CHANGE: Jessie Harrold on Rewilding Through Rites of Passage (Ep. 57)
“When a woman decides she has had enough of living by anyone else’s rules but her own, she usually decides to change her life.”
SUBSCRIBE: APPLE PODCASTS / SPOTIFY
BONUS CONTENT: PATREON
In this episode of Moonwise, we speak with coach, women’s mentor and doula Jessie Harrold about supporting women through radical life transformations. We discuss her approach to rites of passage as identity shift and why she feels we’re collectively being called toward transformation. We talk about reconnection with our authenticity and reclaiming parts of ourselves that were framed as “too much.” Jessie shares her 4-element model of radical transformation and why a framework for navigating these shifts is so helpful.
We also talk about:
The lack of research in Western culture about rites of passage
Why the shift to motherhood is so profound for many women
How capitalism conditions us to believe mother is a demotion
The importance of rewilding and connecting to the earth
Core competencies we gain through a rite of passage
Mothering as a counter-cultural act
Jessie Harrold 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. Jessie works one-on-one with women and mothers, facilitates mentorship programs, women’s circles and rituals, and hosts retreats and wilderness quests. Jessie is also the author of "Project Body Love: my quest to love my body and the surprising truth I found instead,” as well as the forthcoming title, “Mothershift: Reclaiming Motherhood as a Rite of Passage.” Jessie’s work has been featured in Spirituality & Health, Green Parent, Expectful and Explore Magazine. She is also the host of The Becoming Podcast. Jessie lives on the east coast of Canada where she mothers her two children, writes, and tends to her land.
Links:
—> Leave us a written review on Apple Podcasts, and get a shout out on the show!
CHANGE: Jessie Harrold on Rewilding Through Rites of Passage - Ep. 57 (Transcription)
Dorothee: Hello, and welcome to Moonwise Podcast, a space to celebrate seasons, cycles, and writes of passage. I'm your host, Dorothee Sophie Royal, And today we speak with coach, women's mentor, and doula, Jessie Harrold, about supporting women through radical life transformations. We discuss her approach to rights of passage as identity shift and why she feels we're collectively being called toward transformation. We talk about reconnection with our authenticity and reclaiming parts of ourselves that were framed as too much.
Jessie shares her four element model of radical transformation and why a framework for navigating these shifts can be so helpful. We also talk about the lack of research in western culture about rights of passage. Why the shift to motherhood is so profound for many women. How capitalism conditions us to believe mothering is a demotion, the importance of rewilding and connecting to the earth, and core competencies we can gain through a rite of passage. Jessie has been supporting women through radical life transformations and other rights 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. Jessie is also the author of Project Body Love, my quest to love my body, and the surprising truth I found instead as well as the forthcoming title, Mother Shift, reclaiming motherhood as a rite of passage. She is also the host of the becoming pod cast. She lives on the east coast of Canada where she mothers her two children, rights, and tensed her land. Hi, Jessie, thank you so much for being on the show today.
Jessie: Thanks for having me.
Dorothee: I have been following you on Instagram and reading your blog post for a while now. And I've come to think of you as a thought leader or a heart leader in the matrescence space and I just appreciate so much the way that you write about transformations and rights of passage in such a real and compassionate and thoughtful way, so I can't wait to chat with you today.
Jessie:Thank you so much. Oh, that's wonderful. Yeah. I'm looking forward to this.
Dorothee: Yeah. You know, I'm sure many of the listeners of my show know how interested I am in rites of passage and how much I lament the lack of support for many of us in the dominant culture around rights of passage. And so I wanted to start with you and ask you how do you define a rite of passage in your work or your experience?
Jessie: Oh, that's a reallygreat, great question because it's sort of there are many different ways of looking at what a rite of passage look like. And I think that I look at it somewhat generously in terms of what what might be considered a rite of passage. I always say that they're the kind of changes that change everything. They are not necessarily something that you seek out, but they can be. They can also come unbitten. Some of our rites of passage are like these age old transformations that we've been going through since the dawn of time, like birth, and menopause and things like death or illness, partnership, things like that. Those are all rights of passage. But also, I have been really interested in exploring what I call modern day rites of passage in these kinds of transformations that so many of us are making to our lives that are actually really specific to the times that we're in. So thinking about how many people I know who are changing their lives because of burnout or because of accumulated trauma. Because of things like climate change and some of the, you know, pandemic.
