All exercise helps stress and energy, whether its periods or pregnancy, depression or anxiety, moving your body and working your heart, helps your energy and stress levels. Pregnancy can be an unknown time of a woman life, especially baby number 1.
Add the hormones, and bigger body transformation and wild woman can commence. It’s ok if you’re feeling this way it’s a natural part of pregnancy and nearly all pregnant woman will feel emotionally more heightened.
For support, try joining a local pregnancy group by looking here https://www.nct.org.uk/.
Having liked minded people around you in which to share similar experiences and emotions, can support you feel better, more calm and positive in mind.
I have a disability dysarthria if I were ever to hang out with the normed herd, i’d be extremely suicidal. Connecting with strangers especially as a new mum was and still can be, challenging
I remember it well when I was brand new to the mum scene, wanting to say to a mother sitting opposite me on a mum group table, “Whats wrong with you!” as she moaned and groaned about having to put the washing into the washing machine and press a button. My god woman are you washing your clothes in a river! Can you not see what an amazing little human you have in your arms or oh my days is this what happens to some woman! they just become this endless moaning machine because they have so much of everything that they have nothing else to talk about.
By this point extremely exhausted I politely excused myself from the mum group table, and chose to go home and lay on the couch, cuddling up with my newborn. Promising myself that I will never put myself through that mentally draining exercise again.
I’ll find new friends, it’ll just take time.
Three years really till I started having a good group of mum pals who liked a giggle, could laugh at themselves and seek lightness in life.
Its admitting’ly challenging, even now 16 years on from experiencing a brain injury, attempting to find my feet in motherhood. Think most parents who go out the way to express their feelings with bulging eyes towards their eager to learn kids as soon as I speak, its wise not to waste my precious energy any further.
Please like me
im really nice
and funny and a bit wild
But if I was ever to have chased these thoughts, the one treasure I would have missed out was my son, Seb.
Watching him grow out, getting to know him, helping him to understand my speech as best he could, was so much more important than reacting to the pouts or glib smirks that a group mentality of what the norm, brings.
So I chose to be me.
With all my flaws and faculties.
I chose to not react to the ruthless ravens and smile instead, at how much love and compassion is needed to be shown.
By behaving in this way, it feeds a different energy in my child of love and compassion.
This isn’t spoken, but shown.
I know this through many years of experience living with this disability and testing out peoples parameters.
I don’t wish to belong to the “such a shame what happened to her” group.
I don’t belong to the “what if it hadn’t happened to you” group.
I don’t belong to “wish I could understand you better” group.
I now, after 16 years of living with this disability, and being blessed with the personality I have, of yeah ‘stubbornness’ some would say, I would rephrase ‘determined.’ Having met so many different people, with a variety of glibness about them, but expressed in such different dialogue of play by which to learn and grow from, it has been such a privilege and pleasure to have met them. Because without meeting so many sanity challenging people, I wouldn’t know what I now look for today.
Without the drama, hurt, pain and emotional rollercoaster navigating my way through how best to help me, cope with this new disability, I wouldn’t be the person I am today.
Without this utter inner drive and mindset remembering “that is their energy, not mine” I probably would have killed myself along time ago if I ever internalised others perceptions. And don’t get me wrong, thats all I used to do as a teenager and right through my 20s, at a highly influential drug fuelled age.
But i’m a mother now.
Sure i’ll challenge perceptions, but I pick them wisely these days.
What kind of person do I want my kid to learn from?
Your amazing ability to see the positives in the negatives?
Or a mother who just continual complains about anything and everything and sucks the beauty and joy in life at everything she comes into contact with.
Your choice
I get why people yearn to collude, I understand the humans need for acceptation and belonging. It was a very painful part of my healing journey because from all that stuff that roared out, was an emptiness that took time and sometimes painful choices to refill.
To inspire to me, means being me, and not attaching or chasing those that don’t see the awesomeness in who we are. Ive got so many naughty qualities, but i’ve got so many more positive qualities.
Not everyones going to understand you. Not everyones going to like you, not everyones going to want to listen to you. These are things that can be influenced by me, for sure. But I have no control over the outcome of it.
We are limited by our experiences.
Can you let it go?
What is your purpose? Where are you choosing to put your focus? How can I help my mental health better? These are questions I have control over. These are factors I can adjust and readjust when life changes come.
I get peoples jist, where lies our insecurity of a need to ‘create a group, within a group, within a group’ and don’t wanna play the group game anymore. Instead I bow my head to my heart and send them so much love.
Don’t yearn to be a part of the popular circus. Been there, got the t-shirt, plus a mighty successful ultra ego of how to be great at it. Decided that actually i’d completely lost me as a consequence of trying to keep everybody else happy and forgetting I can only truly make myself happy, not other people.
