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About Lotus Fertility Resources & Mary Ceallaigh |
The Lotus flower has been associated with fertility, spiritual renewal, and divine
inner beauty from time immemorial, for good reason: they not only survive, they
thrive - they find their way up through the muddy water and they bloom. Like the
amazing Lotus, human beings endure & transform through inner journeys and heroic
life passages.
Women's unique opportunities to cultivate optimal mind-body health via the many
fluctuations of the physical menstrual cycle and emotional fertility/creativity cycles
can create positive change for both the inner world and the outer world. All women
are connected to the divine mother principle of the universe: pregnant with
creativity and change, carrying the possibility of more joy and more peace for
personal and planetary health.
The mission of Lotus Fertility's Resources, Consulting, and Services is to help
women help themselves, because every woman is ultimately her own teacher.
The source of this pivotal paradigm shift is found in the principle of mind-body
harmony and the intuitions that ripple out through the healthy female body into ALL
our creations - including (yet not limited to) physical fertility.
The values of Yoga and Midwifery through the Lotus Fertility approach bring
about realignment with the interconnectedness of creativity, sexuality, and
spirituality. In this approach, ALL women are mothers: pregnant with the creative
possibilities of conscious female embodiment, nurturing all creations.
The vision of Lotus Fertility is to facilitate women's own many ways of knowing
in order to embody the healing power of womanhood: aware relationship with the
great Life Cycle and its transformations.
The Lotus Fertility approach facilitates the inner midwife, the intuition within the
healthy woman's neuro-endocrine system. This intuitive center plays a major part in
successful integration of the milestones of women's development: menstruation,
sexual partnership, self-healing, pregnancy & birth, mothering, and empowered aging.
Lotus Fertility honors the role of awareness within human health and development.
Most blatantly expressed in how a culture deals with birth and death, it is also most
intimately experienced in how each person experiences their relationship to breath,
and its creative wisdom in the body.
Four principles taken from ancient Yoga philosophy are themes in women's work of
cultivating inner guidance for lifelong wisdom and healing:
Ahimsa: Non-violence, Harmlessness (in thoughts as well as actions)
Ananda: Contentment within the Present Moment, Joy
Moksha: Emotional Freedom (feeling secure in the universe)
Rasayana: Radiance, Juiciness, Vitality
Lotus Fertility contributes to the larger work of healing the earth through the
continual rebirth of woman's conscious relationship with the Life Cycle of the cosmos
in her own body & mind.
Putting it into Practice
Lotus Fertility consulting work encourages a re-framing what fertility is, and explores
the possibility of going beyond preconceived notions and into the healing power of
conscious creativity with life as-it-is, often bringing about surprising changes of
heart. Lotus Fertility preconception/women's health work involves dialogue-based
facilitation, self-care education, and the encouragement of daily self-care and
attunement routines (meditation, prayer, being in nature, yoga, etc.) along with a
full range of traditional birth/postpartum attendant services and personal yoga
instruction for women of all ages.
Life Cycle Themes
The Lotus Fertility work focuses on full-blossom life balance through menstrual
health and preconception health, and including rejuvenative practices that cultivate
radiant aging. Because of cultural ignorance, conditioning, or trauma, the vast
majority of women carry on with at least partial and even full disabling of glandular
health & the heart-womb (emotional-physical) connection. Restoration of this
embodiment naturally allows for more opportunities for the innately supple feminine
mind to flourish physical wisdom.
As Lotus Fertility relates to pregnancy, embodying a conscious heart-womb enhances
energy pathway in the body enhances prenatal bonding with the baby, partnership
between the woman and her own radiant light, and a potential deepening of the
conscious union between the woman and the committed partner. Lotus Fertility
resourcing focuses on honoring each woman's unique story in order to optimize her
personal journey of informed choice with a spectrum of possibilities including the
options of home labor, home birth, water birth, lotus birth, freebirth, and
empowered institutional birth.
In new client postpartum scenarios, the Lotus Fertility approach supports healing and
well-established bonding of the new family, assisting the mother's recovery on all
levels. Viewing the first 9 postpartum months as "extrauterine gestation" (Ashley
Montagu Ph.D) where the nursing mother and her baby are as in-sync and unified as
during pregnancy (nursing mothers & their babies share the same REM sleep patterns
even), the Lotus Fertility approach works with the mother and baby as a unit, and
supports optimal postpartum adjustments and family harmony.
