Mother’s Day

image by Quang Nguyen Vinh from Pexels

A divine feminine celebration

Happy Mother’s Day! It seems like such a joy-filled phrase doesn’t it? So all inclusive and wonderful. Well it’s certainly a powerful message of recognition for one of the most profound roles anyone can ever play. But, not all women are created equal and for some it is a day of challenges and deep introspection. The ideal mother, the gold standard greeting card version, is what we are all taught we need to strive to be or can expect to have as our experience. The reality is that some women will never reach that standard, not because they love their children any less than the hallmark inspired versions of motherhood would suggest, but because they simply do not have the internal or emotional resources to do so.

A woman who was raised by a wounded mother (read here alcoholic, addicted, mentally unstable or ill, abandoned, abused, unloved, chronically ill, workaholic, perfectionist, critical, overly judgemental, heavily stressed, or even absent mother) will have filters on her psyche through which she experiences love, and these filters may either inhibit or radically enhance her ability to love her own child.

Some mothers replay the wounding of their own childhood because it is all they know how to do, and on some level they’ve accepted that distorted love is real love and they believe it is enough… they never learned how to ask for, or reach for more; others reject their childhood wounds and overcompensate by ensuring their children want for nothing and they love them to the point of entitlement and apathy; and there is a full spectrum of the mothering experience that lies between and beyond these two examples.

Why am I saying these things? Well it feels like there is an unreasonable amount of pressure placed on mothers by their partners, their families, their community, their teachers and leaders, their colleagues and bosses, their peers, friends, enemies, social media… and most importantly, themselves. A mother often feels that she needs to be all things to all people and will so often sacrifice her own comfort, growth and happiness for the sake of her children. A woman who has not known unconditional love in her own life may well struggle to offer that to her children… unless and until she heals the wounds of her own past, and that may be a lifelong process.

So while we are singing the loving praises of our amazing mothers on social media, in public, in our own families and lives, let us offer compassionate understanding to the mothers who may be struggling with the task at hand and who may be feeling like they aren’t ‘making the grade’. Those mothers facing challenges most of us will never have to encounter or could never understand; those mothers who are smiling to hide their tears and who push down their fears and doubts and insecurities, who hide their grief and their overwhelm. Every mother loves her children to the best of her ability, however, that ability is so often determined by factors over which she had no control or ability to influence. We do not all start with the same toolkit.

Which brings me to this wonderful truth:

It takes a village to raise a child.

Let us offer on this day of recognition and celebration, our heartfelt thanks and gratitude to the others in our lives who uplift, and support, and love without reservation, both the mothers and the precious children in our care. Those who pick up the slack when we find ourselves flagging, who love us unconditionally no matter how poorly we might think we are doing, who are honoured and treasured members of our parenting teams without whom we might collapse under the enormous weight of responsibility we sometimes feel.

Mothering is the feminine divine in action and embodies the energies of nurturing, holding, guiding, supporting, encouraging and allowing and it isn’t necessary for a woman, or indeed a man, to have physically birthed a child to embody this way of being. So my wish on this Mother’s Day is to not only salute the mums who did the hard labour, and heaven only knows you’ve earned the title and should wear it with pride, same for those who struggled through the IVF process, or went through the anguish of the adoption process, who fostered, used surrogates, who took into their hearts and homes the children of other mothers, anyone who supported and championed young hearts in need… I salute you all; I wish to recognize too, the invaluable contributions of the rest of womanhood who by choice or providence may never have their own personal mother and child experience, but who, by virtue of their divine feminine energy. are helping to raise the women of the future.

As always, I offer you my understanding of things. I encourage you at all times to question and decide for yourself what you want to accept and onboard. I am always interested to hear your opinions and I encourage feedback. However, it is essential to understand this vital truth as we journey together:

We don’t have to agree on a single thing to be kind to one another.

So, disagree with me by all means, own your different perspective, but please remain respectful of other’s beliefs and journeys.

Treat yourself with EMpathy and EMbolden yourself to dream. EMerge from your learned way of being, allowing yourself to celebrate life as you EMbrace your full potential. EMancipate yourself from your limitations, EMpowering yourself to live with greater clarity and joy!

Until next time, be kind to one another and honor yourself as the unique and incredibly special soul that you are.

© Copyright 2020 – Janice Melmed

10. Building a blueprint for life

Self-mastery one lifetime at a time

For this blog I am once again delving into the quantum space. I may talk about concepts you’ve never encountered before. I ask that you read to the end before deciding whether this is madness or inspired. You never know it may surprise you.

I’ve spoken quite a lot about us being souls living a human experience through the medium of love. I’ve spoken too about how we come to earth to master different aspects of humanity and to seek enlightenment. I’ve been very clear about the need for us to decide for ourselves what our soul experience will be in each incarnation. So how do we do that, you might ask? Also, if we have planned our lifetime, then why is it that so often we find ourselves living lives that just don’t seem to fit or feel ‘right’?

