Anchored in the Mother: Healing Through Body, Lineage, and Land

Preface: Holding Space for the Mother Wound

A large part of holding space with Plant+ medicines for healing, discovery, and empowerment is helping others process parental wounding. We all have it—some more than others—but unless you are Mary, Joseph, and Jesus, there is inevitably some light and shadow to reckon with when it comes to our parents. We’ve been deep in medicine work this past month, and this pattern has held true—though notably, many of the themes we encountered were rooted in Mother Wound healing.

I was graced with the gift of guideship in moments that moved through grief, clarity, and emergence. I witnessed someone reach across the veil to connect with a mother who had passed. I held space as someone learned to mother themselves in the absence of a capable mother. And I watched another tenderly confront their relationship with their own mother so they could show up more wholly for their child. Big, ouchy, and beautiful work.

A universal tool we offer in our guideship is anchoring in the Earth Mother—giving to Her what is too heavy to carry alone and receiving back the transmuted, life-affirming energy she offers from her underbelly. Earth anchoring gives us the safety and connection we need to process the complex emotions that live in our actual maternal relationships, the mother archetypes we’ve internalized, or the parts of ourselves that embody the role of Mother.

Every person carries elements of the Mother archetype—regardless of gender, parenting status, or background. And each of us holds both healed and unhealed expressions of the receptive feminine and projective masculine aspects of the Mother. This is why the Mother Wound often shows up first on the path of healing. It’s almost like our gifted starter kit for evolution.

The most effective way I’ve found to process the stuck energy of the Mother Wound is through Mary Shutan's Body Deva work—dropping down into the body and authentically listening to what it has to say. This is often a scary and unfamiliar process for many. HETA is our bridge—from dissociation to embodiment, from static pain to dynamic listening. Emotions and sensations become our language.

One rubric I offer clients to help navigate this terrain is the spectrum of healed and unhealed expressions within feminine and masculine aspects of the Mother archetype. It helps ground the inquiry. When we explore these patterns and notice where they live in the body, we find the doorways into healing.

Here’s an example I share with clients:

Mother Wound ExpressionsMother energy is associated with receptivity, nourishment, emotional connection, and intuitive being.

Energy Type	Unhealed Expression	Healed Expression
Feminine	Smothering, enmeshment, emotional manipulation, collapse into victimhood, boundarylessness	Nourishment, unconditional emotional presence, intuitive support, healthy emotional guidance
Masculine	Criticism masked as "protection," conditional love based on performance, over-structuring of emotional experience	Clear emotional boundaries, discernment in nurturing, steady emotional holding without control

When We Repeat Mother’s Wound:

• We may become emotionally dependent, unable to hold our own feelings without merging with others

• Or we over-caretake, abandoning ourselves to feel needed or loved

  
  

When We Reject the Mother’s Wound (Creating a 180° Unhealed Pattern):

• We may shut down emotionally, rejecting vulnerability and refusing nourishment or help

• We may judge tenderness as weakness and over-identify with hardness or self-reliance

  
  

I offer this as an invitation: to meet the Mother Wound in ourselves and in others with more grace, more clarity, and more capacity to listen. What follows is a personal reflection, a cultural lens, and a guided practice for reconnecting with the Mother—within and around us.

Reconnecting to the Mother

My mom was just here for a visit. I was more emotional this time than during her previous two visits or my trip home last summer. Beneath the emotion was a deep feeling of overwhelm and an aching desire to throw myself into her arms and be held. And she did hold me—in the quiet way that being held at 44 by your mother, 30 years wiser, must look. It’s not the same as being four. But it counts more than ever.

My favorite moments with her were small and sacred: making kolache, quilting, watching movies, and piecing together mosaics. These moments meant more than their simplicity—because they were with her. Because she showed up. Because her presence still holds something no one else’s can. If there were an international kolache competition, my mom would win. If you're looking to tend your mother wound, watch The Wild Robot. If you want to learn how to make lemonade from lemons, stitch a quilt from old fabrics or craft a mosaic from broken glass.

My mom has taught me some of the deepest lessons of the Great Mother: that nourishment, storytelling, and creativity are not separate squares stitched side by side. They are pieces of one quilt—connected by intention, shaped by memory, and held together by love. You can’t pull one part out without unraveling the whole.

What she passes on to me—through flour-dusted intuitive hands, through stories embellished with new insights, through quilts stitched with memory——is part of a much older inheritance. One that lives not only in our lineage, but in the land itself. This visit reminded me how much the personal Mother Wound is connected to the land, the culture, and the Earth herself. The personal Mother Wound doesn't just live in our bodies—it lives in our cultures, our migrations, our displacements, and in our estrangement from the Earth.

This visit reminded me that healing our mother wound can’t happen in isolation. It’s kneaded into our relationship with land, stitched through culture, and set in the clay of the Earth Herself. And for me, no place reflects that inheritance quite like Mexico. In that spirit, I want to share a reflection on Mexico—a place that continues to teach me what it means to remember the Mother.

Mexico as Portal to the Mother

One of the reasons Mexico is so threatening to the dominator systems that sever us from the sacred feminine—the machinery of empire, scripture, and capital; a world shaped by hierarchy, conquest, and conditional worth; systems that traded reverence for control—of women, land, and spirit—is that in a world increasingly defined by patriarchal order, Christian doctrine, and capitalist values, where authentic reverence for The Mother is rapidly eroding, Mexico refuses to forget Her.

Here, the sacred feminine is not theoretical—it is embodied. Reverence for Mary often eclipses devotion to Jesus. Mushrooms are still remembered not as drugs, but as sacraments. And even within a society shaped by machismo, mothers—both literal and archetypal—anchor the emotional, relational, and spiritual life of the home.

