Renee McDonald Public Page

Such a lovely message to receive this morning. Grateful to so many beautiful people in the world 🤗🙏🔥 Lorena Acosta 🤗

A friend of mine was struggling today …. So here’s some phone numbers if you or anyone you know needs urgent support.

I’m leaving Melbourne, and what a trip it has been…

Catching up with friends and colleagues.
Meeting new people, making new contacts, and opening new conversations.
Experiencing amazing intergenerational healing workshop with Catherine Lyell and crew.

Some trips are more than travel.
They become a reminder of connection, purpose, timing, and the quiet power of showing up.

Melbourne turned it on — the people, the conversations, the energy, the moments.

Feeling grateful, expanded, and very glad I came.

Until next time, Melbourne. ✨

Renée McDonald
www.reneemcdonald.com

Such fun! Lovely company, fun, laugh, colleagues, work and play - all in one night! You girls ROCK 🎸 🔥

Flying into Melbourne this morning, I found myself sitting near a young couple navigating one of those very human, very tender moments.

She was pregnant with her first baby and experiencing intense morning sickness phase — the kind that doesn’t politely pause just because you’re on a flight.

Her partner mentioned she had been vomiting almost constantly.

Having had my own pregnancies — and knowing how much my own body has changed after children and has interrupted my bodily equilibrium, even on flights, since then — I found myself gently offering a few breathwork techniques and small body-based suggestions to help her settle her system.

And for the first half of the flight, she didn’t vomit.

It was such a small moment, but also not small at all.

A reminder that sometimes the work we do doesn’t stay neatly inside clinics, boardrooms, workshops, professional conversations or carefully planned meetings.

Sometimes it shows up in the seat beside us.

This Melbourne trip has in store a full calendar of those threads for me — meeting with women’s advocates, connecting with colleagues, and participating in important workshop spaces that I’m not quite ready to speak about in detail yet.

But I can say this:

I’m increasingly interested in the places where lived experience, professional wisdom, advocacy, body-based practice, and deep care meet.

The spaces where women are believed.

The spaces where bodies are listened to.

The spaces where support is practical, human, and immediate.

And sometimes, that begins with something as simple as helping a pregnant woman breathe through the next few minutes.

There are many conversations unfolding right now.

Some public.
Some private.
Some still forming.

But I’m grateful to be in the room — and sometimes, on the plane — where care, courage and advocacy are quietly happening.

Renée McDonald
www.reneemcdonald.com

Modern day madness

I’ve taken some time out.

Not because I have stopped caring.
Not because I have stopped working.
Not because I have stopped showing up.

I have still attended to my motherly duties.
I have still attended meetings.
I have still attended sessions.
I have still tried to do the right thing, even in circumstances that have been deeply painful, confusing and at times almost impossible to make sense of.

And perhaps that is one of the hardest parts of modern life.

Sometimes you are not pulled apart because you have done the wrong thing.

Sometimes you are pulled apart because other people have done the wrong thing — and will not admit it.

Sometimes the person trying to stay steady becomes the one who is questioned.

The person asking for truth is labelled difficult.
The person asking for accountability is framed as unreasonable.
The person trying to protect what matters is treated as the problem.

This is part of the madness of our time.

We live in a world with more systems, more policies, more language around care, safety, inclusion and wellbeing than ever before.

And yet, many people still find themselves unheard inside the very systems that claim to listen.

So how do we make sense of modern day madness?

Perhaps we start by refusing to lose our own moral centre.

We keep showing up.
We keep telling the truth.
We keep tending to what is ours to tend.
We keep loving, mothering, working, healing and discerning.

Not perfectly.
Not without grief.
Not without exhaustion.

But with enough integrity to know that being affected by madness does not mean we have become mad.

Sometimes stepping back is not giving up.

Sometimes it is the most responsible thing we can do while we gather strength, protect our heart, and remember who we are.

And sometimes, in a world that has lost its way, staying anchored in truth is its own quiet act of courage.

Modern day madness may pull at us.
But it does not get to define us.

Happy Mother’s Day.

My first as a motherless mother.

Honouring my mother and all mothers this Mother’s Day.