11/13/12—Absorbing the Mother

Today's Draw Classic: The Moon from the Rohrig Tarot. What have you inherited from your mother? Is it possible you've inherited more than just physical and personality traits? Do you have memories, leanings and wounds you can't account for?

The Moon card is a card of the unconscious, a place of our most primal urgings, nightmares, motivations, fears and emotions. It is where the seeds of creativity are planted. The place from which our fears rush forth. All those answers we spend our lifetimes seeking are locked within this frightening and alluring place. 

The symbol to the right of the moon is Othala, a rune symbol of inheritance. From time to time I think about the things we inherit from our parents...the things that are passed down from generation to generation. For example, I have my mother's Irish features. I have her poetic, spiritual soul. And I have a funny way of saying "ing" words that, apparently, is common in American children of British parents.

These are the kind of genetic and social inheritances we all know about. But what I sometimes think about is, is it possible to inherit psychic scars...traumas? For example, when one of my brothers was in my mother's womb, she had a sudden and dramatic fear of heights while standing on a mountaintop. That brother is the only one in our family that was born with a terrible fear of heights. My mother only had that phobia that one time. So it's like something in the chemical change that particular day was transferred to him and latched on to. 

So, to the degree that a mother who, say, smoked crack, passes that chemical dependency on to her children, can there be more subtle ways of exchanging chemically coded information in the womb? Can the same thing be said about thoughts? Aversions? Fears? Traumas? And other high-octane emotions, good or bad? All those things change the chemical makeup of a person.

My mother died when I was 21, so all those kinds of questions you might ask your mother as an adult never got asked by me. So many of the things I would be curious about are lost to the ether, because there's no one alive who has the answers. And some of the things I'd like to know are things only she could have answered anyway, because they're more the kind of questions you ask yourself. 

She was the oldest of five children. She was, we believe, sexually abused by her father. Then he abandoned the family and the mother went to work, leaving my mother with the children. Then the Germans bombed their home for a few years during WWII and my mother was in charge in rations, so she decided who would eat and how much. All of this before she was an adult.

How can that kind of persistent stress not change your entire chemical makeup? And how can that not affect any child you carry inside you, even years later? I often wonder if I carry some of those psychic wounds inside me...if they are the reason behind some of the fears and defenses that I can't seem to find the origin of when I poke around in my murky unconscious. And yet I debate whether the influence is entirely chemical or subtle social influences that occurred beneath my awareness. 

Likewise, my mother was born in India and the first couple of years of her life were spent living there and in Egypt. She was blessed by Ghandi. Some of her first words were in Hindustani. She was weaned on the mystical energies of pyramids, sun gods and Ganesha. Though my mother had no religious allegiance and rarely brought these things up, how come I've been SO fascinated by mysticism, polytheism and more earth or elementally based beliefs all my life? The only religion actually brought into our household and encouraged in any measure was Catholicism/Christianity.

The thing is, by the time I came along, she'd healed enough to be in a stable relationship with a good man who made her feel safe. My older siblings remember things that could be traced back to her childhood traumas, but by the time I rolled around in her mid-thirties, she didn't seem to carry those scars with her in a significant way anymore. But perhaps she did. And as for the spiritual stuff, more than anything for ME, the house was religion neutral or even religion-free. My siblings, however, were all raised Catholic.

It's an interesting thing to consider. I speak of my mother, of course, because a father only offers genes to the equation, while we absorb so much more from the mother during gestation. The plant may come from the fertilized seed, but it's significantly affected by the quality and chemical makeup of the soil it grows in. Of course so much of its "programming" comes from genes alone. So I debate. And waffle. And wonder. 

What do you think of all of this? Are there aspects of you that can't find the roots for in yourself, but you can see how the roots might extend to your mother? Do you think the origins occurred in vitro or were they passed to you through social means? And if you're a mother, can you see how some intense emotional moment that might have happened during your pregnancy shaped your child in some way?

*Adapted from a post originally made on 2/23/12

6/26/12—Surrendering to Your Inner Knowing

Today's Draw: The Moon from Thea's Tarot. Do you have trouble trusting your intuition? Do you even know which voice up there it is? Given the choice between a gut feeling and logic, which would you choose?

So this week's theme is "how do we create more peace in our lives?" This Moon card brings a simple answer—trust yourself. 

