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.

This great grief, this separation from the source of who we are arrives through our maternal experiences, which we, especially as children, must deny the truth of in order to survive.

Our culture provides the moral imperative towards forgiveness and looking towards oneself for the faults if things weren’t loving. We protect the truth of our wounds by wrapping them up and creating a life or a personality that avoids it. But, in our world this is falling down and not working anymore.

The return of the feminine is truly a profoundly deep cosmic pull back to the soul. To realize how much love there is in the unconscious, which is not rational in the way that every day consciousness is. That we are loved and supported from below as above. There is a strong call back to love.

We do not have to accept fear as a part of the creative process. It’s simply we did not learn how to trust our own unconscious, our own deep, primordial feminine energy because it was not safe, accepted and nurtured. Our mothers did not know how. Their mothers did not know how.

This is the energetic, emotional and sometimes physical environment we developed in. This is our introduction to spirt and life and our emotions and unconscious life....the imagination world that is the ultimate creation of the divine.

What are we if we cannot trust this?

This is what I faced when I was trying to do my dissertation research. When I birthed my business. Whenever I want to write from the deepest places of clarity in my own being. There is actually nothing to fear. It was taught to us. It’s not something we wage an unconscious war with or beat ourselves up about.

When we face this great grief, this death mother, our life force is liberated and the heart becomes free. It is what allows us to heal our relationship with life itself.

Creation becomes possible again in a way that feels hopeful, beautiful, liberating and even healing in both the act of it and the recieving of it. It’s the fountain of our light, it springs from the root of our beings.

It is simply not necessary to live in fear, force creativity through fear. There are no blocks to break through. It’s tending to our broken hearts, allowing the great grief to transform into life affirming love. It can change our own personal worlds. It will change the world.