Mary Ceallaigh
B.A. Human Development, Certified Yoga Teacher
Midwifery Assistant, Life Cycles Celebrant
Mary's work is the fruit of her own path of personal and professional experiences,
including countless lessons transmitted through apprenticeship with the mentorship
of Jeannine Parvati, mother of the modern yogini-midwife lineage. This reclaimed
tradition cultivates reverence for the feminine embodiment of self-healing &
rejuvenation in relationship with the Life Cycle of the whole earth and cosmos.
After her Grandmother Treva introduced her to the medicine of aloe vera over
twenty years ago, Mary continued to befriend many healing foods, herbs, and spices
as allies for restoring harmony and health to her own cycle, psyche, and body. Her
personal path has been one of lovingly attuning to the body's symptoms & sensations,
as a reverent practice for proceeding to restore balance on all levels - rather than
automatic suppression or surgical "curing" of the body's multifarious, ever-changing,
and unique expressions of inner realities and environmental impacts. She brings her
own journey as a presence of encouragement for many students and clients, as they
learn to attune more to their own bodies' wisdom.
Mary's Yoga study began with her first asana class in 1988, which soon expanded into
studying ayurveda for women, and the divine mother principle of Shakti. She is a
daily Yoga & Vipassana meditation practitioner, and has studied with a variety of
teachers including Jeannine Parvati, Hari Deva/Linda Green, and Tom Yamaguchi,
completing a certified kundalini yoga teacher training in 2003. Previously, she
studied Tai Chi & Chi Gong from 1997-1999 with Chou Li at the Pacific-Asian Museum
Garden in Pasadena, California.
Mary attended her first birth in 1989 and has apprenticed in midwifery & women's
self-healing since that time, both in the U.S.and Scotland. Mary's great-grandmother
Minnie Mae was a traditional midwife in rural Arizona, attending low-risk women
often referred to her by the travelling country physician; and her grandmother, who
later became a pediatric nurse, spoke passionately of the dignity and grace of those
days, a touchstone for Mary's own vocational path.
As a Traditional Birth Attendant ("doula") and Apprentice Midwife at various
junctures, Mary has worked with a diversity of client scenarios including births
(hospital, birth center, and home), prenatal support, and postnatal domestic care.
She has served as a board member of AIMS Scotland and the California Assn. of
Midwives, attended many midwifery-related conferences, and pursued significant
additional studies and research related to midwifery history and feminine psychology.
Pacific Oaks College, a Quaker-founded school where Mary received her BA in Human
Development in 1991, is an institution reknowned for its contributions to the realm
of social & political contexts of human development, the validation of pivotal
infant/toddler intelligence and patterning, and for originating anti-bias/diversity
guidelines for early childhood emergent curriculum in private and public schools.
She also credits the innumerable stories women and men have told her, upon learning
of her work, about their life cycle & birth experiences, covering a spectrum of
possible outcomes. These stories shared, many in unlikely, spontaneous scenarios,
have offered profound lessons that have confirmed the impact of personal
development upon the realm of creative consciousness along with the prenatal,
perinatal, and postpartum passages that shape the destiny of the world
family.
resume highlights...
Vipassana 10 Day Training Silent Retreat, Southwest Vipassana Center
Yearly since September 2008.
Nritya Yoga Weekend with Amrita Choudury
Austin, Texas May 2008
Kundalini Yoga Teacher Training
Austin, Texas completed May 2003
Hollywood Birth Center (California), Mary served as center Office Manager & Public
Relations representative as well as on-call Midwifery Assistant and occasional Doula
from 2001-2002.
Tech Consultant (Midwifery & Homebirth) for the homebirth "Home & Away" (ABC TV)
episode. Culver City, California. November 5th-12th 2001.
Co-Director of the Cal. Assn. of Midwives "Midwifery & Childbirth Awareness Project"
providing community education for California, working with CAM Board of Directors.
1998-2000
Co-Author of NOW's 1999 Resolution "To Expand the Definition of Reproductive
Freedom to Include Homebirth and the Midwifery Model of Care."
Apprentice/Assistant to Midwife Jeannine Parvati
Typist of 2001 edition of Prenatal Yoga & Natural Childbirth
1995-2005
Apprentice to Midwife Lani Rosenberger
California, 1998
Apprentice to Independent Midwives Linda Green and Debs Purdue
Edinburgh, Scotland 1997
Steering Committee Secretary of AIMS Scotland
(Assn. for Improvement of Maternity Services)
1996-1997.
APPPAH (Assn. for Pre & Perinatal Psychology & Health) Int'l Congress
San Francisco, 1995
Hygieia College member from 1995 - Present
B.A. Human Development, Pacific Oaks College 1991
inner beauty from time immemorial, for good reason: they not only survive, they
thrive - they find their way up through the muddy water and they bloom. Like the
amazing Lotus, human beings endure & transform through inner journeys and heroic
life passages.
