Your life is busy and full. You are constantly changing and shifting to the demands of motherhood. You do everything for your kids with love. They are your life and joy. But that means your days are full of poop, snot and tantrums - or depending on the age, angst, mean looks and slamming doors. This is a lot to manage along with everything else in your life. It can be easy to forget the sacred. So why should we make the sacred a priority? What is sacred anyways?
The definition of sacred in the dictionary is “considered to be holy because of a special connection with God or a god” or “set apart for worship of a deity considered worthy of spiritual devotion.”
Let’s take the word sacred out of religious context but retain the essence of its meaning.
Take time out
One thing that characterizes the sacred is taking time out. If something is sacred, it is special. It transcends the busy and mundane in our lives and connects us to something profound.
Taking time just to be, feel, and connect with the essence of who you are is so important.
Connecting with who you are beyond your role as a mother or your current job connects you to the “why” behind what you are doing. Who you are is the source of inspiration for what you do. It helps you reaffirm the inspiration for becoming a parent and why you are running around like crazy.
When you connect with your essence, you become full. Your essence is the sun around which all things revolve. It brings center and stability. It is the strength upon which you rest.
This is the place your intuition and inner knowing come from. Connecting to your inner knowing means that you don’t just react to the world around you or follow society’s trends. Instead, you create your life and nurture your family from your truth within.
When you take time to be present with your own true nature, you can also see and be present with the true nature of your children. What a gift to really be seen! This could arguably be the best gift you give your children. Children who are seen and nurtured in their essential nature by their mother will have a deep inner knowing of who they are and what they bring to the world.
You can connect with yourself by checking in instead of checking out. In those moments when you reach for your phone to scroll through social media, for example, you could take a moment to tune into yourself. Close your eyes, take a deep breath. How are you feeling? How is your heart? How is your belly? What do you need?
Connect to and rest on universal forces
The sacred means connecting with something bigger than you. Something that is sacred is profound. It takes you out of your normal standpoint and out of your day to day life into something cosmic and universal.
The sacred connects you to something that is beyond your personal life, something that exists throughout time. Fertility, pregnancy, and motherhood are not personal to you but constitute the continuation of life on the earth. The drive within us to create new life, the whole process of conception to birth, and the dedication we have to our children, these are forces that flow through us and have done so for millions of years.
The Archetypal Feminine or Universal Feminine Forces are the universal forces that uphold fertility, pregnancy, birth, and motherhood. They are the archetypal forces on which a mother is shaped. When you become a mother, a deep transformation happens within you.
Universal Feminine Forces are:
Compassion
Love
Nurturing and growing life
Mystery of transitions (birth and menopause)
Timing (cycles of life)
Transformation (becoming a mother)
Depth
Sensuality
Rage
Ferocity (protect her young)
Surrender
Discernment
Inner Knowing
These forces can be seen in the animal world when animals nurture, protect and carefully teach their offspring. Love and compassion are forces that transcend nature and biology. Mother Theresa brought compassion and care to the poor and destitute though she never had children of her own, she embodied these feminine forces like few before or after her. These forces are the ancient wisdom of women, like the deep knowing of the process of transformation, the sacred nature of cycles, and the profound mysteries of transitions. These forces also include innate feminine know-how such as sensuality, surrender, discernment, and inner knowing.
These forces are archetypally feminine. They exist beyond you and yet you, being a mother, are connected to them. They are already there in the background, underneath your conscious mind. If you can learn to feel these and rest on them, they can support you. You can call on them to help you become more expanded or to move through you when you are exhausted or devastated. You can connect to something bigger and more universal that will flow through you to nourish your babies, to bring compassion, or to express deep rage when you need to protect them.
Ways to connect
You can learn to consciously connect to these universal forces throughout pregnancy and motherhood so that you don’t feel so alone and so you have something to rest on and be supported by when you are exhausted.
Many cultures have goddesses or saints who are embodiments of these archetypal feminine forces. You may connect with one or more of these. You can connect with the forces they carry and embody. You may just want to connect with the pure force such as Universal Love or Universal Compassion or the universal archetypes such as Universal Mother or Divine Mother.
Archetypal Feminine Figures:
Virgin Mary
Black Madonna
Mother Earth
Triple Goddess – Maiden, Mother, Crone
Kali Ma
Shakti
Kuan Yin
Pachamama
Demeter
You can feel these powerful feminine forces by softening and opening. You will most likely need them when you are frazzled, exhausted, and wanting to control a situation. But remember, to feel them, you must open and not close off. When you open, you become connectable and accessible to these forces. It is then that you feel your essence and you can feel the universal mother forces moving through you.
You can build relationships to these forces and connect with them through devotion. Create an altar to them, light a candle and tune into them, meditate on them, and let them flow through you when you are holding and loving your family.
You can offer up your pain, hurt, exhaustion, and confusion.
Allow yourself to flow with the forces like waves. Let them lift you up. Let them sooth you. Let them hold your sorrow.
*There are many ways a modern family can be structured and when I say mother, I mean the role of a mother. The role of a mother includes women and men who may not be the birth mother but are holding the role of a mother for their children.