I work with mothers on the path towards wholeness

Many of us mothers have been living what I call the motherhood split. This is not new. This is something mothers have been living for thousands of years.

Prior to this split, the Great Mother was worshipped in cultures all over the world in her wholeness, both light and dark. Yet over time,, the masculine principle began to dominate, and the Great Mother was split. Her light aspect remained in conscious awareness, and her dark aspect was pushed underground. Although this occurred collectively in cultures across the world, it also occurred in the individual psyches of mothers.

Mothers began to be split from our more instinctive, intuitive, fierce, wild, and powerful aspects, all associated with the “dark.” Instead, we have been pushed through culture and society to embody only one side of the archetype of the Great Mother: the light. Wholeness requires mothers to hold both ends of the expression of the Great Mother.

The dominant cultural image of motherhood honors the “light mother,” an aspect of the Great Mother archetype associated with nourishment, protection, tenderness, fertility, and unconditional devotion. She is imagined as endlessly giving, emotionally regulated, patient, self-sacrificing, an inexhaustible source of comfort whose own needs are quietly set aside for the sake of others. In many cultures, this figure becomes the moral ideal of motherhood: the mother who never tires, never resents, never withdraws, and whose love remains constant regardless of circumstance. Yet this is only half of who the Mother is. The compliment of the light is the dark. They go together.

The dark mother is the aspect of the Great Mother archetype associated with destruction, engulfment, rage, grief, boundaries, death, and transformation. Where the light mother nourishes life, the dark mother reminds us that all life is cyclical, that what is born must also change, separate, decay, and die. She is not evil, though she is frequently portrayed that way. Rather, she represents the fierce and often uncomfortable dimensions of maternal power: the capacity to say no, to withdraw nourishment, to confront shadow, to protect through severity, and to initiate others through loss or ordeal.

My work lies in helping mothers remember that we were never meant to be only the light. To be a whole mother, once must hold both.

The mother who can hold both the light and the dark, who can love fiercely and release, who can give and also receive, who can be connected and also separate, who knows both profound joy and deep sorrow, who rises to the heights and descends to the depths, is the whole mother. She is what you are becoming. Yet in order to find Her, we often must pass through the underworld first.

The underworld is a place of transformation. It is the night sea journey, the dark night of the soul. This is the realm in which we find our true self.

It is in the underworld that we experience the death and rebirth of identity that comes with birth, loss, illness, estrangement, or the slow disappearance of a former self. The death of who we were. And the possibility, on the other side, of becoming who we truly are.

I bring the realms of depth psychology, archetypal astrology, and mythology to serve as maps and guides as we move through the underworld.

These act like lights to help us see in the dark. And in the midst of it, we begin to see that perhaps our life is not falling apart. It is being rearranged, and we are rising whole.