We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Michelle Noble a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Michelle, thanks for joining us today. If you had a defining moment that you feel really changed the trajectory of your career, we’d love to hear the story and details.
By the time I got pregnant at 36, I had already been a massage therapy and craniosacral practitioner for over a decade. I saw myself as capable and in control in most every area of my life. I believed my body knew how to birth a baby and I’d read all the literature and watched all the movies about how much better natural home-births were than hospital births.
When my water broke in the middle of the night, I was giddy. But by mid-morning there was quite a bit of meconium (baby poop) in the amniotic fluid, which can cause respiratory distress at birth. Plus my contractions hadn’t really kicked in. Our midwife strongly recommended that we go to the hospital.
But, oh my gosh, I had such strong opinions…so many beliefs that kept me reacting and stuck in fear. I had so much resistance. And I had no trust in the hospital staff. I was in resistance every step of the way.
It was a long haul, including suction and forceps, but at last my daughter was born. She was healthy and I was grateful, and the message from the world was that that should be enough.
But my daughter was also sensitive, colicky, sleepless and often un-soothable. She hated being a baby! My husband and I had such bad PTSD that we lived in “resentment flu”; we felt guilty, hurt and angry, and didn’t know how to support each other. The next couple years were just rough. We had originally planned to have a second child, but we started to question that decision.
However, despite a lot of misgivings and fear – and then a miscarriage, which added to our anxiety about all of it – we did get pregnant again. My pregnancy went easily once we got past some first trimester bleeding. We again planned a home birth, but I was terrified that the birth would be as difficult as the first time and I wasn’t sure if our marriage would survive another colicky, sleepless year.
On the outside I was confident and resolute. Behind closed doors, I shed a lot of tears.
The day of my due date, in order to avoid sitting around wondering if my labor would start and dwelling on the plan of expected disaster, I went to a workshop introducing a simple and effective set of energetic tools called Access Consciousness®.
I loved them! The tools made so much sense to me, even though they were unusual; it felt like I was being reminded of something I already knew to be true, but had forgotten.
That night as I got ready for bed my water broke. Gussy was born the next day – at home as planned.
I wouldn’t say it was an easy birth, but there was an ease to it. And even when we were faced with the possibility of going to the hospital again, with the tools I’d learned at the Access Consciousness® class, I was able to trust myself in a new way and choose with confidence to continue birthing at home. We did have the home-birth of our dreams.
Over the course of the following year, I got to experience how my new toolkit was creating more ease in every area of my life, including healing my marriage, navigating motherhood and career, while still having more of me, even with a preschooler and a newborn.
I also got that none of the anxiety, pain and trauma that I experienced through both pregnancies and my first birth was necessary. There was another possibility available, and I could have had an entirely different experience, if I’d only had the tools required earlier on.
And that’s how The Calmer Mom Project was born! I now use the same Access Consciousness® tools that have helped me so much to facilitate other mamas to trust themselves, trust their children and have a more joy-filled, ease-filled motherhood journey.
Michelle, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I work with clients from conception, through pregnancy, birth and beyond to experience more ease and joy in every step of their motherhood journey. Sessions can be in-person or online, including coaching, energy clearing, and techniques to include the client’s body and baby. I also work with spouses and partners on how to support their partner while still taking care of themselves. I teach classes in one of the world’s fastest growing stress relief techniques, Access Consciousness BarsⓇ.
One of the most powerful tools I teach my clients is that in order to create the life of your dreams, you have to get a strong sense of what you truly desire, what lights you up and what is fun for you. Once you have that energy, then choose things that create more of that in your life.
I’ll give you an example. About a year ago, I made what’s called a “WOW” list. It’s a list of 10 things that if they showed up in your life over the course of the next year, you would just be blown away – your life would be a “WOW!” One of the things I put on my list was, “Become a published author.”
Becoming an author is something I’d always dreamed of but I had no idea how to get published.
Then last fall an amazing woman, whom I’d met at a class, posted that her publisher, Radhaa Publishing House, was looking for authors in an upcoming collaborative book called Stories of the Goddess. The book was described as a call to action for the divine feminine, including stories by powerful women about their personal journeys, their relationship with the Goddess, and the greater future they were bringing into being.
