One hour after I birthed my eldest son, I haemorrhaged. This experience changed the course of my life forever; it connected me with my purpose of serving mothers and babies, and it taught me how to transform pain into power. This is birth story alchemy.

Before I found this peace, I was full of pain. At first, I was wracked with anxiety and guilt. I was terrified that my son or I would get ill or die, and that his experience of birth had disturbed him and our connection, forever.

I sought help from a fellow cognitive hypnotherapist, with whom I had trained, and the disturbing flashbacks that had been haunting me reduced almost immediately. I could finally fall asleep and even talk about what had happened, without crying.

Life went on, and I was able to experience some of the joys of motherhood, but too often they were dulled by my worry about the lasting impact that my son’s birth may have had on him and our relationship.

It felt like old parts of myself were dying a slow and painful death, and I was full of self-doubt about my ability to be the mother that I wanted to be. It all felt so hard, and I berated myself for feeling this way, especially when I had so much support from my loving family.

Gradually, my anxiety turned to rage, and I now know that the root of that rage was that no one had accurately reflected to me this transformative experience of childbirth that I had been through. It felt like no one was really seeing me for who I was and what I had been through, and that’s because they weren’t, they were seeing me through their experience of it all, which was so different to my own.

My rage caused me to question why our culture places so much emphasis on preparing for childbirth, with little more than a mention to stock the freezer when it comes to preparing for what comes afterwards. When my son was three, I channelled this rage into qualifying as a certified INNATE postpartum care provider.

This intensive 18-month training connected me to the knowledge, the people and the practices that enabled me to not only accept everything that had happened, but to make peace with it. The biggest relief for me came when I experienced the truth that it is never too late to heal, and that when we tend to our own healing, the effects can ripple out to heal our children, too. My firsthand experiences of this have felt nothing short of miraculous, and the tangible moments of seeing this in action will stay with me forever.

Today, my aim is simple: I want to provide women with the services that were so supportive to me when navigating early motherhood, so that they can integrate their own experiences and honour their right of passage into motherhood, so that they can embody the mother that they want to be.