Motherhood & Chaos Magic

Our feminine superpowers aren't meant to be regulated into a straight line....

“One must still have chaos in oneself to birth a dancing star” Nietzsche

Back when I was single, in the heights of my ‘spiritual’ days, I would meditate sometimes for a couple of hours in the evening, in candlelight, or playing healing ‘high vibration’ music. Sometimes I took an ice-cold bath in the darkness for 30 minutes, followed by a hot bath in candelight. Other times I sat quietly reading mystical and inspirational books.  On weekends I would walk through the remnants of the ancient boreal forest, Queen’s Wood, and sit under a tree and commune with the forest spirit and afterwards write in my beautiful journal carried in my handbag.

Or, I would be on my way to a yoga class, walking for hours across London’s green spaces, including Hampstead heath. Earlier yet, I would spend my Friday evenings praying in Aramaic with a Rabbi, or travelling across London to take counsel from an incredible psychic. Every year I would travel to the Himalayas and practice meditation and yoga or temple dance with lineage teachers, honed so I could do backbends from standing, touch my toes, whirl, or sit for hours in still quiet contemplation of such lofty ideas as enlightenment, or experience yogic siddhis or satori in sacred ceremonies.

I thought about this the other day in the car. My daughter, Orphea was having a meltdown, had taken her clothes off and was screaming for food. Our new kitten Elfie was scampering wildly across the car, and running up my skirt and clawing my legs, until I let out loud screeches. The car was, quite frankly, a shit show, with the entire floor covered in clothes, food bits, empty wrappers, and possibly a microrhizomal layer of living matter. We hadn’t slept a lot as Orphea and Azra both had a bad cold, and Azra’s hair was unbrushed, so he looked like the professor in Back to the Future. My back was hurting, and I had just come off my moontime. I would have cried, but my energy reserves were too low for such an expressive endeavour.

And I thought to myself, watching the whirl around me: what unknown siddhi is being forged in the midst of this Feminine Chaos Magic?

Ok, sitting in meditation can be hard. But, sitting in chaos – as the feminine realms of magic demands – requires a lot more discipline and courage and devotion.

In feminine magic we talk a lot of about bandwidth. Getting your energy field large and strong enough to hold more. To become wider, deeper. This is ‘breadth work’.

I often found that people who were really good meditators or denizens of the quiet, had very little bandwidth for the everyday and real world. Especially the feminine.

I realized that I no longer believe in enlightenment. Or more like, I’m just not interested. I don’t care if your bones turn into rainbows when you die. Or you bi-locate. I’m not impressed that you sat alone in a cave for 50 years (try sitting in a car with a tantruming toddler for 50 minutes!). I’m curious about creative capacity.

And just as we have the myth of the perfected male yogi sitting in quiet, peaceful contemplation above all the dirty, mucky, filthy, complicated, exhilarating, sprawl of life, so now we have developed the myth of the perfected organic mother, with her enlightened nervous system, washing climate change out of the cloth diapers, with her Instagram-ready ‘Waldorf baby’ playing quietly with wooden toys, worshipping on the great boob mountain, while she ruminates on the right attachment patterns.

You might already whiff the scent of puritanism in the air, the kind of cloying conformity of suburbia, where nice smiles and closed doors mask the reality of life.

It does amaze me how we strive to liberate ourselves into a kind of primal original wildness, only to build recyclable boxes around our children, forcing them into idealized positions of sweetness, quietness, goodness, kindness, regulation.

Of course the word that sits most fittingly with regulations is also rules. We want to measure things with rulers, to make sure everything is in line, and developing perfectly, so we can create the perfect humans who will live in the perfect world and enjoy perfect lives. We create rules and ideas to make sure we are aimed righteously.

But the kids have fangs and claws and villainous drives and come to remind us of the futility of our ideologies. They have a destiny that has a scorched earth policy on our parenthood desires, racing their soul dragons round our lives - unless we cage them.

