378. Why mothers need to be held too: Somatic work and the circle of nurture with Lisa Rombach

Lisa (00:00):

I started to have this whole somatic experiencing aspect, which really goes into, so what is my personal experience? What does it feel like to have a body? Which is different from how does it move or what is it made of? It’s like, what does it feel like to have body? And only then was I able to start to translate on how do I bring all of this into connection with another, which is the relational part. So those would be the four stages. It would be the like, how do I move? What am I made of? How does it feel inside? And then how does it magically change once we get into connection with others?

Dr. Sarah (00:41):

If you’ve ever felt depleted, overwhelmed, or like you’re carrying too much on your own, this episode is for you. Hi, welcome to Securely Attached. I’m Dr. Sarah Bren, a clinical psychologist and mom of two. In this podcast, I’ve taken all of my clinical experience, current research on brain science and child psychology, and the insights I’ve gained on my own parenting journey and distilled everything down into easy to understand and actionable parenting insights so you can tune out the noise and tune into your own authentic parenting voice with confidence and calm. And this week, I’m joined by somatic practitioner and founder of Circle of Nurture, Lisa Rombach. Lisa does beautiful work supporting mothers through embodied relational practices that help people feel safer in their bodies and less alone in their experience. Together, Lisa and I talk about what somatic healing actually means in everyday language. We talk about why self-care often isn’t enough and how something called circle work is different from the traditional mom groups many of us are familiar with and why this kind of community can have a lasting impact, not just for us as mothers, but for our children too.

(01:59):

And as you’re listening, if you find yourself recognizing the overwhelm or burnout that we describe, I want you to know you don’t have to navigate this alone. At Upshur Bren Psychology Group, we support mothers not just as parents, but as whole people, helping you feel more grounded, regulated and supported so you can show up for yourself, show up in your relationships, and show up in your parenting in a way that feels sustainable and true to you. Our practice offers both virtual and in- person services, and we work with children, parents, and families all under one roof. So whether that means supporting a child who’s struggling, helping a parent who feels depleted or stuck, or working on the relationship dynamics that affect the whole family system. You don’t have to piece support together from different places. We are here to be a single trusted resource so you can get the care and support you deserve.

(02:52):

You can find a link to Upshur Bren Psychology Group in the episode description wherever you’re listening or visit upshurbren.com to learn more. Okay. Now here is my amazing conversation with Lisa Rombach.

(03:10):

Hello, welcome back to the Securely Attached Podcast. Welcome, Lisa. It’s so good to see you. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Lisa (03:19):

Hey, thank you for having me.

Dr. Sarah (03:22):

So it’s been a while since I’ve seen you. I’ve been blessed to be able to have spent a whole weekend in person with you, but it’s still really good just to see you virtually. How is everything going? How are you doing?

Lisa (03:40):

Yeah, actually, since you’ve been here, one thing has stayed the same, which is my circle of nurture studio and the carpet that you sat on, things are still happening there every week. And our family of four has moved within the city of Vienna, but that’s been a big thing. And I think every mother knows the logistics of moving for people’s things is very different than moving just your own. So I feel like I’ve accomplished a big thing and I’m back. Yeah.

Dr. Sarah (04:11):

I’m sure this will come up in this conversation, but I always say any transition, but especially something like a move, I always feel a transition is like a snow globe. You shake it and all the snow moves. It’s like you can’t just move house. The whole life feels like it’s in a flurry and then it takes time for everything to settle back down. But I feel like that’s the big … You know when you’re settled when all the little stuff feels like it has settled.

Lisa (04:43):

Yeah. And I love that you bring the image of the snow globe because it’s one of my favorite images when I start to work with people teaching them the language of their own body and they start to listen. It’s one of the things I’ve noticed is when they’re upset and then having this settling move and trace that inside yourself is like, oh, most people really have an easy access with that image. Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Sarah (05:14):

And so you bring up something that’s very relevant to what we’re talking today. And some people who are listening, we like skipped over kind of grounding and orienting people, but if you’re listening, you’re like, “What are you guys talking about? ” So why don’t we start out by explaining a little bit about what you do and like this work that you do is grounded in somatic fury, somatic, I guess practice is the best word because it encompasses so many elements of it, but a lot of people don’t know what somatic even means. So maybe we could start there and then you could tell us a little bit about how you got into this work.

