The Mother-Child Relationship
In the 25 years of doing shamanic healing, I’ve worked with a great many people who needed to find peace within the relationship with their mother. Whether a mother is alive or deceased, biological mother or adoptive, and whether the child is young or grown-up, the mother-child relationship is a sacred, often complicated quest.
I think of it as a long, pivotal journey that impacts most of the other relationships in your life—including your relationship with yourself and your Divine. This is the far-reaching and powerful nature of the mother relationship for all of us children.
For many of my clients, whether or not they have been close to their mother or have felt wounded in childhood by her, the relationship with mother is an issue we generally tackle.
People seek help who have had mothers who were insensitive, narcissistic, alcoholic, abusive, neglectful, dependent, abandoning, over-worked, absent, suffocating, loving but exhausted, loving but abused themselves by their husbands, loving but themselves victims of sexual molestation, loving but unconscious, and so many other types of mothers.
I’ve never kept a tally, but I can say that most people I’ve worked with have felt in childhood either a recognized or unrecognized yearning for a closer bond, or have struggled with a need to recover from emotional trauma relating to their mother; or both. Furthermore, even if they were, or were not close, and their mother has passed away, there can be layers of deep, deep grief that need to be honored and integrated. Sometimes we lose soul parts when our mother passes away; sometimes mothers take parts of our soul, and usually energy cords and unhealed connections to mothers limit our happiness and fulfillment, as well.
Did you know that babies in the womb are actually affected by their mother’s emotions? We’re all born into this unique potential for incredible love, connection, and trust with another human being, our mother, or we take on the potential for lack of attachment, lack of self-respect, feeling unloved, and so sadly, feeling unworthy of love. Is it a role of the dice or fate that determines the impact our mother has on our lives?
I believe we choose our mothers prior to incarnation.
We choose our lessons, challenges, and opportunities for soul growth. But when it comes to making peace with whatever motherly patterns we have grappled with from childhood, or even from past lives, the path of acceptance of our mother is really the place we want to land eventually. With acceptance, our consciousness raises. With acceptance, our heart opens. With acceptance, we move into peace. With peace there is even the ability to love the unlovable, not only in our mothers, but very importantly, in ourselves.
When we talk about love, we talk about a power that imbues the living with life. To love is to be free of the past, to be in the flow of goodness, and to resonate with a vibration so much bigger than the traumas, childhood perceptions, and stories about our mothers that so often we cling to, well-past the onset of adulthood.
As a mother myself, I’ve been blessed by my daughter’s sacred role as my teacher.
Because of her, I’ve wised up and grown up, mainly because she taught me that real love brings up everything that isn’t love. As I raised her, and as I relate with her now, she is my sacred mirror. I see my own patterns and conditioning. I watch her as she slowly matures into her own adulthood, and see that no matter how I might trigger her, no matter how she may judge me for my unconscious personality patterns, nothing can really change how much I love her. And hopefully she feels that way about me. I see that same amazing power of love between me and my mother, despite the years of differences, judgments, and distance at times.
I think this Mother’s Day holiday, as mixed as it may be for people depending on their relationships with their mothers or their children, is a great day to take stock of what needs to be honored, what needs to be healed, what old stories need to be seen, and what still needs mothering within one’s self. Ultimately, we will all benefit by becoming our own gorgeous, all-powerful Divine Mother; She who lives within our precious heart. In June, we’ll talk about connecting with our inner Divine Father, for he shall have his day too!
To all who are practicing mothering or being mothered, I wish you the blessings of this Mother’s Day. Not the cheery, Hallmark version, but the hot, molten mother-love that rocks this planet and keeps the stars twinkling in the night sky; the Divine Mother known by all her many goddess names in all cultures and spiritual traditions, all over the world.
Honor the Mother Goddess in you, as well as the earth-bound, possibly un-awakened human goddess who you gave birth to you.
