The Mother Wound is 10,000 Years Old

(or it's been a long time since anyone got real mothering...)

[Malificent from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty]

At a recent book event a young mother asked me, “Why are the mothers in our children’s stories either monsters or dead?” The truth and the horror of her question took my breath away.

[Ursula from Disney’s The Little Mermaid]

At the heart of the dis-ease almost everyone feels in our modern culture is the absence of enough mothering.

[Bambi and his (dead) mother]

Patriarchy has demonized women for millennia. Pandora and Eve were preceded by the great grandmother goddesses who were mutilated and disappeared, whose names have been erased from records and memories but lived in the heart of the forest, old women, old witches with the trees, the turtles, the moss and the ferns all waiting to heal us, hold us and guide us home.

Yet we have privileged independence as a species and have cut ourselves off from the consolations of the many beings of this earth who love us.  When we lived in great circles of return and reunion, what we now think of simplistically as reincarnation, we knew that every being we met had once been our mother—and that our mothers were always as close as the very earth beneath our feet. These days we try to feel mothered by our pets…and to mother them in return but once all of creation—in its ecstatic variety—was our mother and we were HER mother, with all of the responsibility and joy that came with that knowing.

But it is hard to return to the very word “mother” because psychology has blamed everything on mothers for decades. Our mothers were over-attentive or not attentive enough. They were narcissists, they were needy. Their mothers were also a problem. No wonder so many of us feel isolated and abandoned.

But we don’t have to feel that way. Because we aren’t alone. We have more mothers than we know.

This summer I am offering a radical seven-week workshop where participants will discover this—directly and miraculously—for themselves. We will meet the wild mothers before patriarchy’s violence, explore what has happened to the mother within patriarchy, and imagine a world of mother—beyond gender, species, and biology—to which we might be reborn. We will explore the simple, powerful ways we can all summon the many mothers who have loved us for lifetimes and who are even now waiting to help us, guide us, and protect us.

“But will these mothers do the dishes for us after dinner?” asked someone facetiously on a recent social media post I made.

Okay, probably not. BUT our ancestral mothers WILL help us:

·       Heal with our loved ones to share the meal we have made together

·       Access the abundance we need to prepare that meal.

·       Give us the courage to be who we really are at the table of life.

·       (and maybe help us find the most beautiful set of dishes at a local yard sale… the dead do love the old, abandoned things….)

So many of us are searching for saner ways of being in the world. We don’t want to feel so burdened and overwhelmed. That’s why we are exploring herbalism, and tarot, and ancestral healing of all kinds. This workshop, gracefully and powerfully, weaves together all of these modalities so that we can access simple everyday help that can change our lives forever. During this seven-week course we will learn how to received guidance from our many mothers in the plant and animal world, create an oracle deck of our own ancestors, and most importantly, discover how life-changing it can be to feel circled by real mothers who love us.

Each of us has circles of ancient mothers and grandmothers who remembers the prayers we have carried in our hearts for lifetimes. What is it we are here to share in this wild and precious life? The mothers will help us claim and become who we really are.

You are not alone. You are not ever alone. You have more mothers than you know.

You can watch a FREE talk and register for the course, which starts Tuesday July 30th, right HERE.

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Perdita Finn is the co-founder, with her husband Clark Strand, of the feral fellowship The Way of the Rose, which inspired their book The Way of the Rose: The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary. They are currently at work on their next book together Circles Not Lines: Spiritual Community Beyond Patriarchy.  To find out more about her devotion to “ecology not theology” visit wayoftherose.org

In addition to extensive study with Zen masters, priests, spirit workers, and healers, she apprenticed with the psychic Susan Saxman, with whom she wrote The Reluctant Psychic. Perdita Finn now teaches popular workshops on Getting to Know the Dead. Participants are empowered to activate the miracles in their own lives with the help of their ancestors and recover their own intuitive magic. Her book Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World is an intimate journey through her recovery of these lost ways. She speaks widely on how to collaborate with those on the other side, on the urgent necessity of a new romantic animism, and on the sobriety that emerges when we claim the long story of our souls. Her next book is The Body of My Mother.

She lives with her family in the moss-filled shadows of the Catskill Mountains.