Sometimes I imagine the mother I want to be to my children and then consider, what would it be like to mother myself like that? To hold unending tender space for my own innermost needs, to extend bottomless unconditional love to my suffering, fear, and shame? What would it be like to turn a mother’s beloved gaze to my own aching heart, to behold myself as the Divine Mother forever beholds me?
[Since this offering is longer than usual, I have recorded it so you can listen instead of reading if that suits you better!]
In honor of Mother’s day, I was invited to share a teaching on the divine feminine in the form of a 90 minute workshop. Afterwards, I committed to translate the live teaching into as essay so I could share it with you. In preparing the teaching, I intentionally chose not to consult any resources or ideas beyond what I’ve already assimilated in my Being. I did not compile a report on what everyone else has to say about the divine feminine and, despite my feelings of inadequacy, relied solely on my own understanding, personal experience, and work as a spiritual companion. My intention is to present the qualities and character of the “divine feminine” as I’ve come to know them energetically within myself, and to offer practical applications for tapping our own umbilical connection to the Inner Mother for our individual and collective transformation.
As we begin, I invite you to hold lightly your personal associations with motherhood. Regardless of your relationship with your own mother or as a mother, longing to be a mother or grieving the loss of a mother, you are empowered to connect with the Inner Mother. Respectfully, it does not matter if you weren’t mothered or will never be a mother, the feminine dimension of God is equally alive and present to you, as you, in every moment. Embarking together on this exploration of God’s motherhood, I beckon you to soften your possibly long-held identifications with and definitions of the word “mother” and to relax into a larger conception of Mother, capital M, as a quality or essence of primordial energy.
Many traditions across time recognize that in the beginning of Creation, there were two. From eastern teachings, we have the myth of Shakti and Shiva and the cosmology of the taijitu expressing the ongoing cosmic homeostasis as a dance between yin and yang. In Christianity, although the Bible suggests one God brought forward the planetary bodies, the mythical story of Adam and Eve tells of two embodied energies unified to continue the unfoldment of Creation. It is a story we see evidenced across the species of earth and which we might further consider in light of the holy adage, “as above, so below.” Contemplating this truth in reverse – “so below, as above” – we observe what is offered to us on earth and understand what is true beyond it. On earth, two primal forces meet and mate in order to create further life on earth; could it be so for the origin of matter in the very beginning?
One of the most influential teachings I’ve received about masculine and feminine energies reached me through the doctor-prophet Zach Bush in recollecting his encounters with the indigenous Achuar Tribe of the Amazon Basin. The Achuar people are dreamers, who for centuries have kept and passed on a daily ritual of dream interpretation. Until the 1990’s, the Achuar had absolutely no contact with the world beyond their tribe, but began receiving dreams warning them about the dire state of the earth as a result of westernized culture. In these visions, they saw humanity represented by a giant condor flying with only one wing extended – the masculine one. As a result, the bird flew in spirals, humanity committing the same overly-masculinized atrocities over and over, inevitably headed to its own demise - unless. Unless it would stretch out the feminine wing and begin to flap.
If I had to distill my own impression of the masculine and feminine energies into the tightest possible conception, I might say this: the masculine is discerning, assertive, and active, while the feminine is patient, present, and unconditional. Everything that is whole is a song, the two forces harmonizing. To expand this impression, I turn again to the earth and its creatures. I observe that femininity, and motherhood specifically, assumes a gesture of receiving which understands the slow notion of gestation. In its waiting and growing and birthing, it is tireless. My observation of the feminine principle suggests that it does not attempt change by force but by presence, like a mother holds and pats and whispers to her wailing child.
This Easter I received a special message from Mary Magdalene, who many of us have noticed arising from her long shame in the church. As Mary is reinstated to her rightful post as the “apostle of the apostles,” some go far as to argue she was a co-teacher and lover of Jesus. Regardless of how you understand her relationship to Jesus, she appears with the offering of her presence to reveal a very special quality of the divine feminine. When she appeared to me it wasn’t a mystical encounter, I simply noticed in a new way the example she lived. While the other disciples hid, Mary held a steadfast vigil at the base of the cross and at the tomb. We don’t know for sure, but she may also be the Mary who sat at Jesus’ feet while Martha ran around, and the Mary who devotionally bathed Jesus’ feet in expensive perfume. Mary, in all her iterations through scripture, including as mother, evidences to me that the most authentic feminine quality is the willingness to bear witness, the willingness to ATTEND. Attend the birth, attend the death, attend the body and the tomb and the moment, as it forever arises.
