Walking Motherless: Receiving Love After Loss

Love doesn't have to be perfect to be real.

I feel like I've gone through a year of therapy in the last two weeks since my mom passed.

There's something extraordinary about cosmic timing. A couple of newsletters ago, I wrote to you about the powerful planetary events bringing in massive change. A time for unexpected endings, new beginnings, and reconstruction happening all at once. You can read it here, When Time Stands Still: Finding Grounding in Unexpected Moments

Little did I know how true that would be and how it would reshape my life as I learned to walk motherless for the first time. As I’ve been grieving, something unexpected is happening, I’m receiving massive downloads of love I couldn’t access before.

In the past few weeks, I've had so many winks from the Universe – signs and synchronicities that seem like they're coming directly from my mom. It feels as if I’m on a spiritual scavenger hunt picking up tiny breadcrumbs guiding me towards healing.

While I was working away on a new tapping (EFT) project, the idea of 'sisterhood' unexpectedly dropped in, reminding me of the book, 'Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood'. I had forgotten about the story but suddenly felt the urge to watch the movie that night! It felt like more than a coincidence. As I was thinking about my relationship with my mom, this story about mothers, daughters, and healing appeared.

The timing seemed perfect, as if my mom was nudging me toward something I needed to see.

There I was, seeing myself in Sandra Bullock's character Sidda – the daughter with a complicated relationship with her mom. I was both the little girl basking in her mom's sparkling gaze at the lake, and the grown woman standing in her kitchen, devastated when her mom hung up on her. Joy and heartbreak, all in one story.

As I watched Ashley Judd's character Vivi, it reminded me of how charismatic and beautiful my mom was and how I adored her. The movie spoke directly to what I was feeling, that forgiveness was what my heart needed most.

We all put walls around our hearts sometimes.

These emotional barriers can make us feel numb, disconnected from feelings and memories that should be accessible. It's as if certain files on our mental hard drive became corrupted.

When we can't receive love emotionally, we process it only intellectually. This is the mind without the heart. We understand love with our minds but don’t fully feel it. This creates relationships that lack the affection that makes human relationships whole.

Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist from the early 1900s, had beautiful insights about our inner world. Jung believed that we all have parts of ourselves we've tucked away in what he called our "shadow."

Our mind has a basement where we store things that felt too painful or uncomfortable to deal with. The problem is, those stored-away parts still affect us, even when we can't see them.

Like Jung famously said, "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate."

This makes perfect sense now. The blocks in my heart weren't accidents, they were shields I created to protect myself when I was younger.

Here's what I've discovered, my mom was always sending me love, just in a file my heart couldn't open. Like incompatible software systems, we were sending and receiving love differently. The love was there, we were just speaking different languages. But once I accessed my heart differently, all the years of her love came flooding in.

Learning to walk in the world without my mom doesn't mean walking without her love. It's the opposite. Now that my heart has cleared these old blocks, I feel her love more strongly than ever, even though she's no longer physically here.

Why couldn't I receive these messages before?

Our subconscious mind acts as a gatekeeper for our heart. It decides what feelings get to come in and what stays out. While it's trying to protect us from pain, this gatekeeper can be overly cautious, sometimes turning away love that's been knocking at our door for years.

Think of it as an antivirus filter that quarantines important files because it doesn't recognize their format. In this space created by grief and divine timing, my system's firewall temporarily disabled, allowing this backlog of love and memories to finally download.

As spring brings new beginnings, I wonder how many of us have love waiting to be received. What messages of love might be sitting in your spiritual inbox, sent in a language your heart isn't able to comprehend?

Try this: Close your eyes and picture a small light in the center of your chest. This is your heart's light. Take three deep breaths while focusing on this light. As Jung said,”your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart.” This simple practice helps you notice and expand what's already there.

Maybe that's the real divine secret, love doesn't have to be perfect to be real. Sometimes our greatest healing comes not from finding new love, but from finally receiving the love that's been there all along.

….. until next time many many sweet blessings.

Love + Wellness to You!

Lynn