Descent + Return

The truth is, becoming a mother nearly broke me.

And I should also say that it did.

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The truth is that the descent that becoming a Mother has taken me on has shattered apart infinite layers of self-centeredness and emotional immaturity, and taken me to the edges of every unintegrated wound from very young life. It has re-shaped the landscape of every relationship, including the one to God and my body, and the Mystery.

And on some level, this descent and reorganization is completely normal. And on the other, I wonder how many women really go through it—all the way—without medication.

It has been the deepest, most cavernous psychological and physiological reorientation of my Life (and many many more—I have a handful of lives before this one, where I never Mothered…).

On some level, I know it is meant to be that way, and on others, I know we can do better to support women through these passages.

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When I was growing up, becoming a Mother was never top of my list. It wasn’t NOT on the list, it just wasn’t ON the list—it was an ambivalence, mostly woven with cultural expectations that I would have to surrender my wildness, intelligence, curiosity and self to becoming a cookie cutter version of a mother. And honestly, Paris in June sounded better.

I also know that, have been pre-disposed to mental health challenges from an early age, in pubescence, that I felt, deep in my bones, that I would experience post-partum depression. And some part of me doubted that it was in anyone’s best interest for me to become a Mother.

I wonder now, knowing what I know, whether an intact culture that honored and supported the deep hormonal and psychological transition through puberty (from child to maiden) would have alleviated some of those early mental health issues, exacerbated by sexual abuse from a neighbor. But the shattering was already occurring then, the imprints for the next hormonal re-matrixing, the passage from maiden to mother, already laid in stone.

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In many ways, parts of me knew that this passage would break me. During the portals of conception, I had been dieting the Ohia Lehua tree, a sacred Hawaiian tree of fertility born of lava, of the Mother who dies and gives her life for fertile soil. To the Kanaka Maoli, the indigenous Hawaiian people, Ohia is the Mother of all the ferns. She dies, so they can all live.

In my first true deep dieta with Ohia, I received the clear vision of conception, a dragon egg born of and returned to my womb, and I knew I would have a child.

When Richy and I became pregnant, we made the challenging decision to leave the Hawaiian Islands to be closer to family, to my mother, and to the financial and logistical support that having blood relatives around offers. I knew I would need it.

Leading up to Oran’s birth, the logistical and financial reorganization of our lives, including my essential retirement from. the work I had been offering and building for years, challenged Richy and my relationship immensely, and invited us out of the cloud of years of world travel and gypsy-timelines, and INTO reality and a budget and schedules and structures to support life.

And in the days leading up to Oran’s arrival, as my dear sister Eliza sat and journeyed with us through the realms, preparing me for birth, Oran would come, hand open, guiding me down through dwarven realms of metal and stone and fire—deep, deep, deep into the Earth, telling me that he knew the way. These were new maps for me—and I can see now, how deep Motherhood was beckoning me.

During our birth, at the moment of transition, when my body was as wide open as it will ever be, I was facing and traversing realms of suicide, abuse and feminine enslavement that rocked me to my core. It was only the presence of my dragon family, all of the Mary’s, and a prayer for the liberation of lineage and homeland, that walked me through that door.

All that to say, I could have known this might be challenging ;)

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Postpartum, too, with breastfeeding challenges, and. a screaming hungry baby and a swollen bladder and catheter, and then… the sleep. I don’t need to go on here—because what I have learned and have been so incredibly humbled by, is that this part of the story is wildly challenging and utterly normal.

The depths of challenge that women can face in postpartum is astonishing.

My body, too, was deeply challenged by the hormonal rearrangement, and coupled with sleep and stress and the subsequent erupting of unintegrated young attachment imprinting, gained almost a pound a week for 6 months straight. It has been wildly humbling to accept this new body, the Mother body, and learn how to love it well.

Needless to say, I have been ever transformed by this passage.

And humbled at the feet of the Mothers. And I could likely write an entire book on the death, grief portal that was the pathway to my Motherhood.

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Becoming a Mother, too, if we choose it, it just about becoming a Mother to our own child. When we truly take the passage, we become initiated as MOTHERS—Mothers of Earth, of our communities, of our cultures, of ALL the children.

For me, this has meant massive reorientations to my perspectives on harm, and the ways we perpetuate it. This is an entire essay on its own, but suffice it to say that in many places where I used to be able to turn an eye and look away, I cannot anymore.

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All of this is to offer you a landscape of descent—of what it means to follow the passageways of life out of the legacies of surface level living, flights of fancy, dissociation, escape-ism, and delayed maturing, and INTO the human experience, which is the legacy of the feminine Christ.

The feminine Christ is born THROUGH her union with Earth, with matter, with the Mother, and to descend so fully, and so deeply down and through it, that she knows, deep in her bones, that God is not only in the sky— that God, that true love, is also right down here, in the dirt, the kitchen, the bedroom, the gym, and the garden.

And, unfortunately, we do not get there without falling down. We do not arrive at this place of inner union, without a full, sweeping integration of long-disowned dark.

A few days ago, I held a free community call with beloveds from retreats and ceremonies and classes over the last decade, and together, we began to celebrate the ingathering of the alchemical process of integration and embodied awakening. I am not the only one who has taken this passage in the last couple of years, and for many of us, we have stayed so deep, and so long, in this devotion to dark, that the Light is starting to gather within us again.

As I have been making this passage, black swans have filled my vision—sweeping their vast, wide wings over desolate landscapes, empty of the Mother, and making sure their wing tips touch every single part of the pain. Staying low and slow, they call the dawn with their song, and they weave with mermaids, gathering every bit and bob and thread that I buried there.

My friend Kelly (thewalkwithmystery.com), reflected back a similar gnosis, born of a Hawaiian fern of cycles of periodicity—a fern who says that we cannot complete the cycle until we have gathered every single bit of its mana, its medicine. I felt that in my bones.

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When we learn to stay low and slow, and to stay in the dissolution and death and breaking open until it is COMPLETE, a return begins. We cannot force or create a true return to occur—we must wait for the Mother to bear this light, this Christ light, through her womb. But it is completely natural, organic, and dependable. This is the way of organic creation—Life always comes again. And for me, beloveds, Life is coming again.

I can sense, from deep in my body, that my cells have reorganized and restructured themselves, and that my body is no longer a wasteland of the Mother’s absence. I can feel her more and more in my being each day, my heart is lighter, my creativity is burning, my vision clearing and my devotion deepening tenfold to this path. Not because I manifested it so, because it was simply time.

I know many of you have silently witnessed this descent, maybe with some concern—and I am so grateful for your prayers, for your love, for your meals and especially, to my own Mother and all. the Mothers who have let me know that it will pass, and that life will come again.

This is the Return.

The feminine Christ is coming, beloveds. Mark my words—in the decades to come, the Matter will not longer feel separate from the Light, and heaven will not be a place other than Earth, and Mother’s children will be Home again, safe on Earth, full of light.

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If you have been through a similar descent and dissolution in the last year, and are actively waiting for the return, waiting to see and understand how death can be Life, Divorce can be Union, and destruction is creation, I am here for you, and with you.

I will be holding a small, sacred space, a group mentorship program, for deep initiation that allows and nurtures organic rebirth.

The Return runs from September 21. - December 21, and you can learn more here. I’ll share more specifically about the trajectory of our time. next week (mostly it’s remembering the sacred womb of the Mother), but if you’ve read this far, you deserve the early bird discount, available now. I’m here if you have any questions.

All my love,

Jane