The Sacred Mundane: Mothering as Embodied Spiritual Technology

Recently, I had the privilege of contributing a chapter titled Motherhood as a Spiritual Technology, co-authored with Hillary L. McBride, in a newly published edited collection exploring women’s psychological and spiritual formation called Mother Becoming: Reflections and Scholarship on Matrescence.

When I first heard the phrase spiritual technology, I felt intrigued and wanted to understand the concept more deeply. The idea lingered with me and, the more I sat with it, the more this idea of technology seemed to fit motherhood.

A spiritual technology is any practice or relational experience that shapes a person’s inner life over time. It is something that forms the heart, the nervous system, and the way we relate to ourselves, others, and the sacred through repeated engagement. Prayer, ritual, meditation, and pilgrimage have long been understood this way. What I began to notice is that motherhood functions in a similar way.

I have spent years immersed in the theory of attachment, perinatal transitions, neurobiology, and identity development. I understand matrescence as a developmental shift. I can speak about nervous system regulation and trauma responses. I can name the research on maternal ambivalence and the psychological reorganization that happens after birth.

And still, living it was hard.

There is something different about holding knowledge in your mind and holding a crying child in your arms at three in the morning. There is something different about teaching emotional regulation and feeling your own body flood with shame and frustration in a public moment. Knowledge offered me language. It did not exempt me from the experience.

Motherhood did not contradict the theory. It embodied it.

Writing this chapter required me to bring together what I know professionally with what I have lived personally. It required me to reflect on how birth, grief, daily repetition, and relational repair have shaped me in ways I could not have anticipated.

When our son was stillborn in 2020, motherhood became a site not only of love but of profound disorientation. The theories I had taught and written about became intensely personal. Maternal identity was no longer something I studied. It was something I was rebuilding.

In the chapter, we explore how motherhood functions as a spiritual technology precisely because of its repetition and intimacy. A spiritual technology is something that forms us over time through practice. It exposes us to ourselves. It reveals where we are rigid and where we are tender. It invites surrender, not as passivity, but as participation in transformation.

Motherhood confronts our attachment histories. It stretches our emotional capacity. It surfaces anger, grief, protectiveness, longing, and fierce love. It asks us to repair when we rupture. It draws us into rhythms that reshape our nervous systems and our identities. It forms patience slowly, sometimes painfully.

This is not self-improvement.

It is formation.

In my clinical work with mothers navigating perinatal mental health challenges, identity transitions, and the complexity of matrescence, I often see how easily struggle becomes interpreted as failure. But what if the intensity is evidence of growth? What if the friction is part of the refinement? What if the disorientation signals that something foundational is being reorganized?

To call motherhood a spiritual technology is not to romanticize it. It is to take seriously the depth of its formative power. It changes how we inhabit our bodies. It reshapes our sense of time. It alters our thresholds for stress and for love. Over time, it can expand our capacity to sit with pain without immediately trying to fix it. It can deepen our humility. It can widen our compassion.

For me, this integration of scholarship and lived experience continues to shape the heart of my work. I am interested in how maternal identity evolves, how grief and postpartum adjustment intersect with faith, psychology, and embodiment, and how women make meaning of the transformation that motherhood brings.

If you find yourself in a season where motherhood feels stretching rather than serene, demanding rather than enlightened, you are not alone. Formation is rarely tidy. But it is often sacred.

If you would like to learn more about the book, you can find it here:
https://demeterpress.org/books/mother-becoming-reflections-and-scholarship-on-matrescence/

If this reflection resonates with you, I invite you to join my mailing list or explore working together in counselling around maternal mental health and identity transitions.

Larissa