On healership and entrepreneurship.
This is the face of a mother…a woman who has and is working to overcome some of the darkest memories held within the intricate web of the nervous system. Someone who has followed her force of will her entire life, which has kindly pulled her out from the depths inch by inch. Someone who pushed so hard to move through and rise up. All the way up…only to realize that the real world isn’t what she thought or was taught it was. The face of heartbreak, disappointment, rage, and exhaustion. Tirelessly fighting for all that is good in the world unwilling to turn away from what must be said and what must be done for the better of this place.
I want to share some real talk with you for a moment. Some thoughts on the realities of mothering, tending, loving, and building a business. Let me just start with some truth, that sometimes I want to give up, that I ask myself why I chose this road and if its really ok for me and my health. I second guess and I doubt. The ways in which I find to move through all of this is to remember the joy this mission has brought me. The deepening connection to the world around me, the strengthening of my offerings and skills, and the moments where I sit and honor my wild resilience.
Being a mother is not all its talked up to be. It’s beautiful in many ways but with just as much awfulness, helplessness, and worry. Motherhood pushes you into a self reflective healing journey that is ugly and fatiguing like no other task on earth. We love with all of our hearts, we advocate for our children like no other, we tirelessly hold space, teach, learn, solve, shape shift, and forgive…ourselves.
Mothering while creating and founding an education based business with the intention of holding space for others to work through healing and release layers that have been binding them is the hardest thing I have ever done. It requires my full attention, much of my energy reserves, and trust that this is going to actually work out. Thats a big one for me. Trust. When the two most foundational people in your life, your parents, show you many ways to not trust at a very young age, this becomes a foundational understanding in your mind. You learn not to trust anyone and you become hyper independant.
You see, healing isn’t pretty, it doesn’t feel good and it takes time to free yourself from the bounds of something that has held you hostage for a long time. But before you can even get to that point, you must go back to the wound. It seems that, in order to unravel what does not serve you, you need to understand in full capacity what happened to you and what your unique experience was in that moment, also how you processed this experience at the time. This is so very uncomfortable and many people are unwilling to jump into this work for various and valid reasons. There is a buddhist saying that I came across many years ago and it read that enlightenment is like fitting an elephant through a straw hut. When I read that, it stayed with me. It was the only thing I had come across that had so simply described the experience of the deep inner healing journey. For each layer I peel off, my body responds intensely and I sometimes feel like I have been hit by a truck, or wrung out.
So, in order to leave a career path I had put my all into for years and shift into offering what it is I was sent to this planet for, I had to unravel all of my previous and limiting beliefs. I had to learn to trust again, to regain the stability I had lost as a child, and most of all to reopen my heart and allow myself to receive and build relationships with others. And I’ll just note, I still work on this every day.
I think it is important and fundamental that this healing work be done before or simultaneously to the building of Mountain Hollow. For both things are deeply interwoven and one needs the other. Every single one of my clients resonates deeply with what I have experienced and this is why they are drawn to me. They are drawn to me because I have so willingly jumped into the deep dive of fearless healing and have moved through many of the things they are coming to me to support them with. Therefore I can compassionately and lovingly hold space for them, I can recognize their challenges with ease and ever so gently support them in taking a step forward to being less afraid of that dive. Because that dive will inevitably set you free.
So if you’ve come to this post, read all the way to here and feel like much of this hits home for you, I want you to also know that all the images shared all over social media that beautify the process of being a woman, a mother, a person who is building a business from the ground up are nearly a sliver of what its really like or what goes on behind the scenes to build, create, maintain, and hold space to be in service in community and beyond.
So although I love to create images that bring me joy and capture the unending beauty of the land and place I spend most of my time on, I also want to be so very real with you all. I want to share what this is like for me so that folks who work and learn from me are aware of what it takes to do this work and can sit with that for a moment and make a choice of their own.
No one has ever given me any kind of road map to navigate through motherhood, relationships, and building a business. Some days I truly wish I had had more access to learning more about many of these things and as I scramble to catch up on what I wished I had grasped earlier, I hope to also share my authenticity, personal experiences, and many of the resources that have carried me forward through the wild terrain of taking your own life back, your power back, standing with confidence and self love, and step by step coming back to the frequency of love.
With steadiness,
Diana