The Grief of the unMothered Heart

Anyone with an unMothered heart is left feeling a sense of emptiness that is a profound loss that only gets expressed in the unconscious behaviors of adulthood.

This kind of heart often has a difficult time seeing his/her own innate goodness; an embodied knowing the divine nature of soul that feels connected and a part of the goodness in life (regardless of how much is accomplished).

In search of soul, of a connection to innate goodness and love, the adult with an unMothered heart projects this out onto others and searches for soul, love and ultimately Mother or a higher power in another, in the world or in behaviors and substances.

A good enough mother, according to Winnicott, is a mother is who is attuned enough. She loves her children, she enjoys being a mother and while she has her moments of anger and frustration, she tends to her children, protects them, nourishes them, nurtures them and provides enough of a holding container for their experience to be mirrored back as lovable, workable (through maternal guidance and demonstrating through her own being) and human.

For an infant, Mother is everything. She is, essentially, God and this experience of her is wired into the psychic system in the first seven years of life, before any verbal or meaning making skills have taken effect.

All future thinking, meaning making and belief systems that are formed arise out of an internalized structure of life experience that by then is so far out of conscious, mental awareness but is living there, inside the body.

The body is the home of our consciousness.
She is the ground and home of our soul.

The empty feeling of the unMothered heart is a craving for that sweetness, that ground, that place of nourishment that comes with connection to innate goodness, the unctuous quality of a soul that is fed, danced with, sung to, dreamed with and living in partnership with.

If we do not know how to do this, and we don’t if we didn’t receive it, we are building a life from an unMothered heart that is creating more of the same.

Just look at the world. Look at our addictions. They are all symbols of our longing for reconnection with a Great Mother that have become painfully solidified into a suffering.

If we allow our suffering to break our hearts open, the soul is able to re-emerge and move into the space that it has been yearning for as much as we have been yearning for it.

We can stop projecting our soul onto others, then trying to save them but rather see that it is we who need our saving, we who need our mothering, we who needs nourishment and we who long to thrive and feel love.

The healing that comes from allowing the unMothered heart to be the way we re-connect with the Archetypal Mother matures us. We begin to see that our addictions and co-dependent strategies are the ultimate survival strategies that keep us out of a thriving life.

We can only create a new world, a new life when we are able to take up a home inside a new consciousness, one that is innate, one that is indestructible and one that has always been there…that has pulled you through the toughest of times, stood by you in all you experienced as a child and now, rather than turning on it, we can use it to transform the unMothered heart into a good enough inner mother.