I can't believe I didn't mention that first. You know, there's there's our world is changing. Right? So there are I think there's sort of a growing number of calls, I suppose, capital c calls that we, as a collective, have been experiencing toward transformation. So, yeah, anything from having a baby to changing your career and everything in between, I think of a rite of passage, particularly as an identity shift.
So as opposed to, like, a behavior shift to, like, change to the things that you do or say or think this is a change to who you are. And I tend to be pretty generous in thinking about that also. Like, you can you can change who you are by, you know, thinking of yourself. Like, who am I now as a as a leader as opposed to, I don't know, whatever you did before. But right now as an entrepreneur.
Who am I now as a mother? So there's lots of different ways to kind of look at this who am I now question that I think writes a passage ask us.
Dorothee: I love that question. Who am I now? And one thing that I think about often is that many of the transformations that women tend to naturally undergo have been held in a kind of secrecy and often historically a history of shame attached to them. They're internal physical processes that people may not be able to recognize from the outside but that are that do. They they change everything. And, yeah, I wonder yeah. How do you how do you think about that?
Jessie: That's a good questionwith a number of different places we can go. I mean, because I think it's true. You know, you think of the the biggest rights of passage you will ever make, birth and death. And in our sort of modern western dominant culture, those two things have become increasingly medicalized, increasingly, like, sort of institutionalized, I guess, will say. And hidden then from the community.
So it used to be that we made these transformations in community. And now we're making them, we are actually removed from our community to make these rights of passage. So that's a really, like, a distinction, I guess, from the way we used to do things.
Dorothee: Yeah. I mean, that makes sense. I'm just just now picturing, you know, in a village setting if a woman was in labor and giving birth, you might actually be hearing some of the cries. And so when you were entering that yourself, you may not be so surprised by the incredible power of that moment and and the same with death if you're seeing bodies that awake or being buried and have that be part of a daily part of life, then it perhaps isn't such a shock.
Jessie: Absolutely. Yeah. I think that's a a big difference. And you're right. I think you touched on this idea of kind of going through these inner transformations that the world of romance doesn't necessarily see, and I think that that's I mean, that's common no matter, like, what time and face your thinking of, but I think that, yeah, there's this idea that because we've lost a lot of the language or ability to talk about rights of passage that we don't necessarily see those kinds of changes they're absolutely monumental.
We don't see them in the right of passage. So we just we don't have a framework to to talk about what comes up when we go through those kinds of transformations and what challenges exist and just power our hearts as we're as we're going through that. You know?
Dorothee: Yeah. And I'm thinking about how social media doesn't necessarily help with that, though I have to credit social media for finding your work and the work of they're amazing, you know, people like minded, but there's that shadow side too of of people really skimming the surface and and of course not wanting to share those personal details with just the public at large. I wanted to pull a quote from something you wrote that I absolutely love. And you write, when a woman decides she has had enough of living by anyone else's rules but her own, she usually decides to change her life. And yeah, I just love that idea of kind of coming home to one's own sense of who am I now and how do I want to live as a result of that?
For many women, these transformations are kind of built into our biology in certain ways, but then there's, of course, many other ways to come to that moment. So you've worked with so many women in that process. I'm just curious, yeah, what that's looked like.
Jessie: curious, yeah, what that's looked like. Oh, I love that question. So this is it. Right? Like, so there's this there's all of our individual changes that happen to our lives, whether that's, you know, having a baby changing our career, losing a loved one, getting a diagnosis like all of these.
Major catalyzing moments that tend to kind of spark the beginning of transformation. And they look you know, every which way for each individual person. But what I get really excited about is that I see there is this collective nature to the changes that we're all making right now. And it's exactly that it's this like not wanting to play by your rules, but your own this sort of reconnection with ourselves our authenticity. And I think for those of us who've and by this, I kind of meet everyone, who've been socialized away from that.
Kind of sense of authentic self. It's a reclaiming, a reconnecting, and a reclaiming Those parts of yourself that you've been told are too much or not enough or that didn't fit in some way with the dominant culture. So, like, your individual change might look like a shift in career, but I think so much of these things are actually about us reclaiming our authenticity and our wholeness. And that's the collective rumbling. I think that that's the thread that ties so many of these transformations together who really unifies us.