The reality is kids are drawn like magpies to things that are brightly colored and they love plastic toys and bad candy, and they can decimate your house in a heartbeat, and children have a wicked side, they are tricksters, dragons, testers and teasers, they love chaos, they are a vast tornado of wild magic. They are underworld gods.

I wouldn’t have it any other way. When I see my daughter’s cheeky smile, her delight at naughtiness, her big presence, her wild spirit, I could cry. Not with frustration and exhaustion (thought there is plenty of that) but with the joy of watching her live in the center of her brightly burning self. To see her magic. To watch her theatre unfold.

I love her racing through the forest, exhilarated, running feral with her coyote pack, plunging into ice cold rivers, able to forage plants and eat candy with equal gusto. I remember, after the hunting dogs got the pet rabbits, amidst her heartbreak, as we lay on the floor together, her telling me we all would go back to mother earth one day. 

I have decided to see this time of motherhood chaos and constriction as not a fall from spiritual grace, but as the next level. Gaming up. The power of limits, edges, testing, initiation. What the Saturnian Angel ladies unleash when they think you’re ready for the strong stuff. Feminine Chaos Magic. Now that is how real grace is forged. Indeed, that is why psychedelics work so well. They disrupt and take you into chaos realms, where green snakes talk to you, and your senses are overwhelmed.

Motherhood, the home, the animals, the relationships, the children will do pretty much the same thing (sometimes I have to sit for hours with a green dragon puppet on my hand, talking in a Transylvanian accent, in full Zog character. I don’t really need any psychedelics at this point in life). Mother magic is full of an insane creative chaos.

Life is not reasonable, growing other beings inside your body is not sane, everything you are dreaming into being is utterly outlandish and impossible. And you will do it.

I want you to know that you can hold this chaos and make it into a superpower.

Maturity, responsibility, leadership, motherhood, creation, happens inside fields of chaos, when you can hold your center like a supremely skilled spinning spider.

And you will practice and fail, and spin out of control, and keep coming back together.

Worry not. This chaos is not ‘regulated’ – the word regulation means ‘to make something straight’ to create a ‘line’. It is a very masculine concept that we should always be ‘regulating’ our nervous systems and ironing out all the kinks and twists.

Especially as mothers, when we are in the chaos vortex. Our bodies need resources and support not regulation in the way that we should be emoting in a straight line.

Sometimes we worry, is everyone else getting this right? While I’m tap dancing into insanity, whirling more plates than a circus clown. Feminine magic does not regulate us or takes us into linear energy. It helps us to make magic with the circles of crazy.

Our nervous system is a spiral, we dip into chaos, we un-regulate – and the wild thing is, this is when all the magic happens, when our creative superpowers are at their height, depth and breadth. We are a walking vortex of unruly potential – just like kids. Psychedelics are the same. Their power is that they deregulate us, kick us up the cosmic ass, talk back to us, make our hearts pound. We vomit. We say no. But still the medicine keeps on going. Motherhood is no different. It is ceremony. It is sacred.

And yes, in the slow moments of the spiral, grab hold of the railings and scream for help, and do whatever it takes to catch your breath, and come into coherence.

Structure your life, or at least your expectations, for the highs and the lows, and the whirlwinds and the destructions, and the creative surges and brief moments of peace. Feminine magic does not move in lines, but moonlit tidal surges of spiraling energy.

Then when the quietness comes, it echoes in the deep. For me now, in the silence I can hear the reverberations of life, and I can stretch into a spaciousness that is not only peaceful, but tinged with exquisite sorrow. Stitched with voluptuous grief. Inside the silence is mourning for the passage of time, for the movement of love. Not a static, imaginary heavenly love, but a rich, earthy, transformative love, shaping and breathing in each moment. Pulsing with life and death. Vivid with the continuum.

It is a love sourced from the deep, the place that births us and rots us. It is complex.

This feminine chaos is a crafting of the grail, the container that holds all of life, its love, its losses, and a vastness that wisdom marinates the heart and roots us down.

Feminine chaos is time magic. Don’t doubt you are creating a wild new future.

Feminine Magic School starts for 1 month on January 6th.