The Birth of Acacia Wellness

Before Acacia Wellness I had a successful 15 year career in the corporate world. It wasn’t necessarily the career I had dreamed of as a child, but I fell into it & I was pretty good at it. I was driven & enthusiastic, I loved my job. But after a while I became deponent, so I  took at break & spent most of 2006 gallivanting around the world with my then boyfriend, now husband. We spent most of our time travelling continents overland & loved the perspective & experiences that this gave us.

Needless to say we had the travel bug & a few years later for our honeymoon we embarked upon a 3 month overland adventure in Africa. Overlanding across the barren desserts showed me, in a way that few other things have, that there is something bigger than me out there. There’s nothing quite like the hypnotic experience of being in a moving vehicle & just being with yourself. I didn’t have the knowledge of hypnosis back then, but I knew that there was more to this life than just sitting in my office back home. So upon my return I started further education in Nutritional Medicine & waited to find my calling.

In 2010 filled with excitement about being pregnant with our first baby, Richard & I looked forward to enjoying what would likely be our last holiday together as a twosome. My long awaited dream to go to the Splendour in the Grass music festival & a relaxing few days in Noosa were just what we needed. Whilst enjoying lunch with some friends I was smacked in the head with a major migraine, I left them to enjoy the sun while I went for lie down in our hotel. After a short, restless, painful sleep I woke & used the bathroom to discover pink blood on the toilet paper. Panicked I rang my Mum. Concerned but reassuring she said this sometimes happens but if I’m worried to see a Dr. We decided it was best to investigate & were sent for an ultrasound where we saw tiny heartbeat, we left feeling relieved but exhausted.

The next morning, I awoke with excruciating stomach pains, after visiting the bathroom I discovered a significant amount of blood & I was fairly certain I was losing my baby. We had earlier been instructed to head straight to the hospital if things changed. Our arrival was the beginning of a series of events that significantly changed me as a person & I left that hospital 2 days later without my baby & without a huge piece of myself.

Later that year we were once again thrilled to discover we were having another baby!  My miscarriage filled me not only with an often unbearable amount of grief but also when I then became pregnant again this horrendous amount of fear & anxiety. There wasn’t a visit to the toilet where that toilet paper was not checked, I was constantly living on the edge, I was enjoying this experience but also terrified of losing it all again.

In addition to this fear I was terrified of birth as well. I have spent my entire life hearing my own birth story from my Mum & women’s birth stories in my life & I always felt there was this element of ‘one day you’ll know what it’s like’ & an assumed understanding that ‘this is just what birth is like’. But really? Is this really just what birth is like? It sounds horrendous. Why would anyone do that? And then do it again & again?

But evolution is a fascinating thing & it got me thinking. We are on this earth because women birth their babies, how can it be that the very thing we are designed to do according to many women, including my own mother, was the most painful & excruciating experience of their lives. I didn’t want this for my birth.

My husband had also experienced a great tragedy that caused him to have a physiological response to hospitals. As soon as he stepped inside he would feel hot, nauseous & faint. Knowing that my own father fainted during my brother’s birth he didn’t want that for us. He wasn’t sure how he would be able to support me during one of my most trying experiences if he was feeling so terrible himself or worse flat on his back on the floor.

So I started asking questions & researching like a crazed pregnant woman! I’m a fixer, I like to find solutions, that’s what I’ve always done. We discovered Calm Birthing & HypnoBirthing. This sounded like exactly what we needed. We left our course filled with excitement, trust & empowerment about the birth of our first baby. I will admit that there was this little seed of doubt in my mind but mostly I felt confident that I could birth this baby the way I was designed to & that Richard had all the confidence & skills to support me. I completely threw myself into the practice, I understood that I needed to condition my mind & my body, but I could do this & I DID!

I will share my birth stories with you another time but it was through these beautiful entrances of my children into the world that were so peaceful & empowering that it compelled me to want to share this amazing gift with other families, guiding them to achieve a calm beginning, whatever that looks like for them.

Of course my experiences have been put down to flukes or a high pain threshold, someone even said to me ‘well you’re obviously just built to birth’ ..... uh yeap, I am....we all are! Fear, Pain, Doubt, Trauma – these are the most common concepts forming peoples belief systems around birth & to be honest parenting & life in general. Birth should be the celebration of life & then living life itself. It should not be this terrifying & painful experience if it doesn’t have to be.

We are living in a world that has never been more connected, through social media & the internet & it is FULL of stories. Stories are absorbed by our minds, the emotions that we feel when hearing these stories create a chemical change within our bodies. These little moments in time are forming our belief systems & creating our future for us, determining how we are going to respond physically & emotionally. So when it comes to birth the worst thing we can do is fill our belief system, our memory bank, with fearful, painful, traumatic stories.....we need positivity, calm, happy stories....because this is what we want our reality to be.

So Acacia Wellness has been created to help other families have beautiful stories. I am so grateful to be a part of their stories, to help them have these amazing, powerful, sometimes healing but always life changing experiences & that’s why I love what I do.