Dec 23 2017 68 mins
Lillian Lartey is my guest in this last episode of 2017. She’s a personal trainer, massage therapist, and I consider her a life coach for women because she is so grounded in her values and commitment to having an extraordinary life. She came over to record this episode, and it was wonderful to spend those 90-minutes together. So much of what she said was illuminating for me about womenhood, and motherhood. Lillian isn’t a mother, and yet, she has so much wisdom about it!
“If we look from the central part of the world going eastwards, a lot of the time when it comes to parenthood, it’s not just the mom taking total responsibility of that child or those children; you’ve got a total village, you’ve got a total town taking care of that child. So that mother doesn’t necessarily have those pressures that they do in the Western world. We also don’t have those pressures of wanting to get a really good job, wanting to have A, B, and C; Take the children to the best school, have the best clothes, have all this money, etc, go on the best holidays - all this pressure adds in. Why? Where as, when we appreciate our lives why we’re here, and that mum gives birth in a village to a child, everybody celebrates that. That’s everybody’s child. It’s not just that mum who’s given birth to that child. It’s everybody’s responsibility.”
Lillian is a personal trainer, massage therapist, and I consider her a life coach for women because she is so grounded in her values and commitment to having an extraordinary life.
“For mums, I believe, and having worked with mums in the type of work that I do, a majority of the time, if they’re under that pressure to have to hand over their baby, at say, at 6 months, even a year, their bodies physically are not ready to let go. Because it’s such an emotional trauma - one, in terms of when you’re pregnant and you’re carrying a child. There’s so many hormonal activities going on. Two, when you give birth. And in three, through nursing that child. And that body, I believe, has to go through a process of recovery, and that includes when you’re doing the releasing of that child to go into someone else’s hands, in terms of going to school or going to nursery, taking care of the house, etc.”
As a life coach, she has helped women, many of them mothers, to focus on themselves and to achieve happiness, building back their health, self-esteem, and love for life.
“I’ve had women who wanna be super women, you know business women in particular are like, ‘Oh yeah, I gave birth yesterday, and I’m here today and I’m treatin’ my clients, I’m speaking to my clients, and I’ve got my baby on my boob…’ And I just think, ‘Why’? In the Western world there’s this race to get back and to prove yourself that, ‘I’m a strong woman and I’m going to be a responsible mother, and I can do it all.’ And then they crash and burn.”
Check out Lillian's website for her business, I Want My Body Back.