Dorothee: I love that so much. And it just dawned on me that the question, "who am I now?" has so much compassion and flexibility built into it. And I feel like if that's something I would ask myself even on a daily basis, it would it would relieve me of some aspects of perfectionism, of trying to live up to other people's expectations, of, like, beating myself up for not being this certain way that I identify. I'm this I am a responsible kind of organized person, and therefore, how dare I, like, have a mess or something like that?
And to actually be able to ask ourselves that question and be okay with hey, things have changed like today. I'm not able to be that person and so who am I and what can I do? Yeah.
Jessie: I really love that. I love kind of stretching the the notion of what we kind of think of in terms of identity shift. One of the ways that I like to illustrate this is when I so a few years ago, I wrote a book called project body love, my quest to love my body and the surprising truth I found instead. So it was it was a rite of passage that I guided myself through to begin to explore how to sort of be in relationship, I guess, with my body again. And And so you don't think of that necessarily as an identity shift.
In fact, our entire diet culture thinks of our, you know, shifting our relationship with our body as being a bunch of new behaviors that you need to do, like a better shinier to do list that you stick to. Yeah. And And so what I realized was that I actually did have to go through an identity shift to kind of fully you know, reclaim that relationship with my body. So who am I now that I'm no longer willing to change what I look like? Who am I now that I am no longer someone who spends all of their spare time exercising.
Who am I now that I'm you know, and the other kind of question that this calls up is, like, who am I now, but where do I belong now. And so again, in diet culture, that's another, like, another really tricky place. Who who who do I belong to? If I no longer am doing x y z diet or showing up to this gym or whatever, So it's kind of like and I use that example because people don't think of identity shift. They think of, you know, we tend to just in our sort of like get things done culture we think of the things we're doing differently and we don't necessarily ask if we're becoming someone different What's really interesting about that question too, it's actually, oh, I'm gonna I'm gonna forget the name of the person that was a sports psychologist who actually did some research around what happened to athletes when they rather than sort of setting on target, like a time target or something for racing, that they ask the question or or, you know, ask the question who am I now that who am I now that I'm a gold medalist?
For example, or who am I now that and and that perspective of thinking of themselves as someone who as opposed to hitting a target of some kind actually allowed them to make more meaningful and sustainable changes to their lives. And that's how I think of it too. Like, when we ask that who am I now a question, I am I am someone who, like, imagine asking that around your self care, for example, rather than putting a bunch of self care to do listy type things on your calendar. Like, who am I now that I consider myself worthy of my own good care. That's the kind of question I'm really interested in.
Dorothee: It's not something that that we really come across as much. It's like, no, do the facial and make sure you drink the celery juice and but why? What's the intention What's the motivation? How are we treating ourselves underneath the the habits and the actions?
Jessie: Yeah. Exactly. So that's kind of a a need way of thinking of rights of passage and identity shifts, and I think it's really meaningful for people. Wow.
Dorothee: Yeah. That opens up a lot, a lot of possibility. I love it. Well, you talk about three different ways in which you guide people through rights of passage and one of the aspects that I'm intrigued by is rewilding. I think you talk about reconnecting, rewilding, reclaiming, and so I'm really interested in this rewilding piece and this idea of connecting with the earth and the elements and, yeah, can you tell me about how that works in in the framework.
Jessie: Yeah. Definitely. So there's a couple of different sort of facets of the idea of rewilding the juices. How we often think of it, which is to to walk hand in hand with the earth as we're going through these major transformations. We always, across time and culture, have turned to the earth to support us during times of change.
You know, there are changes all the time. You know, we witness if we're connected to it for the three wild things part, like, if we're connected to it, then we witness the life, death, life cycle, all the time. All the time. And so there's these beautiful examples, these incredible metaphors that we can lean into to support ourselves. And we used to touch base with ourselves and reconnect with ourselves on a seasonal basis.
So there's the literal experience of of tuning into the seasons. And also, being on the earth, I think I think we we become more of who we are. In a lot of ways. And so to me, for me, it's always been a through line to that sense of my authentic self, which is the other part of rewilding. I think of, like, a rewilding of our hearts.
