Mother’s Day and Healing

This year, I’m remembering my mother with love. For those who’ve read my blog for a while, you know my relationship with Mom was complicated. There was great love, and also great pain. Being aware of some of the plans and agreements I made in spirit before I was born, Mom and I agreed to do this dance.

I was born to a woman who was born to a woman who was born to a woman who lived with great struggles with mental health. I’m not sure how many generations back mental illness went, but one day during my meditation I became aware of a pattern of mother-daughter wounding that went back around seven generations.

At the time, my father had died weeks prior, and unable to even begin to process the watershed of grief, my mother’s mental health went completely off the rails. She finally stopped taking her medication, became completely delusional, and was unable to take care of herself. (You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to get help for someone whose mental health has tanked).

While she was hospitalized for extreme mania I called in to a radio program of a psychic whose book I’d read. Once on the air, I asked the psychic why when my mother was manic she’d attack me (verbally). The answer was that it wasn’t personal. But something happened to my mother when she was little. The next time I meditated I should look at what happened to my mother.

At the time, I was new to meditation and was still struggling to make the time and find a quiet place in the house to sit with my mantra, but I did as instructed. A side note: at this point, I was about a year into obsessively learning about energy healing and had been Reiki attuned.

About five minutes into meditating I suddenly remembered to look at what happened to my mother when she was little. Not really knowing how to do this, I decided to imagine I was my mom as a young child. As soon as I imagined this and asked what happened, a scene began to play out in my mind’s eye. I saw my grandmother going off on my mom just the way my mother would go off on me. Holy shit! A moment later I saw my grandmother’s mother going off on Grandma. And then I saw it was a chain that stretched back for generations. A pattern of mother-daughter wounding. Holy shit!

Wanting to heal this, I put all my focus on my heart and called in every healing spirit I could think of, including Archangel Raphael, Jesus, and God. I asked them to heal this chain of wounding and I sat there until I suddenly became very emotional. With a release, I was filled with love and thanked all involved.

The next time I talked to Mom, she was still in the hospital and still very manic. It was when she was in this state (mania) that I could trigger her rage and defensiveness in a heartbeat. I’d spent a lifetime walking on eggshells around her and knew just what to say to set her off. So, to test the waters, I said something that would have normally flipped her switch. Nothing happened. No snarky retort. No passive-aggressive remark. No attack. Just quiet. Holy shit!

From that day until the day she died, she never attacked me again. I’d love to say we had a love-fest for the rest of her life, but the truth is her mental health never stabilized for more than about one week. But it was one of the first steps in healing our relationship. The rest would come after she died.

A year after Mom died, I had room in my life again to work on myself. With all sorts of stressors during the years of my parents’ decline and ultimate demise, my weight had ballooned and I met a new hypnotherapist who helped transform my life. Working with her was a time when I was able to begin to see my childhood wounds and how they were affecting me. Not only see them in a comfortable and safe way but heal them. Dissolve ‘beliefs of less-than’ I’d created about myself, this dissolving all sorts of emotional discomfort I self-medicated with food.

With each and every session I felt more peaceful inside. I felt calmer overall and had more patience for life. (And I began to know myself as a divine being). It made me a better mother. Although I didn’t have a daughter, being a parent is triggering (stressful) in general, and I’d been struggling with depression ever since having my son. Between his challenges and mine, I became conscious of not wanting to hurt my child. Healing work helped lift depression and made me a better mother.

Exploring energy healing and having healing sessions when life allowed, a lot of my early relationship with Mom not only came up in sessions but was healed. Within a few years of her passing, her memory no longer brought up all sorts of pain.

And only a few months after Kundalini energy opened in early 2017, what felt like the rest of our dance together bubbled up from deep inside and burst with a new awareness about Mom allowing even more love to flow through my heart. It was like I could see through her eyes in a way I never could before. I understood her pain and resulting behavior in a new way.

That moment felt like mission complete for me and mom. The agreement we made to do this dance called life, the dance that created all sorts of trauma and inner disconnection as a sensitive little girl, was healed. Done.

These days I’m able to remember the good times, like playing music together, going on vacation together, and hearing Mom tell me what a great mother I am. I’m able to appreciate the difficulty of the mental disease she lived with and have great empathy for how she chose to leave the world.

Finally, Mom always championed women’s rights and would be sick about the possibility of Roe v. Wade being overturned, sending women backward in time. Denying women the right to safe access to healthcare and the ability to control their destiny. Leaving it up to politicians to dictate what is a very personal decision. She would be livid. And so am I. Mom would be the first person to say, “Get the hell out of my womb!”