Lisa (05:53):

Yes, I love to share. And I think that especially the somatic practice that you mentioned is a very good way to start because I don’t know how much you know about that, but I come from the background of music. I grew up the daughter of a violin maker and a violinist and pianist. And that means my earliest memories are those of singing together, learning to play the violin was my first conscious learning journey, learning skill. And it also made me very aware of the subtleties that we as humans are able to perform with our hands and also to notice with our hands. And very early on, I think music was a language that allowed me to master skills that are related to rhythm and pacing and attunement and storytelling and the high energy moments of life and the low energy. So a lot of the things that you can also encounter in many bodies of somatic work, but also the work of my husband, Ale Duarte, which over the last eight years, I’ve also worked alongside with him and have deepened my own practice.

(07:18):

So how did I come from music to working with people? It’s pretty much been a parallel path all my life. So I was one of those kids that the family said like, “Oh wow, she’s got these magic hands. When she touches someone, then the pink goes away, it just gets better.” And I guess there was a curiosity that I had always about how life moves and there’s ways to describe this in words, but then as you get, like you’re seeing me right now, but some people that are hearing me, like there’s a lot of gesturing happening in my body. And I think that is one of those translations that happen silently the whole day long. We’re translating what’s moving through us into language. And one of the professions I took was that of making my voice a translator between the realm of emotions and what arrives in somebody else’s soma in their whole being.

(08:19):

Because when I sing, the words are really just a little part that translates and then there is a huge part of like how I feel in my body and the emotional colors of what I’m transporting. And because a big part of my life was to own that instrument, like the finesse of all that, I really had to learn how to … I always say how to ride that horse that my body is because it’s God a will of its own and I can either listen to it and respect it and work with it, or I can try to dominate it and control it and go over it. And it’s something that we will talk about more is my work with mothers and that includes birthing and bringing up children. And some of you might recognize that this is something that also brings us in contact with all the things that are beyond our will.

(09:18):

And so this is maybe the junction where I see the biggest connection piece and yeah, just to give you an idea. So I was a young student, I was singing and I knew that now it’s serious. Now it’s a profession. Now I need to know what to do. And it became, all of a sudden, it became much more difficult because I tried to get something right instead of just enjoying the music. And I think that’s something that happens to us in parenting as well. It’s like sometimes we run into our own ideals instead of just being in the enjoyment of the wonder of life that’s unfolding in front of our eyes.

Dr. Sarah (10:04):

We’re trying to be the good student, trying to be the good mom, we’re trying to get an A.

Lisa (10:13):

Yeah.

Dr. Sarah (10:14):

Yeah. I mean, that’s the perpetual … I’m always, that’s my big, I think, internal struggle with motherhood is like the competing forces in me that’s like, slow down, tune in, be, trust, listen, wait, right? But then there’s this other part of me that’s like, I can’t wait too long. I have to make sure that I know the right answer before I wait too long because what if it’s like this and then I didn’t do the right thing? What if I should have called a pediatrician or like, what if it’s a teachable moment that I didn’t teach right? The window could close. I’m always fighting that part of me that’s like, there is a right thing to do and if I miss that window, I failed, like I got a bad grade. And I’ve spent a good amount. I mean, my oldest is eight. I’ve spent a solid chunk of the last eight years trying to understand how to listen more to the other part, but that was not intuitive initially.

(11:25):

I think I had to get permission from other women in my life that had already kind of figured that piece out to say, Hold on, you can slow this down. You can tune in. You might know more than you think you do. But I didn’t know that I could do that at first. Someone had like a wiser woman had to tell me that. I feel like that’s a lot of what you facilitate.

Lisa (11:57):

Yeah. I think that sitting with other women is what equipped me for motherhood before I became a mother. And it’s something that I am very passionate about providing more of, like just contribute to this broken web of connections amongst these wise beings that we are. It’s like a mosaic where each of us holds a piece, but when we put it together and we step away and look at it together, all of a sudden we see this bigger picture that makes so much sense and that we can just not paint alone.

Dr. Sarah (12:43):

Yeah. And I also, I really like that you talked about sort of the, in kind of introducing the idea of like, okay, somatic practice has a lot to do with being in tuned to our internal experience and the space between us and another, and then another’s internal experience, right? Soma means body, right? And working with the body and the connection between the body and the mind. But I love that you started this off by explaining your experience with music because I think a lot of people when they think about mind, body stuff, they can get a little, it can feel super abstract. It can sometimes like drift off into the land of like woo and people get lost and they’re like, “I don’t really buy that. I don’t really get that. ” It’s foreign to me. We’ve atrophied a lot of this sort of normalizing this natural intuition, natural awareness of our body’s energy as a society.

