Mandy Martini, Hudson, NY (2026)

05/31/2026

A few days after giving birth, T and I were at the pediatrician for our little one’s first checkup…

After finishing the exam, we started putting our newborn’s clothes back on while our doctor sat down on a stool across from us. “Any questions for me?” He asked. We both shook our heads.

He clasped his hands in front of him and looked at me with a smile. “Now, how are you doing?”

“Good! Just healing.”

He nodded. “Now, it’s important you know, especially if you’re planning on breastfeeding, and I assume you are,” he nodded at my son, who was now nursing. “Stress travels through your milk to your baby... so whatever you do, avoid stress!”

His advice, loaded with well-intentions, pressure, and responsibility, instantly made me feel stressed.

Considering how most of us live today, where stress is everywhere: in how we live and survive, in the environment around us: the screens in our hands, on our walls (the TV), at work, school, the people around us... for the majority of us, avoiding stress is an impossible task.

So maybe that’s not the answer— avoiding stress. Which can result in more stress, and even feelings of failure, especially for mothers.

Maybe the answer is to learn how to understand stress. How it was made to move through your body instead of piling up inside of you.

Because that’s where the real danger is. In the chronic. Not in the brief movements of reacting to the world around you.

Comment SUBSTACK for the direct link ❤️

05/05/2026

I used to joke that the only crime I haven’t experienced is being k1lled, but this is no joke.

I’ve been told that I share about my story with DV too much. I’ve been accused of sharing my story for clout. I’ve been told to stop feeling sorry for myself and get over it.

But this is not what this is about.

In the 10 years that I’ve shared my story, it’s been about connecting with others. It has been about showing the dark to those who’ve never seen the dark so that we can help each other see the light.

Few people know that my work started in a group of women who were escaping DV. Or that SLG, my online program, since then, has sponsored women who have escaped DV, human trafficking, a drug cartel, along with women from some of the most poverty-stricken reservations in the country.

It has financially contributed to a DV shelter on Native territory, and has given Indigenous people, from a wide range of territories, access to healing rooted in Indigenous wisdom, as opposed to Western ideologies and theories.

None of that would’ve been possible if I had listened to these people and stayed quiet.

Thank you to those of you who’ve listened and engaged. Thank you for building this community with me. A community of Indigenous, non-Indigenous, women, men, and non-binary, across the many corners of the world, coming together to share stories, growing, and healing together. I’m immensely proud to walk alongside you.

Now, let’s keep uplifting Indigenous stories and help bring awareness so we can see some changes ❤️

04/27/2026

Someone once told me that they feel a “weird frustration” towards the calmness exuding from my videos. (they shared it kindly and in a moment of honesty, and ended up becoming a SLG member ❤️) But I want to be honest too. Honest about the fact that I’m not always calm. Sometimes I get rattled. Even more so after becoming a mother who’s also trying to keep up with the demands of this society and somehow run a business (still trying to figure that one out). Yesterday, on Substack, I saw someone refer to is at their “snatches phase” and I loved it! That’s where I’m at. Everything I’m working on and creating gets done in snatches around nap and bedtime. Unless I knock out with my little one from the exhaustion of going all day 😅 anyhow, “Walking in Balance,” as I shared about in the article, is not always easy. It’s not easy to not let yourself get swept away with the pressure of keeping up and getting “everything” done, always chasing a clock and the calendar. Sometimes I push instead of listening to myself and then I turn into the Gruffalo 👹 kidding. But we were never meant to hold everything inside, letting everything pile up. Without our body’s ability to release, we turn into a dam that’s trying to contain a wild river. Eventually the walls break.

