For women, aged 25-50 ☽

Owning the Mother archetype, abdominal massage practice & how I stay grounded while travelling

Over the last couple of years, my WhatsApp has become a convention of motherhood.

Messages ping in about pregnancy tests, quiet attempts at home insemination, the heartbreak of early loss, life with two toddlers, sick kids, sudden bouts of "baby fever", strained partnership post-children, navigating school holidays, sleep schedules, the relief at never having had them, deciding to delay motherhood, grieving terminations, and for some: total indecision over it all.

These are just the personal interactions. Considering what I do professionally (menstrual cycle awareness and natural fertility teacher, and women’s coach 👋) conversations about babies, blood, wombs and women occupy a great deal of my time.

And this feels deeply right to me, as I’m in the “Mother” years of my life.

The way I teach the archetypal female life cycle is to consider the years from 25 to 50 years of age to be our “Mother” years. This applies to all of us, babies or not, and it is the chapter where we progress, grow up, and can choose to create, build, and birth our own lives. No longer a curious and dependent “Maiden”, we become a creative force, capable of actual magic, and responsible for more than we have ever known before.

In Maiden to Mother, Sarah Durham Wilson says:

“The Maiden archetype, like spring, like the waxing moon, is the healthy beginning phase of a woman's life — but it becomes unhealthy when we stay trapped in it, not progressing, never developing into the mature feminine. Like stagnant water, we get stuck somewhere on our path. And we stay in these small patterns of girlhood even though we are now in women's bodies.”

For me, that transition into “Mother” was fuelled by initiations of a great loss, grief, moving abroad, coming off the contraceptive pill, starting my business, and taking responsibility for my life.

Now at 38, I find myself crossing into the second half of my Mother years; into the “Autumn” of this chapter. Where my early thirties hummed with ambition and milestones (living in London! getting engaged! then married! teaching all over the world! making that sweet 6 figs! publishing a book!), just like that monthly luteal shift, there’s a different voice emerging now.

This one is all about savouring over striving, and letting the wisdom earned through the trials of the last few years settle into my bones. I still desperately want to have a baby, don’t worry about that, and that will come — probably and hopefully quite soon.

Here’s how the archetypes correspond to each phase of the menstrual cycle. We can consider this to be reflected also in our life cycle. 0 - 25 years to correspond with The Maiden. 25 - 50 years with The Mother. 50 - 75 years with The Enchantress. 75 to 100 years with The Crone. I first came across the feminine archetypes in Miranda Gray’s work and it was Jane Hardwicke Collings who helped me to understand the age transitions, as you can see in the below Cycle Wisdom Map. I’ll include a link to download the map in the footnotes.

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These Mother years of life call us ALL to create, to take responsibility, to build our lives, and for many of us, to sit with the decision and consequence of whether we choose to have babies or not. In a recent training call I held, words used to describe this chapter of life included:

“Living my values, prioritising, finding purpose, nurturing a family, grief, maturing, sacrifice, community, self-actualising, fading innocence, having boundaries, letting go of the pressure to be something I’m not…”

…and honestly, this transformation—while essential and correct—can be a lot for us to hold in our bodies. A LOT!

I’ve shared how powerful it was for me to connect with my womb through abdominal massage and feel the grief held there from the babies I had envisioned with my ex-partner that never came through. We had dreamed up names, and a young girl who loved to read and maybe wore glasses, and would we take them to Australia for a few months each year?? Or move our bedroom into in the living room to give them more space??

I’ve grieved the two terminations I chose nearly 12 years ago. I held small ceremonies for them, gave them names, thanked them for joining me, but said, not now, not now, but please come back later. But I hadn’t thought to grieve those souls we had called in. I was angry, furious, that my ex-partner couldn’t fully commit to parenthood with me, and felt so much of my time had been wasted (those precious fertile years!!).

As time has passed I have, honestly, come to a place of forgiveness. But what I hadn’t fully felt was what was beneath that anger: the raw, pure, sobbing grief that was still so alive.

“I sat with my anger long enough until she told me her real name was grief.” — C.S. Lewis

So when my abdominal massage teacher pressed on my psoas muscle in class last month, there it was. Raw, like a thundering wave through my body, it escaped, finally able to be felt and released. (I have a video recording of this practice session, and watching it back was… quite something to behold.)

This moment in class reminded me that sometimes the most powerful medicine isn't analysing our experiences, but in creating safe, physical spaces for our bodies to speak. We hold so many “Mother” stories in the abdomen; in the womb, pelvic bowl, and down to our hips. It’s not just the potential for physical creation, but the ancestral memories, the unspoken stories, the grief and the joy, that all live in this soft centre.

...this soft centre. 1. Here I am, receiving the Maya abdominal massage. just before the huge grief outpour. 2. Practicing my skills - the massage includes the ENTIRE body, not just the abdomen.

This practice offers us a chance to tangibly connect with the place where our stories live, which is why I was so excited to share more about abdominal massage on our recent Cycle Journaling Circle X Queen of Pentacles call.

After we explored the grounding qualities of this archetype, we journaled together, and then placed our hands on our bellies, breathed, massaged, and felt our way in. Sometimes, like I had experienced, this massage can bring on a big release. Other times, it is much more gentle; inspiring connection, providing increased circulation, inviting relaxation, and a yummy sense of embodiment.

Watch the replay of the class (at the bottom of this post) for a gentle self-massage practice that you can do at home, on any day of your menstrual cycle. If you’re catching up on the replay, be sure to bring some oil to class.

