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Sophie Messager

Tag: taboo

  • Confessions of a hippy scientist : 3 years on.

    Confessions of a hippy scientist : 3 years on.

    Three years ago today, I published a blog call “confessions of a hippy scientist“.

    In this blog, I came out as a science meets woo person, something I had shied away from for a couple of years.

    You see I’ve got a PhD in biology and spend 20 years working as a research scientist.

    When I left my scientific career to become a doula (back in 2012), being at births and feeling the incredible powerful energy in the room, combined with hanging out with a lot of spiritual birthworkers, led me to want to develop my energy healing abilities further.

    Back in 2003 I had undergone Reiki Level 1 training. In 2015 I took it to level 2 then master teacher level.

    After training and starting to offer healing to people on a regular basis, I agonised over showing this side of myself to the world.

    Doula clients told me they’d picked me because of my scientific background, which wasn’t surprising as Cambridge is full of medics and scientists. They felt reassured by it and I understood that.

    I worried a lot about putting people off if I chose to show my woo underbelly.

    I even went as far as considering a separate website for my Reiki work!

    Luckily someone challenged me to “come out”, and I wrote the blog I mention above.

    It felt very vulnerable to publish it, yet the post only got amazing responses, mostly from people who felt the same as me and thanked for it. It helped others on their way to embracing their full selves.

    Something magical happened in my work too, as I started getting clients who were more aligned with my true self.

    Because you see, when you show your true self, it puts some people off, but these aren’t the people you want to work with.

    Instead, you start attracting people who are much more aligned with who you are.

    For instance, a birth client who had told me she didn’t want any hippy stuff, asked for several Reiki treatments after birth. When I asked her what had made her change her mind, she said “before the birth I didn’t get it, but now I do”, which was a complete reflection of my own journey.

    So where am I now 3 years after this “coming out” blog?

    First of all, I have now embraced who I am so much that I cannot believe that I used to feel the need to hide this side of myself.

    I still work with a lot of scientists and medics (I’m still in Cambridge after all), but somehow my alternative side is never an issue.

    I’m getting a lot more woo clients too, which I love. This year I have finally ticked my bucket list wish of drumming during a birth, and I have also been hired specifically by someone who wants me to drum at their birth. It feels very good and exciting.

    I’m also being hired to organise mother blessings and group closing the bones ceremonies, as opposed to just doing them for friends.

    I’m still a scientist, and always will be be. I love nothing more than providing clients with evidence based links, especially when those help them make truly informed decisions about their care, and challenge population based hospital policies.

    Last year, I spent several months reviewing the research on the aging of the placenta and wrote this blog  mostly because I got fed up of seeing non scientific birthworkers friends being bamboozled by jargon, and to show that things aren’t quite a simple as the “experts” say.

    To write it I had to put my old scientist hat firmly back on and spend many hours reading the research. I realised I found doing this, that I found it tedious and dry. This is no longer who I am, and I’m really glad I’m not working in academia anymore. Today I’m able to unapologetically embrace who I am, and no longer feel that I need to know everything.

    As I write this, I realise that I already felt this way when I was a budding scientist, early during my PhD. I remember my supervisor implying that I had to know everything and that I was incompetent if I didn’t. What a load of tosh! Something in me already knew this wasn’t true. I also remember questioning the way scientific papers were written under the same rigid rules and not liking it. I found reading papers for the sake it really tedious even then. I guess I always was a bit of a maverick, and someone who questions everything.

    Between 2008 and 2012, as I trained for my diploma in antenatal education, I learnt about the way we learn, and it makes so much more sense to me. You simply cannot force knowledge into people, by pouring it into their heads.

    Interestingly, I feel that my scientific knowledge is now kept fresh and alive by the multitude of clients I supports and all their wide and varied needs. Because I love nothing more than finding scientific evidence for clients, I find myself reading avidly on their behalf, and the knowledge sticks because there is a positive and emotionally investment behind my looking for it.

