As mother’s day is approaching in the UK at the time of writing, I would like to do something I have never done before and come out in public as a person who is Childless not by Choice or CNBC. For the first time, I am going to sharing my personal journey and also be reflecting on childlessness and The Genius Groove.
Some of you may have noticed that my website was absent from between 2015 – 2017. There is a myriad of reasons for this but one of them is that I was on a journey of grief due to childlessness. This has led me to lots of realisations as to who we are as human beings and what our purpose is on this planet so I thought I would share.
The assumption of family
I have always wanted to be a mother. I grew up with two sisters and a working mother and father. Ours was the sort of house where we would gather around the kitchen table and chat. We also went places as a family to visit other families, as is the norm for Asian culture, so I always expected this family-centric life to continue.
I did get married quite young at 21 years old, but I was still a medical student and because I had a working mother who was away for long hours, I didn’t want to have children during my years as a junior doctor. I wanted to be in a position where I could focus on my children.
So, in the late 1990s, I envisaged a future for myself where I would travel the world as a speaker and author, earning enough to also have time for my children. My future children were always at the heart of my career plans.
To juggle or not juggle?
Image: Shutterstock
I went on to train as a GP and this is when a lot of my colleagues started to get married and have babies. I looked at them juggling their breast pumps and their bleeps and I thought again that I did not want to put my own children through all that. I thought it best to wait until I could take a career break.
But as many of you know from my book The Genius Groove, by the time I had finished my training as a GP, my marriage was on the rocks. I would not dream of bringing a child into a relationship that was not stable and about to collapse so although my long hours had diminished, I was no longer in a suitable relationship.
My marriage ended and after a few years I found my new partner and looked forward to starting a family with him. To save our privacy I will not go into the details of what happened next, but suffice to say that we did not have a child together. All the while my career as an author and speaker took off, but it was a lot more work than I envisaged back in the late 1990s.
There were many times when I would travel with very little notice. Looking back, hand on heart, if I had been a mother at that point I would have had to say no to all those dream opportunities. And I would be sitting here now without that sense of achievement.
Reaching the end and reaching out
It all came to a crashing halt when my body went into menopause a lot earlier than expected whilst still in my early 40s. That same year no less than eight of my friends were in various stages of pregnancy, some of them for the first time. So not only was I facing a future of childlessness, some of my friendships would never be the same again.
I had an uneasy feeling growing inside me. I was happy for my friends. I love children and babies and even did a conference about indigo children so I am delighted to spend time with children. But the uneasy feeling would come to me at times.
I looked online for discussions about women without children and only found articles about people who were adamant that they never wanted children and were happily childfree. Or I found sites discussing infertility. But what if the fertility journey had come to an end? I did a google search for ‘childless and don’t want to be’ and at last, I found Jody Day and Gateway Women.
A new gateway
Jody Day is a British author and psychologist who found herself childless by circumstance. She has broken down barriers in this taboo subject and is doing a lot to get the subject of being childless not by choice into the public eye.
Crucially, she realised that people who are childless not by choice, feel grief. Grief is normally only assigned to parents who have lost children but those who have never had them also feel a type of grief that is often not recognised as such.
She has founded an online community called Gateway Women. They also have in-person meetups around the world. This subject is still so secret and taboo that I had to go through various checks before being allowed in.
Healing the healer
So here I was, an international speaker, Amazon best-selling author and even TV host. I had written books on the subject of emotions and had been a holistic therapist for some years not to mention having been a GP. But I had no road map for these emotions. I needed help to navigate the torrent of feelings that were going through me about not being a mother when I so badly wanted to be.
Being part of the community for some years now has helped me so much to heal the grief I feel. Along the way, I have come to learn a lot about the dynamics of having children and also where we get our sense of purpose. So here are some of the things I have learnt.