To answer those questions let us start by imagining ourselves sitting Upstairs in between lifetimes, as a not yet fully enlightened soul. You might be deciding whether or not to incarnate again as a human. There are so many aspects of humanity to be explored that you could be living an infinite number of lives before you get through them all. For the sake of illustrating the point let us assume you are a soul who is needing to master the aspect known as power. It is quite possible that you have had previous lifetimes where you had great power and you perhaps did amazing things with it; and then you may have had another lifetime where you abused your power and created some chaos and mayhem. In order to fully understand all aspects of the power construct it makes sense that you should also experience total disempowerment so that you have a full and complete understanding of the power aspect of humanity.

I need to interject here and share with you that souls travel in groups (some sources say hundreds and some say thousands of beings in a soul group. I don’t have an attachment to a number, but I definitely resonate with the concept). Each group forms a collective consciousness. All souls in a particular collective are grappling with the same aspect of humanity. No soul proceeds along in the celestial game to the next aspect until every soul in their collective group has mastered the current aspect fully. This is why you get to choose to incarnate again as opposed to perhaps staying Upstairs to help out another soul who may be struggling.

Think of this exercise as building a project plan for a huge development… a fair analogy for an entire lifetime. Your Higher Self, which is that aspect of you that knows everything there is to know about you across all lifetimes, incarnations, and experiences, and has full access to your Akashic records as inscribed in the Book of Life, is your project manager. It makes perfect sense does it not that you would put the most knowledgeable soul aspect in charge of the project. Your project manager will liaise with the various souls in your group to see who has what requirements that might dovetail in with your plan or which souls are free to get involved in supporting your plan. All aspects of your life are then built into the project plan. This is, in effect, the overall scope of work. Resources are engaged beginning with your parents who are cast in their role, and all aspects of your life are meticulously planned. Birth circumstances, economic factors, country of origin, race, creed, education, life partners, children, teachers, siblings, friends, agonists, protagonists, helpers, supports, abilities, disabilities, opportunities… the whole nine yards, including a bunch of contingency plans and a couple of emergency exit strategies for in case you get so off track that correction is not possible, or you choose to bail and recalibrate your game. Everything you could possibly need to be able to experience total disempowerment is built in. If all goes according to plan in this upcoming incarnation and you reach a complete understanding of disempowerment, and that is indeed the last piece of the power puzzle for you, then you will have finally mastered that aspect of humanity. This completes another leg of your enlightenment journey. Once all the souls in your group have reached the same level of mastery, your soul group moves on to a different aspect of humanity and the game begins anew. It really is a thing of beauty. Once you are satisfied that your plan is fully scoped and all resources have been cast and everyone knows what is expected of them, you press Go on the game board of life. The souls cast as your parents begin the dance that will lead to your conception and in time you are born! Then the game begins in earnest.

There are, however, one or two enormous challenges that can easily knock this wonderful plan off-course. The frequency in the soul space and the frequency of the human aspect are not fully compatible. Once you have gone through the traumatic experience of being born, you find yourself totally helpless, trapped in a newly born baby’s body unable to do a single thing for yourself. You cannot remember your life plan at this new denser frequency, and so you begin to flounder your way through life, learning how to be a human. Everyone plays their part to the best of their ability without remembering, for the most part, that they have a part to play. This leads me to the second problem with the plan… free will. It is a unique aspect that souls on earth work with and it creates all manner of chaos and misdirection. You can imagine without too much difficulty how this could send a plan spinning off in the wrong direction. Perhaps one of your parents married someone other than who you cast, or they decided to go live in outer Mongolia, or they become politicians instead of farmers as you had planned. Extreme examples, but all possible due to free will. At every junction in our lives, we make choices that change our path and the path of anyone we are influencing. Ultimately by the time you are fully grown you may be so far removed from where you planned to be, through no fault of anyone at all, that it becomes hugely challenging to get yourself back on track. Your Higher Self, or project manager, may not intervene unless you specifically ask them to. This is not likely to happen until you remember they are there and so Upstairs they will be working flat out to move people and places and contingencies into your path hoping that something will resonate with you and you will begin to remember why you are here.

Isn’t it ironic, we come here as a soul with a fully loaded and scoped plan; we forget the plan the minute we arrive (are born), are often completely misdirected by our parents, teachers, and other resources who are striving to teach us to be what they believe is the best version of ourselves, and all the while, we are learning how to be human. Once we are fully grown and have reached independence, we begin to develop spiritually and then we start the process of learning how to become an enlightened soul again… which is what we were when we first arrived. Neat!

