Hello. I’m Helen.

I work with women who are on longer conception journeys as a conception doula. I share yoga with them, I listen, I support them with anxiety, IVF cycles and long awaited pregnancies. I also support them with unlearning the tendrils of shame and not feeling good enough that can wrap around us from external sources with each month we are still not pregnant.

I write about the noisy world of women’s reproductive health, or rather, I write about how to stay kind to ourselves within the cacophony of do more, try harder.

The Antidote

Within The Antidote you can expect to see all kinds of eclectic writing about the things I see that make me wince, about self-compassion and about my own lived experiences and ongoing processing. The ways we are positioned in pre-conception landscapes continues to reverberate into pregnancy, in motherhood and picks up a new kind of pace in the arena of menopause. So I’ll no doubt write about that too.

I weave my words and teachings from the threads of my own reproductive story. I spent five years in the wilderness of discovering that making a baby isn’t always as simple as ceasing to use contraception. My own biography includes IVF, medical and pregnancy trauma. It isn’t pretty. There’s also a distance of eight years and hundreds of hours of therapy between me and that particular island. It’s coastline shaped me. And is also only one part of the cartography of what it means to be me.

I'm also a lecturer, writer, yoga teacher (unlearning yoga), lover of songs, constellations, forests and the beyond human, voice notes, murmurations, kingfishers, sea glass and thousands of other remarkable things. And some of these things will no doubt feature here.

Mapping the territory

As this space unfurls the intended directions of travel for subscribers are;

Writing to my community on the regular, for free, with tales of the time being.

Writing to my inner community; after four years of baring my soul for anyone to see, I am drawing a curtain between the words for all and the words that are sacred to me. There are tales untold and a fatigue with the vulnerability of being open for all to see. I am being pulled to inhabit a space that feels safer and these words will be behind the paywall.

As a valued paid subscriber you will also get access to;

Podcast style extended voice notes

Meditations and online practices

Writers in fertility workshops

An intimate community to act as a refuge from ‘the noise’ and the endurance of being on the trying to conceive road (and all the destinations that takes us too)

I would love you to join me here. I’d love you to write to me here. Be in the comments knowing that, to me you will always be the person at the end of the comment.

If you have found me via Substack and would like to see more of my offerings and heartwork you can do that here;

Find out about conception doula support here

Explore my website here

Work with me as a holistic practitioner mentor here

Explore my Instagram here