Meet your Guide, Marie Gough

“What if I just had a baby now?”

It was the pandemic, and I - like so many women in their thirties - was mentally fizzing over where I was and what I ultimately wanted in life. I’d never imagined getting married or having kids, but since I’d just flipped my own script and gotten married, maybe now was the time to go two for two.

But then - and how on theme for the times - it didn’t go as planned.

In my day job as an advertising producer, I’m hired to create control amongst chaos, to command the dials and schedules in a timed symphony so that the wheel turns - so that ultimately shit works out. But those skills didn’t translate to my body. My womb wasn’t a lock-step advertising campaign as much as I wanted it to be.

We didn’t get pregnant.

For the next three years, we were shoved down the moguls of fertility doctors, naturopaths, acupuncturists and health coaches, accompanied by a smorgasbord of treatments, procedures, supplements, needles and ever-invasive speculums. We got pregnant. We miscarried. We took a break. We did more treatments. We gave up. We tried “not trying”. We wondered if we still wanted kids. We started trying again.

The entire time, I did what any woman who involuntarily steps into the abyss of infertility does and questioned every single choice I’d ever made in my entire life. 

What made this happen? 
Why wasn’t I preparing my body for this sooner? 
Is this my fault? 

It became so hard to keep holding the desire for a child when nothing seemed to be working.

On top of that, infertility has a way of shaking out every rug, turning over every rock and opening every closet to awaken every dusty-ass skeleton. Everything crowds under the microscope and it can be truly unbearable to look at. For me, the list was long - the unwanted pregnancy I was born from, the domestic violence that marked my childhood and the sexual assault, drug addiction, eating disorders and C-PTSD of my adolescence - it all had me living totally disconnected from my body and emotions. Everything came up.

What's gotten me through and given me hope?

Yoga and coaching has.

Through years of practice, they’ve both taught me that there was never anything so wrong with me that I had to suffer forever; nothing permanent, irretrievable or beyond repair had happened that I couldn’t recover and heal from. By moving and feeling my way through it, I re-prioritized, re-jigged and re-audited my entire life using movement as my medicine. Because of yoga and coaching, I’ve found a promising share of compassion, acceptance and self-love I haven’t known for most of my life. I’ve learned about true surrender, about taking big risks and surviving, about asking questions while falling mid-air. I’ve learned to trust my beautiful body and the wisdom it holds, to differentiate anxiety from intuition and to move toward love instead of fear. I’ve learned how to truly be myself on the inside so that I could live in peace no matter what was happening on the outside. I’ve been able to walk through it with hope and excitement for my future - no matter what that looks like - knowing I can serve in a multitude of meaningful ways. 

It’s no surprise then that the methods and modalities that have helped me would be the same I would teach as a somatic coach and trauma-informed yoga teacher. We teach from our transformation, allowing our own experiences to be exposed and excavated in order to shed light on the shame of the very same things happening in others. It brings me so much joy to offer the specific support and space women need for such individual seasons, whether trying to conceive or not, so that they can simultaneously heal and expand into their incredible future.