If you want me to send you the link, comment “Substack” 💌

Pewkayal (until we meet again)
Mandy Kvyen

04/18/2026

March 🍁 we spent most of the month sick and recovering back to health but still managed to squeeze in plenty of fun ❤️

1. The cabin at night
2. Tapping maple trees, a first for me and Namkú
3. Boiling maple sap (Little man got a fever the first day of boiling, so I stayed in bed with him while watching from the window. Next day we got to join him ☺️)
4. Cuddles by the fire 🔥
5. Banana blue corn pancakes with our freshly made maple syrup
6. Our friend Fluffy
7. processing hides for drums and Namkú’s moccasins 🦌
8. Finding out my story about my grandmother (on the topic of grief, loss and healing) is getting published in a magazine later this summer 🥰
9. Coffee made with maple sap in my favorite Moomin cup
10. Pruning 30+ blueberry bushes at the Beaver Lodge Food Forest (a lot of work since they have not been pruned in over a decade)
11. Library story time and play with new friends in the community ❤️
12. Listening to the song birds 🫶🏽
13. Quick stop on our way to Onondaga to visit family and celebrate our birthdays! 🥳 ( on the 27th and River, Namkú’s big sissy, and I on April Fools!)

04/16/2026

When you’re “in it,” it’s hard to see the big scope of things.

When I was living with trauma, I never thought of myself as living in survival mode. I was just someone who was depressed, anxious, and extremely exhausted and unhappy. Same thing when I was living with domestic violence, I never thought of myself as someone living with abuse. I was only someone living with a man who was controlling and who hurt me when he got upset.

It can be hard to connect your problems or symptoms to one root cause. Sometimes we need someone else to tell us how they are all linked together.

If you feel like you’re on the verge of breaking, and many of these symptoms ring true…

1. Exhausted
2. Angry
3. Sad
4. Overwhelmed
5. Aversion and agitation while breastfeeding
6. Anxious
7. On edge, often snapping or losing your temper
8. Feeling alone even around family and other people
9. Numb, like you’re going through life on autopilot
10. Unhappy
11. Spend the days watching the same show over and over or scrolling social media.
12. Have no motivation to do anything.

… maybe your problem isn’t that you’re always angry (as an example). Maybe it’s just you living in survival.

If you are, please know you’re not meant to stay stuck there. Your body was made to finish the cycle of survival, and IMO, as a mother, you need that more than ever… especially in this world we live in.

✨Comment SURVIVAL if you want me the link to a free class where I explain it more.

03/15/2026

I once had a friend drag me with her to a meditation studio in Santa Monica. It cost us $39 each and the little room was packed full with people sitting on cushiony seats with backrests. In the front, on a platform, was the person leading the class.

As I sat there, I kept thinking of how odd it was for so many, including myself, to pay money to sit in a room for 30 minutes. Everything about Western culture seems to be a transfer from one room (and building) to another— including when we intend to connect with ourselves on a spiritual level.

In LA, I always had friends dragging me with them to places like this, to one spiritual leader after another. And I get it. I’ve spent years (almost two decades now), in the world of healing and wellness, and as an Indigenous woman, I should be into these things, right? Because these things always seem to get grouped like a family: wellness, healing, spirituality, New Age, pe**te, breathwork, Indigenous/Native spirituality etc.

But the truth is, there are distinct differences.

I would say that, as Indigenous people, at least from my teachings as a Mapuche (People of the Land), spirituality is about connection.

The way we meditate is not in isolation.
It’s not with a group of other people surrounded by four walls. It’s not through listening to a “leader” who often hides their own inner turmoil behind words that we’ve learned to recognize an enlightened person. It’s not by searching out the self-proclaimed healer/shaman/guru/medicine person, who seems to live in abundance in both LA and here in the Catskills/Hudson Valley, who seeks to dominate the people who come to them for help.

No.

Spirituality to us comes through connection and relationship with the land— with the diversity the living world has to offer us: water, earth, wind, trees, fungi, birds… and yes, other people as well.

Spirituality is a connection through energy.
So how can we connect to other energies behind walls? How can our spirit find calm in a room of people who are mostly in survival mode?

A sick tree doesn’t find support from another sick tree. It seeks support from the healthy trees that are living around it in balance.