(13:49):

So it’s not like we’re constantly talking about it and noticing it when it’s there, but I do think anybody listening can appreciate that like music is a very sort of normalized example of this, right? Music is our ability to like to learn the art of music, to learn the craft and to like practice an instrument, whether it’s your voice or a musical instrument, I think is really universally accepted that there’s something invisible to the eye that’s sound waves, there’s energy, there’s a whole lot of invisible stuff that’s happening that we absolutely accept is happening because you hear it, right? You feel it.

(14:39):

Some people with like some, like if you’ve ever heard of synesthesia, some people can even see it like their synesthesia is where like there’s some crosswiring in the brain and like you hear, you like see colors in sounds. It’s very cool and interesting phenomenon, but like we accept, totally accept that this is very, very real. And I would imagine too, as a child being so exposed to music, that that’s a lot like learning a language, right? Like there’s a whole part of your brain that’s being wired to attune to the nuances of that language that had it not been practiced, would have atrophied just like most of our like linguistic abilities, atrophies as we get older, but like there’s this really like plastic stage in our brains where like we could learn any language or learn any instrument because it’s really the same idea.

(15:36):

And so I just, I’m so glad that you brought that up and painted that picture because I feel like it really kind of helps people like, as we start to talk about something that could feel sort of abstract, like it helps people maybe have a concrete parallel to map it onto.

Lisa (15:52):

Yeah. As you speak, one thing that comes to mind, and let me know if this is going off topic too much, but today we’re going to also talk about my work that I do with mothers in the format of mother’s circle and in addition to the one-on-one work that I do and just to fill in the blanks between my music life growing up and then the somatic work that I’ve been doing, I’ve had my own practice since 2008. So like I’m coming up to 20 years soon and it was really singing that brought me there because I had to find this way to work with that instrument and a lot of singing well, especially as a classical singer means to consciously let go that includes your diaaphragms. I think that is one of the big correlations between the work I’ve done with mothers and my own mothering and the singing is that we need to somehow feel safe enough to let this natural coordination happen between all our diaphragms in the body.

(17:01):

And that of course is especially in the moment that we become mothers through birth. This is like a crucial part, but it’s really what brought me there because I went and I had Feldenkrais workshop on just the tongue and the larynx and I was so deeply impressed how these very subtle movement sequences that you explore in the Feldenkrais method, I actually unlocked this whole chain of my diaphragms in my body. And it made me so curious that in my beginning 20s, while I was still studying, singing, I started to study the Feldenkrais method in depth. And then for about 10 years, I studied with this amazing teacher whose name is Jeremy Krauss who specialized in working with children with disabilities. And for 10 years, I really was allowed to learn alongside him a lot about adaptability, a lot about abilities. And this was one big piece that informed my work.

(18:01):

And then because I also wanted to understand the medical side of it, I went and I became a medical massage therapist and I started to explore the structural work. I did a lot of work with fascia and I started to also listen to the different rhythms in the body studying craniosacral therapy. So for me, it was really piecing together this puzzle and then.

Dr. Sarah (18:20):

Like a map almost of how it’s all connected, how the body is all connected.

Lisa (18:26):

Yes, exactly. And that’s how I found the work of Dr. Peter Levine and I became a somatic experiencing practitioner and that was already a big piece of where I started to understand, oh, whenever I had to sing in front of an audience that I didn’t feel as open or appreciative, but rather like very judgmental or like almost predatory, like especially in university when you’re a young student and people look at you as something that’s to be taken apart, it can be very threatening. And I think that was a big piece of information for me to be like, oh, my whole somatic experience, my whole soma changes in this silent dialogue of how people look at each other and how they’re with each other, which is a big part of what you work with, right?

Dr. Sarah (19:18):

That’s so interesting. I’m just realizing it’s like almost like these building blocks of like, okay, first as a musician understanding like, okay, how does like my diaphragm and like my lungs and like when I move air and my vocal chords and how does it all, like how does my body make this music? And then to deepen that, you had to understand like these like subtle muscles in your, how the mouth and the throat and the layers. So then you’re like studying that and then you layer onto that, this knowledge of the whole body with the massage therapy and the muscle work, which connects the whole like head to toe, right? But then with the somatic experiencing work, it’s like, oh, there’s the space between the psychic, the psyche, like the psychological piece, right? When I perceive threat, when a person looks at me a certain way, my body actually experiences something.

