Part 2 of 2
Missed part 1? You can read it here.
As I shared in Part 1, I knew the Mother as a child. I knew Her through the Earth, through the changing seasons, through the garden, the trees, the water, and the rhythms of the natural world. But alongside that knowing, I was being conditioned into a religious worldview in which God the Father was supreme. The feminine form of the Divine was absent.
The Divine, as I was taught to understand Him, was male. The prophets who spoke for Him were male. The religious authority surrounding me was predominantly male. The feminine was not presented as an equally sacred expression of the Divine.
So perhaps I didn’t forget the Mother. I learned not to give Her the same authority.
It’s ironic to me that it was in India that I began to actively explore different emanations of the Divine Feminine principle. Ironic because India, as a society, is deeply patriarchal, even though religiously, many forms of the Divine Mother are worshipped and placed above many male deities.
This contradiction fascinated me. How could a culture so deeply shaped by patriarchy also hold such a rich understanding of the Divine Feminine? How much of what I was seeing had been shaped by colonization, and how much was something much older?
I first visited India in the fall of 2017. I was immediately overwhelmed by the colors, textures, smells, sounds, people and animals roaming the streets, cars, bikes and buses all going every direction all at once—so much life packed into such a small area. Everywhere I looked, there seemed to be contradiction. The sacred alongside the mundane. Piles of cow dung right outside the temple gates. An impoverished family living beneath a plastic tarp just outside my nice hotel complete with a soft bed and hot running water.
India didn’t fit neatly into the categories I was accustomed to. This is what I loved about it.
While I was there, I met an Indian teacher who challenged my viewpoint on the Divine—but more importantly, my relationship with the Divine. For all his shortcomings, he reminded me that having a direct relationship with the Divine was my inherent authority. I did not need someone else to mediate that relationship for me.
He also began introducing me to the many forms of the Divine Feminine revered in Vedic tradition—Durga, Kali, Lakshmi, Saraswati. For the first time, I was encountering a spiritual tradition in which the feminine face of the Divine wasn’t absent. She was everywhere.
Regardless of wealth or status, men and women visited temples daily. And temples were everywhere, from tiny altars on the side of the street to large marble structures.
But simply being surrounded by the Divine Mother didn’t mean I was ready to receive Her.
My conditioning came with me.
“Have no other gods before me” rang loudly in my head, alongside warnings against “worshiping false idols.” When I looked at the murtis, I thought, This must be exactly what they were talking about.
The first time I witnessed a puja—an early morning ritual honoring the Mother—it seemed performative to me. It felt culty. The women wore white and went through the motions as though they were on a stage. I didn’t feel the devotion. I didn’t witness a connection.
Yet, I remained curious.
Some part of me wanted to see beyond the conditioning of my childhood.
After twenty-eight days of Yoga Teacher Training, we were set to graduate on December 16th, my thirty-eighth birthday. I had avoided going to puja throughout the entire training, yet that morning, I felt called to go.
A different lead teacher was conducting puja that day. And this time, something was different.
As she moved through the ritual, I experienced her heart. I felt her deep love for the Mother. I understood that what I was witnessing was not simply a series of prescribed gestures. For her, this was an act of devotion.
Through this witnessing, something in me opened.
I began to understand that puja could be a performance—or it could be a sacred act of devotion. The ritual itself wasn’t what determined that. What mattered was the relationship beneath it: the relationship between the person performing the ritual and the Divine.
Perhaps what had changed that morning wasn’t the puja.
Perhaps it was my willingness to see Her.
So much internal—and external—metamorphosis followed that birthday. What had begun as curiosity became a deeper exploration of the Divine Feminine and, with it, a gradual loosening of the religious conditioning I had carried with me.
By November of 2018, I was open to receiving initiation into the Dasha Mahavidyas, the Ten Tantric Wisdom Goddesses—ten forms of Ma Kali.
These were not simply soft, nurturing expressions of the feminine. Some were fierce. Wild. Unkempt. Raw power—Shakti. Together, they presented a much fuller spectrum of the Divine Mother than anything I had encountered before.
She did not have to be pretty or pleasing. She did not have to be quiet, pure, or contained. Just like Mother Nature, She could create and destroy. She could nurture and devour. She could be beautiful and terrifying. She could hold the whole of life.
This was the Divine Feminine without the requirement that She conform to our ideas of what a woman—or a Mother—should be.
Just a year earlier, the idea of participating in a ritual honoring the Divine Mother had triggered warnings of false gods and idol worship in my mind. Now I was willingly entering into a tradition that invited me into direct relationship with Her.
This was more than a change in what I believed. Something in my relationship with the Divine was changing.
And it was through this initiation that another unexpected doorway opened for me: Mary Magdalene.
