Pregnancy changes everything, not only who you are, but how you exist inside your own body.
The curvature of the spine shifts. The organs rearrange themselves to make room for life. The heart enlarges. The blood volume increases. The body heat rises. Every sense heightens.
And as the body prepares to open - to become a portal between worlds - the nervous system, too, grows more sensitive and psychic ability is heightened.
The Body Remembers: Birth, Loss, and Postpartum Healing
During that time, my mother was dying.
My core muscles stretched so far they forgot how to hold me. After giving birth; twenty-nine hours of labor, stitches, sleep deprivation, and the weight of sudden loss of self; my body ached in ways that language can’t hold. The back pain. The hormone crash. The exhaustion and ecstacy. The emptiness and fullness. The wonder and grief.
Six months later, I’m still recovering. But I am also stronger - in ways that have nothing to do with muscle. Something elemental has rearranged itself inside me.
Because the transformation that happens through birth isn’t small. It’s total. It tears away the old architecture of identity and builds something entirely new - from the bones outward.
This is where my work deepened - in the sacred soma, in the mind, in the breath and presence.
Returning to the Body After Birth
What is necessary after birth is not “balance” or “bounce back.” It’s surrender. It’s the kind of weeping that empties the body of old fear. It’s letting the nervous system relearn safety through softness, breath, and release. The tears themselves are medicine - they regulate what the mind cannot.
Postpartum healing is not only physical; it’s deeply somatic and spiritual. The body becomes both teacher and temple - revealing where life still lives inside us, and where grief has settled to be felt.
And through it all, I’ve had to return, again and again, to my body.
To listen to her tremors and echoes.
To rebuild safety from the inside.
To find the strength to carry my child while grieving my mother.
Healing Begins Where the Body Finally Exhales
The truth is: there’s no linear healing after birth or otherwise. There’s a deep unravelling, a reckoning, and eventually a return. The body teaches you this, not through control, but through release. The trembling, the tears, the breath that softens what was braced for too long; these are the real practices. Healing isn’t about regaining who you were before birth, but learning how to inhabit who you’ve become.
The Birth of Return to the Temple Within
The seed of Return to the Temple Within was planted long before, but I officially birthed it while pregnant. I had no idea the initiation I would walk through to stand in that leadership again.
Now I see - this retreat isn’t something I created after healing.
It’s something that is born through the healing itself.
Because the return to the body is not a concept, it’s a practice.
It happens through breath that slows the pulse of thought.
Through trance and hypnosis that soften the mind’s grip and allows the soul to speak.
Through embodied movement that helps the body remember safety again, and the nervous system relearn trust.
This is the work we enter inside Return to the Temple Within; a lived transformation.
Over seven days in Bali, we move through the very gateways I walk - breath by breath - as I carry life and loss at once. You’ll be guided through hypnosis journeys, somatic movement, and trance states that help the body release what it’s been carrying, and rebuild safety from the inside out.
This retreat is a reclamation of your body as temple - the home of your power, your softness, your remembrance.
And to help you begin before you even arrive, I’m offering my Deep Rest Hypnosis as a free gift - a sacred initiation into the stillness that begins every transformation.
The Body as Temple
Return to the Temple Within was woven from these lived truths; from the places where grief met grace, and exhaustion met devotion.
It’s a women’s retreat in Bali dedicated to remembrance, rest, and renewal; where we meet ourselves beneath the noise, through movement, ceremony, and the sacred language of the body.
To breathe.
To feel.
To remember that the body is not just the vessel,
she is the temple.
Join us in Bali this December for Return to the Temple Within - a seven-day women’s retreat for remembrance, rest, and renewal.
Collage Cover image created by Carla JvR using a photograph taken by Malaika Evans @the.hempress