After I guided everyone through the practice, Laurie asked a question that's stayed with me:

“Claire, how do you stay this grounded and connected to your body when you're traveling?”

It made me smile, because isn't that the eternal question? How do we stay rooted while in motion, centred while in transition? As we transition into (and out of) our Mother years, how do continue to stay present to it all?

Our current muse, The Queen of Pentacles (see below), knows something about this. She's the ultimate earth mama, yes, but she's also savvy about moving through the world. She understands that grounding isn't about staying still, it's about creating what I like to call, “portable sanctuaries”.

As a Virgo sun, homebody hermit, world wanderer, and very sensual woman, I know a thing or two about this as well!

Here’s how I stay grounded while travelling (or when life is in flux):

TLDR; sleep, good food, movement, taking care of my ND brain, structure.

• Get good sleep. I go to bed and wake up at pretty much the same time each day. I get some sunshine on my eyes and skin first thing in the morning, with no phone either side of sleeping. Lavender oil, sleep masks, ear plugs. And I travel with a pillowcase. Leaning into cycles helps us stabilise, so getting that 24-hr cycle as consistent as possible is key.
  

• Get good food. One of the first things I do in a new place is figure out where I can get the best quality food with the least amount of effort. In Guatemala, I found a farm delivery service where you order online on Mondays, the food is delivered to a local store on Wednesdays, and I’d walk down, collect our organic groceries, and get a tuk-tuk home. Perfect.
  
  Note on food: While I’m great at acquiring good quality food, remembering to eat it is more challenging for me. When I’m in full Queen of Pentacles mode, I spend my Saturdays making bone broth, pre-cooking veggies like sweet potato and zucchini, boiling eggs, etc. but one of my neurodivergent quirks is becoming hyper focussed and forgetting to eat, so there’s that. But I do my best!!! Also, not drinking alcohol is super nourishing for me during transition phases of life or travelling. 
  

• Set up an altar. To me, this is a “portable sanctuary” that I like creating, sitting at, and tending to. It’s a place where the material and spiritual worlds meet, but it’s also a creative outlet, somewhere to keep things that are symbolic of aspects of my life and the world that I want to honour. My current altar includes a deck of tarot cards, an embroidered piece of material that says ALIVE (to remind me of my 2024 intentions—my cousin made this for me), a squirrel skull (this is my partner’s), a tiny Matrioshka doll (representing the baby we wanna make), a tiger’s eye stone (divorce support from my friend Lacey), and a few other meaningful things. I like to bring in the elements: earth in a plant pot, a candle for fire, a tincture or little bowl of water, and burn copal or incense.

• My work. Having a location-independent business was an intentional choice for me, and I’m so grateful that when I move about, I can still work. My output definitely declines when I’m on the move, and I have no aspirations to be sat permanently poolside with a laptop, but I appreciate the consistency and sense of rhythm that my business offers me.
  

• Exercise. The Queen of Pentacles is the most embodied of the Queens and she loves to sweat. Again on the theme of consistency, I like doing the same classes and so I have a subscription to The Class (you can use that link to get a 30-day free trial), which is a mix of aerobics, pilates, yoga, dance, emotional release… it’s fun and cathartic and you don’t need much equipment (if any), so it’s perfect while travelling. Also, walking. Lots and lots of walking.
  

• Transition days. My neurodivergent brain finds “transition days” tough. These are the strange days after you get home from a holiday or the day after a big block of work or the day(s) after you move house. Or in my case currently, the day(s) after I arrive in a new location. I don’t move around much when I’m travelling—my preference is to stay somewhere for at least a couple of months—but even still, I know not to plan ANYTHING for the first day or two in a new place. This is also why I don’t work Mondays! Transitioning out of a weekend back into the work week requires a whole day for my brain to adjust. I’m not complaining about it; it’s taught me how to live a slow life, and I’ve learned there’s no hack to get out of this one. We must honour the time and space required to transition. 
  

• Be organised AF. I am a J in the Myers Briggs which means I am an

  organised person by nature. I literally travel with a whiteboard weekly calendar that I stick on the fridge of every AirBnb I stay in, with the days of my menstrual cycle listed alongside the date—you can see it in action here. I am also messy and chaotic and spontaneous, but at my core I love and need to use To Do lists, digital and paper calendars, and to have an immaculately organised inbox. (Do not take this to mean I have replied to all of those emails!! I most certainly have not!! But they are flagged in a coordinated colour system and allocated to folders, lol). Structure is our friend. The messier life gets, the more I lean into my rituals and routine.

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I shared some of these tips on the call, and there was a lot of resonance. Jen shared that she was curious about this herself, not because she's travelling right now, but because she's going through a big life change and craving a sense of being held.

Jen, perhaps like you, and definitely like me, is in her "Mother" years.

These Mother years will ask us to dig deep and take responsibility for our lives. They require that we prioritise what is most important, tending to our physical, mental and emotional health, and that we get clear on our values—and live them. These years will likely ask us to decide whether we want to have children in this lifetime or not. For some, that will be an easy decision and journey. For others, less so.

These years are powerful, and they invite us to own OUR power too. This is not always an easy or comfortable thing to do, and certainly one aspect of this initiation is disappointing other people, letting go of comparison, and coming back to our own truth—again, and again, and again.

This chapter of "Mother" is a lot to hold. And if you're feeling the complexity of it all, I see you. I'm with you. Me too. But feeling it all means that you are alive. You've made it this far. And let me tell you, if my WhatsApps are anything to go by, you are not alone.