Reflection on Mary’s example fostered in me a nuanced interpretation of the Christian Trinity, one I am still unfolding. Earlier we talked about the primordial energies or the archetypal weaving together of what we call feminine and masculine energy. In each tradition, the myth is an origin story: the coming together of the two produces a third, creation itself or the continuation of it. In Christianity, we have the related theology of the Trinity through which we believe in three facets or dimensions of a singular God-Source, traditionally labeled: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. As the narrative goes, the Father sent the Son and afterwards came the Holy Spirit.
It’s my sense that the Father, according to the Father’s decisive masculine blueprint took action to send forth the Son. The “Son” appears multidimensionally in that, on the largest possible scale, the Son is all created order in cosmic harmony streaming forth from the God-Source AND, microcosmically, the Son – as Jesus – is an embodied representation of the harmonized energetic union of masculine/feminine forces. Jesus comes forward from the cosmos at least in part to reveal the highest divine potential inherent in each of us; one in whom the harmony of energies is perfect. We could go so far as to argue that we murdered Jesus for refusing to overthrow the unbalanced masculine paradigm of the times with the same principle of unbalanced masculine energy. Because he wouldn’t fight back or assume power by force, he ended up on the cross. From there, it is Cynthia Bourgeault’s proposition in The Wisdom Jesus that after physical death, Jesus entered the darkness of hell and simply bore witness:
“He was just sitting there—surrounded by the darkest, deepest, most alienated, most constricted states of pained consciousness; sitting, if we can imagine it, among all those mirroring faces of the collective false self that we encountered earlier in the crucifixion narrative: the anguish of Judah, the indecision of Pilate, the cowardice of Peter, the sanctimony of the Pharisees; sitting there in the midst of all this blackness, not judging, not fixing, just letting it be in love. And in doing so, he was allowing love to go deeper, pressing all the way to the innermost ground out of which the opposites arise and holding that to the light. A quiet, harmonizing love was infiltrating even the deepest places of darkness and blackness in a way that didn’t override or cancel them, but gently reconnected them to the whole” (123).
Ten days later, the Holy Spirit came on tongues of fire. The Holy Spirit: the tireless care-taker and forever witness bearer. The One endlessly present, umbilically tethering us to Source through the spiritual Heart, at the very level of the breast; feeding, guiding, and nurturing us from within. There from the beginning within God-Source (the Mother to the Father), gestating in the appearance of Jesus, and finally manifesting in space-time to attend the next evolution of love; could this be the energy I conveniently call our Inner Mother?
Whatever we name it and however we understand its theological underpinnings, the feminine principle never looks away. The idea is that in connecting with this Ever-Presence within us, we can hold vigil for ourselves the same way Mary held it for Jesus and Jesus held it for the entire created order. In our willingness to hold ourselves in love, not judging and not fixing, but simply being present-to all our mirroring faces, all the little wounded personalities and patterns of suffering within us, our disharmony dissolves in the Mother’s gaze. And if we can learn to bear witness to ourselves with such steadfastness and compassion, we gain the capacity to turn this tenderness toward the world. When we transform the way we relate to ourselves, eventually, we transform the way we relate to everyone and everything else. This cumulative effect is the great lifting of the feminine wing of the bird of humanity.
Encountering the Inner Mother is an intimate affair, not one we can think about with our intellectual center, but must hold space to experience in our hearts. It’s helpful for me to understand the Mother’s Presence within the psychological framework offered to us through Internal Family Systems theory and the teaching on multiplicity given in The Work. In a nutshell: we believe ourselves to be one cohesive being when, in fact, we are a collection of many, many little i’s (or parts) developed over time in response to our experiences in the world. “Jane” is not a singular entity but a vast menagerie of little Janes who have learned certain ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving as a result of my social and familial conditioning; different little Janes appear and control my reactions in the world depending on my immediate circumstances. The whole collection of little Janes can be understood as my “personality.”
