M O T H E R
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Route Five's Sacred Alchemy Anointing Oil associated with the Mother Archetype is Baptism.
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As I unwrap the complexities of the Mother Archetype please know that it applies to all humans - even if you don’t identify as female - the expression of this archetype is just as relevant in your exploration of wholeness.
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The oils and their teachings unfolded in some weird parallel universe where all things line up just right. The Baptism Oil is by far the most requested and yet the inspiration to share it through the wider channels of the interwebs just emerged.
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I’m wondering if I was the last one to realize it, but with Mother’s Day on the horizon it maybe should have been more obvious to me that this is the time to introduce it, now, like right now, before it was actually ridiculously obvious.
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Okay, so that’s another story, and I’m just awe-struck that it IS just the right time.
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“The rise of the divine feminine” is not the fall of the masculine - it’s the movement towards balance and inclusion.
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That’s the Mother Archetype.
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The Mother Archetype is much more expansive than our typical cultural notions of a mother.
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We can mother animals, friends, family, plants, a project, an idea, our SELF.
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To mother is to nurture, give life to, receive, and hold space for: the Great Mother, Mother Earth, the Nurturing Mother.
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It does not use force or will to protect.
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It’s receptive and accepting of you just the way you are, in this moment, without changing anything about you.
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But even with Nurturing - it’s necessary to be firm, set limits - such as the Earth resetting through what some call the Wrath of Nature.
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The Warrior Mother offers a powerful, active, outward warrior energy that will do just about anything to protect that which she seeks to nurture - mama bear fierceness.
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The Mother Archetype gives birth to the stars, the planets, the cosmos.
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The concept unconditional positive regard coined by the Humanistic Psychologist, Dr. Carl Rogers - is, according to him, the healing elixir of a successful therapeutic encounter - it's the honoring of the opposites in the other, an open, non-judgmental regard of the other, and also ultimately, of the self.
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Yes, ultimately, myself. To connect with the Mother inside me by choosing to love myself in a world that at times tells me not to.
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At first, as this collection of words was coming together, I wrote down that we must love ourselves before we can fully experience what it is to love - but I winced as if being pinched by a mischievous sprite,
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and then I pivoted, reread it, and determined, that's absurd - we must not MUST anything.
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Sometimes, it's through the witnessing of love that we discover love is possible, that we discover we are loveable, can love, and BE love - and so - I instantaneously revised my notion, now accepting that loving ourselves is critical in loving others - but if it comes before or after loving another, it doesn't really matter so much.
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Sure self-love comes naturally for some - but for most, it’s the byproduct of a daily practice of experiencing unconditional positive regard for our limitless expressions, over and over.
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To feel worthy - no matter what, I have to practice that my thoughts, my actions, or inactions, my feelings, sensations, appearance, and the environment - are. all. coooool.
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we cool.
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When the great mother archetype has the space to emerge freely and fully, you’ll feel an innate drive to nurture your own body, mind, and spirit, and the relative ease with extending that compassion with others.
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You may feel in alignment with your purpose and experience awe in the grace, beauty, and mystery of all expressions of life.
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According to Jung, “The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.”
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All archetypes have both a positive and a negative pole. If one is being expressed, the other exists as potential.
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AND so, the Death Mother reveals herself.
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The Death Mother is an archetypal energy coined first by Jungian analyst Marie Louise von Franz- and NOT to be confused with the Dark Mother which I’ll cover next.
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She’s the cold, resentful, critical, anxious/depressed, rejecting, intrusive, smothering, abandoning, and/or addicted mother.
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A mother who has lost touch with her own soul.
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She disrupts our connection to self, others, and movement forward.
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Her impact is so powerful that it can result in entrenched feelings of unworthiness, blaming ourselves for being unloveable, or on the other end of the spectrum, having an over-inflated sense of self, a palpable grandiosity, or experience the hungry ego constantly searching for something external to define or soothe the Self.
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This energy is alive in acts of comparison, competition, cutting each other down, manipulation, gaslighting, one-uping, and control.
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There’s no blame here - it’s likely you’ve been both the receiver and the deliverer of the Death Mother.
