the first few seconds as someone scrolls on by. A society of people who are searching for saving and sound-bite-solutions, produces a an assortment of vendors playing the role of savior and giving oversimplified answers. Where is the humility on either side of this equation?What is True Humility? I have come to believe that true humility has nothing to do with shirking praise. It is not feigning meekness or modesty at your achievements. It is not believing yourself too weak or incapable of impact. Humility is not saying “Oh jeez! Please, stop! You don’t have to do that!” (All the while loving every second of acclaim and compliments.) It is not pretending that you don’t need or like recognition or validation. Humility is as much not an inferiority complex as it is not a superiority complex. One of the spiritual texts I come back to again and again is the The Way of Mastery. Concerning humility it says: “Genuine humility flows from the deep-seated recognition that you cannot save yourself, that you are created and not Creator, that you are effect and not cause (in an absolute sense), that something called Life is not yours, that there is something beyond your capacity of containment and intellectual understanding. And if that something ever decided to give up loving you, you would cease to exist.” In other words, real, true humility is an in-the-body recognition that without Source Energy, God, Universal Intelligence, The Great Mystery you would do and be nothing. Really sit with this a moment. Let it wash over you and in you. No matter where you are or what you are doing, really allow this fact into your body: the thing responsible for your very existence is unfathomable to your mind. You cannot know it. How does that make you feel? When I feel into it, I feel a lot of things. I feel a deep relief and a great fear. I feel simultaneously like weeping with grief and cackling with ecstasy. I feel terrified and completely electrified, at the same time. I feel a deep, resonant, quaking Truth in my bones and through my center. This is true humility.The Power of Dreamwork I have been working intentionally with my dreams in the style of Marion Woodman and Carl Jung for about a year.Dreamwork has been an unending source of humility for me. I feel inexperienced with the language, while at the same time feeling highly attracted and resonant with it. I feel like a total rookie, but also clear that it is for me. As someone who has identified as an ‘experienced practitioner’, who has genuinely built my life and career around my own interests and spiritual seeking (hello 1/3 profile in Human Design), I may have gotten a bit stuck in a rut of feeling like I knew what I was doing and had done it all.I have done a lot. I have had more experiences in my 37 years than many people have had in lifetimes. And yet, as the saying goes, the more you know, the more you know you do not know. Stepping earnestly into the world of Jungian dream analysis has given me humbling experience after humbling experience with just how much I do not know. It has shown me how little attention I have give my Dream Maker, my Soul, the subconscious part of me. The part that is actually most connected to the Great Mystery. Every single night our dreams are filled with symbols, images, stories… subconscious material that we can choose to work with or not. I used to think dreams were just psychological castoffs; unimportant details being sifted and reorganized from our days. This is, on a small level, true. Our dreams can largely be our psyches trying to synthesize and rebalance all the information and experiences we’ve taken in throughout our waking life. Our dreams are not junk, however. They are not lifeless jibber jabber. They may be full of content we do not understand, but they are alive with metaphor; the language of the Soul. When we write our dreams off as nonsensical or just weird interpretations of what happened to us in our waking life, we lose out on the Wisdom staring back at us. One of my most spiritually fulfilling practices is to look out onto the natural world and feel how it is looking back at me. This is what I am doing with my dreamwork, acknowledging that there is some part of me, I like calling it my Dream Maker or my Soul, attempting to communicate with me. I am looking at my dreams and seeing and feeling them look back at me. Dreamwork is quiet work. It’s not work done out in the world. It’s done at home, in my journal, in silence, and within my very own psyche. There is zero flashiness to it. And it’s some of the most deeply rewarding work I’ve done with myself and ultimately it is for no one else, but me. Shamanism and Dreamwork When you choose to practice ‘dream weaving’ you start to see and feel patterns, insights, realizations, and assimilations within yourself. It’s like your own personal shamanic journey created by your own personal Shaman (your Soul) each and every night. As Marion Woodman said, “The more you work with your dreams and your unconscious, and honor it, the more you understand it and it understands you.”Shamanic journeys are simply connecting you to this dream world and dream state in a more conscious way. This is what we do by working with our dreams. We bring consciousness to the unconscious, within us. We see that there are different forms of consciousness all around us. We are expanding our consciousness. So much of shamanic journey work is simply allowing our imaginations to run and move without the narrowing influence of the programmed egoic mind. Imagination is how you access the shamanic realms (without drugs). Dreams are as well. Dreamwork has shown me a new level and depth of unconsciousness within myself. As I build a relationship with my own Dream Maker I cultivate a relationship with the magical, feeling, intuitive, mysterious aspects of myself through the guidance of the bigger, wider part of Myself that lives unconfined by our consensus reality. My mind doesn’t really get it. And that’s precisely how I know it’s the place I need to be in and explore. We ‘experienced practitioners’ think we are out here ‘working with our shadows,’ ‘figuring out our patterns,’ and making some headway on comprehending our deeper selves while filtering it all through our conscious understanding. We think we are moderately far up the mountain peak of enlightenment, that we have made some noticeable dent in the meal that is a Soul’s journey to consciousness, but what weaving with my dreams has shown me is that the sheer amount of unconscious material I have to work with is endless.It’s like an iceberg. What we are conciously aware of is the part of the iceberg on the surface of the water. The unconscious is not only the lower, massive, under water part of the iceberg, but the dark oceanic waters as well. Its vastness cannot be overstated. We could never fully understand our motives. We are never going to totally comprehend our unique path. We will never know all the pieces and parts that are driving our own becoming. We cannot see all the lenses we perceive reality through. We aren’t meant to. It’s not how human life works. It’s not the experience we came here to have. Maybe when our spirits leave our bodies we will be able to access a higher vantage point, but until then, here we are. While here in these human forms, the idea that we could somehow comprehensively figure ourselves out, with our small intellects, lacks genuine humility.Humility When Giving and Receiving MedicineThe amount of information available to us nowadays is shock-inducing. We can find the answers to literally any query we may have in a matter of seconds. We can ask Chat to summarize the entire internet for us on any subject we find ourselves wondering about. It can be so hard to imagine how little we know, especially when we can know so much, so quickly.We are also inundated by all sorts of advertising, algorithms, sales tactics, and general lack of authenticity every minute we choose to engage with any source of media. This can leave us feeling inferior, superior, angry, confused, and just plain overwhelmed. All of these things play in to our subconscious states. Everything we engage with takes up psychic space. We are so wildly impressionable.This is another humbling realization, just how little awareness and control we have around what is influencing us at any moment. It can feel so good to feel like we have got it figured out. It can feel like the safety we have always longed for. On one level, isn’t that what we are hungrily searching for? The answers? The secrets? The keys to life? The ways we’ll be safe and protected and stable forever? What is that thing you find yourself endlessly pining for? Money? A partner? A career? Fame? Power? A home? To be truly seen or loved? We all have some weak spot, or many weak spots. We all have some tender, raw, trembling desire (probably coming from a wound) that we might do things we are not proud of to acquire. Humility is recognizing this about ourselves. It is understanding that we do not know all we think we know, that we could never know. Again, recognizing that we only exist because of a The Great Mystery. Even though we think we know what reality is, we could easily be tricked or persuaded or enchanted at the prospect of getting something our unintegrated wounded parts secretly yearn for or believe they need.Humility is to know and honor that these desperate parts exist within us and understand that we may not see them until they’ve already been driving our behavior or choices.I remember when I was 8 years into running a business only to discover that my inner teenager was the one who was running my finances. You ever been there? Humbling. Humility is also to know and honor that these desperate parts exist in others, too. Our unawareness of our desperate parts and not acknowledging sometimes others also have desperate parts driving their actions is a lack of genuine humility. A genuinely humble teacher, guide, practitioner, coach, service provider understands that they are not the source of transformation or healing.The Way of Mastery says: “A master accepts the love and the gratitude offered by those whom his or her teachings have touched and gives it all to God, recognizing that of themselves these things could not have been done.” To hook into someone’s desperation for healing or power or love or money would be to assume you could play the role only Source can play for them. There are a lot of inner young ones out there running practices and businesses for validation, a sense of power, accolades, belonging, and self importance. This is OK, I don’t believe in perfection other than perfection as wholeness. However, having a sense of genuine humility and a sense of our own limitations is wise. It keeps us from believing that the work we do in the world is due to something special about us. True Power is Like Sand Through the HandsEach and every one of us is wildly special and unique. We each have our own quintessential vibration. We all need to offer the world the song only we can sing. And, we are completely and totally insignificant, at the same time. This is the great paradox in the middle of the Truth. The more we can release our sense of self importance, the more we can actually be of service. True power is like sand through the hands. It is something we cannot hold onto for ourselves. It may only come through us, if we are willing not to grip too tightly, while being very clear about what is us and what is not us. I pray everyday to remember: “I am not the doer and the maker” and to recognize “that Only Love can fulfill my Soul.” (Way of Mastery)This is humbling work. May you receive true humility for the terrible and wonderful gift it is, within you and without you. Only Love, Clara This is a public episode. 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I have been taking a social media break over the summer. It’s been about 2 months I’ve intentionally not engaged with social media. I go on to check my messages and respond to things once in awhile, but other than that I am not on it. For someone who spent the last 10 years (with one 6 month break around when my second daughter was born) building a social media account and showing up there pretty much every day, this has made me feel a lot of things. I knew I had to take a break when I really saw and, more importantly, felt fully in my body, how being on instagram at the capacity I was, was undeniably going against my values of nourishment and presence. Integrity: Why I Chose to Take an Instagram Break I recently read this definition of integrity from Amy May: “Integrity is the alignment of what you think, what you say and what you do.” About six months ago, I saw, with full, blinding clarity, that the way I related with instagram was not nourishing me or my family. I felt myself constantly being pulled into the digital sharing of my life versus actually living my life. I found myself preferring the ‘social engagement’ I received on instagram over my real life community connections. I noticed that if something cool or exciting or novel happened in my actual life, my first response was to think about how I would share it on instagram, instead of actually being in the experience itself. I noticed how when I was sitting down to eat dinner or relax on the couch I was much more likely to grab my phone and start scrolling than I was to be with or connect with my kids and husband right in front of me. This narrative around social media use and its insidious, dehumanizing qualities is a well discussed phenomena, most of us here on the internet are abundantly, conciousnly aware of it. Those of us that use social media regularly have heard it and felt it all before. We’ve all probably felt guilty or shameful about the way we use instagram as a pacifier at times. It wasn’t the first time I had noticed myself being hijacked like this, but it was the first time I really connected the dots between my social media use and my own aligned integrity with the frequency of nourishment. There was also this new dissatisfaction I was feeling with my ‘real’ life. Some way that my actual life just wasn’t filling me up in the ways I knew it could. I was starting to notice more and more low level, almost subconscious, uneasiness and disquiet, a lack of contentment that followed me around like a piece of toilet paper stuck to my shoe. I know the signs of addiction. One of the ways I know addiction is running the show in my life, is an isolated dissatisfied jitteriness, a pining for the one thing and not being able to enjoy anything else fully. There is an always-on-my-mind rumination that starts to surface. It brings me into myself in a harmful way, in way that makes me feel separate, hollow, and desperate. It disconnects me from those around me.There was all the sudden no longer a doubt instagram had become an addiction. The Personal is Political Poised at precipice of needing something to change, I heard my ‘business owner voice’ loud and clear saying: “You can’t stop. This is how you generate an income for yourself. This is how you ‘find clients.’ You’ve spent so much energy, time, and attention on building this platform and audience, you can’t just let it go!” And yet… I could not unsee how much lifeforce I was giving to this entity that is soul-less.If I am to be the change I wish to see in the world and be in alignment and integrity with my teachings and messages, I could not continue. If I was going to be the mother, wife, daughter, friend, and person that I would like to be, I could not continue. If I believe that I serve the highest and best good in the Universe when I am full, nourished, juicy, and grounded, I could not continue. If I believe that nourishment is possible in this modern world, I could not continue. If I believe that integrity, alignment, and authenticity are the most powerful frequencies, I could not continue. This is so much more important than my business. This is so much more important than money. This is so much more important than anything else. These are places we have to hold our values so strongly if we really want to see a New Way and new paradigm emerge. If we want to see a paradigm that truly values integrity, beauty, authenticity, nourishment, and the power of Life itself, we need to value those things more than our own fear. This is where, as Marion Woodman says, “The personal is political.” Through our choices and what we choose to follow within our own lives, we choose what we take part in creating. We are culture creators with each of our very personal choices. I am not on a crusade of better-than. I do not judge you if you use instagram. In all likelihood, after this summer I will probably find a way to use it with more consciousness. I am on my path and you are on yours. I trust both of those paths, completely and infinitely. How could I ever know what is best for you? How I Feel Off of Instagram In the last two months since I got off instagram, I can feel my nervous system settling in a way it hasn’t in many, many years (maybe since I got on social media). I feel genuinely happier. I keep searching for more a more precise way to say that, but that’s really it. I just feel happier. I feel more content.I feel more excited about my real, in person life. I have more energy for depth and connection for those friends that don’t live close to me, but that I value deeply. I feel more bonded with my children and like I have more capacity to hold space for them in their hard and frustrating moments. I feel like I am more engaged and am leading my family with more clarity and precision, instead of just reacting to what is thrown at me. I have more space for my husband and find myself way more interested in intimacy. I find myself feeling more gratitude and heart opening for him and our life together. More genuine connection. What I think, what I say and what I do are endlessly more aligned. Performance and Narcissism Being off Instagram, I have been struck, like a clanging bell, by the amount of performance social media creates. As someone who had the conscious intention to be completely and totally ‘real’ on instagram, to not use filters and to not only show the highlight reel of my life but share some of the hard stuff too, I’ve realized how it’s actually impossible not to perform at least a little. When you are creating content for other people, you are always going to be orienting externally. No one would be on instagram if they weren’t interested in having other people see them. That could be for business purposes or creative goals, but it’s going to create this view where a person is constantly putting themselves as the object of other people’s gaze. This creates an energy of performance and breeds narcissism. Narcissist is a big buzz word these days and I’m not going to get deep into the pop psychology that surrounds it, but it comes from the Greek Mythology story of Narcissus, who becomes so enamored with his own reflection that he eventually dies from unrequited love.Think about instagram, YouTube, and reality TV personalities, they are entertaining. They create a caricature of a person, which doesn’t allow that person to be multifaceted and nuanced (like a true human). Instagram promotes characters, not people. It puts people into black and white, pro and anti. It doesn’t have space for the nuance that true connection and understanding requires. This doesn’t have to be wrong or bad, it’s just true.If I create a character for myself and I play that character for years and years for my audience, I eventually come to believe I am that character. This can create a numbness. A despondency that can make people depressed. It’s what I imagine happens to celebrities, on a smaller scale, but more prolifically, considering the way anyone can be an ‘influencer,’ these days. If you create content on social media you know how blatantly narcissistic it can be. Photographing or videoing yourself constantly. Looking through and editing photos and videos of yourself. Listening to yourself over and over again. Writing about your life, your thoughts. Again, always orienting to yourself as the center, the ‘main character’ energy. I don’t believe there is anything inherently wrong with promoting myself or creating content that centers me, but I think it is very important to be aware of the way it can plant seeds of narcissism. It creates a tendency to preform, center myself, and speak in aggrandizements and half truths. Even with the best of intentions, I would argue that social media will make anyone who uses it regularly more narcissistic. It’s not a reason not to use it, but it is a trade off to be wary of. The story of Narcissus, is the story of so many “influencers,” big and small. It is possible to get so obsessed with ourselves, that we start to miss our lives. We miss our families. We miss the very humble lessons being offered to us. We get so caught up in the self importance that we forget we are but a speck on a blade of glass, spinning through infinate space. We forget how to live be in community with other flawed and unimportant humans. We forget how to really live our lives from a place really rooted in reality. My Take I don’t have anything figured out here. I’m very much in process with this all.I do not judge anyone or myself for where we are on our paths. I love performance. I love the bigness it can bring. I love when people allow something energetically big and archetypal to roar through them and let the watchers experience something almost super natural and spiritual. I love people going big with their expression and thoughts. I also think it’s important to understand that social media is not real. No matter how real you try to keep it or the person your watching is trying to keep it. Life happens in the tangible, not the digital, and we will be happier when we remember and engage with Life from a place of true humility and wonder. I don’t regret any part of my life or my time on social media as it was me, figuring how to express, sell, connect, hold, teach, invite, transmit, and everything in between. I am always, always a fan of learning through doing. There are no mistakes, only steps on the path toward your unique becoming. Announcements: I was a guest on my friend’s Suzzi’s podcast and it was such a good convo we broke it up into two episodes. Woman’s Bodies Podcast with Clara + Dr. Suuzi Hazen. Part 1: The Missing Nutrient of Feminine Embodiment Part 2: A Fat Body is a De-Energized Body - root causes of weight gain “out of nowhere” Body Prayer In person offering at Lighthouse Bzn. Tuesdays at 10:30-11:30am. Body Prayer is a class for anyone to come and experience their body in a new way.It is a mix of mobility, stretching, self lymph and fascial work, meditation, somatic connection and embodiment practice.It is guided by primal movement, repatterning, and energetic clearing principles. Body Prayer will move you, relax you, ground you, stretch you, and bring you fully, gently, into your body.All are welcome! Please come as you are. This is a public episode. 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I have been stalled in my formal writing. I write furiously in my journal. Producing pages of nonsensical dialogues with my many selves and internal voices. I write out my dreams in painstaking detail. Pouring over them, trying to unravel and unwind the messages my unconscious Soul is communicating with me. I write out conversations I wish I’d had or feel like I need to have, but also know to say the things I wish to say would not be kind or compassionate or true, in the long run. I write letters I’ll never send. I write poems no one will ever see. I write from altar egos trying on what it would feel like to be completely different than I am. I write statements in the margins of books I’m reading, on random scraps of paper I find around the house, in the notes app of my phone, of potential topics I would like to think and write about more deeply. I have a notes folder called “inspiration” with close to a thousand half-started articles and essays and incomplete thoughts. It’s all felt dense; heavy, lately. There is never a time when my mind is quiet enough to focus, always thinking of who needs a dentist appointment, what to cook for dinner and playing mental Tetris with my schedule so I can squeeze in a walk or workout. When I do get a moment to write with a seemingly solid a thread to follow, I only find another knot. Like a pile of tangled gold chain necklaces. It feels impossible. So all my writing has stayed spread out, like a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle. I’ll come back to it later. There are times in my life when writing has felt easy. I have so many things to say and I just have to let my fingers fly around the keys and something relatively cohesive spills out. Sometimes it feels like God is just whooshing through me and I just have to get out of the way. Those are the days for which the slogging becomes worthwhile. When I’m writing a lot, I am in the habit of translating my thoughts and feelings to words. Everything worth doing in this life, takes practice. Writing is no different. Expression is no different. We have to actually express imperfectly; messily, before we can express in a way that fully lands for ourselves and for others. I am not a great writer by any accounts. But, I have indeed put many, many hours into the practice. I have been writing here on Substack since 2021. And I started with a 100 days of writing practice, which I completed. I think there are over 200 articles on this account. I don’t write weekly, but I’ve written one or two articles a month since beginning, sometimes more.Before Substack, I wrote on Facebook, instagram, blogs, newsletters, for years. I have journaled since I was 10. As I think about the sheer amount of writing I’ve done, I’m realizing I should probably be a better writer than I am. Writing is medicine for me. When I first started this Substack it was called “Medicine Writing.” I was a brand new mother of two really needing a creative outlet. Those first 100 days of writing were me committing to a practice of spending time with myself each day. I will not forget the moment I sat down to write my first Substack article. It was early morning, the sun was rising, breaking through the mist that had settled around the river below my home. My babies and husband were still sleeping and I had a hot cup of cacao steaming next to me and my computer open to a blank page. I felt like I could take a deep breath for the first time in a long time. There is something very healing about allowing other people to see you in your process. The perceived accountability of other people watching you show up for what you’ve committed to can be the thing that keeps you going when you’d rather not push through the humps of resistance. I don’t feel any external pressure to write publicly at the moment. I am having a very family-oriented summer and enjoying the slower pace immensely. However, I am very familiar with the feeling of what I will call: expression-constipation. It feels a lot like a head too full of ideas. It feels like you’ve eaten too much dinner and it hasn’t quite started leaving your stomach. It’s uncomfortable. It makes you tired and complacent, sleepy and forgetful. It makes you apathetic and unenthusiastic. Sometimes you can feel very “busy,” but you just can’t seem to focus on one thing. When you do have something you want to say or express, this overfull fogginess makes the resistance to saying it have a little more weight and feel more tempting. Whereas, when you’re in the practice of expressing, that resistance will burn off quickly. There is so much of this apathy in the world. So much non-committal, draggy, tired, stuck energy towards our own inevitable and necessary regeneration. We are alchemical creatures. We are here to transform, shift, learn, grow, and flow, not stagnate and idle. I read a quote the other day from Joanna Macy, “Apathy is the refusal to suffer.” Reading this was like finding a key piece of the jigsaw puzzle under the coffee table. So much could finally fit together. This swelling discomfort I’ve been experiencing is the exact thing I need to move towards. As I refuse to feel it, experience it, allow it, I am ‘refusing to suffer’. I am refusing to allow the alchemical, creative process to happen. I am postponing the inevitable ever-changing reality of my humanity. This is not a small concept. Nor is it easy to embody or take in. But it is relatively simple. I am reminded of another anchoring statement I have used throughout the years, “Whatever is arising….love that.” Writing is one of the ways I turn towards my own suffering and feel it. It is the way I acknowledge and make sense of my own jumbled thoughts. It is the way I work out what is me and what isn’t me. Writing is one of the ways I stay fully alive, awake to the burning transmutation happening within me and without me at all times. It keeps me as conscious as I can be of the pain and joy of this Life.Thank you for being a witness to my process and writing. My prayer is that you find something in these writings that sparks this aliveness within you. May we all be a little more willing to feel what we have been refusing to, so that we may awaken from our slumber and turn our open heart towards the world again. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

For over a decade I have been sharing my life and my work on instagram. I have slowly been coming to terms with the truth instagram it is no longer a place I want to spend a lot of attention and energy. There are so many reasons for this, and most of them you’ve probably heard a million times, so I won’t go into all the harrowing statistics about social media and how it negatively affects our health and our ability to think critically and independently. I tell myself that I need to be on instagram for ‘my business’ but I have done enough inner work in my lifetime, I know better than to really think this fear based belief is a fact. So, I have decided to take a break from instagram for the summer and put my attention and focus here on Substack. Some the questions I want to know the answers to:How do I feel without instagram as a daily activity? Can I run my business, generate clients, without it?Will I feel disconnected from friends if I’m not on it?I’m feeling the desire to do more focused work, research, and contemplative writing and reading. I’m craving more deep focus.I love instagram for all it’s given me and allowed me to create from just my phone.It truly is such a miracle in the potential it has to connect people.I’ve made and sustained a lot of very cherished connections on instagram. In my personal life and practice I am in a reckoning and reclamation of my attention back to what feeds, nourishes, and moves me towards how I want to feel in my life. I am deepening my devotion to service and my unique work in the world, and somewhat paradoxically, this is calling me to spend more time in connection with nature, quiet, stillness, and true, whole self listening. True focus is such a lost art.I made three posts over on instagram as I took my leave:1. Who Am I? 2. Ways to Work with Me. 3. What I am in Service To? I am sharing a longer form version of the What I am in Service To post here.What I am in Service ToYes, I run a practice that needs to generate money.Yes, I charge for my services.Yes, I value having comforts, safety, and the freedom having a steady income allows.And, the reason I do the work I do is not for the money or the validation.I could do a lot of other things that would make a lot more money.I could find a high paying position somewhere. I have a lot of amazing skills. I could run my practice in a way that was more “scale-able”I could charge a lot more for what I do.I could find “high paying” clients.I could make my work exclusive or create a system that would allow more people to access it and me to work less. Maybe I will do some of those things someday.But only if it would be in service to do so.Because, the reason I do what I do and offer what I offer and offer it how I offer it; is because it is what is most in service to the energy and frequency that I call: The Mother.The Mother is where all nourishment is derived and being in service to Her is my mission in life.The Mother frequency is related to the frequency of Life itself, The Father, Divine Union, The Family, and humanity in its most flawed and perfect forms. And so, I am also in service to these frequencies and you’ll see them woven throughout my work and offerings.This is not just some fluff I say out front and then in the backend disregard based on metrics or what’s popular or logical. This is my very real and solid barometer and ultimate decider of every step I take, in my personal life, in my business, in my soul.“What is in service here?” is always my first and most prioritized question. Serving the legacy of humanity is my mission.It is crystal clear to me.My personal practice and journey brings me further and further into alignment and integrity with this energy. It’s a tight rope to walk at times because there is very little room to be out of integrity with Life and Nourishment. (hence the social media break when I feel like I’ve recently had the most traction I’ve ever had with social media. It really make no “logical” sense.)This service to The Mother is the most foundational aspect of my life.I follow Her. I serve Her. I am not confused about who makes this Life I live possible. I do not get bewildered about who deserves the accolades. It is Her. It is always Her. Not me. Does this mean I’m no fun and all somber seriousness and never celebrate myself?No! That would be not be in service to The Mother or Life itself, would it?Does this mean I don’t have parts of me that wish I could just run away, lay on a beach all day? Of course I do. And in some ways, that is sometimes necessary for me to be in service. The Mother knows how to take care of our earth and bodies. She knows when to say, “That is enough. Time to rest.”Serving The Mother definitely is not an all work and no play gig.I am only human. And I own my creational power, fully, because She lives in and through me.I will mess up. Just because I know my mission doesn’t mean I will carry it out perfectly.I do not serve mothers or fathers or children. I do not serve people. Not myself. I serve a bigger, broader, deeper current. As I move into this summer of making myself a little less available (via social media break) I just wanted to be abundantly and crystal clear what it is I serve.I am not just some “business owner” making a living off of coaching people (there is nothing wrong with that, by the way), I am deeply devoted to something much bigger and this is weaved into every thing I write, offer, and hold.May my Life, words, transmission, being-ness be of service.May I honor all of Life.May we remember Her and Her place at the center of our Hearts and Wombs.May we delight in Her presence all around us.May we hold and see ourselves as She holds and sees us.May we all be nourished as we are and remember the abundance of love that is offered all around us.Amen.Who Am I?Professionally.. I teach nourishment for embodiment.It is my intention that through interacting with my work women are more attuned to themselves and their needs and are able to recieve the nourishment of their lives more fully.I am a Master Nutrition Therapy Practitioner (MNTP).I blend my knowledge, experience and extensive training around nutrition, cellular biology and female physiology with my deep practice of divine union in service to creation and Life.My expertise is in the areas of fertility, gut health, female hormonal health, physiology as well as somatic parts work and the spiritual undercurrent of all dis-ease.I approach all my work with clients from a bio-energetic framework. I draw on everything from my embodied experience, spiritual practice and study, my own personal health journey as well as over a decade of working with women; one on one and in groups.Personally.. I am a woman. A mother. A wife. A sister. A daughter. An Earth Friend. A humanity lover.I belong to the Jefferson River Valley in Montana.I love local and seasonal wholesome food prepared with reverence and love, deep laughs, authentic relating and raw honesty, attention to the details and beautiful surroundings.My love language is acts of service and gifts.I am a Manifesting Generator, Emotionally Defined, 1/3 profile in Human Design.I am a Taurus Sun, Sag Moon and Cancer Rising.I feel that working for myself and creating income on my own terms is far safer than being “employed.”I do not trust the medical industrial complex, big food, big pharma, but I believe individuals are mostly good.I find Motherhood to be the greatest and most worthwhile “job” in the world and my greatest spiritual endeavor. I would like more children.I have a very small inner circle, but feel rich in community and am generous with my resources and time.My highest value is freedom, followed by s p a c e.What am I doing here?When I share and write I am transmitting what it feels like to work with me in a professional capacity. This is how I invite people into my work and how I generate income for myself and my family.I am so grateful for the community we’ve cultivated here and the women who consistently engage and reflect back to me that what I am in service to is entirely needed in this world, that my life of service is indeed received and appreciated.I don’t do this work for validation, trust me, it wouldn’t work if I did, but to see the ripples from my unique kerplunk of devotion to Life is always satisfying as it is form of art, creation, and expression.I provide a ton of free content and have been for literally years.Take your time.Come into my field slowly.Look through my feed and links, listen to the Matriarch by Clara Wisner podcast on apple or spotify or read it here on Substack.You’ll get a great feel for if I am for you.You are always welcome.Ways to Work with Me This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

