Oxytocin the physiology of love, bonding and connection, a sacred biology, coding for love, and life and the power to heal. The heart and the womb creating life and love and healing ripples.
My daughter was little (4) when I found my spiritual home with Shakti Durga my teacher and committed to a sense of spiritual discipline, so a lot of the time that has meant having her alongside me. When she was young enough to come to pooja (ceremony) or kirtan (sacred singing) she would come. Now that she is a teenager and she doesn’t come, she wants to do her own thing (although it’s interesting to notice how so much of what I practice has gone in and how many mantras she knows and remembers). When she was young it also meant that having practices that were short (10 minutes) or I could do while my eyes were open were helpful.
Mantra is the repeated singing or sounding of sacred words that can be done anywhere, outloud or in your head. I feel it’s very suited to motherhood, because it can be done eyes open and while performing other tasks. It helped me to remember that each moment even if it was boring, or hard, or overwhelming held god within it.
Listening to sacred music in the car or at home and dancing with my daughter as a youngster were ways that we could weave together the divine into the every day.
When Lulu was 7 I was working with my lovely ‘HandinHand parenting’ mentor Miranda. Through her I discovered the ritual of Special Time. When I first heard of the concept my inner child was screaming ‘but it’s Special Time every second of the day for my child!’ I couldn’t really imagine what it was to create a ritual of Special Time. BUT in fact it had a really profound impact on our relationship and how settled she was. Either one of us could suggest Special Time – a timer would be set for 2, 5 10 or 20 minutes. You have to really tune into what you have capacity for at that moment. Special Time is a totally dedicated time of me giving her all the attention and importantly the lead in the game. Making it a ritual made it time ‘set apart ‘and this somehow was part of how it filled her emotional cup so deeply. Lulu actually asked me for Special Time the other day at age 16.
When I went to India for the second time but the first time on a specific retreat, one of the beautiful teachers there Brahman Kyrie said to me “make your home a temple.” Sometimes people say things to you and it goes straight into the heart with divine resonance. In Peedam where Sri Shakti Amma lives there are many many beautiful temples, where ceremony and prayers are performed every day, these become batteries of divine energy. The love radiates through the air, its almost viscose with love. We can create mini ones of these in our homes, to support the vibration and wellbeing of everyone who lives there or comes into your space. Tending to the altar is a way to anchor more of this energy each day.
My daughter grew up with us having an altar in the home from around the age of 5. For a long time we had no tv and just an altar! It was normal for her that candles would be lit, incense burned and rituals performed to bring more divine energy into the home. When she was smaller she would join in with the aarti (gifting the flame), and offering incense, and offering food to the divine. Offering food being her favourite part because after giving to the divine, we would eat the fruit, chocolate and nuts too.
I could really see through observing my little daughter how ceremony and play are connected, that they both engage the intuitive non logical part of processing. I could see how witnessing how my daughter experienced the same ‘aliveness’ with her dolls, that this sense of power and healing could come through ritual as a really deeply human expression.
Lulu’s other mum is Jewish and she also got to observe in her other home, the rituals of Friday night candles, passover and other festivals. Interestingly Lulu didn’t ever see Christmas or Easter as spiritual or religious which I found fascinating!
I think for a lot of us we think that we need to go on retreat or go to do special initiation, take ayahuasca in far away places as spiritual practice, but motherhood is its own path. Having practices which anchor the divine energy into the every day brought me a lot of peace. I have been committed to healing through what motherhood has shown me, the dark side of the maternity care system, my relationship to power, the wounding of the school system, my own sense of worth and feminine creativity.
Bringing ritual into the every day through prayer, music, ceremony for me has been supportive, healing and nourishing.
On that note I would like to leave you with this poem that really spoke to me as a mother
My firstborn, by jessica Urlichs
It was you that made me a mother.
It was you that stopped me in my tracks and paved new ones for me.
It was you that reduced me to the rubble of myself, and then built me back up stronger.
It was you that gave me so many reasons, but also reasons for criticising my body, for loving what it gave me, for being comfortable in my own skin.
It was you who first turned the nights into weeks and the years into days.
It was you that filled me with a type of gratitude I’d never known, each breath you took filled my lungs, each step you took was our journey together.
It was you that introduced me to so many firsts, to a different type of love, heart ache, and to me.
It was you that gave me a kind of confidence I never knew I had within, a whisper turned roar, an exercised patience, a worry that will live in my heart forever.
It was you who unearthed me, things tucked away, no longer buried, it was you who cracked me open.
It was you that showed me a different view of the world, decisions, memories, dreams, are all shaped with you.
It was you I held as I cried in the early months, deep in the trenches, lonely but in the best company. Tired but never more alive. It was you that got me through.
You’re much older now.
But I’ll always remember us in the quiet of the weekdays, where we did nothing and everything. Our chapter.
How it was you, who made me a mother.