Born of a Woman

finding heaven on earth to create the future we all need.

Photo by Alexander Krivitskiy on Unsplash

In honor of Mother’s Day in the U.S., I’m resharing an article I wrote over a year ago on the feminine. May it inspire us all to nurture ourselves with kindness, care, and love.

…the vast majority of humanity before us and outside of the West have always had an intuitive, embodied, “archetypal feminine” relationship with reality. - Tom Morgan in The Emperor is Naked

The one thing we all still have in common is that we were born from a female body. For the first nine months of our existence we were cradled safely in her womb. Everything we needed was provided for and all was right with the world. Our only purpose for existence was to be.

Then came a time when suddenly our life was interrupted and our world began to shift. The walls started to squeeze tightly around us and we were thrust out of this world into a new one through a violent but necessary act called birth. Where we landed was no longer warm or peaceful but cold and demanding. We were shocked. This new place required something of us, that is, to respond, not only to ourselves but to the other. This other we would eventually recognize as our mother.

From this point on, we were in direct relationship with her. We needed to be. We were completely dependent on her and, unlike before our birth when we were provided for without effort, we now had to relate to her for everything we required. If we were fortunate, she responded when we called her. If we were even more fortunate, she was attuned to what we needed. And if she responded well enough, over time we did not form an intractable position of frustration with what we would eventually call Reality. However, as most of us can attest, our experience of her was conflicted at best because she was imperfect, as are we.

So we, like her before us, could not help but develop some resentments as a result of needs gone unfulfilled. To cope we began to form ideals. These ideals provided the basis for our dreams as well as the excuses for our disappointments. However, if we take a deeper look at these fantasies we find that they lead us back to the world before this one, the world where we were connected to something greater than ourselves, the world where our needs and desires were met. In other words, our dreams lead us back to the world of Being.

Because we spend much of our lives attempting to form a separate identity from the woman who bore us, we lose sight of the fact that on an unconscious level, we are also attempting to return to the heaven that she initially provided us. In societies like ours that celebrate rationality and progress, separation is the goal because our egos thrive on it and economies based on consumption depend on it. The more identified we are to separateness, the more connection threatens our sense of freedom because freedom, in all its different manifestations, reminds us of the blissfulness we all came from and still yearn for - when everything was right in the world.

Fortunately, there is a part of us that still has access to this state of beingness. It’s the part that we left behind when we formed our sense of autonomy and the part we suppressed culturally when we began to worship progress. It’s also the part that we need to remember and reconnect with if we are going to address the social, economic, political, and ecological crises we currently face. And it’s the part that will help us make the shift from quantity to quality that will be necessary for a viable future.

In communities that honor connection or more importantly, celebrate interconnection, the archetypal feminine is elevated, not because she is better than the masculine, but because she is the very foundation from where we came from. She is our embodied sense of Reality. She is Love. She is Contentment. She is Beingness, herself.

It is time to reconnect with this intuitive embodied sense of the feminine because we all have a memory of her. However, to do so properly, we must engage in the slow, sometimes, arduous process of forgiving our mothers first. They were imperfect, as their mothers were before them. This is our individual work. Once we do, we open ourselves up to a new realm of possibility, one of deep connection and interconnection with self, other, and Reality, herself. This is our collective work and it is important because the feminine holds. She holds. And it is time, more than ever, that we do too. Hold our resentments. Hold our need for more. Hold our desire to be free above everything else.

Hold.

At first we were held in her womb. Then we were held in her arms. Now we need to hold ourselves. Heaven is here. There’s no need to look further. She’s part of us because we are a part of her.