One thing I learned early on in motherhood is that I needed more structure in my life if I was going to hold the responsibility of motherhood in a way that didn’t fully drain me.I think of this similarly to if you wanted to lift (or “hold”) more weight than you have previously at the gym, you would need more physical muscle fibers, or else you would get trapped under the weight and not be able to lift it. Or, just like as a tomato plant grows it needs a tomato cage or wall to climb up or else it becomes a jumbled mess of vines and inaccessible fruit. Our lives can also get too overgrown or heavy for us to hold alone without some solid systems in place to support us.For some reason, however, many of us seem to have the idea that we should be able to pile more and more on ourselves; more tasks, more activities, more responsibilities; and hold it all without any help or assistance (and not show any signs of strain in the process). I believe part of this false line of thinking is a deficiency in our culture of The Mother, or what I’ve called The Collective Nurturer, whose job it is to say, “Stop. That is enough.” She can see from a higher (or maybe lower and more grounded) perspective. She can feel we are moving too fast, with too high of expectations. She is the one who tells us, it’s time to rest and enjoy the fruits of our labor. She is the one who tells us, after a pause of appreciation for how far we’ve already come, “It’s time to reevaluate, readjust. It’s time to put some more support in place.” Because she can see and is tapped into the long game.I have always been a highly functional person. I have always been capable of doing a lot.Since I was 23 years old I have basically only worked for myself, so I’ve always had a ton of flexibility with my schedule and how I spend my time.(Honestly, the main reason I became an entrepreneur was because one of my highest values is freedom.)I love being free to do and spend my time as I see fit. It’s never been hard for me to be self motivated and to move into action.Before I had kids; my days flowed. I would always wake up and do some sort of spiritual practice and eat, but the rest of the day was totally free form.I might have clients, work on the computer, meet up with friends, workout, have meetings, go to the grocery store, travel, go on a hike; whatever. My time was wide and open and that’s how I liked it.When I was pregnant with my oldest I was determined to keep living this way. I hated even making my own schedule too rigid because even that felt like I was being trapped. I rebelled against even my self-made rules. (That’s how much of a rebel I am..haha).I had the idea my baby would sleep when she was tired and I would just bring her everywhere as I kept doing my stuff and it would all be totally fine. HA.I wasn’t going to be one of those mothers that made her whole life revolve around being a mom!I wince, shake my head and chuckle lovingly at this past self of mine that was so (endearingly) clueless about what was about to smack her square in the face.The first 6 months postpartum were all the things postpartum is: sweet, nourishing, exhausting, tender, raw, and a lot like being thrown into the middle of a game you don’t know the rules to. Where the consequences of f*****g up involve the livelihood of a tiny human you now experience as your own heart outside your body.But, for the most part, my husband and I kept flowing.We didn’t meal plan or think about what our “working hours” were. We didn’t think about childcare, but just kind of passed baby Alma back and forth to do whatever work either of us needed to do in the moment (and of course, when she needed to nurse).When Alma was 6 months old it started to become glaringly clear that this “going with the flow” was no longer possible. My inner Mother said, “Stop. This isn’t working for anyone.” I was clear we were going to need some structure; set childcare hours and some clear delineations about family time vs work time. We were going to have to figure out how to have food for us all to eat at regular intervals. Basics to some, but to us, this felt like a radical adjustment.Then I got pregnant again.Just as I am starting to come to terms with the fact my life was going to become way more structured; I was hit with the responsibility of another precious baby on the way.We hired our first nanny around this time and started doing a semi-strict nap schedule with baby Alma. She had decided to stop sleeping at night and I realized that it may be because she is not getting enough sleep during the day with my lackadaisical idea of “she’ll just sleep when she’s tired” but then not actually creating any space for her to fall asleep.This was my first hard learned lesson about the importance of building in more structure as you expand in family and in life: the need for scheduled and regularly available down time with kids.I resisted the nap schedule idea so much until I was pregnant, breastfeeding, and deeply sleep deprived and very desperate, I would try anything; even ….duh duh duuuunn…a nap schedule!As my husband and I committed to creating time in our days to lull baby Alma to sleep by nursing or swaying her back and forth in a carrier, her sleep at night improved and our energy system as family recharged a bit.Another piece of structure we added: childcare.Adding childcare was the first time I had to choose working hours.I recognize this may not be a common experience but before this I just worked, pretty much whenever I needed to. I had very classic entrepreneurial-grind-“boss-babe” vibes. I loved my work, it didn’t always feel grinding. It’s just what I was into. I had lots of freedom and flexibility but I was also very ambitious and driven to “succeed.” I went on vacations, sure, but I would work if I needed to. I probably worked less on weekends. But no time was technically off limits. I was always available to work. I was always creating. Always dreaming and scheming about what was my next offering, idea, or post would be. Once Alma came, I pretty much operated the same. I just worked when I could, but as any mom knows, that “working when you can” with infants and children, is basically a recipe for resentment and/or total chaos and feeling like you’re constantly being pulled between quality time with your family and creative expression.We hired a nanny, now her working hours were my working and self-care hours. I had to be more structured with my work. For me, this is what it really took for me to feel like I could do a good job at being a mama and a good job at my work.I couldn’t just work all the time because all the sudden I wanted to have time that was family time.I started having set days of the week that were my work days.This was really the beginning of what is now so key to the structure in my life that really keeps me grounded and sane, while I hold businesses, my household and a young family.I struggled adding in this structure. I resisted it. I really pushed back against it; but now, I’ve finally really embraced and accepted it; I see so clearly how the more we add to what we need to hold energetically, the more structure we need.If we beat ourselves up because we feel overwhelmed with what our daily lives require of us or because we find ourselves energetically dropping things we care about or we feel disorganized and like we’re barely getting by the majority of the time, I bet it’s not that we need more internal pressure. If this is your experience, I bet you need more structure to hold you. That structure could be internal, eg keeping promises to yourself, creating a schedule that works for you and sticking to it, experiencing yourself as worthy enough to take time for yourself and receive help. But, it could also be that you simply need more help, externally. You might need to hire someone to clean once a month or hire childcare (like I did in my story).You might need to get really real and take things off your plate while you build the stamina to hold the life you’ve been wanting. You might have to make your life much smaller. It is not shameful or regretful to need to downsize. It could be really true in this season of life you’re in. The actions you personally need to take will come from The Nurturer within you and they will be individualized to you and your very beautiful and precious journey. However, so many times we find ourselves in a ditch with our wheels spinning. We’re not going anywhere, but we’re using all of our energy. We just loop around the same issues again and again. Which is also a place we can build deep wisdom from, but a place where we will eventually need to hear the quiet, loving voice of The Mother, saying “Stop. This is enough.” Personally, I am currently feeling really supported. My kids are older (which is such a huge part of me feeling more resourced) and so I have recently been feeling a season expansion coming. From when baby Alma was born up until just recently, our family has been in a season of major stabilization. We grew fast without much structure to hold us, we had to build it as we went and even retroactively, at times. It’s interesting that my health was also a reflection of this. But now, it feels like we have steadied. My health is really burgeoning, just as the Spring season we are in. We feel secure and solid. I have come to recognize this place as the restful, preparation-time plateau before the next big level up.Our family has a lot of potential growth coming.We are coming into a season of change and evolution.There is a lot coming and I can feel that it is time to start putting the scaffolding in place so we can open to this next iteration of us. This is my Nurturer at work. She is the one who senses and sees this. She can see the bigger picture and she has been directing me to soften, take things off my plate, give myself more space. To really open to receive, we have to feel safe. She has been hard at work ensuring my safety.This has looked like getting a little more help around the house; with cleaning and food. I, myself, have been doing more meal prepping and getting more efficient with our nourishment and making sure we, more often than not, have easy nourishment available via freezer meals and extra food in the fridge. (My kitchen philosophy is efficiency and reverence.) Saying no a little more to social things that don’t feel aligned or easy or like they give us energy vs take it away.I have also hired some help in the backend of my business which has freed up a seemingly disproportionate amount of energy. I had no idea how much more supported I would feel with someone just doing a few hours of work on my tech and back end stuff each week. There were all sorts of reason why I shouldn’t do this, but it feels like such a wildly solid investment in my well being. One thing that helps me immensely with having a lot of supportive structure without it feeling suffocating or too rigid is to have a daily rhythms and a day of the week rhythm.For example, every day; we form our days around meals. We don’t skip meals because that doesn’t serve our family energy system and it’s literally the scaffolding upon which our day lies.We eat breakfast; lunch, snack, and dinner. If we are out or traveling, we still plan our day around these meals. It doesn’t change. It’s not rigid for us; it just is. Nourishment is central. (I wrote more about this here).We also have a “quiet time” every day after lunch. This is a time for the adults to rest, nap, read, *sometimes talk on the phone or catch up on some of work* and a time for the kids to rest, nap, read, or just be generally more mellow and chill.We don’t always do this if we are out and about, but I will try to build in even a 30 min period of sitting outside or even just in the car to rest a little bit and regroup after lunch.Personally, I always have morning and evening routines daily as well.I have a morning practice of warm lemon ACV water, greeting the sun, movement/lymph, and then eating breakfast within 1 hour of waking.In the evening, the kids and my husband or I take a bath; I wash and massage my face and brush my teeth.These are the pretty much nonnegotiable daily rhythms. I don’t force these things; they are literally like structure upon which my day exists. It would feel much harder for me to not do these things than to do them.Sometimes it’s time for shift and something about these habits changes a bit, but for the most part this is always the structure of our days.Society’s day of the week rhythm is Monday through Friday are work days and Saturday and Sunday are weekends.However, that doesn’t actually align with a lot of families with young kids these days.Here is ours currently:Mondays * nanny comes 9-5 * Clara and Sean work workout/walk 9-5 * evenings family time * Clara puts kids to bedTuesdays* Kid’s school 9-2:30* Clara and Sean work/personal appts 9-2:30* After school, family time * House gets cleaned and get some help with food prep this day * Clara and Sean share bedtime duties Wednesday * Kids’ school 9am-2:30pm * Clara and Sean Date Day, grocery shopping and Yoga together 9-2:30* After school family time * Sean’s Personal Practice time 7-9pm * Clara puts kids to bed Thursday * Grandma with kids 9-1* Sean at work 9-5 * Clara work, workout, self care 9-1* Clara with girls 1-7pm * Clara personal practice time 7-9pm* Sean puts kids to bed Friday * Clara with kids and movement practice, Sean work/workout/walk/self care 9-1* Sean with kids, Clara work/workout/walk/self care 1-6 * After 6pm family time* Clara puts kids to bed Saturday * Family Day * Clara Workout * Sean puts kids to bed Sunday * Family Day * Clara long walk * Sean puts kids to bed So now you know my whole life. ; ) Maybe to you this looks insanely rigid or weird. Maybe it looks totally normal or even less scheduled than your life. I don’t know. I’m only sharing because I know people love to see real life examples of how to organize your days.I know, if you would have said this schedule would be my life a few years ago I would have told you to f**k right off and thrown my head back and laughed.But the truth is, the only way we as a family can hold the things (family, businesses, non profit organization, clients, multiple homes, relationships, real estate, our health and ongoing healing, well being, our dreams and hopes for the future, and even more!) we hold with the grace we do, is because of this structure. This structure holds us, so we have the space to hold even more.Do I sometimes totally disregard this structure and do what feels good and right? Yes, after all I wrote most of this far after my normal bedtime.But this structure holds me, so that I can open to receive even more.There is a big difference between forcing a structure like this and allowing it to grow organically and intentionally based on what you value and as what you are carrying increases.It’s a nuanced and delicate thing knowing when to add in structure and when to let things be flowy. All I can say is the Nurturer within you knows what you need.If I have a ‘goal’ it is to open wider and deeper to Life itself flowing through me.I want only to receive my life and all Life has to offer me more and more fully without feeling zapped or depleted. Will I feel tightly stretched at times?Will I be taken to my limits? Will I fumble and fall down completely, make major mistakes and be totally and completely humbled? Yes, I expect to, because all those things come with a life well lived. There is only so much we can hold as an individual; if we want to grow beyond, we have to start to let structure hold us. We have to listen when our internal Nurturer says, “You are doing too much, my love. Time to rest. Time to refill.”We will not open unless we feel safe. And the right amount of structure allows to us to feel safe to open even more. What amount and what kind of structure is appropriate will be different for different people and different seasons of our lives. We get to be the creators and channelers of the relationship between structure and flow that is right for us at this moment in our lives. We can have the structure we engage be nourishing, regenerative, and right-sized vs depleting, suffocating, or overbearing. Questions to contemplate as you connect to your inner Nurturer and feel into what structure would be supportive for you: * What is the state of your family’s energy system? Are you overwhelmed? Is there a deadness or a lack of flow? OR Is there a feeling of aimlessness, chaos, or like your days just float by without ever finding a solid footing? * What season is your family in right now? Expansion? Stabilization? Integration? Gathering? Something else?* What structures would support your opening and ability to receive more (nourishment, space, beauty, connection)?* If you feel you need more structure; what part of you is resisting it? What does this part need or want?* If you feel you need more flow, what part of you is resisting it? What does this part need or want?Would love to hear if and how any part of this article lands in you and what it shakes up or shakes loose. Thank you for being here. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

I wrote a Substack post about what nourishment really takes and then I made a little video over on instagram showing what I do to nourish myself in a day.I received a lot of really good questions and comments about what came up for people seeing the practical ways I center nourishment in my life. I also got a lot of comments to the tune of “this seems so hard!” or “I could never do that!” or “That’s not realistic for my life.” In this piece, I am attempting to really parse apart some the intricate reasons for the resistance people have towards whole body nourishment.Nourishment Doesn’t Have to be Your Medicine I have no agenda other than to hold the frequency of nourishment and transmit it. I do not, in any way shape or form, believe that all humans need to value nourishment above all else. We all have our unique paths, journeys, lessons we are here to learn, and work we have to do in the world. Sometimes nourishment isn’t part of your journey. That is totally ok with me.It just so happens that nourishment is one of my highest held values for myself and my family. It is the thing I attune people to in my work in the world. It’s literally and figuratively, what I eat, sleep and breathe.It is important to point out that nourishment has been my teacher for my whole life. My early years, I was extraordinarily undernourished and completely unaware of my body and its needs. I have now made nourishment the center of my world. Initially because of necessity and now out of pure love and desire to love myself as deeply as I can. It really is, in my case, the adage of my biggest wounds being the place of my greatest medicine.Nourishment, as a frequency, continues to teach me more than any other energy I have come into contact with. So, I continue to be immersed in the refinement of this medicine and healing the places where I am still not really in full alignment with it.Other people have other subjects of deep pain and healing in their lives. We all have the seeds within our greatest pain for our greatest potential. And I don’t mean potential in some sort of grand materialistic, conventionally ‘successful’ way, but maybe a quiet beautiful way that is all your own and never “amounts to anything” outside of the way it changes you. Food based nourishment might not be your thing. That is totally ok. Many people live beautiful and fulfilling lives without addressing their physical nourishment on any level.Nourishment, Values, and DiscernmentI value food-based nourishment. So I spend my resources (time, money, energy) on food. It makes sense for me because I value it. There are plenty of things that I value less or don’t value and don’t mind cutting corners on, that other people might be really appalled at. I don’t wear make up and therefore, never spend time or money on it. I do value skincare and spend time and money doing that. There are probably all sorts of things I don’t value that you really do.It can be so key to know what you value. Know your values. Know your standards. Know where it’s worth it to you to spend your resources. That is part of nourishment, being discerning (see: Adult Discernment) with what you spend your resources on.In the 3D world, there are finite amounts of time, energy, and money. There just are. We can talk about the quantum level and I love to live there sometimes and dream there. But when you live a full life here in the 3D there are realities that you cannot deny and are important to come to terms with. When you have a baby to take care of, for example, there can be no doubt in your mind, that your resources are finite. We cannot do it all. We simply cannot. I am a very functional, capable, and efficient person. I can get a lot done. But one of the lessons I’ve learned in the hardest of ways is this: that my energy and my resources are, on one level, are very exhaustible. Being connected to what I value and making discerning decisions about how I spend my time, money, and energy is necessary for me to feel fulfilled, nourished and in alignment.We cannot be nourished if we are leaking our energy, time, and money in all directions. We need clear delineations of what we would like to spend our resources on to live in such a way that feels good, aligned, and like it’s moving us towards what we desire.Nourishment, Embodiment and ReceptionBecause I value nourishment, I attempt to only move at the pace of my embodiment. If I have to force and push myself beyond my capacity to stay with myself just to make dinner because I’m so exhausted, that might be a time when it’s more in service to my nourishment to order a pizza or grab a rotisserie chicken on my way home or hopefully, I stashed away some hot dish casseroles in the freezer, one of my fav ways my past self takes care of my current self).If you can’t cook a meal and clean up the kitchen in an embodied, present way, but you have to force and push, it probably won’t be a nourishing experience because you won’t be able to receive it. You’ll be leaving some part of yourself behind.Am I saying I never push myself to clean up the kitchen at the end of the night? No. I do quite often, but I am gauging myself and if it really was going to bring me far outside myself I might definitely leave it or I would power through and then do something really sweet and nourishing for myself after, like a hot bath with candles or reading while putting my legs up the wall and breathing deeply into my back body.I have to be attuned to myself (see: Self Attunement is the Key to Everything) to know what I need in these moments and not easily collapse into scrolling on my phone or watching TV I don’t even enjoy. A Matriarch is highly attuned to her own needs AND the needs of the others she cares about, at the same time. This doesn’t mean she always puts others’ needs before her own, it just means she is aware of them and takes them in consideration. This is where I think a poor model of mature feminine affects so many women in the realm of nourishment. If we didn’t have a model of what it means to be a woman committed to her nourishment then it doesn’t feel safe and we feel unsafe claiming it for ourselves. Safety is such a big part of being able to receive. You’re not going to truly receive something if you feel unsafe or there are a lot of unknowns involved, because you can’t open. Imagine a closed fist and an open hand. Which one is going to be able to receive something offered to it? There is a finite amount of time. You have a finite amount of energy. This is just a 3D fact. So we do have to be really attuned to ourselves (See: Self Attunement is the Key to Everything article) and the values we want to choose to uphold and be willing to make trades and swaps for the things we don’t value as much. This is where efficiency does matter and commitment to our values does take effort (See: Nourishment Takes Effort).Nourishment and The MotherIf you are here, I am willing to be there is something within you that yearns for a life that is more nourishing on some level.Maybe you wish you enjoyed cooking more.Maybe you wish you knew what to feed your kids so that they grew up robust and strong.Maybe you just have a feeling that you are in some way under nourished and you’re exploring what would remedy that.Maybe you are really well physically nourished but you still feel the ache of hunger for something more in your soul.All nourishment, no matter physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual comes from The Mother. The Mother is where all nourishment is originally derived.When you think of the word nourishment, what picture comes up for you? A table full of scrumptious food? A warm cozy couch full of blankets and a fire cracking in the background? A well used kitchen? Maybe a maternal figure of some sort? A soft and curvy woman? A warm embrace? Something else?I’m willing to bet that whatever it is, it has a feminine feel to it.We are profoundly lacking in the mature feminine principle in this day and age. It is rare to have a maternal model of a nourished and embodied older woman. It is rare to find a real world example of a wise old crone. And because of this, I believe we are severely undernourished as a society.I draw a very strong connection between the lack of modeling of mature feminine energy in the world and the collective experience of the lack of true nourishment.Why Don’t We Allow Nourishment? Generally, people know how to nourish themselves if they just slow down and listen. Everyone knows they should spend less time on screens, less time comparing themselves to others, eat more whole foods, and prioritize their sleep. Everyone knows that nature is healing and that they would be happier if they spent less time being concerned about material gain and more time truly receiving what they already have. We know this.But, why don’t we make these things part of our everyday reality? What is it that keeps us so stuck in the habits and patterns of excess stress and deficiency of that warm and subtle thing that I call nourishment?It is easy to say, “My job keeps me in the stress!” “If only I had more time, then I would nourish myself more!” “It’s everyday modern life that has me so stressed out!” “It’s the way I was raised, I was taught that my worth was dictated by how much I could preform!” “It’s my mother. She didn’t nourish me, so I don’t have a blueprint for nourishment!” “My mind is always spinning! It feels like I can’t catch a break and just be!”These could all be totally true. I don’t doubt your high stress job, feeling super overbooked, modern life, and the way and culture in which you were raised all contribute to your habit of choosing stimulation over rest, even when rest is what you need. I know. I am right there with you.Have your feelings. Be victimized. Acknowledge the ways you are programmed away from nourishment. This is part of it.And then, once you’ve felt that, my question is: ‘So what do we do from here?’So you’re tired, overwhelmed, overbooked, patterned from birth, traumatized, and burnt out; are you still able to meet yourself where you are and ask yourself, in each moment that you can remember: “What would nourish me here?”Are you willing to ask the deepest parts of yourself that question?Not what does Clara say I should do in this moment. Not what would X influencer do in this moment? Not what would someone else do to nourish themselves. What do YOU need in this moment?Because here’s the thing: nourishment is for you. It has to be. It comes through you.It has to be something that takes all the uniqueness that makes you, you into consideration.You can constantly be looking to someone else to tell you the answers, give you the next diet, the next study, the next supplement, but if you don’t ask yourself, “What would nourish me here?” then you’re just putting your work on someone or something else. And you’ll never be truly satisfied. Because the answer to what would nourish you has to come from you.When we remember that our nourishment is for us and it comes through us, we don’t feel the pressure of the shoulds. I ‘should’ eat more whole foods. I ‘should’ not watch so much tv. I should lift weights, walk more, etc.These shoulds are inherently not nourishing. You can go through the movements of doing the “shoulds” and be doing all the things, but are you really receiving them? Because that is difference between being truly nourished and just ticking boxes. So many women (myself included sometimes) are just going through the motions of nourishment, not actually receiving the nourishment of their lives.When we don’t really receive nourishment, or receive our lives, the idea of nourishment can feel heavy, overwhelming. It creates pressure. It creates a squeeze. Nourishment takes up space. It’s stretches out. It widens us.One of the most common questions I got around nourishment was around how hard it feels. Women tell me it feels like work. It feels like too much of a mental load to meal plan. It feels like too much work to clean up the kitchen after cooking. It feels never ending to have to always have food ready for meals. It feels overwhelming to keep track of “all the things I’m supposed to do.”I really get this feeling. I do. I’ve spent many years of my life being overwhelmed and feeling like I didn’t have enough time. I’ve spent many years of my life finding all the things I should be doing and doing them without any question and feeling fried afterwards when I thought I was supposed to feel good.What Do We Do?The answer is not to force yourself to be nourished or grind your way to nourishment. That will never work. Because it is the opposite of nourishment.Nourishment is never about doing more, it’s about receiving more and then of course, we can overflow and give from a place of overflow and joy. We make dinner with a sense of purpose and alignment. We meal plan because it aligns with our value of having food that is home cooked and nourishing for our family and our selves. We grocery shop and have food available because it’s what works best for us.Softening into a deeper relationship with nourishment is receiving more than you are giving out. Having more while doing less. It has to be. Especially if we have been in a place of depletion. This is hard for people to wrap their heads about because nourishment has become just another thing we have to “do.” No wonder we feel exhausted and pressured by it.Now, you might look at all the things I “do” to support my nourishment and think you need to do more. But this is comparison, this is ‘should’ thinking, this is the idea that you need to do what I’m doing for you to be nourished. That is not the case and it’s not how nourishment works on a broader level .I meal plan. I am pretty much always cooking to some degree and cleaning up the kitchen when I’m at home. I am always thinking about food, where we will get it, what we will have, what we need, how we will build our days around our meals and snacks. I have built so many skills in the kitchen over lots of time. Food has become the scaffolding upon which the fabric of lives lays. That is not work. That is just how my life works. And I love it. I don’t love or enjoy every single moment of it, but overall I love the way eat, the way we procure most of our food from our own land and our community, and the way we really attune to the earth and her cycles through what we eat. AND sometimes I just order a f*****g pizza because I also really value freedom.. which is one of my highest values actually, so I can see why I can’t quite give myself the full “I will never order take out” standard. Nourishment requires effort. It requires resources. It should. It’s worth it.I don’t actually think the majority of modern day people are too lazy or undisciplined to eat in a nourished way, I think most Americans are burnt out. Some sources say 80% of American adults show significant signs of burnout. We need nourishment. And we are exhausted and it takes effort. It is quite a conundrum.What do we do then?We do what we can, where we are.And we keep asking ourselves: “What would nourish me in this moment?” If you don’t know, then this is an even more important inquiry to be with. We need to know our needs and know ourselves before we can really deeply nourish ourselves.This is the kind of work we do in my program FERTILE. I will be opening the doors again at some point. You can get on the waitlist here or book a call with me to get more information on how to work with me here. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

I am not ‘the best’ at anything.To say that isn’t a very smart ‘marketing strategy’ on my end. We are supposed to claim our expertise.To exude authority.To share things with the certainty of a herd of elephants.To lay out a program with the exact 5 step approach to save your life.There are so many voices out there, so many smart, convicted, and confident voices.And they all have valuable things to say. We love certainty. We love authority. It makes us feel safe. It makes us feel like if we mess up, then it will be someone else’s fault and we won’t have to hold the pain of it.But pain is a teacher.We love the idea of a big Daddy in the sky that’s going to save us from all our indecision, failures, and mistakes.Every time we give up our own responsibility to an authority figure and/or we rely on someone else’s certainty to guide us, we get a little dose of Daddy, and that can feel great, until that Daddy turns out to be another flawed human being, and we are left back where we started, unsure and wavering.The truth is narcissists exist. So do humans with ill-intent, people who are unstable, humans who have been hurt deeply and are playing that out by hurting others. There are people who have hidden their soft vulnerabilities so deep down, behind so many layers of armor, they don’t even know or have access to those parts of themselves anymore.There are people who will take advantage of you and people who you should not and cannot trust. There are plenty of people who put material gain far above their alignment with Life. There are plenty of people who most of us wouldn’t blame one bit for doing this. I would never want to send my daughters out into this world without a healthy dose of skepticism, critical thinking skills, and much encouragement to trust their hearts and guts when it comes to if a person is safe and trustworthy or not.Our world rewards people for being heartless robots. The tougher, the better. The less sleep you can get, the more you can get done. The less needs you have, the stronger you are. The less empathy you have, the higher you climb. The more you can play into and identify other people’s wounds and not be affected by it, the more money you can make. On one level, our modern world breeds insanity.Why do you think we are getting sicker and more mentally unwell every year?When our world is filled with so much darkness, unthinkable cruelty, and torture, how can we be soft and sensitive? How can we have faith? When we need to work 40+ hours a week just to keep our homes and put food on the table, how are we supposed to feel the backlog of grief building up or not be tempted by people selling different ways of being? I believe the only sane response to this, however, is to double down on our humanity. This is why softness is so courageous.Our humanity does not need more certainty, but more curiosity. Our humanity doesn’t need more authorities pontificating from podiums telling the peasants how it is, but more true listening.We need more humility and willingness to do things differently than we ever have.We need more discernment about where we place our attention and who we give our attention to. And recognize that this is where our power lies. The power doesn’t come from the people out there hellbent on doing harm, it lies within us. We need to recognize all the places we have misplaced our power, placed it in authorities, gurus, collective societal programming, and take it back into our own human hearts.We have to stop making material wealth the measure of our success, but instead, make success about how willing we are to meet life with an open heart.Even writing that feels a little cliche, but it’s actually one of the most important ways to bring sanity back into an insane world.Can I soften in the face of this?Can I allow Life to teach me here?Can I allow this thing to touch me?Can I feel it, all the way?Can I let myself be led by something much bigger than myself?Can I let myself open… even here?Can I stay in the tension of opposites, indecision, wavering and not knowing?Can I stay in and with the uncertainty I feel, even if a knight in shining armor offers me clear path forward, so that I may find my own way forward? Can I resist other peoples’ certainty and wait for the click of my own certainty to lead?Can I receive my Life as it is?I am not the best at anything, because ‘the best’ is subjective. ‘The best’ for you, depends on you.The best diet.The best supplement.The best practice.The best teacher.The best advice.It all depends on you and where you are at on your journey.Your journey is yours and no one else’s. It cannot be compared to mine or your friend’s or that-girl-on-instagram’s. Your circumstances are yours and yours alone. For better and for worse. We cannot know another person’s journey. It is theirs. And to pretend that we know is actually quite insulting and what I see as quite broken in the wellness industry. So many people espousing solutions and no one willing to sit in the tension of the symptoms and what they are teaching the individual, on their individual journey. I will not tell you the ways you are broken so as to tee you up for the ways I can fix you.I will not align with systems that suggest anything other than each human being as a child of god, because, to me at my point on my journey, this is what sustains humanity.I will not sacrifice my peace, wellbeing, physiology, my children and therefore my future children’s well being or physiology, for material gain. This is what is being asked of me at this moment. And, I am deeply flawed and 100% human. I am learning, growing, expanding, and changing always. I do not have anything fully figured out.One thing I choose to settle into is that Life is sacred.If nothing else, I make it sacred. I make the not knowing sacred.I build my life and my choices on faith in this Life and in humanity. Not in a bypass-y way that makes my eyes sprout hearts for every single person that comes across my path or blinds me to the atrocities of the world. (Although, on a good day, one of my practices is to see all humans through the eyes of God.) It doesn’t mean I don’t doubt. It doesn’t mean I know what you should do. It doesn’t mean I have answers. It simply means I choose to make what happens to me in my life, sacred. I choose to give my life meaning beyond my small self. Not because it has to mean something, but because devotion anchors my nervous system. It is functional. Faith quite literally gives us a capacity for wholeness when without we feel broken, fractured, and torn apart. I don’t know anyone who has gone through something truly heartbreaking and come out the other side ok who didn’t lean on faith and the idea that something mysterious and bigger than them is going on. Faith and devotion allow me to keep my attention on love, sacredness, joy, and belonging in the midst of the suffering around me.As a song I love to sing to my girls as they’re falling asleep goes:“I am grateful to be. Breathing, heart beating, joyous and free. Even though hard times are all around me, I am still grateful to be.”It doesn’t mean we bypass the hard times or we pretend they aren’t happening. For me, devotion literally gives me nourishment as I feel the darkest corners of my psyche and experience. Devotion fortifies me, so that I may face the world with an open heart and feel what is there for me. Faith connects me to something bigger than myself so that I can withstand and alchemize more than I could on my own. We all need a little extra space in this crazy world. Devotion gives me that space. And it is a choice I make every day and every moment. I do my best everyday to BE the thing that I am teaching and transmitting. This is what I am committed to.That means my “business” and money isn’t the most important thing and it never will be.Service to Life, even when that looks like making less money or having less “followers/engagement”, is.And it starts at home with me, always.It isn’t important for me to look extra special, I am special to my family and my children and that is enough.We are all standing on the shoulders of giants after all. There really aren’t any new “teachings” or “codes” at this point that you can’t access by getting quiet and listening to the whispers of your very bones and sitting underneath a tree and opening your senses and listening.I will point you back there, to your bones, to your ancestors, to the trees, to your pain and your wounds and the lessons they are teaching you.I will point you back to your symptoms, to curiosity, and to your own wisdom.I will share my experiences and stories of my life. I will reflect back what I see when it is appropriate.I will share the things I have studied, researched, the patterns in the collective I see and that I have contemplated.Maybe these will ping something for you to search out and experiment with.If we work together or have any sort of relationship, I am sure you will teach me and I will teach you.“We are all just walking each other home,” as Ram Dass said. Stop and really be with and listen to the people around you tomorrow, you’ll see that the world is filled with teachers and wisdom keepers and they come in all shapes, sizes and the most surprising packages. God is coming through each experience, person, tree, mountain, animal you interact with, you just have be open to receive it. You don’t have to trust them. You don’t have to agree with them. You don’t even have to like them. The Buddha said the next Buddha will be the sangha (community).This isn’t some special community or commune, but literally the people around you, right now.Listen, open, be receptive, and be discerning at the same time. It’s not about the personality in front of you, it’s about seeing the child god within them and within you. The Matriarch understands that different situations require different handling. She knows her worth and her power doesn’t come from someone else or fitting in, but in her devotion.May we see each other in our power.May we remember our own.As an offering related to what I’ve been writing about here I want to highlight a special totally free 3 day event held by Siri Birk, called EARTH BODY, over the eclipse portal, March 13-15. There will be embodiment practice led by Siri each evening and a guest speaker each morning. I will be speaking on March, 14th at 10am PST.You can sign up here: https://www.siribirk.com/earthbody This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

I don’t know what to call the journey I am on. I’ve been writing about it for years at this point.Is it a spiritual awakening journey? Is it a personal development journey? Is it the journey into motherhood? Is it a body or healing journey? Is it my online journal?At this moment I’m inclined to say it is simply: my life journey.It is the journey of living a life with more and more conscious awareness.It is my singular and simple expression of an internal searching and finding process.After many years of big explosions, realizations, changes, transformations and alchemizations, I have reached a Still Point.The image that comes to mind is me, as a surfer, having paddled through and traversed the intensity of the breakers, sitting on my surfboard, water still and clear as glass around me. Being able to see far into the horizon in all directions. I can see from a more steady place what I have been through, where I have been, and ultimately what I have created for myself.No one else created this for me.I did.I did the work.I used my arms, my legs, my sheer force of will, my devotion to something bigger than me, to get myself here.And now, I need and get to really take it all in.From this location I am at now, I really have the blessing of being able to see everything from a new vantage point. There are times in our life we get to really appreciate what we’ve built and what we’ve created; the good, the bad and the ugly, and I have reached one of these points on my life journey.I’ve been inquiring into the deepest reaches of my heart and soul why it is that I share and what it is that I’m sharing.There is so much noise in our world.So many inputs coming from all sides.There is a cacophony of voices with strong opinions and activating ideas. And there are plenty of platforms for these voices to be projected and spewed out upon the world.There are a select few voices saying things I feel deeply need to be said and heard. These voices seed more love, more authenticity, and more realization that we are, in fact, all walking each other home.There are far more voices out there that just love to hear themselves talk and are using their words to prop up their small-s-self aggrandizement. Or feeling like, if they aren’t heard, they don’t exist.The amount of voices overwhelms me, as I’m sure it does you. We are all so desensitized to this constant inflow of other people’s expression that we can’t really be discerning, let alone really process what we consume.We are all walking around absolutely stuffed to brim of other peoples’ ideas, tips and tricks, little quotes, funny video clips, pings from messages bombarding us every few minutes, and sound bites.Without a still point, a serious pause to digest, a chance to look up from the waves of life that have been crashing over our heads, it’s hard to really understand where we are in time and space.I have been feeling that my spiritual body has been quite far ahead of my physical form for sometime now. I believe this to be a puzzle piece in the mosaic of the contributors to my health crash 3 years ago and part of my continued health issues. I said to a friend the other day that it’s like my spiritual body clock is at 10pm and my physical body clock is at 4pm.I don’t necessarily think it is true for our spiritual and physical bodies to be perfectly synced, but there is a point at which we have to take some space to really allow our vessels to catch up.It is clear to me this is where I have landed.Doubling down on the explosive spiritual awakenings at this point in my journey would be like trying to escape the season of winter.All things in nature go through cycles and part of these cycles are always a period of rest and release. The trees drop their leaves. The energy is drawn in toward center. The grass up top dies. The uterine lining sheds. There is a pause, a darkness. A re-gathering of strength for next rebirth cycle.When we override this truth in micro or macro ways there will always be consequences.On a macro level we see this with our collective societies’ obsession with always being up-and-to-the-right! More money! Bigger companies! Greater “influence”! More likes! More “engagement”!On a micro level it’s our obsession with coffee and stimulants and the idea that we can’t trust our bodies and their needs for rest, space, nature, food, breaks and screen free down time. “It must be something else making fatigued and exhausted! It must be an infection or complicated hormonal issue! It couldn’t possibly that my physical body’s basic needs aren’t met with the processed food, 10 hours of screen time a day, and 6 hours of sleep I give it each night!”Stimulants actually only feel good to people who have low energy, because it gives you a short term expensive boost to where you actually would always be if you had sufficient energy. If you have adequate, organic energy, stimulants make you feel jittery, shaky, uneasy, and paranoid and you would avoid them.[Read more about this idea of burnout here]I believe part of the reason “uppers” are so addictive is because of how collectively burnt out we are. People do cocaine and for the first time they have a plethora of energy. It’s not organic energy but it’s something more than burnt out.When we are burnt out we will consciously and unconsciously seek out things that will stimulate energy production in our bodies. We will reach for caffeine, sugar, simple carbohydrates, drama, chaos, and situations that activate a sympathetic nervous system response. Because these things gives us false energy.Burn out is different from simply being tired or fatigued. It is beyond fatigue. The body is really in a place where it has no charge, no juice. This is the potential place we end up in when we don’t listen to the whispers and knocks from the fatigue our body is showing us.And so I am in this place of listening. I have been listening. But there is a new intensity with which I am listening to the body. I am listening on even a subtler level.I can feel how I am actually on the precipice of a totally new imprint here with my body.I have been in and out of burnout since adolescence. I believe this was one of the reasons I started abusing substances at the age of 13.I have an imprint of going hard, pushing myself, partially because of how exhausted I always was. I had to create extra pressure so that my body could rev up enough to have any energy at all. And this carried on into my spiritual work as an adult. I used the activation of spiritual work as the spark to rev up my engine.I’m not mad about this. I don’t think I made any mistakes. I have grown and expanded so much.It’s all perfect here. It can be true to push. It is true to expand. It is true to dig up old ways of being and do the work to integrate them. It is true to really transform myself again and again and be reborn. There is a time in life when it’s appropriate to rev the engine and go!However, more activation would actually be the easier and more comfortable thing for me to choose at this moment.My mind wants the stimulation of it all.On the surface my body craves the action, so that I may avoid the stillness, which within it may have fatigue, exhaustion, but what will also have space, peace, and gathering of information.How much do we crave spaciousness only to fill every inch of it with scrolling and spending?How much do we ask for more time only to schedule every inch full when we get some?How uncomfortable is true peace for most of us because it is simply so unfamiliar?These are the inquiries I’m interested in right now as I sit in this Still Point on life’s journey.I will choose peace this time. I will choose spaciousness. I will choose to allow my body’s its exhaustion and its gathering of strength for what is to come. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