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She’s your mother, your father, your sister, your brother, your cousin, and friend, she’s the person you despise and the person you admire, she’s you, and she’s me.
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The Death Mother can be stealthfully disguised as genuinely well-intentioned; inhibiting another’s growth by taking on their pain, smothering, being too permissive, over-indulgent, or holding unreasonable expectations for greatness - prohibiting their potential to develop resiliency through adversity - overly inserting ourselves into their evolution.
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In contrast, the Dark Mother offers love, with a primal feral-ness that rips the heart wide-open.
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She wakes you up to misalignment, opening your eyes - reminding you that pain is part of the journey - nudges you to move through it, stay with ALLL the feelings, resist the drive to shut-down, ramp-up, or numb out.
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She’s not the idealized, warm, all-giving, doting, and sacrificing mother - she gives to herself, sets limits with herself and others, makes mistakes, owns up to them, admits error, exposes her darkness, claims fallibility, and encourages others to do the same.
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She’s the dark womb, the turning in to heal and grow. The dark night of the soul that breaks down, rebuilds, trusts the messiness of the metamorphosis as she recommits to birthing new life - again, and again - and again.
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And, maybe you're wondering when I'll address the Mother Archetype's sensuality? Uhhh - YES!
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She’s the Lover, the erotic, sexual, seductive, risque, savage-slayer being that embodies her flesh, her soul, her mind - she’s not bad, wrong, or shameful to experience pleasure through her body, though some may insist otherwise.
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The feminine principle of the mother archetype is vital to transforming both ourselves and the world.
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We can embody our innate wholeness; our light and dark and the infinite shades of grey in between and all around.
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As we explore the Mother Archetype we learn that discomfort and negative emotions are actually beacons of light that when authentically examined can deliver us to greater intimacy with ourselves and others and a deeper feeling of aliveness.
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Jung wrote extensively about Goethe’s Faust and his notion of “The Realm of the Mother’s”
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This Realm of the Mother’s is infinite, devoid of space and time and as such has the potential to both root and birth the unimaginable.
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It’s the dark womb from which consciousness is continually born.
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We talk about connecting to the Inner Child, let’s give the Inner Mother space to come to life too.
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B A P T I S M x Water
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And, as I previously mentioned, Route Five’s Sacred Alchemy Anointing Oil associated with the Mother Archetype is Baptism, expressed through the element of Water.
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Our Lady Guadelupe emerged as the muse for the Baptism Oil.
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Please bear with me, I'm about to share a really butchered, cliff notes version of the legend associated with Our Lady Guadelupe’s miraculous revelation.
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I’m humbly requesting that whether or not the details of this narrative fit with your sentiments - scientific, religious, or otherwise, that you suspend all that for a moment and allow for the symbiotic threads of humanity to offer a sort of deeper connection with you, allowing for the potential of self-actualization to tumble down into your orbit:
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In December 1531, a converted Nahua man named Juan Diego was on his way to mass.
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As he walked on the hill of Tepeyac, a town just outside Mexico City, formerly the site of a shrine to the Aztec mother goddess Tonantzin, Lady Guadalupe appeared to him as an apparition, calling him by name in Nahuatl, the language of the Nahua.
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Juan Diego described her as dark-skinned, with “Garments as brilliant as the sun.”
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She requested that Juan Diego ask the bishop, Juan de Zumárraga, to construct a shrine in her honor on the hill, and report back to her the next day.
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After recounting the story, the bishop did not believe Juan Diego and requested proof of this miraculous appearance.
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When he returned home that evening, he discovered that his uncle fell terminally ill. Certain of his impending death, Juan Diego didn’t revisit Lady Guadelupe the next day as she requested, instead, after a day passed, he went to fetch a priest for the reading of his uncle's last rites.
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On his way to the Priest, traveling in a different direction than the one he originally encountered the vision of Mother Mary, in some sort of futile attempt to avoid running into her (haven’t you heard of Mother’s Intuition, Juan? You can run but you can’t hide.), nonetheless, Lady Guadelupe appeared before him again and upon learning about his avoidance of her and Juan's objective to recruit the counsel of a priest, she spoke these words - now inscribed over the main entrance to the Basilica of Guadalupe,
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"¿No estoy yo aquí que soy tu madre?" ("Am I not here, I who am your mother?")