Children and Purpose
This is one of the biggest lessons I have learnt on my healing journey. It is sometimes an unspoken tenet of society that your children are meant to be your greatest purpose in life. Otherwise, why would you be working at a job you hate to bring in money if it wasn’t to build a life for your family? Having children makes it all worth it.
It’s been said straight to my face – what is your purpose if you don’t have children? Luckily for me, such comments are rare as I have a public life. My sense of purpose is out for people to see. It has amazed me that in all the time I have spent travelling the world speaking when I was on my own, nobody asked me if I was married or if I had a man in tow. My work spoke for itself.
I found my Genius Groove but people don’t always find theirs. Our education system is designed to numb out our creativity and funnel us into jobs that pay the bills instead.
So if the children that your life was supposed to revolve around do not manifest then what are you supposed to do after that? People stay in jobs that they do not love where they don’t feel a sense of purpose and not having children compounds these feelings.
Excusing our dreams
But what does that say about wider society? That to some degree, we have substituted having children for having a purpose and fulfilling our creative dreams. For some, having children and being a parent might truly be their creativity. But we are also individuals and part of our inner journey and our path in life is to discover who we are in our own right.
But this can be hard work: to stand up and be counted for what you really want to do and who you really are. It feels much easier to cover all that over and children give the perfect excuse to not fulfil your true potential. You can point to your children and your responsibilities.
A lot of children are not planned so it cannot be said that they are consciously brought into the world as an excuse to not face ourselves. But once they arrive they can take on that role.
So this gives another double whammy for childless people. They not only haven’t had the child and have all that readjustment to do, they also have to face questions that people with children may put aside such as why am I here and what is my purpose?
Moving on
With childlessness from all causes on the rise and about a quarter of women in Europe and the USA reaching menopause without having had children, these conversations are only going to become more prevalent. Thanks to Jody Day and Gateway Women and others for getting that ball rolling. They have helped me immensely.
As time goes by I feel very different. The grief, although it never entirely goes away does diminish as I do the work of processing my feelings. I realise now that I could not have fulfilled so many of my dreams if I had been a mother. Although it has been a tough journey, I understand and even now celebrate why I chose at a soul level not to have children.
It is mainly the work of Jody Day and her community that gave me a map to understand my own feelings that I could not articulate that has moved me forward into this place where I feel whole again.
At this unprecedented time in human history when childlessness from all sorts of reasons is so prevalent, we can gain new insights into our dynamics around parenthood and our sense of purpose. Together we can greater insights into parenting and The Genius Groove.
I know this is a controversial post. Please do not leave suggestions in the comments as to how I can adopt or some other solution that you think is being helpful. I would welcome your thoughts on the main points though.
In this article, I would like to discuss something disturbing when it comes to ancient legends and history. It seems there is a new type of racist attitude when it comes to local legends of various gods.
Local legends around the world attribute various achievements to gods and giants. But modern thinking ignores these local legends and attributes these achievements to the ancestors of the people living there now.
But in some ways isn’t that worse: to ignore the voices of indigenous peoples around the world and project Western scientific values onto them in the name of anti-racism? By not listening to the voices of indigenous people when it comes to the attribution of past achievements, are we projecting a new type of racism onto them instead? Do we have a case of ancient legends, racist projections?
Preserving the memories of the gods
A few years ago I was visiting the ruins of Tulum on the Yucatan peninsula. There, literally carved in stone, are figures carved in the sides of temples that depict the gods returning to Earth. Our guide told us some of the accompanying stories that the gods were supposed to one day return to earth having lived amongst humans in the distant past.
By El Comandante (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
We see a similar motif around the world. Local legends about mysterious structures say that giants or gods built something them in the distant past. This applies to everything from The Giants Causeway in Northern Ireland to the legends around Puma Punku which say that the god Viracocha and his giant servants created much of the world. A lot of myths such as those from Sumerian cultures speak of how the gods gave human beings skills such as metallurgy and even makeup.