Modern life tends to make people soft in the places we should be tough and tough in the places we should be soft.We have endless OTC drugs to make simple illnesses like the flu more bearable. And trust me, after being fully incapacitated for 3 days with the flu, it is not pleasant in anyway shape or form. I didn’t enjoy it. I didn’t love it. I’m still pretty physically miserable, to be honest.Taking ibuprofen or any other OTC drugs that are simply meant to keep us comfortable, slow down the natural healing process. And, I believe, they create a numb divide between the communication of our bodies and our consciousness.I did take one capsule the second night just so I could sleep, so I am not militant, but that is the first ibuprofen I have taken since tearing during childbirth, so I take it VERY rarely and only when very necessary.I was so hesitant to take that one ibuprofen because I knew it would lower my fever and a fever is what you want when you have the flu. We are programmed to be afraid of the ways our bodies heal themselves because sometimes they are quite uncomfortable. I am a woman who leans in to the communications of the body.There is value in the pain. There is wisdom in the experience of something hard. There is insight to be had when we are brought to the edges of our sanity with discomfort.Now, does this mean we should unnecessarily make things hard for ourselves? Does this mean we should be gluttons for punishment? I also know all about this, because I am someone who has had, in the past, a very strong internal punisher. The story you have got to earn it was very much part of my programming.So I’ve sat with my hesitancy to take OTC drugs or go to a doctor and I’ve asked myself, “Are you punishing yourself here?” And the answer is truly, for me, no. I believe ibuprofen disconnects me from myself and my own felt sense. Call it a sort of extreme sobriety, but I feel it when I take it. It’s super subtle but it allows me to override parts of myself that I wouldn’t be able to override if I didn’t take it. The answer is that I believe these physical health challenges are shamanic initiations of sorts. I believe they leave us better than they found us, maybe not physically initially, but mentally or spiritually. To disconnect from myself while in that experience doesn’t feel aligned for me and in integrity with who I am and what I teach and model.(As far as going to a doctor, my observation is the closer you get to conventional medicine the sicker you become and the more interventions you get.)As I was in the deepest dark of my recent flu journey, one of the stories that really got kicked up is how I’m going to lose what I’ve created in business, and in life. Like I have this idea that my family will fall apart, my house will fall apart, my business will fall apart, if I’m not capable of holding it all together. Because the fear is always that I will always feel this way (sick). These stories are not logical or based in reality, they are the illogical fear stories that just play on a loop when you’re in a vulnerable, painful, uncontrollable, uncomfortable place. It’s not actually about the stories. It’s kind of like the Bogart in Harry Potter, the stories just show you what you are most afraid of. This takes A LOT to be with and not want to run to something to take it away. There is the physical discomfort and that is painful, but it’s the stories that arise from that discomfort and the idea that it may never go away that really gets you desperate.I am not saying that everyone should see every headache as a mini shamanic initiation. This is my practice. My path is of listening to the body and trusting the communications of the body, and that needs to come with the fun and pleasurable, as well as the pain.This is a spot where I do feel like people have gotten a little too soft in a place where it would serve us to be a bit tougher. Not in a “tough it out” kind of way, but in the way that we see physical processes as an opportunity to learn deep truths about ourselves. If we stay deep in the cavernous blackness that opens up to us when we are in pain, sick, or grieving, there is a massive opportunity for growth and expansion.In this particular flu, for me, there was a big healing around my younger self who was sick a lot and always felt like she needed to get better quick. That being sick wasn’t ok and it needed to end as soon as possible. I got to revisit this wound during this illness and rewrite it for that internal little one. I got to love her and let her know, no, it is ok. You can be sick. You can rest. You can be warm and cozy and do nothing.One of the messages that came through was: This sickness doesn’t mean “you’re falling behind”, it’s actually propelling you forward in ways you can’t see right now.What if that was true? Our minds think we need to keep all our appointments and can’t handle the inconvenience that illness brings with it, but what if the illness was actually preparing us for something? What if this pause right now is exactly what we need? What if this is the “fastest” track to our own awakening?What if illness was always an upgrade?I see this in childbirth. Childbirth is an initiation. It is not meant to be easy or breezy. I do not think it is meant to be “orgasmic.” I think it’s possible for it to be orgasmic, but most of the time it is f*****g intense. As it should be. We deny our strength when we try to rescue women from this fact or offer epidurals or planned c sections to anyone and everyone. I am speaking on a collective level. I, obviously, believe each woman has complete bodily sovereignty over her choice of how to birth, but if this narrative was shared more, and we practiced being uncomfortable more via going through things like headaches without ibuprofen, maybe women would be more willing to surrender to the birth process as the intense initiation and rebirth of a mother that it is. Which is intense, painful, and, ultimately, always leaves you a better woman than you were before, when it’s integrated.Postpartum feels so long and “unproductive” and I understand how isolating it can be for women, but postpartum is also thought of as the “golden opportunity” in Chinese medicine. It is a time in a woman’s life when she can miraculously heal old illnesses and diseases, complete cycles, change relationships, and massively blossom into who she is becoming.It’s all about how we frame it. What if we met these naturally occurring initiations in our lives with courage and strength and a resolve to learn what there is to learn from the communications our bodies are giving us?What if we softened into the ways these initiations want to shape us?(Ok. I want to be really clear here. There are a lot of things in this that could ruffle feathers and poke at some tender spots. I want to say, I am speaking on a collective level. If you decided to have a planned c section, I do not judge you. If you take nyquil to go to sleep every night, I do not judge you. If you go to the doctor all the time, I do not judge you. We all have our own stories and our own histories that shaped us into who we are and got us to where we are today. Your journey is yours, mine is mine. We all have to live our lives in this day and age. There is no judgment on how you decide to go about healing your own body). This is a public episode. 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The end of 2024 for me has brought with it many endings and therefore new beginnings.A big overarching theme is a deep reckoning with how available I have been.I wrote more about this here.On a macro level I can see how I have associated my deservingness of love and my availability.The more available I am, the more I give of myself; the more love I can get, right?Or, maybe more accurately; no one would love me for just being me; I must prove my worth by being useful, capable, and available. I must earn the love I am given. I must make sacrifices and work hard.If I have something people want; I should give it away, right?The answer is probably yes, but there is a subtle line between being generous because you can be and giving more than you actually have to give in hopes that someone else will see you and replenish you.Where does that line live? Who determines where it lives? I have been operating as if my business gets to decides where that line lives. Or that the collective society gets to determine where that line lives. Or that other people’s expectations get to decide where that line lives. [I loved this piece on this subject].But what about me? What if I got to decide where the line lives?So much of my work, personally and professionally, revolves around nourishment.But being nourished can be quite relative and subjective.One one level; I am very nourished. I have impeccable boundaries. I have more than enough and more than I need in so many ways. I am very well resourced.On the relative scale of nourishment; I would say, my current life is probably quite a bit more nourishing than the average person’s life.This is not about comparison and it is not about better or worse.The frequency of nourishment and Mother are my teacher. This is my path. The levels of which I have been undernourished in my lifetime are also quite extreme relative to most.The pits of despair and pain we crawl out of happen to be the places our medicine gets the strongest.Wisdom is built in our experiences of alchemy. This is the way of the medicine woman. We know the medicine is in the poison.And so.. l am being invited forward.I am being called into even more integrity with nourishment.I am being called through the spiral 🌀, and into the more integrated, mature, and powerful woman I am becoming (as we all are by our current circumstances whatever they may be). I am seeing how starved I am of certain necessary nutrients of wellbeing: spaciousness and self preservation being major themes.I have given so much away before I have really digested and received the nourishment of it.I have rushed toward a perceived reward that as I slow down and give myself more space, I’m not actually sure I want.I notice that the more I integrate and heal and nourish myself, the less ambitious I become.I start to see what so much of my ambition around having a ‘thriving business’ and proving myself as a ‘respected authority’ on certain subjects, was just about wanting to be loved and feel safe in my place in the world.As I see and feel in my body more and more that I am perfectly safe and will always be loved, by g-d and myself, there is no need to hustle. There is no need to grind. There is no need to override my precious physiology. I don’t need to spend hours a day on platforms I know to be wildly depleting and in direct opposition to the juicy and cozy frequency I call nourishment. I don’t need to respond to every DM or give people endless hours of my time just so they will spend money on my offerings.I don’t need to deliver my message in a way that feels for good to anyone but me.I don’t need to sacrifice my physiology or the physiology of my children or the entire energy system of my family as a whole, to make sales.I don’t need to make people like me. I don’t need to make offers that are more accessible. I don’t have to have a clean kitchen or more new or trendier stuff.I don’t have anything to prove. I need no external validation when my internally sourced worthiness is stable and abundant.And my internally sourced worthiness and abundance comes from me protecting it, cultivating it, and listening to it, like it is The Most Important Thing In the World.Internally sourced worthiness comes from being unendingly devoted to my inner well spring of energy. And this is ultimately what I teach and guide other women to do.Obviously, there is nothing wrong with being kind, generous and loving. I am actually naturally such a generous soul. I love nothing more than to nurture, give to, and feed people. But the way these qualities get twisted up with self-sacrificing, ‘being nice’, and likable more often than not, has made me really question all the places in my life I am giving others the benefit of the doubt or explaining away bad behavior, at the detriment to myself.My inquiry this year is really around: what if I really honored my own energy system FIRST?What if nothing came before it? What if I really asked myself; what do you want? What are you hungry for? What do you think? Is this serving your well being and your nourishment?Because I’ll tell you what: being constantly on social media; feeling like I have to respond to every message I get across all platforms and apps; feeling beholden to make my offerings accessible to all, constantly having my attention pulled between different apps on my phone and my family; and using my life to create content instead of living my life, doesn’t actually serve my nourishment one bit.Consistent creative expression does serve my nourishment. Working with women committed to their own long term nourishment, nourishes me. Spending time being a main feature in and holder of my girls’ daily lives, nourishes me. Having the space to dive deeply into topics that interest me for no reason other than I’m interested in them, nourishes me. Having the space and time to create and cook my own food, nourishes me.What nourishes you?Because I am so deeply devoted to The Mother (where all nourishment is derived), I am heeding the invitation here because I can’t unsee how the level of unbridled availability expected in this day and age is actually in direct opposition to what I so vehemently believe the world needs. Which is more reverence; a deeper sense of sacredness and respect for the sanctity of human life and life force, eg more of a connection to what nourishes us.Quite honestly, I feel very alone in my sober realization here. I feel like most of the world can’t feel what is at stake at the tenor at which I feel it.I respect peoples’ choices and their sovereign paths. I actually really do trust humanity. I would never assume I know what is best for anyone but myself and my children, because only you can know what is best for you.However, I can no longer bare the dichotomousness of teaching about nourishment from the compulsion and addiction that is wrapped around social media and the constant consumption and creation of ‘content’ and ‘having a growing and successful business.’It’s not it and it feels like the elephant in the room.The wellness industry is indeed an industry and it’s one that 99% of the time isn’t actually promoting anything even close to true wellness or relaying accurately what it actually means to nourish ourselves. The wellness industry is promoting fear driven quick fixes and sparkly silver bullets to overstimulated, depleted people who simply need to put their phones down, eat enough whole foods to properly fuel their bodies, go outside and drop to their knees at their connection to something larger than themselves.We all need the long game work of real and true nourishment. Which requires a slowing down. A tapping in. A willingness to do the mundane and unexciting work of being where we are. As Sarah Blondin said; “Sometimes it’s not about blazing a new path, but rather kneeling down on the one you’re on and asking if there is anything you have been denying.”I spent the last 2 weeks off of social media and deep in quiet contemplation of where my work is headed. I slowed all the way down to the speed of my embodiment and what I’ve been feeling at this spot actually surprised me.When I slow all the way down and ask what I really want without the compulsion and addiction to results driven thinking; it is that I want to spend more time with my family and with my girls on a daily basis.Who is this Clara that pines for more time spent coloring with my girls? Who is this powerful woman who feels her path bringing her right back to what we, as a collective, are told is the lamest location of all, barefoot in the kitchen?What if the window into my desire was wiped clean of all shoulds and have tos and potential sparkly accolades and what I see so clearly is the truth that I want to be a mother who doesn’t outsource her mothering?I want to be a mother who understands what a privilege it is to be able to spend this short season of my children’s childhood being a mother before anything else.To quote Sarah Blondin’s most recent essay again, “Everyday is new, wild, and whispering in your ear, and courage sometimes involves letting go of who you thought was you, and embracing someone else underneath. It is okay for life to be lonely and raw, unfamiliar and newly discovered. Neither is it predictable nor is it even definable. You are free to explore an entirely new, unformed version of yourself and tell no one about it.”Who am I without work? Who am I without the incessant pull of the inbox? Who am I without this ambitious drive toward making something of myself? Who am I when I’m less available to you and more available to me?This is the new version of me I am being called to explore. Lonely and raw, I am sure it will be. But embracing the woman underneath, the woman I am becoming, is where my nourishment lies. It’s the long game step by step my soul is hungry for.My work and offerings are going to change drastically in 2025. I am going to be far less available, which is actually very in service to the potency of my work.The only way to work with me directly in 2025 will be through, joining FERTILE.We already have a beautiful group of women fully committed to their long term nourishment and exploration of their creative power ready to begin later this month.FERTILE is going to be such a gentle and spacious journey with me. It is the truest offering I’ve ever put out in that, it’s so deeply in service to this long term flavor of nourishment.It is the offering I’ve been too afraid to put out there because it’s felt like such a big thing to ask women to commit to 2 years of work with me.But I realize that when I commit to myself and what I know to be true, like the fact that you can’t actually work on true nourishment without a bigger and longer commitment, I call the women in who are also ready to take responsibility and play the long game with nourishment. Here we go.If you feel called you can find the basic details here and send me a message to book a call or message me more about it. We being mid January, so be sure to message me soon as I’m only doing calls next week. I’m still not clear what I will be doing with the FED newsletter. I’m thinking I’m going to adjust it to a monthly vs weekly offering, but stay tuned. I am offering some in-person experiences around Bozeman in 2025. A one day VILLAGE retreat in February 2025 (date TBD) and a 3 day family VILLAGE retreat in August (save the date 8/22-8/24) for sure. I will still post to Instagram and Substack as I’m called but I will only be answering DMs and comments one day a week. The best way to get a hold of me will be old fashioned email: [email protected] new years to you and yours! Here’s to us all finding the nutrients we are missing and giving ourselves exactly that. As always I hope this little peek into my process gives you some inspiration or permission to give yourself the new beginning you need. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

As I’ve been watching and experiencing the fall out and division surrounding the results of the United States election I have had this resounding truth about myself settle in: I trust humanity.In a world where the places we are different are constantly being highlighted, we have to remember to come back to the places where we are actually the same. In a world where the fear mongering is so constant and the assault on our nervous systems is so pervasive (in the sense that we are living in environments that are so far from the natural environments we evolved in) we have to remember that we are not our highest selves when we are triggered. In a world where it is profitable for us to feel powerless and like we need fixing, we have to remember that we are whole and holy as we are. I see this really disappointing and inhumane response of, “Anyone who voted for Trump is a bigot and an idiot.” As if anyone who doesn’t think like a liberal is simply stupid and awful.How much of an ignorant oversimplification is it to assume because someone came to the conclusion that voting for Trump was in their best interest, they are a “bad” or “stupid” person? (and this goes for the judgment of people who voted for Kamala being brainwashed or somehow less intelligent.) Humanity is so much more complicated and nuanced than that. Humans are multifaceted, multi-layered, beautiful, terrible, awful, manifestations of Universal Intelligence.All of us have done and said things we regret. All of us have hurt others. All of us have aspects of ourselves that we are not proud of and are working with and on in our own ways. We are all hurt and, therefore, project that hurt out onto the world and those around us.This is what it means to be human. We are inherently flawed. Each and every single one of us.Anytime we start to get high and mighty, righteous (not to be confused with rightness) or so egoically convinced that our way is the only way, we are not in our right minds. We are all getting played in some way. We are all glaringly misinformed in some way. We are all convinced of at least a few things, that, in reality, aren’t at all true. If more people were able to remember compassion is not condoning, that our own personal healing is the greatest form of activism, and that it is completely possible to have connected conversations with people who don’t agree with us, we would not be in the situation we are in.However, because we are in this situation, let us not use it to seed more division, but instead seed more unity. This is a choice. A choice we have to make of our own volition, every moment of every day. We can choose unity or division by how we speak to our partners. We can choose unity or division by how we treat a stranger in the coffee line. We can choose unity or division by how we treat our own bodies. We can choose unity or division by how we choose to see people who don’t fit our definitions of “good.” We can choose unity or division by how we talk to our opponents. We can choose. And with our choices we create. We forget that we are not each other’s enemies. We are each other saviors. We are the friendly souls that came to play out roles and parts for eachother to learn our life lessons through.I understand that what I’m saying can get dangerously close to going over the edge into “spiritual bypassing” territory. You may say, “Ok, well if we’re all just friendly souls walking each other home, what are we going to do about our DEMOCRACY?!” right? I hear you. But if you actually attempt to listen to what each side is saying, both are actually afraid of losing our democracy. Both are positioning themselves as the prevailing party over the evils of some dystopian future.The left thinks Trump is such a lunatic and misogynist that he doesn’t and won’t respect the traditions and precedents set up in our country. They believe women will lose all their rights and we will fall into international chaos because of the policies he is going to back and put into place. The right thinks Kamala and her backers are threatening fundamental constitutional rights like free speech and the right to bear arms. They believe she is a pawn of the shadowy deep state agenda and a threat to the United States. They believed choosing her was a vote for the globalist World Economic Forum’s 2030 agenda and the statement “you will own nothing and you will like it.” If you zoom out, both sides are actually concerned about the same thing: the collapse of our freedoms and values. We can double down on our divisions and differences OR we could see that we actually both really value our country, our traditions, and what they represent to us.If we can stop making snap judgments and sweeping generalizations and letting our systems to be dragged into fear mongering, we can come back to ourselves and remember that we are all human and we all, for the most part, want the same things.We all want life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We can agree that we all feel the severe need for something to change. It is so clear our country is not ok and that our systems are broken. That’s why the tensions are so high, because, collectively there is a very clear feeling that something cannot go on as is. I feel this too. I want change. I want big change. And, I know the only change that is going to be worthwhile is going to achieved through further unity, not more division. Separation is actually the enemy here, my loves. When we band together, we move mountains and create worlds. This is the space of miracles. There is a potential here that people who are still focused on the “win” or the “loss” are not seeing and that is the potential for True change and True shifts. The amount of potential energy here in this moment is massive. Because of my own personal practice of body based energetic alchemy, I have an embodied understanding of how when we can be with a “negative” emotion or sensation, no matter how powerful or overwhleming it may feel or seem, if we can actually be with it and welcome it and invite it in deeper instead of push it away, it transforms.True energetic masters understand that everything is energy. There is no negative and there is no positive. It all just is. The greatest pain can be transformed into the most orgasmic pleasure when we are fully present with it. (orgasmic childbirth anyone!?)Humans are alchemical beings. We are the conscious connection between the physical and the energetic. We have a massive capacity to transmute energy on the very basic level of how we turn food, light and electrons from the Earth into energy in our bodies and on the more spiritual level of how we are spiritual beings having a manifested physical experience. In many spirtual traditions we see this theme of humans being the bridge between heaven and earth.Human beings are quantum, a particle and a wave, energy, light and matter all at once. When I hold my attention on humanity’s power, I see what is possible for us. When I hold my attention on individual human’s power, I see them as their highest version.I choose to see each human as a sacred amalgamation and expression of God, not because I am some love and light chump, but because it is the best use of my creative power and energy to do so. I choose to see Trump and Kamala as two souls who are deeply in service to our alchemical potetional for change on this Earth. Souls willing to play roles for us cultivate our own power within oursleves. (And souls who wanted to have a wild ride this time around.)When I make the choice of unity, in all the miniscule ways of my day to day life, I am choosing to see humaity in its power. That power can be used to create all sorts of things, terrible and beautiful, and has been. But I am ready for it be a conscious choice.I trust humanity. I trust peoples’ choices. Because the moment we start question our neighbor’s humanity, is the moment we lose sight of what it is we are here doing. It is the moment we start to let separation win. And this is what creates the future world that I wouldn’t want my children to grow up to inherit. I trust in humanity because I am a mother. I trust in humanity because I am a creator.Come be with yourself and listen. Next Live Practice: Saturday, 11/23/24, 9-10:30am. $33. Register and more info here. This is a public episode. 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This piece has been percolating for a long while.This is an invitation into a new or deeper experience of what I am calling; Divine Union, or the aligned relationship between the Feminine and Masculine energies within us and outside of us. As I repeat again and again, I am in service to The Mother, the mature feminine frequency that lives within our physiology. I have also called this energy ‘the collective nurturer’, because the mother is the source of all nourishment. Something that has become clear more recently is that because I am in service to The Mother, I am also in service to the Family, or, in other words, the legacy of humanity.When we think about the family we are not only talking about The Mother, but also The Father and the legacy that is begotten from the two coming together, the child/ren and the family as it’s own creational force.When you start to study things like masculine and feminine energy, you can go down all sorts of rabbit holes. There are infinite teachings about these two energies, because they are ultimately what our world (and maybe everything in existence?) is made up of. They are are the balanced (ideally) and opposing forces. The yin and yang. The two aspects I’m going to use as a way to demonstrate my translation of the integral relationship of Masculine and Feminine forces are modern relationship polarity teachings and feminism. I have written a lot about these two aspects before so you can check the archives of the Matriarch substack and find all sorts of articles on the Feminine, Masculine and co-creation. The two articles that feel the most applicable to this piece are The Mature Feminine the World Needs and Mature Feminine Responsibility Just Is. Polarity On the most basic level, the word polarity means the separation, alignment, or orientation of something in two opposing poles. That is a very mental way of saying; duality. Duality exists. In the reality that we live in on earth, duality exists. There are all sorts of spiritual teachings suggesting there is no duality and that we are all one. This is a big YES AND, we also live in a world of opposites. We see this in the charged particles of atoms and we see this in night and day; the micro and the macro. Relationship polarity teachings suggest that a “polarized” relationship is preferable to an unpolarized relationship because it creates an enlivening, sexual tension within the relationship. Polarity teachers and coaches suggest that the more the poles, Feminine and Masculine, are embodied and enacted (very important word choice here I’ll come back to later) the more aliveness and spark there will be in a relationship. This basic concept, I don’t really disagree with. It seems to be as factual as the basic definition of polarity. We select partners that generally create some sort of tension in us and have some unique magnetism that pulls us in. It could be their appearance but I would argue it’s really more their energy, something about what embody pulls us towards them. However, polarity teachings lose me when they suggest that we should role play the epitome of Feminine and Masculine characters so that we can somehow create polarization in our relationship.My very clear embodied knowing is that when I pretend to be something that I am not; it is never good for me or, ultimately, my relationships. If you have to pretend to be something you are not to be friends with someone, are they really your friend? If you have to pretend to be the perfection of feminine softness and receptivity to turn your husband on, are you really connected? I do believe that we can have fun and alchemize a lot of frustration and disagreement through role playing with our partners. Sexual role playing can obviously be very hot. There is something super sexy about inhabiting that demure feminine and being ravaged by your masculine man in his beast. I’m not in denial or delusion about any of this. However, if these types of interactions with your chosen partner aren’t done with a lot of intention and a set container, then it’s just fantasy and boundaries get foggy. It starts to get dangerous when we’re not sure where the role playing stops and the reality begins. And this is what I have heard from women who have gone deep into polarity teachings as a lifestyle; that they started to lose themselves and disown parts of themselves that weren’t part of the polarized Feminine menu. [This is a good post by Madelyn Moon on her experience.Teachers espousing that we should live our entire lives within the confines of some polarized definition of feminine and masculine as women and men are not in any way shape or form leaving room for the subtle and intricate dance of these two energies within ourselves and the way we express each aspect uniquely. I’ve noticed that zero of these polarity teachers have children, because you simply cannot maintain these rigid poles and fantasy in a relationship when you have to keep baby alive too. Polarity is true. It just is. There is a lot to learn about yourself as you play with these aspects in yourself. Your partner and you have it, or else you wouldn’t have been drawn together. It can be fun to embody in an intentional way, but when it comes to Divine Union, creation, family, and legacy, polarity just is not a huge part of it.Feminism In a world where feminism is basically just the masculinization of women (wrote more about this here) polarity teachings can feel like a relief to women who have been trying so hard to basically do everything men do. Paradoxically, feminism also has this kind of “girl power,” vibe that feels deeply off and immature. In the world of feminism women can do it all! They can have a career. They can have drink, smoke, and f**k just like the men do. And then when they turn 30, they feel their biological clock ticking, they can also have a baby, while they still do all those other things. And f**k their lazy, silly, stupid man-child husbands who are good for nothing but drinking beer and, at best, playing with the kids on the weekends. Of course I believe women should have the freedom to work and own businesses and property (and I’m very grateful to those women that fought for me to have those freedoms), but saying women can do everything men can do is not actually revering the Feminine.The man hating I see in the feminist spaces stems from this over masculinized woman. She’s bitter. When women aren’t allowed to be fully expressed versions of themselves, then men aren’t either, and both sides of the whole, suffer. Women’s bodies are made differently. We are on a 28 cycle vs the simple 24 hour cycle of men, so working the same way everyday doesn’t really work for our physiology, just as an example. Our bodies (until menopause) are always prioritizing the ability to build a baby on a biological level. We need more sleep than men. We need food on a more consistent basis than men. Why do you think things like thyroid issues and autoimmune disorders so disproportionally affect women? Revering the Feminine would be valuing the Feminine, not just more valuation of the masculine through women, which is making women sicker, victimized and more burned out than they ever have been. This is why so many women are attracted to this polarity idea of “just let me be in my feminine and the man can tell me where to go for dinner so I don’t have to!” It feels like a relief to a body that is tired of trying to be something it is not. And it’s a radical thing to attempt to be completely devoted to a man when you’ve seethed about his ineptitude. It’s a pendulum swing over to the other side. In both of these examples there is a compartmentalization happening. In the polarity examples there is an idea that women should only be a certain kind extreme feminine; soft, demure, gentle, open, devotional. In the feminism example, it’s women being over masculinized and denouncing their softness, openness, and devotional nature.The Mature Feminine Loves the Masculine As I have found with most truth, I find it in the gray, in the subtitles and in the twists and turns. I find it in the paradox. Feminism is not true and these polarity relationship teachings are not true. The Truth is the mature Feminine loves the Masculine. She loves Him because the desecration of Him would be the desecration of Her, because they are two parts of the same whole. Which I will call the Third Thing. The integral relationship between the exalted, mature Feminine and the exalted, mature Masculine is that they understand they are creating something together. The two parts come together and create something that is more than them individually: the Creation, the Child/ren, the Family. Polarity teachings say the masculine must always lead and feminism eg ‘the future is female’ concept says the feminine leads. The Truth is, the Third Thing must lead. God must lead. Creation must lead. Union must lead. The Feminine has more access to raw creational life force. She feeds life force to whatever she backs. Therefore, she must also have discernment. She must also be able to say, “No.” I am reminded here of the hormones estrogen and progesterone. The old idea was that estrogen was the feminine hormone. However, estrogen is the hormone of growth and proliferation. We need it. It is important. However, when we have too much of it or it is unchecked, it will tell cells to grow and grow and grow. Endometriosis is connected to too much estrogen in the system and results in the overgrowth of the uterine lining. Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS) characterized by cysts on the ovaries is also due to too much estrogen in the system. Same with fibroids. Too much estrogen equals too much unchecked and undirected growth. Progesterone is actually the solution to this because it tells the cells where to grow, how to differentiate, and when to stop. This is discernment. Progesterone is actually far more important for feminine fertility in a lot of ways than estrogen in our modern world. Just as discernment is actually the quality our world needs so badly. In a world where it is unclear what is real, where we have AI writing poetry and books, and there are discussions of growing human embryos in artificial wombs, we need the power of discernment more than ever. One of the most valuable qualities a person could have is to be able to determine what is True and what is not True; eg discernment. I’ve been working in the field of women’s fertility for over a decade and I have seen, on a hormonal level, progesterone being the biggest player in women’s fertility. I have also seen again and again, that as women improve their progesterone to estrogen balance, their discernment increases.Pregnancy is the state of our bodies where we have the highest levels of progesterone. You have either felt yourself or seen for yourself how much more a woman Knows when she is pregnant. She knows what she likes to eat. She knows who she wants to be around. She knows when she’s tired. I believe, progesterone is actually the Feminine hormone. The more progesterone you have, the less estrogen. They are in a direct inverse relationship with each other. It’s actually a big piece of the puzzle when it comes to how much estrogen dominance symptoms (ovarian and breast cancers, PCOS, endo, hot flashes, difficult menopause, etc) we see in the collective. Generally, if you increase progesterone naturally you will see women having less symptoms. The idea that estrogen is the feminine hormone is about as off as the idea that the feminine should only be soft spoken, demure, and open. The Feminine is both sides; soft, open and powerful and chaotic. She is both devotional and quick to slay that which is not true. She is discerning. She knows how to say No. These are aspects of the Feminine that need to be exalted in the collective. In fact, I would argue, just as most women need more progesterone these days because of our wildly estrogenic culture, most women need to invite in more Feminine discernment. Not man-hating, girl power rhetoric, but discernment, eg “This is enough.” “It’s time to rest now.” “It’s time to stop this.” “I am a No here and a Yes there.” Not closed or tight, but open and fully extended. The Mature Feminine is not just devotional and open to anyone. She understands that her devotion is power itself. This is not a “soft feminine” quality. This is a Kali, sword, cut your head off, Feminine quality, and with great power comes great responsibility. She is responsible for her power and opening. The Mature Feminine understands that her opening is sacred and loves the Masculine deeply. She wishes to create with Him. She calls him forward into His best and highest self through her openness, devotion, AND her clarity, her discernment and ability to say No. She doesn’t hold back any part of herself and the Mature Masculine isn’t afraid of any part of Her. The Mature Masculine serves her opening because He knows that She feeds him. They become a regenerative cycle this way. They come into alignment and integrity with the The Third thing this way, and then Creation in alignment with Life moves through them. The Mature Feminine loves the Masculine enough to tell him the Truth. Not “her truth”, no, this is most likely egoic, but The Truth. She is willing to say what she feels, what she sees, and what she Knows. This requires that she cultivate a trust of her knowing within herself, first. This requires that she trust the Mature Feminine within herself, first. This requires that she have a deep faith in herself and Life, because her man may not be able to hold the truth yet, but she must say it anyway, fully open and fully extended. This is where the Mature Masculine must be willing to have his ego shattered. He must be willing to drop down below his mind and into his heart and body. He must be willing to feel instead of think, similar to Her. He must be willing to serve, similar to Her. This is where they meet, in service, and create the Third Thing. Bowing down to each other and God. This is not an easy path for a human man and a human woman to walk. We all have wounding. We all have hurt parts and places where we can’t see ourselves clearly. We all have patterns and flaws. We all have needy and selfish parts. We all need to fall apart sometimes. We will hurt the ones we love most and they will hurt us. We are all scared of obliteration. But when I see these deeper Truths and I embody my powers of discernment, No AND openness and devotion, while at the same time seeing the places I am an imperfect human, I can see my partner with a wider lens too. I can see all the ways He serves my opening, holds me, and is completely and totally different than me. And I can see his humanity and all the ways he isn’t perfect, and I can love him nonetheless, just as he loves me. The Mature Feminine and Mature Masculine love each other enough to bow down to each other’s humanity, give each other grace, AND consistently be willing to call forth the highest version of the other. David Whyte defines maturity as the ability to hold to two opposing poles at once. That is exactly why I chose the word mature. Because when these two energies mature, they can start to invite a little of the other within themselves. They can start to hold both; which is ultimately, Divine Union. (think the yin yang with a little dot of the other in each side). Divine Union is the is-ness that surround us. As we let go of the compartmentalizations of ourselves and the ideas that we have to be a certain way, and allow ourselves to be fully seen, felt and loved, as we are, creation itself aligns with us. We can see the wholeness within ourselves and outside of ourselves reflected in our relationships, in the world, and in the cosmos. This is the ultimate healing. The integration of two halves into a whole. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

