Two relativity-significant events have recently occurred in my world, and together, they’ve deepened my awareness of how important it is to be a connected, whole, and joyful human.
Just over a week ago, I got the news that one of Makia’s kindy friends had just lost her mother. It was cancer.
When I heard this, I was obviously upset. These things land differently when you’re a parent. I thought about her little girl, Makia’s age, and how she would grow up without a mother. I felt truly sad for the family.
However, these people are relatively far removed from my social circle. I quickly checked a WhatsApp Kindy thread to see what the mum looked like and saw the clues I’d missed.
Invites to cancer charity events, excitement over fundraising targets met, a group invite to her daughter’s 5th birthday party – maybe she couldn’t print and individually give invitations.
I realised that I had responded to none of it. I’d missed the party, I’d missed the fundraiser, I’d not given to the charity. I didn’t even know that she was sick. And now she’s dead.
The next day, I wandered the beach, collecting shells and basking in the sunlight. I had a moment of deep gratitude for being alive.
I am so grateful to have these moments.
Elle will never have another chance to collect shells on the beach. She will never see another sunrise. She won’t be able to share those moments with her daughter. She is simply gone.
But I am not gone. I am here. I can CHOOSE to live, not just go through the motions of life. To cry when I find a cowrie shell. To schedule low tide beach walks with the kids into my calendar. To pick flowers for my altar and light my candles daily. I can compile the perfect ingredients and slowly cook them into a delectable meal. I can savour bedtime with my two babies co-sleeping on either side of me. I can nestle into their little bodies at night and marvel that they are mine. I can live.
They are mine, and I am theirs.
Getting to this point has been the journey of a lifetime. Finding such deep love for myself and life took nothing less than the death of who I was before. It’s been almost three years since I finally started being honest about my life and where I’d veered off track. I spent half the time since in pain and resistance and the rest in joy and surrender.
I have laid a foundation that I won’t ever waiver from. I come first—me. I love myself first and foremost. The deeper I love myself, the deeper I can love others. I know this because I can see, hold, and love those in my inner circle more than ever before.
I have a love for children, all children, that I’ve never had before. I couldn’t love random kids before because I never loved myself as a child. I believed I was a nuisance—not enough, not worthy of love, lightness, and good things.
And now, I want to extend that love to my community. I want to be someone with the bandwidth and capacity to catch those cancer charity messages and reach out in support. I want to interpret group birthday invites as the workings of an overwhelmed family and step up. With my own love at the centre and the love for my immediate circle in the middle, this new love can stretch and stretch. I know it can.
The second recent event was a little more subtle.
Last weekend, I had a transformational breathwork session with Dreamboat. I breathed, and he coached me. As always, I felt exhausted, depleted, and completely smashed for the rest of the day. However, I also felt incredible the very next day.
Post breathwork.
Deep breathing does something to your body and system that is hard to describe. It lands you so profoundly in your body that you feel rock solid. On the days after breathwork, I use those words to describe myself—rock solid.
On Monday this week, I was rock solid. My nervous system was in Parasympathetic. My emotions were stable. My thoughts were slow and meandering. There was no drama. I was just there, in my body, and clear in each moment on what I was meant to be doing.
On Monday afternoon, Dreamboat watched the kids after school, including Makia’s best friend, while I attempted to get on with some work. The energy was high—very high. I clocked that the energy was high but left it to Dreamboat to handle things.
Very quickly, things escalated. Grandma became dysregulated, and Makia and her friend were as high as can be. Nothing was helping. I sensed that a major breakdown was on the cards, but I still felt attached to letting Dreamboat handle things so I could use my time.
I became dysregulated from my proximity to so much energy in such a small space. My thoughts started up – my stories, too. “I told Emmanuel not to bring the kids back here.” “We can’t do this. What made me think we could do this.” “This is supposed to be my time, so why does this always happen to me?” “I have to do everything.”
And then Makia and Dreamboat got entangled in a physical tussle over a crust of bread that Makia had taken off her dad’s plate. He called out to me to break it up.
I don’t know if any of you here have ever had to forcibly remove a crust of bread from a hyperactive child’s hand, but I am not joking when I tell you that Makia had superhuman strength. I almost couldn’t get it off her. And as we fought, time became very still. I felt like my higher self had somehow taken me over.