Like, who we truly are underneath all of that conditioning who are we as our wild cells. And that's kind of the other side of it that I really like to explore. With the people that I'm working with.
Dorothee: Beautiful. Yeah. I mean, the the sun rises in the morning despite how dark it was and the trees bud again. And so if you can't take inspiration or or support from that, What else is there really? I remember feeling very helped by observing nature in in difficult times and really needing to take walks and just see what I notice in nature and especially in in times of grief or loss or change.
Yeah. Are there overarching kind of like patterns or things that you see in someone going through one of these great transformations and is there particular advice you give them? Or, like, what would you say to someone who's in the midst of just, like, this chrysalis of of becoming and they just feel super lost and they just feel like they're in the dark. They don't know who they are. They don't know what's gonna happen. How do you approach that?
Jessie: Well, I in fact have a way. First of all, did they answer the question about what I said? I'd probably usually almost always say it's normal. Like, Sometimes I think that's, you know, we make ourselves wrong for the amount of time we take to traverse transformation. We make ourselves wrong for feeling grief and loss about things we don't give ourselves permission to feel grief and loss about, like, there's so many ways in which we kind of should ourselves out of our natural process.
So that would be, like, what I would say to anyone kind of going through major change right now. But actually, yeah, I do have this sort of overarching framework that I use with the people that I work with. So it's called the four elements of radical transformation. And so the little bit of backstory behind this was in talking about how we we don't have a really great kind of lexicon for rights of passage or models of rights of passage in our dominant culture. Now when I started working with with women going through these sort of major transformations, I started out as a doula.
And I was a doula for many, many years before working with people in sort of a broader sense during times of change in their lives. And I also am a researcher at heart. So I have a master's degree, and I love doing research. And so, like, when I started to kind of move into this broader work of supporting people through major life change. I gotta get my hands on the research.
I gotta figure out, you know, what's out there that is already supporting people that already exists what kind of literature is there around life transitions in general. And I was sorely disappointed by what I found. You know, generally a lot of this stuff was written in another era. So it doesn't address necessarily what we're talking about. These modern day aspects of our our transformations.
They're also written kind of by and for a lot of like old white psychologists often mail slash anthropologists. A lot of it is is culturally appropriated or misunderstood information from other cultures Yeah. So when and it just, like, it just didn't fit the experience that I was witnessing women that I was working with. You know, it's a super linear kind of like set of goal and head in that direction and it was really contextless and you know, the people that I was working with were deeply influenced by the ecosystem of the lives that they lived, like their family is there. Jobs, their communities, their roles, and responsibilities.
And so making change wasn't about setting a goal and going for it. It was so much more complex than that. And I was just so I was not finding anything that was, like, particularly supportive of the people that I was working with, so I sat out to make a model myself and did a lot of, like, interviews with people and pulled together all the research that I could. And created this model the four elements of radical transformation. So I'll, like, go over it in a nutshell.
And and hopefully, people listening can kind of find themselves within the descriptions that I offer up. So the first element is Earth, and this is usually kind of the first phase of transformation that we go through. I should say that though I have to describe these linearly, it's more of a circular or even an iterative path like going back and forth between the elements sometimes. So earth is this time of orientation. Oftentimes when we go through change, One thing will shift, and then a cascade of other things in our lives will change, and it'll just feel like, oh my god, everything is changing.
I, like, totally feel unmoored. So earth is about, like, naming the change, orienting to what's true for you in your life right now. Just getting your feet on the ground again. You know, they say when in, like, you know, wilderness, first aid. Very safe.
If you're feeling if you're lost in the woods, then you shouldn't go crashing around looking for the path, you should sit down. And orient yourself. And that is what we do in Earth. The next element is water, and it's all about the watery work, the washing away, that release the loss in the grief. This is a really it's such an important part of change.
And I think in our culture where we we tend to kind of push forward into the next thing and just set new and better and shinier goals. And the idea of grief which is taboo in and of itself like, letting go of that which is no longer is just we just don't do it. Particularly when like I said before, like, we don't give ourselves permission to grieve things. So the transition in the motherhood is where I first started noticing this. Like, It's supposed to be heavy, and the culture does not like it when we miss our old selves.
