Creativity and the Death Mother

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.

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