6 Symptoms of the mother wound
At its core, the mother wound is a distortion or disconnection (depending on severity) from the source energy of life. This wound occurred on a global scale following climate change some 6,000 years ago that deeply affected human existence due to prolonged drought, desertification, and famine. Symptoms of the mother wound include:
1. Disconnection from nature
We live in a world that prides itself on how much it loves nature. Yet the love of nature is mostly restricted to ‘pretty nature’—lakes, rivers, mountains, animals, flowers. We enjoy nature as a photogenic background to our real lives, which mostly take place on housing estates, industrial parks, motorways, on airplanes and among cell towers.
Nature has another side: the dark side of the life cycle. Autumn leaves turning to mould. Barren fields in winter. Worms. Bacteria. Vermin. Carrion birds and other scavengers. Rats and mice. Gutting and cleaning fish. Slaughtering animals for meat.
Society is largely disconnected from all this and does everything it can to airbrush it out of existence. That’s why the farmers we depend on for food are treated so poorly.
Yet the dark side isn’t just about degeneration; it’s about regeneration too. Disconnect from one and you disconnect from the other.
The devastation of the environment is testament to this disconnection.
2. Disconnection from the divine
One of the symptoms of the mouther wound is a dulling down of feeling. The less we feel, the more we retreat into the ivory tower of the intellect and lead our lives from there as separate entities, tossed on the raging seas of the vast cosmos.
Restore feeling and intuitive data sources appear. The universe is alive with sentient entities engaged in a great dance—except for supposedly intelligent humanity, grimly clinging to a paradigm that excludes subjective truth.
3. Fear, shame, and hyper-emphasis on sexuality
Our disconnection from the dark side of life is most evident in the shame and horror of our own reproductive mechanism.
Disconnected from natural sexuality, we’ve created a world where anything overtly sexual is publicly shamed while young girls parade themselves on social media with makeup, jewellery, and the skimpiest clothes they can get away.
Yet we hug hunched over, with our bums sticking out from fear of genital contact.
Sexually capable males have been replaced with porn addicts, erectile dysfunction, premature ejaculation, voyeurism, and rape.
No one knows what natural human sexuality looks like. Early psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich wrote that “Man is the only species who has destroyed his natural sex function, and that is what ails him.”
4. Shame of basic bodily functions
As well as sex, we’re ashamed of nudity and all the ‘lower’ functions of our bodies: sweating, farting, urination, elimination, ejaculation, menstruation.
We’ve created massive social structures—including behaviour, clothing, and buildings—to avoid the shame of natural bodily functions essential to life.
Do you (or would you) feel ashamed if someone sees you in the toilet? That’s your mother wound.
5. Inability to nurture
The ‘mother of all symptoms’ of the mother wound is the inability to nurture. This is the Ground Zero of the mother wound, the point where humanity broke and keeps breaking. It’s the inception point—the only point—of the mother wound and, as such, the only place it can truly be healed.
In Saharasia, geographer James DeMeo describes the onset of the mother wound due to famine some 6,000 years ago in the Sahara, Middle East, Arabia, and central Asia:
“A passive indifference to the needs or pain of others manifested itself, and hunger, feeding of the self, became their all-consuming passion… The very old and young were abandoned to die. Brothers stole food from sisters, and husbands left wives and babies to fend for themselves. While the maternal-infant bond endured the longest, eventually mothers abandoned their weakened infants and children.”
The breaking of the mother-child bond meant that infants were raised with physical substance but without emotional sustenance. Once this became embedded in the human psyche—a process that took several thousand years—the other symptoms of the mother wound listed here also became institutionalised.
To varying degrees, we were all raised with a lack of emotional sustenance. Evidence: look at the dearth of emotional intelligence in modern society.
6. Fear of death
Collectively, the mother wound created what we refer to as survival mentality—a short-term outlook that prizes immediate material gain and places little or no value on long-term planning, investment, maintenance, and sustainability.
At the root of this lies the fear of death. Separated from the innate knowingness that we’re an integral part of the universe, a tiny cog in the giant Swiss watch of time and space, we continually make short-term decisions to stave off our own demise.
Ironically, short-term decisions have increasingly long-term negative effects, hastening the opposite of what they’re supposed to prevent—death.
If you choose to heal your mother wound, you can start with any one of these symptoms. All will lead you to the same place—confronting your fear of death and seeking to re-establish genuine emotional nurturing above all else.
You can try starting here.
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Photo by Dawid Zawiła on Unsplash