Yes, there might be some actual white supremacists amongst them but I would argue that it is actually racist to dismiss the voice and agency of the local peoples and cultures that have so carefully preserved this heritage. Just because it does not suit the current Western scientific paradigm to accept that gods and giants lived amongst us in the distant past and built certain monuments doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen and it is insulting to the people whose histories contain such stories.
Dismissing indigenous agency and science
What is worse is that people who do believe the local legends are accused of being racist because they are not giving the credit for these great feats to the local people. But by dismissing the voice and agency of local people I think it is actually another offence. It is yet another projection of the way we want people of other cultures to be, but may not reflect who they actually are. In a way, it is yet another colonialist, paternalistic attitude which yet again removes the agency from people.
When I was in Japan in 2008 at the Hokkaido summit for Shifting the Assumptions in Science, one of the main points we discussed was that the science of various indigenous peoples of the world needs to be respected. Too often their scientific ideas are dismissed as primitive, when they may actually be more in tune with how the universe actually is: not how we are projecting it to be.
So for example when aboriginal legends discuss the Dreamtime as an aspect of the universe with no end or beginning – that sounds very much like higher dimensions beyond space and time. Just because it sounds different from modern physics doesn’t make it any less real when it comes to how the universe works.
I have made a little video to illustrate the issue of this new type of projection. By writing this article and making this video, I hope that more people can become aware of this and move through it. Please leave your comments below and tell me what you think.
In a year that sees the opening of yet another Hollywood movie that depicts Mary Magdalene, I would like to reflect on a bit of a disturbing aspect of what we have seen so far about her and ask the question was Mary Magdalene just a vessel for the Holy Blood?
The Biggest Secret?
The Da Vinci Code book and film were groundbreaking. Their huge popularity showed that the general public has an appetite for moving beyond the church narrative of Mary Magdalene and Jesus to finding out the truth.
Yet you could come away from the film and the novel thinking that the big secret that the church was trying to hide is that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had children and there was a bloodline of descendants. This was at least a change from Mary Magdalene being associated with prostitution. She was being placed back into her seemingly rightful position as Jesus’ wife and the bearer of his children.
The book was partially based on the blockbuster non-fiction book of the 1980s Holy Blood Holy Grail. Whether either project had intended this, you could be left with an impression of Mary Magdalene as just a vessel. In fact, in The Da Vinci Code, Mary Magdalene is called, ‘the Holy Vessel’. She is likened to the Holy Grail at times – the chalice that held the holy blood. This places her womb as a receptacle for the blood of Jesus, meaning his child, and emphasises that this is why she is important.
This is a progress, I guess, as it has moved Mary Magdalene from the status of sinner to that of wife and mother. And yes, that is something to celebrate, but it could also be seen as hiding other demeaning attitudes which I will discuss. It is also totally at odds with the vision of Mary Magdalene that I witnessed back in 2001.
The status of motherhood in today’s society
Bringing Mary Magdalene’s status up to mother and vessel for a Holy Baby and seeing that as the ultimate elevation does tie in with social attitudes that still prevail that say that no matter what a woman does, her ultimate purpose is to be a mother.
Although motherhood is, of course, a state that is highly important that often goes unrewarded in society, to say that it is the only ‘purpose’ of a woman is an insult to mothers and all women.
This is a highly complex issue and I do not want to go into it fully in this article. Suffice to say that when we honour a woman just because she is the oven that the bun goes into, we do women a disservice. We are saying that the only purpose for someone as a human being is that they can reproduce and take care of another human being.
The Oven for the Bun
I certainly witnessed whilst working on labour wards that women are suddenly given care and attention that they have probably never received before but ultimately it is not about them and who they are but their ability to bring another person into the world which really is out of their conscious control. A woman cannot consciously force herself to conceive as the scores of infertile people in the world can corroborate.
So to say that motherhood is the ultimate purpose for women is to actually honour something that is coming through them, not from their conscious thoughts. We are actually saying that they do not matter as a person, just this process of conception that is not under their conscious control. (The job of raising children is another matter – I am discussing the act of becoming a mother.)
