Raising a Conscious Son (While Healing Myself) by Megan Dalla-Camina

When I became a mother, I had no idea just how much it would unravel me. Or, more accurately, invite me to unravel myself.

I was thirty when I got pregnant, coming out of a decade in high-performance, male-dominated corporate environments. I had learned how to succeed by embodying traits that were rewarded in those spaces: rationality, decisiveness, action, control. I had learned to lead by working harder than everyone else, numbing out what wasn’t useful, and keeping anything vulnerable or tender safely hidden away.

And then I had a son.

I was a solo mother from when he was 18 months old, navigating those early years without a partner and without a roadmap. The logistics alone were overwhelming, but what surprised me more was how much of myself I suddenly had to confront. There is something about parenting, especially solo parenting, that brings everything to the surface. Your coping mechanisms. Your patterns. The parts of yourself you’ve never made peace with.

In the early years, I kept trying to manage it all through the lens I had always used: set a plan, stay ahead, do it well, don’t fall apart. But motherhood didn’t work like that. I was constantly being invited - forced, really - to stay in the moment. To slow down. To listen. And not just to him, but to myself.

I started to see how disconnected I had become. From my body and my emotions. From the parts of me that had never really had space to breathe in the corporate world and hadn’t felt particularly welcome in my own internal landscape either.

What I didn’t realise at the time was that this was the beginning of my healing.

Not the kind of healing you can schedule between meetings or add to a five-year plan. But the slow, layered, sometimes brutal process of re-examining who you are, what you believe, and how you want to live.

Motherhood brought me into that reckoning.

It became clear to me that I couldn’t parent from the version of myself that had been built to survive high-stakes environments. That version of me was incredibly capable, but also exhausted, disconnected, and emotionally unavailable in ways I hadn’t fully understood. I didn’t want to pass that on.

So I started doing the work.

Coaching. Inner healing. Somatic practice. Yoga. Breathwork. Anything that helped me slow down enough to feel what had long been buried. I began to examine the beliefs I carried about success, strength, worth, and what it meant to be a woman in the world.

I also had to confront my relationship with masculinity.

As a woman who had spent so long performing strength in the way I thought I had to - by outworking and leading like the men around me - I had internalised a version of masculinity that was tied to dominance, stoicism, and control.

But now I was raising a boy. And I knew I didn’t want him to inherit that same story.

That became a powerful driver for my own transformation.

I realised I couldn’t just teach him about emotional intelligence, empathy, presence, or authenticity. I had to embody those things myself. And to do that, I had to unlearn decades of conditioning that told me softness was weakness, vulnerability was dangerous, and being powerful meant always being in control.

I also think a lot about what it means to raise conscious boys in today’s world. Boys who are emotionally attuned, grounded in their values, and free to express the full spectrum of their humanity. It’s not easy in a culture that still rewards dominance over depth and teaches boys to disconnect from their feelings to appear strong. But if we want a future shaped by more empathy, emotional literacy, and authentic leadership, it has to start with how we show up, for ourselves and for our children. It’s the responsibility of all of us, not just mothers or women, to examine the patterns we’re passing on and to consciously model a different way of being.

It has been humbling.

There have been plenty of moments where I’ve defaulted to old patterns, pushing too hard, expecting too much of myself, falling back into performance and productivity. But each time I’ve caught myself, it’s been an opportunity to shift. To try something different. To parent from the woman I’m becoming, not the one I used to be.

I’ve learned that breaking generational patterns isn’t about having all the answers. It’s about being willing to do the work. To look at what you inherited, what you internalised, and what you want to leave behind.

And perhaps more importantly, it’s about showing up in the mess of it.

I don’t always get it right. But I keep trying to show up with more presence. More curiosity. More compassion, for myself as much as for anyone else. Something that all of us as women can give ourselves more of.

Motherhood didn’t just change my life. It changed my relationship with myself.

It asked me to be more honest. To go deeper. To soften in ways I didn’t know I needed.

And it’s still asking.

Raising a child while healing yourself is not a linear journey. But it’s one of the most transformative experiences I’ve ever walked through.

And while I don’t centre my son in my work or share much about him publicly, I can say this:
Becoming a mother has been one of the most important catalysts in my return to myself.

Not the self shaped by systems, expectations, or performance. But the self who leads from truth and lives with presence. And who is still learning, every single day, what conscious womanhood, and conscious motherhood, really means.

Megan Dalla-Camina is a bestselling author, women’s mentor, and PhD researcher in women’s spirituality. She writes about feminine wisdom, personal transformation, and conscious living at megandallacamina.com. Download your free Awakening Feminine Wisdom guide at her website.