The dominant cultural image of motherhood honors what may be called 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 she 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. This is the Mother that was worshipped for thousands of years.

We are living in a time when the dark aspect of the Great Mother is re-emerging to be brought into complement with the light within the psyche’s of mothers around the world. We are collectively witnessing a complete paradigm shift of mothers, where mothers are rising whole.

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 not a place of punishment. It is a place of transformation. I work as a guide for mothers traversing the terrain of the Underworld.

In the ancient Sumerian myth, Inanna, Queen of Heaven, adorned in her power and beauty, descends into the underworld to meet her sister Ereshkigal, queen of the Underworld. At each of the seven gates, she surrenders something: a crown, a garment, a symbol of her identity. She arrives naked, stripped of everything she thought she was. She dies. And then, she rises.

This is the story of motherhood.

This is the map many mothers are living without knowing it. The stripping of identity that comes with birth, loss, illness, estrangement, or the slow disappearance of a former self. The encounter with grief, rage, helplessness, and the shadow dimensions of the psyche. The death of who you were. And the possibility, on the other side, of becoming who you truly are. This was always meant to happen, as our very descents into the Underworld are marked in the stars. Astrology shows us that what feels like collapse is the swift hand of the goddess clearing away what no longer serves us, even if that means letting go what we care about most.

The planets do not cause what happens to you. They illuminate when and for what.

Archetypal astrology offers a symbolic language for the timing of transformation. Among all the planetary archetypes, Pluto holds particular significance for initiatory descent, associated with death and rebirth, the eruption of what has been repressed, and the dismantling of structures that can no longer sustain life. A mother moving through a Pluto transit may find herself in the midst of a profound upheaval: an identity that has collapsed, a grief that feels bottomless, a confrontation with shadow material she has spent years avoiding. This is the archetypal energy that pulls the rug from under our feet so that we can become more than we ever thought we were, yet have been all along. From this, we can locate ourselves within a larger pattern, one that has both meaning and direction, even in its most disorienting moments.

You are already living a mythic story. Here, we find a language for it.

I work with mothers at the threshold, with those who sense that what they are moving through is larger than what the clinical world has named for them, and who are ready to meet it with depth, curiosity, and symbolic imagination. If this speaks to you, I would be honored to walk with you.