Healing the Mother Daughter Wound Enfolded by the Labyrinth

When I started writing Life is a Song of Love, a Woman's Spiritual Journey of the Heart and Womb I had no idea that the labyrinth would become my metaphor for the heroine's spiritual journey or that there was such a condition as a mother daughter patriarchal wound. I started walking labyrinths in the late 1990's when my closest childhood friend introduced me to labyrinths as part of her ministry. Possibilities for walking labyrinths started appearing in my life. I even walked the classic eleven-fold labyrinth at Chartres Cathedral in France. I found that walking labyrinths helped access my inner wisdom. They became part of my spiritual journey.   The labyrinth is not a maze that deliberately tries to misguide and confuse. The labyrinth's unicursal path folds in and out eventually taking us into the heart of the Holy Mother. We can't get lost. As in life, our spiritual path is not straight. Sometimes our path takes us almost to the center of our being but then we get distracted or confused and our path takes us out of our center before the folding in and out leads back into the center of our heart womb. The folding in out is our spiritual process of learning to lead from our heart and then bring our wisdom out into the world.   My husband Rick and I moved from the Boston area to northern New Mexico in 2011. I was a devoted student of A Course of Miracles and found that living with the spacious gorgeous views of northern New Mexico deepened my contemplative practice in many unexpected ways. I fell in love with the stunning colorful rocks of northern New Mexico and decided to create an eleven-fold Chartres style labyrinth in front of my house. It was there, feeling so strongly the presence of Mother Earth, that I began to understand the labyrinth as a representation of walking into the womb of the Holy Mother. In retrospect it seems so obvious. However in my pursuit to understand separation consciousness, I had let go my earlier connection to the sacred feminine through the Wiccan earth-based Goddess energy. Walking the labyrinth in front of my house facing the iconic New Mexico mountain called Cerro Pedernal anchored me once again in divine feminine energy. I felt I had finally come home.   I started reading other channeled texts from Yeshua, Mother Mary and Mary Magdalene and many additional books from other faith traditions that spoke to my heart. During my spiritual journey I was used to receiving information via dreams, visions and guided meditations. In New Mexico they increased, especially while walking the labyrinth. While reading the Way of Mary in the channeled text A Course of Love, I had the profound urge to take a walk. Two hawks spiraled overhead signaling that a message was coming. I stopped and my life flashed before me showing that all had been divinely orchestrated to bring me to this point of becoming an emissary of the divine feminine. It was awhile before I understood how.   In a meditation with Quan Yin, my six-year-old self gave me a blank book titled Life is a Song of Love. I loved the title but resisted writing another book. Almost year later I finally acquiesced and then could not figure how to start or what to write. I only knew it was to be about the divine feminine. Okay, I thought, the heroine's journey is different from the hero's journey. In a moment of pure inspiration I realized that the labyrinth was a perfect metaphor for the heroine’s mystical journey. It also became a metaphor for writing the book. My guidance was to throw away the outline and just start writing. Mother Mary assured me that the message and content would flow in and out just like the labyrinth. Let go she said and trust. I let go and received what I was to write. The unfoldment of my life's story came with seven movements like sections with multiple melodies or chapters within each. In many ways they felt like movements in a symphony with many tones, songs, sounds, rhythms, vibrations and resonance—all weaving together in harmony within the symphony of creation. Without any conscious attempt on my part, the pivotal movement of the book is Healing the Mother Daughter Patriarchal Wound. Three movements prepare us for it and three movements evolve from it. My divine guidance was strong throughout the writing.   I lived the book while writing it. One Christmas my daughter Sarah arrived deeply depressed. She could not understand why I stopped hugging her which she interpreted as a young child to be an indication I did not love her. I was devastated because I love her so much. Yet, it focused my attention on my own childhood fear of hugs that I brought into this lifetime.   My daughter Sarah had the courage to share her deepest sacred wound which is feeling abandoned. My sacred wound is feeling second best. All of us incarnate with a sacred wound. It is sacred because healing the wound is a holy process. Sharing and talking about these wounds led to understanding that women are conditioned to be the primary purveyors of patriarchal conditioning passed down the female line. This was necessary in order for the distorted masculine power-over paradigm to dominate. The purpose was and still is to suppress women's innate wisdom, intuition, wild creative abilities and primal connections to Mother Earth. Healing the mother daughter relationship frees women to dissolve lifetimes of patriarchal conditioning returning us to our powerful, wise, intuitive, loving selves. We let go victimhood. In Life is a Song of Love I write about giving up trying to fix, hide, sooth and polish our wounds in order to heal the trauma in our lives. Instead I suggest we crawl inside our wound to just be with it in order to accept that we can't be anything else but ourselves.   "Sarah and I crawled inside the mother daughter wound, we spread it open and abided in it without trying to fix anything. We stayed present with each other as we shared our hurts and pain, we cried, we held each other, releasing judgment and blame. I learned hugs are a way to be totally present and loving—a physical demonstration of what it means to listen unconditionally. Depression is a gift that helped us crawl inside the wound." pg. 193   "After Sarah shared her deepest hurt, I realized I held a very deep fear that maybe I was a failure as a mother. I abided in this pain of failure for a few days until something inside shifted to self-forgiveness. Even though I missed consistently showing my physical love, both my children have always felt comfortable coming to me without fear of judgment or criticism. This creates an environment and expectation that both Sarah and Tyler can talk to me about anything troubling them. While it still took an immense amount of courage to share her deepest hurt, Sarah did have every reason to believe I would be receptive and not angry. I also knew Sarah came into this incarnation with the wound of abandonment, so that no matter how I behaved towards her, it would trigger the feeling of not being loved or wanted. With this understanding I accepted that I’ve always done the best I could with the awareness I had in each moment, and the pain began to dissipate."   "Crawling inside the wound in order to surrender to what is feels counterintuitive. But what happens is that we bring light to our deepest wounds and fears, the ones that have been hidden in the shadow. Crawling inside the wound instead of trying to soothe, polish or fix it is an act of saving ourselves.   It is a pause on one of the many folds or turns of our mystical labyrinth journey into our heart and womb. It may happen more than once. Even in our darkest moments, we can be assured that we won't get lost. We know the folding in and out of our journey is necessary for dissolving all that does not serve us. It is a constant path of surrendering to what is until all that is left is our true divine self, existing within the Cosmic Mother’s primordial womb of infinite beginnings and endings, infinite creations, infinite possibilities and infinite love." pg.196   Life is a Song of Love, a Woman's Spiritual Journey of the Heart and Womb, O-Books, an imprint of John Hunt Publishing now known as Collective Ink, 2023.     https://embracechildspirit.org