How Mothers Are Shamans
The Feminine Art of Calling Life In
This is a story about a daughter who called me from beyond the veil,
and how, in answering, I remembered something ancient.
Something every soul—mother or not—holds deep within:
the power to call life in, to midwife becoming, to remember the old ways.
By the time I was 39, I had nearly given up on the idea of having children.
I'd wanted them all of my life. Most people who knew me assumed I'd be the first to have a baby—living barefoot somewhere with a caravan of kiddos. But I never once got pregnant.
Even when I married, I didn't imagine children between us. I remember one lunch break at work, tucked away in a private office where my co-worker and I always ate together, I quietly confessed,
"When I look into the future, I see nothing.
Usually, when I date a guy, I always imagine kids.
Now I'm married—but I can't see anything ahead."
As the years passed, I was increasingly warming to the idea of not having children and instead spending the rest of my days on exotic adventures, following my curiosities as I did in my twenties and thirties. I imagined ending my marriage, writing books, solidifying my place in the literary world, and wandering across continents—a lover-in-every-port kind of thing—endless independence and movement.
So, it wasn't that much of a surprise when I met Jaz and everything changed.
It was on an unplanned detour to Mexico during the strange hush of Covid-era travel. Jaz and I sat atop a lifeguard tower in Sayulita one night, sipping a beer after two incandescent weeks together. The kind of weeks that rearrange your insides. The kind that makes you feel like your life is switching train lines.
The night was dark. The black and breathing ocean shimmered faintly under a trail of fairy lights. That's when Jaz said,
"The Huichol name for the ocean is Aramara."
As soon as he spoke the Wixárika (Huichol) word—the name of the Ocean Goddess, the Mother of all Creation—I felt her. A presence. A daughter. In that instant, I imagined her name.
Jaz turned to me and said,
"If I have another daughter, I'll name her Aramara."
And just like that, something ancient turned inside me. Although I hadn't planned to meet my longtime Instagram follower on my way back to Canada—while my husband remained in India sorting out passport issues—there, in separately naming our unborn daughter, I felt the hand of the Great Spirit. I felt a blessing in the wildness. The scandal of affection now felt sacred, fated even.
A door appeared.
And I wanted nothing more than to walk through it.
In my heart, a new track was laid. It would eventually lead me back to a hidden forest home in the mountains of Jalisco—where the life I glimpsed with Jaz could grow roots and blossom.
In the final days before I left Mexico—before I would face the grief of separating from my husband, before I'd leave behind the life I'd known for a future that might not want me—I wrote a poem.
For her.
For the seed of Aramara that had been planted in our shared vision.
For the road before me that called in a way that was impossible to ignore.
TATÉI ARAMARA
We climb the stairway of a lifeguard tower
next to Captain Pablo's bar.
It may not be heaven, but it sure is close.
A red flag flaps high above the
swell of the breaking tide,
warning of the danger ahead.
We share a can of Victoria and a curious love
that I don't understand.
You gaze into the black horizon and
tell me the Wixárica word for ocean
—Aramara—
as we listen to her song
spread across us in waves.
I think to myself,
if I ever have a daughter,
I'll name her for
La Diosa del Mar.
You turn to me and say the very same thing.
You will lead me across her swollen
bosom of savage white foam.
I will be afraid, but I trust you.
Will you trust me into the depths
of my wishes whispered to the sea?
From that first synchronicity with Aramara's name on the lifeguard tower, I continued to feel her presence around me.
On a dog walk to "Los Abuelos," the guardian stones clustered like ancient sentinels on the mountain road behind our home; she came to me like light dappling through the cloud, in the soft knowing in my belly. I wasn't even officially divorced yet; Jaz and I had only been a couple for a few months then, far too soon, by ordinary measures, to be imagining children. And yet, there she was, in some mysterious way, already claiming me as her mother.