This is not a land severed from the mystical, the intuitive, or the Earth. Instead, it pulses with a memory of the feminine that institutions have tried for centuries to bury. Mexico remains rooted in the sacred—sometimes quietly, sometimes defiantly—and that rootedness makes it dangerous to systems built on disconnection. It does not require validation or apology. It simply is.

To enter this place with open eyes is to feel the Mother Wound stirred—and, perhaps, to begin healing it. Not through perfection, but through presence. Here, the myth of perfect love begins to soften. We start to recognize that being loved unconditionally—in that raw, messy, mother-sort-of way—is far more vital than being loved perfectly. That the parts of ourselves we were taught to exile might still be worthy of warmth and belonging.

This is not a romantic gloss over complexity. Colonialism still runs deep. Extractive systems still press in. And yet, there is an undercurrent that refuses to be erased. A current that flips the colonial gaze—not by demanding recognition, but by inviting humility. Mexico becomes a teacher, not because she conforms to external ideals, but because she remembers what the dominant world has forgotten: that healing isn’t about control—it’s about returning.

And in this return, the Earth speaks. Not in metaphor, but in mushrooms and mothers and myth. Not through hierarchy, but through relationships.

Perfect love is transactional. It asks for performance, purity, and obedience. But mother-love—true, embodied, Earth-rooted mother-love—asks only that we be real. And that we return.

To a body that still belongs. To a land that still listens. To a love that doesn’t require perfection to hold us.

Guided Meditation: Reconnecting to the Mother

This guided practice uses Body Deva inquiry, archetypal connection, and Polyvagal attunement to compassionately explore the layers of the Mother Wound across our personal, cultural, and Earth-based relationships. Find a quiet space where you can sit or lie down comfortably. Let your body soften. Let your breath deepen.

Part I: Meeting the Personal Mother Wound

Begin by bringing your awareness to your body as it is right now. Let it be exactly as it is. Feel the ground beneath you, supporting you.

Now ask your Body Deva—the wise consciousness of your body—to show you where in your system you still carry pain, fear, or longing connected to your relationship with your mother or a mothering figure. It might show up as sensation, emotion, imagery, or memory.

• Where in your body do you feel unsafe or unheld in relation to her?

• Where have you hardened to protect yourself?

• Where are you still waiting to be nurtured?

  
  

Let your breath move into those places. Say to your body: Thank you for carrying this. You don’t have to hold it alone.

Without rushing to fix or analyze, ask your body: What is the compassionate truth here? Maybe it sounds like: I needed more softness. I didn’t know how to ask. She didn’t know how to give it. And I still need it.

Let that truth be witnessed.

Part II: Meeting the Cultural Mother Wound

Now, widen your awareness. Ask your Body Deva to show you the energy of the land-place mother wound: the ways you may feel unsafe, unseen, or unwelcome in the culture you come from or inhabit.

• Where in your body do you feel dislocated from your motherland, your ancestral mother tongue, your place of origin?

• What stories or systems taught you to exile parts of yourself?

• How does your body carry the legacy of a culture that may have rejected, ignored, or distorted the feminine?

  
  

Ask: What is the compassionate truth here? Maybe it sounds like:

• They taught me to be ashamed of my softness. They taught me survival through separation. But my body remembers another way.

• They told me to abandon what was intuitive. But my body speaks in instinct, not reason.

• They erased the parts of me that didn’t fit. But those parts are my wholeness.

• They taught me that care was weakness. But I know now that care is power.

• I was taught to belong only through performance. But I belong because I exist.

• The old ways were called backwards. But my body still knows how to pray with soil and silence.

  
  

Let your body speak that truth and feel it held by the Earth beneath you.

Part III: Meeting the Earth Mother Wound

Now, bring your awareness to the Earth as Mother. The soil, the rivers, the trees, the weather, the life-giving body you live upon.

• Where in your body do you feel disconnected from Her?

• Where do you feel grief or numbness?

• Where do you feel longing?

  
  

Ask your Body Deva: Where have I forgotten that I belong to the Earth?

Let your breath become a bridge. Feel the inhale as a receiving of Earth’s presence. Feel the exhale as a release of anything you no longer need to carry.

Ask: What is the compassionate truth here? Maybe it sounds like: I feared I was too much, too messy, too broken to be held by Her. But She’s been waiting all along.

Let yourself be held. Let your body rest.

Integration: Healing Across All Layers

Now, gently bring all three layers into awareness:

• The personal mother

• The cultural motherland

• The Earth as Mother

  
  

Say to yourself: I acknowledge the pain I have carried in relationship to The Mother. I honor the truth of what I needed and did not receive. I allow myself to receive mothering now—through self-compassion, through the land beneath me, through relationships that feel nourishing and true.

As you breathe, ask your Body Deva: What do I need now to heal physically? Mentally? Emotionally? Relationally? Spiritually?

Here are some examples to support your inquiry:

• Physically: I need warm, grounding foods. I need to rest without guilt. I need touch that feels safe.

• Mentally: I need permission to soften the inner critic. I need reminders that I am enough. I need space to think slowly.

• Emotionally: I need to grieve what I didn’t get. I need to feel held in my tenderness. I need joy to be welcome again.

• Relationally: I need to speak boundaries with love. I need to be with people who nourish, not drain. I need repair to be possible.

• Spiritually: I need to feel the Earth’s presence beneath me. I need practices that restore my sense of wonder. I need to remember I belong.

  
  

Listen without judgment. Let the answers be simple.

When you are ready, slowly begin to come back to your surroundings. Wiggle your fingers and toes. Notice what has shifted. Notice what remains.

Bow to your body. Bow to the Mother. Bow to the truth.

This is how we return.