Allow All Life to Grow

As the mother of two sons, I’ve had the direct experience of receiving the power of life, letting it teach me who I need to be in service to that life, and allowing that life to grow and blossom into its own expression beyond me. This is the ultimate challenge and gift of mothering. It demands humility and delivers pride.

Not the pride of ego that I witness in many mothers. That pride uses guilt and retribution as negative power against children. It stems from the false premise that mother is in control and must exert it as a force to get her own way and steer circumstances into alignment with how she wants everything to be. It only works to distort or destroy the child’s potential. And it reveals, for those of us who have the eyes to see and the ears to hear, just how disempowered this mother feels herself to be. She is operating from the weakest link in her psyche and has yet to mature into a being worthy of the child.

So what other pride is there?

In wisdom traditions, it has been called the pride of the unicorn. And human beings travel a passage through the pride of the lion to discover it.

The mother who betrays the nature of her own child is operating in the pride of the lion because she believes her mothering is meant to serve her ego, her constructed identity within the pride of all lions. She lets the convention of her pack protect her and refuses to listen to her child as the individual s/he is.

Mothering is actually an impersonal endeavour.

Yes, it is an intensely personal experience, but one through which we are designed to elevate our understanding of who we are in truth. Mothering activates power in a woman and how she uses that power is the demonstration of whether or not she has aligned with the call on her soul to mother consciously. Personal pride of mothering is deadly. And a woman must resurrect her spirit through the mothering assignment to allow her children to be who they came here to be. No more. No less. So any notions of who she wants her children to be in service to her own needs is to be overcome within her own inner experience. Her children owe her nothing beyond respect for being mother. That’s it. The rest of her life is up to her.

Now the pride of the lion is a developmental stage on the journey of mothering. A mother feels proud to trust herself to be mother and to have faith in her capacity to fulfill its role. She accepts the contract. But there will come a moment when she is faced with her own self-pity, disappointment, even rage in the face of her child not being who she expects them to be and rather than succumbing to the force of this negative emotion, she will have the opportunity to rise into the true meaning of suffering — bearing the weight of her own self-imposed limitations in order to break through convention and discover her true power. This will demand deep listening within herself and to her child. It will cause her to question social agreements in humble repentance. She must then learn to hold the power that will now move through her in service to her mission as mother. For the pride of the unicorn descends into one who is ready, willing, and able to see the clear vision of the whole — every child is a unique emanation of the Spirit of Life and here in concert with All Life. To mother a child is to encounter the entire human endeavour.

When the pride of the unicorn is born in a woman she has no more need to fight herself, her children, her world. For she has come to realize through her mothering that it is only love that nourishes the human soul and through its power in her she ascends convention to make her own way for herself, her children, and her world — and it will be a world made new.

Question for Reflection:
If my child is the teacher and I am the student, what is s/he teaching me about me? What do I see from this perspective that allows me to become more of my true self?