This is something that shocked me when I saw it so clearly in my adulthood - how I related to the world was never actually how I chose to relate to the world. I was handed a worldview, and I never had a say. Probably somewhere around the age of 8 was when the dirt under my fingernails, my obsession with Monarch butterflies, and the ecosystems I would build for crawling critters suddenly started to fade.

What took precedence was performance, discipline, and the grooming of a pre-adolescent girl who could neatly fit into the demands of an extractive society. It started with micro dosages of sedation from the education system. Slow IV drips of amnesia from my own bloodline. Subtle indoctrination to seek approval from the religious community I grew up in.

My life was already claimed, and I was fed from the sterile breasts of a machine long before I could even understand it for myself. I was one commodity in the production line of a system whose mechanical heart was locked up in some chamber that no one really knew about or spoke of. It was well fed, jammed into the masses, and the masterminds behind this machine would never have to worry about it running out of fuel. It was generations old, time-tested, and robust enough to crush anything that got in its way. As if that living, breathing, thing never had its own right to exist.

But here’s the thing — there’s always a crack. There’s always a clue. There’s always that one thing that becomes the doorway to what isn’t supposed to be known. And for me, it was my womb. She knew the way, and she wasn’t going to let me forget that little girl who dug into the soil. The little girl who knew of an intelligence that was buried and that yearned to be met through me.

My womb invited me in as a paradox. First as illusion entangled in the world I knew, then as belonging in the world I was to become. But to cross thresholds, as women who move with Her cycles know, always involves initiation. And this was my descent into initiation.

Part One of The Paradox: Illusion

Here’s a story that’s all too familiar for many of us as women:

1. Find something wrong with your body.

2. Book an appointment with your doctor/gyno.

3. Abnormal pap smear. Rushed scans. Concerning lab results.

4. Stricter protocols. Increased surveillance on reproductive organs.

5. Get on birth control. Get the surgery.

6. Problem removed. Problem numbed. Problem synthetically regulated.

This is the spine of millions of women’s stories, and this was also me. In 2017, I woke up one morning and felt a small hard lump on the right side of my womb. I could feel it as I was laying down, and a wave of hot fear ran through my entire body. I immediately booked a doctor’s appointment. My regular doctor was out, and I was laying underneath bright fluorescent lights, on slippery, crinkly, cold paper on the examination table. My body was contracted. I don’t even remember how we got to the point where this new doctor was examining my lower belly with such scrutiny, it was as if I wasn’t there. It was just her roughly palpating fingers and this bump on my womb. I was a silent observer.

She finally looked up at me with furrowed eyebrows, and with a tone of urgency, told me I needed to get an MRI scan that very same day. That’s it - in the span of knowing me for 10 minutes without any details about my life, I was moved down the supply chain of the medical world of allopathy. I had never been through an MRI machine with injected dye. My nervous system became more dysregulated as cortisol, dread, and anxiety flooded my system. I had no preparation for this event.

A couple days later, the lab results came back and I was told that I had a uterine fibroid on the wall of my uterus. I was told it was a noncancerous growth that many women get, and it’s “common and normal”. During my consultation, the woman told me that the cause was unknown.

This is what I was told:

1. There’s a medication to shrink the fibroid - except once I get off the medication it would likely grow back.

2. If that’s not good enough for me, I could get it surgically removed. Oh wait - if I wanted children in the future, that’s a risk for successful pregnancy.

I asked for another option, for the third way I always seemed to seek out in life. She told me those were my only options. It was medication or surgery. Our 15 minutes were up, and she left. I was heartbroken. It was not the emotion I would have expected myself to feel. But that consultation broke something inside me, and it left me feeling helpless, small, and powerless. Is this really all we can offer our women?

Within 25 minutes of total interaction time with two female strangers, my options for my reproductive organs were laid out for me. None of these options offered an invitation to meet my body more intimately. Let me be more precise: none of these options invited the conversation my body was already having amidst life-altering decisions. No one was listening to her, myself included. I didn’t know that was a possibility. My experience left me feeling more disconnected and negligent toward my womb. In fact, I felt betrayed by her.

We’re talking about a system that left me feeling like I wronged myself. An industry built upon turning our backs on ourselves. A culture that profits on the disembodiment of the most sacramental place on earth: the womb. In hindsight, it had to break my heart. It was the only way I would listen to the prayer that ran through my soul, hanging on by a single thread for dear life.