Now I have never thought of myself as in relationship with the Goddess, though I am attracted to the divine and the magical, so I wasn’t certain writing for the book would be a good fit. BUT, the cover art itself and the book’s call to action created such a resonant lightness and curiosity in my body…a lightness and curiosity that matched what I am asking my life to be like!
Immediately I reached out to Radhaa Nilia, head of Radhaa Publishing. We ended up talking for almost two hours and I saw how much my work really is about trusting ourselves as women, celebrating our being, and embracing our inner Goddess.
I said, “Yes!” to joining the collaboration, and the book is now available to pre-order the Kindle version and became a #1 New Release almost immediately. It was released just slightly over a year after I wrote, “Become a published author” on my “WOW” list. It didn’t show up how I expected, I didn’t know how it could be possible, but here it is!
We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?
Throughout my life, and like most people, I have been exposed to a lot of judgements and definitions of what I’m suppose to be like.
As a girl, I would see examples in books or media or how other girls behaved and what was rewarded and I would try to be that. When I became a woman, I judged my body, my work and my relationships based on trying to be a good daughter, friend, sister, lover, healer, wife. In my business I would look around at other practitioners and think, “That must be what a healing practice is suppose to look like, that’s what is expected and what people will buy.” When I became a mother, I tried to be a mother like my own mother and looked incessantly to outside resources to understand how I could get motherhood right.
Trying to imitate other people is actually the worst creation tool in the universe. It just doesn’t work for creative people, because the most valuable thing we have to offer the world is the difference we are. Our partners fall in love with us because they see a spark of what makes us unique, but then we try to do relationship like what we see on Netflix. Our children choose us because of who we are, then we put on the “mom” or “dad” hat and become bastardized versions of ourselves.
And in business it’s even crazier. When I discovered craniosacral therapy, it lit up my whole world. It was such ease and relaxation for me to works with clients in that way and I saw how potent it could be. But I had a story that what people wanted was deep tissue massage and so I had to give them what they expected. For years I worked in a way that exhausted both me and my body.
I didn’t get that my best clients weren’t coming to me for how hard I could dig into their hamstrings, but for the energy I be in sessions, my presence and my attunement to what their bodies were asking for.
It’s taken me a long time, and it’s still a day to day choice, to stop comparing myself to others and trying to be like them. Sure I can look at someone else’s life or business and say, “Hey, that’s cool. I wonder what they know that I could learn from? What choices are they making or how are they showing up that resonates with me?”
At its core, this is the path I facilitate my clients along as well. Most of them come to me asking, “What am I supposed to do and be? What’s wrong with me and why can’t I get this motherhood thing right?” As they work with me they begin to ask different questions, like, “If I was truly being me, what would I choose?”, “What’s right about this and what is the beautiful energy underneath?” and “What gift am I to my children that I have not acknowledged?”
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
I would say right now I am mid-pivot.
For most of my life as an entrepreneur, I’ve been a DIY queen. I know how to build a website, create an email campaign, set up a Facebook Ad, do my own bookkeeping, create a course, and a thousand ways to market.
Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should!
For the first time I’m giving up the masochistic pride of handling everything myself and investing in a team of creative and extraordinary people to support what my business is asking to be now and into the future.
It’s fun and stressful and demands I look at all the places I’d rather be in control than successful.
Two things that will make you look your control freak tendencies in the eye; motherhood and business.
The difference is, in business you can hang on and keep everything small enough and tight enough it feels secure and predictable. Of course you may never turn a profit. In motherhood, if you’re lucky, your kids will kick your ass until you learn to let go so everyone can fly!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.calmermom.solutions/
- Instagram: @calmermom
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NobleStepsForYou
- Youtube: https
://www.youtube.com/@calmermom - Other: New! Podcast: https://thecalmermom.podbean.
com/ or look for “The Calmer Mom Podcast” on most podcast platforms. - Book: Stories of the Goddess: Divine Feminine Frequency Keepers on Amazon https://a.co/d/eO8Atf8