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Oh, Bam, waahht?
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Seriously, Juan, this is not just another mother asking you to clean your room - she’s a glowing, floating, divine light beaming apparition asking you to build her a shrine - what part of, “build me a shrine,” did you not get?
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With this, she urged him to follow through with her request and in return, she ensured the amelioration of his Uncle’s illness... and then made an additional request:
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~ Gather Castillian roses from the top of Tepeyac Hill, which was normally barren, especially in the cold of December.
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This time, Juan dutifully followed her instructions, found Castilian roses, not native to Mexico, blooming there, the Mother placed them inside his tilmátli (native cloak made of maguey fibers), and Juan brought them to the bishop.
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When he opened his tilmátli before Bishop Zumárraga, the roses spilled out and a miraculous imprint of Guadalupe appeared on it.
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When he returned to his uncle that afternoon, he learned that Lady Guadelupe appeared to him as well and cured him of illness.
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Nearly 500 years later, Juan Diego’s tilmátli remains at the shrine, erected on the hill of Tepeyac, which has become a destination for pilgrimage, prayer, and worship.
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Numerous scientists have concluded that the image on the tilmátli has some inexplicable properties and characteristics.
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The image of Lady Guadelupe remained intact with all its original vibrancy for 475 years. The natural life span of a cloak made with fiber from the agave or maguey plant is only about 30 years.
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The materials that compose the colors do not belong to any known earthly chemical element, such as paint, or pigment. This suggestion was supported by Richard Kuhn, winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.
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By laser ray projection, it was established that the colors HOVER above the tilmátli and do so at a distance of three-tenths of a millimeter above the cloth but do not touch it at any point.
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In 1979, when Callahan, the Florida biophysicist, was analyzing the tilmátli using infrared technology, he apparently also discovered that the tilmátli maintains a constant temperature of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, the same as that of a living person.
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Like the human eye, Lady Guadelupe's expand, contract, and the eyelids show normal microscopic veins.
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According to Dr. Jose Aste Tonsmann, an expert in digital imaging, minute human figures can be detected in the pupils of the eyes on the image. Some believe they're the person's she revealed herself to as the image was created.
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And there're many more inexplicable facets of the image of lady Guadelupe on the tilmátli.
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So what does this have to do with your own self-actualization?
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How many times in your life have you heard that wise whisper within - nudging you towards growth, and instead of listening, you doubted the relative truth of that voice?
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Our Lady Guadalupe reminds us that though we may hide from ourselves, and even from powers much greater than ours, our destiny will find us.
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We will get just what we need when we need it, even if we don't want it.
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We may feel small, insignificant to the larger movement of all life, but we play a meaningful part in the collective.
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As Juan received a message beyond his ordinary awareness, something that emerged from the void, from the dark womb of the unknown, so too can we imagine that there exist solutions, unimaginable love, and personal potentials beyond what is available to us through our own consciousness.
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We are not aware of all that there is to be aware of.
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We can be really loathsome and still be worthy.
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We're deserving of unconditional love and the freedom to be imperfect, to embody the light and dark qualities of being human - or even more than that, of being alive.
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"To err is human, to forgive is divine" - Alexandar Pope
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Forgiving others is not easy, especially when we feel we've been wronged unfairly. So forgiveness can sometimes feel like it goes against our human nature. Even when that forgiveness yearns to be felt in our heart, for our own transgressions, turning down the volume of our inner critic. Breathing in new life for beautiful-mess that we are, have been, and will continue to be.
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The Mother Archetype offers us both the nurturing and the limits - the love and the wrath.
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Compassion, Forgiveness, and Aliveness are all wrapped up together.
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Accessible by exploring the Great Mother within.
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Take risks, make mistakes, repair, forgive yourself, forgive others, begin again, and again, and again.
With SO much LOVE and Gratitude!
~Arinn, xo