There is a punishing harshness I want to unpack in the health and wellness world. I see so many female influencers in this space peddling punishment as virtue and unnecessary harshness as ‘facts.’ I see ‘get-your-s**t-together-you-lazy-f**k’ energy being sold as radical responsibility. Just to be abundantly clear: This is not what we need to heal. We do not need more punishment, more harshness, more authoritative, hierarchal, disciplinary energy to make ourselves healthy. If you are overweight, ill, unmotivated, exhausted, acting in ways you are not proud of; more punishment of yourself will never equal real transformation. It may create a lot of change. You may lose weight through punishment of your body. You may run a marathon by telling yourself harsh words to push through the pain. You may make millions or billions of dollars through a deep hatred of yourself and a desire to make yourself feel worthy. Punishment can be an entirely effective mechanism for certain action; until it’s not. Or until it’s just you and your mind on your deathbed and you hate yourself. Radical responsibility is not dominating your tender, wild, broken, hurting, tired parts into submission. Radical responsibility is being willing to look at those parts. It’s being willing to see them and take stock of where you truly are with neutrality and sobriety. In my personal life and in my work, I live by the statement: “You cannot transcend what you do not first accept.”Acceptance is massively misunderstood. For some reason people think acceptance equals saying the thing in question is good and right. That’s not it. Acceptance is saying what is, IS. That’s it. It’s not a value judgment. It’s neutral.We are terrible at this as a collective. Before we can make any attempt to truly “solve” a problem, we have to first look at the problem soberly. We have to see where we actually are and accept it. Only then, can we really move forward in a way that takes the reality into account. This is a big reason why we haven’t actually made any big changes in regards to climate disaster. We can’t actually get in alignment (another way of saying “accept”) with where we are and feel it. When we get in alignment with where we are and accept what is true about ourselves and our patterns, we can access the despair, the grief, the loss that comes with it. This is why everyone wants to avoid this step because if we opened and softened to what is truly here, we might actually have to feel pain. Even the people pedaling punishment, harshness, and judgment of self are using those tactics to avoid the grief and the despair that comes with actually acknowledging where we are. It’s like they believe if they force the pain; then they won’t have to actually feel the pain and fall apart. If they force the pain; they can get ahead of it and still be in control. We are all avoiding the coming undone; which is inherently feminine. All of this harshness and punishment is rooted in hatred of the feminine; eg misogyny. It’s rooted in not understanding the death and life cycles and how to ride them while staying awake and aware. It’s all rooted in actually wanting to avoid transformation and becoming.We all say we want transformation, but most people aren’t actually willing to die well. You may read all this and think I must be for coddling people. For allowing them all their emotional turmoil and victimization. That I somehow think we all just need to fall apart and lay on the ground and give up. That if I’m not for harshness and punishment; then I must be for permissiveness. This is where the nuance that doesn’t get translated enough comes in. This is where we get lost if we don’t have the maturity and flexibility in our systems to hold paradox.Radical responsibility is not harshness and it’s not punishment. It is a noticing. It is a being with facts and realities that may be hard to sit with. We are so quick to jump into punishment once we see these facts, and that is the place where we need to cultivate softness if we want to experience true transformation. Let’s say you decide you want to work out three times a week. And for a few weeks you do. Then one week gets busy and you miss your workouts and before you know it a month has passed and you haven’t worked out once. What do you do when you notice this? Do you berate yourself? Do you feel ashamed? Do you tell yourself how bad and broken you are? Do you try to avoid thinking about it? Do you kind of go blank? Do you tell yourself you’re a piece of s**t and go to the gym and work out harder than you really had the energy for? No matter the outcome of any of these options they are all based in harshness and punishment. What I’ve found is most people don’t know how to go about change without punishment. Isn’t this the way we were raised? We colored on the walls and then we got punished by having to be in time out so that we didn’t do it again, right? We screamed too loud and then our mothers turned away and ignored us (withdrawing love is most certainly punishment for a child) hoping it would make us be quiet. We parent ourselves the same way we were parented. Our parents’ voices becoming our internal dialogue. How is this working for us? There are wildly alarming, unprecedented negative statistics pertaining to the average person’s physical, mental and emotional well-being. As a collective, we are not ok. This is a fact we all need to look at, soberly. We can look at this and say most people are fat, stupid, ignorant, and lazy, and we all just need to pick ourselves up by our bootstraps and get it together. We could disguise this attitude by saying people don’t “respect” or “love” themselves enough to make good choices, but that’s still using shame and self flagellation (I’m such a loser! Why can’t I just love myself more!) to get to our goal. You can’t hate yourself into loving yourself and if you don’t love yourself now, as you are; you’re not going to love yourself as a rich woman or a skinny woman. That’s not how self love works.What we are seeing in the collective today is actually a result of punishing culture, generations deep and well worn. Eventually, punishing wears us down and ultimately disconnects us from Life. You can see it in the way we believe how separate we all are. “I’m not one of those stupid people because I wear linen clothing and eat organic food and workout!” Life, creator, God, Truth, whatever you want to call it, connects us. It reminds us that we are all part of something much bigger. It tells us: “you are not a drop in the ocean, you are the entire ocean in a single drop.” However, we don’t get to collapse in that either. We don’t get to just lay down and do nothing. Life will humble you. Life will show you where you think you are in control and blast it apart. Life will continually with a whisper at first, a brick next, and a Mack truck last, guide you, lead you, and point you in the direction you’re meant to move. So instead of operating as if everyone is an idiot that just needs to get their s**t together; you could decide to actually be with what is true here.The truth is; humans are good. They are flawed. They are hurting. They are traumatized. They are being poisoned by processed food and chemicals. And we are always more alike than we are different. Underneath all the noise; we want the same things: health and happiness for ourselves and our loved ones. This is where the massive power of softness comes in. When we treat ourselves with softness; we don’t give up responsibility. We simply choose to no longer punish ourselves or others.When we treat ourselves with softness; we will treat others with softness and the world becomes a softer place. A place where people can stop being so deeply afraid of their feelings. A place where people aren’t afraid to look at the facts; because they know; no matter what they will not turn on themselves. You don’t know your power until you know what it’s like to be a woman who refuses to turn on herself. This is the kind of power that creates worlds. This is the power of God’s Love. When we no longer turn on ourselves; we are not afraid to speak out. We are not afraid to stand firmly in the world we would like our children to grow up in and wave people toward us. When we no longer turn on ourselves; we can lead from a fully integrated place.Softness is not weakness. Softness is power.When you embody and hold this kind of softness, you aren’t afraid of the facts or the reality because you can accept anything because you aren’t going dread living in your own mind if you f**k up. When you embody and hold this kind of softness, you can let Life lead you because you trust yourself to not beat yourself up no matter what happens. When you embody and hold this kind of softness; paradoxically, you are precise in a way overarching harshness could never be; because you can feel all the little caveats and deep pockets. When you embody and hold this kind of softness; you can take full and total responsibility because there is no punishment on the other side of it. This is radical. This is not the paradigm any of us were raised in; but it is the paradigm we are shifting in to. Some people (my past self included) think of softness as disgusting. They find it repulsive. They find themselves avoiding it at all costs. Disgust is not neutral. It’s a very charged feeling. It’s visceral. When we have a deep, real need for something and we are again and again denied that need, one way we make the pain of that missing need feel a little less brutal is to be disgusted by the need itself. This has been shown again and again in attachment research. Babies and children require this kind of softness I am talking about; this unconditional love. If you were not given this softness enough as a baby and child; you may feel disgusted by it because disgust is a more powerful position than need. We reject what we need most to make that need less painful. I find the harshest people are most disgusted by softness, and this points to their deep and primal need for it. We don’t need another kick in the ass. We don’t need another reason to punish ourselves. We don’t need to avoid the truth because of the fear of what acknowledging the truth might mean for our internal dialogue. We need acceptance. We need precision. We need to bring the light of unconditional love down into our bodies. We need to own the power of our softness. “EvenAfterAll this timeThe Sun never says to the Earth,"You owe me."LookWhat happensWith a love like that,It lights the whole sky.”- Hafiz Come see my interview with Siri Birk during the Soft Revolution free summit next Friday October 11th at 10am PST where we’ll be discussing this new paradigm of softness.  This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

Last night, I saw a male spiritual teacher’s post that stated: “fat people are untrustworthy.”He went on to claim that because excess weight is a result of “unmetabolized trauma” and “emotional numbing” fat people are avoiding “a necessary transformational crucible” (that would result in weight loss; I am assuming). On one hand; I partially agree. Not that fat people are untrustworthy, but what he’s saying about unmetabolized trauma, emotional numbing, and the need for a transformational crucible leading to weight gain. These things are absolutely a part of weight gain and excess weight, as it’s part of, I believe, all health dis-ease and disease. Any symptoms we experience are our bodies trying to communicate something to us, on multiple dimensions. Weight gain isn’t some sort of special shadowy case of this. I actually taught a class called the Wisdom of Weight about this specific thing. You can purchase the recording here if you’d like. The most important thing to me regarding trustworthiness is; anyone who has claimed to have metabolized all their trauma, to never take part in emotional numbing, and to not need a transformational crucible or five in their lifetime; is definitely NOT trustworthy.We are all humans. Flawed, scarred, and hurting. It is what makes us human. Even humans considered enlightened; Tich Nhat Hanh or Ekhart Tolle. for example, talk about their painful human experience and struggle. The wound is where the light enters you, after all. Now, as an obviously overweight person who teaches and guides other people; in the field of nutrition, no less *gasp* (see my article, The Fat Nutritionist); being lumped into the category of untrustworthy doesn’t trigger me exactly, but it does make me want to set some truths about weight gain/loss and who we should or shouldn’t trust, straight. First off, I don’t take commentary on my body from anyone and I don’t advise anyone else to either. You get to be the arbiter of your own experience in your own body. The only advice about my health I take is from experts I’ve vetted and who I can feel trust my body’s process and it’s deep wisdom as much as I do, or have a very particular expertise that I am looking for in an acute, specific way. I don’t take advice about my body from men, ever, that’s one of my very clear boundaries. I would never go to a male doctor, a male OB (or let’s be honest for me, any OB), a male nutritionist, a male gynecologist (or any gynecologist). I will, in special instances, work with male body workers, therapists, or spiritual teachers, but for the most part anyone on my body care team is a woman. That’s just what makes my system feel smooth and feels true to me. Men and women have very different physiology, life experiences, and spiritual relationship to creation. Therefore, I generally don’t think men have a clear embodied understanding of what a woman’s body might need from a physiological perspective. My body and my own intuition are the ultimate litmus test that everything runs through, be it health decisions or how to handle symptoms. A huge piece of my work with clients is giving them information from my professional training and my embodied experience, and then pointing them to feel into their own Knowing about what to do with that information. I am always pointing my clients back to themselves as the leader of their own health journey. The other piece of this is that weight gain/loss is so much more than discipline and calories in/out. I’m honestly so tired of even refuting these ideas. The confusing thing about this post I’m talking about is that this guy is basically saying: “don’t trust fat people because they have so much shadow, they can’t even discipline themselves into looking better.” Wow. Just wow. There are so many things wrong with this I could write a book on it. (maybe I will). The obvious first issue is the value placement on physical appearances. The idea that if you aren’t some vague and subjective ideal body size then you must be hiding something sinister and therefore unworthy of trust is so blatantly misogynistic and comes from a worldview that is obsessed with optics being what matters most. This is not the world I want to live in. It is not the world I am creating with my energy and my intention. On the other hand, of course, looks do matter. They can tell us a lot about a person’s habits, lifestyle, values, and health. I love to do visual diagnosis in my practice, looking at things like the whites of the eyes, the tongue, health of the hair, skin and nails. However, if we stop there, if we choose something as subjective as “being overweight” as a decider for whether a person is trustworthy there is no wisdom there, there is just surface-level preferences. One person could look overweight but be quite vital, radiant, and embodied and the other could be really toned, thin, and conventionally the “right size” but could have really low energy, a dullness behind their eyes, and be disassociated. Is their weight really what you want to judge your deeming of trustworthiness on? The other piece is that weight gain is not about eating too much or exercising too little. It is an energy management issue. Most of the women who are overweight I see in my practice are eating far too little nutrient dense food. A big reason they aren’t eating enough is because of sentiments like this post shared. Because there is this collective program that says “fat people are lazy pieces of s**t who stuff their faces all day,” so, as a collective, we have stopped eating, to the detriment of our own vitality, lest we become one of those fat lazy people. We are not fat because we eat too much and lack discipline, we are fat because most of the food easily available to us is toxic and we are burnt out. Our energy management systems cannot regulate our energy levels because of toxins in our food and environment, shortage of connection to nature, lack of nutrient dense food, and our sedentary lifestyles (this doesn’t mean we need more intense exercise).I am not blaming the government or big food or big pharma, we are responsible for ourselves always, but we do have to actually understand where these issues originated if we have any hope of reversing them. As a woman, to lose weight in a sustainable way that works with your wise and beautiful body, you need to be eating enough nutrient dense food on a consistent basis, moving your body in a way that feels good on a consistent basis, and spending lots of time in nature. I truly believe given enough time (this may be years) ninety percent of weight issues would regulate.You do not need to go on a diet or deprive yourself or force yourself into some sort of box that doesn’t fit. This is just the same old same old. It may work in the short term but it will never works in the long term. The only way out is through. The only true way to work with the body is the long game. Which brings me to the next thing; weight gain can may be the needed crucible, in itself. For me, having lived in a body that was conventionally attractive and the “right” size for most of my adult life which required a lot of force, manipulation, and discipline in the forms of dieting (basically starving myself) and intense exercise, to let my body gain weight, take up space, and fill out was actually the transformational crucible I needed and am still undergoing.As I released my punishing tendencies, allowed myself to see the grip with which I was living my life, the way I wanted to temper the energy of Life itself from flowing through me through controlling my food intake and movement and let go; I have gained weight. A lot of weight. I know it’s my body telling me something. I know I will not be this weight forever. I know I take impeccable care of my body. I feed her with nutrient dense food, consistently. I move throughout the day and build muscle in a way that allows for my body to feel juicy and strong. I prioritize rest and working with my hormonal cycles. I focus on my felt sense of radiance and vitality.And, other than my weight, I can say, after years of working towards this, I am incredibly healthy. My skin is plump and radiant. My hair is long and strong. My cycles are painless and consistent. I sleep deeply and well. I have good energy levels throughout the day. And all this was achieved gently and without any force over the last three years.  I am still trusting this process. I am still committed to the long game. I am listening deeply to myself and willing to hold myself with such gentle care and trust of the ancient wisdom of healing that lives in every single one of my cells. Since the majority of my weight gain about 3 years ago, I have lost 20 lbs. This seems to be the rate at which my body can lose weight in a sustainable, non forceful way. Everyone wants to lose 20 lbs a month, but this is stressful on the body. It takes energy to burn fat and process what is stored in that fat (toxins, estrogen, etc). And if you don’t have that energy or you get it from an unsustainable source, it will almost a hundred percent of the time, come back. In the process I have learned what it’s like to live in a body that isn’t the ideal. I have softened and learned about my own judgments of myself and where I placed my value of self in my appearance. I have learned to love myself deeper than I ever could have if I had not gained this weight. Through the process of weight gain, I have learned to trust myself most of all. And it continues to be an invitation into more trust, more gentleness, and a radical choice of letting my body go through her process while just holding the position of: you deserve to eat, you deserve to rest, you deserve to open, you deserve to be trusted. I am not suggesting that gaining weight is something every woman should do. It is just my ongoing journey of trusting myself.If there is anyone we can trust across the board, it is people who trust themselves, not their minds, but their inner Knowing. As my teacher Perri Chase just said in her writing on this same subject, “trust is an inside job.”There are no clear delineations based on appearance that could direct us to who to trust and who not to trust; there is only that quiet whisper than lives within our bones and tissues, that Gnows. When we trust our inner gnowing, we will always know what to say, who to connect with, and where to go. And we get to know that through brining our Soul deeper into our physical form, which could come through physical illness, weight gain/loss, and any other experience that asks us to trust in the face of our mind’s doubt.  This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

It’s really interesting that as I prepare to hold a retreat experience called VILLAGE, I am being called deep into my wound of aloneness.From the outside, I’m not sure I look like someone who has a core wound of aloneness. I have community, family, friends and, for the most part, function quite well socially. However, for some of us who have the wound of aloneness being socially adept has been a developed coping mechanism.I believe some of the most charming, magnetic, and likeable people probably have a significant “I am alone” wound.Developing the skills of charm, magnetism, and having people feel comfortable in your presence is a beautiful survival skill. You could think of it as “fawning.” Personally, I am not a fawner exactly, but I do know that because of my core wound of “I am alone” developed social skills so that people couldn’t see just how alone I felt and experienced life to be. The “I am alone” wound is one of, “No one has got me, so I’ve got to get myself.” “No one has my back.” “No one can really be trusted.” When you have this programming, you compensate a need for connection by not needing people. You may become very self sufficient and very capable. It’s not a “bad” thing; although it is a disconnecting thing. Our core wounds tend to be pre-verbal. They were inflicted before we could speak or had language, so there really isn’t a story when we experience the wound arising in the current day. Typically, a pre verbal core wound would feel like unexplainable terror around something that doesn’t seem like it should be that terrifying. It could be that you were ripped away from your mother’s body at birth. It could be that you were left alone for what was deemed too long by your primal body as an infant. It could be a lot of things, subtle to completely unthinkable and awful, and it doesn’t really matter exactly what it was. It just matters that the wound probably started there, at the primal layer of your animal body.Just because we can’t cognitively remember the experience doesn’t mean it didn’t create a program that continues to run in us far into adulthood. As you grow, you have experiences that highlight this wound. Until you are willing to feel the pain that lives in that original wound in a way that integrates it into your being, it will continue to resurface in all different locations and situations.Maybe your caregivers were aloof and self obsessed and you were alone a lot. Maybe you were treated like an adult far before you were, or expected to do adult tasks. Maybe you experienced bullying or rejection in adolescence. Maybe you experienced heart break or professional rejection or isolation. Maybe you’ve had far more serious and terrible things happen to you. Again, it could be a lot things that highlight and reopen this wound of aloneness for you again and again. It isn’t really the details or the story that matters, because the only way you overcome a wound like this is to feel the pain of it from an integrated conscious place. Eg, you allow yourself to feel what you were incapable of feeling when the wound happened and process the pain. I feel this wound of aloneness right in the center of my sternum. It’s a tender, shaky, wobbly spot that is activated anytime I have a perception of: ‘I am alone. I can’t trust people. I’m on my own in this life. I have to figure life out all by myself.’If I scan back through my life; there are many experiences that brought up this sensation/wound, this feeling of deep isolation, being misunderstood or unseen, feeling rejected for the way I exist.And the skills I developed to cope with this pain (notice: I’m not saying feel this pain. I’m saying cope with this pain. Those are very different things) are:1) To put a wall up around my heart and internal world. A protective barrier. 2) Understand social games. It’s not in my make up to be a people pleaser in the traditional sense, but I did learn how to “play the social game,” in a way that made people comfortable at the expense of my true expression. The goal of this was to  make me “popular”, cool and superior (a safer position). The problem with both of these skills is that they completely cut me off from the nutrients of true human connection.We all need to be witnessed and seen. We all need to feel heard and cared for. We all need to feel like we can let all of ourselves out and we will still be loved. We all need to feel connected to other humans without feeling like we have to change who we are. As I said in another article, we need each other. When we put protective barriers that have zero permeability all around us we get into a place where we don’t actually have access to the nutrients of true connection. A barrier may be protective on one level, and was quite possibly a necessary survival strategy at one point in our lives, but it’s also extremely isolating and can end up feeling like we’ve put ourselves into a prison of aloneness. Having social skills isn’t a bad thing, but when we lose the ability to actually share openly about the truth of our lives or how we feel from an authentic place; it’s all just being fake and superficial and we feel that. It’s like junk food connection. It might feel good to gossip or collude with our friends, but it isn’t actually what we are starving for. Fake, superficial, gossipy, victmized, complain-y conversations with people we are close to, will always leave us hungry for the real thing in the long run.We may even be so convinced we could never be our true selves around others or share our most vulnerable stories; that we don’t even try to anymore and keep it all inside. Where it pressurizes and festers; making it seem even more inane and toxic in our minds. A snowballing of all the reasons you’re too different, too stupid, too bad or too crazy to be considered a good person worthy of sharing their feelings or desires. I have been working on revealing myself more to those I love and love me for many years now. I have long ago given up the compulsion toward overly superfulous social niceties or the urge to gossip and opted for honest relating. This is not always comfortable, easy or fun. But it is wildly more nourishing. I don’t lie. I don’t have secrets or things about myself I’m trying to keep hidden. I don’t spend energy trying to be someone I’m not. Can you see how much less energy social interaction takes when you relate like this? When there is real conflict I address it in a way that’s honest and willing and I have the energy for it because I’m not wasting my energy on lots of inauthentic pseudo-connections. When I hang out with people I am just me, not some version of me that I have keep up the facade of or remember. Getting the shadows out of the closet and into the light is something that is terrifying but ultimately always feels like the best kind of relief and release.As Gabor Maté says, “Safety is not the absence of threat, it is the presence of connection.” I have deconstructed the barriers and implemented boundaries, which are loving layers of protection that do not block all flow but simply set up gates and specific channels where connective nutrients can be offered and received between myself and other humans. I feel deeply devoted to being a fully expressed Clara in the world. Nothing to hide. Nothing to keep hidden. All parts of myself integrated and integral and in integrity is the ultimate intention. And yet, in the past 3 weeks I have been so hit by this I am alone wound. In the process of promoting and transmitting VILLAGE, a family embodiment retreat, I am feeling the everyday rejection that comes with “selling” things on the internet, as if it were a dagger to my personal heart. I am seeing all the places I still use things like “likes” and numbers to validate myself and the worth of my work. I am seeing all the ways I still operate with the idea that creations are only worthwhile if other people like them too.The dark side of community is indeed rejection and betrayal. This is one of the reasons why we don’t cultivate the community we say we want; we are afraid they will reject us and we will end up feeling alone and bad, once again.The obvious downside of opening our hearts is if we do open them they could very well be shattered. I am seeing all the places these fears still have a hold on me. Better to be alone. Better to self isolate and disengage. Better to just do what I can alone and not invite people to join me. I am seeing where my instinct is to wall up and disconnect. I see where I have a sneaky voice that runs in my head always keeping score of who is “worse” and who is “better” than me so as to not be blindsided by rejection or judgment. I am seeing all the places I still believe I am alone and that I can’t have the connection I want or need. I am seeing all the ways that when I believe I can’t have the connection I want or need; I don’t get it. I am seeing all the ways I am the creator of my own experience with this wound.When I expect people to be untrustworthy; they are. When I expect people to not be able to hold me, they can’t. When I expect people to not get me, they don’t. The wound of “I am alone” is self perpetuating. We unconsciously create from our wounds until we are willing to feel the pain in them from a conscious and integrated place. The only way I have found to start to dissolve this wound is to start to lean into the ways I am not actually alone and open my heart. And a big part of this is actually feeling the pain of rejection. It’s feeling the pain of the aloneness I’ve experienced in my life and also the greif of how I’ve subjected myself to a lot of it in the interest of safety. It’s feeling the pain of being laughed at, ridiculed, bullied, misunderstood, betrayed, and left behind and then choosing to open my heart again. If I’m going to receive the nourishment of true community; I have to open my heart and to open my heart I have to feel all the times my heart has been broken, from a conscious place. I have to hold myself as I lean deeper into that shaky, wobbly, raw place in my solar plexus and feel it. This has been the deepest lesson the frequency of VILLAGE has taught me so far.Community brings up these spots and wounds in us. It reflects back to us all the places we don’t trust ourselves or don’t have firm boundaries (not barriers), or don’t feel worthy of attention, expression, or connection.True community requires us to open and receive and reception is inherently defenseless. But the thing is, the more I have opened and felt the pain of my wounds from an integrated conscious place, the more I notice opportunities for genuine connection all around me. When I don’t have to believe the lie that I am alone, I can receive my life and the people who love me and see me and want the best for me that are actually all around me. When I trust myself I can appreciate the ways people are available to me and not need them to available in ways they are not. When I trust my own discernment I don’t need people to always agree with me or eat the same way I do or wear the same type of clothes to connect with them. When I am connected to my humanity I am more connected to other peoples’ humanity and there is beauty all around me.As Michael Singer says, “Nothing is worth closing your heart over.” And I am truly a believer in this. Open heart and open pussy, connected, this is where true nourishment comes from. What I’ve found as I’ve leaned into holding a retreat in service to connection, nourishment, and community is that community is actually everywhere, all the time, we just have to be willing to feel it, open to it, and receive it.  This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

I awoke this morning after just 5 hours of sleep unable to fall back into a peaceful slumber.The stars were calling me. Some people might call this anxiety, but I have come to know it as purely energy that wants my attention. It is just a little buried underneath the static layer of daily tasks and to do’s. I am holding so much. I am carrying so much. We are all holding so much. This is not just me. It makes sense that there would be a call to consciously set it down and feel what’s underneath at times, or else we get lost in the noise and forget what we are doing here.I have always been a morning person. I love the fresh start of a day and basking in the stars right before the sky in the west starts to glow. It’s quiet and it feels like one of the rare times these days I can fully hear myself. There is something about the morning hours when no one else is awake that allows me to really put it all down and be with the layer that lives below all that I am holding. Almost always when I touch this layer the first emotion I feel is grief. A lot of times I cry, story less tears. Again, one might feel like this is a problem or it means they are depressed or something is wrong, but I have come to relate to grief as opening. When I’ve been closed and then I open, there is unfelt emotion there. The tears or the overwhelming sense of grief is just that unfelt emotion moving and clearing.If I don’t get hooked into any storyline about what is wrong or where the tears are coming from, the experience is really beautiful and feels cleansing. As I felt into this spot this morning I touched this grief that isn’t even all mine, it feels more collective: the umothered mother.This well of grief of the unmothered mother I’ve been tapping into lately is not actually about what my own mother did or didn’t do. It’s about the lack of the collective nurturer. The absence of Her within the collective. It’s about the ways we, as a society, have abandoned the true Feminine. How little we call upon Her. How little we value Her.Because she is always there awaiting our invitation. She is in the soil and grass and she is in the stars. She is in the earth and in the sky. She is in our very bodies and she is outside of our bodies; within and without.We have access to Mother everywhere we are. And yes, our own relationship with our own mothers is the template for our connection with Her, but if that relationship wasn’t nurturing or it didn’t teach us the boundaries and discernment or give us the guidance we needed to navigate the world, we can rewrite it.We must rewrite it. For our children and for their children. When we invite back in the collective nurturer into our own lives, we can invite her back into her rightful place, at the center of it all.When the collective nurturer is present in our collective we don’t have unmothered children or unmothered mothers. When we are all mothered, we don’t have to fight so hard for our nourishment, it just becomes natural. She provides for us.As I prepare to hold the family embodiment retreat, VILLAGE, I see the need to highlight the importance of Mother in the village of humanity. We all need to acknowledge the grief of all the umothered mothers and children. We need to allow the consequences of the absence of Her for generations to sink in. The only way out is through and we cannot bypass the greif and loss of what we have forgotten and abandoned. In fact, we can only make real sustainable changes when we’ve acknowledged and willingly felt the despair. The absence of wisdom about our bodies, pregnancies, birth, parenting, food, self care, family care, community care, relationship, creation in alignment with Life, nature, proper utilization of resources, is felt so deeply in every single corner of society. It’s rom the micro to the macro. We can invite Her back; through our actions, through our listening, through our choices for our families, through our mothering of our children, ourselves, and others. We can call back in the collective nurturer, by simply nurturing ourselves and our communities. If you are ready to connect with me and others who are ready to center family and community, VILLAGE the 4 day retreat and VILLAGE the community day (a one day version of the retreat) are happening. Send me a message for details.  This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

Over the past few weeks, I have been in some deep portals of healing personally. Whenever I hold a new frequency in service, like my VILLAGE retreat that I’ve been promoting, I am simultaneously served the medicine of it. The places in my life where I am not in integrity with the lessons and energy within the offering will be highlighted and I will have a chance to work with them more deeply. When you choose to live a life of service to the energy you don’t get to stay on the surface of life. You don’t get to simply worry about numbers, sales, optics and the value you’re offering. You have to get in the muck and the mess too. You have to see all of the ways your life is not in alignment and integrity with the thing you are serving. I am not here on the internet sharing as a typical business owner. I do not simply create offerings from my mind or my ideas of what I think will sell or what I think I’m “good” at. I listen deeply.I pray. I quiet my mind and ask, again and again, “How can I be of service here? What is mine to teach? How can my life be a living example of the world I would like to create? Show me. Guide me.” I am deep in my own personal practice and then whatever arises from the place beyond my mind and ideas is what I ultimately offer.This is a deeply vulnerable and unpredictable way to do business. You cannot do business this way unless you are fully, 1000% moving from trust and faith in the bigger thing that is leading us all. I don’t get to abandon offerings because they don’t work for my preferences. I don’t get to decide this whole “spiritual nutritionist” thing isn’t working for me so I’ll go get a day job. I’m way beyond that. This path is mine and mine alone. No one could copy what I do and no one offers what I offer because it wholly and completely unique to me. There is no competition from this location. However, this also means that when I offer something, I am co-creating with The Creator and therefore I will be reminded again and again that I am not in control. Co-creating, yes, in charge, absolutely not.I like the analogy my teacher, Perri Chase, (Magic Led Business is what she calls it) uses of co-creation being like surfing. You are the surfer and the energy is the wave. You’ve gotta build the skills, understanding, and muscle memory of what it feels like to paddle out beyond the breakers of the mind, sit and wait until you feel a wave that’s for you coming and then paddle like crazy and if you’re lucky and you commit at just the right time with the right amount of input you’ll get on that surf board the ride the wave. There is a perfect amount of participation and trust that gets you on that wave, and that is a different amount for each individual wave of creation.Do you see how this isn’t just about laying back and doing nothing and letting the wave take you and it’s also not about forcing anything to happen? It’s a constant back and forth, a conversation between you and the wild oceanic powers of creation. In the process of feeling the wave that is VILLAGE I have been so cleared out and worked. The gift so far has been this crystal clear landing on what is mine to teach and transmit. I have learned that the frequency of VILLAGE and I are in a forever relationship. I will be working with this medicine for the rest of my life. This is a confronting knowing to have. We all think we want so badly to know our purpose but my experience is that when you know, that doesn’t make anything easier because then you see all the places you are out of alignment with that purpose and all the places you will have to get bigger to meet that purpose.What is the frequency of VILLAGE, this content that I will be working with, on some level, for the rest of my life? The medicine of VILLAGE is the medicine of original and true humanity. It’s the medicine that exists in the way we need each other. The paradoxical spot of how needing each other makes us stronger. The place of where the imperfections are the perfection. The beauty in the flaws. It’s the divinity within the messy and gross human form.It is the experience of all of our parts belonging and being welcomed home. It is seeing how the most painful experiences in our lives somehow shaped us led us to this very moment where we are alive and breathing and capable of love. This is the medicine of coming into our bodies and fully incarnating here; fully inhabiting ourselves. Belonging to ourselves is the only way we can ever belong to others, because we are the same. We cannot transcend what we do not first accept. I will spend my life backing, exploring, transmitting and holding with such beauty, care and reverence the fact that we need each other. We need to be witnessed. We need to be seen. We need to be held.We need to be heard. We need to be allowed to be human in our imperfect bodies and with our imperfect behavior. We need our families, be they chosen or given. We need the simplicity of what it takes to keep a human body thriving; good food, clean water, body care, love, nature and connection.The future of true humanity quite literally depends on these needs being met and us remembering that all our parts belong. I am here inviting my beautiful partners in this revolution to come forward, to say, “Here I am too.” Let us come to together and remember what it means to be a human. I am forever committed to bringing the truth of humanity through. As my morning daily prayers always start with: “I am here. I am listening.” Final call for VILLAGE | A Family Embodiment Retreat registration. Send me a message to join us.  This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