By saying Mary Magdalene is the grail and vessel that receives the Holy Blood we reduce her to being the oven for the bun. It seems to me like yet another taming of a woman to conform to what is expected in the lens of the society that we have now.
If you want any proof of this you only have to look at the reams of press given to the status of Jennifer Aniston’s womb. It seems that no matter what success a woman has, she can only be truly acceptable if she has a child. High Profile women such as Jennifer Aniston and Kylie Minogue who do not have children seem to provoke nervous twitching from many quarters of society.
A lost feminine power
What I saw in my visions of Mary Magdalene in 2001 was a woman like nobody I have ever met because such a woman would not be possible now. She was a learned person but not in the way we would recognise because she had knowledge of a nature that existed before science and spirituality split off from each other – when it was just knowledge of the universe.
The closest we have to this sort of knowledge is what we call sacred geometry but the very fact that we have to add the term ‘sacred’ to it shows just how far removed we are from the unity of knowledge that used to exist. It used to be just knowledge: it didn’t need the ‘sacred’ title.
She also combined the science and spiritual, the male and female and an inner power in a way that women today would find difficult to embody. This is because we have a lot of the sense of feminine power in our society. For many years now, in Western culture, feminine power has been extinguished to the point where most people don’t even know what that is.
So when we see female empowerment in our culture today it is when a woman takes on what has traditionally been a man’s role – fighting for example as seen in the film Kick-Ass.
This is what passes today as female empowerment but it is not necessarily an expression of feminine power. That is a muscle that is so disused in many Western societies that it is just unfamiliar. It is still present in some other societies around the world and you can see it if you witness women elders of tribes being honoured for their wisdom.
This lack of feminine power hurts both men and women – when men are told that being emotional or vulnerable is weak, they end up suppressing their emotions. This could be a factor in the higher suicide rates in young men.
What I saw of Mary Magdalene was that she didn’t just bring her womb to the table but the whole person. She was powerful and learned in her own right. The research I have done and guidance I have been given in the terms of visions has led me to a conclusion as to who she might have been as a historical figure. If you would like to see my full insights on this check out The Magdalene Mystery School.
Was Mary Magdalene a teacher in her own right?
We see glimpses of what I think is the real Mary Magdalene in what is known as The Gnostic Gospels. The Gospel of Phillip and indeed the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, have sections that suggest that Mary Magdalene has special knowledge given to her by Jesus, something that caused protests from the other disciples.
There are also many traditions around the world that say that Mary Magdalene was a teacher – one of the most popular ones is that she ended up in France. Usually, this assumes that she was teaching the information that Jesus had passed on to her and this could well be. But there is a hint in Luke’s gospel that she could have had her own independent life as it says that she was one of a group of women who were funding Jesus’ ministry.
It is still taboo in our society to think of a woman as independent with her own opinions today. I think this sketch puts this across rather well.
Hence when we think of Mary Magdalene we are still seeing her through our lens which is that ultimately a woman’s purpose is motherhood.
Conclusions and visions for the future
In my visions, Mary Magdalene was both a mother and a person in her own right with her own ideas. Wouldn’t it be radical if we saw Mary Magdalene like this today? Maybe with the shifts in society happening at the moment, we may even start to see all woman in this way: as people in their own right whether married or not, mothers or not. We may, at last, recognise women as more than just vessels for another’s teaching or bloodline and see Mary Magdalene in a new light.
Sometimes other dimensions can appear quite dramatically into this one. This time, I am going to discuss the time I woke up to see an alien in my bedroom.
The Perfect Life?
Back in early 2002, my life was very different to how it is now. I lived in a smart area of the UK just outside of London, I was working as a doctor, my husband was a doctor; he had just acquired a sports car and we had our own townhouse by the canal.
