My Third Pregnancy Story, The Spiritual & Physical Challenges: Learning To Lean Deeper Into Trust, Surrender & Identity Work | 288

What does it take to create the life, relationship, and business of your dreams? I've spent over a decade studying, speaking, and coaching on emotional intelligence and on this show, I share the exact strategies and energetic shifts my clients have used to launch and scale businesses to seven figures and beyond, transform their relationships and step into their authentic power to become the leaders they came here to be. If you're ready to create success that feels as good as it looks, you're in the right place. Welcome back to another episode at Time of Recording. I am 17 weeks pregnant with my third baby, Alia, my oldest, just turned 10 and my current baby, I'll still call my baby, Luca is going to turn 6 on December 31. So my children have a pretty big age gap, so there's a 10 year age gap between my first and my third, and this pregnancy has been so different, so I wanted to share just some of the insights that this journey has taught me so far. If you've been thinking about having a baby and you don't feel ready, let me just give it to you straight that there is no good time to have a baby. So this is geared to a woman who wants to have a baby. If part of your life vision is one day I would like to be a mother and you're over the age of 30, girl, what are you waiting for? So I had my first at 30 and I had her with no desire to even be a mother and I'm going to get into that a little bit later. But when women and it's usually career women, it's women who have big goals and ambitions and visions and they want to create and that's amazing and women, we should be able to do that. However, what I see happen and I've seen this happen so many times is a woman will be so focused on her career and achieving her goals that she's like, it's not the right time to have a baby, I'm not ready, I'm not ready, I'm not ready. But there's never a good time to have a baby. That's just the reality of it because no matter what your expectation is of having a baby, your world will get rocked. Let me just tell you that. So you can try to have it as perfect as possible and you're like, oh, I want to have this prepared, I want to have more money, I want to live in the dream home, I want to have this. It's all coming from a sense of wanting to control and that's masculine trait. I know, I know, okay, but it's masculine to want to have a sense of control and also when we are over controlling, that's actually coming from fear. When we want to have everything organized and this needs to look like this and I want to earn this much money and I want to, that's coming from fear, that's coming from scarcity, that's coming from you're not trusting that God's going to provide. Because here's the thing, is that when that baby arrives, you will learn to let go and you will be forced to surrender because that is the essence of motherhood and what I have observed, both even in my family, friends, relatives, whatever, it's the women that want to have the most control, that struggle the most in those, you know, post-partum times because you're so used to having control and your baby is completely unpredictable and that lack of predictability and that lack of control sends you crazy and it's not you, it's your ego. Your ego wants to control, your ego wants to have routine and so, again, I'm not a child psychologist but I have been mentored by a child psychologist, I have a really good relationship with my doctor who has background in psychology, early childhood psychology as well and I don't think that babies should be put on a schedule, the mothers that do this, that put these babies on a strict schedule, they go mental, they literally send themselves well. So going back to my first daughter, so my daughter, I never planned to get pregnant, it was never a vision of mine to become a mother, I got pregnant after I was told by doctors that I probably wouldn't get pregnant, that the hormones of a post-menopausal woman, like I was not thinking about getting pregnant. So I didn't have this idea of even what type of mother I wanted to be, I knew I wanted to be like a loving mother but I didn't look into how some people do all the study on sleep training at this and this and this, I followed my intuition on that and I didn't put my daughter on some schedule. When she needed me, I held her, I never let her cry it out. She was on the boob all the time and that really soothed her. If she cried when I was away, I did my best not to leave her and that's it and I just followed that and what that allowed me to do was to not be a stressed out mother. So when we get so hyper fixated on a schedule, like feeding schedule, sleep schedule, everything, like everyone needs to be silent in the whole house. We have to pretend that nobody lives here and like my child's nap time is this, so every, I'm going to completely change my life for these little sleep schedules. When you do that and your baby doesn't follow that sleep schedule because maybe they're calling, maybe they're sick, maybe they have trouble digesting. Maybe there's like so many reasons that your baby is not going to follow that schedule. You go mental and you become so stressed out and your anxiety goes up and you become this nervous wreck. Who do you think it's feeling that energy? It's your baby. It is your baby. Your baby cannot self-regulate. Your baby needs you to co-regulate for them. I.e. when you put your baby on your boob or you're holding your baby close to you and your breathing is regulated, then the baby's breathing will be regulated as well. The baby can't regulate on its own. That's why it needs you. So if you're driving yourself crazy because you need the baby to nap for a certain amount of time, they need to go to the bathroom this many times, like in your stressed out, which by the way, most first time moms are, your baby is picking up on that energy. That's not