Deepen Your Roots & Remember Your Belonging

I am currently on maternity leave and will be back at the end of November.

Follow me! @beccapiastrelli

Busy hands * Quiet Mind * Open Heart

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Being a woman with a baby and work to do in this pandemic is incredibly frustrating. PATRIARCHY WE ARE JUDGING YOU.

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In today's episode of the Belonging Podcast, I am joined by Yaya Erin Rivera Merriman (@activeculturefamily) — a Plant Spirit Medicine Practitioner specializing in sacred plant medicines for communication and relationship. Believing strongly in the necessity of hybrid medicine to meet the unique challenges of modern life, Yaya is engaged in the continued study of Plant Medicine, Active Dreaming, and Goddess Traditions from around the world as gateways into the richness of direct personal experience of uncurated reality. A Devotee, Artist, and Mother of primarily Taino and Irish descent, Yaya offers multi-dimensional, plant medicine assisted, sex-positive prayer spaces, and healing experiences designed to help you integrate all that you have encountered on your soul's journey and come to live from a place of deep understanding of the way that each of your life experiences has contributed to the uniqueness and potency of your personal spirit medicine.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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In this episode, Yaya shares her experience of being of mixed descent and the braided blood of the Taino indigenous people. She shares how she's developed a relationship with the land she lives on and how she likens being in relationship with the land to being in a romantic relationship. We talk about the cyclical wheel of the year to foster reconnection to nature and how linear time is a tool that can facilitate a certain way of being, but that doesn't necessarily need to be adhered to. And finally, we talk about plant allies for a time of racial uprising and healing from white supremacy and how Yaya has found the medicine of kava to enable her to feel herself in a time when we lose ourselves.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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To give it a listen, search "Belonging" wherever you get your podcasts or click the link in my bio.

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Something I've been contending with since I found out Atlas was going to be assigned female at birth was how to approach gender with our babies. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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I tend to dress her in gender neutral clothing and have noticed that nearly every stranger who sees her assigns her boy because of that. Most of the time I don't correct them because I don't think it really matters. When they do figure out Atlas is a she, I break the tension with, "what is gender anywayssssss?" which is kind of a funny way of creating more tension or confusion but the contrarian in me is into it.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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As soon as the genetic counselor told us girl, I felt that I didn't want to attach too strongly to feminizing this being. I'm okay with using she/her pronouns, but my intuition has been strongly telling me to not input too much GIRL onto her. I guess because I want her to be able to tell me what her gender is but also I'm in my own unlearning about gender norms in this culture and I'm seeing how quickly we apply that to our babies. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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And I think it's kind of messed up. I find myself saying things like "you're a good girl" or "what a pretty girl" and then recoiling at the words that just came out of my mouth. Like...where did that come from?? I once had a conversation with someone who is gender non-binary and they told me it was really painful to look back at pictures of themselves as a baby in girlie dresses knowing that wasn't their true expression. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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As a mom I wonder about how not to mess this up for my child and honor their true expression when they cannot tell me. I was introduced to the term "gender creative parenting" which I'm still learning about but I'm pretty sure is something I want to adopt. I want our family to be a safe space for her to navigate her gender expression - because I truly think the future generations will be less attached to the binary than the current culture is.

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Surrendering into the portal that destroys time. Succumbing to the path of being unraveled. Dropping my sword and letting myself be taken into this new realm of mother.

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{credit to @tehyasky for bringing words to this state of becoming 🙏🏼}

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For this vast, wide, deep, multi-layered topic of Belonging, I've got a powerful conversation to share with you today with @madisonmorrigan. Madison is a life coach and speaker whose work is centered on self-responsibility and full expression. She coaches ambitious and creative womxn to shed layers of old programming that are keeping them small so they can finally come home to their true selves. Madison is also someone who has left the evangelical church, grew up in a household of narcissistic abuse, and has recently come out as queer, so she's been doing a lot of personal work in the realm of belonging, unbelonging, and false belonging.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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Together we talk about belonging as sovereignty, as well as her story of leaving the evangelical church and growing up with an alcoholic father who went to prison and became born again. We chat about how she joined a radical church and spent 5 years questioning the abuse in that space before leaving and processing that trauma, and then how she found her own wholeness after leaving the church. Madison sweetly shares that in the last two years she's discovered that she's queer and fell in love with a woman. We talk about the behavior of defaulting to rigid belief systems when you aren't willing to heal and the either/or response to uncertainty stemming from traumatic events over generations. Finally, we discuss whether or not there can be beneficial uses of shame and breaking down narcissistic abuse in our culture.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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You can listen in on our conversation by searching "Belonging" wherever you listen to podcasts or click the link in my bio!

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Currently contending with this being enough. She doesn’t know what time is or has even seen a clock. All she has is this moment and what her body and emotions tell her. This is the medicine. This is enough.

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