I started out this journey of pregnancy with an understanding that it would change me, that I wouldn't be the person I was at the start.
I went into it with a blank space, not really knowing how life was going to pan out and trying my hardest not to pin my colours to a mast and holding myself accountable to anything. I could already feel at the start that my hormones were going to try and sway me in one way or another, and I didn't want to make decisions whilst the ground beneath me felt unstable.
For anyone that knows me, they will know this is rare, I am quite a gogetter, if I have an idea I'll go for it with every thought that its worth a go, once I've got the idea in my mind then its all guns blazing. But deep down I knew this approach wouldn't work.
Illness has come and wiped me out for along time, truly asking me and then telling me to stop, a deep unravelling of control and wanting to be a certain person and for the first time in my adult life fully surrendering to just being. In that time I questioned everything, my spirituality seemed to wane and I couldn't find a steady rock to hold onto, I just had to float and trust.
Tears flowed and days turned to weeks of darkness, but I knew deep down that this was meant to be, this needed to happen.
If I'm honest this journey started many years ago, and the pregnancy, a new life beginning a birthing of not only a child but a mum, seems to have culminated in the releasing of the past. An exhausting process of really letting go.
So I promised myself in August to not rush, to slow right down and see what comes. To let go of the expectations of how and what I should be, of how I saw my life and just see. For the first time in my adult life I had no business plan, no action points, no lists I just waited.
Illness came, each time I tried to grab to something, to start something the sickness would rear up and like the universe was telling me NO now is not the time I has to let go, then just before Christmas I jumped back in, desperate to escape the darkness I grabbed, but again after a couple of days I was shown a sign, NO.
Each time I committed to something it was taken away, I still was learning the process of waiting, of releasing. My knee was the next teacher, I wanted to get up and going I had plans of walking miles each day, of getting busy again, but I was told no, one lock after another, you're not ready. You haven't gotten to where you are going to go.
I'm now heading into the third trimester and with the new moon above us as we made the transition to this next stage something shifted. A growing light that's been buried for a few years under pain and hurt and mistrust has started to shine, an old passion reignited to the point where I can't doing anything but breathe it. Yet I'm still unable to action it, I must go through the process first, I can't rush, I know that now.
If you'd have said mentally I'd have been hear 6 months ago I'd have never believed you, I wouldn't have been able to envisage this person who sits and types right now, she is growing just as the baby inside her is.
But it takes time.
Last night whilst sitting in a hypnobirthing class and practising the breath work I was sent an image, I was suddenly not in the room at all, but instead I was riding my beautiful mare, along a track and over a field, I felt her, smelt her and she was there. In real life my hands were rested over my pregnant stomach but in my mind I could feel the reins, the wind against my skin.
As we drove home I thought about my beautiful mare, and realised, she died May 7th 2014, our baby, the baby beneath my hands is due May 7th.
As if the next chapter is revealing itself to me, breath by breath I find she is guiding me, telling me I'm on the right track and that this pregnancy has taken me to a space that is not new to me, but reminded me and reignited an old passion but placed on a new path.
My lesson is time, to not rush or force, to be open to pathways that felt closed at the start and to feel into something rather than think.
This pregnancy whilst not being easy has been my greatest teacher for a while.