Women's unique opportunities to cultivate optimal mind-body health via the many
fluctuations of the physical menstrual cycle and emotional fertility/creativity cycles
can create positive change for both the inner world and the outer world. All women
are connected to the divine mother principle of the universe: pregnant with
creativity and change, carrying the possibility of more joy and more peace for
personal and planetary health.
The mission of Lotus Fertility's Resources, Consulting, and Services is to help
women help themselves, because every woman is ultimately her own teacher.
The source of this pivotal paradigm shift is found in the principle of mind-body
harmony and the intuitions that ripple out through the healthy female body into ALL
our creations - including (yet not limited to) physical fertility.
The values of Yoga and Midwifery through the Lotus Fertility approach bring
about realignment with the interconnectedness of creativity, sexuality, and
spirituality. In this approach, ALL women are mothers: pregnant with the creative
possibilities of conscious female embodiment, nurturing all creations.
The vision of Lotus Fertility is to facilitate women's own many ways of knowing
in order to embody the healing power of womanhood: aware relationship with the
great Life Cycle and its transformations.
The Lotus Fertility approach facilitates the inner midwife, the intuition within the
healthy woman's neuro-endocrine system. This intuitive center plays a major part in
successful integration of the milestones of women's development: menstruation,
sexual partnership, self-healing, pregnancy & birth, mothering, and empowered aging.
Lotus Fertility honors the role of awareness within human health and development.
Most blatantly expressed in how a culture deals with birth and death, it is also most
intimately experienced in how each person experiences their relationship to breath,
and its creative wisdom in the body.
Four principles taken from ancient Yoga philosophy are themes in women's work of
cultivating inner guidance for lifelong wisdom and healing:
Ahimsa: Non-violence, Harmlessness (in thoughts as well as actions)
Ananda: Contentment within the Present Moment, Joy
Moksha: Emotional Freedom (feeling secure in the universe)
Rasayana: Radiance, Juiciness, Vitality
Lotus Fertility contributes to the larger work of healing the earth through the
continual rebirth of woman's conscious relationship with the Life Cycle of the cosmos
in her own body & mind.
Putting it into Practice
Lotus Fertility consulting work encourages a re-framing what fertility is, and explores
the possibility of going beyond preconceived notions and into the healing power of
conscious creativity with life as-it-is, often bringing about surprising changes of
heart. Lotus Fertility preconception/women's health work involves dialogue-based
facilitation, self-care education, and the encouragement of daily self-care and
attunement routines (meditation, prayer, being in nature, yoga, etc.) along with a
full range of traditional birth/postpartum attendant services and personal yoga
instruction for women of all ages.
Life Cycle Themes
The Lotus Fertility work focuses on full-blossom life balance through menstrual
health and preconception health, and including rejuvenative practices that cultivate
radiant aging. Because of cultural ignorance, conditioning, or trauma, the vast
majority of women carry on with at least partial and even full disabling of glandular
health & the heart-womb (emotional-physical) connection. Restoration of this
embodiment naturally allows for more opportunities for the innately supple feminine
mind to flourish physical wisdom.
As Lotus Fertility relates to pregnancy, embodying a conscious heart-womb enhances
energy pathway in the body enhances prenatal bonding with the baby, partnership
between the woman and her own radiant light, and a potential deepening of the
conscious union between the woman and the committed partner. Lotus Fertility
resourcing focuses on honoring each woman's unique story in order to optimize her
personal journey of informed choice with a spectrum of possibilities including the
options of home labor, home birth, water birth, lotus birth, freebirth, and
empowered institutional birth.
In new client postpartum scenarios, the Lotus Fertility approach supports healing and
well-established bonding of the new family, assisting the mother's recovery on all
levels. Viewing the first 9 postpartum months as "extrauterine gestation" (Ashley
Montagu Ph.D) where the nursing mother and her baby are as in-sync and unified as
during pregnancy (nursing mothers & their babies share the same REM sleep patterns
even), the Lotus Fertility approach works with the mother and baby as a unit, and
supports optimal postpartum adjustments and family harmony.
Mary Ceallaigh
B.A. Human Development, Certified Yoga Teacher
Midwifery Assistant, Life Cycles Celebrant
Mary's work is the fruit of her own path of personal and professional experiences,
including countless lessons transmitted through apprenticeship with the mentorship
of Jeannine Parvati, mother of the modern yogini-midwife lineage. This reclaimed
tradition cultivates reverence for the feminine embodiment of self-healing &
rejuvenation in relationship with the Life Cycle of the whole earth and cosmos.