There are a few threads that have been really present in my awareness lately: * The metabolic health crisis we are currently experiencing in the US and a lot of western countries. * The importance of reverence for family as a key to humanity’s legacy. * Healing as the expansion of our range of consciousness These three things have been swirling around me non stop for the last month. It seems like every podcast, conversation, work meeting and discussion I have somehow brings one of these subjects up and what I’m really sitting with is the place where each of these meet. Number 1: The Metabolic Health Crisis Processed food has been available for about two to three generations now. I believe the harrowing statistics we are seeing like soaring infertility rates, chronic illness, autoimmune diseases, decline in quality of life and mental health, etc indicate we are very much in the midst of a public health crisis.We can look at all these health conditions as mysterious separate occurances or we can ask, what is the root here? What is the thing at the bottom of all of these seemingly unrelated collective health concerns. The answer is: Metabolic health. What is metabolic health you may ask? Metabolic health comes down to bioavailable energy. Every single cell in our body needs energy to do its job. When the energy is not there, then the body has to triage and jobs that may not be necessary to short term survival, do not get done. For example, our body will always prioritize making stress hormones before sex hormones because if we need to run away from the proverbial tiger, it doesn’t matter if we can procreate later. Chronic low energy states create chronic illness eg our body goes into survival mode vs thrival mode. Whether this low energy state results in a mental health condition or infertility has more to do with the individual and their constitutional weakneses, environment, genetics, all the more variable pieces, but the root cause of all of it is this ability or inability to create and utilize energy well. Where do we get energy from? We get it from electrons. We get electrons from food, natural light, and the earth’s magnetic field. I wrote more about this in my article The Electric Body and Evolutionary Mismatch. There are all sorts of things we need to utilize these electrons well and efficiently. Two of them are totally free and very much intuitive: grouding and sunlight. Grounding requires you to touch the earth, trees, and plants with your bare skin or through natural fibers or conductive material. You can even gahter electrons by sitting in waterfall spray or the rain. Getting electrons from sunlight also requires that natural light from the sun or moon touch your bare skin or eyes (without glasses or contacts or lasik surgery). We get the most electrons from food that is closest to its natural form and local, eg fresh. Our bodies are wise and they know when we eat an avocado in Montana something isn’t quite natural about that. Water is also important. The water we consume from cities has been piped in from the aquifer or somewhere else, with added chemicals like fluoride and chloride etc. The water we drink and cook with and use should be alive as much as possible, not treated and battered and stored in plastic or pipes. When water is structured, mineralized and clean, it supports more efficient electron transport throughout our body and therefore greater energy availability and utilization. Some really good resources on this subject for a deeper dive are: * Energy | An Interview with Dr. Paul Eck* A series of Rooted in Resilience podcast interviews with Kathleen Stewart discussing the Minnesota Starvation Experiments and what happens to our bodies in a low energy state. * Tucker Carlson Podcast with Calley and Casey Means Number 2: Reverence for Family I am very much rooted in the Truth that my purpose in this lifetime (and probably other lifetimes as well) is to be in service to the frequency that I call The Mother. The Mother is a mature feminine frequency that I experience as living within the body and cells. It’s the place where my work with my physical body and with nutrition overlaps with my spiritual teachings and understanding of Life itself. The Mother is a frequency and presence that I see as very much needed in the world right now. In the mainstream collective culture of our times women, mothers, children and family are not intrinsically valued. There is some sort of optical valuing of  “the perfect life/family,” eg that white picket fence, nice home, and luxury car in the driveway with cute blonde kids, but there is not an innate valuing of Mother and Child. We see this by how little mothers value themselves and how little mothers are supported in the greater collective culture. We are told that mothering is a side plate and not the main course of our lives. (I wrote more about this here..) “Women can do anything men can do!!” we are told, and then we are expected to do all the things men do and raise our children without help and take care of our home. ‘Women can do everything men can do’ isn’t actually true. And men can obviously, not do everything women can do. We are perfectly different and entirely complementary, and each equally important, but definitely not the same. When a man and a woman understand this about each other, they are in flow. When we do not try to put one below the other, we are in right relationship, equal and opposite in a lot ways. The yin yang symbol comes to mind. When a woman and a man come together in deep love and reverence, creation happens. That creation is sometimes a child. These two create a family. And family is a representation of their and God’s love. These two opposites coming together, supporting each other in equal, but different ways. It is perfection and it is a legacy. Family and legacy are one in the same. Not in some sort of masculinized “I must procreate and spread my seed” way, but in a way that the thread of love is expanded upon and widened. Life wants to extend itself. This is creation. Creation wants to stretch and grow and actualize. it is the point of Life. That is why, I am seeing more clearly recently that I don’t only serve The Mother, I serve Family.Family is the vehicle through which the grace and love of humanity is passed down. It is the center point of Creation and all that the manifestation of love is. You don’t have to create a family of your own in the traditional sense to participate in family in the way I am speaking of it here. We all have family, given and chosen, you simply must revere the relationships you have and recognize the reciproicity and love you are being invited to participate in through them.Just as I aim to be an example and beacon of permission for Mothers to claim their innate worthiness, value, and power because it is of service to do so, I also aim to be a Mother who puts her family at the center, because family is the highest form creation. Now, I am a human with flaws, patterns, triggers, and s**t I’m carrying, so I am not the perfect mother and I do not have the perfect family. I still struggle with rejection, pain, lashing out, feeling victimized, acting out of malice and frustration. I am the first to admit not every day is easy. I am stretched on a daily basis by my life. Mostly to recieve its beauty fully but also to hold steady in the pain of it. However, I am clear that my reverence and full participation as the Matriarch of my family is my highest honor and practice. I was on a call with Nicole Parker today and she said, “Mothers are born and matriarchs are made.” Meaning, there are lots of women who became mothers through the birth of a child, and that is no small thing. But to become the Matriarch, the woman who Knows her worth and the power of her presence and claims the responsibility of the leadership of her family, is a process that you must consciously participate in. Every single human being on this planet is deeply affected by dynamics between themselves and their mother. There is no human being on this planet that didn’t come through the portal between worlds that is a woman’s cervix and pussy. This is the level of reverence we need to have for Mothers and families, because it is the legacy of humanity and that from which all humanity springs forth. The continuation of humanity requires women and families. The culture we create and live in will be created by the mothers of the children of the future. This is the influence that every mother holds in her hands. May they know it and revere it and participate with it consciously and intentionally. Number 3: Healing is about Range Expansion This one is something that really dropped into my body like a ton of bricks after opening a particularly painful wound last week. I have been on the “path of awakening” for a long time. Maybe like two decades if you count my drunken and drugged attempts to reach God. The seeking has always been there, even before that. I got a tattoo at 17 years old that says “Create Your Own Reality” in Latin. Looking back on my life I have always been looking for something, something deeper and more basal than what any adult I knew at the time could offer me. I found it in poetry and music and expression initally and in my adult life have sought after teachers and spent hours and hours on the mat of daily practice and pattern identification. I consider myself lucky because the constitution I came into this life with was one of not taking no for an answer. I came into this life with a willingness to go deeper and be more uncomfortable than most. I had an Akashic records channel tell me that this life is my Soul’s favorite life and that I’ve had A LOT of lives. I believe it. This life has been such a deeply rich one and I pray it’s not even close to over. And so, when I was working with this wound somatically last week the level of sensation in my body increased until it was at a childbirth level intensity. My mind wanted to tell me all sorts of stories and spin in all directions; I stayed conscious with it, but barely. I leaned in and leaned in and right when I thought I might pass out or explode, there was a whoosh of relief and a dissolving. I was shaken and weak, but the intensity left me and I felt how I had reached some new level of awareness because of my willingness to feel that old pain. And I could not have held steady in that spot without a thousand smaller scale experiences I have gone through. Practice was the key here. There is no guarantee on this path of concious embodiment that things will get easier. In fact, in a lot of ways they get harder and more challenging and that is actually part of it, because you are expanding your range. As you become more awake you increase your ability to feel more. The up and down. The “good” and the “bad.” The only guarantee is that you will get to Live more awake. More awake to pain. More awake to joy. The last couple days, seemingly randomly throughout the day, I have experienced these levels of sustained and embodied joy and connection that were not available to me before. I have felt a level of gratitude and opening and reception I’ve never felt before. The making of the space for the pain also made space for the joy; my range has increased. You don’t get one without the other. On a healing path we get obsessed with “feeling better” and there is nothing wrong with wanting to feel better. This is not about self punishing. But we forget that part of the feeling better is also being able to feel more. Healing isn’t actually about better or worse, it’s about expanding your capacity for range, up and down, backwards and forwards.How are number 1, 2, and 3 related? Metabolic health, reverence for family and healing as expansion of range, all come back to orienting to a new kind of paradigm. The mainstream views on health, family, and healing are not working. They are outdated, rigid, and rooted in the glorification of immature masculine ideals and the small egoic mind. The holdup is people being unwilling to slow down, feel, question their minds and their indoctrinations, and be with themselves below the static layer of all they think is so urgent and important. We can be so committed to our confusion, misery, and discontent that we miss the way Life is pouring love into us and leading us down the exact path we need to become who we were always meant to be. On a mainstream level you bring up the word “metabolic” and people just think their “metabolism.” If they have a “good” one and they are skinny or a “bad” one and they are fat. Metabolism and metabolic health are about how our bodies utilize energy. Energy being the baseline for everything. Energy is prana, life force, qi.. dare I saw, creative power? Access to energy is in some ways your access to God (and I know that God is a loaded, charged word for some people, but I have never been nor will I ever be a religious person, so for me, God is just the original Creator. It is in all things. It is energy its self).I am not implying that if you don’t have energy you don’t have access to God, but I am personally drawing the conclusion here that all of these three threads I’m discussing have a root in a disconnection from Life (God) itself. I heard an MD say the other day that the reason we have so many public health issues is because people are living longer. He also said that we can’t do double blind studies on things like herbs and eating a diet based in whole foods and therefore can’t make public health recommendations based on them. Do we really need a study to tell us that eating an apple is better than eating something out of a bag with 60 ingredients? Have we fallen this far away from our innate Knowing and common sense? Do we really need a study to tell us that breastmilk is a far superior food for babies than formula? Have we fallen this far into our own egoic God-complex that we think we could possibly know better than Nature Herself? The mainstream view on having a family is that it is hard, exhausting, expensive and kind of miserable. We need coffee and alcohol to just get through the mornings and evenings with our kids. We need to put them on screens just to go out to eat. Really? Is that the best we can do for the raising of the future of humanity?The mainstream view on healing is that is you should heal quickly and if your’e sick its probably your own fault. We should be satisfied with as little calories as possible and eat a “plant-based” diet cause it’s what’s best for the planet, no mind what’s best for your individual body! If you don’t feel energetic, happy, and look amazing all the time then there is definitely something wrong with you and you should probably get on a pharmaceutical! It couldn’t possibly that your body is struggling to produce energy and you need to have a spiritual awakening. How is all this working for us? I heard someone say, “Americans aren’t lazy, they’re just burnt out.” And that really resonates with me. I don’t think people want to put their kids on screens all day, I think they literally don’t have the energy or the modeling to do anything else. I don’t think people really want to eat plant based, they’re just confused about what is healthy and have basically been starving themselves all their lives and work under fluorescent light and sit in chairs on a computer all day and so they are so dissociated they have no access to their body’s knowing. As sick as we are, our lives are entirely too comfortable in a lot of ways, we aren’t well versed in traversing difficult situations.  Healing in an integrated and sustainable way takes time, stamina, commitment, faith and trust in our bodies. It takes a playing of the long game and a trust in our own ability to hold ourselves through difficult times.  We would need to be at home in our bodies (embodied) to address healing from this angle. Our current medical system is based in a hierarchical system where medical professionals know more about bodies than we do. This is not the directionality to operate from if you’d like to address healing on a holistic level. You have to trust your own insights and feelings first and foremost, collect information from experts and run those opinions and recommendations through your own inner knowing. It takes so much so responsibility to come at healing from this direction. That’s what most people are unwilling to take on. They would rather someone just tell them what to do.If we would like to heal on the level of increasing our capacity to stay fully conscious in more and more situations then we will have to take a whole lot more responsibility on an individual level, as well as a collective level. Metabolic wellness is about creating and utilizing energy well and efficiently. Family is about creating a legacy of love and creating a future consciously. Healing is actually about creating a larger capacity for Life itself. These all tie back to us having a more conscious presence and awareness of ourselves within our bodies; more God in our bodies. The more embodied we are, we become more aware of what takes energy away and what gives us energy. The more connected we are to our bodies the less we can override them by feeding them food devoid of life. The more embodied we are, the more presence we can have with our children, with our families, and the more capacity we have to consciously create a culture that serves the life of our families and therefore, humanity.  The more embodied we are the more capacity we have to be with the discomfort of illness, disease, or whatever challenging thing Life offers us (to teach us and guide us). What do we need to come into our embodied nature? The first step for most people is to slow way down. That doesn’t mean not being functional or neglecting your duties or becoming metaphorically numb or frozen, it just means brining more awareness into your life throughout the day. Feeling things as they come up just 5% more. It means brining your awareness to your body more often. Listening to your biological impulses. It means noticing and stopping the mind spin and bringing the energy back into your pelvis and asking what really needs to be done from there. These are simple but not easy tasks. Most peoples’ minds will try to find something flashier or more entertaining to “do about this,” but the real practitioner will stay with the slow, boring and steady and lean in to the monotonousness of what it takes to make real sustainable changes. VILLAGE | A family embodiment retreat, is a chance to slow down and be in your body for a weekend with your family. It’s a chance to truly BE together in a way you may have never been before. VILLAGE is steeped in all three of these threads: metabolic wellness, reverence of family, and healing. We will focus on whole, local, ancestral and lovingly prepared foods eaten slowly and together. We will greet the sun in the morning and say goodbye to it at night, with our families. We will allow our bodies to touch the earth and be outside. We will be with other humans who are also committed to slowing down and becoming more intentional as a family committed to a legacy and culture of responsibility, embodiment and intentional creation. We will experience workshops and practices that bring us further into our bodies in a way that is gentle and slow and nourishing. If you come with your partner, there will also be opportunities for you to drop in together without kids. For me, there is no higher priority than parenting and enjoying that parenting. This is my parenthood, afterall. May it be everything I know it can be. Joyful, painful, challenging, and expanding. This is also my children’s childhood. May it be joyful, shaping, beautiful, and exactly what they need. This is the most important thing we can do for our families, center our embodiment.We are calling in two more families to join us. Reach out to me if you’re ready. Registration is now closing on September 12th. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

As my girls get older and we move further away from that tender, tender infancy phase, to the phase where they can communicate, entertain themselves a bit, and generally need less from me, I am struck by how much less time we have together. I am struck by how the days fly by and blur....how leaving them overnight has become a little less heart wrenching…how I work 8 hours days largely without seeing them three times a week. I am struck by how the identity of mother doesn’t feel as new and shiny as it once did. It’s more comfortable. It feels more like a broken in pair of Birkenstocks, instead of the new ones that you love but are giving you blisters and feel awkward. Not all days are easy by any means, but the physical demands on my body are most definitely less. I’m getting better sleep. I weaned Maya and have stopped breastfeeding after 4.5 years of my body nourishing little bodies that came from my body. I’m not always carrying a baby on my hip. Nowadays, the carriers only get brought out for hikes. I read somewhere that there is a big decrease in how much a parent engages with a child around the age of 3. The ideals of that early parenthood stage start to slip. Most preschools start at age 3. Maybe another child comes into the family and attention is spilt. Age 3 is also when children do seem to reach a significant level of independence; they can walk, talk, go potty, and put their shoes on (for the most part). It makes sense that us, parents, would be ready to breathe a little sigh of relief.It makes sense that we might shrug off our initial feverish sharp ideals of zero screen time and perfectly sourced nutrient dense food, as we have been sanded down by the years of interrupted sleep and the energy intensive reality of what it takes to raise kids and hold a family together. And so, this is where I am, really noticing the shift in gears on my motherhood journey. Motherhood is just watching a part of your heart walk further and further away from you and it is true and good on one level. This is what is supposed to happen. Time passes and children grow up. I can only imagine the heart breaking that must rattle your bones as your baby starts to drive a car or takes their first solo trip or moves away from home and goes out into the world, for good, without you. Even in writing that I feel a hollowness in the lowest reaches of my heart. I heard, again and again, from strangers and friends alike, “Oh! It goes so fast!” And I know it does. It has been my deepest intention from the beginning to not take a moment for granted. To really experience it all; the highs and the lows. The pain and the beauty. And when things are so fresh and you are such a green, new mother, it is all so much more sensational.It’s like when you travel to a new country and everything is interesting and different and just going grocery shopping is an adventure. You don’t just birth your baby; you birth yourself into Mother. You get to watch their first times but you are also having so many first times; as a mother.  Right now, for me, the sensation around motherhood has been turned down a smidge. And this is when we look back at those massively formative times and think; “Oh! They were so sweet! So good!” Because we were really living. We were in it. It may have sucked at times but we persevered, and we were so blasted open by love. Hard times have a way of shaping us; forming us into something new and we actually really love that on the other side. We love to feel our strength. We love to grow and expand. We love a good challenge. We need them to keep life interesting.We say we want all the money, ease and power, but really that would lead us into a pretty boring existence. A huge issue in our collective is the lack of initiatory experiences. We’ve got no built in grist, no whetting stones upon which to sharpen our character….except birth and motherhood. These are some pretty wild initiations built right in to the existence of the human race…if we choose to see them that way. It feels as though I am through my initial initiation into motherhood. Me, having chose to double down, with two babies born 14 months apart. It was not an easy time. But it was a real time. A raw time. An achingly beautiful time. I have found myself in the unfamiliar place lately of feeling… really good (knock on mothafucking wood). Good sleep. Energy levels coming back. Feeling really strong and fluid in my body. I am watching a part of me that wants to cling to the illness, the burn out, the story of “how hard it is” because it makes me feel closer to that blasting-open-intensity of becoming. I could so easily use the daily tasks of mothering, home keeping, running a business and serving clients, financial stress and uncertainty, cooking nourishing meals for my family, lingering smaller health stuff, to manufacture an intensity, but that’s actually not actually true. The true intensity of an initiation is one thing. That’s the fire of alchemy. The pressure required turn coal into diamonds. But manufactured intensity; that’s just avoidance of joy, avoidance of clarity, avoidance of slowing down and taking stock, avoidance of enjoying the fruits of your labor and the natural flow of the life and death cycles. Manufactured intensity is the static layer of life. It’s the noise that keeps you from the nourishing, calmer undercurrent of intentional living. It’s not actually true and you don’t need to live in it, but it does require a conscious choice not to. Life in this day and age is always going to be busy, feel urgent, and keep you moving faster than the pace that’s true. But is that the reality you really want to give your power to? My deepest desire when it comes to my family and my girls is still to be present with them as much as possible. My desire is to get to know them deeply as they grow up into humans with gifts, skills, interests, and journeys of initiation of their own. As they grow and expand their worlds, I want to remember who they are and how much joy, connection, nourishment, and beauty they bring to my life just by being exactly as and who they are. I don’t want to collapse into the busyness of the everyday life and take for granted the role of mother and give up the intentional creation of my motherhood experience. I am seeing how it’s going to take a little more intention for me to stay conscious here as well as a little more energy to make sure I have the space and time with my girls to tend to and nurture the relationship I would like to have with them. This is a huge reason why I am holding VILLAGE | A Family Embodiment Retreat. I am creating and holding it because I can feel that it is actually what I desire and need most. I can feel that I need the space and intentionality that something like the container of a retreat provides. Our lives get so busy and it’s just hard to put down all the things that pull at our attention in a way that really allows us to be together. We could do it at home. Hopefully we do make intentional time to be together, to connect, and hear each other’s hearts, hopes, and dreams, but there is something about removing all other obstacles to this (work, cooking, cleaning, organizing, planning, logistics) for multiple days that feels so deeply needed and nourishing to me I feel tears well up and my heart filling. Holding a retreat, of course, is not the same as attending one, but when I feel this level of tender desire, I know it is mine to create because it needs to be created. My family needs to create this, to bring our VILLAGE to others who are feeling this call so that we can all get that deep connection and alignment with each other that we are craving. Attending something like this will come in direct conflict with a lot of perceived static layer concerns. “I don’t have the time!” “We can’t afford it!” “Not this year, maybe next year!” Trust me, holding VILLAGE comes right against my logical mind (the money! the time! the vulnerability and possibility of rejection!) and comfortable ideas of who I am.These can be compelling and maybe they are actually true for you, but my invitation, if you feel called to this retreat, is to really sit with the investment that something like VILLAGE would be in the deeper undercurrent of connection within your family. Money can be worked out. Time isn’t as rigid it as it may seem. Be willing to drop below the noisy layer of the daily tasks, worries, and routines and ask: Is this for me and for us? Am I ready to choose something that pulses a few layers deeper in my heart even if it isn’t easy to say yes to? If you are called, enrollment for VILLAGE closes at the end of August. Send me a message.  This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

Hello loves, This is very special and near and dear to my heart email because I’m releasing a podcast I recorded with my husband during the celebration of our 10 year wedding anniversary! We told the story of our relationship (highlights and lowlights) as well as answered the audience questions I asked for a couple weeks ago.You can listen to it, or you’re also welcome to watch the video of us right here. (it’s part 2)We got into all of the taboos: money, sex, and betrayal. Oh la la! I trust that our story will serve you on on your journey in some way. Most of all, I hope you feel seen and that you can take a little deeper breath knowing that no one has the perfect relationship because it doesn’t exist. Part of being in long term committed partnership is weathering a whole lot of storms together. Ultimately, what I am taking away from this process for myself is that relationships are constantly evolving and transforming and as long as you are willing to stay connected through the process, you’ll both continually grow and transform as well. The only constant is change, after all. The questions we answered in this episode: * “What was your practice of coming into your powerful embodiment of truth and holding that pole in your relationship? There is a spot where my damsel or inner brat comes in and wants the other to bring this in first/without me having to hold it myself. There’s a collapse in conviction, out of fear.” * “How to hold the feminine and have her lead in a family? Just learning how to hold myself in this with my husband?” * “Did you always trust your husband fully or did you get through a process? I’m finding it difficult to let go of projections from my parents/past relationships?” * “How do you manage a sex life with little/s around?” * “How do you guys navigate finances as a family? Particularly disagreements on how money should be spent?” * “How did you create the financial stability to have the life you live?” * “So curious what you mean exactly when you say orienting to feminine nourishment? Tell me more!”I would love to hear what landed for you or what you’re taking away after you give it a listen or watch. This question I answered on my instagram here and here. And Sean and I also talked about it in the first class we taught on Divine Union you can listen to here. * “Do you see your husband as the “leader” or the “head” of your family? Sean and I are so honored and excited to be holding a family embodiment retreat September 27-30th at Homestake Lodge in Butte, MT. Registration closes for the retreat at the end of August. We have 3 spaces left as of now. If you feel called to this work and being held by Sean and I and the VILLAGE we are creating, please reach out to schedule a connection call. You can get all the details and information you need about it here. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

Hello love, I’ve been talking a lot about family embodiment, intentional parenting and partnership, divine union on a practical level, orienting to feminine nourishment as a family, and the right relationship between the Masculine and Feminine over on my instagram stories today. I've put a call out to my community to ask questions about these topics via this link (it’s totally anonymous if that makes it easier) and Sean (my husband) and I are going to answer the questions on a podcast episode here on Matriarch. So, I thought I would share our first Divine Union discussion we held a few weeks as a podcast as a part 1, so that’s what this is! I hope you enjoy it and I’m totally open to questions, comments, discussion as we prepare to record the part 2 of Q+A. VILLAGE | A family embodiment retreat, enrollment ends at the end of August. If you are feeling called to come drop in with your family, surrounded by nature, centering distraction free connection and deep nourishment. Intentional creation, together. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

This piece has been percolating for a long time.I’ve been in active, conscious, non extractive participation with my creative process long enough that I know better than to rush something that is percolating and gestating.But I’ve been watching this one take form.When something wants to be created through me it starts to circle me. I’ll be shown other pieces of writing, conversations with friends, posts on social media etc that inspire and awaken the thing in my own experience. One thing that spurred to me to get to work on this piece was I saw a very well known influencer and teacher in the world of sexual health post pictures of her emaciated looking body saying she feels amazing at 10% body fat. “Is this what people think is sexy?” I thought to myself. Women need at least 13% body fat to bleed and need closer to 20% to be fertile. This complete disregard for the truths of female biological health is just so tired and old. Women are meant to be juicy. That doesn’t meant you can’t be very healthfully slim. But it does mean eating enough for a grown ass woman, eating properly raised animal products, and having enough muscle mass to be able to painlessly get around in the world. On the opposite side of the spectrum, Amber Magnolia Hill’s most recent substack, ‘Children v society’s views on their mother’s bodies’ struck this thing that I know deep down in my bones that our bodies, no matter their fat percentage are glorious and the perfect haven for the people who love us. I also had a conversation with Dr. Suuzie Hazen where we spoke about the Chinese medicine concept that each time a woman gives birth she gives away most of her life force and therefore, she is eventually made anew postpartum. There is a new physical density that comes with motherhood. There is a coming into the body that just isn’t there before you have children.It doesn’t mean that you are necessarily bigger but there is a presence, a thickening and rooting that’s there post giving birth and nurturing a child that wasn’t there before. On a shallow level a lot of women think about their less perky breasts or wider hips post birth and think of this coming into their bodies more as a bad thing, when really it’s just a maturation of the body. A maturation as perfectly natural (and as awkward and uncomfortable sometimes) as going through puberty. Another ping related to this topic: I was at a mother-centric retreat with my friend and incredible yoga teacher, Jessica Cartwright, and I’m remembering a short conversation about mothers’ bodies we had as well. We were both admiring the beauty of a body that has been used for its purpose. This is generally thought of as a bad, demeaning, and shameful thing too; to be “used up.” However, I believe there is something deeply magnetic about a mother’s body. A body that has served a deep, primal and spiritual purpose.On a biological level our bodies are made to reproduce. A woman’s body is made to create, carry, birth, and nurture her children. This doesn’t have to be enjoyable every single step of the way, but it should be deeply fulfilling. I believe that our collective beliefs about what constitutes beauty, “health”, sex appeal and its value, and the ways we place virtue on youngness only, as a society make the transition from maiden to mother much more of a struggle than it needs to be. There is also this idea that men prefer young women and that once a woman has had children she is somehow not sexy. My experience has been quite the opposite. My husband far prefers my mother’s body as far as I can tell. There is this idea that men primally want to procreate with multiple women, and I just don’t think this is necessarily true. Men in committed monogamous relationships not only have more sex than single men, but also live longer and experience more joy in their lives. They are ultimately more satisfied with their lives on the whole and the legacy they’re leaving behind. Men love to have something outside of themselves to serve. They think mothers are hella sexy and mothers are hella sexy. And all this BS about men wanting only young women is something you simply don’t have to experience or choose to play in to if you want to have a committed and deep partnership with a man.These are caricatures of men and it’s insulting to perpetuate the stereotype of the “womanizer” man because men deserve better. We all deserve better. Men are also just trying to find a way to feel loved and belong, just like most women. We all need to grow up, parent ourselves, and then we can all start building a life that our awake adult selves are proud of. However, it is not secret that the collective doesn’t exactly value the work of mothering. [read this article I wrote in this]We love the prospect and romance of pregnancy. We love a young beautiful woman getting pregnant for the first time.But once that fresh faced young woman has had a child and gets pregnant again and again and has little inconvenient, messy, loud humans in tow, she becomes uncouth. If that pregnant woman is older than 35, a “geriatric” pregnancy, that’s even worse. Once that woman has children that won’t sit still or quiet down, or her unruly body doesn’t acquiesce to tight jeans and crop tops or form fitting dresses and high heels, we deem her frumpy or plain and write her off as unwelcome or inconsequential. Just another basic tired ass mom with a messy bun and sweat pants. Nothing to see here. In fact, side long glances and tight lipped fake smiles that say “get your s**t together,” are all she gets. If you do happen to be a woman who “bounced right back” after having kids, or you are one of those mothers who manages to look incredibly elegant at school drop off and running errands, I imagine (because this is not me) that you still feel the profound sense of transformation that’s happened within you. And when people don’t see or act as if your entire world has shattered and been remade it’s got to make you feel a little lost and empty inside. To not have a world that reflects back to us mamas the profundity of our internal experience is a recipe for feeling alone, isolated, and incredibly tender. This can then turn into rage, depression, apathy, bitterness, and anxiety. Humans need reflection and witnessing in the process of transformation. We need to have our own internal experience acknowledged and mirrored or else we feel adrift, which in turn makes us feel scared and go into survival mode, and puts our mind into an uncreative state. My work is really about bringing women and mothers back into a creation orientation.I want mothers to see themselves as the creators of their lives and families. This requires them to go through that epic transformation from maiden to mother in a way that leaves them in deep approval of their own transformational process.That includes being in approval of the body and its changes. I see so many women that are deeply spiritual, smart, talented, creative, and capable letting the shape or size of their bodies somehow determine their self worth. Or believing that because of their size they aren’t deserving of pleasure, feeling safe in their body, feeling sexy in their body, or feeling like they are not beautiful. This is insane. The idea that there is ONE kind of beauty or one type of cheek bones, lips, eye shape, body shape that is the most beautiful and all the others are inferior is not your belief. This is a belief that has been programmed into you. Ask yourself: Do you, in your own self, actually believe that wrinkles are not beautiful? I’ve been asking myself this question with ideas of beauty I notice myself holding. And when I go really deep into the Truth of my being, I’m realizing that I actually don’t believe these standards. Collectively there is a belief about what is most beautiful, yes, and the collective ideal of beauty has changed significantly through the years.But what do you think is beautiful? What do you find intriguing, mesmerizing, magnetic really, deep down? I see when I ask myself this it’s the uniqueness in people I find most alluring. As I’ve uncovered these programmed beliefs about what beauty is in myself I’ve been more able to access that which is truly my own experience of beauty, and it is everywhere. I used to see humans through the lens of collective programming. I was harsh, critical, and unforgiving when it came to appearances. Mostly on myself, but with others too. I find the harsher we judge others the harsher we judge ourselves. The less we judge ourselves, the less we judge others. But now I look at humans around me and mostly I see fascinating beauty. I am blown away by the gorgeousness of human beings. The intricacies and uniqueness of each face, like different sunsets or landscapes, impossible to say which was more or less beautiful, but all beautiful in their own way. I look at bodies and I might see a body that is fighting against gravity, or a body that looks like it is lacking energy or vitality, but it’s never ugly or disgusting.It’s a marvelous, miraculous, breathtaking body. For me; it’s the bodies of mothers that are especially awe-inspiring and beautiful. The presence of them. The softness. The skin that’s been stretched or wrinkled by laughs and tears. The muscles that have held a whole world for countless hours. The eyes that are tired but filled with purpose.The souls that would do anything to make the lives of their children safer and more enriching. Embodiment is the word that really comes to mind here. The more embodied, the more light that emanates from the very skin of a person. That’s what I see when I really ask myself what I believe is beautiful. Humanity that’s brought more and more of the light into its body is beautiful.I want you to look in the mirror, into your own eyes, see what you have been through. The awful things you’ve done in the name of belonging and getting love. The courageous being you are to be on the Earth at this time. The ways that you’ve loved and lost. The lessons you’ve learned.I want you to look into your eyes and see yourself for the holder of the light that you are. Now tell me you’re not beautiful, as you are. I hope that you cannot, because I know that I could not. Chasing some external ideal of beauty will never be it. Because you are you. You are on your path. It is yours and no one else’s.The way you look is for you; it is through yourself that you will be awakened into the light of love. You are perfect. You have always been perfect. Whole and beautifully human.I see the obsession with changing and enhancing our looks as a diverging away from this perfection as wholeness I am transmitting here. We cannot accept only certain aspects of ourselves and be integrated. We cannot really step into the next level of human evolution and be cutting into our sacred flesh to soothe our egos. It feels so entirely obvious to me that collective beauty standards around remaining forever youthful are not rooted in a world where the mature feminine is valued. Beauty standards that tell us our bodies and faces should not change from the time we are prepubescent teens are not based in a reality where women can love themselves and mature women are revered. If we want a world where mothers and older women are valued, we need to start standing solidly in the camp of loving ourselves as we are. This does not mean not taking impeccable care our bodies. I spend so much time feeding myself, moving my body in ways that are respectful to her, caring for my skin, my hair, my muscles, my movement, my eyes and on and on.That’s one of the things that is so obviously backward to me.We are encouraged to slice our tissue, prick our faces, wax our vulvas, all things that hurt in the moment and have serious negative long term consequences as a forms of “self care.” We are encouraged to paint toxins on our nail beds, slather chemicals all over our bodies, dye our hair, all of these which have known negative health effects, as a form of “having some me time!” But when we want to take the time to make our own scalp spray or spend time each night doing face yoga we are crunchy and hippie. Ok. I am calling out this collective programming and saying: No. No, I want no part of it. Will I never wear make up or paint my nails? When I do I’ll do it for me. No one else. I will be it for the joy of adornment and the enhancement of my own unique expression of self.I will never cut my body’s tissue, prick myself, or harm myself unless it is for life saving reasons. Wake up to who and what is creating your negative self image. It’s not you. It’s never been you who believes you are ugly or unworthy. If you have the privilege of being around a toddler in your daily life you know this.Toddlers love themselves and their bodies so innocently and genuinely. It’s the most disarmingly delightful thing to see a toddler take joy in their new clothes or hair do or their completely chocolate covered face.They don’t give a f**k and they love themselves deeply. They are masters at self expression without anything held back. We all were like that and we can be that way again (just with a little more myelination and impulse control, hopefully).Express yourself; dress yourself in loud and crazy colors, wear red lipstick every day, buy sequined shoes, whatever makes you feel more you. Take impeccable care of yourself; feed yourself the highest quality food you can get, touch yourself lovingly, massage your skin with oils, look into your eyes and see your effervescent sparkling beautiful essence staring back at you.You are a miraculous body. You are a wonderfully messy human.You are beautiful. My Offerings Right Now: VILLAGE | A Family Embodiment Retreat - September 27-30, Homestake Lodge in Butte, MT. Get all information here. HomeBody Practice, Saturday, July 6th. 8-9:30am PST. Come home to your body. Get more information or register here. Deep Nutrition 1:1 Work- work with me 1:1 on all things physical, mental, emotional and spiritual body health. Get more info or book a connection call with me here. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

