(click to listen here to audio with Sho)
“This is what is the matter with us: We are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the Tree of Life, and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilised vase on the table”
D.H Lawrence
Forgetful of the Feminine
For over 2000 years we have been diminishing our natural love affair with life and enhancing our skill at the management of life, as if it was a business instead of a gift of nature.
The result is that we are disconnected from the natural world.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in our oppression of life-giving women and our control of their bodies. We use beliefs, including religious beliefs to exalt the male principle in our creation and in management of life and all too often ignore the female, all too obvious, vessel and creator of beings.
We all come from women and yet we seem to have forgotten how to relate to this fact and her as our gateway of life. Our mothers raised us in their womb for 9 months, created us from a tiny fertilised egg to a complete baby, literally from their own bodies, in an unprecedented rite of passage. This rite is of a magnitude that is greater than any other: for the born it is moving from whatever is before life into life, and for the mother, it is being the cultivator and the gateway, furthering an unbroken chain of life from the first ancestors till YOU. This is unacknowledged in our cultural celebrations in the west.
The feminine in her most natural state is our collective gateway of life. Let’s bring her out out of the shadows and into the light.
Why Honouring Nature & The Feminine
The process of giving birth is one of the two most aggressive, forceful, acts on earth. One 
is giving life and the other is taking life, killing. In our culture killing for what is considered a good cause, is heroic and we are taught to remember and retell the story of the battle, to honour our heroes. There are some stories of heroics around giving birth, however, we tend to devalue and dismiss those acts which we consider to be natural, in this way we see how this feminine power, the extraordinary power of hers that we cannot mimic, the power to grow and give life, is devalued as being ‘merely’ part of nature.
In the same light nature and the power of life itself, of growing plants, of flowing water, of air and oxygen are considered ‘merely’ natural powers, therefore to be diminished and disregarded as powerful in their own right.
Despite the fact that we have no replacement for these powers. That this IS life. Without them we have no life, nothing exists.
It is a sad affair that we regard these life-givers highly when there is a monetary equation to it. When we own the rights to land, to a plantation, to people or specifically to a woman (as in domination or slavery), then we consider that ownership valuable, but in itself and in herself we have somehow collectively agreed to ignore and diminish the value of life-giving principles.
I propose that this insanity begins from the moment we agreed that God is male, that creation is masculine, as in this moment we disregard what our eyes and senses show us clearly, which is that it is the feminine that creates, carries and gives birth to life in nature.
Celebrating Her Birthing Day
So, my proposal is that we do something about it. That we annually celebrate not just ourselves as having a birthday, but also our mother as birthing us that day. We can do this no matter what relationship we have to our biological mother.
Remembering our mother and celebrating her on this day could involve sharing her birthing story or just sending appreciation and love to her at the time of her pregnancy. It could involve friends and family, or be something we do ourselves silently within, a private blessing or meditation.
When we, as the birthday person, connect with our pregnant birthing day mother, we connect with ourselves on the day of our arrival in our mother’s womb pre-birth, and we receive from her the love and nourishment that we shine on her.
I believe we all are in need of an unstoppable flow of love from the feminine, from the source of life. Let us reconnect and quench our thirst from the fountain.
We have been disconnecting ourselves from the female principle for so long that it is no wonder that many of our mothers were damaged. So, I’m proposing that we draw a line in the sand and we start celebrating the source of life here and now.
When we resource and honour our mother, I believe we revisit our connection with life. She being our source. By creating for our mothers the nourishment and supportive structures they surely deserve as givers of life, but most often didn’t have.
This could be healing for us as a people, even and eventually especially for those who have an estranged relationship with their mother. It might be very difficult at first to remember her, to go there and to celebrate the mother who perhaps was a source of pain and damage, but what we are doing here is essentially reconnecting and bringing love back to the start of life itself, to our source of life.
Honouring the Mother – Birthing Day Visualisation
I propose that every year we bring our attention, and perhaps ask our friends and family, to bring their attention to the mother, to see us as a 
little one inside the womb of our mother, and to shine blessings, love and light on her. To see your love flowing into and filling her body, her hands, heart, eyes and mouth, belly, womb and feet with life force, with good wishes. Strenghtening her with love.
We can then absorb this light as her nourishment and as part of our connection to life itself and emerge (in our visualisation) into life from there.
I believe that every year we would emerge a little bit stronger. A little bit healthier in our relationship to life.
This was missing for many of us.
Just do this visualisation now and see for yourself what happens.
I believe this healing of our primal connection to life may change not only our relationship with ourselves and our own lives but also improve our relationship with each other socially, and our relationship to the planet, ecologically because if we are more connected directly to the source of our life we are more part of it all. Our senses would be more attuned to this life-grid that we are part of, that we call nature. We are part of nature, we are not apart from it although we behave most often as if we are.
This is how we reconnect.
Personally, I gave birth to my daughter on her dad’s birthday and every year we’ve celebrated their birthdays – my daughter and her father – and for many years I’ve proposed that I be included as the mother and received many weird looks over the years saying ‘what are you doing? What does this day have to do with you?’.
I was once at a fantastically deep constellation workshop with hundreds of other people that happen to be on mothers day. I proposed that we give some attention to mothers on that day. The group leader responded that as not all of us are mothers, that would divide the group. I tried to explain that our mothers unite us, as we all have one, they are the source of life, we can give attention to them as our source. I was met with blank looks…
This speaks to me of the blind spots we have around mothers, around our relationship to women currently and historically and our acceptance of the power that women and our mothers in particular hold for us.
Our Feminine Lineage
It’s a huge subject and we need to start addressing it somewhere, and a good place and time to start is our birthdays.
Every year they come around, clearly defined – this is the one day that could be just a birthday, one year older, or could be also a birthing day – the day that we acknowledge that we arrived here in life from this uniquely mysterious natural process called birth and honour our gateway – our mother.
We can give our attention, and even call the attention of our friends and our family, to shower their light and love and blessings on our mother with us inside her womb on that day, and to recreate our arrival as a meditation, a visualisation to support and nourish her in her pregnancy with us inside on the day of our arrival.
This is how things will change, when we give more attention, more resource, support and encouragement to the people who are creating and raising the children, and I propose we begin at the beginning, with honouring she who gives life, who has been forgotten for too long.
We all heard it takes a village to raise a child.
Perhaps it takes a village to support those who raise a child.
Women have been perpetuating life on the planet by giving birth unmedicated since the beginning of time. Anyone who has given birth with minimal or no tranquilisers knows this is a most extraordinary experience.
Let’s honour this. Let’s honour the woman who gave us life, who connects us to all of this, to all of our ancestors who gave us life, that created the unbroken chain between the beginning of time and us.
To all our ancestral Mothers, let us remember and honour them!
Credits and thanks for the artwork to:
Jonathan Borba from Pexels
Ilzy Sousa from Pexels
Thiago Borges from Pexels
Janko Ferlic from Pexels
Andreas Wohlfahrt from Pexels
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