helpful to your baby. So this sense of control, if you can learn to let go of that a little bit and trust, trust that God has a higher vision for you and that when this baby is supposed to come, this baby is going to come. When you can lean into that trust and that surrender, the whole process will be easier. So when I got pregnant with Aliyah, I was not thinking about getting pregnant. I had no attachment. And often we are blessed in the areas of our lives that we are not hyper focused on. For example, someone who is born into a wealthy family, they don't have resistance around money. It's often easy. It's almost natural for them, for them to attract money and opportunities and wealth, like its second nature. Yet someone who has never seen wealth may want it so bad that they hyper focus on it. And when you want something so bad, you are acknowledging its absence. I see the exact same thing in relationships, women who centralize men and dating and being treated like the prize, like when women hyper focus on this relationship, you give off a desperate energy and you actually will repel the exact thing that you want because why you are too attached to the outcome. So not knowing what I was doing, I made my life easier, number one, to get pregnant because I wasn't thinking about getting pregnant. I wasn't thinking about controlling my life, like I was really happy with my life. I was really just focusing on my career, I was traveling at the time. I was actually in South America when I got pregnant. I was visiting my family, like I was doing all of these things and I was just focused on abundance. And I actually remember because I went to Machu Picchu at that time and I'm connected to nature and I was just really feeling so abundant and then boom, I get pregnant. And I leaned into trust and again, that's always been kind of just the way that I am and it is a blessing because I just have this, I don't know, I have this sense of trust that I'm being looked after, that God is protecting me, that I'm a child of God, that I'm highly favored. Like I've always just believed that. So I always have this feeling that things are going to work out. So I'm not like stressing about like all my pregnancy now and for the most part, I had a really easy pregnancy with my daughter. Now I had an overactive thyroid which just meant that I struggled to put on weight, but I honestly felt great in my body. I had some morning sickness in the beginning. I had that overactive thyroid but other than that, my pregnancy went amazing with my daughter. Now my delivery on the other hand was a whole other lesson in and of itself of surrendering, stepping into my power, not choosing myself, like healing a lot of, and repeating, a lot of ancestral trauma that had been passed down. Unknowingly, I repeated some of the patterns that had been in my lineage where it was, you know, not supported by the masculine and feeling alone and feeling out of control and feeling almost trapped. That's how I would describe my labor with my daughter. It was like thirty something hours, I think thirty-six hours of labor. It was intense. She ended up having to get suctioned out. I had an episiotomy, I had a failed epidural, I had a second epidural. It was crazy. I lost fifteen hundred milliliters of blood. That's an insane amount of blood for someone of my size. That's a lot of blood. So it was, you know, that challenging part, like it was almost, it stunted me. It was like, whoa, I had no idea what was going on and I felt very disempowered and I didn't feel supported and that had to do with the relationship that I was in at the time. Then with my second pregnancy though, it was very different, like I experienced morning sickness, food versions, all that stuff, but my delivery was like magic. It was so incredible, yes, it was so painful, it was completely unmedicated. I requested like a free birth in that, and not in the technical sense, but in that I wanted to move around my room, however my body felt called to. There was no way they were going to get me to lay on my back. I said, do not put me on that bed, do not be lifting my legs and that's what I did with my daughter is this very medical and just unnatural way of giving birth is you laying on your back. The baby has essentially, has a stop with your tailbone in the way, like it, it is not using gravity to support you and the essence of it is you're pushing through it and you're not actually supposed to push and delivery, you're supposed to breathe through it. And in delivery, it is a surrendering and as painful as my second delivery was with my son, I was able to get to the point where at the very end where I knew he was coming, I was squatted down and I, he just came out, it wasn't me pushing, it was me relaxing and breathing into the process again, surrendering. If you cannot surrender at the beginning of you getting pregnant or you just allowing your pregnancy to be, if here is like a hyper control mode, which a lot of successful women are in, which is why they, number one, struggle to get pregnant, don't want to get pregnant. Feel it's not the right time. All of that is like such a lack of trust in God, okay? So if you can't surrender there, your delivery, you won't be able to surrender. And so with Luca, I was able to surrender in that. And when he actually came out, I know this is going to sound crazy, but it actually felt good. Like when he came out, it was like, it wasn't a relief, it was something else. It's hard to articulate what that feeling actually was. My recovery with Luca was insane. I walked out of there carrying my own baby four hours later. The hospital couldn't keep me there. I was like, by I was not ready to stay in that hospital because I wanted to go home and just be in my bed. And that was it. And I trusted. I trusted my healing and I healed so well. I did tear. And they stitched me back up and I recovered really, really well from it. Whereas with Alia, I had a lot of discomfort after the