As my relationship with the Divine Feminine deepened, I began to question why reconnecting with Her felt so radical in the first place.
My own conditioning was religious, but I began to see it as part of something much larger. For generations, patriarchal systems have privileged the masculine—action, authority, hierarchy, rationality—while devaluing qualities associated with the feminine: intuition, receptivity, emotion, embodiment, cycles, relationship with the Earth.
Even as women entered the workforce in greater numbers, we were largely asked to adapt to systems already built around masculine ways of operating. Success often meant learning to perform within those structures rather than being invited to infuse them with our own natural strengths—our creativity, intuition, relational intelligence, fluidity, and cyclical ways of being.
In the process, many of us became separated from these more feminine aspects of our nature. We learned to distrust our bodies, override our rhythms, question our intuition, contain our sexuality (yet also ‘be sexy’), and measure our value through systems that were not created with our full nature in mind.
The more I explored the Divine Feminine, the more I began to wonder whether healing required something other than becoming more successful within those systems.
Maybe it required remembering another way of being.
So, what was this other way of being that I was beginning to remember?
For me, the wisdom of the Divine Feminine is rooted in relationship with life rather than dominion over it. She teaches through cycles and seasons. Creation and release. Action and rest. Receptivity and expression. She reminds me that change is constant, that rest is not stagnation, and that receiving is as vital as giving.
I already knew this wisdom through the Earth. My body knew it too. What was changing was my willingness to trust it.
I began to recognize how often I had overridden my own rhythms in the name of productivity and perfection—pushing when I needed rest, forcing when something wanted to unfold, looking outside myself for answers when something within me already knew.
Remembering the Mother invited me into a different relationship with myself: to listen to my body, trust my intuition, honor my own cycles, and allow space for creativity and life to move through me rather than believing I always had to make things happen.
This wasn’t about rejecting action, structure, discipline, or direction. I was beginning to understand that the problem was never the masculine itself. The problem was imbalance.
When I speak of the feminine and masculine, I am not speaking simply of different genders, women and men. I believe both principles live within all of us.
The masculine gives us structure, direction, discernment, boundaries, and the capacity to act. The feminine brings receptivity, intuition, creativity, fluidity, and the capacity to listen and respond. We need both.
The masculine without the feminine can become rigid, controlling, and relentless. The feminine without the masculine can remain ungrounded, without the structure needed to bring what we receive into form.
I was praised for my masculine qualities—for my ambition, striving, taking action, accomplishing, pushing, and making things happen. Over time, I learned to measure my worth through those capacities, while the feminine qualities within me remained less recognized and less valued. I learned that I was accepted and valued when I stayed composed, productive, and capable—especially when I didn’t show emotions.
Healing, for me, has not meant replacing one with the other. It has meant restoring relationship between them.
Remembering the Mother did not ask me to abandon my capacity to act. She taught me the importance of timing – a time to soften. A time to receive. A time to pause. To Trust and Listen, always. And when the moment aligned, a time to act.
Perhaps that is what balance actually feels like—not fifty percent feminine and fifty percent masculine, but learning to listen for what life is asking of us now from an integrated place within.
Somewhere along the way, I began to realize that remembering the Divine Mother was changing the way I saw my human mother, too.
The more I allowed the Divine Feminine to be whole—not simply soft, nurturing, beautiful, and accommodating, but fierce, wild, creative, destructive, fluid, and ever-changing—the more space I found for the women in my own lineage to be whole human beings too.
My Mama did not have to embody every quality of the Mother for me. Neither did her mother. Neither do I.
We are women shaped by the mothers who came before us, by the cultures and systems we were born into, by what we were taught to value, and by what we learned to suppress. Each generation receives an inheritance. And each generation has an opportunity to become conscious of what it is carrying.
This brings me back to where I began.
Healing the mother line, for me, has become both deeply human and deeply Divine.
It is looking back at the women who came before me with compassion—honoring the ways they were able to show up, while releasing my attachment to the ways they could not.
And it is remembering the Mother beneath it all. The sacred presence I knew through the Earth as a little girl. The Mother I was conditioned not to grant the same authority as the Father. The Mother I encountered again in India in forms I had once been taught to fear. The Mother whose wisdom has slowly taught me to trust my body, my intuition, my rhythms, my creativity, and my own direct relationship with the Divine.
The women before me gave me more than their wounds. They literally gave me life.
Perhaps healing the mother line is learning to receive that life with gratitude without carrying everything they could not heal.
And perhaps it is also becoming conscious of what I choose to carry forward. I will never carry a child in my womb, yet my flame continues to light the way for generations to come.
I cannot change what moved through the women before me. I can choose what moves through me.
And that, too, is an act of mothering.