    I’m still a hippy, in fact more than ever! I’ve carried on developing my more spiritual skills since I wrote the original blog. In 2017, made a shamanic drum at a very spiritual workshop, for the purpose of healing around pregnancy and birth. I then took a Reiki Drum training course shortly after that, and using my drum for healing and holding groups etc has become completely normal and natural to me. I’ve had two Reiki training upgrades. I have even stopped shying away from using my drum as standard in my closing the bones treatments (I used to give people the option to have it or not, now I just tell them it’s part of the treatment). Using Reiki treatment is part of my everyday life.

    What I’ve found has happened is my energy work offering, which started being a neat Reiki thing, has morphed into my own style of blended healing, which is completely intuitive, and doesn’t actually have a proper name or fit in a box, but it’s mine and I love it.

    Rather than offering energy work as a standalone I now weave it in and out of my birth and postnatal practise as and when feels appropriate.

    The call to embrace and develop my inner healer is extremely strong. It feels without a shadow of a doubt that this is where I’m headed.

    To make room for this I ended up dropping hats that no longer fitted me, that I felt I had outgrown. For instance I left my role as an NCT teacher.

    I’m also slowly letting go of my teaching of babywearing. I still love supporting parents using slings, but I dropped running a sling clinic and I’m also letting go to actively teaching babywearing peer supporter courses-because whilst I still enjoy it, it doesn’t fill my soul with joy the way facilitating more spiritual work like closing the bones does.

    The thing I love above all is blending my own cocktail of science and woo.

    I trained with Spinning babies since I wrote the blog, twice, and I use a combination of their techniques which I apply in a very scientific way, together with tuning in to what I feel and see happens energetically to the mother during labour. I have experienced true miracles in using this unusual mix.

    Perhaps the one thing that exemplifies this above all, is that I just finished developing an entirely new massage technique inspired by closing the bones, together with Teddy Brookes the osteopath. We called it the postnatal recovery massage. It combines massage, energy work and osteopathy. We teach it together, and the feedback we have received reflects exactly that. To quote Charlotte, a doula who attended our first training :

    ” Sophie and Teddy have taken all that is special about it and fused her energy-work approach with his osteopathic technique to create something extraordinary.”

    Openly embracing who I am with all my paradoxes and quirks has been the most liberating journey ever.

    I am a scientist but I am also an energy healer. I am proud of it. It’s what makes me unique.

    If being a doula has taught me one thing, it’s that we are ALL full of paradoxes and quirks and uniqueness.

    Nobody fits nicely into a neat little box.

    I want to support others in this journey of embracing themselves, and this is a massive reason being my recently becoming a doula course leader.

    When we celebrate rather than shame our uniqueness, this has tremendous power, both for ourselves and everybody around us.

  • The taboo of the first trimester of pregnancy

    pregnancy test

    We have this weird taboo in our culture about the first trimester of pregnancy. The first rule of the first trimester is you don’t talk about the first trimester. We just don’t tell people we’re pregnant. I don’t know how it started. Before the advent of medicinal chemistry and pregnancy tests were available, I believe we were more in tune with our bodies and had other ways of knowing, so I don’t think it came from “not knowing” with a medical proof that we were pregnant. But these days, it’s like we’re going to jinx it somehow if we tell people. We have to hide it and worry about people guessing because we are no longer drinking alcohol. It’s one hell of a big taboo.

    It doesn’t make any sense to me now and it didn’t make any sense to me when I was first pregnant. I wanted to tell people. Sure I didn’t tell my boss and every acquaintance, but I told my close friends and family pretty much the day I knew.

    I’m really glad did because, when, after trying to get pregnant for 18 months, I found out I was finally pregnant I was overjoyed. But when I was told at the 12 weeks scan that my baby had died, nothing could have prepared me for the raw grief I experienced. I really needed my loved ones’ support. I am so very grateful for the support I received from the Miscarriage Association. When everyone else was feeding me unhelpful platitudes (“You can have another one” “It wasn’t a real baby yet” “It’s for the best, there was probably something wrong with it”), they understood my grief and provided much needed soothing words of support. My first miscarriage was and still is today one of the hardest grieving experiences of my life.

