Postpartum
What nobody tells you about the six-week check
Cleared for exercise, unasked about everything else. What to do with the questions the appointment didn’t have room for.
Six minute read
Eliza Falk, MA
Somatic Therapist
You hold so much, mama.Come and be held.
Pregnancy·Birth trauma·Postpartum anxiety·Postpartum depression·Matrescence·Toddler years·Second time through
In person
The Mama Circle
A monthly gathering — somatic practice, shared stories, and a closing ritual. Come as you are; leave less alone.
Monthly · The Portal, Mill Valley
Join the next circle
About me
I'm Eliza,
Somatic therapist, mother, and believer that you were never meant to do this alone.
I hold an MA in Integrative Psychology, a mind–body coaching certification and training in Hakomi mindful somatic therapy. I work slowly and without judgement, blending somatic practice with depth work through matrescence.
I came to this work through my own postpartum — surrounded by a village I had built myself, and still aching, still living outside my body. Somatics is what let the grief move.
We go at your pace. Nothing you bring is too much for this room.
More about me
Free ten-minute practice
Touched Out — ten minutes to come back into a body that has been needed all day.
Who this is for
I understand it because I have lived it.
You can be surrounded by love and still feel pain in it.
You've lost touch with yourself
Somewhere in the giving, the holding, the never-stopping — you've drifted from the woman you were. You're still showing up for everyone else. You just can't find yourself underneath it all.
Your body feels unfamiliar
Birth does something enormous. So does pregnancy, loss, feeding, holding. If your body feels foreign, numb, or far away — that's not weakness. It's what happens when we move through transformation without support.
You're carrying grief nobody warned you about
The woman you were. The freedom you had. The childhood you never received and are now trying to give. Loving your child and grieving your former life are not in conflict. Both are true, and both deserve space.
The rage, resentment and ambivalence have nowhere to go
Modern motherhood has no container for these feelings. No language for what it costs to give this much. They live in your body, quietly building — and they belong somewhere safe.
Your relationship has shifted in ways that scare you
The distance. The resentment. The longing for what you had before. Motherhood reshapes everything between partners, and few couples are prepared for how much. This is not a failure. It's a threshold.
Birth left something unfinished in you
Something happened — in your body, in the room, in the experience itself — that you haven't been able to fully name or move through. It lives below language, and it's asking for attention.
You're living the in-between
You're not who you were before — but you don't yet know who you're becoming. The ground has shifted and nothing feels solid. This liminal place is disorienting. It's also where the deepest work happens.
The bigger questions won't quiet down
Who am I now? What do I want my life to mean? What was I handed, and what do I want to pass on? Motherhood cracks these open. They deserve more than symptom management — they deserve real exploration.
The mother wound surfaces
Motherhood reaches back into your own experience of being mothered — what you received, what you didn't, what was never named. The patterns that live in your nervous system, not just your memory. This is some of the deepest and most meaningful work there is.
Any of those, or all of them. If you recognised yourself more than once up there — you are not broken, and you are not behind. You are in the middle of a rite of passage nobody prepared you for.
What somatic therapy is
There is a power inside the body that motherhood cracks open.
Our work here is to listen to that power— to honor birth as a sacred initiation, one that challenges us, rearranges us, and brings us closer to our deeper wisdom and truth.
Where we work
Our stories, emotions and memories live in the body. Trauma, anxiety and grief sit at the body level, where unprocessed memory and held life-force get stuck. Somatic therapy goes to that root — slowly, with mindfulness — so what has been braced for years can finally move. In practice it is quieter than it sounds: I ask what you notice right now, and we stay there long enough for something true to surface. Nothing is forced; your body sets the pace, always.
How we work
Therapy that works with the whole of you
Somatic
Most therapy works from the neck up. This work starts in the body — with breath, sensation, posture, and the slow practice of noticing what is actually here before deciding what it means. Your body is not the problem. It is the way through.
Relational
Healing happens in relationship. The space between us — how it feels to be truly seen, to say the unsayable, to be met without judgement — is not incidental to the work. It is the work. What becomes possible here can begin to shift what is possible everywhere else.
Depth-oriented
This is not about managing symptoms or getting back to functional. It is about going underneath — to the patterns, the stories, the inherited wounds, and the deeper questions motherhood has cracked open. The goal is not resolution. It is integration.
What changes
what you are carrying can change
Change happens through the body, not by understanding it
You can name every pattern and still feel the same at four in the afternoon. What shifts a pattern is felt, not concluded.
Repetition rewires
Each time you notice the held breath and let it soften, a new pathway is laid. Not a breakthrough — a hundred small returns, which is how anything in a mother’s life ever gets done.
Your patterns will move when they are met gently
Nothing shifts under force. Bracing, rage, numbness: they loosen when they are given room and a slower pace, not when they are pushed.
Freedom comes from befriending the signals, not fighting them
The tight jaw, the flare of anger, the wish to be left alone — these are messages, not misbehaviour. Turning toward them is where the room opens.
On the village
We were never meant to mother alone.
Four months postpartum, on my own birthday, I hadn't made a single plan — I had no capacity to celebrate myself. Six mothers from my prenatal yoga class showed up with cupcakes and babies on their hips. We kept gathering every week for years, and that thread is still my lifeline.
We are mothering in a culture that expects us to bounce back, without the village that made it survivable. So alongside one-to-one work I gather mothers in rooms — because being witnessed by other women does something no session alone can.
From the journal
All writing
Birth trauma
When the story comes out flat
Telling your birth like a weather report is not proof you are fine. It is usually proof you had to put it somewhere.
Eight minute read
Matrescence
Rage at the dishwasher, and what’s underneath it
Anger is rarely about the plates. On reading your own irritation as information.
Five minute read
Where to begin
Two ways in, whenever you are ready
One to one
A free consult
Twenty minutes to feel whether this is right.
A number of hours are held at a reduced rate. If cost is standing in the doorway, say so on the call.
In circle
The Mama Circle
One Sunday a month in Mill Valley. Come as you are; leave less alone.
Join the next circle