Hello,
Just over a decade ago, my mother died two months before my daughter was born. It was a profound threshold. I was grieving in the late stages of pregnancy and of course, despite trying to move on for my new baby, this continued while nursing a newborn. Everyday I walked the tightrope of utter joy and desperate loss, doing my best to manage that, as well as the instability that already comes with motherhood. In my effort to survive that chapter, I realise now that I had in some way closed a part of myself off from my mum.
I was incredibly close to her and I felt angry with her abrupt departure - the need for one's mother (however complex a relationship one might have) is ancient and visceral, and it rears itself in various forms of need, yearning or desire when you become a mother yourself.
She had died in Africa, gone for some months over the winter as my aging parents now did every year. So I couldn't even say goodbye, couldn't fly as I was too late in pregnancy, couldn't take malaria tablets and all the other unbearable things I was told to do to protect me and my unborn child.
Over time I came to understand that my unprocessed grief dulled my connection to my mother, but not just to her, it also dulled a vital link to the lineage of women who came before me.
Some years later, my father passed away on my 47th birthday. It felt like a profound weaving of souls and somehow a perfect full stop in the complex story of our relationship. This loss drew me ever deeper into ancestral curiosity and veneration.
Over the years I have felt a quiet urgency to understand who they were, not just as my parents, but as part of something older and larger. I wanted to reconnect with their strengths, to understand the cultural lineages they came from and to make sense of the challenges their people had faced and survived. That journey has reshaped my understanding of the resilience within me, with all of us, entirely.
My enquiry deepened when I retrained in family and organisational systems work, and encountered constellations - think of these as therapeutic maps that help illuminate the hidden dynamics of our family lines. These gave me a new lens to map the flow of life force, gifts and inherited challenges across my own lineages. It helped me understand my parents more deeply and feel even more connected to them posthumously.
This week marks the launch of our very first Coaching Short, Finding Resilience through Resilient Ancestors: Looking back to Resource the Present.
I came to understand that resilience wasn't something I had to create and build upon through sheer willpower alone. It was already there inside me, inherited, embodied, waiting to be remembered.
That's the heart of this Coaching Short, which invites you into a different way of seeing resilience - one that honours where we come from, and reconnects us to the strength that's already within us.
I hope you enjoy it.
Love,
Remi
Founder and CEO (Chief Esoteric Officer)
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