delivery. So let's go into this pregnancy now. This pregnancy, four years I've been feeling it's not the right time. Like I wanted to give all my attention to Luca. I really wanted to be a present mom for him. I didn't even think I wanted to have a third baby. And then the idea of a third baby came and there's something about delivery that was so spiritual. And I know it sounds crazy, but euphoric that I would, I would like watch birthing videos after Dan was like, you're a weirdo, like, what are you watching? This is really weird and gross. And I'd be like, oh my gosh, like, oh, it would just take me to this place. Like, I don't know. It was weird. And so it had like last year we had been talking about it, but it just didn't feel like the right time. And I hear this all the time from so many women. And when I hear it, I just nod and you know, it's not really my place to tell them anything, but I'm telling you on the podcast because you're tuning in and you guys get my unfiltered just honest perspective and things I wish I could say to these women who want it all to be perfect. Girl, don't do this to yourself. Anyway, so there I was trying to control everything. And because Dan works away, he was basically away every time I'd be ovulating. So the likelihood of us like getting pregnant was very slim because he wasn't actually here when I was ovulating. And it's like nearly impossible to get pregnant. Anyway, at the beginning of the year, I was still kind of having conversations with Sophia, my baby, about like not feeling ready and all that. And then I just had this like knowing I was laying in bed and I just had this knowing when I was speaking to God and I said, you know what, father? If this is it, because I was legit negotiating with Sophia and she was talking to me and I was telling her like, baby girl, like, I'm not ready, like, I want a new house. I want this. I want her, like, I just didn't feel ready. Anyway, I prayed and I said, you know, father, you know, I trust you. If your will is for me to have Sophia, then you know what's better for me. And that was it. Anyway, we weren't actively trying like obviously my husband and I have a beautiful relationship and were intimate. Like, that's just our relationship. We have a beautiful relationship. It's very healthy. We're very attracted to each other. We're like obsessed with each other. And so, you know, we are just being a normal husband and wife and then it just so happened I went to Las Vegas and I came back and he extended his stay home and I didn't even notice this until probably a couple of weeks ago when I did the math is that when he extended his time to be home to look after the kids and spend time with me, we had a window that I was ovulating. But I didn't even know. I legit didn't even know. So I got pregnant the minute we came back from Las Vegas. And it has been the trickiest first trimester of my life. I had everything. Migrants, morning sickness, food versions, big emotions, extremely low energy. I couldn't work out. I could barely walk some days. And when you're feeling like this and you probably know what it's like to like have a flu or especially if you have migraines of it's very hard to feel inspired when you're not feeling well. So I had to surrender. But here's the thing that I believe saved me through this. I have done identity work. Meaning I'm so rock solid in my identity. And this is one of the things I teach deeply inside of the academy is like who are you choosing to be? Like who are you deciding like you're born and you're born into trauma and you're born into challenges and you're born into unconscious parents and all of these things. But then there's a time where you get to decide who you are. And thankfully, I have decided about who I am. So when I felt like I was dropping the ball with some of my clients or I felt like I had to reschedule an academy training or I had to push back interviews for my podcast, you know, me 10 years ago I would have made a story about that. So this means I'm not going to be successful because most people are super, super consistent and it means that this, and I didn't allow it to mean anything because I know who I am. I write those affirmations. I write the story of my life in who I be, not what I have, but who I be. And so I just locked into my identity work and I was like, Mars, because I was like offline for like a month, too. And I was like, Mars, it doesn't even matter if you're offline, girl, you are still going to get paid, you are still going to get clients like you are magnetic. People want to pay you. People want to work with you. Your friends know that you love them. They're going to be there to support you. They're not going to be upset if you can't make it to that event or that event because there's a lot of like events and PR things that I couldn't make it to. And I was like, my teacher people, I'm so sorry, I couldn't get to you, did it out like, but I have decided who I am therefore when I went through literally two months of just the work feeling terrible that I didn't lose sight and I didn't let it control my mind. And I have so much empathy for people who are like chronically ill and who like are bedridden and all that kind of stuff because that mental game, that weight on you, that psychological weight is heavy. And I think, God, I've done the work that I have done because I could feel it. I'm like, no, Mars, don't let your mind go there, mama, like that is not who you are. This is a period of you surrendering. You are creating a human right now. You are literally developing her heart, her brain. Now her placenta is growing like I just reminded myself of the miracle that was happening inside my body and also tapping into trust knowing that God is with me. That is guiding me like everything is going to work out like, I'm a child of God and he only wants what's best for me. So I'm going to lean into that and I'm going to trust and I'm just going to say, Father, I know you're