(20:16):

And now because I know how all the building blocks go together, I can notice that like, oh, my heart starts to race or my fist clench or my stomach flips, but it’s not because of something that’s happening inside of me, it’s because of something that’s happening interpersonally.

(20:35):

I think the reason why I’m getting so granular is because I really feel like one of the biggest misunderstandings about sort of more somatic work in the therapeutic space because as a clinical psychologist and as a therapist who is very grounded in like neuroscience and empirical evidence, and I think people don’t recognize that like the somatic world fits very, very neatly and cleanly inside of that space, but it’s confusing because it’s so abstract. But I really want to help people who are listening who might not get it and think it’s something too abstract to be able to say like, “Oh no, no, no, this is like elemental.” It makes a lot of sense to be curious about how the body tells us information that informs our emotional and relational experience and vice versa, like our relational and emotional experience can inform how our body then moves.

Lisa (21:37):

Yeah. And I think like, I could even say it shorter. If I had to name four stages of the development of my work, it would be that I learned, “Oh, this is how my body moves. This is how I move this vehicle that we’re born into,” which is actually the very first thing that babies do when they arrive, right? They learn how motor control works. And then that was largely the work with Feldenkrais and with a lot of neurological diseases. I worked a lot with stroke patients, I worked a lot with Parkinson’s, and as I said, a lot with cerebral palsy or rare gene mutations, so all types of ways in which the body would not function as expected. So that would be, how does my body move? And then the next thing was like, “Oh, let me explore the structure. What is the structure?

(22:32):

What am I made of? ” But this is more like an outside experience. It is not an inside experience. It is very much like what I can touch. And the best example I can give you for this was an older doctor, she was maybe in her 70s and we started Feldenkrais together and she used to be a surgeon that operated shoulders for a lifelong career. And there was a moment when we did a very subtle movement of the shoulder and for the first time in her life, would she feel her own shoulder joint and it was a completely different experience from operating on people’s shoulder joints and knowing every external detail about a shoulder joint. Yeah. Oh, that’s so cool. Which is a really important distinctions for mothers to understand. It’s great that they’re experts out there. Wonderful. I myself, I wouldn’t be here, Sarah, having this conversation with you if there weren’t brilliant doctors out there who would have saved me twice for … I was pregnant three times, I have two healthy children and in between I lost one and I know that I’m only here.

(23:39):

Like my last two pregnancies, I wouldn’t have survived without expert doctors. So this is something wonderful and brilliant and it made me so aware of being part of this bigger net and the experience that we’re having in our own body, like we really are the only expert for. And I think this example of my colleague that looked at me and I could see her eyes wide and she was like, “This is what my shoulder joint feels like. I’ve never felt a shoulder joint before.” Imagine this I think is a really good example of what it means to do somatic work. Oh, and I understood, oh, this is in a different book. So there was a structural work, the functional work, and then I started to have this whole somatic experiencing aspect, which really goes into, so what is my personal experience? What does it feel like to have a body, which is different from how does it move or what is it made of?

(24:33):

It’s like, what does it feel like to have body? And only then was I able to start to translate on how do I bring all of this into connection with another, which is the relational part. So those would be the four stages. It would be the like, how do I move? What am I made of? How does it feel inside? And then how does it magically change once we get into connection with others?

Dr. Sarah (24:56):

Yeah. And I feel like the connection piece is where, I don’t know, it seems like you have found your home, like this is what you were probably meant to be doing because I have been in a room with you and I know what it is like to be in connection, like to have that sort of like interpersonal awareness of another. It’s just, I can’t articulate, like it feels so safe and like, I can’t even say it. It’s a feeling that I don’t have words for, but like, yeah, there’s like, you talk a lot about the idea of like embodied presence and you are very good at doing that. You are present and when a person in a room is present, it really has a ripple effect and allows everyone else to kind of, Oh wait, hold on. I’m orienting here where I’m here and I’m with these people. You get out of your head, you get out of the 10 things you have to do, you become aware and present. And I think that that’s something that is, it’s hard to find these days. We’ve trained ourselves out of it.

