Tenderness is strength.
It is this tremendous capacity to meet ourselves with raw love drawn from the deepest knowing that every part of us is worthy of love and compassion. It is the space where our beingness meets with the love that life longs to offer us, reminding us that eros connects us to the very heart beat of life itself. Tenderness has the capacity to soften the heart open and expand our ability to feel trust in the intelligent nature of life. Tenderness shows us that power is not in force but in meeting what arises with fierce softness and that loving presence is the elemental nature of the feminine that naturally brings change when we make contact with her. Tenderness heals us. She cracks us open and brings healing relief to tension in the body. She kisses our grief and joy in equal measure. She roots for us to wrap our fear in her loving arms to transform it into courage. She builds the bridges between the shadow and the light. Tenderness is power. It is the reclamation of the great mother within our own hearts. We can no longer afford to feed the belief that tenderness is weak. Our hearts (and this world) are deeply in need of more tenderness, not less. . How can you find some tenderness for you today?
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Grief does not need to be healed, it IS the healing itself.
It’s the range of love that weaves its way through the cracks in the walls built around our hearts...walls built to protect us but only serve to keep the grief and love inside. It is the wildness of love that explodes our hearts open, reconnecting us with compassion and connectedness to all the things in this life. It is the seeds of sanity and self-love. It is the waves of great letting go, mourning the passing, inner wailing at disappointment, the peace made with taking refuge inside the walls of impermanence that everything will eventually change. There are so many patterns we learned to survive as children that are ways of being that are acceptable, almost cherished qualities, in our consumer driven, future focused society; one that idealizes perfection as a goal wildly unattainable by the nature of being human.
These internal patterns and habits of perfectionism and people pleasing are soul killers. They further the split between our "ideal" self and our inner, tender, feeling and creative nature. It creates a deep divide between the wise animal of our body and the divine nature of our hearts. Perfectionism and people pleasing are expressions of the soul wound, not who we really are individually or as a culture. But, these very pattens enforce us to not reveal the truth of our pain, the roots of our habits because it will wreak havoc to a system that relies on our pain remaining out of our awareness. This leads many to feel ashamed of the truth of their hearts, the wisdom of their bodies, true purpose or calling, or the particular ways genius wants to be expressed in the world. There are no emotions that are a lower frequency than other emotions. We may have preferences, and that is different. There is no hierarchy of energy that exists within the energetic patterns that life force energy uses to communicate with you.
Every single emotion has wisdom. No emotion is more spiritual than another. It is simply no longer acceptable to wrangle these “lower” parts to get them to behave and be on board with higher frequencies or at the request of some “higher” version of yourself. Our highest self, our deepest self, the soul, is all love and would never be cruel or unkind to aspects of you that are stuck in pain or feeling the pitter patter of old trauma surfaceing for healing. We cannot clear away being human. When I was finishing my dissertation, I constantly faced a deep frozen paralysis; an inability to trust the unique vision arising within me. It was so hard to say what I wanted to say. I was worried my way of seeing the data was crazy (turns out to be far from it).
I’ve experienced that kind of frozen fear for many, many years when I’d move towards writing or creating or making life affirming leaps forward. That slow steady feeling of frozen paralysis was there. Something bad might happen. I might die. My mind would go blank. I’d “sabotage” myself. I tried all the things. I came to the resignation that this fear is par for the course in the creative process and that I need to fight my way through it, no matter what it took. This frozen fear was in fact the grips of the archetypal death mother. She’d pull me back into what was familiar. She’d pull me into my addictions. Into self-doubt and projecting my fear and anger onto others, into myself and destabilize the trust I had in the world. Death mother often stands between us and reunification with our souls. She’s this great grief that lives inside our systems that we are trained to avoid, even if it means going into trances to ignore it. And, we are all in a trance, especially if we are spending most of our time scrolling, numbing out, checking out or avoiding our real soul work because of the the change and feeling that requires. Addiction is the antithesis of creativity or life-affirming, soul based work and love. The death mother is an archetypal energy coined first by Jungian analyst Marie Louise von Franz, then elaborated on by Marion Woodman. This energy is so, so very much alive today in this domination heavy culture, as well as in our own bodies.
