Demi Lee

Huski’s first trip and my first return to work since birthing her ✈️ It felt so good to travel with my girl, to arrive up North and begin weaving our work through @eclectica.hub again. By some beautiful alignment, Josh was part of the facilitation team at @thegatheringofmen_au in QLD that same weekend, so we could fly up and back together, carrying our work into different circles.

With me in the later months of postpartum and Annie pregnant, I feel our work being rebirthed around the lives we are actually living. The mothers need to be held here too. The babies need to belong. Our bodies, with their needs and seasons, must have a say in how we gather.

Having Huski in the space felt effortless, my little superstar. She will always come first. And yet I want to build a life in which she can accompany me into the work I love. I want her to grow up with this imprint of the feminine. Women aged 27 to 55 speaking honestly about their bodies. Naming the bargains they've made for acceptance, the years spent inspecting themselves, the pleasure postponed until they became more smaller, smoother or more desirable.

These women were willing to look beneath the familiar stories, to meet the shame, envy, hunger for approval and fear of ageing that can take command of a life. To recognise how a voice absorbed from a distorted beauty culture can become an authority within us. How faithfully we can obey it, how fiercely we can defend it, without ever asking whose interests it serves.

This is where shadow work asks something of us, in our willingness to bear down and see our own participation within it. To recognise where we have become custodians of the very beliefs that diminish us.

To witness women reclaiming the pleasure of being in their bodies, inhabiting every curve, line, softness and texture, letting life move through places they had been taught to conceal, felt especially profound with my daughter there.

This is the women I want Huski to grow among, women who can tell the truth without turning it into another weapon against themselves. Women who take responsibility for what they carry, so their daughters have more room to live.

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