Wellness, Mothering and Deep Intuition
The Whole Avocado
Today I interviewed Sonia Funk, a health and wellness specialist who does a lots of work with employees that translates into community wellness. She runs events for various groups including mums and parents of teenagers.
Sonia feels that caring for and learning to listen more deeply to the self is key in addition to overcoming the guilt mothers may experience around self care. The guilt that we all experience may be a legacy of Lutheran Christianity and the fact that, in Sonia’s view, monotheistic religion disconnected us from our fundamental goodness.
In his series “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis” John Vervaeke talks about the notion of the “divine double” which more or less maps on to the higher self. This is similar to Maslow’s notion that we self actualise when begin to realise this better version of ourselves.
Cultural Shifts
We have gone through a time of rapid change culturally and technologically and our suggestion is that psychologically we need to catch up with this. There is a growing body of evidence that suggests we need to move beyond a purely materialistic view of the world. That reason and intuition are not incompatible.
Sonia talks about the way in which at a subatomic level everything is in motion and they all emit frequencies which she compares to musicians in an orchestra. When the orchestra is in tune the wave flattens out and becomes more regular giving us a sense of harmony. Within the body the functioning of all of our cells emit frequencies. In this sense your body is an orchestra and we have our own frequency when all of this combines.
In Tune With Ourselves
On some level we feel it when we are out of tune but have been taught to discount this, disconnecting from the body which was thought of as sinful. We explore the idea that we can sense when others are “out of tune” or when we are vibrating on a similar frequency to them and therefore get along. If our frequency is close to someone else’s but not quite in harmony, the frequencies may fight each other.
Sonia encourages mothers to reconnect with their intuition around how to parent and how to take care of themselves. She found that when things were difficult for her when her child was small her friends encouraged her to improve her situation. This was because they understood that if she was well the baby would be well.
Bringing the Village Back
Sonia acknowledges that a challenge faced by many mum’s is that it is difficult to get support because the village has gone. She runs events which aim to get the village back. Not necessarily recreating what we had in the past but finding new ways of doing this. The ways of combining work and family life I experienced in the circus provide a great model for this.
Parenting can be viewed as extremely creative, I love to bring skills I have learned doing theatrical improv into my interactions with my son. Sonia talks about a useful way of helping children to cope with stressful transitions: Engage the child in risky play, this activates their sympathetic nervous system (stress response) but within a context that is safe. This means they can activate the parasympathetic nervous system and calm down, you are therefore strengthening their ability to self regulate.