My lower self, thoughts, and ego had no clue what to do. How had things gotten to this? The stress in our apartment was palpable, and there was nothing left to try.
Dreamboat had already taken them outside, I’d already encouraged some breathing exercises, and they had all tucked into a high protein, early dinner. But now this, a physical altercation over a crust of bread? And Makia was not backing down. Hell no, she wasn’t.
By 5:30 PM it was too late.
But my higher self was seated a bit further back, and she stepped forward. I didn’t think; I just acted.
I exclaimed powerfully, “Enough!”
I picked Makia up as she thrashed and fought in my arms, and I carried her bodily into the shower. I blocked her escape with my body and started a warm stream of water; the door locked behind me.
Makia backed up towards the end of the shower and started to wail, verbalising a nonsensical sound in her throat.
I noticed my thoughts starting up again: ” Well, she just has to learn what behaviour we will not tolerate.”
But I ignored them. Instead, I looked at her—really looked. She was in a freeze state. Her nervous system was so overstimulated that she was now like a deer in headlights, petrified for her life but unable to run. Makia, my four-year-old daughter, was so out of body that she had zero hopes of bringing herself back in.
She wasn’t doing this to defy me. She needed me.
Once I realised this, I picked her up, pulled her flush against my chest and sat down so we were both getting some water. I pulled her to me so tightly that she could feel my heartbeat. I started to rock and shush, rock and shush.
Eventually, her tears slowed. I started sharing little things, like how impressed I was that she had gone for the bread. Food is a massive tool for regulating the nervous system, but there are other, better tools, like mummy. I called myself Mummy Bread and got a little smile.
Slowly, she calmed down. I told her that she had had enough stimulation for the day and that I was taking her straight to bed. My voice was authoritative, certain, and powerful, and she sensed it.
We FaceTimed her friend, who had been picked up while we were in the shower, and said goodnight.
We talked about school and what she wanted for lunch the next day. After reading a book and a story, she fell asleep.
When I picked her up and held her to my chest, I realised something that I’d known on a logical level for a long time but never really understood.
My mother could not be that person for me. I don’t have any memories of being soothed like that as a child.
If I had behaved as Makia had done, stealing food, defiantly throwing threats around and trashing the house, I would have either been smacked or sent away to deal with my emotions by myself. I have a core childhood memory of falling asleep outside my mother’s door, crying to no avail.
I don’t say this to make you feel sorry for me, and I also don’t say this to make my mother the bad guy. My mother raised my brother and me without a husband and with zero outside support. She worked full time, raised two kids, and somehow managed to pay off a mortgage and own a property I now live in with my family.
My mother did the best she could, but her best did damage because she didn’t understand emotional and nervous system regulation. She didn’t have time to go on her own healing journey or ponder the mysteries of the universe. She worked and kept a roof over our heads.
Even with all of my work, time, space, knowledge and capacity, I could have handled that bread situation very differently if it weren’t for the fact that I was “rock solid” from my transformational breathwork the previous day.
And it hit me. I am a better person, mother especially, because of the decisions I make for myself. The yoga, the daily breathwork, the transformational breathwork, my ocean swims. All the time and space I give myself. My journaling practice, now 18 months in. I know who I am beyond the thoughts, emotions and feelings of the human experience.
I know who I am underneath the ‘noise’.
It has struck me in a whole new way that our sole job on earth is to become rock solid—for ourselves because we love ourselves and for the people we love, especially the small ones.
Through this realisation, I have ramped up my work on the Awareness Journal Practice. I see how all of my work can be traced back to starting this practice and being consistent over the months. This practice bridges the gap between my thinking mind, my conscious, and the rock-solid being that is always below the surface. I want others to have access to it. I want to birth it to the world and empower people to take responsibility for their own journey into self-love and solidity.
Birthing something.
The world needs more humans who know and love themselves.
I’ll be showing up here a little more. I have so much inspiration to write. I am in the “nesting” phase of creation—getting everything ready for birth. I still need to finish my ten-part series, and so much other good stuff is happening in my world.
I’ve missed you,
Lauren xx
NB/ The Awareness Journal has since launched and is on sale until the 23rd of April, 2025. Check it out here.
**Originally published to my email database on the 7th of February, 2025.**
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