Do It All Woman No More: A Return to Rest and Community
Do it All Woman No More
On the 1st of Jan I was scaling a Scottish mountain in my maternal homeland in absolute delight, by the 3rd of Jan I was floored having put my back out. I have never known pain like this. Excruciating what the actual fuck pain. Pain that has made me have a whole new empathy for people who suffer chronically. I cancelled all my in person movement classes and for two days slightly spiralled and panicked as it was not clear what was actually going on and I’ve had to wait it out and rest.
Being me and always looking for the deeper reason- there’s always a deeper reason- I could see straight away that this wasn’t just inflammation from a muscle strain or a disc/nerve thing. It wasn’t just a clearing out of material stuff. It was and is a flushing out of emotional pain, it was grief of watching my mum in daily pain for 2 weeks. Since last January, she has developed an acute spinal condition called osteophytes from her arthritis. Seeing her do her exercises twice a day every day in agony cracked me wide open. Mum and I’s bond is deep and living with her for a fortnight I can see the boundaries blurred between her and me. I’m her first born and we are both highly sensitive.
I took her to the river near her home and asked for healing. I knew in my bones that this pain was coming up on the cancer full moon-the sign of the mother-to clear ancestral pain from my maternal line. Mum found a tree right by the water’s edge that had a bulge at the base of its trunk, the perfect seat just for her, she cooried in and rested her back against it. All the stuff mum was holding I told her to ask the water to hold it for her as I washed my face with it, spoke prayers and sang a song to her I wrote on the last day of 2025 called Daughters of these Waters in a very scottish accent which always comes out more when I go home. I love my mum more than anything but I do not want to hold the maternal or ancestral pain body as my own.
The start of 2026 has literally put me on my back and right into my body. My word of the year is Devotion which to me means ALL IN. All in doesn’t mean do it all. I’ve seen the part of me that January always gives me a lesson in. A part of me I’m now calling Hold it All Woman. Hold it All Woman is the part of me that holds it all alone, holds it altogether, does too much and holds too many things at once. Or maybe it’s Do it All Woman, yes her too. I am being royally stripped to the bare branches of another layer of the hold it all, do it all pattern. I don’t want to hold it all anymore. I don’t want to do it all. My teacher Erin’s teacher told her once; “you can’t do it all in life, do two things and do them really well.” That has stayed with me for over a decade and is just so bloody grounding.
I know exactly what two things I want to do this year that will pull me back to what matters every time Do it All Woman tries to scatter my energy with that pattern. For now, I’m devoting myself to my body. My body is the foundation of my creativity and this year I vow to create at my body’s pace before I do anything. And I’m so bloody happy about it.
This is all part of the feminine cycle of descent, of going into the shadow and alchemising it into gold.
Come gather round the hearth this winter to Movement For The Feminine, our weekly women’s circle, ritual and movement class on Wednesdays at 6.15pm
I’m now on the other side of pain and going slowly to let this lesson integrate.
There are many layers to the do it all pattern and as we are at the tail end of the year of the snake, let’s burn this one with love before the year of the horse starts next month.
All my love to the Oca women,
Francesca xx