03/03/2026

For almost a decade, I listened to the advice of people who had never healed themselves. They didn’t know how or if it was even possible, so they taught me how to cope and numb. We live in a culture that pushes survival over healing, and suffering over joy, so I want to make it clear that Indigenous Knowledge and wisdom hold more than just sweat lodges, vision quest, ayahuasca, pe**te, and whatever else people think about when they hear the words Indigenous and healing in the same sentence. For thousands of years, we’ve been in a close relationship with our bodies as nature, understanding how we respond to stress and survival, and also the responses the allows us to heal. Unfortunately, this is becoming lost and diluted in a world that prioritizes everything but nature. With that said, I hope this message reaches you, not only on your Instagram feed but in your heart and spirit. Your body holds its own medicine ❤️

02/27/2026

Can you imagine how many things we learn to think of as “normal” that, in reality, are far from it?

This is something I’ve been thinking about for years. Painful periods, postpartum anxiety, rage, and depression, chronic illnesses and pains... there’s so much!

I compare all these things we experience in Western culture with my own culture and people, and so many things are unheard of, or used to be unheard of for us, before we were forced to move into cities to survive.

Not until after I healed did I realize how much all this pain every month in my body, the migraines, the anxiety, depression— all of it— how much space, time, and energy it was taking from me.

Our bodies are capable of so much more. They are capable of leaving survival, of healing, and of living in balance. Our bodies are not our problem. The problem is what this culture has taught us to believe: to distrust it.

✨If you want to learn more, I have a free class you can watch. Just comment “CLASS” and I’ll DM you.

❤️ Both my wooden hair piece and the earrings (pine-needle with deer tail tuffs) were made by my partner . He’s an incredible Onondaga artist (his pieces are featured in museums!), and he has more if you’re interested in getting your own. Jus send him a message ☺️

P.S. If you’re thinking, “This woman has no idea how to do her makeup!” then you’re absolutely right! I’m just a mama who, right before this video, was wearing a t-shirt that was wet from p*e from her toddler, and wanted to glam herself up a bit while he naps 🥰

02/27/2026

I was recently asked about how we raise children as Indigenous parents, and I’ve been pondering this for a while. With the state of this country, world, and the overall trajectory of the future, my partner and I have been having a lot of conversations about how we show up through it all as parents and as members of our communities: Indigenous and where we live today. It’s been feeling like too big a topic to cover in a social media post, or even on Substack or my email newsletter, so yesterday I asked , “How about if we just go live?”

So here we are!

We’re planning on making this a bi-weekly thing (depending on how things go), covering different topics, especially as we move through the seasons: what we harvest, what we grow, and how the community work is going, including updates on how the Beaver Lodge Food Forest (BLFF), the non-profit land-back project we’re working on here in Catskills, NY.

🗓️ Click the calendar icon on my profile to set a reminder. 🫶🏽

Next live, March 15th, will be all about Maples. 🍁 How the maple is the leader of all trees for the Haudenosaunee. How it’s celebrated. Making syrup. And getting together with volunteers to get the maple evaporator that was donated last year to BLFF up and running. (If you’re in the area and want to join us for this, send me a DM!)

See you on Sunday? ❤️

02/22/2026

Keep it kind. No bashing. Just curious about your thoughts. A while back, a woman in a mom group I’m in on FB said that she’s a nurse in an emergency room and find that easier than when she was a stay at home mom. “At work, I clock in and then out. But as a sahm, I was always on.” she said.

I personally think this is one of the reasons that moms are pushed into survival. The overwhelm piling up with the dirty dishes. The anxiety of trying to do more and feeling like you never have enough time to catch up. Maybe it leads to snapping. Especially when you’ve been pushed too long without any support or time for yourself to be nurtured. Just always giving and giving— of your body, emotions, and energy, until there’s almost nothing left. Add to that, in your ears you not only have a society that’s telling you you’re not doing enough, but also a partner/husband saying the same. That’s tough.

If you’re a mama who’s feeling underappreciated right now, I see you. Sending you a big hug and so much love❤️

Mandy Martini

05/31/2026

05/05/2026

04/27/2026

04/18/2026

04/16/2026

03/15/2026

03/03/2026

02/27/2026

02/27/2026

02/22/2026

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