After her Grandmother Treva introduced her to the medicine of aloe vera over
twenty years ago, Mary continued to befriend many healing foods, herbs, and spices
as allies for restoring harmony and health to her own cycle, psyche, and body. Her
personal path has been one of lovingly attuning to the body's symptoms & sensations,
as a reverent practice for proceeding to restore balance on all levels - rather than
automatic suppression or surgical "curing" of the body's multifarious, ever-changing,
and unique expressions of inner realities and environmental impacts. She brings her
own journey as a presence of encouragement for many students and clients, as they
learn to attune more to their own bodies' wisdom.
Mary's Yoga study began with her first asana class in 1988, which soon expanded into
studying ayurveda for women, and the divine mother principle of Shakti. She is a
daily Yoga & Vipassana meditation practitioner, and has studied with a variety of
teachers including Jeannine Parvati, Hari Deva/Linda Green, and Tom Yamaguchi,
completing a certified kundalini yoga teacher training in 2003. Previously, she
studied Tai Chi & Chi Gong from 1997-1999 with Chou Li at the Pacific-Asian Museum
Garden in Pasadena, California.
Mary attended her first birth in 1989 and has apprenticed in midwifery & women's
self-healing since that time, both in the U.S.and Scotland. Mary's great-grandmother
Minnie Mae was a traditional midwife in rural Arizona, attending low-risk women
often referred to her by the travelling country physician; and her grandmother, who
later became a pediatric nurse, spoke passionately of the dignity and grace of those
days, a touchstone for Mary's own vocational path.
As a Traditional Birth Attendant ("doula") and Apprentice Midwife at various
junctures, Mary has worked with a diversity of client scenarios including births
(hospital, birth center, and home), prenatal support, and postnatal domestic care.
She has served as a board member of AIMS Scotland and the California Assn. of
Midwives, attended many midwifery-related conferences, and pursued significant
additional studies and research related to midwifery history and feminine psychology.
Pacific Oaks College, a Quaker-founded school where Mary received her BA in Human
Development in 1991, is an institution reknowned for its contributions to the realm
of social & political contexts of human development, the validation of pivotal
infant/toddler intelligence and patterning, and for originating anti-bias/diversity
guidelines for early childhood emergent curriculum in private and public schools.
She also credits the innumerable stories women and men have told her, upon learning
of her work, about their life cycle & birth experiences, covering a spectrum of
possible outcomes. These stories shared, many in unlikely, spontaneous scenarios,
have offered profound lessons that have confirmed the impact of personal
development upon the realm of creative consciousness along with the prenatal,
perinatal, and postpartum passages that shape the destiny of the world
family.
resume highlights...
Vipassana 10 Day Training Silent Retreat, Southwest Vipassana Center
Yearly since September 2008.
Nritya Yoga Weekend with Amrita Choudury
Austin, Texas May 2008
Kundalini Yoga Teacher Training
Austin, Texas completed May 2003
Hollywood Birth Center (California), Mary served as center Office Manager & Public
Relations representative as well as on-call Midwifery Assistant and occasional Doula
from 2001-2002.
Tech Consultant (Midwifery & Homebirth) for the homebirth "Home & Away" (ABC TV)
episode. Culver City, California. November 5th-12th 2001.
Co-Director of the Cal. Assn. of Midwives "Midwifery & Childbirth Awareness Project"
providing community education for California, working with CAM Board of Directors.
1998-2000
Co-Author of NOW's 1999 Resolution "To Expand the Definition of Reproductive
Freedom to Include Homebirth and the Midwifery Model of Care."
Apprentice/Assistant to Midwife Jeannine Parvati
Typist of 2001 edition of Prenatal Yoga & Natural Childbirth
1995-2005
Apprentice to Midwife Lani Rosenberger
California, 1998
Apprentice to Independent Midwives Linda Green and Debs Purdue
Edinburgh, Scotland 1997
Steering Committee Secretary of AIMS Scotland
(Assn. for Improvement of Maternity Services)
1996-1997.
APPPAH (Assn. for Pre & Perinatal Psychology & Health) Int'l Congress
San Francisco, 1995
Hygieia College member from 1995 - Present
B.A. Human Development, Pacific Oaks College 1991
| "All we need are a few more saints. A Jesus. One Buddha will do! ...Take the Dalai Lama, for instance. Look at what the contribution of just one little human can do!" ~ Gurmukh Celebrity Prenatal Yoga Teacher, Author, Home Birth Mother |
