The Double Mother Wound

We are powerful and most of the time there is no one to witness the transmutation and the elevation—except for the angels and our ancestors.

I am an extroverted introvert, a hermit, a sensitive, and an empath.

I feel most at ease with the world in the comfort of the shell of my home that surrounds my daily life. Where I have been spending more time than usual, like the rest of the world in shared pandemic experience.  

But this hasn’t meant that my work, my evolution, or my healing has stopped just because we are, a bit frozen in time at the moment. Quite the opposite for me though, my inner work has continued to deepen and to show me in beautiful ways what is possible if we allow ourselves to feel everything.  If we are brave to look at the things that trip us up.

I am also a self-described alchemist—give me lemons and I will most likely make you a nice Vitamin C shot, a gimlet, or even a soothing tea to warm your soul.

What comes to me on the plate of life, I ingest and allow it to change me, to be my teacher and guide. I want to work with everything.

Often times what comes up are  experiences from my childhood or past relational experiences that have caused wounding, trauma, and emotional scars. Lemons of my past, that are desperately asking to be made into something else.

As an alchemist, that’s where all the magic happens for me. I start to ask questions like:

“Looking at this experience, which formed me uniquely and specifically in this moment in my life history, what can I make this now?”

“How can I transmute and transform my pain into wisdom and healing?”

My cycle has always been aligned with the full moon and I know the series of events that transpire every cycle, physical and emotional.  During the week leading up to the full moon, usually an old wound, memory, or scar starts to surface. First in my dreams, then in my subconscious, and finally fully into my living reality. Like clockwork.

Before I became an alchemist and healer, after my consciousness would recognize that a wound was asking to be addressed I would make myself so busy, booking myself up with friends or activities, housework, binge watching television until I had burned through all my free time and Monday morning eventually arrived and I had to work. Successfully, avoiding my wounds who wanted to be heard.

I would feel a deep sense of relief having escaped looking at this old, painful, scar that needed healing. And my week would move on and I would forget about what came up…until the next full moon. And then dreams would start. Or would get contacted by a person who was related to the wounding or I would see a story about similar situation.

One day I finally decided that I could lean into my own wisdom and listen to what was asking to be healed.

Before this, I had relied heavily on meditation practices, my spiritual rituals and tools, and therapy which all work incredibly well. 

But maybe, I needed to trust my own ability to self-heal. Maybe my ancestral intelligence that lived deep inside my human DNA and in the swirls of my energetic soul were asking me to step into the alchemic process of purging my old wounds and delivering unto myself closure, healing, and grace.

In the fall of 2020, I had an extraordinary experience with listening to my soul's desire to heal my mother wound.

I have a double mother wound.

I was given up for adoption as a baby and when I was adopted into a family at the age of five, I never truly bonded with my adoptive mother (and quite frankly I have mostly been a disappointment to her my whole life in her eyes).

Like many of us with a mother wound, whether we are male or female identifying there is something so painful and burdensome to both carry that wound within us and longing to fill it with feminine mother.

Having a mother wound can manifest in a variety of negative ways that take us away from ourselves and induces additional wounding, or can cause us to disrespect ourselves, we might even stay in unhealthy partnerships etc., but all those byproducts will have to be addressed in another post.

The burden of my mother wound started to become too heavy after decades of carrying it around and during the pandemic, I really started to lean on my full moon practice and healing process. I got better at going with the flow of what was coming up and not running away.

I even started to become proactive and ask myself, “What needs healing this month?” I would ask in my meditations and give my divine intelligence space to alert me and my consciousness about what should be healed next.

What came up was my mother wound. As I felt it hit my awareness, my body slumped from the heaviness of the weight of this wound. Immediately I felt emotionally tired.

I have been carrying this wound around for so long.

I would even joke with my spiritual friends that clearing the mother wound was the “final frontier” for me and I imagined when I cleared it, I would just evaporate into the heavens because it’s the one thing that has kept me most anchored to my humanness and most separated from myself and others.

The mother wound has not just been a burden, it’s a been a wedge.

An obstacle.

And most importantly, I recognize that a part of me kept it there as part of my identity and to perpetuate my own need to feel victimized by circumstances.

I know this consciously and empathetically as an alchemist, from having transmuted and transformed my other wounds.

It is not a judgement upon myself to know that I held onto this wound as part of my identity and victimhood—it is to see it with crystal clarity via my highest observing self that I am not this wound, and I am not a victim to it any longer. That I must cross the bridge of hot stones from victim to victor.

In September of 2020, I called my spiritual advisor Carol to tell her that I was finally tired of carrying my mother wound around and I wanted to be free of the expectations around my relationship with my adoptive mother. I wanted to be free from the wounding I had incurred, and I wanted to be free from the double wound of not having a close relationship with either of my mothers.

I just wanted to love them, without condition.

As a practicing Buddhist, I pleaded with Carol to help me break this karmic cycle we were in. I wanted to break it for myself, but more lovingly for them.

As healers, we often do the work in the darkness of our own spaces and sacredness of our own hearts. 

We break karmic cycles.

We heal family trauma.

We repair our lineage.

