The Mother
In you, me, us all.
If you’d like to listen or watch as opposed to read, you can here.
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In the lead up to Mother’s Day, I find myself drawn not only to the personal figure of my mother - or even to myself as a mother - but to something older than identity.
Something ancient. Wiser. More mysterious. More difficult to name.
Like The Great Mystery itself (God, Source, Universal Life Force) what I’m reaching toward here feels ultimately ineffable. Language, in some ways, diminishes it. Words reduce what was never meant to be contained.
And yet, for the sake of communion, for the sake of trying to touch the untouchable together, I’ll refer to her simply as:
The Mother.
Not a role.
Not a Hallmark category.
Not even necessarily a person.
But a pattern woven through time, culture, psyche and body.
A presence that has been revered, feared, embraced, mystified, sanctified - and at times, forgotten.
Across ancient traditions, The Mother was never small.
In Celtic cosmology, she was the land itself - sovereign and sentient. Rivers were her veins, hills her body, the soil her offering. To belong to a place was to belong to her. To walk with reverence upon the earth was a form of prayer.
The Mother here was not sentimental. She was generative, yes, but also wild, cyclical and utterly uninterested in control. She did not ask to be idealised. She asked us to remember.
To return to our own natural rhythms.
To honour the body.
To listen to the seasons within us.
To remember that we are not separate from nature, but born of her.
And perhaps this is why modern life feels so exhausting at times. Have we tried to outpace The Mother?
Have we mistaken productivity for worthiness, disconnection for independence, control for safety. Meanwhile, beneath the concrete and noise, she continues her ancient work quietly reminding us:
Everything blooms.
Everything dies.
Everything returns.
The Mother as Shakti
In yogic philosophy, The Mother appears as Shakti: the primordial creative force of existence itself.
Not merely nurturing, but electric.
She is the pulse behind breath.
The intelligence animating form.
The movement beneath all life.
In yogic cosmology, all existence arises through the interplay of two forces: consciousness and energy. Consciousness - often associated with Shiva - is still, witnessing, formless awareness. But without Shakti, consciousness does not move. It does not create. It does not become.
Shakti is The Mother.
Not symbolically, but cosmologically.
The movement of galaxies.
The growth of trees.
The forming of a child in the womb.
The flicker of intuition.
The ache of grief.
The birth of art.
All of it belongs to her.
In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna speaks of the “great womb” of creation:
“My womb is the great Brahman; in that I place the seed; from that, all beings are born.”
What a breathtaking image. Creation here is relational. Consciousness plants the seed, yes - but it is The Mother who receives, gestates, nourishes and births life into form. Without her, nothing manifests.
And importantly - Shakti is not passive.
She is dynamic.
Fierce.
Intelligent.
In texts such as the Devi Mahatmya, she appears as goddesses like Kali and Durga - not simply nurturing figures, but protectors, destroyers of illusion, restorers of balance.
Kali in particular unsettles the modern imagination.
Adorned with skulls, tongue outstretched and standing atop Shiva himself, she embodies both creation and annihilation. And perhaps this is why she is so confronting to us. Because we have been taught to associate motherhood only with softness. But The Mother, in her oldest forms, has always included endings.
She births life.
She sustains life.
And when the season arrives…
she clears away what can no longer continue.
This is not contradiction. It is completeness.
To mother, in the yogic sense, is not endless self-sacrifice. It is participation in truth. It is learning when to nourish, when to protect, when to release and when to allow something to die so that something truer may emerge.
The Mother is not merely the one who gives life. She is life in motion.
The intelligence that knows how a seed becomes a tree.
How wounds scar over.
How winter gives way to spring.
How something unseen slowly becomes visible.
And also…the force that knows when enough is enough.
The force that says:
This cycle is complete.
Perhaps this is why the yogic path reveres Shakti so deeply.Because to honour her is to honour life itself in all its movement, beauty, destruction and becoming.
Not gently, necessarily.
But precisely.
Mother as Medicine
As I write this, I’m reminded of my own encounters with the sacred medicine often referred to as Mother Ayahuasca - a plant medicine used ceremonially for generations by Indigenous peoples of the Amazon basin.
One particular journey returns to me now.
Before the ceremony began, our guide - a wise, stoic woman - explained something I have never forgotten.
She said:
“Mother Ayahuasca does not come simply to nurture you. Though she may, at times. She comes with her sleeves rolled up, rolling pin in hand, showing to you what you have not faced.”
And she did.
Not cruelly.
But unmistakably.
She revealed grief I had buried beneath performance.
Patterns I had disguised as strength.
Places within myself I had abandoned in order to be loved, accepted, chosen.
My encounters with this archetype of Mother have been wild, beautiful, nauseating, illuminating and deeply humbling.
At times she has held me with unbearable tenderness.
At others, she has dismantled me completely.
But perhaps this too belongs to The Mother.
Not the polished version, not the socially acceptable version. But the ancient one.
The untamed force that refuses illusion.
The intelligence that loves us enough not to let us remain asleep.
Pachamama: The Living Mother
Beyond the yogic traditions of India and into the high Andes of Peru and Bolivia, we meet her again.
Not as concept. But as presence. And similar to the Celtic cosmology.
In many Indigenous Andean cosmologies, The Mother is known as Pachamama. Though often translated simply as “Mother Earth,” this barely scratches the surface. Pacha refers not only to earth, but to space-time itself - a living field holding past, present and future in one breathing continuity. And Mama here does not mean “mother” in the reduced, domesticated sense we often celebrate one Sunday a year.