Lisa (26:30):

Yeah, that’s very sweet to hear. And I think that that’s also where I see every single mother. This is not to exclude the fathers at all. It’s just like from my body experience, this is what I can speak to best. And I have a respect for the enigma that sometimes my … Yeah, just like fathers are to me, because I guess in so many levels, a different experience. But I believe that we as mothers, we are an embodied relational presence. It took me a long time to understand that this is what I work with. I work with our embodied relational presence and you cannot take out any of the three pieces because this makes a whole lot of difference. And I have found this wonderful teacher, her name is Kimberly Ann Johnson, and I know that we found each other because of her back in the day when she was teaching a course together with my husband on Jaguar Parents.

Dr. Sarah (27:34):

Yes, that is. It is all comes full circle because Kimberly set up that training and I went to it and that is how I found Ali’s work and opened my whole mind to the somatic field of study and just getting to do more and more and more, just deepening that learning and getting to spend more time with you in that process, like what a fun …

Lisa (28:05):

Yeah, I’m so happy being here because I thought like, look, this is so interesting how the pieces fall into place. And so Kimberly, who’s also a bestselling author and is like doing trailblazing work of her own. She’s a very dear friend of my husband’s. And I saw what Kimberly was doing and I thought this is amazing to have someone around who is doing this much needed work of also including our lower body in the conversation because I was lucky enough to grow up with a mother and the grandmother that really taught me a lot about my body and overall I had a very supportive experience and I noticed not everyone is as lucky to get taught words that let you express what you need. And there’s always like, it’s an ongoing journey because our body changes, our needs change. And now that I’m a mother, I’m in the same position of where I want to teach my children the same, like this body literacy. And for me, that means a literacy to express how you make choices in life that are aligned with the needs that you have as a human being.

(29:14):

So this is where, for me, alignment comes in because sometimes if we just make choices that are aligned with our ideals, but not with our actual soma, with what we are capable to also feel, then we sometimes land in precarious situations and our body starts to speak. Mostly it starts to speak through pain or through numbness. Those are the two, like if that is a continuum, those are the body’s favorite ways to say, either screams at you or it stops talking to you, which is very much what happens with your kids too.

(29:45):

And so Kimberly definitely has been a wonderful influence in those last years for me to bring this work to more, to start to share what I’m passionate about with more women in my field. And And she developed this curriculum, which is basically an eight week journey where you travel through the hidden arc of motherhood and you go together to look at the places that usually society doesn’t cover. It doesn’t give it a loud voice. It is not spoken about clearly enough that we find ourselves mirrored in how we find the mainstream is writing about or talking about motherhood. And I think it is so important to include the big transition we go through as a woman. This is one thing is that our own relationship with our body changes and because our body changes a lot. And often this is secondary to everything that’s happening with this young life that’s all of a sudden our soul responsibility together with a partner, if we’re lucky, but it’s a very intense job.

(31:01):

And so this is one thing that’s easily overlooked is our own methomorphosis. And this is something that Mother Circle wants to also take care of because the better we as mothers are cared for, the more effortlessly our children are cared for. And this is something that I see as elemental. We have a culture that encourages us to give our everything for our children and abandon ourselves. And this is not the way I believe in. So you mentioned it before I call my work, the place of my work is called circle of nurture. And it really comes that there needs to be a somewhat circular movement of giving and receiving. And that needs to happen continuously. And so mother circle for me is filling in the gap of the mothers receiving not only each other’s attention, not only Kimberly’s wisdom through my mouth, like sharing her wonderful curriculum, but it’s really receiving their own attention, their own love, and making space to receive more from the people around them.

(32:17):

And to make this an express necessity is not a right. It’s just a necessity that we all get nurtured because we’re the nurturers. So hence circle of nurture.

Dr. Sarah (32:30):

Right. I mean, the idea of, because there’s so much right now about parental burnout. There’s a lot of studies being done and papers being written about it. It’s becoming like an actual operationalized and like identified a thing that one can study. They’ve measured it now. And I even did a podcast, like a deep dive on parental burnout. I’ll link it in the show notes because it summarizes some of the research. It’s pretty interesting. I learned a lot when I was like prepping for it, but it’s like, okay, we can pour all this in time and energy into understanding burnout and putting bandaids on it, but is a pretty simple solution. Not easy, but simple. Fill it back up. Make sure that we’re not having a one way stream of energetic flow. We can’t just only be output. There has to be input. It’s like really basic math. And this is, I think, what you are saying here.

