Past Life Karma, Cats, and 10 Gentle Ways to Increase Your Milk Supply
- Apr 24
- 10 min read
Updated: Jul 25
Here for the milk supply tips, not the life story? Scroll to the bottom to find them.
Becoming a Mother
So my friends, I have a BIG announcement. I’m officially a mom! Just like that—six months went by and I had a baby.
I mean… I know motherhood is one of the most ancient rites of passage in the life of a human woman. Actually, in the life of all females on Earth—mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, amphibians. You could even argue it’s one of the central continuations of life itself.
And yet.
As I sit here blogging it up, with a little one at my breast, his head tucked perfectly into the crook of my arm, it all feels wildly surreal.
Sacred. Ordinary. Cosmic. Exhausting. ✨
Lately the self-reflection I've had on my life is one of living in paradox—and motherhood feels both primal and brand new. Ancient and personal. Beautiful and completely overwhelming… sometimes all before lunch.
The First Unexpected Challenge
The last three weeks have been full of baby “firsts." While having been a nanny for over a decade, many of the tasks themselves feel familiar—save for one or two. For example, I’ve learned that changing your own baby’s diaper is somehow significantly less gross than anyone else’s.
Smart biology, I guess.
Plus breastfeeding—which I’ve never done before—has been my biggest challenge to date.
When My Milk Didn’t Come In
Despite a valiant effort over the course of a month or so—supplementing with formula, and eventually transitioning fully—I came to the conclusion that I wasn’t producing enough milk.
When Izzy was just three or four days old and I realized it, I was gutted—teary-eyed at any given moment. As I sat with what I was feeling, it landed like a punch straight to the heart chakra—my survival instincts in full failure mode. 💔
Dramatic? Maybe.
But also deeply primal—and, as other mothers in this circumstance would likely attest to, so deeply real.
An ancient alarm bell started ringing: If I can’t provide the most basic need for my child, how will I provide for the rest—especially as a single mom? When even the most innate thing doesn’t feel like a given, the fear gets loud.
My body had somehow missed the memo on the one job it was supposedly “designed” to do—and I was left standing there, heart open, wondering how something so natural could feel so unavailable.
And yes… painfully ironic.
In a world embedded with toxicity and artificial substitutes, I had spent over a decade trying to live as naturally as possible.
And yet, here I was.
Widening the Lens
So, I took a breath, many breaths, and decided to move into the spiritual layer of my experience—which helped me immensely. And by that, I mean I attuned myself to the subtle layers of my life and to the kind of perspective that requires widening the lens of the status quo.
And as surreal as it may sound, this has truly been my experience.
I paused to consider the karmic memories that had surfaced over the previous decade of my spiritual training—memories now coming back into view. My intuition nudged me to look at how these soul threads were weaving themselves into the larger arc of this life.
I leaned into living through the heart—choosing meaning-making as my anchor—and asked: What is being balanced here?
Something in me quieted.
And I remembered the threads.
A Memory From Years Earlier
A memory from years earlier surfaced—something I had almost forgotten.
During a meditation retreat, a quiet voice once said, “I’m not incarnated yet. I’m going to be your child.”
At the time I had filed it away under mystical experiences that were either deeply profound… or borderline unhinged. And then as the years passed I forgot about it completely.
But we’ll get to that part of the story.
Leading a Soul-Led Life
Before I share the memories that helped soothe my washed-out new-mom hormones (and my psyche), I want to speak to something bigger—what it means to live, heal, and thrive through a soul-led life. 🕊️
Now… let’s see if I can hold something this vast in just a paragraph or two.
When we wake up to the soul level of who we are—and I mean that literally, not just as an idea—past lives and karma naturally become part of the lens through which we experience life.
As the lens widens the moral frameworks many of us were raised with—Christianity in my case—can overlap with our spiritual identity in many beautiful ways. Yet, as we expand our perception beyond a single lifetime, something shifts. More nuance enters. The clean lines of right and wrong begin to soften.
We discover that what we’ve been taught to see from the outside looking in isn’t always sophisticated enough to hold the layered nature of our inner karma—what you might call the soul baggage each of us carries, each in our own unique way.
It’s why we also need to look at life from the inside out, so that certain experiences—the ones that don’t quite fit the standard mold, yet still feel deeply right within—begin to make more sense.