protecting me. I know you are guiding me. I know that opportunities for me will still be there when I feel better. And I remember having this realization while I was laying on my couch, which by the way, I started loathing my couch because it just signified how unwell I was. I had this realization, so if you have migraines, you're going to know exactly what I feel or what I mean by this is when you have a migraine. And if you have them like to the real extent where you're like vomiting and you can't open your eyes and your whole body hurts, that's what my migraines are like. So I was having this migraine and I had this realization of like, oh my gosh. So when you have a migraine, you literally feel euphoric afterwards. You feel so good. And is it that you feel so good, or did you feel that bad, that any sense of relief feels euphoric? Side note, that's also why I feel people drink because people give themselves hangovers. And you felt so bad that once that hangover is done and you feel good again, you actually think you're living a good life when you're not. And then it keeps you in this cycle. And you think like, oh, like alcohol is fun when it's not. It's poison. Anyway, I digress. So I reminded myself, Mars, once in this period of pain, which is what it was, it was literally pain. I'm like, when this is over, you are going to feel so inspired. I don't know if I'm at the level of like my normal inspiration, but because I'm a naturally very inspired person. And like the moment I open my eyes and this has been, I've trained myself to be like this. And this is also something that we go over in the academy. It's like I won't get up out of bed unless I have acknowledged God for all the abundance in my life. Like I wake up and immediately go into my gratitude. And I'm in my shower like that is a meditation. That is like it just, oh my gosh, God's light and love washing over me. And like I just feel so blessed to have hot water. Like that's the level of appreciation and love that I'm normally in. So I just reminded myself, like Mars, when this pain goes away, you are going to feel so good girl. Think about that. It's going to feel like such a sense of relief. And even if you don't feel like you're normal, inspired yourself, you're going to feel so much better than this. So just hold on, hold on to that vision, remember who the F you are and just know and just trust. And so I just, I had an even deeper understanding of surrender because I had to surrender. What am I going to do? You know, it felt so gross to only eat like fries. Like I only wanted fries and I was like, this is so gross because I don't eat carbs. And then my husband's making me toast with avocado and cheese and I would never eat that for breakfast. Again, I don't eat carbs. I don't like carbs. I don't eat pasta. And there I am, like having two bowls of pasta. And I was like, I'm surrendering to what my body needs. And I believe that you can't out discipline your pregnancy hormones. Could it, it's like, it's like nothing that you will, you can't, like you literally can't. I have seen girls who are like personal trainers, nutritionists, the cleanest eaters I've ever seen talk about how. And it's not every pregnancy, okay, because I didn't have this for my first two pregnancies. It's not every pregnancy, but some pregnancies will hit you like and you, the thing that you want, you become like ravenous for that specific thing. Like in this pregnancy, I cried on the phone, borderline, like yelling but more crying at my husband because he didn't bring me this, this Greek rap. I thought he was bringing me like right away. And the poor guy's just trying to catch up with his friend that he's in scene in a month. And there I am crying, crying. That's how emotional and that's how desperate I needed that rap. It was a deep surrendering, it was very humbling. And also really just reminded me of how incredibly magical our bodies are because I'm not consciously creating that heart. I'm not sitting there creating that spine, God is. So if God can literally put a baby in my body and make it healthy and beautiful and perfect. And every little cell in that body is just perfectly molded by the hands of God. Who am I to not to trust him that my life is going to work out? That his divine plan for my life is exactly what I need a surrender to. So if you have been thinking about having a baby and you don't feel ready, not wanting a baby and not feeling ready, two different things because I am not trying to project that every woman should birth a baby because we should have free will. And if you feel cold to do something else or even if your body is not going to birth in this lifetime, that's something different. I'm talking about a healthy woman able to birth feeling not ready to birth, mama, you're never going to feel fully ready. And you're wanting to control the dynamics number one is masculine, number two, you are going to be so humbled in the areas that I have tried to control the most is where I experienced the most resistance in the areas of my life where I trust the most, I eat my relationship. I wasn't focused on finding a relationship. I was focused on myself. I was focused on my growth. I was focused on raising my daughter the best I could boom. The dream man appears. I wasn't thinking about getting pregnant. I was there like meditating and praying to God and climbing Machu Picchu and connecting to my Inca ancestors, boom, I get pregnant with my little angel, baby Alia, when you don't want to control, you will be blessed and lean into God and just say, God, let your will be the way I surrender to your will, use me, use me as an instrument to the service. If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, I would absolutely appreciate it so much if you hit the subscribe button and if you left us a five star review, anytime we get a review, this pushes our podcast out to more listeners so we can positively impact more lives and I will see you on the next episode.