This last week I’ve been on what I am calling my “body love vacation.”I took 6 nights to simply be with my body and listen.The amount my body has changed and been through in the last 5 years is really mind blowing.Two pregnancies and fully natural physiological births, co-sleeping with babies and toddlers, four years and counting of breastfeeding, gaining 80lbs over the course of this, completely redefining my identity on multiple levels, 1.5 years of severe insomnia, the stress of covid throughout this.. there is more, these are just the big ones.And I can honestly say that these have been some of the best years of my life too.I have never felt more well used, alive, and like it’s all for something bigger than and beyond me.When I heard Lindsay Courcelle being interviewed on Amber Magnolia Hill’s podcast Medicine Stories a few years ago, I could feel the resonance in what they were discussing and I knew that part of my lingering health issues were related to my fascia and what it was holding on to.When Lindsay shared that she offers week long intensives where people travel to see her for this myofascial release technique body work I felt the very familiar zing of “this is for me.”So end of last week, I got on a plane to Vermont, leaving my girls for the longest I’ve ever left them, 6 nights, to be with my body and be held and worked on by Lindsay for 2-3 hours a day.I also put everything else I have been holding down to simply see what comes up. No work. No house care. No cooking if I didn’t want to. No distractions or external obstacles to simply being with my body as the intention. My work with Lindsay is still landing and digesting. I will say that I have never had such a clear experience of the “issues being held in the tissues.”There was no doubt that an experience with an ex boyfriend I hadn’t thought about in years was stored in my diaphragm.There was no doubt that there was sexual shame and repression from another experience I’d had being held in the left side of my pelvic bowl. The work I did with Lindsay gave me a more visceral experience of this truth than I’ve ever had before. I know releasing what I released this week is huge. Some things my body had been stuck holding for over 10 years, moved and changed. I feel I even moved emotions and patterns that may not have even been mine but were generational in nature.I had a session a few weeks ago with Alee Reina and one of the nuggets that has stayed with me since is: “Receive, Don’t Carry.”My system is big. It’s wide. And I can carry a lot. I have always been able to.My generational pattern and inheritance is to just take it on. Carry it. Hold it. Just because I can and I’m doing it on the level of the unconscious.(this, carrying because we can, is also a manifesting generator thing in human design.)My system is big for a reason. I was created this way because I have a lot to do in this lifetime.I have a lot of energy I am designed to bring into manifested reality.I am like lighting being grounded in the earth. (Come to the Magic of Minerals class on Tuesday for more on how every human being is actually light).But if I’m not aware and conscious, I will take on everything. Just hold it. Because I can.What I know for sure from my personal and professional experience with healing the physical body is that no one else can live inside you, but you.The obsession with finding someone who is the “authority” on whatever subject and following them just because you are desperate for some outcome is not how we really heal. It will never be how we heal.Those parts that are so desperate to figure out your health issues are not the parts that bring healing.As radical as this is to say: healing isn’t something we figure out.I know, that is a big one. In the way I work with the body; you cannot protocol your way out of your ongoing body issues.You cannot yoga, meditate, restrict, or supplement, your way out of a belief about yourself or an unconscious pattern you are running.It’s unconscious. It takes examination, a deep listening, and a willingness to follow threads and paths with no definable end in sight. It takes a willingness to follow the nudges, the pings and the zings (because that’s the way the unconscious communicates). Something I only recently have seen about myself is how subtly addicted I am to the next “healing” thing.Maybe the new health tech health gadget will be my savior!Maybe this supplement will finally be the silver bullet! Maybe this class or book or knowledge will be IT!And, I also love my insatiable desire to get to the bottom and my willingness to keep learning and always try new things. This is also part of my human design. I’m a 1/3 profile. The seeker of truth and knowledge. I’ll always follow the thing I’m interested in to the very bottom.But when this seeking is done with this idea that IT is the thing! Then it’s just a desperate part of me looking outside myself for saving. When this quality of seeker I have is used by my mind seeking a solution to something I am off on a ride that will never bring anything truly nourishing or healing.There is nothing outside of us that can save us. We are only ones who can save us.Constantly looking outside and thinking we need to find the answer is actually inherently stressful and activating.It is the opposite thing most of us need to heal.There is so much focus on fixing and eliminating symptoms. And I’m not saying that all our symptoms are fun or that we shouldn’t want to be comfortable.But most of us want bigger lives, yes?Most of us want to grow and stretch and expand.If we are constantly thinking that if we get rid our symptoms that’s the solution AND THEN we can get bigger, I’m here to tell you, the thing you think is your hindrance to getting bigger is actually the way you get bigger.It’s asking you to become. You don’t become by avoiding. You become by going through, not through force. Not through “figuring it out.”You become by surrendering to the guidance of the body.If your body is consistently telling you things through symptoms, maybe it’s time to listen to those symptoms instead of trying to figure out how to get them to go away.Do you feel the difference there?One of the experiences in my healing journey I get victimized by is how the more I tune into my body; the more kindly I treat it, the more sensitive I and my body seems to be. For example, as a kid I ate all sorts of junk food and fast food, no issues. Now; I eat junk food once in awhile and I am laid out. I feel awful.There could be a piece of metabolic health here (again, see Magic of Minerals class) but I think it’s also just that I am way more IN MY BODY now. I am attuned to myself in a much deeper way. Which means I feel the negative at a much deeper level as well as the positive. I have far more access to pleasure now too.I have been changing the way I’ve been thinking in that I’m saying to myself: the body will never be free of symptoms, it shouldn’t be. Symptoms are how my body communicates to me.They’re just all communications. They are not something to fear. It takes time to be with the body. It takes slowing down. Getting curious.It takes coming at your symptoms with an openness and reception versus anxiety and worry or attack and a desire to destroy.I believe people with unique and pertinent-to-our-issues gifts, skills, and experience can be wonderful guides on our healing paths.I know, personally, I need holding to access the deeper the spots. It’s just something about my system. Those who hold me are sometimes people who know me in my personal life really well and sometimes they are long lost soul friends with a very specific gift.The healing experience always requires that I am willing to open.It requires I am willing to surrender to the cues of my body.It always requires me to follow the destination-less path that only shows me a tiny bit of it at a time.Here is to building a new relationship with our bodies.One of curiosity towards our symptoms.One of trust in the fact that we are the only ones actually living in our bodies and therefore the ultimate authority over them.One that honors our bio-individuality and the differences between you and I. A relationship where we can walk with ourselves through our health challenges instead of exacerbating them with a desperation to solve, figure out, and fix.You don’t have to go on a 6 day body love vacation. I know that ain’t in the cards for everyone.You just have to stop; slow down, feel your body and get curious about your aches, bloats, sensations, emotions. Let yourself be open to them.You may need to move while you do this, sometimes being still creates a lot of agitation for people. Take a short silent walk before and after work and feel your body moving. Roll around on the ground and stretch while brining your awareness inwards.I’m a big fan of bowspring classes with Amanda Cepeda for coming into your body and listening and becoming aware in an open way.I heard the other day to just take 10 breaths in between each time you switch tasks.Just start to bring more awareness to your body and its communications. See what happens to your symptoms. I find the more acute symptoms dissolve or release as I turn toward them with love and attention. The ongoing chronic symptoms are more mysterious. I’m in all honesty still figuring out how to listen to my body when it’s repeatedly not feeling the way or doing the things I think it should. However, I would bet my life that listening to them more deeply and with more openness is always the best course of action. Questions to sit with, write about below in the comments or send me a message about:* What are the symptoms my body has over and over again? * If I came at these symptoms with curiosity and openness, what is my body trying to tell me? * What does my body need to heal? There are two offerings I have right now that are related to this subject of listening and being with:* Magic of Minerals | A 2 hour free class exploring minerals as root cause and solution to our health concerns. Tuesday May 21, 8-10am Pacific. If you can’t come live, register and you’ll be able to watch the recording for a week after. *I know this doesn’t sound like it’s about being with your body, but you’ll see, it is on the same thread here. Register here. * HomeBody practice. First Saturday of the month 9-10:30am Pacific. June 1st. If you don’t take the time to be with your body, feel confused about what that would look or feel like, or just want a container to experience a deep connection to the body and its wisdom, HomeBody is an embodiment practice for you. Get more info and register for the June 1st practice here. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

The programming to be a good person runs deep.Our parents were programmed and they programmed us with things like “Be polite!” “Be nice!” “Include everyone!” “Don’t stare!” In my childhood and even still in a lot of ways, it’s, “Don’t be so opinionated, big, inconvenient, needy.” “Don’t take up so much space.” “Don’t be so assured of yourself.” “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” “How can you be so sure?”Maybe your programming was slightly different, but the thread that all these programs come back to is: don’t be you. Don’t show all sides of yourself. Be more predictable. Less wild and unruly. Be nicer. Be good. What does it mean to be good when you’re a child? Basically, it’s to have less needs and be more manageable. To be happy and go with the flow. To listen to authority without too much push back, because (and those of us who are parents know this) it’s way easier to parent if your kids listen to you. So we all have some variation of programming around good equals only acceptable parts of myself, not all parts of myself. It seems very obvious to me that the ‘light and love’ teachings and veneers I see in a lot of spiritual teachers and coaches is just this same only good is ok programming dressed up with feathers and palo santo. If you are actually going to undergo or hold people through true alchemical transformation you are going to need to get dirty and go to dark places. You are going to have to open up all those basement rooms of yourself you’ve locked away and pretended you don’t have in the interest of being good. You are going to have to face your shadow and your unconscious.You are going to have to admit you take stinky s***s, get rashes, and have body odor.You’re going to have to feel the ways you’ve been wounded and how that wounding has hurt other people, maybe even people you love.You’re going to have to come to terms with the parts of yourself that don’t fit into a spiritual love and light groove. You’re going to have to come to terms with the parts of yourself that have ulterior motives and want to look cool, be wanted, and belong at all costs. We are no longer living in the age of the guru. We’ve seen venerated spiritual teacher after venerated spiritual teacher be brought down to the level of imperfect humanity. Sex scandals. Cult accusations. Priests and altar boys.Spending money on private jets, hookers, and drugs. Using their power and influence for their own personal gain. Ultimately, we’ve seen how even the most respected good people icons of our collective society have done some very seedy and sleazy things. Ghandi slept naked with his teenage niece. Martin Luther King cheated on his wife regularly and was known to be a womanizer. These are just examples. To me, I just see all this as a reflection of how far we’ve gone off track when it comes to placing one human being at a higher level than another. It points to how much distortion there is in collective spiritual communities, in general. It points to the fact that when we exalt our “goodness” at the expense of our “badness” we inevitably create toxicity. When our darkness gets squeezed and locked away, it putrefies. This is the age of The Mother. The age of interdependent wisdom. The age of the mycelium network. The age where we see that from the dark comes life itself. That light and dark aren’t so different and that one begets the other. This is the age of integration and brining light into the darkness and seeing that they are two sides of the same coin.This is the age of understanding that the soil under our feet is made of death and decay. And it is the only thing from which new life springs. New age spirituality and the idea that we need to go through some sort of ascension process is one giant bypass over the Truth which is every single one of us is holy and every single one of us is human. Doing our spirutal practices just right will not get us to some destination where we will then sit around and eat berries and live in peace and happiness the rest of our days. We aren’t going to do plant medicine enough times to finally see the meaning of all life. That meaning is here, right inside us. You don’t need anything special to see it. Practices are meant to keep energy moving. To keep our attention focused. My practices do not make me better than you. Your practices do not make you better than me.  There are no superior practices. There is no getting in any of it. I have done everything from yoga to plant medicine to living for years with no running water or electricity, but my greatest practice is cooking dinner for my family. It is by far the most challenging thing to stay open and present with. That’s what I’m interested in now. A spiritual practice that brings me deeper into communion with my everyday, boring and very human life. Sure; doing ayahuasca in the jungle may give you some deep insights into where your programming and grief comes from, but if you can’t go back to your most monotonous, frustrating life moments and apply those insights, plant medicine is nothing more than another way you’re searching for the jewel that lives within you, outside of yourself. We don’t need all the extra. We don’t need the crystals, plant medicine, feathers, spirit guides, or whatever. They can be fun and help us to focus our energy, but my spirituality doesn’t require any of it. In fact, all of it just becomes a distraction from the Truth that is so simple. To find the jewel inside yourself, you must be willing to traverse the wilds within. You must be willing to feel the pain you would do everything to avoid. You must be willing to go to the places where you hate yourself and love yourself there. No substances. No distractions. That is where real Feminine power lies. Not in trying to change anything about yourself but in being with yourself in the dark corners.You could bring me anything about yourself, any of your deepest darkest most private thoughts, any awful, unforgivable thing you’ve done and I will hold your gaze, steady, and with so much love. Because I know those spots in myself and I have stayed with them, when no one else would. A teacher guide cannot bring you to places they have not gone themselves. So choose your teachers wisely if you wish to actually transform and awaken. If you’d rather stay asleep and in the programming that good is better than bad, light is better than dark, then please by all means continue to search outside of yourself for the answers and be a good person. I will stand by my statement that the world does not need more good people, it needs more real people. Real people have all sorts of diametrically opposed and subtle differences within themselves. They cannot be sectioned off into neat categories.Real people are multifaceted; mean and nice, beautiful and ugly, loud and quiet. Poet David Whyte says, “Maturity is the ability to live fully and equally in multiple contexts, most especially the ability, despite our many griefs and losses, to courageously inhabit the past, the present and the future all at once.”All my writing and teachings here revolve around calling forth the mature feminine frequency that lives in us all, the Matriarch, and a real person attuned to that mature feminine frequency will be able to hold multiple contexts and versions of herself all at once. That is what the world needs; maturity, authenticity, and realness not a facade of light. What comes up for you reading this? Where are you focused on being a good person where you need to be more real?Would love to hear in the comments. 🧡 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

I wrote the lower part of this quickly on my instagram stories yesterday during the times I had to wait for the dentist to come in and check me at my appointment. I like to share how real-life my expression is. I am deeply committed to cultivating my creativity daily. I journal pages and pages. I record voice notes to myself in the car. I write plenty of things that never get published. I am always reading at least three books at a time (mostly fiction these days). I sing. I color and paint with my kids. I dance. I walk. I spend a lot of time in nature. I do a lot of creative things for no reason other than I enjoy them and they feel good. I think of creativity as an internal fire that needs to be stoked and tended. It needs to have kindling, small sticks, and sometimes a big log that burns slow for a long time, put on it. You don’t have to force yourself to write every day, but you do have to be tending to the fire in some way. Blowing some air on it. Observing it and feeling into what it needs. I am pretty much willing to write and express most days and always being in process and practice with my path, I have a good burning fire of creation that I am always tending to. Most of what actually gets shared publicly comes from a big flare of that fire and something just comes through like a lightening bolt and needs to be written down and shared at that moment. A lot of times if I wait and try to come back to it later; it won’t land. If you don’t have these lightening bolt moments I think this means your creative fire may need some tending. You can’t have a roaring fire without some small burning twigs initially. I also have pieces I work on for months that need to simmer and bake. So I am always writing on my phone in between appointments, squeezing it in while my kids are entertained for a few minutes, or asking my husband if he can be with the girls while I pop up to my computer to get something out. I never have glamorous or perfect conditions to write. Ever. So this is just an intro to what I wrote while at the dentist yesterday that just felt like it needed to be put out and shared immediately. I have spent a few moments with it to flesh it out a bit more. I want to talk about the victimized mother. She is the mother who feels resentful of her partner or other people because she feels they don’t support her or help her. She is the mother who constantly feels bitter, spiteful, annoyed, and dissatisfied with her partner’s ability to show up for fatherhood or partnership. The Victimized Mother and the Martyr Mother are actually the same.You cannot be victimized if there is a choice. And there is always a choice.[I wrote about this in this piece: The Victimized Mother and the Well Used Mother]Believe me, one of my core stories is that I have to do everything, that other people won’t do it so I’ll just do it.And this story took me to full on burn out in early motherhood. I know the story of “I have to do it all..” very, very well. I am also well aware that we live in a time when mothers are expected to be super human.But that’s actually the place where we have a choice and a responsibility to choose another way.If we want to change the way mothers are seen in the collective we have to hold the pole in our very personal lives of the full and fed mother. We, in our very personal lives, have to be committed to not perpetuating the story that women have to do the lion’s share of the parenting, have impressive careers, be super hot, take great care of themselves, be perfect attuned gentle-parenting mothers and and and and….We get to create our own experience of Motherhood. You can create whatever motherhood experience you would like to have. For me to have the experience of being a full, fed, and revered mother, which is the experience I want to have, I have to take responsibility when it comes to knowing what I need, asking for help with I need, being clear on my priorities, and valuing myself.It requires me to back the story that I am a creator and that I have influence over how my reality arranges around me. Being able to create our own experience of motherhood requires us to value our role as Mother enough to not play into collective narratives about what a mother should be or the collective narrative that mothers are undervalued. Mothers are not undervalued in my home. In my home the mother is revered and respected and treasured for the shepherd of life and the future she is. I have invited my husband into his role as co-parent and papa since day one. I have played the long game and thought about how each time I soothed the baby for him or took over to keep him more “comfortable” in regards to parenting, I would be taking his experience of becoming a father away from him.So I chose to do that only minimally. I let him struggle with the babies. I trusted his journey into fatherhood.. and he has shown up with flying colors. So many men don’t even get a chance to ripen into a good father because of the martyr mother and the programming that men can’t or shouldn’t be with babies. So before you’re quick to assume your man can’t handle it.. ask yourself if it’s really that you can’t handle his discomfort and struggle? Ask yourself if you’d rather have the fake power of the martyr, the power that resentment makes you feel like you have, instead of allowing yourself to take up the space you take up and being responsible to figure out and ask for what you need that would make mothering less depleting. This goes with parenting and it goes with telling our men the Truth. We are the oracles. Say the thing you Know that he needs to hear with a lot of love. This is what real partnership looks like. Invite him into his power. This is what real Divine Union means, trusting each other and trusting your path. You don’t get a King if you’re not willing to hold what a Queen holds.And we don’t get a society that values mothers until mothers value their fullness as mothers. One last thing: do not emasculate your men. Assuming they cannot handle the Truth you see or the portal of fatherhood or your feelings or tough love is emasculation. Assuming they only care about physical looks and sex or that they are incapable of controlling themselves around their physical urges is also emasculation. Men are just as multifaceted as women. They want so much more. They are so much more. Invite your men into their power.Hold your attention on his power with everything you’ve got and see what happens in your relationship. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

For me every day is earth day.She is my greatest comfort and my greatest inspiration.We are all cells within the being that is Gaia.This may sound woo woo or esoteric but to me it actually feels like the real-est thing I’ve ever known. She is our Mother. We are her children.The very matter of our being made of the same star stuff that She is. Her beauty is our beauty. Her waters our waters. I am a human living in a collective time where we do not respect our Mother.This is evident everywhere from the way we treat the Earth to the way we treat the female body; really all bodies, to the way we collectively exalt logic and reason over feeling and intuition. The Earth speaks in feeling and sensation, just the same as our precious soft bodies. When I tune into the Earth and Nature itself I feel two things as it pertains to humans:1. We think we are so separate and we matter so much, but to the Earth we are just a small piece of such a vastly larger whole. We believe our minds have it all figured out and that we need to “save” Her. But to Her, this is like a teenager telling his parents he knows how to take care of a family or run a household. There is no wisdom in it. No maturity and reverence in the idea that we small humans know what is best for a billions of years old being. 2. There is grief in the Earth when it comes to humans. I feel it when I tune into the trees around my home or the soil under my feet. She says; how could you believe there is not enough for you? Like a mother whose child has lost their way a bit, She feels a deep sadness in our disconnection. But she also trusts us. As a mother needs to trusts her children to find their way. I don’t have a message of doom and gloom for our Earth. I don’t have any call to action.I just feel a heart opening and womb landing gratitude for our Mother today and all days and the being-ness she provides. The unconditional love we all are so desperate for is available to us, right here, right now. Go find a piece of grass or ground and let yourself remember your original Mother is here. She never left you and she will never leave you. If you would like, please listen to this guided 11 minute guided meditation from my land to you on this Earth Day. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

*I shared this on Instagram a couple days ago and am resharing here because it’s gotten a lot of action and I’m announcing a free class I’m teaching tomorrow.I got a question from a follower yesterday, “why are we still fat when we eat well and move our bodies?” This question has been the source of so much inspiration for me since yesterday because it’s actually a question I have been asking myself for almost two years now. I have been deep in the practice of trusting and loving my body. I wrote this piece when the bulk of the weight gain started. I have been asking myself: if I trust my body and I love my body and I know I am providing my body with what she needs on a regular basis, why would my body put on weight and keep the weight on? I have had many tender moments, lots of confusion, lots of looping thoughts about what if I’m all wrong and I need to just commit to a diet and exercise routine. I have thought to myself many times that I need to DO something about this! But then I come back to what to I know to be true. I come back to the truth that my body loves me and I love her and there is actually no way that what she undergoing isn’t the most intelligent thing for her to be doing with what she has and where she is. Our bodies are of the unconscious realm. They are the results of our maternal lineage; the matter and the Ma. The weight that I have gained and continue to hold is not just a result of my choices in the last couple years, it’s the result of the choices I made in my 20’s and the choices my mother made in her 20s, and the choices her mother made in her 20’s. Our bodies are our karma. The way our body looks and functions now is the result of so much more than just what we eat and how much we move. Most women who are overweight actually under eat which leads to a down regulated metabolism. So much of my weight gain has been the result of a constricted relationship with food for most of life and constantly trying to make myself smaller. Our bodies are wise. Women who are fat are not less worthy of love and do not have something wrong with them. Our bodies are neutral. They are doing their best and always have been. Being overweight is just a sign that our energy utilization systems are not functioning well. In my experience, it is a result of our bodies giving us signs to slow down and listen and us choosing to not listen again and again, until our body believes it needs to put on a whole lot of extra cushion to pad sweet selves from the harshness we subject ourselves to through crash diets, brutal exercise regimes, starvation/binge cycles, substances, harsh inner critics, and living lives that do not respect our feminine physiology. The solution isn’t going to be simple and it’s going to require a lot of self love, trust, and true mental and physical rest along with beautiful, joy filled movement. It’s going to require changing how we view and enjoy food, movement, life and our bodies themselves. Come to class this Friday, April 19th, 11-1pm PDT (if you can’t come I will send out a replay that will be available until the following Friday) where I will be unpacking this further and sharing more of my story. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

Current beauty trends strike me as some of the best examples of the collective’s loss of the ability to think from a place of commonsense. Someone who is willing to inject their body with “fillers” or poisonous substances on a regular basis or slice into their precious tissue for any reason that isn’t life threatening, strikes me as someone who either cannot listen to their body or is willingly acting against what their body is telling them in the interest of an external ideal. I do not believe in telling full grown adults what they can or cannot do with their bodies. I obviously have a judgement here, but I would never shame someone for their choices. I don’t necessarily judge the individuals but I definitely judge the trend. I don’t think I should have a say into what you chose to do with your body, but I do want to point out some very basic facts about these beauty trends that have become so popular. Botox Botox is a drug made from a toxin produced by the bacterium Clostridium botulinum. It's the same toxin that causes a life-threatening type of food poisoning called botulism. It has been explored for its use a biological weapon. Botox paralyzes facial muscles so that they do not move, which means less “wrinkles.” The tissue stops moving as much and doesn’t create creases. However, tissue is designed to move. So much of what I, as well as any human who works closely and with reverence for human tissue, teach about is how important it is for there to be flow in the lymph and the fascia. From a physical perspective of tissue health to an emotional perspective of energy moving through.  I don’t know about you, but voluntarily paralyzing anything on my body innately does not feel like a good idea. Fillers Fillers are made from synthetic hyaluronic acid. Yes, your body makes hyaluronic acid, but the form that is used in fillers is synthetic. Your body treats this synthetic hylauronic acid as if it is a foreign object. That’s why you see all those horror stories with lips the size of footballs. This is the body mounting an immune response to isolate and remove the foreign object. Your body sensing a foreign object within it will impede lymph flow, proper blood circulation, and creates fascial restrictions, all of which mean less flow, more stagnancy and less nutrients getting to the tissue. All of this will, paradoxically, cause tissue to age faster as well. Plastic Surgery It totally depends on the type of plastic surgery but going under the knife is always going to create scar tissue, fascial restrictions, and issues with lymph flow. Your body will identify anything put inside it as a foreign object (because it is) and this has a lot of possible side effects. It defintely creates a huge energy loss in your body because your body is trying to fight something and heal from something unnecessarily and it could continue this fight for years or even decades. Plastic surgery can be a source of disconnection from yourself and the deep wisdom of your Soma eg felt sense. It could be truly life threatening infections or breast implant illness. Your tissues literally need to move to keep energy, blood, nutrients, etc circulating. Our tissues hold memory, deep wisdom, and millennia of information in each and every cell. To think that we could cut into our tissue or inject it with toxins and make ourselves better is preposterous.The fascia of our chest is connected to the fascia in our feet. The fasica in our lips is connected to the fascia in our lower back. It is the living matrix of our being and when you slice into it in one place that shock will have repercussions in other places. Not to mention the scar tissue in the location of the injection or cut.The idea that we can get away with botox, fillers, and plastic surgery and not experience serious repercussions to our health is the same energy that has us extracting resources from Mother Earth without any reverence or care for what it took for them to get there or their finite reserves. This is the same energy that has women afraid to birth their babies without a man in a white coat present. This is the same energy that says it’s more important how we look than how we feel.This is the same energy that says be a good little girl, look pretty, be nice and one day you’ll be rewarded. This is the same energy that says you’re worthless when you’ve lived your life and are at your most wise.One more thing, men are not asking women to do this. It’s, collectively, other women. All the men I’ve asked about this subject have said they prefer the real thing to anything fake, from boobs to asses to lips. We all want to be with men who love us for more than they way we look.To assume men only care about physical appearance is one dimensional. To assume all men want is sex with hot young chicks is similar to objectifying a woman. It comes from the same place. Humans are so much more than that. They want and need so much more than that. Let’s be honest about what this is. If you love your botox or fillers or plastic surgery, great. We need to start thinking of it like smoking. It might be glamours and cool initially, but in the long run it’s very, very bad for you. Beauty is something that radiates out from within. We all know this, deep down. No matter how much “work” you get done, you’re going to age. You’re going to be old and wrinkly and frail, if you’re lucky. Trying to stop aging is in vain, my love. Get in touch with your inner radiance. Spend your money, your time, the appointments you book on cultivating your internal lifeforce and energy, and watch your internal value and beauty grow. Come to HomeBody this Saturday [4.13] from 1-2:30pm PDT and listen to what your tissues are telling you. Come recieve a transmission of tissue and body reverence. $33 for a drop in. Get tickets and more info here. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

Today is the day we know as Easter.I suspect if you’re following me here; it isn’t news to you that most of the collective symbols of Easter and possibly even the resurrection story itself, stem from pre-monotheistic religion or pagan rituals and iconography. The Easter egg? A pagan sign of fertility and rebirth. The Easter bunny? A pagan sign of prolific fertility, similar to that of rabbits. Eating lamb? Flowers? Baskets? Wool? All also related to the ancient pagan celebration of Ostara, which took place over the spring equinox. It seems a little too synchronistic to me that Christianity’s Jesus resurrection also falls within just a few days of Ostara, the festival of fertility, new life, and growth. Similar to Christmas and the pagan solstice celebrations of Yule. There is just too much obvious overlap for these pieces of Christianity and paganism not to be related. In fact, blending Christianity’s holidays with that of pagan rituals and celebrations made it much smoother for ancient people to say they were Christian without really changing much about their day to day life and traditions. I fully and completely take all stories and parables coming from religious and spiritual text as metaphorical and rich with symbolism. The Soul speaks in metaphor. The Soul speaks through art. Literalism is of and for the mind. One of the gravest mistakes of organized religion is taking the stories in the Bible or other religious texts as literal.They are and never were meant to be taken literally. Plus, they have all been translated so many times by so many people with very human agendas and intentions, not to mention the humans that originally wrote down the stories were also writing it down from their own human memory (which has been proven wildly faulty again and again) with their own agendas and lenses. My intention with writing this isn’t to dog on organized religion, but it is to point to what is underneath and what came before. The thing about religion and spirituality is that it all has the same inception point. That’s what I’m most interested in. What would Jesus dying and being reborn be metaphor for? And how is that metaphor related to the symbolism of the egg, the rabbit, and the season change into spring included in the pagan celebration of Ostara? And ultimately why am I, a spiritually inclined nutritionist in service to the mature feminine frequency I refer to as The Mother, interested in any of this? Because all of these themes point to the paradoxical truth that birth and death are related. Birth and death are two sides of the same coin. You cannot live if you are not willing to die. You don’t get life without death. Jesus died and was reborn anew. Spring bursts forth from the silent stillness of winter. The grounds are fertile once again after the freezing cold. The Mother knows that the birth of a child is indeed the death of herself as a maiden, or as a mother of one, and that the birth of a family of four is the death of the family of three. Any mother understands how much loss is involved with each new birth. The Mother knows that we must die to birth the next iteration of ourselves. The Mother knows about cycles, seasons, circles, rhythms and spirals. I am no theologian, although a part of me would love that job, and I do not claim to be a scholar of the Bible or an expert on paganism or on anything except what I teach about feminine physiology, but in my life and my practice, I have learned to die well. I have attuned myself to that feminine frequency that lives within the feminine physiology and let it lead it my life, and She has taught me that to ascend, you must first descend.If you would like to truly live, in this body and this lifetime, you must be willing to come down and into the depths of yourself, into the flesh and the blood, and be willing to come into close contact and relationship with your mortality, so that you may meet the eternal part of you. This is the wisdom that She has always taught. This is the wisdom subtly weaved into the narratives still told on this Sunday morning around the world.  She is not dead. She is alive and well if you know how to listen and see. She is in every single cell in your body and atom in the cosmos. You must allow what is not true to slough away so that you may rise into the next iteration of yourself. And then do it all again. Until your body dies and you realize you’re part of an even broader cycle of life and death. You must die to live, my love. Happy Easter. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

I want to tease out some concepts around “listening to your body” and what that actually means. I am a proponent of listening to your body. All of my work with my clients and my students revolves around teaching people to listen to their bodies. In my nutrition work I guide people into a relationship with their food and nourishment that is self lead and oriented from the inside out. I don’t give people a set of rules to follow that come from theory or dietary ideas. I keep putting people in the driver’s seat of their well being. I keep asking and reminding them to listen to how they feel and pointing them to what they already Know. In the embodiment practice I created, HomeBody, I teach people how to come inside themselves, listen and attune to their inner landscape.In my long term 1:1 work I am guiding my students into their most nourished selves and serving that aspect of them until they grasp how to serve it by themselves. All of my writing, podcasts and free content seeks to penetrate toxic collective ideas about women’s health, beauty, and the roles we’ve been programmed to play as women. I see an epidemic of people thinking they are doing “embodiment work” and “listening to their bodies” when really they are just super dysregulated, disembodied, high on addiction, and simply attuned to whatever makes them “feel” good in the moment. How could this be the case, you may ask?The answer lies in the nuances of listening to the body on a deep, cellular level, from a regulated, mature place versus listening to the body on the surface, static layer level.Here’s an example: when a heroin addict listens to their body it will say: “I want heroin.” But is heroin what the junkie’s body needs? On one level; yes. If they do not get heroin they will get sick. They will puke. They will shake and convulse and feel awful. On another level, a junkie’s body really needs to detox. A junkie’s body needs to be lovingly fed, rested, and cared for. This is the Truth. But when the junkie is in an addictive state of mind he or she will never feel the Truth of the second level, UNTIL, he or she gets to a place where he or she is not in the addictive cycle. Another, less extreme, example: Scrolling on our phones. Is scrolling on our phones something our body needs? No. Is scrolling on our phones something our body does without thinking? Yes. Similar to heroin we get dopamine from it. Dopamine makes us feel good. Our bodies like to feel good. So on the first level our bodies need the scroll. On the second level; in our collective society, the typical western person’s nervous system needs a lot less mental stimulation and a lot more physical movement. Scrolling on our phones is the opposite of that. It’s physically restful (we are typically still) and very mentally stimulating. Same goes with watching TV. But what does the average person do to unwind when coming home from their typically mentally stimulating/physically restful job? They collapse and watch TV or scroll on their phone because they feel exhausted. When they would probably really feel much better after a walk around the block.  But, when we are dysregulated, we cannot attune to the thing that would really make us feel better in the long run. We tend to just go for the short term treat or the habit. The way I talk about this phenomenon in my work with clients is that you have to “develop the ability to intuitively eat/intuitively decide what to do with your body.” You don’t get to starve yourself for most of your adult life and then jump into eating ‘intuitively’ because you ‘want to be more in your feminine’. There needs to be a reestablishment of connection to your body and her language first. Which is far more reverent and feminine anyway. You don’t get to come home from work feeling super agitated and edgy and get to ‘intuitively’ decide how to rest. You need to ground yourself first. You need to go slower first. You need to collect data about yourself and your patterns first. You need to be committed to something deeper (Truth) first. You need to be willing to question yourself and your motives. You need to get sober.In overarching terms, you need to grow up. I’ll give another personal example. I used to be a heavy drinker. I used to binge drink a lot. Over time and via lots of work; I became a very rare occasion drinker. And then there was a point where even if I had a few sips of wine I felt it my sleep and in the morning. It became clear that on a long game level it was not at all what my body wanted. It wasn’t True for me to drink. And once I saw that; I haven’t had a drink since. Does that mean that sometimes, at a fancy dinner or during a celebration, I don’t have a knee jerk reaction to want some alcohol to loosen up or enjoy with a really good steak? Of course.. but I am so deeply oriented to the deeper level of what is True, I physically can’t do it. This has taken years and years of practice and listening. This isn’t a place I got to from a weekend “embodiment” retreat. It’s from literal moment by moment practice dropping into the deeper Truth that my body ultimately resonates with. When I say you need to develop the ability to intuitively eat or intuitively move or rest etc, I mean you need to develop an attunement to the thing below the surface level pleasure seeking of the body. I mean you need to develop an attunement to something beyond survival mechanisms. I mean you need to attune to the Truth, which is in the body, but not necessarily what the body wants most in the moment. To attune to this you need to be in a regulated state. You need to be able to feel your pussy and your feet on the ground. You need to be aware of the air on your skin. You need to be able to drop below the mind’s stories. You need to be able to differentiate a mind that is spinning out and aligned action. You need to be able feel the beauty of your heart beat no matter what is happening around you. You need to be able to hold yourself in presence. If you can’t do those things: you aren’t going to make a Truth oriented decision. You’ll be making an egoic, addictive or survival based decision. The practice then is to repeatedly come back to the basic practices of orienting yourself in space, feeling what is in your body presently and leaning toward it, instead of away, and coming back to your breath, and that is the only practice. At my retreat SAVOR we will be putting this into practice. We will be dropping below the mind and survival into the regulated place of alignment with Truth in the body and with the Earth. Eating well. Moving well. Nourishing ourselves. So that we may touch the spots beyond survival. So that we may integrate it all. So that we may actually feel the Intuitive Truth for us, maybe deeper than we ever have. Still 2 spots open. March 19-22. Sage Lodge in Pray, MT. Reach out ASAP to have a call with me this week if you’re interested. Discounts available for locals (Montana based). Free for All HomeBody Practice on Sunday, March 17th. 9-10am PST.You can register here. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