From the outside, we looked like the perfect, successful young couple. But the cracks had long been appearing. Ironically it was the initial success of the marriage I had entered into in 1995 that had given me the safe place to grow and I ended up changing dramatically. My spiritual growth had accelerated to the point that my husband no longer understood me and I was also deeply unhappy in a medical job that reflected the reductionist, fear-based paradigm.
Little did I know that this dissatisfaction at my life was part of a greater perspective orchestrated by other levels of consciousness that, even now, I still don’t fully understand. But I guess this is why, in around February 2002, I awoke to find an alien in my bedroom.
The Night Visitor
I was sleeping in bed with my husband and around 2-3am I awoke to find I was sleeping on my right side which was unusual and had the distinct sensation that someone was rummaging around in my back! I had the strange sensation of there being fingers actually inside my back which was hot but I wouldn’t say I was burning.
And in front of me was a strange sight. I can only seem to describe it as a blue blob that had a swirling within it. It looked to me almost like a water cooler bottle on its side. And it was edging, amoeba-like, out of the door. One of my immediate thoughts was that I didn’t understand why it had to use the door as it was in a different dimension and surely the door did not exist in that one.
The other was, I must admit, a bit of fear. At the time, I had just starting channelling and the beings coming through me said that their collective name was Angelis. So inwardly I pleaded, “help me, Angelis”. But then a thought which felt intrusive as if from outside myself said, “how do you know this isn’t Angelis?” I realised that I didn’t know.
I tried to wake up my husband to see it, but I could not rouse him. I knew it was not meant to be – that he was not meant to see it. So I relaxed a bit watching the thing move away.
The dimensional overlay
And the rest of the room was in a sort of eerie light. I could see overlays of other dimensions onto this one. I realised the futility of what we think is property ownership. We don’t really own anything in 3-D – there are many dimensions above this one that makes all that seem so irrelevant.
For the rest of the night, my consciousness seemed to dance around the planet. I went anywhere a thought would take me. I flew over the countryside of England looking at green fields and in the state that I was in, I saw different aliens just wandering around.
There are many different types that exist in the different octaves of dimensions all around us. But we don’t normally perceive them.
I wondered if they really did land on The White House lawn, so suddenly my consciousness saw the deals done behind our back between aliens and USA government agencies.
At one point, I went to visit my friend in her flat in London and her emotional body appeared like a matrix of intersection points – some seemingly thicker than other points. I intuitively knew what the emotions were that were stuck there and helped to release them.
Journeys in consciousness
For much of the rest of the night, I had more explorations in consciousness – most of which I cannot remember. At one point I was in the jungles of Central America and being shown that many more pyramids are covered by vegetation and just waiting to be discovered.
This last revelation may be already known to you but at the time a) this wasn’t often discussed if at all and b) it wasn’t something that I knew about from my education so far. A week or so later I saw confirmation of this in an article in New Scientist. In fact, at the time of writing a news story is breaking that even more extensive Mayan ruins have been found in Guatemala.
We are all from Krypton
I also got a feeling that I understood how to move my consciousness in order to do certain feats, even some we normally associate with the comic character Superman! Have you ever seen the sections of the Superman films when other visitors from the planet Krypton discover their powers here on Earth? They can fly and they can stop a bullet. Well, these are all things we can do too!
Our bodies are made up of information and consciousness – we know this from physics. At the macro level we think we are solid but deep into the atom we are ’empty space’. What I realised in the altered state was that we can actually move this consciousness any way we want. Most of us are not at the perspective to be able to do this but some people have developed themselves enough to be able to manipulate reality, although it takes a lot of practice.
That day I realised it is possible to manipulate consciousness so that we can fly. Or even will the atoms in your own hand to come together so strongly you can stop a ‘speeding bullet’.