And losing yourself in motherhood is considered to be a a really big no no. So but but I really believe that you can't do the growth without the grief. So doing this watery work of really attending to otherwise unintended griefs about what's no longer true for you. Whether that's a good thing, maybe you're relieved about it, but maybe you're you're letting it go and it's hard. The next phase is air and it's So it's when it's the liminal space.
It's this in between time. It's when people tend to say, everything is up in the air. And they have you know, they're no longer who they were, but they're not quite haven't quite stepped into who they're becoming yet. And it's super uncomfortable because our society really likes us to have, you know, measurables and goals and and outcomes and things to work towards. And this is a time when you just don't know.
You don't know. And again, another one that we try to bypass off because it's so uncomfortable. But there's just this beauty in the liminal space where, like, if nothing is sure, then everything is possible. Right? And there's there's so much creativity.
There's the ability to tap into your intuition during this time to help guide you, to reconnect with yourself. There's so much. If you can hold your feed to the fire of this discomfort in air. It's an incredible time. And then we move into fire, which is the part that everybody wants to skip to.
It's like this kind of this, you know, it's gently moving forward into who you're becoming. And again, you know, not a big, like, goal setter in this kind of context, you know, we I'll just put my geek hat on here and say that you know, writes a passage or a developmental process. So you are becoming someone new. So if you as you are now sets a goal for your six months from now self. It will no longer apply because you won't be the same person in six months.
So we have to do a really kind of a scale back, gentle, experimental, curiosity driven, and approach to exploring who are you now, and what are you stepping into. And that's the work on fire. So that's like the overarching framework that I use to support people. And usually so I actually have a quiz that people can take and find out, like, which phase they're in now, and then there's an ebook and a five day, little mini course, so they get sent that helps them with tools and resources for that particular element. Because I'm sure people listening will be able to, like, oh, yeah.
I think I'm probably here. And just how should I just you know, the orange yourself, like, back to that idea of being normal. Like, imagine, oh, okay. This gnarly feeling that I'm having about whatever change that's going on. It's actually normal.
And here are some things that I can do to work through it. So incredibly powerful.
Dorothee: Wow. What you just described is exactly what I've gone through in particular in the past to motherhood, it just describes it to a t, and what an an amazing work you've done here to to articulate that and formulate that. Thank you. And it I just crack up when you're like, oh, you know, it's It's generally older, you know, white men in the past. And I'm like, wow, big surprise.
Vatria essence wasn't like a big theme of their research. And I'm I'm just always blown away that there there isn't more out there around this, but it it is like a very circular and perhaps even intuitive on some ways, perhaps what people would describe as a feminine energy and so hasn't really been categorized perhaps by our western intellectual thought and it's so cool that you're kind of bridging those two things and giving it language. So I I just really appreciate that.
Jessie: Yes. It never fails to amaze me that we're, I mean, the word matrescence was coined in the seventies by Dana Rafael who was a social scientist. She also coin to the word doula, so we love her. But then the word itself and sort of everything attached to it, all of our understanding of it, kind of went underground until about ten years ago when Dr. O'Reilly Athen, who's a prophet, Columbia University PhD, started to do a little bit of research around the idea of matrescence and particularly not just sort of the again, not the behavioral shifts, not the changes to the things you do, which is what we often talk about when it comes to motherhood. But but some of those deeper more kind of impactful identity of spiritual shifts that many mothers experience and anyways, so yeah, it shocks me that we've been becoming mothers since forever, literally by definition.
And our, at least, our modern dominant culture is only just getting around to really in the last couple of years. Exploring my lessons. And right now, we know that it happens. Like, we know that there's a change but we don't necessarily know how it happens. And that's kind of where the four elements model ties into to the right of passage of matrescence.
So we can use that model as a way of of describing how it happens, describing the arc of experience that mothers go through. So that they can again, like find themselves, locate themselves within that, know that they're normal, and know how to resource themselves well. And I think of this often for, like, the kind of postpartum support that we provide to mothers you know, if we know kind of where on that trajectory of experience they are, we can know better how to support them, like what's valuable to them. Yeah. So anyways, we're only just going there though. You know, we're just beginning and you articulate a theory that I think is is really interesting and true in that when we ask ourselves, why is this transition to motherhood so particularly difficult in the time and place we're currently living in. I mean, of course, historically, we can't really know.