So how do we eventually remember our soul plan, what our purpose in this life is, and begin to get ourselves back on track? Well, some people never do. They live the lives their parents, teachers and other extrinsic influencers have taught them to live and they experience perfectly ordinary lives that meet their ordinary expectations and they go through the motions quite happily following the rules and guidelines and never questioning anything outside of their immediate need’s radius. They are happy, uncomplicated people who do what is expected of them and they leave this life completely satisfied, but wholly unenlightened. For others, we begin to question and think for ourselves. It may start as a slight stirring inside, a feeling that there has to be more to life than what we are experiencing. Possibly we find ourselves uncomfortable with the norm; at odds with people in our lives, feeling challenged by the never-ending rules and dictates of society. Our lives feel uncomfortable and so we begin to search our souls for answers to the questions “who am I”, and “why am I here”. We begin to live life mindfully, more conscious of, and focused on, our own worth. We begin to develop our intuition and we lean into our heart’s desires. We begin to find out for ourselves what our authentic voice wants to say, rather than listening to the voices of everyone else who has had, and continues to have, influence over our lives. We begin to awaken. Usually, this awakening only begins once we find ourselves wholly out of balance and troubled by our existence. Then the real fun starts as we begin to unscramble everything that we thought was true and work out what actually is true for us. As we begin to question for ourselves who we are and why we are here, we often find there is much self-healing that is needed… but more on that at a later date.

As always, I offer you my understanding of things. I encourage you at all times to question and decide for yourself what you want to accept and onboard. I’m always interested to hear your opinions and I encourage feedback. However, it is essential to understand this vital truth as we journey together:

We don’t have to agree on a single thing to be kind to one another

So, disagree with me by all means, own your different perspective, but please remain respectful of other’s beliefs and journeys.

Treat yourself with EMpathy and EMbolden yourself to dream. 

EMerging from your learned way of being,

Allows you to celebrate life as you EMbrace your full potential.

EMancipating yourself from your limitations

EMpowers you to live with greater clarity and joy!

Until next time when we will look at the question, “are you living the life you chose?” be kind to one another and honour yourself as the unique and incredibly special soul that you are.

© Copyright 2020 – Janice Melmed

09. The shadow self

Living in illusion

In my last blog about self-worth, I referenced the shadow self. I have read and explored much on this subject and I have been given many perspectives on what our shadow is. Much of what I was initially told about shadow was coloured by the perspective of the person imparting the information. This person happened to be a very wounded soul who hadn’t done much work in reclaiming her own value, and as such her interpretation was at best skewed, and at worst, completely misleading. This led to me wandering for many years believing that my shadow side contained the elements of my own inner axe-murderer and was to be suppressed and denied at all costs. I no longer blindly believe everything I am told and prefer to research and decide for myself what I choose to believe. I would therefore like to offer you my personal understanding of the shadow self now that I have had the opportunity to explore it more fully.

Our shadow self is an incredibly important and valuable aspect of self. Until we unpack it, make our peace with what we find there, and embrace the full spectrum of ourselves, we can never be completely whole.

I would like to insert a rather interesting quantum fact here that you may or may not resonate with. As each human being has a unique and specific fingerprint, so each soul has a unique and specific colour imprint or identity. It is not possible within the limitations of the human capacity to perceive this, but on a cosmic level, souls are uniquely identified by their specific colour signatures. Having parts of our self in shadow distorts our colour resonance and reduces our frequency or resonance. Since we seek enlightenment through the human experience, it is reasonable to conclude that in order to attain that enlightenment we need to step out from, light up, or fully embrace our shadow.

How do we get a shadow self and how does it operate? Carl Jung the founder of analytical psychology, first introduced the concept of a shadow self thus:

The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge. Carl Jung, Aion (1951)

Well, reading that I can understand how my wounded teacher misread the concept and taught me that everything that was bad about me was locked up in my shadow and I should make every effort to keep it that way.

I have come to understand through years of learning and personal journey work, that our shadow side holds the experiences in life that we were not able to understand and process, or that perhaps made us feel unsafe. Any aspects of ourselves that we were taught, or learned (albeit erroneously), that made us feel unacceptable to those we sought approval from, reside here as well. Everything in the shadow is not bad as I was initially led to believe. Some of the very finest aspects of ourselves can be stored in our shadow. As a child I was taught by my mentally ill mother that I needed to be as invisible as possible in order to be acceptable, or at least tolerated in my family dynamic. I therefore learned to suppress any aspects of free will, joy, and spontaneity. Since energy cannot be destroyed, and I was unwilling to own those aspects of myself, because to do so got me into big trouble, those parts of me were stored in my shadow. They stayed there waiting for me to reclaim myself through enquiry, introspection, understanding and finally, acceptance, thereby transmuting them back into the light, or my conscious reality.