. This energy gets conflated with the darker aspects of the divine feminine and they are not the same thing. Not even in the slightest. . In order to begin to truly liberate the feminine archetypal energies and heal the masculine archetypal energies as well, we must understand the difference and how the death mother rules our unconscious realms. . The death mother is the dark side of the mother, the shadow side that no one talks about. The cold mother. The resentful mother. The mother that didn’t want to have children. The mother who was not mothered herself. The addicted mother. The depressed/anxious mother. The rejecting or abandoning mother. The intruding mother. . The one who did not nurture or nourish or celebrate or love the way we are trained to think mothers are supposed to be. So much so that we think it’s our fault if this was our mother or that we are not worthy of love because she didn’t know what love was. . This enters our hearts in such a deep way that when we have the impulse towards creativity, new endeavors, life transitions, more soul and life affirming expansion, she enters and pulls us back in. . This is addiction and food issues. A search for a nurturing, soothing energy and returning to what we know..the death mother. In a trauma culture it’s incredibly important to become aware of ways that we make the aftermath of symptoms of trauma wrong. It is not true that the universe only gives us what we can handle. If that were true, trauma woudn’t even be a thing since the very definition of trauma is an experience that is too much for the system to handle, metabolize or make sense of whether it is physical, sexual, emotional or spiritual. (Note that most physical and sexual trauma also involves emotional and spiritual dimensions).
. Indifference to the truth creates complacency and shaming of trauma survivors, people suffering with symptoms of trauma like addictions, anxiety, eating disorders or depression. Isolation. We are wired with needs that need to be met by others. If we start to program this out of us, it is supporting trauma at its core. We aren’t supposed to get used to not needing anything from others. . People are not addicted to their trauma. Nervous systems wired via fear because environments were not safe run on adrenaline, which creates a deep feedback loop. There is a deep disconnect to one’s own vital life force energy. It’s not just physical. It’s also emotional, spiritual and impacts the quality of consciousness through which life is perceived. . Awakening out this trauma trance can be quite intense as our whole inner (and outer) world must shift. We must learn that safety and joy are okay, that our own energy is safe because trauma at its most basic level impacts the very way we experience life. That it’s safe to be here in a real way, rather than the mind yelling at the inner one trying to convince it is safe when it doesn’t even know what safe feels like. Grief is not the same as depression.
Grief is very human and natural. It is the heart’s response to the ever shifting tides of change and movement and rhythms of all things life. It is life force energy moving through as love breaking the heart open, longing to keep the heart open. Making more space for more love and more joy....the more love and joy and pleasure, the more grief, the more we expand into the infinite cycles that exist at the very core of who we are. Depression is stuck grief. It is life force energy stuck in the heart, the nervous system and the body. It is literally the oppression of the soul, the pushing down and away the tides of life. It is solidified fear. It manifests as shame or anxiety sometimes or anger or deep, deep sadness and mistrusting life. The sparkle is gone because it is stuck. All the grief gets turned inwards on the self. We are not static creatures. This culture conditions us to be afraid of change. To be afraid of change is to be afraid of grief. Fear of the natural cycles of life. Fear of death and the deep feeling that comes with transformation. Fear of life changing if we change. So, these fears can crystallize in our heart space and shut us down. Deaden us. There is a collective theme through the dreaming brought to me in sessions, shared with friends and in my own dream realms. It is the archetypal feminine via the wild cat that is circling, attempting to enter the psyche in order to merge with the soul. There is also resistance to this primal energy, a pushing away, building of fences, an attempt to control or destroy or run away from while watching the outside world try to kill her.
It’s Persephone returning from the underworld wild, raw, fresh and whole that threatens the parts of ourselves that truly long to embrace and restore this energy in our hearts but are terrified of it at the same time. This is the pulse of where we are in our relationship to the feminine, longing her return and yet fearing all that comes with reigniting her flames within our hearts. A world we can only make safe by allowing her love to enter us, to blow our ideas out of the water of what swimming in her love really is. There is something we must let go of in order to let the wild cat in and claim her in our hearts. Grief is far from one tone. It is as layered, nuanced and complex as our human experience.
We love deeply. Part of the loving is in the inevitable letting go of what we have loved. Letting the love morph, take a different shape that is sometime no shape at all. That’s the part that hurts. That’s the part that makes us afraid to love again. Grief is love. It is the power of life and love and spirit urging you to keep your heart open, to keep loving and expanding, including even the lost bits in your mourning. Because, in every mourning, many of the ungrieved pieces arrive to see if your heart will stay open as a way of staking it’s claim on your wholeness. Grieve what and who and and how something has been lost. Know that some endings are traumatic; deepening the grief with questions the mind wants answered. Let your heart speak to your mind, to let the mind know that now the heart takes over. Your heart is wise and strong and knows what to do. For its strength is in how deeply you love. This grief is a last act of loving what has been. This last act will change you. Do not let your mind interfere with figuring out facts and figures, next steps or moves to take. Grieve your relationship to what’s been lost. Our life is a living breathing relationship. Inside and out. Our engagement with life creates these third parties...relationships; the containers in which we whisper and exchange, connect and disconnect, laugh and cry, find exiled parts or birth ourselves into new ways of being. The container is gone, but know it will reconfigure and continue to live inside of you. |
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