We are powerful and most of the time there is no one to witness the transmutation and the elevation—except for the angels and our ancestors.

I shared with Carol everything I was feeling and my thoughts about letting go and in her beautiful, angelic way she provided additional guidance and tools to prepare for the full moon and to finally release this wound.

The full moon in September of 2020 was a Pisces moon linked to Uranus and was associated with bringing about personal freedom, stimulating encounters, and exciting events.

It was also said to lower one’s inhibition, making way for change. I don’t think there could have been a better full moon in hindsight, to transmute my mother wound and give me the freedom I was looking for.

Carol prescribed a bath of rose petals, lavender, and pink Himalayan salt to call in Divine Mother.

She asked me to write out everything I needed to tell both of my mothers and everything I felt I needed to forgive.

I also needed to ask for their forgiveness in the ways I had harmed them, either knowingly or unknowingly.

Forgiveness is this beautiful gift we have to liberate and empower ourselves with. We actually do not need the other person there to give or receive forgiveness, we just have to open ourselves up enough to let go.

Carol’s prescription also included staying in the bath water until it started to cool, a practice most healers know to be useful for releasing trauma, negative feelings, and emotional baggage.

From a scientific standpoint, water carries negative ions that create a positive effect on our human experience. To bathe in water during an emotionally charged healing session means the water will pick up that energy charge and pull it literally out of your body. (To read more about this process, I recommend The Hidden Messages in Water by Masuro Emoto)

As the water came to cool, I began my recitation and litany of pain--first to my adoptive mother, then to my biological mother.

In my session with Carol, she had picked up that there was residual forgiveness that needed to be exchanged between my birth mother (who passed a few years earlier) and myself.

All my life, I never really harbored any negativity towards her, she was mentally ill and unable to care for us. I understood she couldn’t be a mother and I never felt like I resented her for that. However, my struggle with an abandonment wound was so closely related to her that I hadn’t associated her with, until Carol said “you can forgive your biological mother too…”

So I did.

I sat in the luke warm water crying and speaking into the ether and directly to the energetic souls of my mothers.

Releasing us both from the karmic cycles of relational wounding we had created together and singularly.

At the close of my ceremony, I dipped my whole being into the bath imagining returning to the womb of both of my mothers, and feeling the fullness of their love, companionship, and tenderness. I held my breath underwater, eyes closed...lost in the dream of feeling my two mother's capacity to love me as a child in their wombs, and I as their daughter until I heard my heart beating so loudly, I had to emerge.

Reborn.

When I woke up the following day, my body felt as if it had ran a 26 mile marathon. I have never felt so physically exhausted after a healing.

But I also felt good.

I felt changed.

I felt free.

The most extraordinary part of this healing was how the Universe answered in kind to my internal work and healing the following day.

An affirmation.

Every day, I take my dog to a small, secluded, wooded area that somehow has escaped the knowledge of many people in our bustling city. It is my sacred space. Where I can take off my shoes and ground myself in nature while my sweet dog Penny Moon runs wild. There is a creek that cuts right through the middle of the woodland that always has cold, clear flowing water—I love dipping my toes in there and listening to the sound of the creek gurgling.

On that September day, it had rained.

The woodland area was engorged with water and both Penny Moon and I were having a great time splashing through the water and making a mess of everything.

After forty minutes or so we were getting ready to leave and as we walked up the path I felt something tap the side of my leg. I looked off to my left and there was a large snake, with it is head fully out of the water (that was flowing across our path) and we made eye contact and held each others gaze for a few, brief but powerful moments.

Then, it gingerly swam away.

When I am in nature, it is where I feel most connected to source. Nothing happens in nature to me, that has not been a message for me.

It is how I communicate most easily with the Divine.  When I got home, I looked up snake totem because I had a sense there was a message for me from the other side.

When snakes show up in your life they represent:

• Healing

• Transformation

• Re-birth

• New Season

• Shedding of the old

Snakes are connected to life force, our primal energy and often associated with spiritual guidance.  Snakes can help us be sensitive to our healing of ourselves and others.

“The presence of a snake in your life often means that you are in a period of transition and it points to ways to promote your personal growth.” (Spirit Animal.info)

It was clear to me that the healing I was seeking was fully completed.

I was transformed and my healing was being recognized energetically by the universe after my encounter with that snake. I even wonder if the snake tapping the side of my leg, took whatever left over energetic charge I had related to this wound to the otherside for me, like a messenger delivering the rest of my healing to divinity.

I have felt fully released from my double mother wound since that day.

Free to love both of my mother’s without condition or expectation.  I know that if we had not been in the middle of this pandemic, it’s quite possible I wouldn’t have had the emotional and physical space to clear this wound for myself.

Since that September day, I have been using this pandemic time to process and purge monthly.

Old wounds and scars have been falling off easily like a snake shedding old skin.

I am always astounded by our ability to heal ourselves. To find the grace to be compassionate and loving to ourselves in a way that no one else can be.

To know exactly what we need.

We can trust that we have the tools and internal guidance to transmute the pains of our past, to walk in the light of our future unencumbered.

For this I am eternally grateful for the time and the healing this pandemic has given me.