I mean, I'm sure women have had all kinds of difficulties and challenges. But in this moment, you know, where we're, you know, thought to be afforded rights and we have certain resources and, you know, we can vote and all this kind of stuff. Why is it still so hard?
Dorothee: And you talk about how becoming a mother in our society is often considered a demotion because of the way in which capitalism is conditioning us to think about productivity and our worth and our contribution and how we become almost instantaneously invisible in that structure. And, yeah, I would just love to hear your thoughts about that.
Jessie: Mhmm. Yeah. That's something that if I've written about it extensively in my my book that I have coming out around sort of this all of it is context. Right? Like, there's so much context here. You spoke about sort of the particular modern day challenges that we have with the transition to mother kind of go. I wrote an article a couple years ago now, I guess, called Patocin, Patriarchy, and Pinterest.
Why becoming a mother is harder now than it's ever been more. And it's true I speculate whether or not it's easier to you know, worry about putting up enough preserves for the winter, you know, making all your babies close by by hand, but But I do believe that we have this kind of particular confluence of modern day kind of influences factors that make it really challenging. And yes, one of them is our kind of capital to drive to drive. And that motherhood demands that we opt out of that in a lot of ways. And if we don't, we pay.
We often pay for it. And I should just pause and say that we don't all have that option. Right? Like that that, you know, speaking of some of some of the modern day context that make this really challenging, that there isn't you know, universal maternity leave offer, like, a reasonable amount of maternity leave. That's a huge problem.
So, no, it's not it's not entirely possible to opt out. But yet, you know, motherhood still demands it. And so it becomes incredibly challenging. And yeah. So, you know, it makes me wonder or think that it's no wonder that we have such a challenge with the transition into motherhood when we think of it as a demotion in our society.
And I think about something that I call them mother powers. So these, like, skills and capacities and abilities that motherhood actually opens the door for us to explore. We can walk through it or not. And it's and it's and it's not it's not learning how to change diapers really quickly. It's things like learning how to listen to your intuition and value that as a way of knowing that is equivalent to or even more worthy than research evidence, for example, or Google. It's embodiment. It's about knowing the power of our body is in accessing that. It's about community building. It's about creativity.
There's there's so much that motherhood has the potential to allow us to access for ourselves you know, it's it's the stuff that makes it easier to mother, I think, in a lot of ways and and kind of eases that transformation. But but these are the actual skills and capacities that I think our world needs right now, which is like this is getting into this bigger conversation of, you know, motherhood is considered a demotion in our capitalist culture. And yet the things that we need most to to grow and thrive as humans are things that motherhood offers us in spades. And so there's just there's so much potential there.
Dorothee: I couldn't agree more. And if I can quote you one one more time in this interview, I just love what you wrote about this. You say, "we mothers are asked over and over again implicitly and explicitly to deny the fact of our motherhood in order to participate in a world that values money over caretaking, productivity over presence, and individuality over relationality." And the things that you name there, presence, relationality, caretaking, like you said, those are things our world needs and you talk about mothering as a countercultural act. And I love that so much.
Jessie: It's true. It is deeply countercultural. I mean, you know, I can't I almost wanna, like, kind of, shift out of this big thinking and and move into, like, a story of It was quite a few years ago now. It was supporting a mama who was this is her second baby and she had had this enormous child for a ten pound baby. And I went to see them at about a week postpartum because the baby was losing weight and couldn't figure out what was going on and it was sort of, you know, strange that I mean, I should say losing more weight than we would expect for a a newborn because we know that they all lose a little bit of weight. Anyway, so I don't know what told me because I think, you know, my doing practice at the time was pretty, like, traditional and transactional, like, you know, it would it would normally, you know, check out the latch and things like this. But for some reason, I sat down at our couch, I said, when I say life looked like these days, before I asked about any of those, like, kinda nitty gritty details. And she described her last week for me, which was you know, some of it necessary in the sense that she had, like, appointments for her baby, but of course, she didn't leave the house for those because that's the kind of model of care that we have here. She had play dates, she had copy dates, she had, like, she was literally on the go for this entire first week postpartum.
And and I should say this is, like, a little bit before we were really talking about the fourth trimester or anything. So it's pretty normal. Like, you know, yeah, it wasn't that unusual, I suppose, in terms of what kind of people might have done or they might not have known differently, I suppose what I'm trying to say. And so it turned out that this baby just, like, was falling asleep. And the car feed and through no fault of her own.
