10/02/2022
❤
A big barometer of self-love is how well we are able to be kind to ourselves through difficult times.
All too often, tough times are when our wounds are triggered and we enact ways of being that perpetuate the cycle of wounding within our psyches.
If we keep treating ourselves and our inner worlds the way we internalized, the way we learned to treat ourselves, then we continue the cycles of pain in our lives without realizing it.
It keeps us stuck in perpetual "shadow" work, which can prevent us from actually healing our trauma and starting to water the roots of our North Star, so that we can expand into a more loving relationship with our own creative energy.
Grief is a common reaction not only to loss, but also in heartbreak, rejection, healing trauma, individuation from codependent patterns, disappointment and spiritual growth.
We make mistakes. We are human. Our hearts open and close. Life has its ups and downs. Things happen. We feel things in response to it. Our feelings are love.
This is normal and healthy. It's the way we keep evolving and opening to more of life, through spirals. We are not linear beings meant to live in some kind of non-feeling, non-reactive stasis.
When we use our "tools" and addiction to self-improvement to try to get rid of these very crucial aspects of our humanity, we are being abusive towards ourselves.
When we are trying to get rid of inner experiences (often by throwing love and light at our shadows like a weapon) that are an aspect of what our soul came here to learn about love through, it is a violence towards the soul.
When we are trying to fix ourselves or negate our inner truth so we are acceptable and lovable, it is cruel to the heart.
When we buy into the idea that we will only get what we want if we become perfect enough to be seen as worthy by the powers that be to bestow upon us wealth or a soul mate or whatever it is, we deny our worthiness to be loved, happy, healthy and provided for exactly as we are...as we evolve and grow.
Sometimes I wonder if all this personal devlopment work actually makes us feel more scarcity of love than less of it.
After all, that is what scarcity is really about, a scarcity of love.
A scarcity of loving inner resources.
A scarcity of connection to spirit.
A scarcity of loving connection.
A scarcity of a nourishing, compassionate cultural paradigm.
This is a death mother culture.
The death mother swoops in with all her ideas about what is wrong with you. What you did wrong. Why its wrong to feel that way. Seeks to punish you or make you feel worse than you already do. Forces you to smile and pretend its okay. Isolate you. Tell you how you are a terrible person. How you will always deserve to be lonely or miserable.
This archetypal energy is cruel, and it's quite dominant in our collective unconscious...until now.
In a death mother culture where emotional cruelty and dehumanizing others online (and off) is the norm, most of us don’t think that there is anything wrong with how hard we are on ourselves.
This is the antithesis of self-love. It is being an abusive parent to our own soul, body and inner life...none of which is valued by our culture yet totally necessary for our well-being.
It’s hard to be happy if there is a dragon waiting to breath down your neck about what you did wrong, how it’s your fault, what you should have done or that you are weak or ridiculous for feeling normal human feelings.
Self-love is a conscious parenting of self. It is entering into a conscious, loving relationship with the aspects of self that long for love, that need ongoing tending and attention, kindness, gentleness, fierceness at times (but a loving kind), compassion, attunement, listening and follow-through.
It’s offering ourselves nourishment and nurturing, protection and holding. It is allowing the transformative aspect of our emotions to flow through to bring us closer to the pulse of what our soul life has waiting for us.
It is transforming the death mother into a loving internal mother. It is learning that our inner parents, the ones we internalized, have their own wounding that needs to be tended to. Because, our inner mother and father carry our most unconscious attitudes towards ourselves.
After all, who is it that is looking after our inner child?
The death mother’s original wounding lays in betrayal, oppression and neglect by those she often needed to rely on the most.
She was punished for being wounded.
Not talking about it is causing so much of us harm. It keeps the patriarchy going in our own hearts with our minds trying to enslave our humanity and crush it with our "mindsets."
It perpetuates this mother wounding, a deep disconnection from a loving source of life, and hurts us when we are already hurting from being human and affected by all the trials and tribulations of life.
It is imperative we all learn how be KIND to ourselves (and each other), which, surprisingly, seems to be the place we are hardest on ourselves. Remember, kind isn't "nice" it is being respectful, compassionate and loving. But, in offering that to ourselves first, we then naturally create boundaries and a life that is honoring of all that is.
Healing the inner parents also helps us heal our relationship to pain, which is necessary for the true alchemy of pain into love.
Death mother to loving mother. The loving mother is the mature feminine. We need her now, more than ever. And...she lives inside each and every one of us.
It is time.
It is time.
More love.
Not less.
Art by Sandra Shugart
