Bethany Webster
Developmentally,
our relationship with our mother serves as a template for our
relationship with ourselves.
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| Mother Daughter |
As
female children, we absorbed information about how she felt
about herself, about us as her child, and about the world. Naturally,
we internalized these beliefs and worldviews to form the basis of our
very own beliefs and experiences. We
learned to treat ourselves the way our mother treated herself.
Our
task as awakened women is to transform the inner mother within our
psyche from a duplicate of our biological mother with her human
limitations into the mother we always needed and wanted. In doing
so, the inner mother more accurately meets our needs, and
unconditionally supports and nurtures us in ways our outer mother may
have been unable to.
We can
become the mother we always wanted—to ourselves. In
this way, we become capable of accepting the limitations of our outer
mother, because the inner mother becomes the primary one we can
rely on, in ways that perhaps we were never able to rely on our
outer mother.
Our
mother could only love us to the extent that she could love herself.
At a
certain point, we must face that our mother could not and will not
meet our needs in all the ways that we needed and wanted her to. This
must be grieved all the way through. We have to grieve the ways we
had to compensate and suffer from the mother wound.
In the
process of grieving, we have the chance to realize that the fact that
we felt unloved or abandoned in moments was not our fault, and we can
stop struggling to prove our worth to the world. In the grieving
process, we can also have compassion for our mother and the burdens
she carried.
Healing
the mother within transforms your life beyond anything you can
imagine.
Through
facing this pain, we may find that what we thought was our pain may
actually be partly our mother’s pain that we have been carrying for
her out of love. We can now choose to put this burden down. Instead
of attenuating ourselves out of guilt, we can stand confidently in
our bodies and hearts with a sense of true wholeness and self-love.
By
becoming the “good enough” mother to ourselves, we
liberate not only ourselves but everyone else in our lives.
It is
challenging to admit to ourselves the ways in which we felt unloved
in our relationship with our mother. We may recall seeing how
burdened and overwhelmed she was, and we may have thought that we
were the source of her pain. This “daughter guilt” can keep us
stuck. Recognizing the innocence and legitimacy of our
childhood needs is a way of releasing shame and baptizing ourselves
into the truth of our goodness.
Once
we have first grieved for ourselves, we can then grieve for our
mothers and for women as a whole.
Grief
replenishes and strengthens us.
As
women, we can heal and give ourselves what our mothers could not give
us. We can become our own source. The collective female “pain
body” is healed one woman at a time. And as the female pain
body heals, so does the collective human pain body. Our own
healing is not only a gift to ourselves, but to the world.
The
mother wound is a great opportunity.
As we
allow ourselves to contact what feels like an ancient, inexhaustible
hunger for an inexhaustible mother, we birth ourselves into our
true identity—the womb of light—an inexhaustible, overflowing
fountain of love and abundance that is not dependent on circumstances
or conditions.
We
then can live in service to that which we truly are—love itself.
Bethany
Webster is a writer and facilitator living in western
Massachusetts. She is currently working on her first book, The
Womb of Light: The Power of Conscious Menstruation. She co-teaches a
workshop called “Healing the Mother Wound.” Visit her blogs
at http://womboflight.com and http://embraceofbeing.com.
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