Princess to Queen

I spoke on the Wise Women Diaries podcast last week, and our conversation circled around the preconception phase as a “princess to queen” initiation.

Listen to the episode: Spotify / Apple.

We discussed my journey through learning the “truth of birth,” trusting my body, continually wanting to save the world, finding the rot in powerful systems, doing what’s best for my current self and inner child through the motivation of my future child, and ultimately accepting the unknown and releasing the need for a child to fulfill my life.

The “new paradigm” of maidens that we described centers around the total access to information that we now live in—and the resulting importance of being able to tune into our own soul knowing in the midst of all of that information. The choice of whom we want to emulate is more available than ever.

Maidens—women who have not become mothers—have the opportunity to prepare for motherhood and pregnancy long before becoming pregnant. This is obvious, but the common narrative (and the one that I lived out when I was briefly pregnant) is that the research begins once one is already pregnant.

I had at least done some mindset preparation—I had studied yogic teachings on conscious conception, and I was in relationship with my body deeply enough to know that I was pregnant without taking a test. But my nutrition, arguably the MOST important factor affecting fetal health, I gave almost no care until I had conceived.

This is just one example of the cultural absentmindedness around birth, and why “discovering the truth of birth” is something that people often come to only after becoming birth professionals or having traumatic births themselves.

We don’t even understand the reproductive fertility cycle! We are told—I was told—that the only time you can’t get pregnant is when you’re already pregnant. People are viewing sex at any time in the cycle as a gamble. Women’s libido is treated the same as men’s. It doesn’t make sense.

So, now, with access to the internet, we have the power to educate ourselves on how fertility works. We can learn directly from experienced midwives, nutritionists, and healers. We can examine our cultural beliefs—all of which have a reason for existing—and decide whether they’re relevant now.

In preconception coaching, we sit together, without distraction, and allow what we need to surface. The best advice is what we already know we need to do. My role, on this topic specifically, is to hold expertise and offer options but ultimately allow what you need to emerge from within.

The preconception stage asks of us which generational patterns we wish to continue, and which we want to amend. It asks us to examine our abundance blocks: our relationships with food and money and support. It asks us to consider how we can hold our own self-responsibility, so that we can offer space to a new soul without demanding our own happiness from them.

During this stage, we begin to imagine the inner authority that we will embody as a mother. We set the stage for our relationship to our kin: we become fiercely protective of our own energy as we contemplate the seriousness of what we may soon be asked to protect.

Ideally, during this stage we also learn about the truth of birth: what it is, why it is, how it has been skewed, and the effects of that disruption. We visualize going into labor and see that, in all likelihood, the most natural state of birthgiving is private and safe. We confront our worst fears about birth and address them, so that there is no more mystery than the great mystery inherent in the portal of life.

We also confront death. Motherhood means the death of the maiden. We die, and we open up to the potential of death of the only being we could possibly love more than anything else. We either make peace with this, or we avoid it and defer authority to others to deal with it, thus losing our center of internal trust.

The preconception phase is so dense—it deserves the reverence of pregnancy! To be pregnant with pregnancy is to fully honor the hugeness of this undertaking. Of course the progression of pregnancy and birth itself provides the perfect initiation into motherhood, if we let it; ideally, the courtship and foundation-laying of preconception does the same for pregnancy.

We are given the opportunity to demand and create an acceptable life for ourselves. We prepare the nest. We imagine what might be good enough, or best, for our offspring, and we give ourselves that.

There’s so much that we went into in the podcast that I can’t begin to get into here. But it sparked this meditation on the preconception phase as the opportunity to initiate into queenliness before pregnancy begins: releasing the anxious need for a baby and instead preparing for the grave honor of hosting life.

For more, listen to the Wise Women Diaries podcast or set up a free consult with me to sit with your process and your needs, wherever you are on your path.