It means origin.
Relationship.
Intelligence.
Life itself.
Ten years ago, while trekking through Peru with my own mum, I remember watching our guide, Lao, perform a small ritual each evening before taking his first sip of beer.
He would dip his fingers into the glass, flick droplets onto the dirt, and quietly say:
“Para la Pachamama.”
For Mother Earth.
Such a simple gesture and yet it held an entire cosmology within it. And such reciprocity.
A remembering that nothing we receive is ours alone.
In Andean traditions, this sacred reciprocity is known as ayni - the understanding that to take without giving back is to fall out of right relationship with life.
And perhaps this is one of The Mother’s deepest teachings.
Not consumption.
Not extraction.
But participation.
To walk upon the earth as though she is alive.
To eat with awareness.
To recognise that all nourishment carries sacrifice somewhere within it.
Pachamama is not endlessly passive or forgiving.
She responds.She reflects. She reminds us that we are not separate from the systems we exploit.
An earthquake.
A drought.
A season of scarcity.
These too belong to her - not as punishment but as part of a greater intelligence that does not organise itself around human comfort.
And still, she remains astonishingly generous.
Every sunrise.
Every fig tree.
Every ocean tide.
Every breath.
A gift.
Mary: The Quiet Vastness of The Mother
As a little girl, I remember sitting in church on Sunday mornings (probably bored) - staring at a statue of Mary.
Draped in pale blue.
Baby in arms.
Serene. Silent. Untouchable.
And somewhere along the way, I absorbed the message that she was secondary. A supporting role. Important perhaps, but not central.
So I didn’t think much of her.
Until I did.
Until I began awakening to my own inner life, my own Shakti, my own relationship with the Divine Feminine moving through all things.
And suddenly Mary revealed herself differently.
Not weak.
Not passive.
Not small.
But immense in her receptivity.
In the Christian mystical tradition, Mary becomes not merely the mother of Jesus, but a symbol of the soul itself - the part of us capable of receiving the Divine.
When the angel appears in the Gospel of Luke and tells her she will carry a child conceived through mystery, her response is simple:
“Let it be done unto me according to your word.”
No doubt this is often been interpreted as obedience but the mystics understood something deeper - consent to transformation.
A radical willingness to surrender to what cannot be controlled or predicted and to say yes to a life that would unravel everything she previously knew.
Somehow we have overlooked the enormity of that courage.
Mary receives.
She carries.
She births.
But she does not possess.
And perhaps this is one of The Mother’s deepest heartbreaks: To love what you cannot ultimately keep.
Mary remains present not only at the birth, but at the crucifixion. She witnesses suffering she cannot prevent and devastating loss she cannot negotiate away.
And still she stays.
This too belongs to The Mother.
Not only nurturing, but witnessing.
Not fixing, but remaining.
In Catholic mysticism, titles like “Our Lady of Sorrows” honour this dimension of her - the mother who does not turn away when life breaks open. And still, she is not defined by grief.
There is a quiet steadiness in her. A strength that does not need spectacle.
Her teaching feels different from Kali’s fire or Pachamama’s vastness.
More subtle.
More interior.
Not all transformation arrives like thunder.
Sometimes it arrives as a quiet yes.
A softening.
An opening.
A willingness to let life move through you without gripping so tightly around what it becomes.
Returning to Real Life
And so here we are.
Mother’s Day weekend.
Flowers.
Breakfast reservations.
Handwritten cards.
All beautiful in their own way.
But perhaps somewhere along the path we have reduced “Mother” to a role defined only by selflessness, patience and perpetual giving. We have polished her into something consumable, something safe, something marketable.
And yet the older stories remind us:
The Mother was never meant to be contained.
She is paradox.
She nourishes and demands.
She creates and destroys.
She holds and releases.
She births and buries.
And perhaps every one of us - regardless of gender, regardless of whether we have children - participates in her mystery.
Every time we create something.
Every time we tend to another.
Every time we begin again.
Every time we release what no longer serves life.
The artist mothers their work.
The friend mothers through presence.
The healer mothers through witnessing.
The earth mothers us all endlessly despite our forgetfulness.
And perhaps the deepest invitation is this:
Could we mother ourselves differently?
Not through indulgence.
Not through perfection.
But through honest listening.
Sometimes self-mothering looks like rest.
Sometimes it looks like discipline.
Sometimes it looks like finally walking away from something that once felt like home.
Because The Mother is not merely comfort.
She is truth.
So this Mother’s Day, perhaps we can widen the lens.
Of course we honour the women who raised us, shaped us and loved us in all their beautiful imperfections.
But alongside that, perhaps we also remember something older.
The Mother as force.
The Mother as rhythm.
The Mother as sacred intelligence moving through all life.
And maybe, in remembering her this way, we remember something within ourselves too.
Something ancient.
Something instinctive.
Something quietly waiting beneath the surface all along.
Not asking to be idolised.
Only recognised.
Only loved enough to be met honestly.
And perhaps, above all else…
To be returned to ‘right relationship’ with once more.
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Are you in Sydney?
I’m hosting some breathwork upcoming.
Sunday 14 June, Mindful Garden, Stanmore 12-1.30pm. Book here.
And if you’re up for a WILD adventure, check out this incredible experience in Botswana - yoga, meditation, safari…curious? Check this out.