She was just missing feeds, and and they were starting to lose weight a little bit. So no fault of her own. Because this happens all the time. It's okay. But, you know, when we really got to talking, she just she was trying to feeling herself again.
And she was, you know, really felt as though she needed to stay busy, that, you know, she was well, she was, you know, caring for her daughter, but needed to felt like she needed to kind of keep the home. Like, all of these things But, like, at the root of it, she didn't know who she was anymore if she wasn't productive. And so that is what's driving so many of us in this early motherhood time. And I talk about I talk about call it the big slowdown because we literally have a baby and then the like, the breaks go on. Our lives screech to a halt in so many ways.
And and we just we can't do in the same way that we used to be able to do. And, you know, I do hear from a lot of mothers who kind of like should themselves. Like, I should slow down my this. I should I should rest more. I should sleep more.
But but really, we have to think about like the who am I now question. Who am I now? But I'm no longer productive. Where do I source my value from if I'm no longer completing it to do list every day? And so, I guess, let's bring that back to the to the big picture.
This is incredibly counter culture. Right? The idea, like, of of being overdoing, of being in relationality of, okay, caretaking, all of these things are incredibly counter culture. So no wonder it's hard. Right?
No wonder. It's incredibly challenging to go through this transformation. You're literally swimming against the tide of capitalism and patriarchy. And and and no wonder we feel unwored in the process. Because the rest of the world works in a completely different way than early motherhood.
Yeah. And if we haven't ever dived into that way of being and we maybe don't have practice with being internal with ourselves and having those inner resources or just being okay with what did I do today? I sat and fed a baby and that was the day. It can be it can be very confusing and challenging and disorienting. And I I love how you say that the world really needs mothering as a whole, and I see that as well. So if we can really kind of like sink into that energy, what could that do to transform our ourselves, our families, our communities, and ripple out from there.
Dorothee: Absolutely. One other thing I love that you say is you will lose yourself in motherhood and you will find someone entirely new. And I think that and is everything that we're talking about.
Jessie: Yeah. You're right. Yeah. Well, yeah, like we were saying. I mean, the idea of losing yourself in motherhood is is the worst.
You know, our culture tells us over and over again don't lose yourself in motherhood. And in fact, almost that that most mothers to be while they're expecting or thinking about, like, how am I going to kind of maintain my identity? How will I make sure that I don't lose myself? And it's often in literally in doing those things that's our downfall. Right?
Which causes suffering, you know, it causes so much suffering when we're trying to scramble back to even some semblance of who we were before having children. You know, some of those things will definitely come back. They will never come back on your timeline, unfortunately, which is so hard to hear and that and that the invitation is is to sink into this liminal space and to, you know, there is this opportunity to grieve your former self. And and there is sort of, I mean, I'm diving into a bunch of things here, but there is this sort of sense of ambiguous loss too, where I don't know if I'm going to have to give up all of these things, but right now it doesn't look like it's coming back. You know, when I had my daughter, ten and a half years ago.
I didn't think it was gonna be ten years before I surfed again. You know, like these things, these kind of like tiny reclamation that we make over the years, but then there's some things that are going forever. And I guess, our culture doesn't have a lot of capacity to grapple with that. We don't tell mothers that it's normal to be really sad about that. And and that and that, yes, kinda bring back to the way things used to be will probably cause suffering ultimately.
Dorothee: That timing piece something I appreciate that you articulate as well because we just have a lot of cultural stories around bouncing back and recovering quickly and it's just a realistic that it's gonna take a lot longer than what our culture is really comfortable with. I mean, for me, I would say it was about a three year period before I really felt like I had reassembled and realigned into my new self and could really move forward from that place. And I'm sure the timing is different for everybody. But it was way longer than what I firstly would have bet on or accepted consciously.
Jessie: My mentor went before I had my own maybe my mentor who became my doula said that the transition to motherhood takes two to three years. And that I remember that as being, like, what it was almost an initiation in and of itself because I hadn't yet become a mother, but I was really I'd been a doula for a while. And so I was kind of you know, most people are quite concerned about the births when they're thinking about having a baby, but I I mean, kind of, like, been around that and I, you know, new prenatal classic back in my head because I taught them. I was really worried about the up and came out of her. So and so for her to say the transition of other hand takes two to three years was incredibly normalizing for me.
