Unlocking the Power of the Womb Through "Womb Awakening"
I recently finished reading the profound book "Womb Awakening" by Azra Bertrand and Seren Bertrand, and it has truly transformed my perspective on womanhood, feminine energy, and the sacredness of the womb space. This book is a powerful guide to reclaiming and honoring the wisdom of the womb as a source of creativity, intuition, and spiritual awakening.
One of the main teachings that resonated deeply with me is the understanding that the womb is not just a physical organ for childbearing but a potent energetic center that influences every aspect of a woman's life - our emotions, sexuality, creativity, and even our ability to give birth to new ideas and manifestations. As the authors eloquently state, "The womb is a cosmic compass, guiding us to our truth, our power, and our essence as women."
The book delves into the ways patriarchal societies have disconnected women from their womb wisdom, leading to a collective suppression of feminine power. It highlights how trauma, shame, and societal conditioning have caused many women to shut down, ignore or even reject this sacred part of themselves. However, "Womb Awakening" offers a path to healing and reclaiming this vital source of feminine energy.
Through a beautiful blend of ancient wisdom from various cultures, personal stories, and practical exercises, the book invites women to embark on a journey of self-discovery and healing. It emphasizes the importance of releasing past traumas, societal conditioning, and limiting beliefs that have disconnected us from our womb wisdom. One of the standout quotes that resonated with me is: "When we reclaim the power of our wombs, we reclaim the power of our lives." This sentiment encapsulates the transformative potential of womb awakening, reminding us that by honoring this sacred space within, we can unlock our full potential and live with authenticity and purpose.
The book also explores the profound connection between the womb and the Earth, recognizing the cyclical nature of both and the importance of aligning with the rhythms of nature. The authors draw parallels between the menstrual cycle and the cycles of the moon, highlighting how our wombs are intrinsically linked to the Earth's natural rhythms. As they beautifully express, "The womb is a microcosm of the Earth, and when we heal our wombs, we heal the Earth."
Through a variety of womb-centered practices, such as womb meditations, yoni egg practices, menstrual rituals, and even womb-friendly nutrition, "Womb Awakening" offers tangible tools for cultivating a deeper relationship with our wombs and embracing our feminine essence. These practices have helped me connect with my body in a more profound way, honoring my menstrual cycle as a sacred time of renewal and introspection.
Here are some of the key practices described:
Womb Breath Reconnection
The authors emphasize that reconnecting to the breath and life force energy in your womb space is a powerful first step. The womb breathwork practice I outlined below helps bring awareness and prana (vital energy) to this area. By consciously breathing into the womb, you begin to clear stagnation and reconnect to your divine feminine essence.
Womb Healing Visualisations
One visualisation exercise guides you to imagine entering the womb space within, seeing it as a beautiful sanctuary. You are encouraged to simply be present, send love, and set the intention for any trapped emotions, energy blocks or past imprints to be cleared and transmuted by light.
Another visualization is focused on your journey from the womb outward. You imagine going back through the birth canal, seeing/feeling any themes, emotions or imprints that may have impacted you. The goal is to send that younger self love and reassurance that you are safe, worthy and whole.
Writing a Letter to Your Womb
This exercise has you write a letter to your womb, pouring out any emotions, fears, gratitude or wishes you may have for this sacred space. You can share memories, acknowledge any wounding, and make requests for healing. After writing, you are guided to breathe into your womb and imagine its response back to you.
Womb Chakra Clearing
Since the womb is linked to the sacral chakra, practices like hip circling, chanting, and using healing sacral chakra stones like orange calcite can help clear blocks and stagnation in this energy center.
Working With Yoni Eggs
The book provides instruction on practicing with spiritual yoni eggs made of gemstones like jade or rose quartz. These eggs, when carefully and respectfully used, can help increase womb awareness, release stagnant energy, and remap neural pathways around sensuality and worthiness.
Honouring Your Cycle
Tuning into your menstrual cycle as a sacred, cyclical journey is also key. Rather than overriding your body's natural cycles, you can realign your lifestyle, work schedule, self-care and spiritual practices to harmonize with your inherent rhythm as a life-givingcyclical being. This honoring allows you to reclaim your true feminine power.
