In between consciously parenting two toddlers and healing her own inner child, stay-at-home mother Hannah from the UK creates holistic pregnancy, birth and postpartum education downloads, gifts, and healing art for doulas, antenatal educators and pregnant families. Through her art, she hopes to inspire and empower others: whether that is through childbirth or spiritual rebirth.
What inspired you to want to make art for pregnancy, birth and healing?
My predominant memory from childhood is that of fear, shame, and separation. As early as I can remember, I felt insufficient, unwanted and out of place in the world. The only thing that I seemed to be ‘good’ at – and felt able to lose myself in – was my art.
But over the years, being told how I ‘should’ create, having rules and limits placed on my self-expression, and being conditioned to feel my instincts and inspirations weren’t the ‘right’ way – I lost the joy in my art and the intrinsic motivation to create. Once I finished school, I stopped painting, drawing and crafting – apart from when I felt I had a worthy ‘reason’ to do so – like a birthday card or a Christmas gift. And on some level I could always tell that there was a void in my life where my creativity wasn’t being expressed.
When I was blessed to become pregnant with my eldest daughter, I had a wonderful time discovering that birth didn’t have to be the awful, painful, medical event like I’d seen on TV – and on maternity leave I spent lots of time watching YouTube watercolour tutorials and painting myself birth affirmations. It felt beautiful to return to painting after so long, and for such a hopeful, loving reason. It occurred to me then that perhaps one day I could make my own arty business selling painted birth affirmations – and I’d call it ‘Womb to World’. But I wasn’t at a place in my healing journey where such a new, brave, expressive venture seemed like a feasible reality for me.
How did you start out in the beginning?
We planned and prepared for a healthy home birth as best we could, but the Universe had other plans, and after an emergency transfer my daughter was born with forceps and taken away to NICU with Meconium Aspiration Syndrome. I couldn’t hold her for three days, or feed her for five. After 10 days, we were finally able to bring her home, and I then added healing birth trauma onto my existing to-do list from childhood trauma – and my art was forgotten once again.
When we became pregnant with my second 18 months later, I felt called to start working with a Sacred Intimacy Mentor after listening to her podcast about healing sexual shame, and it was actually the work I did with her which began my spiritual awakening and led to the start of Womb to World Art.
Our sessions together initially focussed on learning about the chakras – the seven main energy centres within our body – and developing practices to help heal, open and balance them. This had quite a dramatic effect on my emotional healing, and I started to see big changes in my life: finding it easier to set boundaries with toxic family members, starting to dress vibrantly and feel safe to take up space, finally connecting with my wounded inner child, beginning to see signs that I was feeling fundamentally more held by our Earth and loved by our Universe – and one morning I realised there was nothing stopping me starting an art shop straight away.
All the reasons I’d told myself in the past for why I couldn’t do it ‘yet’ suddenly didn’t mean anything! I realised I didn’t need a business plan and a mapped-out product range, and competitor research and branding – I could just paint a picture, put it on my Etsy shop, if someone liked it they could buy it – and if not, I had a nice time painting it!
At first I painted affirmations: for birth, then chakra healing, and then for whatever I felt I needed to heal that day – and it became a big part of my pregnancy journey. It was like painting the words my inner child needed to hear – and then to publish them to the world – became the ultimate manifestation tool. Painting gave me opportunity to practise being conscious of my conditioned limiting beliefs around being perfect, and seeing value in something without others’ approval. I progressed onto making paintings that expressed my awakening spirituality, and how I wanted to bring that belief in security and support from the Earth, and guidance from the Universe, into my upcoming birth.
What led you to start making antenatal education downloads?
Despite everything we’d learnt in antenatal classes and hypnobirthing with my first daughter, I didn’t fully understand birth (particularly what was going on in the womb and what surges were all about), so I made myself drawings of the ‘up’ and ‘down’ stages to help myself feel safer with the sensations. Our doula thought they were great and said she thought others would find them useful too, so (feeling dubious anyone would want to pay for a scan of what I saw as a fairly ‘amateurish’ drawing) I added the diagrams to my Etsy shop (hidden at the bottom though!).
My second birth didn’t go as I hoped, and despite my extensive efforts to heal from childhood and birth trauma, I couldn’t feel safe to surrender to my surges. Thanks to divine guidance, we did end up with the safe, unmedicated birth that I wanted – but in a shocking, unexpected way. I struggled emotionally after birth, and felt like a light had gone out in me after the expansiveness and radiance of pregnancy. I didn’t paint anything for months, and I didn’t realise how much I missed it (and needed it) until I was led to start again.
Thank you for sharing my story