For me, I mean, it could sound scary, but I think of it as being a huge permission slip. To do exactly as you were talking about, like, kinda kinda fall apart completely and then reassemble yourself can take time.
Dorothee: Yeah. And for anyone who who that does sound scary or who hasn't been through it yet, I have to say, I have grown so much. I like who I am so like, the maturity, the capacity, the creativity just Wow. Like, it's so worth it to me. But, yeah, there are challenging moments on the way.
Jessie: Totally. Well, that's just it. And it's like, it is a rite of passage. And so of course, of course, you are literally changing everything. And oftentimes, you know, we talked about those kind of cascading impacts that writes a passage.
So a lot of us find ourselves. I know I did when I became a mother, my career changed, then we changed location, relationship changed. Like, there's everything, everything, everything, everything, relationship with my body changed. So it literally triggered like ten other ways. So I wonder if it takes time. Right? But you're right that it's It's in process of becoming. It's this, you know, and I think, like, I hope becoming more ourselves. You know, becoming more of who we really are and really understanding and living in alignment with what matters most to us.
So, yeah, that's it. That's what's at the other end. I shouldn't say that. There's no real end to it, but For people looking for reassurance, there are, like, readers before we go to the next day.
Dorothee: Well, as we conclude, I'm wondering if there is anything about your work that you like to talk about that maybe people don't understand about this this type of work or or misunderstand or Yeah. Like, is is there anything else you'd wanna touch on before we go?
Jessie: I think what's coming to my mind is just some of these, you know, I hinted at these kind of capacities and skills that we can use to traverse major change. And so part of the model that I created includes these seven core competencies, and we talked about them a little bit. Things like community building, intuition, developing intuition, creativity, you're literally creating your life anew. And also creativity can be a beautiful practice for like metabolizing change and making sense of our lives self tending, like a self care practice is really important.
Ritual is really important. So there's all these kind of, like, accessories, skills like, yes, there's there's so much available to equip us for these journeys. And a lot of it really is that kind of inward turning, tending to our needs and and really reconnecting with ourselves this is such important work here.
Dorothee: Beautiful. Well, thank you so much, Jessie. It's been enlightening talking with you I I really cannot wait for your book mother shift. And I yeah. For those listening, who wanna know more about you and what you offer, where can they find you online?
Jessie: They can find me at my website, JessieHarrold.com. And I pretty much hang out on Instagram for the most part, so you can find me in jessie dot e s. Herald. There. And for people who are just kind of interested in exploring this work, I have this really great online gathering space called chrysalis and which if you can imagine this little cocoon that kind of holds you as your traversing radical transformation.
And so we have, like, three or four gatherings a month there that work through the four elements, those seven core competencies. We have like deep dive workshops into things like, say, healing journeys as rates of passage is coming up. Pretty soon. Different kinds of motherhood journey is so, like, empty nesting or we've got a workshop on that. We've got a workshop coming up in the fall around when transformation is is around your career.
So, like, lots of kind of specific things, and then we also have a monthly community circle. And it's just a place for everyone who is kind of, you know, intimate with this work who's going through change in their lives in some way to just be heard and held and witnessed. You know, we talked in the very beginning about how deeply we lack and need community as we're traversing rights of passage. And so this is sort of a small nudge in that direction. So people can look at joining Christmas.
You can join come and go as often as you want. There's, like, monthly or month by month membership options. So that's a really great way to kinda like dip your toe into this work if you're curious and and want to know a little bit more about how it can support you.
Dorothee: Beautiful. Well, this is such important work in the world. I'm so glad that you're doing it. And yeah, I I can't wait to see and read and hear about more from from your world. So thank you so much, Jessie.
Jessie: Thank you so much for having me. It's been wonderful.
Dorothee: Thank you for listening to the show. You can hear more episodes on moon wise dot c o or subscribe to the moon wise podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a written review on Apple podcasts and get a shout out on the show. Reviews help others find the podcast and I read each and everyone. Thank you so much for your support.
Our theme music is butterflies march from Sophie Cooper's album rewilding. See you next time.