Womb Breathwork Practice
This powerful breathwork practice is designed to help you connect with the energy and wisdom of your womb space. By focusing your breath in your womb area, you create an energetic flow that can help release stagnant emotions, increase creative energy, and deepen your intuitive connection.
Step 1: Prepare Your Space Find a quiet, comfortable space where you can lie down without being disturbed. You may want to use a yoga mat, blankets, or pillows to support your body. Consider dimming the lights, burning a candle or incense, and playing soft, ambient music to create a calming atmosphere.
Step 2: Begin with Relaxation Lie down on your back, allowing your body to fully relax. Take a few deep breaths, inhaling through your nose and exhaling through your mouth. Scan your body from head to toe, consciously releasing any areas of tension or tightness with each exhale.
Step 3: Womb Breath Connection Once you feel relaxed, bring your awareness to your womb space, located a few inches below your navel. As you inhale deeply through your nose, imagine drawing the breath down into your womb, feeling it expand and fill with prana (life force energy). As you exhale through your mouth, soften and release any tension in your womb area.
Step 4: Enhance the Connection With each inhale, visualize a warm, golden light entering your womb space, filling it with radiant energy. On the exhale, imagine any stagnant emotions, blocks or densities leaving your body through your womb. Continue this visualization, synchronizing it with your deep, conscious breathing.
Step 5: Open to Intuitive Guidance As you settle into this rhythmic breathwork, open yourself up to any messages, visions or intuitive guidance that may arise. Your womb is a powerful source of wisdom, and this practice can help you tap into its innate knowledge. Allow any images, symbols or words to gently flow into your awareness without forcing or attachment.
Step 6: Integrate the Experience
After 10-15 minutes of womb breathwork, begin to bring your awareness back to your physical body and surroundings. Take a few final deep breaths, and gently move your fingers and toes. When you feel ready, slowly open your eyes and take a moment to ground yourself before sitting up.
Step 7: Journal and Reflect It can be helpful to record any insights, visions or emotions that arose during the practice in a journal. Reflect on how you feel in your body - do you notice a sense of openness, warmth or creative energy emanating from your womb space?
Womb breathwork practice can help release energetic blockages, balance your sacral chakra, and increase sensitivity to your innate feminine intuition. With regular practice, you may find yourself feeling more connected to your inner wisdom, sensuality and life's creative flow. Be patient and compassionate with yourself as you deepen this sacred connection.
One of the most impactful sections for me was the chapter on "Womb Memories," which explores how our experiences in the womb, including our mother's emotional state and any traumas she may have experienced, can shape our patterns and beliefs later in life.
Womb is not just a physical space, but an energetic, emotional and spiritual center that imprints and stores experiences, especially intense ones like trauma. Any wounding or shock experienced in utero or during the birth process can become encoded into the womb's cellular memory and energetic field.
For example, if the mother experienced high levels of stress, fear, grief or abuse during pregnancy, those heavy emotional imprints can get passed onto the developing baby through the biochemical, hormonal and subtle energetic pathways of the womb environment. This sets up patterns of anxiety, disconnection or hypervigilance from the very beginning.
The book also discusses how any invasive procedures, birth interventions or difficulties like a traumatic cesarean or premature birth can disrupt the sacred birthing process and imprint on the womb and feminine psyche. There is a potential for feelings of being "ripped from the womb" rather than an integrated birthing experience.
The effect of such primal traumas can persist long into a woman's life, impacting her ability to feel safe in her body, to trust her intuition, to experience sexuality and sensuality openly, and to step into her full feminine power. Womb trauma may show up as:
Disconnection or disassociation from the womb space
Reproductive/fertility issues or pain during menstruation
Body image issues and struggles with self-worth
Boundary issues in relationships
Creative/sexual blocks and energy stagnation
Anxiety, depression or PTSD symptoms
Unhealed womb traumas can be passed down for generations, which is why the book emphasizes the importance of breaking cycles of intergenerational wounding. It guides women to excavate and actively transform these imprints in order to lead more embodied, empowered lives aligned with their innate feminine wisdom.
"The traumatic experiences of our mothers, grandmothers, and ancestral lineages leave encoded imprints within our womb consciousness. These unresolved memories, emotions and stories live within the womb's energetic blueprint, shaping our beliefs, patterns and experiences."
