HANNA HART
Midwife & Medicine Maker
Here is my story.
It is a story of what is to be a woman and human. It is a story of birth and death. It is raw and messy and beautiful. It has been my path home.
May it inspire you to share yours.
I was born into a bicultural family in San Francisco. From the exterior, my childhood looked like any other, yet inside the walls it was permeated by darkness. It wasn’t until the birth of my daughter that I was able to meet the truth of what lived within that darkness.
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My grandmother was my shelter, the one place of true belonging in the storm of my childhood. Her altar and her complete surrender into the arms of the Divine Feminine was where she found her belonging.
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She held me in this embrace and taught me the power of prayer and altar work. I carried her template with me through the spiral of my life. I used to say I didn’t believe in God, but I believed in my grandmother’s prayers.
At art school in Boston, I made huge altars to the feminine. I explored what femininity meant to me, both the shadow and the light. I danced with the edges of the Divine, but wasn’t ready to surrender into true feminine power. There were layers of myself I needed to meet first.
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Art school led me to process…to the felt experiences of life.
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I fell in love with food as a means to capture the nourishment of what life has to offer us. The desire to have my hands in the tactile elements of food and where they intersect with the earth led me to a goat dairy in the rolling hills of West Marin County.
Here I met myself in the warm bodies of ruminants and the deep holding of a pastoral landscape. The hum of anxiety and loneliness that had been my constant companion for much of my life quieted.
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Here I met the power of the earth and the beauty of birth. That first season of being elbow deep in warm wombs and of witnessing the resiliency of the feminine in the flesh opened something deep within me.
I had never felt more myself than I did in the presence of birth.
Birth brought me into my skin and into connection....
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Birth called me and here began my path to midwifery.
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I learned the art of midwifery within a traditional apprenticeship model. I worked with a collection of midwives, each showing me different layers of what it means to hold space for women as they become mothers.
I learned the most from the women who welcomed me into their homes, hearts and bodies as they shed and softened into all that birth offers. A deep reverence for the power that we all hold as women was born in me through this process.
Here I felt the pulse of TRUE feminine power.
Halfway through my 30th year, I became the matriarch of my family. I felt my mother’s heart go still under the weight of my hand and stepped out into the light of the full moon changed.
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As I took over care of my family, I had the opportunity to feel the patterns that my maternal lineage had woven into the legacy that they had built together.
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The quest for resource was steeped in the paradigm of struggle and the denial of self in the name of others.
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As I experienced the weight of this pattern, I recognized that I had been living in service to others at a cost to myself for as long as I could remember.
My journey to motherhood is where I began the process of unraveling these patterns of depletion and self betrayal.
I had always longed to be a mother and my path to motherhood was the expression of that longing…
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I struggled to conceive…
I suffered miscarriages…
and ultimately turned to IVF to conceive my children.
The grief and heartache that I met as I became a mother led me to see that my body carried its own deep expressions of grief in the form of physiological symptoms.
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My journey showed me places in myself that I did not trust, places where life created a wall between me and the inherent wisdom of my body.
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As I stepped into pregnancy, my body and my spirit continued to show me what was asking to be shed.
My first son was born in a bathtub under the midday sun. His birth was an opening and a step towards trusting my body. As I dropped into the blur of early motherhood, the longing that I thought would have quieted with a baby in my arms continued to grow.
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I tried to bury it by being perfect, by controlling every nuance of our small world. I was in a state of constant hypervigilance, concealed under the veneer of what a good mother should look like.
I lost myself in the “shoulds” of motherhood.
Deep under water, I tried to surface myself in the birth of my second son. I was so deep in the narrative of what I should be that I couldn’t feel who I was. As I manifested the homestead and the family I had always dreamed of, I could never be still. I ran from the constant hum of what I was trying to keep buried in my flesh by always doing, striving, pushing, struggling.
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I was lost in the pattern of depletion in service to others. I could not feel the joy and the nourishment of all that life had to offer me.
Then I got pregnant with my daughter. Her birth was an initiation. As I held myself through the waves of sensation and the places within myself that I had not faced something in me cracked wide open.
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With my daughter’s emergence, a pool of repressed memories of childhood trauma poured out of me. What had been buried became unearthed.
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In meeting all the stories that had been living in my body since childhood, a lifetime of… anxiety, digestive issues, endometriosis, infertility, skin eruptions, people pleasing, perfectionism and hypervigilance came into view.
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My journey to motherhood brought me to the edge of my dark pool and my daughter’s face gave me the courage to dive into those waters.
Since her birth I have been meeting the parts of me that have been frozen in my body, fragmented in holding patterns of trauma. As I have met these parts and heard their stories, the patterns of struggle, pain and inflammation that I have lived with have started to soften and fall away.
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With each layer, I gain a deeper perspective about how all the threads of my experience have woven together to create the medicine of me. My life as a daughter, a woman and a mother has been a true initiation.
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I bring all the wisdom that I have cultivated through that initiation and weave it together with my training as a midwife to offer you the medicine of my journey:
The ability to guide you into the power of your instincts and cultivate your own INNATE wisdom.
What if the struggles and challenges you have been facing are invitations into a deeper, more authentic version of yourself?
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Let me guide you to birth the mother and the woman that you ARE in your heart.
I stand before you as a midwife in every sense of the word:
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I am a shepherd over thresholds… a reflection of the beauty held in the truth of our stories.
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I am a daughter of the earth and an expression of her holding.
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I am the fire of compassion and the wisdom of one who has traveled to the dark pools within myself.
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I trust the journey and the soup of life that is the chrysalis of unbecoming to become.
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I walk this path. I am here to walk beside you.
Your STORY is the path.
Tell me your story and walk your path home.