Eliza Falk, MA mother, somatic therapist, village weaver

Training

MA, Integrative Psychology

Hakomi Somatic Mindful Therapy, L1

Mind–Body Coaching, The Embody Lab

RYT-200, Bhakti Yoga Shala

I grew up building community around me because of how alone I felt inside my own home. My single mother raised me through cancer twice and bipolar disorder, barely making ends meet. All I wanted was for her to be happy, so I dimmed my light rather than take any of hers.

My body learned to stay small early. A childhood of serious illness taught me to override what I felt and get on with it — so for most of my life my body was something I managed, not somewhere I lived.

The birth team left. The meal train stopped, my husband went back to work, and I was syringe-feeding a colicky baby through nights that didn't end. I had built the village — the birth team, the meals, the friends — and I still sat in a full room and ached to be held. Anxious, unseen, living just outside my own body.

My attachment wounds surfaced while I tried to be the perfect mother, doing everything for everyone but myself. And I saw my own mother reflected back at me: a woman who gave everything and was never quite able to be there.

Once my own practices had brought me back, I could not un-know what they had done. I returned to my somatic work — this time not as something I was receiving but as something I was training to hold — and enrolled in integrative psychology with one intention: to walk with mothers through this passage.

Because I know, in my body, how badly a mother needs somewhere to be felt, heard and held. Not fixed. Not advised. Not congratulated and moved past. Held — long enough and closely enough that she can find her own way back to herself.

We start in the body

The held breath, the braced shoulders, the flinch when the baby cries. We slow down enough to notice, then stay long enough for something to move.

We make room for meaning

Matrescence asks existential questions — about who you were and what you want now. Those aren’t symptoms to manage. They’re the work.

We reparent as you parent

Your own childhood arrives uninvited at bedtime. We give that younger part of you a seat, so you aren’t the only one in the house doing the holding.

Utterly in love with their children and unable, some days, to feel it. Holding rage and resentment they turn on their partners or themselves. Many have already tried talk therapy and came away more confused than before.

Nothing you bring to me will be too much. We were never meant to mother alone — the village is missing, and the culture asks you to bounce back instead. You are the one breaking a long line of women who forgot themselves. Come and be met.

One to one

In circle