Chapter 19: Big Mama Energy

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. I spent the next few years paying deep attention to my inner “little one.” Honoring feelings. Finding ways to call in the Mother I’d needed. My therapist asked me to imagine a Mother figure I could call upon, and somehow I envisioned Aunt Jemima. I know that not only is the “maple” syrup awful and completely artificial, and the “character” of Aunt Jemima a problematic and racist rendering, but maybe because she represented sweetness in my childhood, and I somehow could feel her as soft and strong, she was the Mother my little one imagined for myself. When I fell down the stairs, I lay there at the bottom, imagining myself in Aunt Jemima’s lap. I imagined her soothing me, comforting me, letting me know it would be okay. It was the first time I’d let myself feel completely held, and I kept returning to that practice. Anytime a feeling felt overwhelming, I’d close my eyes and envision myself being rocked by Aunt Jemima. I let myself surrender into her, let myself feel her abundant body holding mine, let myself feel held by the body of the Earth. Around the same time, my dear friend Karina Maria was holding a women’s group, and one of the practices was to imagine a Divine Mother. To call in and envision the mother with all the qualities of the Divine. By then I’d learned to mother myself in small ways, but this practice asked me to imagine something larger. I began by envisioning my mom and grandmothers on both sides, and their mothers behind them. I envisioned them surrounded by a sphere of healing white light, and thanked them for showing up to life as they did, as they could. I acknowledged that they had different opportunities than I had, and told them I loved them and thanked them. I asked for my meditation to serve and heal them too. I began to envision a Mother who had been supported and revered and honored and even worshiped by man, by all of humankind. I imagined Earth Mama, she who makes mountains, monsoons and hurricanes and is the entire ocean, who holds the atmosphere and daylight and moonlight. I imagined her being protected and supported. She who gives life. She who nurtures life. She who sustains life. She as the Great Protector, the giver of abundance. I imagined feeling safe enough to be as big as I wanted, recognizing that my bigness and my abundance and my fullness would not diminish her because she, too, was big and abundant and full. I imagined that she wanted that abundant energy to flow through me too. I could feel it pulsing through my body, warm and alive, as if my body itself was remembering what it meant to be nourished. I imagined that instead of that energy being sent to live in the shadows, so that when it rises up in me, I feel too much or ashamed, I envisioned how I’d feel if that energy was nurtured. If all of the energy that lived in me was seen as valid and valuable and essential. My passion. My fire. My emotional body. My sexuality. My sensuality. I imagined allowing Big Mama energy to live in me. To move through me. To recognize that it was my birthright to claim that energy in myself. I apologized to the women who came before me that it had not been safe for them to claim that birthright. And then I just let myself imagine being held, accepted and loved completely by that safe, strong and joyful version of the Great Mother. She was powerful but also soft. Tender. Nurturing. She could hold me in all of my emotions. There was no good. No bad. Only me, worthy of love. 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. It ached to recognize how much I had longed for that version of her. What struck me most, an awareness that hadn’t occurred to me before, was that this mother would only be willing to be with a man who deeply honored her. Who loved her. Who revered her. Who cherished her. And she would be even more of who she was because of that love and adoration. That the presence and support of and adoration by the mature masculine would let her be even more-so. I had always seen my mom shrink around my dad’s energy, and if I’m being honest, I did too. Easier to fawn and retreat than to fight and engage with aggression. In my Great Mother meditation, 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. My shoulders dropped, my breath deepened — my body exhaled. I could feel what safety might feel like. It was the first time in my journey into the Feminine that I really felt, in an embodied way, the importance of the relationship between the Feminine and Masculine. Yin and Yang. That to be truly able to bloom into her fullness, the Feminine needed to feel supported by the Masculine. Protected. Like a strong spine, the Feminine could feel the masculine at her back. Having her back. And I felt, for the first time, the real importance of mature masculinity. I imagined my Mother, my real Mother, as having been with someone who loved her. Really loved her. Accepted her. Supported her. Protected her. Defended her. I imagined if she had had that, had felt that, had expected that and accepted no less than that, she’d have been able to love me better. She’d have been able to love herself better, and then love me from that place of fullness. It wasn’t just about what I deserved from her. It was about what she deserved. In that moment, I was able to feel back all the way through my lineage and realize that the sacred union between Masculine and Feminine hadn’t been there for a really long time. And so Divine Mother energy, Earth Energy, had been dwindling, shriveling, as the Feminine in my line had been surviving on scraps instead of the deeply rich nourishment of Divine love. My own mother, with Crohn’s disease and depression, had severely depleted Earth energy herself. How could I possibly source from her? But what about the other women in my life? My grandmothers? My friends’ moms? My aunts? Teachers? I tried, but couldn’t think of ONE truly vibrant, free, abundant, ecstatic woman in my world. Not one. I couldn’t help but wonder if my experience, while specific to me, was somewhat universal. Fertility is SO much about Earth Energy, Mother Energy, Abundance, Love, Creative life force. While I’d spent so much time feeling sad and sorry for myself, what if I actually wasn’t alone in my experience? In my clinic and later through Wisdom of the Womb, I kept hearing versions of the same story from women all over the world. We had spent the last 4,000 years diminishing the value of the Feminine. We used to have societies where all humans lived and worked together in harmony, where we were devoted to and even worshiped the earth, experienced God as in the earth and in our bodies. With the advent of Judeo-Christian religions, God was taken out of the earth, out of our bodies, put into the sky, “out there.” Women’s bodies, which before had been honored and revered, were deemed impure and even a vessel for evil, to be feared. While we’ve evolved from that, to some extent, those beliefs are the foundation of the culture we have now. Women have since been viewed as “less than.” Even Feminism, which I believe was a necessary and important movement in our evolution, didn’t quite make the mark. Feminism wasn’t about extolling the virtues of women as much as it was about women trying to prov…