Every human comes with a built-in GPS. We call it our instinct, intuition or inner knowing. Before we can learn to trust its turn-by-turn navigation, however, we must first learn how to hear it. It's that whisper that comes without thinking. It's a sudden idea or inspiration. It's the answer you get before you're done thinking the question. That said, it's also that voice we tend to second-guess with "why am I thinking that?" or "is that my intuition or is it just what I want to hear?" or "is that my knowing or my thinking?". So if you're not sure which voice is which in your head, you'll just have to experiment...go with the flow until you're pretty sure you know which is which. Even then there will probably be times you're confused.

The second thing you need to learn about this GPS is something that's critical to experiencing peace—there are no wrong turns. So whichever way our intuition steers us is the place we need to go. 

Think back on your life. Is there any decision you have ever made that didn't lead you to someplace valuable and necessary to your path? Even if you ended up someplace you felt was a bad place at the time, you survived it and came out of it with the kind of information you needed to keep it from happening again. Assuming you're still alive, whatever the situation was, it could have been worse. And the lesson you learned kept you from having to suffer that worst-case scenario. So if this GPS has never failed you, why do you second-guess it?

If you're anything like me, there have been times in your life when you've allowed others to steer you away from your inner knowing. And then, mostly likely, you've found yourself living someone else's version of who you should be. You took the job that didn't feel right because someone talked you into it. You bought a dress that you don't feel comfortable in because someone said it looked nice. Or you ended up lost on a roadtrip because you had more confidence in someone else's GPS than you have in your own. 

This is the worst kind of betrayal. Because its a betrayal of self. You listened to every voice outside of you before listening to the one within. The same is true even when there are no other voices in the mix—when you hear your intuition telling you to turn right and you turn left anyway. Even if the left turn leads you somewhere safe, you didn't honor the one and only voice on this earth that comes without an agenda, can speak faster than your ego and has only your best intentions at heart.

When you placing the voice of your higher self low on your priority scale, you cannot feel peace. There will always be conflict within...a grumbling between your knowing and your thinking...a lack of alignment between the calling of your higher self and the choices you make. So today's path to peace is paved by listening to that voice within and trusting that it cannot steer you wrong, no matter where it leads you.

3/28/12—Bringing Shadows to Light

Today's Draw: The Moon from Infinite Visions. What thoughts slowly and persistently haunt your mind? And how do they limit the way you live? What is it time to shine the moon's light upon in your life?

Yesterday we talked about different ways we resist the flow of what the universe brings to us. We resist when we're unhappy with what we're given. We resist when we can't find reverence in everyday things. And The Moon comes to tell us that we also resist when we keep parts of ourselves and our lives in the darkness. 

Often times we carry around questions or worries we don't have the answers to. And we tend to create monsters in place of those answers. An example might be putting off our annual mammograms. The longer we put them off, the more monsters we build in our heads. What if cancer is growing inside of me right now? What if it's too late? What if I have to have a mastectomy? These fears cause further resistance and further fears to the point that the last thing you consider is that the mammogram could actually say you don't have cancer. 

Further, this darkness spills into other areas of your life. Because you don't know how healthy you are, you might be making inappropriate choices. So the reach of your fear widens. And those inappropriate choices may lead to to other things. For example, the weight of your fear could cause you overeat out of nervousness. Then that could lead to insecurity about the way you look, which could lead to isolating yourself socially. 

My god, this is starting to sound like me! Haha. I'm actually good about the mammogram thing. But I do have issues around weight that create issues elsewhere in my life. But you don't even have to think that big to find something. It could be as easy as worrying when you're driving because you know you need new tires. And that could cause you to be more nervous on the road. Etc. and so on.

 

Whether it's the end of a relationship, a health issue, a change you need to make or something more mundane, we tend to be more comfortable pushing the answers into the dark. Which makes no sense because the only certainty that exists is when you bring these things into the light. 

And the crazy thing about all of this is that we NEVER ask ourselves, "what if I DON'T have cancer?" What then? What kind of stuff would we do if our heads were free of all the heaviness and yuk? What would our lives be like if we imagined the best, rather than imagining the worst?

This is what The Moon card has come to teach us today. To look at these worries, fears and concerns that limit us and consider replacing at least one of our worst case scenarios with a best case scenario. To turn our fears around. To know we can handle any eventuality with grace. To be the person we are, regardless.