That opened up a whole tin of worms of learning how to assert myself differently. Choosing not to react to the car crash drama of idle gossip and literally moving my brain into a different thought process.
See if you have nothing nice to say, please keep silent.
It was and still is, amongst my silence and solitude that I shine out and can hear me again.
Confident ok sometimes cocky, funny ok sometimes silly, smart but sometimes dim, pretty but sometimes butt ugly, charismatic but sometimes arrogant.
I seen me, in all my opposites, in all the dark and light, in all the good in the bad and I cried like a baby for months. All the shite that I have chosen to hold on to, is coming out because I know it is not mine.
It does not belong to me.
I cleansed to the point of shaking on a therapy table. I cleansed so much to the point I see the good in the bad, the negatives in the positives, the sun in the cloud, because without one, we wouldn’t know the other.
Im not going back i’m moving on.
And I howled for months.
Painful, life reaffirming, self growth therapy that I was brave enough to look at and question. I was brave enough to go under the feeling and understand why this behaviour has occurred and brave enough, to see a different way and find light from the experience.
Can you see the lesson?
Who am I? What do I stand for? Why the f##k am I here?
I searched in countries where my language wasn’t a barrier, where I could literally lose myself. By losing myself so deeply in cultures so alien to what I learned as a child and stripping myself bare of me, I stumbled and often crumbled at the endless consequences of who I wanted to be, and learned so much behaviour that I didn’t want to be.
But there’s a lot of years between these stages and a whole lot of struggle to reach a space within, that remembers, such inward minded strong sense of self and to cherish her.
Especially when the majority of society, understandably, see a very different picture.
Can you let it go? and not chase, remember you?
Being a mum to me, means standing up for what I believe in. Means growing up a bit and thinking about how my behaviour influences my child. By the words I say, to the actions demonstrated.
My energy is vital to the kind of little human i’m nurturing.
By taking care of my energy and watering her with love and care it shines out onto our kids….. most of the time.
Of cause we have our grumpy days. Do you not? I still do.
It’s natural, but it is not our norm.
Is it loving is it kind? A phrase I regularly ask my child
Im not into competing and comparing, i’m into you.
What makes you angry, what makes you a better human? Can we talk together and share how we feel?
Can we take this time and energy now, when our kids are young and open, to invest it in these non verbal energy fields, that can influence our feelings greatly and guide our mental health down a horrible path, if we don’t have a courageous open minded person, who wants to go there and address what isn’t said, just shown.
Or are we just set on fitting in?
Can I be a triangle when I know i’m a circle?
It requires standing up as me, with no armour just experiences, that have and will continually shape me into the person I remember, I wish to be.
It ain’t an easy choice changing and what!!! I need to look at me, in order for change to happen!
Now that was a tough denied rocky path of three steps back, two steps forward, motion, healings ugly.
But it’s so worthwhile, years on, once you start seeing those inner growth reactions, to stimulus that would have at one time, left me crying into a pint while I rolled another fat one, yearning for their approval.
Ah those wee steps, now seek, a different direction.
But in order to see this space, meant a whole lot, of unlearning, to relearn, to learn another way of being, before transformation occurred.
Don’t think I don’t see what you see, I just choose to shine a different light and to look another way.
Becoming a mum birthed a part of me I thought id completely lost after my accident.
I never lost my fire, it was my balls that were crushed.
Balls that require standing up for what I thought was important. Arguing is fire, confronting and changing, by looking within, takes balls.
Having a good pair of cohones is definitely required as a mother, especially a single mum. I’m both mum and dad and sometimes its tough having to feed a different energy to get the message across. But aren’t we lucky to possess and be in touch with both energies within us and understand, why we have them.
Keep in mind when you’re happy, your baby is happy. When you feel stressed, your baby feels stressed by the increase of cortisol pumped physiologically. Your baby, right now, inside your amazing body and once in the world, feeds from your energy and physiology.
Our energy is fed from our attitude towards the stimulus on show.
Whatever it is, our hormones, our partner, our work, the stranger whose going out there way to take their fecking time at the cashier!!.
Our baby does not always see the stimulus, but feels it from our reaction. If we are able to keep in our minds eye, how vital our reaction is at feeding our energy and how much it influences our babies, it will in turn help you, through the very thought towards the stimulus, being changed.
There are no quick fix poses to growing and developing, its endless learning for both child and adults.
The more accepting you can be of this, the more likely you are to be able to change your mindset towards them.
Rather than fighting them can you accept they’re necessary for learning and changing. For example in pregnancy rather than seeing them as horrible hormones we can see them as happy hormones. As the “terrible twos arrive, can you see it as testing twos”
“Our attitude determines our destination” http://www.movementpark.com
If we are able to slow down, connect within and tune in to how we feel and what we can do to help and support us fuller, we can change our stress and energy levels for the health of you, as a mama and you’re ever growing baby.