Because in their own way, they create an inner balance that is healing for the soul.
Why Becoming a Single Mother Made Sense for Me
For someone who’s walked a similar path—living nomadically, perpetually single, and building a life through travel, creativity, and inner work—choosing to become a single mother at 37 might seem unconventional.
But add one out-of-character encounter, odds stacked against me, ten years as a nanny, a natural comfort with motherhood, and a knack for taking calculated risks… and voilà—you have it.
After some deep introspection, I’ve come to see this new chapter as a major healing pathway in my life—one that helps bring balance to my karma.
And not having emotional pain or baggage from the past? That part feels like a bit of a bonus. Because Lord knows, when it comes to romantic relationships, I’ve had my fair share.
Healing my romantic self… let’s just say, that’s going to make for great blog content in my 40s.
The Puzzle Pieces
It was years ago, when I was deep in Vipassana retreats, and somewhere in the middle of that chapter, I found myself leaning into what I could only describe as a numbness in my heart.
I could literally feel it—hard to access emotionally, tense, and cold. I even had limited mobility in the back of my left shoulder blade.
It became such a central investigation in that chapter of my spiritual growth that I eventually wrote a book exploring its themes—which, I might add, you can conveniently purchase just to the right of this webpage or down below on mobile.
Back then, I was also attracted to the idea of twin flames.
The Voice I Heard During Meditation
One fine day, I found myself in heaven (on earth), sitting on a bench overlooking a field of golden grass, watching a mother deer and her baby grazing quietly nearby. It’s magical how close the deer will naturally come—minding their own business—when a community of humans remains consistently silent and peaceful.
I was praying—asking, consulting with the Universe… God… the unseen—wherever you believe guidance comes from.
“Where are you?” I asked. Meaning… my soulmate.
And what I heard next—gently, from just above and slightly to my left—made me burst into tears: “I’m not incarnated yet. I’m going to be your child.”
Now, I know it’s 2026, and that might sound a little out there—it's also not how you'd expect a soulmate to come into your life. But before you let it go a little sideways, let me offer the way I see it.
Consider incarnation to be the status quo, then this isn’t so far-fetched. Instead, it resembles what John O’Donohue called an Anam Cara—a soul friend.
A connection so deeply intertwined that the roles we play in any one lifetime matter less than the bond itself—a kinship that lives at the level of the heart.
For me, it felt like recognizing a soul I had known before… one I would come to meet again, just in a different form.
A Memory From Another Time
We’re timeline jumping here—stay with me now.
Fast forward a few years. Living on the Canadian west coast, a memory surfaced in meditation—one that would return again and again. A past-life image of me in a small cabin, deep in the forest.
I was a healer. Or what some might have called a witch. And I was angry. I remember pacing my small one-room dwelling in the woods, waiting to be killed. I knew I was being hunted. My anger was deep, almost otherworldly—but it wouldn’t boil over. And I wasn’t afraid. Just empowered, furious with full spectrum spiritual vision.
The Memory Returns
Fast forward again, to just six months ago—four months pregnant, another layer surfaced. A family trigger bringing it back.
My immediate family is extremely close—in a soul-tied kind of way, one that comes with both love and frustration (luckily not in equal measure)—and as I quietly scurried to the old cabin at the back of our property to feel the imminent pain away from judging eyes, I noticed something strange.
The cabin—familiar from many stays; I’d even lived in it for a summer—mirrored the one in my memory. Over a century old, it had been relocated and restored by my father.
And this time as I leaned into the discomfort, something felt new.
A new layer of pain.
In my familiar memory I realized that it was not only me they were coming for. I also had a child. A baby. They would kill me and take him… to somewhere beyond my knowledge. It was pure heartbreak.
Eventually I dried my eyes, regained my composure, and walked the three-minute trail up the lawn to the driveway. And in the quiet after that experience, another realization began to form.
If a part of my soul carried the memory of such terror—of having my child taken from me—then perhaps it wasn’t so surprising that becoming a mother in this lifetime came with resistance.
After all, if I had once faced men coming to my door to take the most precious thing in my life away… of course a part of me might hesitate before stepping into motherhood again.
And of course my body might mirror that. Our bodies are that wise—quiet living maps of who we are and have been.