Lisa (33:42):

Yeah, Sarah, because I think that we are at a point where mainstream has picked up on the fact that mothers are undernourished or undernurtured. And so there is this idea that, oh, love, you need to include more self-care into your routines. And it’s one of the things that awakens a very healthy anger in me because it’s like, “Oh, there is one more to do on your list. Now go take care of yourself.” And we’re not meant to do that alone. It is ridiculous. Even though I say it’s important we receive our own attention, I do know from experience that in order to do that, we need a supportive layer around us. So this is maybe the biggest secret I’m going to share with you is like, even though we deeply need to receive our own attention and our own care, in order to do this, we need someone who is space around us and they don’t need to hold much. They just need to be there.

Dr. Sarah (34:50):

Yeah. The perfect way to illustrate this, that any mother listening will totally be like, “Oh yeah, no, I know exactly what you’re talking about. ” It’s like, you know, when your kid wants to play, they don’t need you. They want to play. They’ve got a lot of energy and they want to play. But as soon as you leave the room, they stop playing. They don’t need you in there to do anything except just be there. And as soon as you leave, they’re not even paying attention to you. They’re deeply doing their own thing. But as soon as you leave, it’s like, “Well, you popped the bubble. Come back.” We do that for our kids all the time and we accept it and we just assume we … So yes, I get that. I get that I am a bubble, a little protective bubble, a container in which my child does all this self work, but they have the bubble.

(35:43):

And when the bubble pops, it’s harder for them to do that stuff. It’s the same for us. We didn’t grow out of that. We need someone to hold the space for us, for us to do that sort of internal exploring and feeling and reflecting and integrating. It’s not … Yes, you might do some of that work individually, but the bubble has to be there and the bubble is the circle is the thing that has to be held by another.

Lisa (36:15):

Yes. And it’s this giving permission, the silent act of like liberating someone to be in their flow. And one aspect that I have come to love a lot about this work is the intergenerational aspect. It’s that many things can be said, many things can be read. And when you’re in the same space with someone who’s already walked a path, I try to always make sure I have grandmothers in the circle because they can give you this embodied sense of, “Oh, I’ll get through it. ” They’ve weathered the storm and there is a very powerful transmission in like just sitting together and they look at you knowing that you’ll get through it.

(37:11):

And this is also something that we tend to lose easily in times of more demand. Our sight gets narrowed down and we tend to seize like once you’re pregnant, you see all the, you know, like the pregnant women in the street and all the baby stuff. And before you didn’t notice, it’s like this, you start to be in a bubble. And one of the things that mother circle does, I think is widen the bubble that we’re in. And it gives us more wiggle space to also, to come back to what I said in the beginning, maybe to be more gentle with ourselves and to also be forgiving and honoring of this transition that we’re in. Like being with ourselves as someone who’s learning an elemental new skill and to know that we’re not born into knowing how to do this right, but we have a possibility and a right to learn this step by step. And I think it’s something that can become much more a felt experience in this format.

Dr. Sarah (38:19):

So who, like obviously I can imagine anybody could benefit from going to like doing a mother circle, right? But like, who is it for and why might someone say, “Oh, you know, I think I need something like this.

Lisa (38:38):

Yeah, I think it’s when you start … There is like a moment when you’re just in the thick of it and you don’t have any space to notice anything. That’s usually not the best time. But as soon as you have just a little pocket of awareness that, “Oh, I seem to be a little bit like in my own narrow bubble. I seem to be a little bit stuck here and I’d like to just take a breath or I would actually need to pause, but I don’t know how.” Or, “Oh, I’ve noticed I’m not feeling anything.” That moment that you notice, but you don’t know where to turn and what is the next good step, mother circle is a really good next step when you feel stuck somewhere along the journey of mothering. And to give you an example, one thing that I really am very grateful for is that the women who join my mother’s circles are feeling something that you mentioned before, something about feeling safe enough to show up.

(39:48):

And that means my mother’s circles are very inclusive. I, as someone who’s lost a child, know that there, for example, are no places for women to go that are mothers, but their children are not around. And while we often say just like, “Oh, we feel a little bit like, Oh, that’s a sad experience.” And then we try to look away, but we miss a lot of opportunity of bonding over the journey of motherhood. And I have found that this is usually something that whatever experience you’ve lived, when you come to mother circle, you’re adding one more piece that enriches every other woman in the circle. And another example I can give you is adoptive mothers. There’s even like a wonderful colleague, Karla Johnston. I need to look up if I said her name correctly, but she’s an adoptive mother and she’s also running mother circle only for adoptive mothers.