"Womb Awakening" - Ancestral Womb Healing Meditation
Close your eyes and allow your breath to slow and deepen. With each inhalation, imagine drawing earth energy up through the soles of your feet, grounding your body. As you exhale, soften your womb space, creating an opening.
Visualize yourself standing in a woodland grove, the air fragrant with cedar and sage. In the center is an ancient, gnarled oak tree with a hollow opening in its trunk. This is the passage into the Womb Ancestry Trail you are about to journey.
When you feel ready, step forward and enter into the bark-lined hollow. The space within seems to expand infinitely as you are drawn down a spiraling path into the warm, dusky red earth. You find yourself in the womb-tomb of the ancestral mothers.
Around you are floating gossamer strands, like ethereal ribbons undulating gently. Each glistening filament represents an ancestral womb lineage - the unbroken cord of life flowing through your grandmother's womb, her grandmother's womb, and all the way through the primordial womb of your most ancient matrilineal source.
Extend your hands and make a connection with one shimmering strand that calls to you. As you grab hold of it, visions and memories begin flooding through of the womb experiences held within this lineage.
Perhaps you bear witness to the anguish and despair experienced by your great-grandmother as she labors to birth a stillborn child during the brutal Cherokee Trail of Tears death marches. Or maybe you touch into the wounding of an ancestral midwife persecuted as a witch during the Inquisition for her womb healing wisdom.
Be present and bear witness to everything that arises without judgment, holding a space of unconditional love and compassion. Send this lineage the healing energies it has longed for across generations.
When you feel complete, slowly release the strand and turn to make your way back up the spiral path and out of the hollow womb-tomb. As you emerge, draw a few cleansing breaths. Give gratitude for the generational wisdom and resilience you carry within your womb ancestry.
The path of womb awakening involves courageously diving into these amniotic streams to liberate the sacred powers and teachings that have been disrupted or persecuted. Through your soulful tending, you alchemize the traumatic imprints into sources of rebirth and profound feminine remembrance.
After immersing myself in the profound teachings of "Womb Awakening," I feel my perspective on feminine health, sexuality and spirituality has undergone a powerful shift. This book has cracked open an entirely new dimension of what it means to fully inhabit and honor my body as a woman.
For too long, I, like many women, had an unconscious disconnection from my womb space - the very source of my creative, intuitive and generative powers. I related to my womb primarily through a physical/reproductive lens, not the energetic, emotional and sacred wellspring it truly is. Reading "Womb Awakening" was like being initiated into the long-suppressed mysteries of the feminine and reclaiming a birthright I had been separated from.
The key message that will remain etched in my womb consciousness is that when we as women go inward to heal, awaken and befriend our womb spaces, we unlock an infinite source of wisdom, power and radiant life force from within. As the authors beautifully express, "To awaken the womb is to awaken as the Creator herself - wild, divine, and a birther of worlds."
Some of the core teachings I am integrating include:
- Relating to my menstrual cycle as a sacred, intuitive gateway rather than an inconvenience
- Utilizing breath, sound, movement and visualization practices to process stored womb traumas
- Unearthing and transforming inherited ancestral imprints within my womb lineage
- Aligning my creative pursuits, relationships and lifestyle with the organic, cyclical rhythms of my womb awareness
- Embracing the womb as a compass continually guiding me to my deepest truths, boundaries and authentic self
The quote that most struck me was, "Our wombs are not mere reproductive vehicles, but interdimensional portals - allowing us to birth ourselves over and over into our most luminous wholeness." I realize now that my womb's calling is so much vaster than I ever conceived.
Overall, "Womb Awakening" has been an initiatory journey into realms of the feminine that our culture has long renounced or made taboo. By reviving and embodying these ancient womb tenets, I feel I have stepped into a larger landscape of power, belonging and sovereignty as a woman. It has awakened a profound reclamation and reverence for the holistic, cyclical dimensions of my ecosystems of fertility, creativity and pleasure.
I cannot recommend this book highly enough for any woman seeking to forge a deeper attunement to her inherent feminine wisdom, healing intergenerational trauma, and birthing herself into her most vibrant, authentic expression. "Womb Awakening" has illuminated an entirely new way of being in my body that will forever shape my journey as a feminine being in alignment with my sacred life force.