As these puzzle pieces began to settle into place—of which there are more still to share—my earlier struggles with low milk supply started to make a different sense. I don’t know about you, but when my mind finds peace with a story—scattered realizations forming a picture into view 🧩—the rest of me relaxes too.
And so there it was, in quiet understanding that my heart softened to the blow of not being able to provide milk for my little one. 🤍
Back to the Present
Meanwhile, as my inner self was busy connecting dots across lifetimes, my newborn was busy having his very first adventures too.
Izzy had his first lunch out with Grandma and me.
His first car ride.
His first midwife appointment outside the womb.
He met the family pets—horses included.
Shanti, my cat familiar, surprised me the most. She’s stepped boldly into her new role as a quiet guardian. If I’m in the room when he cries, she’ll spring away in milliseconds. But if I’m not there?
She stays.
Head lifted, ears alert—watching him like a tiny, fuzzy security guard. 🐾
Usually, I’m just in the kitchen prepping a bottle or sneaking in a quick shower. That’s the beauty of a small apartment in this season of life.
I’m never far from my babe.
*I never did make enough milk for my little one to be breastfed full time—but Lord knows I gave it a good try. I could have kept pushing it too, but the freedom of formula gave me more time and energy to be a better mom in other ways. So that became the current that carried me.
On paper, breast is best. But life comes with limitations, and circumstance to circumstance, we all find our own way to be the best mothers we can be in a 2026 world.
For me, doing the first-hand research and trying everything under the sun—until I eventually reach my own self-created surrender town—is what helps me let go and move forward in moments like this one.
And it's from that journey that I’m sharing with you these insights. Every body–mind–spirit, and every circumstance, is unique… and maybe—if you're someone who finds that they're needing the guidance—you'll have more time and space to make these supportive prompts work for you.
And who knows... perhaps I’ll also circle back to these 10 ways to increase your milk supply someday, if life blesses me with a round two. 😉
10 Gentle Ways to Increase Your Milk Supply
1) Feed (or Pump) More Often than Feels Necessary
Milk production works on demand. The more frequently milk is removed, the more your body gets the signal to make. Think: you’re not empty—you’re informing your system.
2) Don’t Wait for “Fullness”
Waiting until your breasts feel full can actually slow supply. Frequent, smaller removals build more milk than spaced-out feeds.
3) Prioritize a Deep Latch
A shallow latch = inefficient milk removal = lower supply over time. If something feels off, it probably is—this is one place support (LC, midwife) can make a big difference fast.
4) Use Breast Compressions While Feeding
Gently compressing your breast during feeds helps baby get more milk, which increases stimulation and signals your body to produce more.
5) Add in a “Power Pump” Session
Once a day, mimic cluster feeding with pumping: 20 min pump → 10 rest → 10 pump → 10 rest → 10 pump.
6) Skin-to-Skin as Often as Possible
This isn’t just bonding—it’s biological signalling. Skin-to-skin increases oxytocin, which directly supports milk letdown and production.
7) Eat Enough (Especially Carbs + Fats)
Under eating is one of the most overlooked supply killers. Your body needs real fuel—this is not the season to restrict.
8) Hydrate—But Don’t Force It
Drink consistently, but you don’t need to drown yourself in water. A good cue: a glass every time you feed or pump.
9) Support your Nervous System
Stress doesn’t just live in your mind—it impacts letdown. Even small things help: deep breaths, warm showers, slowing down during feeds.
10) Consider Targeted Support (Not Everything at Once)
Things like oats, brewer’s yeast, moringa, or fenugreek (I used a fenugreek and blessed thistle supplement), can help—but they’re not magic bullets. Start one at a time and notice what your body responds to.
✨ Milk supply isn’t just physical—it’s relational. Between your body, your baby, your nervous system, and your sense of safety, when you shift the environment—mentally, emotionally, energetically—your body often meets you there. Start with one additional practice at a time. Let it be simple. And, Subscribe to the blog (the link’s down below) for fresh insights, soulful stories, and practical tools for your journey. Want to go even deeper? Book a discovery call and let’s explore how me and Earth Heart Healing can support your next big step.
I’m Marnie—entrepreneur, energy healer, transformation coach, mama, and lifelong adventurer. From jungle cacao mornings to surprise nine-month leaps, I guide empaths, old souls, spiritual seekers, and those in seasons of change to embody their power, trust their path, and step boldly into the life they’re here to create.
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