Implanted for Blast Off
As for the hands in my back. I somehow knew I had been implanted with a geometry of consciousness that was a triangle or pyramid. I had travelled to ancient pyramids throughout the night. Later that day, I looked up a passage in the book by Barbara Marciniak, Bringers of the Dawn that discusses how we may start to be implanted with shapes including the triangle and it felt so true to me.
As you may or may not know, my life changed dramatically after that. You could say that I stepped out of the box that I had been living in so far. I wonder, but cannot know for certain, if I was somehow being prepared for the changes about to happen in my life.
If so, it is an amazing reminder of just how orchestrated our lives are at some level. I did not call in a being or even consciously wish for the changes. But somewhere in the universe, it was decided that there would be an ‘alien’ in my bedroom.
You probably can’t help but notice that in the last decade or so there has been a rise in what is called The Digital Nomad. This is when a person has a lifestyle that is location independent. People work from a laptop whilst travelling the world.
It is all about freedom and I have indeed geared my own life towards location independence myself. I have also been observing others who are living the digital nomad lifestyle and have come to understand a few things in relation to The Genius Groove so in this article we shall look at Digital Nomad vs The Genius Groove.
1. Travel in of itself is not your Genius Groove.
First, let’s get this out of the way. Travel can be wonderful; I would never tell anyone not to travel. It is one of the best ways to really transform who you are as you experience different cultures. This is especially true if you never left your country of origin whilst you were a child. So travelling can be a form of personal development in itself.
Some people thrive on constant travel. But do I think travel of itself is a Genius Groove? No, I don’t. The Genius Groove is about bringing through your unique creativity and although aspects of travelling constantly may be very creative, as an activity, travelling in of itself probably doesn’t lead to much creativity.
It could enable something creative – maybe you write better on a beach in Bali or love to compose music on a plane, but I don’t think the act of travelling is a person’s main Genius Groove, although it is very important. You are not creating, as such, just by moving your physical body from one place to another.
2. The Constant Search vs The Genius Groove.
It is said that to perfect any skill you need at least 10,000 hours of practice. I have discussed in the book The Genius Groove at length of how those who feel connected to the field in a particular activity are more likely to actually put in those hours.
To really be in your Genius Groove is actually quite focused. From having a wide range of activities suddenly someone may do one or two activities a day. And they are happy to be that way because they have found their joy. It is this that keeps people going even when the going gets tough.
But what I have sometimes witnessed of digital nomadism is the opposite – a constant experimenting with many different activities. And while that is absolutely wonderful and a type of creativity in itself, I get the sense that the people doing this are actually searching for a connection to something.
So they are trying on lots of hats to see what will fit, which is great and it is so wonderful that they can do this but it is not The Genius Groove. Being in The Genus Groove is often about practising a few activities for long periods of time. By doing this, the connection builds up to the point where the activity seems effortless.
I know in my own life, initially when I did talks I would feel a flutter of excitement and nervousness. Now I know that when I get talking – something kicks in and I am in the zone. It is through sheer years of practice and focus that my connection to the field has becomes so strong that I know I can just speak and something will come.
That deep practice for years to hone my art is the opposite of the experimentation that can accompany digital nomadism. Again there is nothing wrong with it at all – I am simply saying that this is not necessarily the same as being in your Genius Groove.
A Groovy Nomad?
So is there a way that you can be in your Genius Groove and be a Digital Nomad? Of course, you can be location independent and have a Genius Groove that you can do on the road and that pays money enough to sustain this lifestyle – even if that means a few hundred dollars a month because you’re living in Bangkok.
But just because someone is a digital nomad, it does not mean they have found nirvana and know who they truly are. Also just because someone is in their Genius Groove and remain close to their collection of grand pianos because this is where they feel joy, it doesn’t make them less than someone who travels.
Our connection to the universe occurs from within our own souls and that can happen from anywhere in the world (or universe). Our spirituality is truly location independent! So the digital nomad trend, although fantastic, is also a stepping stone for us to transition to a life where everybody is in their creativity and Genius Groove and living the way they want to.
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