(40:51):

So someone who would feel better in an environment dedicated to that, that also exists. And I like to have this diversity of mothering in this circle because it really opens us up to the samenesses. We see, “Oh, that’s different, but oh, I’m not alone with this. ” So usually I have two or three mothers that have just have a newborn and it’s like they’re nursing during the calls. The calls are being recorded. So sometimes you come in later or you drop out earlier and, or you’re off camera sometimes, but we start to know each other over this arch of eight weeks. And then usually I have some calls in between where we just dive into some of the things that are not covered by the curriculum but are highly relevant. For example, patch work, family dynamics are something that I have found is also not a place that’s easily to be found, how that affects us.

(41:54):

I know what that’s like because I have my children with two different fathers and I love to also include this as a harbor that we can speak to the enormous metamorphosis that happens as we grow into a different family unit that often is very different from what we expected or you might have your child in partnership and then you find yourself without a partner. And again, your mothering journey changes so much. And so to have this space where you can just slow down and start to listen to the way your body tells the story and other bodies tell the story, a lot of magic happens.

Dr. Sarah (42:40):

Yeah. I love that the diversity of it, like you were saying, the intergenerational piece, having people who have gone through the developmental journeys before, like the developmental timeline, but also to have people who have entered into motherhood from different doors and to be able to learn from and see ourselves in those other people, even though our stories might feel different and like the ability for some people who might feel like, “I don’t know if that I’m supposed to be here or like I want to be here. I feel like I’m supposed to be here, but I’m not sure if I’m allowed to be here.” To break that story into peace, to break that open and rewrite that, like, oof, that feels so important for many many people.

Lisa (43:36):

And I can give you another example of my dear colleague, Lucy Rowet. She’s a sixtologist from the UK and we’ve done some work for women in person also that had a lot to do with accepting our own bodies and the way that we can bring care to our own bodies. And she herself has had two ectopic pregnancies, but at the same time, she really felt like she wanted to be closer to this whole bubble of mothering and wanted to understand it better. And so last year, she was in mother cycle for a whole round before she had only taught, but then she like joined for it and this year she’s like about to have her baby and like in actually like in two or three weeks and I’m sharing this because she’s a journalist and she’s writing extensively about it and I know I can share it. And it’s been, for her, it’s been a wonderful place also to prepare for motherhood.

(44:35):

So to be allowed, it’s almost like there is the secret club of mothers and to be allowed into these inner rooms is something that I think it is sacred and if we have this understanding, we’re here to be with what mothering brings up. I’ve also had midwives, people that don’t have children of their own, but they are so elemental to the mothering journey that I felt like, yes, come, bring your wisdom, sit with us. And they said they walked out with a much deeper understanding of the women that they work with, with even more reverence. And us as mothers, imagine you get to be one-on-one with a midwife that’s seen so many things and metabolize so much. So I really, now as I’m sharing this with you, I just realized how many gifts I’m receiving through Mother Sex. And maybe the last example I’m going to give you just to round out this arch is that we start, and this is by design because Kimberly has designed this with a lot of intention.

(45:45):

We start by introducing ourselves via our mother line. And in that moment, I can give you this example if I manage. So I am Lisa, I’m the daughter of Barbara, I am the granddaughter of Trowda and Maria, and I’m the great granddaughter of Yosefa, Onya, Maria, and Paola. And I’m the mother of Maya and Levy and a little spark of light. And the moment we start to name our grandmothers and great grandmothers, usually we start the circle and the introduction is very short because people are like, “Oh God, I don’t even know the name of my grandmother.” She was only just Oma or granny and then the names start to drop in and by the end, usually we have a very long introduction because the names arrive and there’s this shift where people say like, “God, I always saw her as this old woman, but now I have this … ” I started to connect to her as this young woman that went through the same stories as me and it does something so potent in like connecting to what brought us here in the first place and just understanding we are resting on one successful birth after the other through generations like that in itself is wonderful and it puts into perspective how much can go wrong because there’s been things happening all the time, but something, we’re part of a line that some elemental things just went incredibly right for such a long time. And that I always walk away just trusting life a bit more and trying to do less of it myself because I realize it’s not just me.