    I discovered a whole new world of grief and silence after my miscarriage- when I burst into tears in a GP surgery after seeing a newborn baby-a kind receptionist accompanied me to another room, and told me she had lost twins herself. As I told my story, more and more women came forward with theirs-I was so shocked to hear how common it was (1 in 4 women people!). Yet until I spoke nobody else did. So we all suffered in silence and lack of sisterhood until we secretly admitted to being part of the club.

    Then I went on to have 3 more miscarriages (with a live baby in the middle and another one at the end), I still needed support. Heck I needed a hell of the lot more support than the first time I was pregnant, when I was so blissfully unaware that my baby could die. I was so scared I would lose this baby again. I never experienced the relaxed bliss I experienced during my first pregnancy again. When I had a big bleed at 11 weeks during my last pregnancy and I was petrified with fear that my baby had died-I was extremely grateful for the support of my doula who accompanied me and my husband to the emergency scan at the hospital. Having her there made me feel safe and loved. It felt validating too.

    Today, I feel very lucky to have 2 healthy children.

    But do I feel that the beginning of pregnancy should be hidden? Hell no!

    Let’s look at several different scenarios:

    If you’re healthy and your pregnancy is progressing well and everything is as it should-you might still feel extremely tired during your first trimester. You might feel nauseous. You might be sick. You might experience dizziness and blood pressure and blood sugar drops, and just generally not feel great. But because at this time you have no visual signs of pregnancy then you get no support. No jumping queues, even if you feel faint, nobody giving you their seats in public transport, no extra rest breaks at work. No extra kindness, no sympathy. That just sucks! I had several experiences like this during my pregnancies- I felt exhausted, had mild to severe nausea at times, felt faint without warning etc. Shouldn’t we have something in place to give women the support they deserve there? Shouldn’t we be treating them like the amazing, special goddess they are? They are growing a new human being!

    When I was only 7 weeks pregnant with my daughter I felt so tired and sick that I had to tell my boss because I had to go and lie down in the sick room at work for a while at lunchtime. I was shit scared to tell her (She was a childless woman and I had only been in the job for 4 months) but luckily she reacted very positively (in fact I recall being so relieved and surprised that I burst into tears!) and I was able to get my breaks without looking suspicious. Funnily enough, once I was told I could have the breaks, suddenly I found I needed them less-because the worry of what people where going to think had been lifted.

    If you’re healthy but there are fears around losing your baby; you have a history of miscarriages, your baby was conceived through fertility treatment, then you need some extra emotional support around this time a lot more than you will once the first trimester has passed and once you can start feeling your baby move. If your loved ones know, then they will be able to support you more readily. Similarly, keeping it secret in a bid to protect yourself (to avoid “jinxing” it), means that you may miss out on expressing those fears and having loving people acknowledge and validate them.

    If you aren’t healthy during your pregnancy-if you have a chronic illness which is exacerbated by pregnancy, or if you have hyperemesis-you are going to need some extra support too as soon as you find out you are pregnant.

    I wish our culture was more supportive of expectant and new mothers in general-and I feel that we need to lift this first trimester taboo-and encourage women to ask for the support they deserve-as soon as they are pregnant.

    If you work with pregnant women-please please please consider offering support during the first trimester. Please tell women that you know why they need it. That you understand. That they deserve it. Please explain to them why they might need it. That is isn’t selfish or indulgent. Please signpost women towards sources of support-from specialist groups to alternative practitioners-and if nothing can help-well just know that having our feelings heard and validated can make a huge different. Please spread the word. I am hoping that if enough of us break the silence around this, and more and more women realise that they need support during this special and vulnerable time, then this will help break the first trimester taboo.

    PS:

    Several women contacted me after reading this blog post, telling me they didn’t want to share their news during their first trimester. I want to say that this is totally fine. It would be just as bad to force women who wish to keep their pregnancy secret to be obliged to do so, as it is to force women who want to share not to. I just wanted to express that I wish that women would choose to keep their pregnancy to themselves do so for the right reasons for them, not because of cultural expectations.

     

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