The Antidote is a newsletter and meditation community featuring essential healing modalities for the modern woman. Our mission is to inspire women to realize their fullest potential through educational content, guided meditation, and self-reflection tools.
I recently sat down with a dear sister, Caley Alyssa. Caley is seven months pregnant and radiates feminine wisdom, power, and healing.
Caley Alyssa is a business embodiment coach and an internationally renowned yoga teacher and Yoga Nidra guide. Her offerings blend quantum technologies with astrological cycles to sooth and balance your nervous and endocrine systems, and assist you in accessing your infinite inner knowing. Caley and I talked about her pregnancy, ego death, deep healing, and the importance of meditation for mamas-to-be.
Pregnancy: Transformation and Deep Healing
Within every birth process is a legend of power, beauty, and resilience. It's been a joy to witness Caley’s transformation through pregnancy, which she generously shares on her Instagram profile.
Birth is the ultimate creative act. Like menstruation, orgasm, menopause - any of the female experiences that center on or around the womb - pregnancy and childbirth can be entered consciously as potential doorways to spiritual power and heightened intuitive awareness.
Caley is thrilled to become a new mother and meet the soul that has asked her to bring it into this life. But she also speaks about her fears honestly. “The part of me that can just do what I want, when I want, is slowly but surely fading. I’m 36 and I’ve lived my life for 36 years in every way that I wanted to and now I won’t be able to do that as much. There is a dichotomy I feel, a polarity of overflowing joy and fear.”
Pregnancy is a toroidal energetic experience wherein the woman becomes at once mother and child. The baby grows inside of her and is not separate from her. She is growing not just a baby, but a new dimension of her power: her evolution to mother. To do so, she must undergo death to her past identity.
“The individual me is going,” Caley shared. “There is an ego death.” Caley had a visceral experience of this recently during an acupuncture appointment. “I just wanted to relax and my baby was doing back-flips inside me. I realized, this is not my body anymore.”
Pregnancy can be a deeply healing experience because it brings emotions to the surface. The woman experiences the passing of love from one generation to the next. It’s not uncommon to feel sadness, fear, and experience old traumas resurfacing, asking to be cleared. There is an opportunity to break negative patterns and create a new reality of love.
Well before getting pregnant, Caley did a lot of emotional healing work. “I cleared a lot. I am solid.” She speaks about her healing process with humility, “Who knows... maybe it will come back up as I am mothering. But for now, I feel really good about already clearing habituated patterns I received from my parents.”
Caley completed the Hoffman Process, a program my husband is keen to do before we conceive to prevent generational trauma from being passed down to our children. I was thrilled to hear about her positive experience.
“Everyone should do it before they have a baby.”
The Hoffman Process is a week-long residential and personal growth retreat that helps participants identify negative behaviors, moods, and ways of thinking that developed unconsciously and were conditioned in childhood. Outcomes include making peace with your past, releasing negative behaviors, emotional healing and forgiveness, discovering your authentic self and improving relationships. Caley tells me, “The Hoffman Process gives you an understanding of why you are who you are.”
Before you arrive, you have about 15 hours of deep self inquiry homework to identify habits and belief systems and attribute them to a person in your life. When you get there, they put you in a meditation on your parent’s lives. As you walk through their lives, you understand your parents and why they are the way they are. Ultimately, this process creates compassion and healing.
“I had such a revelation about my dad during the Hoffman Process. My dad and I don’t speak at all, and now I feel like that is ok. I am complete.” Caley recommends the Hoffman Process for anyone who wants to build awareness, release unhealthy patterns, and let go of trauma.
The Benefits of Meditation during Pregnancy
Like the Hoffman Process, meditation can support deep psyche healing to help you process your subconscious as you create positive intentions for yourself and your family.
Many yoga traditions teach that meditation during pregnancy can influence the consciousness of the unborn child. This seemingly mystical teaching is well-rooted in science. Stress response is a learned behavior. How you experience and cope with stress during pregnancy can impact how your baby is able to handle stress. According to Dr. Esther Sterberg in her book The Balance Within, less than 50 percent of our stress-responsiveness is in our genes, and more than 50 percent is molded by our environment.
Caley agrees, “meditation directly influences the baby’s nervous system.”
Caley teaches Yoga Nidra, a form of guided meditation that allows you to scan the body and tap into a state of relaxed consciousness as the mind settles in a place between wakefulness and sleep. “Nidra is a complete overhaul and reset of your nervous system. During pregnancy, that is so important because everything is diverted from you to the baby. Mamas need to not be stressed for their own wellbeing and also so they don’t pass it on to their children.”
Caley believes Yoga Nidra can help mother’s understand their own limiting beliefs around birth and motherhood, and shift them into powerful embodied manifestations. “It’s just like the Hoffman Process. You’re working through that stuff so you’re not perpetuating and passing it on to the baby.”
The beautiful thing about Yoga Nidra is there is no barrier to entry. Anybody can do it. You just lie down and listen. “For me, Nidra doesn’t feel like work. Nidra is so delicious. It’s such a treat. You don’t have to sit straight like in Vipassana.”
Yoga Nidra is a feminine, receptive practice. I’ve been experiencing Caley’s Cosmic Yoga Nidra meditations and they are magical, creative, and restorative. Caley guides you to a place of deep presence and then ignites the intuitive creative mind through rapid visualizations. Her voice is deeply calming and penetrates into your very soul, instilling a sense of internal peace and leaving you feeling relaxed and rejuvenated with a profound sense of self-love.
Connect with Caley
This Mother’s Day, join Caley for a weekend retreat at Esalen May 7 - 9. Caley’s Preparing for Motherhood: A Guided Cosmic Yoga Nidra Workshop is for anyone who identifies as a woman, who has welcomed or plans to welcome a child into their life, or who has lost one. This is the PERFECT retreat to invite your mama to-be, or a girl friend/supermom who could use a little pampering.
Follow Caley on Instagram where she generously shares her pregnancy journey.
With so much love,
Christina
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