Dr. Sarah (47:42):

Yeah. It pops the illusion a bit that we’re making all of this happen. Everything rests on us to make it happen. It’s like, well, no, like it feels that way and a lot is telling us that. But when we actually zoom out, like really like you’re zoom out in this felt sense way of like across generations, there’s a lot that we are just on, we’re just here for the ride, like we’re just in the passenger seat. We’ve got a whole, what is it, like a auto drive, like the car that self-drives, not self-drives, but like it’s not a manual stick, it’s an auto shift. There’s a lot helping us out here.

Lisa (48:31):

And Sarah, I think the very best investment, if it’s like someone is like, “Oh, why should I do mother circle?” Is anyone who wants their children to be loving and respectful towards them. I think mother circle is the best work we can do because it’s our way of being loving and respectful towards ourselves and the mothers that came before us and it works like magic. The moment we live that in ourselves, we don’t need to teach our children explicitly because they learn it implicitly. Every breath that we take with reverence is a way that they absorb that.

Dr. Sarah (49:10):

Yeah. Yeah. It’s more about living it in the every day than teaching it in teachable moments. It’s back to that part of me, that voice, this sort of like good student voice that’s like, “But what if there’s a teachable moment and I missed it? ” It’s like, “Oh, but just being in my life with gratitude for all that I am capable of and all the women that came before me have given me, the kids will also…” That is like true teachable moments, but it’s like osmosis.

Lisa (49:52):

I like that. Osmosis is beautiful.

Dr. Sarah (49:55):

Yeah. True. If people want to know more about the circle work that you do, and you have a mother circle coming up too, how can people connect with you and where should we send them?

Lisa (50:13):

One way to catch up with me is on Instagram and Circle of Nurture, and then online www.circleofnurture.com is where you’ll find everything. And I have an open class come up on February 9th, I will be teaching a class called Mother Glue. I love to just talk about the things that are most alive for me and at the moment it’s like the things that hold us together when everything else is falling apart. And so everyone is very welcome to just join and get a bit of a feel of what it’s like to be in that field together. And then the next mother circle is going to start on March 9 and we’re going to meet for 75 minutes every Monday online. And then there’s some optional calls in between that you can just join if you want to sit more with a story of one mother that is bringing her particular wisdom to the circle.

(51:11):

Those are usually mothers and women that work also with other mothers and women and speak from their personal experience as well, which is usually a very rich piece, but it’s just like a little add on. And the core sessions are every Monday just to start the week together, arrive in our bodies and arrive with a moment to honor ourselves so we can effortlessly show up for our kids the rest of it.

Dr. Sarah (51:41):

Oh, I love that. I hope everyone listening checks this out or sends this to someone who might love it. And if you’re listening in like the future, right, because like people come back to these episodes, go to Lisa’s website because she does these regularly. So if it’s past March when you’re listening, go check it out because this is worth looking into.

Lisa (52:07):

And also, I need to make a shout out. It’s always worth checking the mothercircle.com page where my colleagues are also posting their in- person circles because if you have a chance to attend an in- person circle near you, please go and build mother culture around you.

Dr. Sarah (52:24):

Oh, that’s amazing. Okay. We’ll link all that in the show notes so people can find it really easily. And thank you so much for coming on. It set my day in a totally nice direction.

Lisa (52:38):

Oh, thank you for having me.

Dr. Sarah (52:47):

Thank you so much for listening. I hope this conversation about why mothers need support, containment, and connection, just as much as our children do, has left you feeling a little less alone, a little more understood, and maybe even a bit more feeling some permission to receive the support that you deserve. If you’re finding yourself wanting to take the next step, whether that’s learning more about somatic work, community support, or finding spaces where you don’t have to hold everything together by yourself, you can find links to the resources Lisa mentioned in the episode description.

(53:20):

And if you’re interested in additional support for yourself, your child or your family, I’ve also linked my group practice, Upshur Bren Psychology Group, in the episode description as well. With both virtual and in- person services designed to be effective and convenient, we offer support with everything from anxiety, burnout, and emotional overwhelm, to parenting challenges, relationship dynamics, and child development concerns all in one place. You can find a direct link to my group practice in the episode description, or visit upshurbren.com to learn more about the supportive resources that we offer. I’ll be back again on Thursday, answering one of your questions in our Beyond the Sessions Q&A episode, and until then, don’t be a stranger.