Let not old thoughts seep in to take you back to old stuck places. They are merely warnings by your fearful self to alert you to the truth of your choices and desires, letting you know that you might get what you want and so be prepared for everything to change. Change is good. New life is refreshing, invigorating, and full of opportunity and growth. Without the advantage of change there is but stagnancy and in stagnancy there is little that is appealing.
Shift into a good mood of contemplation with eyes turned appropriately inward at the truth and outward in a new direction based on what you have learned about the self. This is how to go forward with prudence, ready to also embrace the happiness that lies in store. Remember: Change is good!
With clarity of purpose, fully knowing the desires of the true self, move on into the new life you have envisioned for yourself with confidence and trust in all that you have worked so hard at. Notice how you have been and are being guided, both from within and without, to fully embrace this newly forming and evolving self.
All is as it should be. All you need to do now is acquiesce to all that is in place and take the journey already laid out before you. You know what this means. Go with confidence.
Here is a channeled message from Jan and Jeanne to start off the weekend on a very grounding and yet spiritually connected note. May it be helpful. Channeled with love and kindness for all that we are and all that we receive.
The sun rises and shines upon the golden gates of a new day. What choices will we make today? The gates remind us that each day is an opportunity to move on into new worlds, taking with us only that which serves us, leaving behind that which no longer has value.
How do we make our choices be the right ones? Deep inside ourselves we know what is right to do and what is unhelpful. Deep inside the answers come from our knowing selves, full of wisdom and eternal depths of understanding regarding who we have been and who we are slated to be.
Look forward at the gate of this new day and move onward with burdens released and heart warming, open to receive all that awaits.
Learning to feed the self is the first step in individuation… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
Food sustains life, satisfies the tension of hunger, and protects the body from illness and death. Food is Mother. For all, in utero, food was delivered from mother’s body and for many, post utero, this continued in the experience of nursing at mother’s breast. Finding our way in childhood to the independent obtaining of food—e.g., through opening the refrigerator door—is a giant leap toward gaining control over one’s security of survival, relief of tension and protection—the beginning of becoming our own mother.
Ruptures in security with actual mother in the early dependency years of childhood heighten the significance of gaining control over one’s own access to food. Food may become the safer and much more reliable mother when contending with a depressed, indifferent, withholding, competitive or abusive actual mother in childhood. Secretly, food becomes the real mother, while the actual mother is experienced as marginal at best.
In such rupturing circumstances food takes on the psychological role of soothing and caring for the emotional wellbeing of the child. The child may discover the excitement and reward of relationship with sugar, the soothing of anxiety with excess food, as well as the protective, dissociative numbing provided by a very full stomach. Excess weight may gather with excess food, which can protect the self from the sensations and feelings of rejection, lack of connection, and ridicule from without, as well as fear and sadness from within.
A hyper attachment to food in childhood may be the saving relationship that protects one’s autonomy and very vulnerable self through deeply turbulent formative years. In adulthood, these patterns of attachment will prove anachronistic and become impediments to more deeply satisfying emotional relationships. At the same time, they must be valued for the survival and protection they once afforded our growing selves, as well as their incubational functions at extremely vulnerable times in our lives.
Food is life… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
The task in adulthood is to free the innocent self—still held in body utero—of its private dependence on food for excitement, calm, and protection and birth into full life and real human relationship. The challenge for the adult self is to fully take on the role of mother previously delegated and attached to food. We are charged with becoming our own living mother to our tucked-away innocent self. This is a real human relationship that asks us to be compassionate, supportive, accepting, and encouraging to our shy, innocent self who has waited for decades to truly come out and play.
The defenses that have long sheltered our innocence, with their attachment to the secure food mother, are formidable and deeply challenging of the adult self’s attempts to assume parental leadership within the personality. Those defenses see no wisdom in freeing our innocence into a world where, once again, it will be exposed to rejection and possible annihilation.
The adult self is frequently undermined in its attempts to assume control by waves of deep terror and intense cravings that seem compellingly unquenchable by anything short of the sustenance of food. Perhaps these may be interpreted as labor pains of the birthing process, the innocent self questioning the readiness of the adult self to safely deliver it into life. Sometimes the proving process of the adult self, as it proves its readiness, requires many false labor pains, ending in a return to food. But be assured, each round of labor readies the mother more fully to become the perfect mother to her innocence, which she will someday deliver to the world.
The Empress in the Thoth Tarot deck, the archetypal good mother…able to equally give and receive…
This evolving mother knows full well the limitations of the outer world archetypal maternal matrix that in childhood had it creatively adopting food as the more reliable mother. This new mother knows there is vulnerability and rejection and loss to face in this world, but she also knows that she is fully capable of protecting and helping her innocence through the unavoidable woundings of life in this world. But this mother also knows the utter joy and necessity of bringing her deepest needs and desires into life in this world as part of the fulfillment, completion, and individuation so necessary for wholeness and enjoyment of life.
Food Mother will always have her place, but the living Mother of the adult self is the True Mother to full mind, body, and spirit living.
Let that True Mother be compassionate and supportive of wherever we are, as well as firm and encouraging as she takes full responsibility for birthing innocence into life beyond the old protectorate of Food as Mother.
Appreciating the journeys we all take, Chuck
NOTE: Obviously we all have a True Mother inside us, men and women alike, and it is our challenge and charge to bring her to life, just as all of us have a True Father inside us too, but that is another blog!