Because here's the thing. If the worst case scenario comes to pass, you'll have to deal with it anyway. You'll cry over it and learn from it. But why waste time suffering it before it gets here, especially when there's no guarantee it will ever arrive? We're wasting time we could be spending living our lives and basking in the peace and contentment that comes from an un-haunted mind. It's time to shine the moon's gentle light on those fears, pull them from out of the shadows and deal with them, come what may.

2/23/12—Absorbing the Mother

Today's Draw: The Moon from the Rohrig Tarot. What have you inherited from your mother? Is it possible you've inherited more than just physical and personality traits? Do you have memories, leanings and wounds you can't account for?

The Moon card is a card of the unconscious, a place of our most primal urgings, nightmares, motivations, fears and emotions. It is where the seeds of creativity are planted. The place from which our fears rush forth. All those answers we spend our lifetimes seeking are locked within this frightening and alluring place. 

The symbol to the right of the moon is Othala, a rune symbol of inheritance. From time to time I think about the things we inherit from our parents...the things that are passed down from generation to generation. For example, I have my mother's Irish features. I have her poetic, spiritual soul. And I have a funny way of saying "ing" words that, apparently, is common in American children of British parents.

These are the kind of genetic and social inheritances we all know about. But what I sometimes think about is, is it possible to inherit psychic scars...traumas? For example, when one of my brothers was in my mother's womb, she had a sudden and dramatic fear of heights while standing on a mountaintop. That brother is the only one in our family that was born with a terrible fear of heights. My mother only had that phobia that one time. So it's like something in the chemical change that particular day was transferred to him and latched on to. 

So, to the degree that a mother who, say, smoked crack, passes that chemical dependency on to her children, can there be more subtle ways of exchanging chemically coded information in the womb? Can the same thing be said about thoughts? Aversions? Fears? Traumas? And other high-octane emotions, good or bad? All those things change the chemical makeup of a person.

My mother died when I was 21, so all those kinds of questions you might ask your mother as an adult never got asked by me. So many of the things I would be curious about are lost to the ether, because there's no one alive who has the answers. And some of the things I'd like to know are things only she could have answered anyway, because they're more the kind of questions you ask yourself. 

She was the oldest of five children. She was, we believe, sexually abused by her father. Then he abandoned the family and the mother went to work, leaving my mother with the children. Then the Germans bombed their home for a few years during WWII and my mother was in charge in rations, so she decided who would eat and how much. All of this before she was an adult.

How can that kind of persistent stress not change your entire chemical makeup? And how can that not affect any child you carry inside you, even years later? I often wonder if I carry some of those psychic wounds inside me...if they are the reason behind some of the fears and defenses that I can't seem to find the origin of when I poke around in my murky unconscious.

Likewise, my mother was born in India and the first couple of years of her life were spent living there and in Egypt. She was blessed by Ghandi. Some of her first words were in Hindustani. She was weaned on the mystical energies of pyramids, sun gods and Ganesha. Though my mother had no religious allegiance and rarely brought these things up, how come I've been SO fascinated by mysticism, polytheism and more earth or elementally based beliefs all my life? The only religion actually brought into our household and encouraged in any measure was Catholicism/Christianity.

It's a slippery slope, because who's to say it's not behaviorally inherited from the way she carried herself in the world? The thing is, by the time I came along, she'd healed enough to be in a stable relationship with a good man who made her feel safe. My older siblings remember things that could be traced back to her childhood traumas, but by the time I rolled around in her mid-thirties, she didn't seem to carry those scars with her in a significant way anymore. But perhaps she did. And as for the spiritual stuff, more than anything for ME, the house was religion neutral or even religion-free. My siblings, however, were all raised Catholic.

It's an interesting thing to consider. I speak of my mother, of course, because a father only offers genes to the equation. And while I do often wonder if some of this stuff is encoded in the genes, only the mother offers the environment for growth. The plant may come from the fertilized seed, but it's significantly affected by the quality and chemical makeup of the soil it grows in.

What do you think of all of this? Are there aspects of you that can't find the roots for in yourself, but you can see how the roots might extend to your mother? Do you think the origins occurred in vitro or were they passed to you through social means? And if you're a mother, can you see how some intense emotional moment that might have happened during your pregnancy shaped your child in some way?