Chapter 18: Mother Earth Medicine

These are chapter-by-chapter excerpts from my book, Fertile Like a Mother, Fertile Like a Lover. If you’re just finding your way here, you might want to start from the beginning — each piece builds on the last. In my Alchemy Lab, one of the first practices we learned was Inner Sensing. It sounds simple—to turn the gaze inward—but I had never done it this way before. Not to analyze or fix or even to feel in order to help someone else, as I often did with my patients. This was different. We were invited to slow the breath, turn the light of awareness inward, and just notice. No trying or meaning-making. Just sensing. Where is attention drawn? What does it feel like there? The invitation was to stay, to sit beside whatever arose, the way you might sit next to a small child—curious, unhurried, wanting just to be present. Whenever I tried to do this practice in the presence of others, I would collapse. I’d begin to feel something—sometimes sensation, sometimes numbness—and almost immediately, tears would come. Not necessarily sadness or pain, just the sheer overwhelm of feeling anything at all. I could barely stay with it. Each time our group turned inward, I’d fall apart. It was embarrassing at first, this inability to hold myself together. But no one tried to fix it. We just stayed with it, witnessing the collapse. Letting it be okay. Six months in, we gathered in Maine for our late-summer retreat—the season of Earth. By then I had cried through nearly every meeting, and I cried through the early sessions this retreat too. But something about the lushness of Maine in late summer began to shift something in me. The air was thick with the sweetness of fallen fruit. Flower past their prime. Moisture in the air and on my skin. The word that came to me for Earth was fullness. And it was in my embodied experience of that fullness that I began to understand my collapse. Earth energy is what grounds and holds us. It is the center between seasons. It is the feeling of being supported, nourished, and safe to rest. In Chinese Medicine, Earth relates to how we are mothered—how we feed ourselves, digest life, and allow ourselves to be held. It is the substance of the body itself: flesh, muscle, the physical and psychic capacity to transform what we take in. The Earth holds all the other elements—water, fire, metal, wood. It’s the container that allows everything else to exist. In that sense, Earth is the first matter, the Mother, the ground of being. When my own Earth element was depleted, I could feel it in my body: fatigue, puffiness, bloating, digestive weakness. I used to think it was just my constitution, something inherited. But as I began to sense into myself in the Alchemy work, I realized the depletion ran deeper. Every time I touched into sensation, I collapsed because I didn’t know what stability felt like. I didn’t know what it meant to be held and still feel. My nervous system had learned to shut sensation down—to move on, to do, to keep going. Feeling fully had never felt safe. This was the revelation: my Earth depletion wasn’t just physical. It was spiritual. I had been living without the experience of being held by life itself. Each of us carries, in the psyche, a space for the Archetypal Mother—the Great Mother. This isn’t our personal mother, but an ancient pattern, a divine frequency that holds the template for nourishment, safety, and unconditional belonging. Ideally, our human mothers would channel some of that archetypal energy to us. But most couldn’t. They, too, were shaped by a culture that has long suppressed the Great Mother, that taught women to be small, contained, quiet. When God was lifted out of the Earth, out of matter and the body, the Great Mother was buried beneath him. The Earth was no longer sacred; women’s bodies no longer holy. The archetypal Mother—the big, lush, overflowing Feminine—was replaced by an ideal of purity, restraint, and self-denial. We see this everywhere: in religion, in the ideal of the Virgin Mother, in our cultural discomfort with women’s appetites and needs. The Feminine became flattened, a cardboard cutout of virtue and sterility. There’s no Big Mama Energy in that image. And yet, that Big Mama Energy is what holds the world together. Earth is the archetype of enoughness, the place where we can rest in our bodies and know we are fed, resourced, sustained. When that connection is severed—when we can’t feel the Great Mother—we seek nourishment everywhere else: in productivity, perfectionism, food, relationships, doing. And we remain persistently underfed and unfulfilled. In the Alchemy work, I began learning to let myself be held again—not by a person, but by my body, by my breath, by the Earth beneath me. To trust that there was something strong enough to hold me, even in my collapse. That’s the lesson of Earth. She teaches us to both hold and be held. To allow ourselves to be mothered by life itself. Healing my Earth element wasn’t just about fixing my digestion or managing symptoms—it was about remembering how to be nourished. How to let the energy of Mother Earth move through me. But like the Element of Earth, it took daily practice, devotion, consistency. Upcoming: Chapter 19: Big Mama Energy As I came out of my meditation a bit, I imagined how it would feel if my own mother had been allowed to be big too, filled with the magic of her own life force. I imagined her as abundant. Nurturing. Full. Able to protect me. I imagined my Mother as joyful. Strong. Brave enough to be vulnerable…to let herself be deeply known and seen, both in her strength and her vulnerability. Confident in her body. Safe in her body. I could actually feel that in response to healthy Masculine energy, the Feminine expands. I don’t just mean a man, but that Yang, steady presence of the Masculine principle — in ourselves and in the world — that lets the Feminine unfurl. Have you noticed what happens when you stop holding yourself back—or in? Does the feeling of being “too much” ever rise up in you?