Among those stones is one I call La Ballena—the Whale. It is a massive boulder shaped like a great mouth open to the sky, like the whale that swallowed Pinocchio and carried him home. I approached it as I often had, but this time, something was different. Without thinking, I knelt in front of it and sang. It wasn't a song I knew. It came through me, simple and circular, like waves beating against a shore.
Aramara… Aramara…
Aramara ra ra ra… mara ra ra ra ra…
I sang her name into the belly of the stone, into the waiting silence of the forest, into the space between who I had been and who I was becoming. As I repeated her name, I felt her spirit flit about me, acknowledging my unexpected and sudden ripening toward motherhood.
From that day on, she began to appear in the subtle folds of my life.
In my psilocybin-laced prayers at the waterfalls where, after my dog's accident with a taxi, I questioned my readiness for motherhood at all.
In my first pregnancy, only a couple of months after the experience with the stones. Even in my miscarriage, ten weeks later, I felt her presence visit in the form of a small green bird insistently pecking at the window.
I knew she would come back.
And she did.
A year and some later, beside a fire, Jaz and I stood in each other's arms with our breath held and opened the folded paper from the ultrasound technician—the one who had written the gender for us to reveal to ourselves at home in a sacred moment of witness.
Mujer, it said.
A girl.
She had returned. Our Aramara.
Before she was born, I only ever dreamed of her once.
She sat upright on a cart, wheeled through hospital doors and across the room, her eyes shining like dark jewels. It was like I had known her forever; a kindred spirit had returned to me in a hundred past lives to complete this one.
When she finally birthed herself into the world—at home, in what my midwife would later call "the longest birth I've ever attended"—I travelled to the veil to meet her. I walked the threshold between worlds and journeyed with her through the portal of incarnation.
I felt myself split open, not just in body but in being.
Until there she was: a warm, wet bundle on my chest.
Eyes wide. Black as obsidian.
I had already known her for so long.
Before she ever took shape in the womb.
I knew her in the hush between waves, in the birds that came knocking, in the song that spilled from my mouth without instruction. I knew her in the ache, loss, and waiting. I knew her because she called me, and I answered—not with logic, but with listening. That's what it is to be a woman. That's what it is to be a mother, even before there is anything to hold in your arms.
That moment wasn't just a birth. It was a ceremony. A soul returning. A mother remembering who she truly is.
Pregnancy, labour and motherhood are potent portals to transcendent consciousness.
This primal pathway to meet our shamanic selves is an awakening to our inherent power and a doorway to non-ordinary reality that can take us places we have never been before.
Mothers are the ones who feel the soul before it arrives.
We are the whisperers, the bridge-crossers who kneel before stone and sky and offer our bodies as passageways.
Motherhood is not only biological. It is spiritual. It is shamanic. It is sacred.
And this, perhaps, is the deepest truth I've learned through Aramara: that there are children waiting to find us across time, across bloodlines, across dreams. And we, the women who sense them, are the ones who open the door. With song. With silence. With wild faith in the unseen.
Aramara did not just make me a mother.
She reminded me of what I've always been.
Ritual & Reflection
This story opens a wide threshold, not just for mothers, but for all who midwife the unseen into form. Whether it's a child, a dream, a calling, or a version of self that has been circling for lifetimes, remembering how to call life in—belongs to everyone walking the creative, spiritual, or transformational path.
Journalling Prompts for Further Exploration
What have I felt stirring in me—long before it became real?
Have I ever felt chosen by something—an idea, a child, a path? What did it ask of me?
What parts of myself am I being called to remember right now?
How do I relate to the veil between the visible and the unseen? Do I cross it through creativity, prayer, parenthood, loss, intuition?
Sacred Assignments | Invitations for Deeper Embodiment
Sing a Soul Home
Without needing to understand why, sing a sound or melody for someone or something not yet arrived. A child. A love. A future self. A vision.
Wow................thank you for that beautiful piece of writing...magical...inspiring....uplifting...so welcome.... 🙏🌹🥰