If something happens to us that is too painful to process, such as a sudden unexpected tragedy, or a violation of ourselves, we likewise can store these experiences in our shadow. This allows us to continue our lives without carrying a huge burden that feels like it could overwhelm us. I would like to share with you the story of a gentleman I worked with during my years studying Inner Tuition. We were looking at the wounded inner child and as I began to scan his body’s energy field, I was transported in my mind to a kitchen. I had no idea where I was, but there was a little boy wearing a cowboy hat sitting on the floor playing with a puppy. I observed this happy little scene quietly. An adult male entered the kitchen. He was drunk and shouting abuse and the little boy grabbed his puppy and clutched it to him protectively. The wretched man was hurling abuse at the small child and was taunting him that, “Cowboys don’t cry!” The little chap was by then sobbing in fear. The man grabbed the puppy and wrung its neck! He threw the limp little body down on the floor next to the child and left shouting, “Cry about that you big baby!”

When I tentatively said to the client, “cowboys don’t cry”, he broke down completely. He explained to me that his father was an alcoholic. He grew up being mocked by him for being a gentle, sensitive child, and he frequently found himself being the target for his father’s drunken rages. His dad had killed his puppy to punish him for crying. As a little boy unable to process or understand such violence and abuse, and with no way to escape his persecutor, he had locked that memory up tight in his shadow, he schooled himself not to cry, and he proceeded to live as quietly as he could so as not to incur his father’s wrath. He had buried that memory in his shadow and had plastered over it so successfully that he had forgotten all about it. We understand that energy can never be destroyed, and once something has happened it can never unhappen or be made to disappear. Since he was developmentally unable to process his abuse and transmute it to understanding, he had unknowingly committed that experience to his shadow. There it was kept safely stored away, waiting for the day when he had the desire/motivation, resources, strength, and courage to go back and look at it. With adult perspective he could hopefully make his peace with what had happened and transmute it to understanding, back out of shadow.

Albeit a very efficient coping mechanism for a young child faced with such horror, fast forward to adulthood, and he was, as a father himself, locked in a battle with his six-year-old son. The child was desperate for a puppy and without knowing why, dad was ardently opposed to it. The son was beginning to withdraw from him and as a parent, he was feeling stuck. This had motivated him to seek help. By going back with an adult’s understanding of his father’s alcoholism, he was able to transmute that horrible experience out of his shadow into the light. Seeing things in the light can often lessen the fear and the anxiety attached to these hidden memories, and with adult perspective one can see them with more clarity. This helps us reclaim our sense of personal power and take charge of the memory as opposed to being victim to it. In this case he found new information that he could use to make a different decision with his own child and to heal the breach between them.

Something else that is interesting to note, is that if you find something in another person that triggers a response in you, they are generally acting as an energetic mirror for something that you have stored in your shadow. I used to have an utter aversion to powerful people, leaders, those in authority. Through journey work I have been able to reclaim my own sense of personal power and having transmuted it out of my shadow, I am no longer triggered by such people. I do, however, remain vulnerable and triggered by bullies and bigots and this is simply an indication to me that I have some unhealed wounds in this regard. Your shadow truly is your best friend. It supports you when you cannot support yourself and it holds the completeness of you when you are unable to be fully and wholly yourself through circumstance, decree or indeed, ignorance.

Examining one’s shadow is tantamount to opening Pandora’s box. You are bound to unearth a whole mess of crap inside, but once you clear away the debris and detritus of your life’s experiences, you may also find some wonderful gems about yourself that you were never able to embrace before, because you unknowingly learned along the way that you were unworthy, not enough, too much, conditional or limited somehow. You took your magnificence and you hid it in your shadow waiting for the day when you were brave enough, to be vulnerable enough, to look under the rocks of your life. You can then let the light in, and your authentic self out.

Since we are here seeking enlightenment through the human experience, it is reasonable to deduce that by shining some light on those aspects of ourselves that are hidden in the shadows of our psyche, we can begin to return to our full light signature or potential and can shine like the unique and incredible souls that we are in our full magnificence and resonance. Now that is what I call an awakening.

As always, I offer you my understanding of things. I encourage you at all times to question and decide for yourself what you want to accept and onboard. I’m always interested to hear your opinions and I encourage feedback. However, it is essential to understand this vital truth as we journey together:

We don’t have to agree on a single thing to be kind to one another.

So, disagree with me by all means, own your different perspective, but please remain respectful of other’s beliefs and journeys.

Treat yourself with EMpathy,
and EMbolden yourself to dream.
EMerging from your learned way of being,
allows you to celebrate as you EMbrace your full potential.
EMancipating yourself from your limitations,
EMpowers you to live with greater clarity and joy!

Until next time when I shall discuss building a blueprint for your life, be kind to one another and honour yourself as the unique and incredibly special soul that you are

© Copyright 2020 – Janice Melmed

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