*I have been writing daily posts on my instagram sharing what I am deeply grateful for in my life as a 30 day practice for a program I am in. This particular post just wanted to be way longer than instagram can hold so I’m sharing it as an article on here. The journey I have been on with my body and movement is a long one. My body is and always will be my most potent teacher. I have always been into movement and ‘exercise’ as long as I can remember. It was paired with my obsession with the body and how it worked. It was a healthy and true fascination that quickly got distorted by the obsession with controlling, manipulating, and ultimately punishing my body. I am sure there was a time when I was very young that I didn’t think about my body and my body and I were fully in sync. I watch my girls now and I see how natural listening to your body and moving your body is. However, I don’t remember this. The only early thoughts about my body I remember having are that my body was wrong, too big, bad, and ultimately disgusting. I can probably track these thoughts back to as young at 7. Around 11 I started to consciously exercise to try to change my physical appearance. I would run and run and run the dirt roads around my house. By the time I was 13 it was obsessive and the pushing myself hard physically was paired with a deeply warped view of food or what was ‘healthy.’ One of the things I am most grateful for early on in my relationship with my body is that I got into weight lifting very young. I had a gym teacher freshman year of high school that was super into women lifting weights and being strong. He was all about freshman girls setting personal records on bench pressing and would regularly tell us girls how we should always be able to squat more than than the boys. The things I remember him teaching are actually solid foundations of muscle building/hypertrophy that I still agree with today. At the time I definitely used this knowledge of weight lifting in unhealthy and obsessive ways, but ultimately, I am so grateful for how early on I got comfortable with barbells, kettlebells, and that feeling of building strength from the inside out.Girls feeling strong externally, helps them feel strong internally. I know this.I always loved being really strong and I was relatively strong. Although, now I know if I had eaten more I would have been much stronger.  As I moved into college, stopped playing sports and having designated practice times or workout sessions I oscillated between lifting weights, punishing my body through hours of cardio on machines, hot inferno yoga, spinning, lots of hiking and biking, and doing absolutely nothing but cowering in bed avoiding daylight after drug and alcohol binges. I had this double life for all of my twenties. On one hand I was a super health nut and on the other hand I was a complete hot mess ratchet party girl. I continued this double life through my stint in Peace Corps, where I was very addicted to opiates, a disturbing (but mostly fun) drunk, all the while doing lots of yoga, meditation, and running half marathons. When I got back to the states determined to stop using pills as aggressively (but of course still once in awhile), I continued this pattern of sweaty hot yoga with weights, going to spinning classes at 6am after taking ecstasy and blowing lines all night, and eventually I ended up where most people like me do: CrossFit. What a perfect way to punish myself for my debaucherous ways. During the time I got really into CrossFit I did start to clean up my druggy-ness. I could clearly see that I was getting to an age where it was no longer cool to do drugs; it was sad. I was also starting to do the internal work and that god-sized-hole was starting to fill. As I got more in touch with myself and came back into my body I started to see how deeply all my exercise and movement was about punishment, not joy, and just like the drugs and alcohol slowly stopped being such a thing, the super intense exercise did too. By the time I got pregnant with my first baby I was fully sober from substances other than a drink every now and again. I exercised throughout pregnancy and as soon as I could I got back to it after she was born, but my body had started to revolt. I was all the sudden incapable of getting into yoga poses that had been very easy for me before. Just walking around the house picking up toys and doing dishes started to flare up excruciating lower back pain that would have me laying on the floor every 10 minutes while I tried to clean up the kitchen. I got pregnant again when my first daughter was 6 months old and I started to blame all the aches and pains on pregnancy. I religiously saw a chiropractor, acupuncturist and massage therapist, but I was in a lot of pain and discomfort most of the time. I continued to do some pregnancy approved weight training, gentle yoga and walked as much as I could but the truth was it all made me feel exhausted and I was shocked at how little I could do compared to what I used to be able to do pre pregnancy. By the time my second daughter was born my body was so entirely unrecognizable to me sometimes I literally didn’t recognize myself in the mirror. I was in pain almost all of the time and I gained more weight in those first 6 months of my second daughter’s life than I had in her pregnancy. Also, around this time is when my severe insomnia started. Throughout all this I continued to weight lift, walk, and do yoga as much as I could because I told myself it had to be helping, right? I started seeing a nerve pain/nervous system specialist who told me to stop doing yoga and that yoga may have actually been worsening my back pain. She also told me to just stop doing anything but walking and only walking when I absolutely felt up for it. It was revolutionary for me to hear these things because even though I was deeply exhausted on every level I just assumed that yoga and weight training were going to be good for me. I stopped doing all yoga and my back pain got significantly better within a week. I stopped weight training other than doing the super basic lifts slowly and making sure my nervous system was fully relaxed before and after doing the lifts. I walked only when I felt like it. This is honestly where I have been at the last few years. I was able to start doing yoga again about a year ago but I notice that it would flare my back pain if I did it too much. I’ve been through phases where I can lift a little bit heavier and harder. I continue to have a lot of body work and be in a constant state of communication with my body. Today, movement is purely for joy and training with weights is to feel strong and capable internally (and be able to play with and lift my kids).I am still healing the consequences of the choices I made around my body in my twenties. I am clear on that. This last 6 months or so I have felt strong, my sleep has regulated, and my body generally feels good. This last summer I stumbled upon Bowspring yoga. I was intrigued because of the somatic repatterining it talked about. So I started a totally new thing and it was confusing and weird at first. I would get deeply incommensurately frustrated during class (a good sign you’re repatterining something), but, ultimately after each class I felt clearer. I could tell it was shifting holding patterns I’d had in my body for years. I felt more open and connected to my body and it felt like there was a whole new level of embodiment I was touching. After about 3 months of bowstring my back pain stopped flaring. I started to feel like I could “spring” up off the floor when playing with my girls. I was more open emotionally and my body stopped feeling like it was a creaky suit of armor. Another wild benefit I’ve experienced from Bowspring is an ability to orgasm in all different positions. Yup. So much more openness in my pelvic floor translated to a higher libido and more pleasure during penetrative sex. Now, about 6 months into my Bowspring practice, I am deeply grateful to the modality. It has healed and continues to heal my relationship to my body and help me to fully take up residence in my body in a pleasurable way. My physical body is starting to align more and more with my spiritual embodiment. My work in the world is truly at the intersection between the physical and metaphysical. So much of what I teach is about how to bring nourishment, healing, openness, and connection from the spiritual, mental, and emotional bodies into the physical body.Our physical body needs practices to ground and root our mental, emotional, and spiritual healing in to. It’s great to have realizations and make connections emotionally and spiritually, but if you don’t know how to bring it into the physical body, your third dimensional reality will not change.Bowspring feels like a practice that does this. It helps us repattern the way we hold our bodies so that more energy and life-force can flow through them unimpeded. It helps us open physical pockets of holding and move old energy out. I am so grateful for that. I will be offering some super basic and simple Bowspring practices at my retreat SAVOR. I actually believe that somatic repatterining is a huge aspect of truly healing and absorbing nourishment into our physical bodies. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

For the last 2 weeks I have been in a forced pause because I’ve been sick and my kids have been sick.A part of my mind really did not like this. I am smack dab in the middle of promoting one of the highest stakes things I’ve ever promoted, my retreat SAVOR, and I have been left exhausted, plagued by brain fog, and unable to get myself up on the floor. But, today, I started to feel my energy come back online. I feel myself peeking out from between the covers of my sick bed with a whole new outlook on life. As I sit in awe of this newfound energy and opening I’m having a profound realization of how I am always led by the deeper thing in me, even when the more superficial things are really loud and upfront. In hindsight (and it’s important to see that we can’t always see it in the moment), I am realizing that through this sickness (downward moving energetic) I fully let myself off the hook. I could hear all the voices that wanted to pressure me into doing more, keep myself going at a certain expected pace, to make things happen no matter the cost to my well being and I was aware of these voices. In some ways I even believed them.  But ultimately, I listened to my body. I heard the voices that said I should be doing so much more than I am doing, but I let myself be, because the truth is, pushing myself to do things when everything in my physical body is saying “No. Rest. Stop,” is just not worth it to me anymore.  Nothing is worth the cost of my well being. Even a total and complete career “failure” is not worth risking my well being. Because when you run yourself that hard, you’re already failing, even if you’re optically winning somewhere else. True success to me means that I learn the lesson to be learned and I learn it all the way through. True success, to me, means I am more integrated as a whole. It means I have come into a more authentic version of myself.  True success to me means all parts of me are welcome and can have a place at the table, not just the parts concerned with the rigid societal ideal of what success looks like. I really let myself sink all the way down into the comfort of my sick bed. I released all the deadlines, the “have to’s”, I really took pleasure and joy in the extra time spent with my girls. I allowed myself to BE sick. More rest and sleep. More tea. Canceling plans and appointments. I took many hot baths and trips to the wild hot springs up the road. I spent way more time dancing, slowly, with lots of breaks to roll around on the ground. I spent more time doing nothing at all because, in reality, it was all I could do. Even though there were voices in my mind telling me how entirely not ok this was, I did it anyway. I gave it to myself anyway; voices and all. The thing about letting yourself “have” the nourishment of an acute illness, a (sometimes, forced) pause, a disappointment, a let down, an overwhelming melancholy, a period of deep story-less exhaustion, a winter, is that, eventually, you have been on the bottom long enough that the only option is to push off the floor and float back up. It’s just the way it works. Winter will always, eventually, shift into spring. Death always serves life. Look at the collapsed tree in the forest and how many burgeoning things make new life in its dead trunk. We all need periods of rest and retreat. Our bodies are of the Earth and Earth Herself works in seasons and cycles. Women have a deeper connection to the truth of cycles within their very flesh and blood. The way we demonize the winter and our bleeding bodies is similar to the way we demonize death and these inevitable phases of downward depressions that are simply natural. Show me how you treat yourself when you are sick and I’ll show you your relationship with the Feminine. The true meaning of investing in yourself is allowing yourself to have your downward cycles. You can let them nourish you. You can let them show you where you need to put your attention and your energy. These downward cycles do not have to be miserable. You don’t have to get deathly ill, injure yourself, or develop a chronic illness. You don’t have to bypass the sense of something not being right in your life until you’re in a full blown meltdown or keep creating drama that needs to be constantly dealt with so you exist solely on the surface of your life. You can let yourself go inward and downward on your own accord. That is what I would call truly investing in yourself.It is possible to let yourself have the nourishment you need before the call for it is forced upon you.However, this requires that you do something differently than you normally do. It requires you question all the voices in your head that say: “Not right now! Later.” Or “That thing I want just isn’t for me. It’s for other people, better people, richer people, people with more time and less demanding schedules.” Or “If only I had more fill-in-the-blank (money, time, energy, skinnier body), then I would give myself what I want.” The voices that give you these excuses are the exact voices that would tell you to just keep on keeping on as you are because it’s cool, you’ll figure it out later. These are the voices that keep you in a life that feels stagnated, stuck, and lacking in nourishment and eventually, normally, ends up in a life-stopping-ly loud wake up call of some sort. You have to see that these voices are not the voices you will need to listen to if you want to grow, expand, and have more. These voices actually want you stay smaller, less expanded, and still because that is what feels safe. That’s why expansion generally doesn’t just feel “good”, it also comes with some “Oh s**t! This is scary!” Vibes as well. Expansion should be exhilarating, which includes nervousness and a sense of stretching. Investment in your holding ability for life will require you to stretch your capacity to face uncomfortable situations head on. However, this doesn’t have to equate to force and “earning” it. This can also pertain to how much pleasure, passive nourishment, and wholesome goodness you allow yourself to have and be present with. SAVOR the retreat is exactly that, an opportunity to stretch your capacity to hold more wholesome goodness in your life. It’s an opportunity to be fed better than you’ve maybe ever fed yourself. It’s an opportunity to tune into your body more than maybe you ever have. It’s an opportunity to let your body lead you maybe more than you ever have. It’s an opportunity to be held by me while you unwind what is holding you back from letting yourself receive what you already have; the love, the beauty, the connection, and the depth of your life as it is. It is an opportunity to feel yourself come into right relationship with your own nourishment and fully nourished self.What would happen if you gave yourself this? What would happen if you said; “Yes. I can have this. I can invest in myself.”? Message me to have a call about coming to SAVOR ASAP. Only a few spots left. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

We have been programmed to believe that our bodies are not to be trusted. We collectively believe our bodies are fickle, prone to break and get sick, full of unruly needs for food, rest, and sex. We collectively believe we need to default to someone else to tell us what is wrong with us and what we should do about it. If we are constantly exhausted it couldn’t possibly be as simple as we need rest. If we are constantly craving sugar it couldn’t possibly mean that we aren’t getting enough calories and our body is craving a quick shot of energy.One of the things I ask all my clients is: what does your body need to heal? In my experience, if we really tap in and move underneath the mental ideas of what it means to be “healthy” everyone knows what they need to heal.They’re just looking for some short cut or work around so they can avoid the subtle, baby-step, no-silver-bullets, lifestyle altering work that is actually required and they know is required. So they get another supplement they read about on Instagram. They go to another practitioner who tells them they just need this diet or this cleanse. They go to the doctor expecting to get some explanation that isn’t as inconvenient as what they already know to be true. In my health journey, as a teenager and young adult; I had the self loathing trifecta of: disordered eating, substance abuse, and obsessive exercising/body abuse.Then as I got a little more health conscious and grew up; I got digestive issues, thyroid, and adrenal burnout. I healed a bit via diet, learning about my physiology and implementing lifestyle changes. Then I had babies (two in two years) and gained around 80 lbs give or take and developed severe insomnia. Through all of this I can track a desperation to find “the answer” that would explain and fix my “conditions.” At first, it was all about controlling my body and its needs so that I didn’t have feel anything.When that got entirely too painful, then it was about reaching some epitome of health which also had to do with external ideals and aesthetics and superiority. This third phase of health issues (weight gain and insomnia) has been an oscillation between some desperation to feel “normal” (whatever that is) and trusting my body’s path.The thing that reverberates truth through my Life is: when I orient to my body as my greatest ally, I am less tempted by reactionary grasping to quick fixes, overriding my Knowing, and desperation for some external ideal of health. When I orient to my body as my greatest ally I remember my innate value, as I am in the present moment. To stay with the innate value of a body that falls so far out of the ideal aesthetic and consistently, lovingly feed, care for, and listen to it is truly a revolutionary act in our collective society.Some days I honestly don’t know where I’ve gotten the fortitude to stand so solidly against the narrative that fat bodies do not deserve the love and attention that thin bodies do. A huge part of it is I simply know my body is on my side. I know she is my ally. I know she would never have gained this weight or screamed at me via the inability to sleep if she didn’t need that experience in some way, if there wasn’t a massive amount of wisdom within the experience for me. I know I have to listen, and you cannot listen if you are deep in judgment. I know feeding her well is never going to not serve her.Some days I definitely feel at a total loss as to why this excess fat hasn’t dissolved, but I trust that if I continue to care for myself with the utmost reverence that my body will regulate to the size she feels best at. And maybe that will be this size. I have to be ok with that too, although I don’t believe that to be the case for me. As a woman who comes from a line of women very much plugged into the collective ideas that being fat is shameful, bad, disgusting, and entirely the last thing you would ever want to be, I can see that I may have gained the weight that my mother and her mother couldn’t let themselves gain but needed to. It’s representative of all the ways they didn’t let themselves take up the space they needed to. I will allow myself to take up the space I need to with zero shame so my girls don’t have to worry about the space they take up. I also know that our bodies are our karma. They are the very last aspect of our being to transform. They are the result of our decisions 10 or 20 years, maybe lifetimes, ago. Our bodies are our subconscious. The level of rigidity and control required to hold a body in a shape and size that isn’t true is insane. Literally like working against the flow of a huge rushing river. No wonder women are so badly depleted. We are all imbued with the idea that we must fight against our bodies. Our bodies want to be healthy. They want to be robust and dynamic and morph and shift with the phases of our lives. They want to be our ally. Acquiescing to our body’s needs with reverence may result in a change in body composition because there has been so much contortion in the past. She must come out of all twists and self inflicted girdles, but if you keep listening, treating Her with reverence and have a deep respect and trust for Her guidance you will not be led astray.I know my health journey and body story continues to be permission for so many others who also feel on shaky ground about what their bodies deserve. Our bodies deserve our continued gentleness, nourishment, devotion, trust and deep love. They are our greatest ally. No matter where we go in this life; they go with us. They are our home. You can punish, starve, injure, bend, and deform them and they will not leave you. Like a sweet loyal dog the soft animal of our body will stay even if you beat it. It will cower. It may not be ok. But it will stay. An example of unconditional love if I’ve ever seen one. No matter where you go, there she is; with you. You can’t say that about any other human. If you want to feel safe, loved, and cared for: care for your body. If you can feel safe with her you will feel safe in all places because she is there with you. Start to attune to your body by coming to HomeBody practice. In HomeBody we offer our bodies loving self touch and neutral appreciative attention. Next HomeBody is Wednesday February 21st at 10am PST. Send me a message to sign up. If you are ready to spend 4 days connecting to your body and fully, totally meeting her needs SAVOR is for you. March 19-22. Sage Lodge in Pray, MT. Message me to discuss details. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

What is required for you to live from a place of overflow? For you to be fed, full, nourished?What would you need to feel like you had the capacity to be generous with your love and your being?I guarantee it’s a lot more than you think or want to admit.If you think sneaking in a hot bath on a Sunday while your husband takes the kids to the park or getting a yearly massage with a gift card your mom got you for your birthday is decadent and fulfills your need self care; I am here to say, you need to start thinking a whole hell of a lot bigger, my love.Our bodies, minds, and souls need attention, nurturance and tending to.. consistently and with big doses of permission and approval.We need to stop thinking about what our bare minimum needs are and start thinking about how to give ourselves so many inputs that feed us that we can’t help but feed others.We need to be big and audacious with our self care rituals.Women in joy in their bodies feed the world. When women are overflowing with life force the world is fed. That’s the right relationship between women and life.Life is nourishment and nourishment is life. If you are eating the bare minimum to get by or giving yourself the bare minimum inputs in the form of rest and bodily care you will have a bare minimum life.Maybe not externally, but internally your life force will be dwindling and starved.Life force requires nourishment. It requires inputs so that you may offer true aligned output.If we want a life where we feel alive, nourished, creatively fulfilled, where our kids have a mother that is happy and present, where our husbands are sexually satisfied and also well nourished, we better make sure we are full to the brim with life force.Because we are the faucets that the nutrients of Life pour out of.Too many women feel like their needs need to come last.Too many women feel their bodies are a burden. That they need to control themselves lest they let their unruly appetites turn them into a woman who has “let herself go.”We need a world where more women have done exactly that.. let themselves go and be full and fed and nourished.A world where women claim their needs with bold rightness and go above and far, far beyond the bare minimum for themselves.I have been on a journey of giving myself more than the bare minimum for many years.As an entrepreneur in the wellness industry I saw the women I looked up to and heard them talk about their weekly self care rituals. I was floored by the amounts of time and money they spent on themselves.One of my early mentors told me, “My weekly massage is where I make the most money,” and, “the moments I sit in silence with nothing to do are the most valuable to my business.”What she meant was that the massage and space was where her best ideas came to her. It was where she filled herself up so that she could continue to hold what she held (which was a multi 7 figure business and huge team).And so, about 8 years ago now, I wrote out what I thought was an almost unimaginable goal of having a massage once a month, a yoga class weekly, and one full day a month that I took completely off work and just did whatever I wanted to do.This was a BIG financial and time investment in myself at the time. It stretched me wide.But I did it. And each year I added more to this list of inputs. I started building a team of body workers and practitioners that knew me and my body. I started to see how these investments in myself actually opened me to receive more in all facets of my life.I saw how focusing on being nourished meant even more nourishment could come in.I saw how giving myself these seemingly “extravagant” things created more space in my container. They were literally investments in ME.Now, I have so much pure permission for self care. I take incredible care of my body. I eat 3 square balanced meals a day plus snacks and always, always take a lunch break.Every two weeks I get a massage, have acupuncture, a chiropractic visit, Rolfing work and a cranial sacral and energy clearing session. This is my minimum. Sometimes I go every week if I’m having an issue.I get a facial quarterly and go to as many yoga classes as I feasibly can with my schedule. I do daily pussy practice, morning sun light, journaling, walks, workouts and dancing. Lots of salt baths and skin care. I do castor oil packs multiple times a month, vaginal steaming before and after my bleed. I have an osteopath I go to a couple times a year as well as a naturopath that knows my health history and I can come to with questions or for insights.This doesn’t even include my counsel of coaches, friends, support systems that I touch in with multiple times a week. My husband and I go on 24 hours trips alone to hotels and have beautiful fancy dinners together once every couple months.I give myself so much support. And I receive it all wholeheartedly. And true nourishment requires both; the giving and the receiving.I really let myself HAVE it. I go into my sessions with my body care team and I let myself open and receive their love, touch, and wisdom. I am very particular who I hire and all the people I work with respect me.This is not a “oh look at me and look at how lucky I am.” No, this is the result of 8 years of slowly building this level of nourishment into my life. I can fully receive it now. The average person could not actually stay present with all that self care, even if they did have the appointments.It started with that monthly massage which was all I could receive at the time.There is no fully nourished woman that doesn’t have the same level of commitment to her nourishment as you see here.It doesn’t mean she necessarily does all the sessions and body work, but she may nourish herself deeply in other ways. Her nourishment is the top priority.Nourishment is going to be fully bio-individual. I personally love the bougie, spa experiences, maybe that isn’t your jam and you would prefer to have hours on the beach each week or singing lessons or a new watercolor set.The amount of money spent isn’t important, the investment in yourself and joy is.When my clients really start to get a taste of what it would mean to be the fully nourished version of themselves they comment about what an insane amount of attention it will take. And there is this moment of “why do I need so much more than everyone else?” There is this comparison that comes in.I feel it too. Part of what is so confronting about writing this and letting the true level of support I have in my life be seen out in the open is that I don’t want to feel like I need so much more than most people could ever imagine having or giving to themselves.But that right there is the little virus that I want to kill off right here and now: what it takes for you to be full cannot be subject to comparison.We are not in some competition of who can take up the least amount of space and have the least need is the winner. Or vice versa: who can spend the most money at self care doesn’t win anything if they aren’t actually being nourished by it.We actually don’t need to compete with each other at all. When women are full there actually isn’t any comparison and competition at all. Feeling that way is a sure fire sign that you’re not fully nourished.That is the old story that has kept women starved, brittle, and constantly about to snap at their children, their partners, and feeling void of joy.That is bare minimum thinking and I am interested in the world of overflow thinking. The world where women are so full of themselves that it spills over and feeds everyone around them. A world where women are juicy and fed and capable of savoring every centimeter of their lives.Your needs are not a burden.Your needs are yours to tend and meet and go beyond.You can want more for yourself.You can have big, audacious desires and I know that the only way for you to really meet those are through filling yourself up to the very brim with love, support, care, and attention.If you are ready for a big fat dose of having-ness expansion. If you are ready to give yourself something that will nourish you down to your bone marrow; SAVOR is the place for you.A retreat over the spring equinox (March 19-22) at Sage Lodge in Pray, MT with me curating the food, the conversation, and offering self care practices and contemplations that will leave you with a blue print of your most full and nourished self.Send me a message to get on a call to talk about your desire for something like this. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

A woman in her true power is a woman in her sex. For a woman, these two things cannot be separated. True power is not domination or force, it is innate. It is the thing that just is. In this sense, my power doesn’t diminish your power. Me becoming more powerful does not mean you need to become less powerful. In fact, in this way of interpreting power, me being more powerful may actually invite out more power from you. This is True Feminine power. Power that isn’t about who has the upper hand, but about that which cannot be grabbed by anyone else, no matter what. Power like this is is like sand through the hands. No matter the effort it always stays the same. No one can take it away from you. A part of me cringed a little when I wrote that first line. “A woman in her sex,” is a phrase I have historically rolled my eyes at. Psh…What does that even mean? All these ideal-bodied, scantily clad, bedroom-eyed, ‘tantra teachers’ running their own finger tips over their exposed cleavage, whipping their hair around, with looks of contrived ecstasy on their faces, humping the air and flicking their tongues and calling this power. I was not impressed in any way shape or form. To be honest, I’m still not impressed by most of what I see in the tantra, sex-positive, pleasure-seeking teachers out there. That is part of what this post is about: how one dimensional, scripted, and formulaic we are about sex and what we consider to be sexy, even the people who may think of themselves as edgy sex educators and coaches. Coming back into my true power has been a long and winding path for me, and therefore, so has coming back into ‘my sex.’As a young woman I was very interested in sex. I loved it. I had a lot of it younger than most people would consider ok. I wanted it and I wanted to. I also had a lot of questionable sexual experiences fueled by drugs, alcohol, and a desperate need for validation and love. I grew up too fast in a lot of ways and that isn’t something that’s anyone’s fault, it’s just the way my life went. In true Manifesting Generator, 1/3 profile fashion, I learned a lot through trial and error and went too fast for what most would consider my own good, although I know it to be exactly how I learn. In my twenties something dark started creeping in around sex for me. Maybe it was too many sexual experiences where my consent had been a little too questionable. Maybe it was all the self abandonment for perceived love and affection catching up with me. Maybe it was the virgin w***e split phenomenon that so many women experience. In hindsight, I can see at this point in my life I started to feel shame around sex when I actually hadn’t before. Sex stopped feeling as easy. It stopped feeling as good. And I started to realize that most of the time I was playing the object and not the subject in each sexual experience.Sex started to be more about how it (I) looked and what it produced for my partner and less about experimentation, my experience or my pleasure. The only pleasure I really experienced was through the pleasure of my partner. Did he like the way my ass looked there? Is eye contact or no eye contact hotter while I suck his cock? Should my moans be higher pitched or quieter? Dirty talk or no dirty talk?This is such a clear example of where I gave up my Feminine power. I started to completely and totally be in my head during sex. There was no connection to my body from the neck down, which is a big problem when it comes to something as intimate as sex. I don’t think my story is unique. I’m willing to bet most women reading this story resonate with a large part of my early story with sex. After all, it is what our porn-obsessed, intimacy averse, fake tits and ass loving, talking-about-sex-openly-is-taboo society teaches and models to us. Objectifying women’s bodies and sex is the standard. Thinking about women’s physical attributes in regard to how men might perceive them is the norm.I was having a dance party with my toddlers the other day and that Megan Trainor song “All about that Bass” came on. I remember this song being such a boon to the body positivity space at its time. People treated it like it was some testament to body love. But listening to it the other day I realized that the song literally orients women’s bodies to men’s pleasure. The lyric is: “Yeah, my mama she told me don't worry about your size. She says, boys like a little more booty to hold at night.” Why are we orienting to what boys like at all? Megan Trainor is also no where near fat and the idea that she is is as this song suggests, is insane and definitely part of the phenomenon I am speaking to here. It’s glaringly obvious anywhere you look in collective society that women’s bodies are some sort of commodity. There is zero focus of how it feels to be your body. What makes you feel good? What do you actually like to look like without the programing of the collective body ideals? What makes you feel alive and juicy and like the energy of Life is moving through you? Because that is what “your sex” actually means. What a way to create the illusion that a Woman, who is quite literally the portal between the manifested and unmanifested worlds, is powerless and weak. What a way to create a disconnect between a Woman and her power, which is intertwined with her sex, than to let her think her pleasure, her overflowing juice, and her subjective experience of sex and life isn’t important.I am not interested in blaming, shaming or pointing fingers here. I am not going to talk about the ‘patriarchy’ or rape culture, although you can see where these concepts could attach on to what I’m laying out. I want to come at this neutrally and with a lot of sober curiosity and willingness to parse apart what is collective programing and what are the values and beliefs I would like to consciously stand upon now as a full, fed, and adult Woman. As a Woman who does not orient toward the collective mental ideas of “what men like.”Collectively sex is taboo. We talk about it in hushed voices, with side glances and innuendo. To really touch the tender spots of our relationship to sex, our desire, and our shame around it, can feel almost crippling. It can be so damn hard to communicate about.We are sold this picture of sex that it is for young, hot, hairless, coifed people only.Young twenty-something women in bikinis with waxed legs and vaginas can want sex and be sexy, but pretty much any other type of woman is out of sexually acceptable bounds for the collective. If you’re a woman who is a mother, frumpy, middle aged, overweight (whatever that actually means), have bad hair, dress in yoga clothes every day of your life, and smell bad from time to time you aren’t worthy of desire according the mainstream narrative. No wonder when I talk to so many friends who are mothers to young children they talk about how their libido is no where to be found. Yes, early motherhood can be exhausting but we don’t typically hear the narrative that fathers to young kids don’t want sex.Sex is a biological need. It should be an experience that is full of love, connection, intimacy, pleasure, and fun. Connected, mutually pleasurable sex is nutritive, not depleting. It is my theory that if there weren’t so many collective stereotypes about what sex needs to look like and be like and how women need to look and behave mothers wouldn’t be too tired for sex. If women were centering themselves in their sexual experience then having sex or being intimate with their partner would be a fulfilling experience for them and they would want more of it. It is all the baggage and expectation we put on sex that makes it feel like a chore or makes it an energy expense instead of gain.We don’t have to carry this baggage with us, but we do need to unwind why we are carrying this baggage with us in the first place, release it, and choose a new, more resonant framework to operate from. “Our sex” is where is get our juice from. Our connection to the life force that moves through all things. It is that buzzing, humming, electrical zing that moves from the crown of our heads through the tips of our toes. This isn’t necessarily the act of sex, but the aliveness in our own pussies and hearts and that connected channel of energy between the two. The act of sex should be a place where we feel this aliveness in an intense and almost involuntary way. It’s where we can lose ourselves. As women, if we are disconnected from our pussy and its aliveness, we will feel sucked dry, brittle, rigid, hard, dead and empty. We will feel angry, fed up, trapped, and crusty. Sexual energy is pure creative energy and we are innate creators. The ability to access this sexual energy has absolutely nothing to do with how you look or your physical form.This is the lie I want to penetrate right here, right now: The way you look has absolutely nothing to do with how much access you have to your sex. Your relationship to the life force that lives in your pussy, heart and voice does. How much access you have to your sex will definitely change the way you look, how much life force radiates from your eyes and skin, how you hold yourself, how you feed yourself, how you care for yourself, how you hold boundaries, how you mother.. it will change everything if you let it. But you will not get more access to that sexual life force by changing your appearance. You can only get more access by being willing to go back, down, and in to your body. This is why the size of your body has absolutely nothing to do with what gets your partner’s cock hard or pussy wet. Pussy and cock don’t lie. You can create some weird patterns around the need for certain kinds of visual/mental stimulation around turn on (porn), but our bodies know when they come in the presence of someone who has a deep, intimate relationship with their pussy or cock. The twenty-something, perfectly-lean-muscled-body, big luscious lips, doe eyes, perky tits, and a bubble butt becomes almost boring when you really start to touch what sex actually is and what it actually has to offer. Men with big fragile egos may want some aesthetically ‘perfect’ trophy to show off to their externally oriented friends. These men may even get off on it in some shallow one-pump-chump way. But when things are entirely externally oriented and there is no depth and it will all feel empty soon enough. Our egos could never know how to get what our Souls need. A woman who is in her body, who is well-fed and full, has her sex turned on from the inside out will always be entirely more capable feeding a Soul than a woman who has her true hunger on locked away.A mother, who has willingly entered through the portal of birth and opened her body to create life has infinitely more capacity for sensation than a woman who has not crossed that threshold. A woman who has let life lead her and guide her into version after version of herself, who has taken on the inevitability of aging with grace and a willing acceptance, who has not fought against the loving life lessons she has been dealt is a woman who has infinitely more capacity to receive than a woman who fights that which is inescapable and completely natural. These are the tenants upon which I would like stand as a woman who knows that I am worthy of pleasure, satisfaction, connection, intimacy and being the subject of my own experience. These aren’t just statements that I will repeat to myself over and over again like some positive sex affirmations (that s**t never worked for me), these statements are just True in the deepest sense of the word. A woman who inhabits her her body fully is the sexiest thing on the planet. A woman’s age, size, wrinkles, flab, has absolutely nothing to do with a woman’s ability to inhabit her body fully and come into a deep relationship with her life force that runs through her and in every living thing on the planet and the planet itself. A woman’s body was meant to create and sustain life. Creating life, sustaining life, birthing life does nothing but deepen a woman’s capacity to receive and therefore to feed the Soul of her partner, which is what our partners most want from us. Breasts that have made milk and fed children are precious and deserve to be touched and worshiped at the hands of her beloved. And they are full of sex in a way that virgin breasts are not. I look at my breasts, sagging and stretched as they may be and I remember them before I nursed my two children, and the depth and richness of love I feel for them is deeper and more satisfied now. Pussies that have birthed babies actually have more capacity for all sensation. This idea that we get “stretched out” is so entirely untrue and in fact, offensive. Our bodies were made for birth. It is the most natural thing on the planet. A pussy that has opened to that level of union with the divine is a holy thing in indeed. Any man who has connected, intimate sex with the mother of his children knows this.Yes, there are things like prolapse and tearing, but those things are fully and completely curable and have to do less with the process of birth and more about how we connect and touch ourselves after becoming mothers. If you have prolapse put your fingers loving inside yourself and massage daily with castor oil and see what happens. If you believe your physical body is less desirable or capable of pleasure because of your size, your age, your life circumstances, you physical attributes, your looks, I ask you this: Less desirable to who and what? To people who are only interested in your external appearance and what they can get from you? Less desirable to you? Why? Orienting to what the idea of what men want is entirely untrue. Orient to what you want, what feels good in your body, what makes you feel alive, juiced up and fed. It is not the main point, in any way shape or form, but what real men want is a woman who is connected to Life itself. That is what is exciting and enlivening and turns them on in the deeper more whole body way.As my dear friend, Blaire Lindsay, told me once when I was really working through a spot with this stuff: “You are the [pleasure] faucet.” You are the source of the deeper pleasure. When your pleasure is on and and turned up, then the man’s is too and all parties are fed and nourished in all their cells with life force. Some Inquiries to Sit With: * What am I oriented to when it comes to sex? * What makes me feel truly sexy that isn’t externally oriented or physical appearance based? * If my body was fully capable and deserving of all pleasure, what would change in my life? * What have I been programmed with when it comes to sex and who has good sex and who doesn’t? What does ‘good sex’ mean to me? Come explore orienting to your own nourishment at my retreat SAVOR at Sage Lodge in Pray, MT. March 19-22. Send me a message and we’ll set up a phone call to talk about your readiness and more details if you feel called. Come Experience Truly Being with Your Body with love and presenceJanuary 24th. 9-11:30am PST. Online. More info or sign up here. Other Resource on this Subject I recommend exploring: * Carly Rae’s Nectar Classes * Blaire Lindsay’s writing and podcast, Siren, about the intersection of sex and motherhood. * Olivia Lara Owen’s writing and videos about sex, hunger, and nourishment of the Woman This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