Spiritually speaking, “personality” is language closely associated with ego and represents who I’ve learned to be, rather than the Truth of Who I Am. The Inner Mother is the feminine dimension of the Truth of Who I Am, as a hologram of the primordial feminine divine. When we meet her within ourselves, she is the part of us able to sit with and bear witness to all the other fragmented parts parading around as our personality. She is the one who says, “Come child, I’m here.” We bring to her our angry parts, sad parts, scared parts, lonely, anxious, tired, overwhelmed, or apathetic parts, and equally we bring our happy, proud, wise, righteous, winning parts and to all of them she says, “I see you.” We spend so much time and waste so much energy turning away from what we do not want to see in ourselves, when it’s the opposite gesture that sets us free. Once we let the Inner Mother bear witness to the parts we do not like about ourselves, to let them be in love, their old programs and patterns lose power over us just as hell lost its power in Jesus’ presence. In the Mother’s gaze, we unbind ourselves to act always according to love.
Beholding ourselves through the Inner Mother’s eyes is a practice. It can be a meditation in which one enters the silence and contemplatively invokes the Mother’s energy to meet an inner part (little i) of oneself that needs attending and to allow one’s little i to bask in the unconditionally loving presence of the Inner Mother. Or, it can be an exercise accessible in any moment of need; as big emotions or physical pain or other suffering arises, one is empowered to turn toward the trouble with opened eyes, graciously, compassionately, and presently meeting oneself in the fullness of the experience – not trying to change or fix anything, but letting it be in love.
It has long been my belief that if we want to change the world, we must change how we relate to ourselves. If we wish for less violence in the world, we must practice less violence toward ourselves. If we want more love, we must offer more to ourselves. If we long for God’s Presence to be felt across the planet, we must encounter God’s Presence within ourselves. In this holographic universe, what we do for ourselves, we do for the world. In the words of Beatrice Bruteau, “All of us together are the Messiah. We have to do it ourselves, and it has to come from the inside out.” Please do not fall into the trap of judging yourself selfish or indulgent for practicing unconditional love toward yourself; every time you do, you release an energy – a fruit of the spirit – into the cosmos which sustains us all. Every time you do, you increase your capacity to do it for someone else. Every time you do, you lift the wounded wing of the bird of humanity. Together, we fly.
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Paid subscribers should look for a bonus podcast on Sunday, when I will send along a companion meditation for connecting to the Mother within. If you’d like to become a paid subscriber as a Mother’s Day gift to me, I would obviously like that very much.
If you enjoyed this essay and thought of someone who might need to read it, please pass it on. Maybe you’d also like to share excerpts on social media and tag me. Your willingness to share makes a greater impact than you realize! Thank you so much for spreading the word.
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Regardless of what Mother’s Day holds for you emotionally or historically, I hope you can spare a moment to tether to the Truth of Who You Are in the Mother’s eyes and remember yourself as her Child, loved to the core without condition.
*I gave this teaching and wrote this very long essay all to ultimately reiterate to myself that while it is intellectually stimulating to explore the theological implications of divine femininity, dividing Source-energy into binaries always falls flat.
I think we are misguided to dissect identifications of God. I have no investment in how we name God or what pronouns we use. It is not remotely a conversation about gender and I realize it’s an unpopular opinion, but I think we are over-identified with our own genders, much less the gender of God as if there could be such a thing.
So as you potentially hold or continue to chew on the constructs I’ve offered here, please do so lightly. Any true encounter with Love defies all constructs and that is the greatest hope I have for any of us.
Finally had a chance to listen to this. This concept of Divine Mother and balancing energies has been a fire in my soul for two years. Your insight on it brought good and deep balance to my perspective and would love to talk more about it with you. 🙏🏽🔥🌈
Beautiful Jane!! Just like your soul 💖💖💖