This conversation is another tender one for me. I find as I’m navigating these initial months of motherhood (and in the absence of being able to have lots of community come over to my house), I’m having the essential conversations here on the podcast.
The wonderful Jessie Harrold joins me in this episode to talk about major life transitions and the skills we need to traverse change. Jessie is a coach, women’s mentor, and doula who has been supporting women through radical life transformations and other rites of passage for over a decade. She works one-on-one with women and mothers, facilitates mentorship programs, women’s circles and rituals, and hosts retreats and wilderness quests.
Together we talk about “arriving” at motherhood as an identity, how major life transitions (like motherhood and loss of a family member) make painfully clear that we as a society don’t know how to show up for each other, the skills we need to learn as a society to traverse change better, learning how to ask for community care and learning how to extend care without being asked, the tension that can arise in asking for and navigating community care, nonlinear reciprocity, practices around major life transitions, and the invitation to create new culture.
“Being the support you want to receive is a way to reclaim agency. We have to show our community what community looks like.” -Jessie Harrold
Resources:
- Jessie mentions her colleague, Britta Bushnell
- I talk about how in Hearthfire, we practice the skill of witnessing
- I mention how Rachelle Garcia Seliga also talked about midwifery as womb to tomb in Belonging episode #77
- I mention Mara Glatzel as someone who talks about the inherent tension in appearing needy
- Jessie mentions Maureen Murdock‘s work with the heroine’s journey
More from Jessie Harrold:
- JessieHarrold.com
- The Becoming Podcast
- The Spiral Way
- Quiz: What phase of Radical Transformation are you in?
- @jessie.es.harrold on Instagram