Responsibility is a word that typically can send people in one of two directions: * Victimization/Resentment: Responsibility takes something from me. I resent how much I have to hold. I feel bitter about the amount of responsibilities I have.* Self-Punishment/Martyrdom - I need/should/have to do this. I need/should/have to be responsible here. Even though a part of me doesn’t want to, I have to sacrifice and abandon that part because this is the “responsible” thing to. When we relate to responsibility from an immature/naive place we tend to oscillate between these two camps. Personally, I notice I like to start with self punishment in the name of “responsibility” and then eventually swing into victimization and resentment.  Motherhood is the perfect place to play out these two reactions to responsibility.It’s so easy to tell ourselves, as mothers or adults, that we have so much we need to do, are responsible for. We can’t pay attention to our own well being when we are so needed by others. There are very real and necessary responsibilities that come with parenthood, and it can be so easy to martyr ourselves there. But we must come to see that it’s because we martyr ourselves so readily that we get so resentful, uptight and rage-y.This is also, on one level, completely and totally understandable. Mom rage is a thing. It is a symptom of so many things that are wrong with our society. I can easily swing into a rage when I think about how little mothers are appreciated for the way we hold together the f*****g fabric of the future of humanity.You know, no big deal or anything. We are simply raising the next generation of humans, keeping everyone fed, clothed, healthy, and safe, while also running businesses, holding down jobs and careers, being attentive and loving partners, and more. The responsibilities here are massive. They just are. If you’re a mother, you do have a responsibility to raise your children to the best of your ability. You do have the responsibility to feed, clothe, keep your kids safe, etc. No matter how you relate to these responsibilities; they exist. One of the main things becoming a mother has taught me about growing up and being an adult is that responsibilities are a reality. Yes; you need do nothing. In the sense that you could always just lay in bed all day if you really chose to. No one is holding a gun to your head and telling you to get up and brush your teeth and even if they were, you could choose to be shot instead of do the things. You could.  You don’t have to any of it. You do have free will here. Every single thing you do in a day is a choice you’re making on one level. And getting in alignment with this fact is step one to relating to responsibility more soberly. If you’d like to be a mature adult Woman, you have accept that you have responsibilities and that you are always making choices. And some of those responsibilities you won’t enjoy or want to do, but you still have to do them. The key is, instead of spinning off into victimization or winding yourself up with self punishment, can you let your responsibilities be neutral? Can you accept where you are and the choices you’ve made up to this point? This is the only way to get to a place where you actually find joy in the mundanity of everyday life. You don’t find joy by telling yourself you’ll find joy and forcing yourself to do things that don’t feel true. That will leave you shriveled, rigid and cold. You don’t find joy by repeating affirmations of joy or by doing mental gymnastics to explain away all the ways you feel resentful and victimized by your life. In simpler terms, you don’t find joy through your mind. You find it through your beingness and if an element of your beingness is not on board with something, the first step is to accept that too. It’s not to pretend it doesn’t exist or shove it in locked room in your psyche where it will fester and become toxic. You practice accepting all the parts of you. Radical self acceptance. As you relate to responsibility in this way you will find you have far more energy because you’re not wasting it fighting the inevitable or punishing yourself for the ways you don’t align with your life. This isn’t a call to check out or go on autopilot through your days either, that’s a form of self punishment because it requires you to leave your body (abandon yourself). This is an invitation to see where you make responsibilities your God. When you stop feeling like your responsibilities have power over you and also stop fighting them, you will have found the life-giving middle way of mature relating to your life. This is a supple, dynamic place where you can simply meet what’s true in the moment without victimization or any form of self depreciation. You wash the dishes because the dishes need washing. Not because your husband is a slob and your kids don’t respect you and you have do everything. You cook a wholesome dinner most nights because it’s true to nourish your family. Not because you need to control every little piece of food that goes into your kids’ mouthes and make sure it’s organic and healthy or else you’re a terrible mother. AND Maybe sometimes you don’t fold laundry because it honestly doesn’t matter more than snuggling your kids on the couch after dinner.Maybe you give up that project you were volunteering on or you say no to another sport for your kids because you actually don’t want to drive around anymore after work and that’s more important than looking like a ‘good’ person or a ‘good’ mom. When you relate to responsibility in this neutral way you create space to meet each adult task from a center point of Truth, not obligation or defiance. This is wisdom. This is maturity. The ability to hold nuance, subtlety, and paradox. The ability to adjust your stance depending on the circumstances. When we can leave the charge behind and find the neutral still point we can find legitimate joy and connection in our responsibilities. Responsibility is simply the ability to respond.More and more as I practice relating to my responsibilities in this this neutral way my tasks, jobs and duties feel pulsing and alive. The more I truly cultivate the ability to respond soberly, maturely and with a lot of love the more turned on I am by my every day life.I literally feel my pussy and heart fill with juice because of my every day life. This is living as a mature adult Woman. To be in your body and pulsing with life force because you are here, doing exactly that which you are made for, living. Introducing JUICE … I will slowly be releasing more details about this all day workshop, but for now I’m keeping it fun and mysterious and only sharing the name, the date, and the location. If you’re turned on by that (even if you don’t want to admit it) then this is for you. I want to play with the players so I’m making it $111 less for those of you who want to come to the workshop and are willing to say YES solely based on what you feel from this piece of writing and this name and image. Sign up for the big time player price of $333 today here. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

I have been taking my time processing what is happening in the world right now.I have been taking in what I can while staying grounded and rooted.I’ve been in a pressure cooker of personal stuff and intense emotional waves for the last couple weeks, as I know a lot of people are.As a person who is not Jewish and does not have any personal ties to Israel or Palestine it can be easy to tell myself some story of “this isn’t about me or this doesn’t involve me.”There is a way I could believe the idea that I should just stay out of it and let those who do live and know this conflict and subject matter speak.And that is partially true. I will not pretend to know more than I know or be something that I am not.But as a teacher that teaches about true nourishment on a physical, mental, emotional and spiritual level there are actually some things I need to say.It would actually be more untrue for me to say nothing here.I can feel in my bones that this point in time is a never-going-back-moment.On a spiritual level this is a time of prophetic proportion.There is something playing out here between what it means to be justified vs unjustified and ultimately good vs evil.The truth as I see it is both sides have ample reason to be justified in their hate, violence, and judgments. Each side is due vengeance on some level.As Charles Eisenstein said in his recent piece about this conflict: “vengeance is self-escalating, as each atrocity loosens further the bonds of restraint.”In this situation there have been atrocities committed on both sides, that is clear. The bonds of restraint have blown completely off to where we have witnessed some of the most inarguably ‘evil’ and inhumane atrocities.But those evil and inhumane atrocities were predicated by slightly less evil and inhumane atrocities over time.And my point here is, people are suffering and people have suffered gravely.I will not actually choose sides here because choosing sides is what perpetuates the justification vs un-justifcation.I could also escape into bafflement and fog. To say, “I just can’t believe this is happening. How could people DO these things?!” And then feel uncomfortable while I move along with my daily life. It also would be easy to do some major spiritual bypassing here. To say something like, why can’t we all just get along? We are all human, right?! To say something about the human heart and its capacity for forgiveness and move on. We are all absolutely human but if you haven’t noticed humans are capable of some mind bendingly awful things.The human heart does have an infinite capacity for forgiveness and it also has an infinite capacity to wall off, shut down, and to vitriolicly spew hatred.I won’t ever operate from a political, policy, or social justice level.My being only sees things from the microcosm of my own internal practice and on the macrocosm of spiritual principle.To me the externally oriented level in between the micro and the macro is just a mirror, so the only way to change something at that level would be to change your relationship to it.But that is not a reason to bypass the very real third dimensional pain that is happening here either.So what do and we do here?What is the commensurate response to what is happening here? What is this asking me to see on the microcosmic level of my own internal landscape? How can I alchemize what is inside me so that I may see a change on the outside?Or as my teacher Perri Chase said recently in one of her teachings on this: What is here for me?What comes up for me when I sit with these inquiries is that this moment is asking us to look inside ourselves and see where we are capable of vengeful atrocities.To look at all the places in our bodies and minds where we harbor hate, the desire to hurt, the desire for retribution and pay back.We are being asked to go in and go in deeper than we have maybe ever gone before.To feel our pain, our anger, our wounding, so that it may be alchemized.I just keep hearing the statement: You have to feel it to heal it.This isn’t just for us on an individual level, but it is also for us on a collective level.We are indeed interconnected. What hurts you, hurts me.And we can continue to add to the collective trauma by perpetuating an idea that there is an us vs them, a good vs evil, a justified and an unjustified, or we can get down on our knees and forgive ourselves.My mentor, Coly Vulpiani, gave me this prayer and I have given it to many of my clients. This prayer is meant to be directed at yourself, not others: “I judge you not. I forgive myself for what I have created with my judgement. I embrace you. I accept you. I leave you with the blessings of forgiveness.”This prayer is what I leave you with as advice on what to do in times like these.Forgive yourself, my love.Lay your judgments of yourself down. Be open to and with the most inhumane parts of you.Practice forgiveness towards the parts of yourself you’d like to keep locked away.This does not mean let those parts drive. No, it means to stay open to them and see what wounds they are protecting so that you may connect with them. Connection is what we need right now. Radical self acceptance and self responsibility. And also, take care of yourself. Hold your family close. Feed yourself well. Rest and sleep. Go outside and as my 3 year old says, “be a sun catcher!” This is a long, long game we are playing and the state of your nervous system contributes the state of the collective nervous system. For those of us that have the privilege and luck to be safe and sound, please do not take that for granted and keep yourself stable and healthy with all you’ve got.This poem that has given me the metaphor to understand in my body what I am trying to convey here. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

In the spaces I hang out in, there is this kind of return back to traditional ways of living. Some examples are: growing your food, raising your own meat and eggs, valuing local food, building tight knit community, birthing babies at home with midwife or free birthing, spending more time with your babies and resting postpartum, valuing motherhood, breastfeeding and extended breastfeeding, taking care of and managing the home, homeschooling, learning about and utilizing herbal and natural medicine for yourself and your family, cooking from scratch; you get the picture. In the past these things may have been called ‘Women’s Work’. That term itself has almost become derogatory in some circles, but for me, it’s the perfect term. These pieces are generally women’s work. It doesn’t mean men can’t do them, but it does mean that women are generally better at them and value them more and I would argue, have more innate gifts in these departments. Here is the first thing I’ll say that may be slightly inflammatory and that is women and men are different, they are not the same. This does not mean one is worse or better, it means they are different. Their physiology is different. Their brains works differently. Their hearts and minds are focused on different things, generally. Collectively, we have undervalued Women’s Work for generations because we have undervalued women on the whole and feminism didn’t value women, it just told them to be more like men. And through the traditional feminist movement, women moved more and more into other types of work. The traditional feminist movement says, “Women can do whatever men can do,” and held this as empowering to women. I am so grateful for the feminist movement and it’s figureheads like Ruth Ginsberg for making it possible for women to vote, take out a mortgage and own a business etc. However, my argument has always been, yes, women can do whatever men can do, but what about what they want to do? What about what nourishes them? What about what feeds their soul on an internally oriented level? I wrote more about this feminism piece here. To me the true feminism is valuing Women’s Work just as much as Men’s Work. To value birthing a baby as much as a corporate high paying job. To value what it takes to keep a home as much as the procurement of a home. To value the production of breastmilk as much as the production of investments. For example, to actually see breastfeeding as an investment equal to or more important than an IRA. This is the next evolution of feminism. To see the work that women and men do in the world as equally important and valuable. And of course, for those of us, myself very much included, who would like to work and have a family, that should be available too, but without it meaning that I have to shoulder all of the Women’s Work of my home. We are starting to see how important Women’s Work is to our health on a collective and individually, and that is why I think we see so many women choosing to stay at home with their kids, give up their ‘high powered’ careers, and focus on Women’s Work again. However, the distortion I want to point out here is the reverting back to traditional ideologies around the value of feminine and masculine within this phenomenon of women returning back to the home. This is what I’ll refer to as the ‘trad(itional) wife’ movement. Just because you want to take care of a home does not mean you have to be a pretty wall flower who is subservient to her husband. Just because you’d like to stop doing your life-force-sucking-big-girl-job and raise a family doesn’t mean you are dumber, less capable, or less worthy than your husband who keeps his corporate career and directly brings in the money. This idea would just be reverting back to the way things were before the feminist movement. This is not actually valuing Women’s Work. It’s continuing to put it a rung lower than men’s work. It’s saying, staying home with my family means I have less power than my husband who “earns” the money. And I put earn in quotes, because the truth is the Woman is always responsible for tapping into the life force that brings money in. All very rich men have women with huge systems behind and around them. Something I see in the content these trad wife people put out is this concept of being ‘in your femininity,’ so that your husbands can be ‘in his masculinity.’ There is a big difference between femininity/masculinity and the feminine and the masculine. Along with the femininity and the masculinity ideals is the assumption that the woman and the man in a relationship are these clear cut puzzle pieces that fit perfectly together. The truth is so much more nuanced and gray. The feminine and masculine are about content. Each and every human has both aspects, feminine and masculine, within them. This is a ubiquitous teaching across many traditions and modalities. Yin and yang, for example.Most women have more feminine aspects in their total system and most men have more masculine aspects in theirs, but in these teachings around feminine and masculine energetics this doesn’t have to be the case. For example, I am very close to even in my feminine and masculine aspects in my system and so is my husband. I have a touch more access to the feminine energetics because of my gender and he has a bit more proclivity to masculine energetics, but really we’re both similar in total. Femininity and masculinity is about affectation, it’s about how you present yourself or act. It’s about a performance. It’s about the form, not the content. So this idea of being in my femininity is really just about about how you dress, act, look, how you do your hair, it’s not about about who and what you are. It’s not about the Truth.This is the crux, for me, about why, collectively, moving into our femininity or masculinity is not what to focus on if we want to create more Truth. The feminine is Life force itself. It’s chaotic. It’s messy. It’s the matter. The puss and the blood. It’s also collaboration, community, and nourishment. It’s unconditional love. It’s fierce mama bear love that sets us right when we’ve gone off track. It’s the pure energetic power. It’s receptive. The masculine is the holding. The container. The linear. The organizing force. The skill. It’s penetrative. These two working together in a system where both feminine and masculine aspects are revered and fed is what I called Divine Union, which is what the femininity and masculinity and perfectly fitting puzzle pieces is a toxic mimic of. In my world, the Feminine leads with her Holy Desire (aka her connection to Life itself, not her egoic wants), the Desire of Life that moves through her, and the Masculine holds and directs based on that Desire. Or as my teacher says and her teacher said before that, “The Feminine is the call the Masculine is the response.” This is the phrase that my personal marriage and partnership is based upon. However, this isn’t actually about wife and husband. I didn’t say, “The wife is the call and the husband in the response.” No. This is about the right relationship between the feminine and masculine energetics within the husband and wife themselves. The masculine is in service to the feminine opening because the feminine opening to Life is what feeds both of them. The masculine wants to serve. The masculine within our own selves as well as the masculine within our partner. But this orientation has to happen internally, first. Then you see it reflected in the external. The feminine leads because She connected to the pulse of Life. She is connected to the greater flow of Life. The masculine serving the feminine opening to Life is the right relationship. And by ‘right’ I don’t mean defendable or logically right, I mean as in the energetic of the ISness. It is what is. It is energetic law. And anything that isn’t in that relationship will feel like grinding. It will feel like it goes against the flow. It will feel unsatisfying, untrue, crunchy, to the part of us that is connected to our mind-less Knowing. And we can go against the flow in this dimension if we choose to. Bringing these energetics within ourselves into right relationship with each other is how smooth creation happens. Creation requires both masculine and feminine. Hello human babies!Divine Union is how we create in flow with Life/God/Universe. This Divine Union has to happen within ourselves before it happens externally. And thats why the affectation of masculinity and femininity will never result in Divine Union, because it’s externally focused. In a relationship, internally or externally, where the Feminine aspects are just as revered as the Masculine aspects, insights like bodily feelings, intuition, clair senses and oracular sight are valued just as much as logic, reasoning and rationality. She (and I don’t mean the Woman, necessarily, although a lot of times she has most access to the Feminine, I mean the Feminine) is the first step in any decision. She is the one who says “This is a Yes,” or, “This is a No,” of “I don’t know yet” (which could always be the Truth too.) She is trusted. It doesn’t mean the Masculine doesn’t have a say. It doesn’t mean logic and reasoning are not taken into account. It just means they are not overvalued or where action springs from.She is most definitely not subservient. She is equally revered. Which is a great responsibility. Because the Feminine pole is generally held by the woman in most heteronormative relationships these days, this is where I feel women aren’t willing to take responsibility and where the trad wife/polarity thing becomes so appealing. If you have to hold the pole of Feminine Knowing, which is so undervalued in our collective society, you may be called crazy, you may be called emotional, you may be called hysterical, you may be called silly. You may come up against someone (and this someone might be your husband) who says, “Where is your research? Where are your peer reviewed studies?” You may come up against someone who says you’re dangerous and harmful because you’re not taking into account “the science.”And I’ll tell you, as I have held this pole against these types of accusations my whole life, it’s not easy. It is not pleasant. You do not get accolades or praise. You mostly just get side eyes and head shakes. But, it’s worth it to me. Because I am here to uphold the Feminine, the Mother and Nourishment on all levels. Look around, we are all starving for Her. The Masculine is starving for something True to serve. Give him someone he can follow and serve, so that true creation can happen. I believe we need a return of the cultural Mother archetype. Someone who says, “That is enough. Time to eat. Time to rest.” The one who can see the larger picture and without proof back and trust the Wisdom in her bones because our bodies can interpret so much more than our minds ever could about reality. The one who can say No More without any explanation. Then we will see the Mature Masculine arise as well. He needs Her and She needs Him. Feminity and masculinity would like you to believe polarity is what is required for a healthy and exciting relationship. Polarity is not Divine Union. Polarity is a kink. Polarity can be super sexy and hot, no doubt, but Divine Union is much more long term, adult, and satisfying on a soul level. If you get off on acting out little girl and daddy dynamics and you do that consciously by choice, more power to you.When it comes to raising little humans and living your real life, you better show them and allow yourself the full range of human expression and hold permission for that. If not, you’ll end up burying and suppressing huge parts of yourself or your little one’s selves. And subverted parts of ourselves will always come out sideways and toxic if you let them fester underneath the surface for too long. You are the whole package, my love.You are Her and Him.The King and the Queen.And the true King and Queen rule together, side by side. This is the next evolution of Woman and Man, to exalt and revere each other and all eachothers’ gifts equally, so that Divine Union and creation in alignment with Life itself may happen. If you are a Woman reading this, your role as a Mother, Wife, Daughter, Sister, Friend, is to allow yourself to be the fullness of who you are, not to play some fun little role. Being all of yourself is terrifying because you are Huge. Just remember, that does not make others smaller. It only gives permission to those around you to be their right size too, including your partner. If you make yourself smaller than you are, you are actually doing them a disservice, because you moving into your fullness is an invitation for them to do the same. The Feminine in the call, the Masculine is the response. Inquiries to Sit With: What have I been calling into my relationship? What is my internal relationship to the Feminine? What do I judge or hold dangerous, unwanted, gross or unpalatable about my nature? Allow yourself to feel into the energetics of subservience vs reverence in your body? What does It feel to be subservient to your partner vs having reverence for your partnership? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

I touched a tender spot this weekend around not fitting in.I taught an in person workshop and it was a lovely experience but afterwards I found my mind spinning off into stories like “nobody likes me” and how “nobody can see me.” Which is an old and tired story of mine.It’s a young part of myself that just wants to fit in and be likable. Teaching the way I teach, because I truly let people feel all of me, is very vulnerable. So to teach in this vulnerable way to an entirely new audience, can feel really exposing and it exposed a wounded young one within me. This young one is like a hungry ghost for external validation and praise. The day after I taught the workshop I was on the phone with a friend and she told me her husband had made some comments about “women being overweight” in our shared community. My friend didn’t say he said anything about me directly, and I don’t think he did. But because of my tender state I took a lot of it personally (when it wasn’t personal) and felt like the generalized comments included me. This is a classic example of how our wounds getting triggered happens. We take something personal that isn’t necessarily. We make a statement mean more than it actually does at face value. When people make comments about other peoples’ bodies it is either a way to make themselves feel superior or inferior. It is a really good way to separate themselves. To say “those people are worse/better than me.” It tells you a lot about their relationship to their own body. It is a sign they are living on the surface and in the collective programming that we are only as valuable as our physical appearance. I am simply not interested in people who are committed to that paradigm. It’s not in service to the world I would like to live in. I know that there are certain collective “ideals” of beauty, but I do not ascribe to them. I do not allow them to influence me, most of the time. I focus on the markers of true health and integrating all parts of myself, which I consider to be true beauty.However, because I was in an extra tender place having felt a little exposed by teaching an in person workshop and was unexpectedly made aware of this commentary about people’s bodies, a wound in me got even more activated. And so I’ve been sitting with what this wounded part of me believes. This young, small, wounded part of me believes:* Being fat is bad, shameful, and shows how irresponsible I am. * Being fat is something I have control over on a mental level, and therefore, I am a failure because I am fat. * My value comes from my physical appearance. * My value comes from the male interpretation of my physical appearance. * Other peoples’ opinions of my body should matter to me.* Having a smaller body makes me more palatable and will make my life easier.  * There is something wrong with me because my body is bigger. * I will never be able to have the things I want in a bigger body.* People will always judge me when I have a bigger body and that is my problem. I could honestly go on and on, this part of me has a lot of programming! When I read these over and even as I was writing them, I could feel how deeply untrue these statements are. However, I could feel how deeply these statements are programmed into the collective in one way or another. When someone comments on another person’s body, as in “Wow! She is so overweight/fat!” most of the time, he or she is operating from the above beliefs. In our society comments about weight are not a neutral statements, they are value statements. That is why it activates these beliefs in me. It’s that resonance factor, we cannot be shamed unless we believe we are shameful. There must be resonance within us for shame to activate. If someone tells you, “You are bad,” and you believe them, you must have a part that believes, “I am bad.” If someone tells you, “You are a carrot!” it doesn’t have much charge I’m guessing, unless some part of you believes you’re a carrot. So what do I do with this activation? What do I do with the part of me that still believes on a very quiet level that because of the size of my body I am devalued and broken? The part that hears someone make comments about women’s bodies and takes it so personally? The part that is living her worst nightmare being in the body I am currently living in? I most certainly DO NOT stuff her down in to a box and shut her away pretending I’ve moved past her. My practice is to call her forth, bring her up, invite her in. My practice is to love her.To get really clear on what her beliefs are. Write them out like I just did, neutrally. To really see, all the way, what I am working with.I don’t write out the beliefs and go on a pity party for myself or freeze because I’m so afraid of them or go and try to pick fights with anyone who tries to say fat women aren’t valuable. I don’t beat myself up and call myself a phony because I talk about loving myself on the internet and I have a part that doesn’t love myself. No. I write them out and have my adult Woman really contemplate whether or not those are beliefs she would like to take on and operate from. I don’t say to this wounded part, “You aren’t allowed to have these misogynistic beliefs! What’s wrong with you?!” I say, “I see you. These beliefs are in the collective and they can be quite convincing, especially because they are beliefs we operated from for a big portion of our life. I see that these are still subtly hanging out in the background and I’ll just continue to love you here. I’m with you. You don’t have to worry about these things anymore. We operate from different beliefs now.”It is true that I would like to have less fat on my body. I would like to move more freely through the world. I would like to fit into airplane seats more comfortably. I would like to be able to go to any store and buy the size of clothes that fit me. These are all actually true statements. But this does not mean that I am not valuable, desirable, or healthy as my body is now. And this is where it can be tricky to parse out the Truth about ourselves from our programming, when it comes to bodies. I take incredible care of my body. * Over 80% of my meals are cooked at home, from organic, local ingredients, and made with a lot of love and intention. And when I do go out to eat I almost always go to restaurants that have similar values (organic, local etc). * I lift heavy weights 3-5 times a week.* I go on walks daily. * I spend a lot of time resting and relaxing mentally and physically. * I have a deep spiritual practice and daily devotional practices and feel very connected to my greater purpose. * I am active. I play with my toddlers and am outside any moment I can be. * I dance daily. * I prioritize sleep and I get at least 8 hours of sleep most nights, or at least I am in bed ready to sleep for at least 8 hours each night. * I read books that are enjoyable and books that stretch my mind. * I spend time building community in person and online. * I have hobbies and passions outside work. * I feel well used and well loved. * The people I surround myself with know me deeply and I feel safe sharing myself with them. * My husband and I have the most beautifully supportive and loving relationship. I am wildly in love with him and he is wildly in love with me. We love what we are creating together. * I have a strong ovulation and virtually symptom free periods. * My hair, skin, nails, and teeth are strong and glowing. * I had two incredibly healthy pregnancies and two empowering, fast and natural births. * I have good body temperature throughout the day.* I take supplements sometimes, but do not need any supplements to feel good.* I feel capable of holding myself through just about anything life could throw at me.I could honestly go on and on here too..  This may sound like a long list of arrogant bragging about how good my life is, but I assure you, this is what I needed to do to come back to myself when the story that there is something wrong with me at my current weight started to circle my mind. I love myself. I feel really, really good in my body. My body loves me. And I love her.Would I like some things to be different? I would. But I also trust exactly where I am at the moment. It’s been a long road to get here and if the only thing that is seemingly “wrong” with me is my weight, well then I’ll trust that it is what my body needs. And no programming or commentary is going to change that. I choose to operate from the beliefs that serve me and my opening. And that is the thing we can all do. We can hear the parts of us that believe unhelpful things. We can really look, neutrally, at what those things are. We can really see those parts and love them where they are. We can parse out what actually might be true and then choose which beliefs really serve the reality we would like to create for ourselves. This is how we change the collective programming. This is how we become less trigger-able. This is how we value ourselves and love ourselves in an integrated and fully self attuned way. A podcast episode I did with Nik Toth called Embracing Your Body Beyond Size I did recently felt like a beautiful compliment to this peice so I’m linking it. It’s just 35 minutes and just a great deepening into this thread. FED | A 6 Month Journey Into Deep Feminine Nourishment is starting in Mid Septebmer (yes, I keep pushing the date back, but I keep feeling I need a little more time). Send me a message to set up a call to see if it would be a good fit. HomeBody | The Container | two HomeBody practices per month for 4 months minimum along with a Mighty Networks group for writing digestion and coaching from me. $111/month. HomeBody is a like a yoga class for body love. It is a chance to come and commune with your body and what she is telling you. It includes self massage, lymph, and fascial work. Send me a message to sign up. Nutrition Deep Dive | A deep dive into your body and what she needs on a foundational, mineral, vitamin, and nourishment level. More details here. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

The times I feel victimized by motherhood are few and far between these days. The first year of my oldest daughter’s life I was victimized constantly. I got pregnant very unexpectedly with my youngest daughter when my oldest was just 5 months old. This is when the victimization of motherhood took on an almost moment to moment frequency. Almost every second I was hit by another wave of blame of my husband or jealousy of my past childless self or self pity because of how much was now required of me 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, no breaks. Once I got in alignment with my second pregnancy, my morning sickness subsided and Alma started to eat solids and was not needing to breastfeed as much, I had a sweet spot in my second and third trimester where I remember feeling really smooth and connected to the beauty of Motherhood. However, once Maya was born the ever present victimization came roaring back. How was I supposed to have two little babies, 14 months and infant, dependent on me? When would I ever get sleep? Or read? Or shower? Or rest? How are you supposed to cook dinner when both babies need you to hold them, or walk to the car, or go to the grocery store? Put a global pandemic as the cherry on top and I was in a pretty good position to be victimized for life. That first year of being a family of four was by far the hardest year of my life. I was in it. Every single day. No rest. No breaks. If you ascribe to the diagnosis of new moms with mental health disorders (I do not, I just call it having your entire existence rerouted and reassigned while your physical body, nervous system, and hormones go through more changes than puberty); I had postpartum anxiety, postpartum depression and severe postpartum insomnia.Having two babies back to back was like a marathon rapid descent into Motherhood. Quite honestly, mothers have every reason to feel victimized in a society that doesn’t value them, doesn’t support them, and doesn’t revere them for the absolute portals of creation they are. But victimization isn’t something that actually serves a Woman’s power or opening. It is not something a Woman in her true and mature Mother feels. Because The Mother is a creator and a creator would never be victimized by their creation. The part of a woman that feels victimized by motherhood is a young part. It’s the part that is in denial of her Creative Power. It’s the part that isn’t willing to take responsibility for Creation. In this way, victimization actually feeds the society that doesn’t value mothers. Being victimized because society doesn’t value you is essentially saying: this society has power over me and I cannot change it. But..you can. We can. I did. As I have slowly and steadily looked at every nook and cranny of my victimization over these past 3 years I have seen all the places I put myself last. All the places I haven’t centered myself. All the places I abandoned myself.All the places I didn’t communicate clearly what I needed or wanted. All the places I sacrificed myself without anyone even really asking me to but because it was what I had been modeled. I saw all these places and I, baby step by tiny baby step, said:No, I will do this a different way. A way that venerates my well-being. A way that upholds my values. A way that threads fullness, vibrancy, radiance and beauty into our family. A way that is rooted in the Earth and what She teaches me about reciprocity. A way that is guided by the connection to my pussy, womb, heart and voice. When Women truly rise to the invitation that Motherhood is and claim their worth, claim their power, and claim their Knowing, our reality will quickly arrange itself in such a way that the Mother is valued, revered and honored.In my world on a very real, practical and foundational level: Mothers are valued. Mothers are centered and The Center. Mothers are cared for. Mothers are fed and satiated and full. The counsel and wisdom of Mothers is taken in and heard. No big decisions are made without first consulting and hearing from the depth of the Mother’s body. My family’s bodies are nourished on every level.Our number one priority for our family is wholeness, above money, productivity, accolades, success, external validation, and social virtuous optics. When it’s been a long day with two toddlers and I feel the sneaking thoughts of victimization about how little time I have or how much laundry I have to do start to wiggle in, I turn towards that victimized part and blast her with some of my Mother love. I hold her while I hold my babies. I tell her she heard, seen, and loved. But she does not drive my life or make decisions, or require anyone else’s validation but my own. Most the time the feeling and thoughts of victimization dissolve into a juicy, pulsating, and fulfilled sensation in my womb. The thoughts turn to: what a gift it is to be so well used. I couldn’t imagine an any more worthwhile task than being with these little human souls as they come into their bodies. What a gift it is to serve at this level. To Shepard these ancient souls of my daughters. To feed, clothe, hold, bathe, and care for them. To get to act out on such a tangible and concrete level my devotion to Life and living itself. The satisfaction I get from being a Mother is really hard to do justice with words and I love words.It’s like eating a big meal, outside, at a beautiful table, with close friends you love. It is gratifying on a soul level. It is perfection. It is the best thing that I’ve been done or will ever do. It is everything. And I am overcome with gratitude, which feels like the most surrendered and deep love. One inquiry for you to sit with or journal with if you feel activated by this piece: Where am I more committed to my victim story than my creator story? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe