Embracing the Pause: Healing via Venus Retrograde, Grief & Women’s Circles
I've been experimenting with making shorter videos for Empowered Mothers Network, including one about the current Venus Retrograde — a theme I've touched on here before. This retrograde marks a potent window for integrating the lessons we've been moving through over the past 18-19 months.
For me, this is looking like suddenly giving 0 fucks about all the little day-to-day things. I’m usually someone very set in a routine, giving plenty of airtime to all my (healthier) habits - I will organise life around my single coffee of the day with accompanying chunks of dark chocolate.
I have different plates to spin and I spin em’ with lists and schedules.
Except when Dad died.
The biggest thing that shot into focus the day or so after he died was the unwavering fact that life goes on. As in, I called the hospice early that morning where they told me as much as they could about his passing. Then a couple of hours later I’m in Aldi getting the weekly shop (thankfully my partner insisted he go along with me cause otherwise fuck knows what we would of ended up eating that week).
Everyone going about their daily life when it felt like someone has just pressed pause on mine. It’s a very odd feeling, and it happens to so many of us after the death of someone close. You look incredulous at these people who are more preoccupied at trying to get a trolley coin out of the slot in the trolley. Never mind your bloody pound, someone has died!!
Slowly we come out of that haze and remember that life, the world, it doesn’t stop, even if our own life did for a moment. For me, that pause was so powerful in addition to the days that followed, that it’s changed me. What a medicine.
In this pause, a lot of day-to-day life seems irrelevant, trivial, pointless. I don’t remember much beyond certain practicalities, but I felt great gratitude for being alive myself, and elevated levels of love and appreciation for my partner and our children. My kids probably spent a few days there with me constantly hugging them!
And now, through felt knowing, that lesson is returning. I can’t seem to get the mojo to pay attention to the trivial. I’ve zoomed out again, just feeling the love. ‘Productive Me’ is a bit pissed off, but I think we all need a bit of this right now.
What is interesting to me at this age (40 y’all) is that becoming aware of things I wasn’t aware of before. A knowing. A felt knowing. It’s not in my brain, I feel it as energy in my heart & womb (this is where my partner keeps it from getting Too Spiritually Serious and suggests maybe it’s wind).
I haven’t always the words for it. According to this morning’s video, I rather don’t verbally… However, that doesn’t matter. Because when I come across women who are just a little older, just a little further along down the line from me - I can recognise that they have this too. Like a seed has grown - mine’s maybe not poked through the soil yet, their’s is starting to cascade down and break open the walls, barriers. You see a recognition of the knowing, a support, a cameradie that is rare to find now in younger women.
I think when we’re younger we’re more self-absorbed but in a healthy/necessary way - building our own sense of self and then also possibly caring for children. But we live in a society where we’re not taught to build strong foundations, secure roots. And so it all takes a bit longer. 40 years and counting, here.
My next EMN Podcast episode is about women’s circles. I’ve been feeling called to them for a while now. What would it look like if we had these spaces, the older and the younger together, the older helping the younger with their roots and the unfurling of self growth?
Well, maybe that’s for the next 18 months to explore.
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