Part Two of The Paradox: Belonging

Fast forward a couple years. My fibroid remained in the backdrop of my life, but it slowly continued to grow. It was like a pest that I couldn’t get rid of, a part of my body I needed to fix, yet didn’t what to do with. I was still on birth control and had an appointment the next day to get a copper IUD inserted so that I didn’t need to take a pill every day. Even though I booked the appointment, I was dreading it.

That night, something happened that changed the trajectory of my entire life. My body had enough, and for reasons I couldn’t understand, I was searching for a way out of this appointment. It wasn’t a grand moment. It was a quiet, desperate plea I made in the dark from my bed, with no one else around, to show me another way. And what I heard back was: “You don’t need birth control ever again.”

It was the first time I heard my womb speak to me. I stopped taking the pills, and I didn’t get the IUD. It was the first time I chose my womb. In that moment, something awakened in my body that was so subtle, yet it wove the red thread for where and who the next several years would lead me to. Thus began my chapter of belonging in a web that was so ancient and omnipresent, that I forgot how to recognize it.

A couple months later, I was on my daily walk across the Seattle waterfront, and I was listening to a podcast I will never forget. The guest for this episode was a woman by the name of Alexandra Durigan. She lived in Colorado and she served hands-on ceremonial pelvic care for women. She spoke to her experiences serving this care, and the miracles of what happens when women and the womb are cared for once more through touch. Her work was internal womb care too, and I had never heard of this. The moment I heard Alexandra speak, my entire body flooded with an aliveness I had never experienced. She wasn’t speaking from her mind, she was speaking a truth from her womb.

I was receiving a womb-to-womb transmission. This woman, who I only knew by the sound of her voice, was doing something revolutionary, and the waters of my body were entraining to the field of invitation that she held. She was doing something I wish I knew existed back in 2017 when I was left heartbroken by a medical system that perpetuated my self-abandonment.

Three years later, the red thread of my life would lead me back to Alexandra as a student of this sacred lineage of women’s care. This pilgrimage of deep study required me to listen to and touch the indigenous language of my body. It flipped my entire worldview upside down and showed me what it meant to truly belong to this body, this earth, and ultimately, to Life herself. I am still in my second year of study, and this is the most psychedelic and profound study I have ever experienced.

Conversations of Touch

The more I tended to my tissues through hands-on care and listened to the conversations around my fibroid, I realized this care didn’t end at a woman’s body. A woman’s holy body is where it began, and she held the regenerative capacity of what is possible for her life. I started accessing parts of my truth I had never touched. Prayers the waters of my womb held for my life. I wasn’t just touching my own body, I was listening to the indigenous lands of the Matriarch. And she was so much more vast than I could have ever imagined myself to experience.

I came to realize, through my own gnosis, that this was about resurrecting the relational field of possibility across all living systems that I was a part of. As a human, I was deeply embedded in this ecology of Life. To truly know myself meant relating to this world through a kinship that had no borders or hierarchy. I had a place of belonging in a collective web that was so much greater than me, and so did every other living being. I was listening into a relational field of original regenerative capacity, and it’s the most compassionate language I have ever known to be true.

This is what I call the Ecology of Care. An animate field of belonging that pulses through the veins of every living system, woven together through conscious relating. A kind of relating we were never given permission to know for ourselves, because it would indefinitely transform who we know ourselves to be as a species. The Ecology of Care has led me down a path I know many resist.

It asks hard questions that challenge our current infrastructures as we know it: Can you anchor into your truth in a world that’s ready to eat it alive and spit it back in your face? Do you give yourself permission to care audaciously, despite it not fitting into the paradigm you’re told to live in? Can you challenge your own divisive agendas for something quieter that wants to be revealed? Are you willing to bravely come home to your body, with so much compassion, that it dries up an entire industry of self-loathing?

I believe this animate field of care will, against all odds, build relationships across this planet in the most unlikely of places and ways. She emerges as novel, but not unfamiliar. As nuance and grief - yet loving in her unraveling. As individual transformation and collective revolution. I believe we’re being asked to move with her, and to be moved by her as well. And if you can remain with the paradox of how she’s appeared in your life, I think miracles are on their way.

Image source: Gáspár Ferenc

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