Mothering from Your Center

Tami Lynn Kent
Mothering from Your Center
2013. Atria Books/Beyond Words, Hillsboro, Oregon

Holistic women's health care provider Tami Lynn Kent connects women to their core energy and helps them interpret their body’s energetic wisdom. In Mothering from Your Center, Kent uses modern medicine and traditional women's health, as well as her own personal experiences of a heart-breaking miscarriage and joyous motherhood, to support the creative process of pregnancy, birth and parenting. Utilizing sacred birthing energy, intuiting feminine power and creating family harmony are at the heart of mothering radiance. Through the wisdom of the mothering center, women learn to recognize the importance of good body mechanics, the benefit of a sustainable mothering pace, and to strengthen the bond between mother and child. A beautiful way to bring presence to the first meeting of mother and child is with a blessing way ritual. Friends, grandmothers and sisters of the expectant mother select a bead and infuse it with blessings and intentions for the new mom, baby and family. During a simple or elaborate ceremony the beads are strung together to create a birth necklace, weaving strong feminine support around the mother-to-be. The necklace can be worn through pregnancy or placed on an altar during birth, and is a lovely keepsake for mother and child. Exploring the energetic cellular lineage (from both our mother and father), Kent offers ways to release lineage imprints. Sometimes something as mundane as vacuuming can be a tool for release. Kent's own rage-filled housecleaning pattern (which many can relate to) resolved when she repeatedly allowed herself to interrupt her housecleaning for rest and renewal by focusing on her breath, and laying her body on the ground if needed. (She also wore fairy wings while vacuuming when her son was young. It's difficult to rage while wearing fairy wings!)

Gail Lord is a freelance writer living in Massachusetts. Please send book review copies to 51 North Street, Grafton, MA 01519 or email socbookreviewer@gmail.com.