Mother As Initiator
The fourth function of the mother is initiating, and it is the most difficult to understand. It is through acts of initiation that you come to feel as though you are a valuable and welcome member of your family. As you develop, it is this function that provides the inner feeling that your life has meaning, and by the teenage years you understand that you have the right to become the full expression of your own unique life. It is also the initiation function that permits, accepts, and celebrates your leaving home to start your own life.

A girl achieves the inner experience of womanhood by way of initiation by the mother, who does this through how she treats her own womanhood and that of her daughter. The father plays a key role in initiation as well by recognizing the girl's power and her natural right to become a woman. For a boy, it is the father who is the primary initiator into manhood, but it is the mother who recognizes that the boy is leaving her side to enter the company of men. She signals that this is appropriate, not a reason for guilt, and she supports his bringing "mother replacements" in the way of female friends and girlfriends into her house. In welcoming them she acknowledges his independence.

When initiation occurs in a timely and clear manner, it is a beautiful process, though often painful for the parent. Most initiation takes place through symbols, rituals, and unspoken behavior. When it does not occur, there is a sense of guilt, of staying a youth, of not knowing or not feeling entitled to one's place in life. For a mother to be effective in providing initiation, she must have somehow received or found her own. It is the most selfless of all the aspects, for she is encouraging a separation that leaves her without. This initiating power is associated with the shaman, the goddess, the magus, and the medicine woman.

In seeking initiation you may be attracted to teachers who claim superior understanding, who create an impression of having vast authority, thus signaling what is often a false claim that they can initiate. You may frantically want answers in your life, not understanding that initiatory power will come to you if you treat your questions as sacred. It is tempting to surrender your power to a teacher rather than seek a teacher who will initiate you so that you gain self-empowerment.

You may be caught in wanting to have energetic experiences on the cushion as a form of initiation. You may simply want something to happen in your life that signals your aliveness, meaning, and place. It is a call for initiation. It is much the same with teenagers who get tattoos, pierce their bodies, form cliques, posses, or gangs, and carelessly risk their lives and use drugs or fundamentalism of one sort or another to initiate themselves.

It is not realistic to expect a parent to provide all the initiation functions for a child. A parent only begins the process of initiation, which can be viewed as a series of lifelong developmental processes that are actualized through the use of rituals and sacred space by various spiritual and societal leaders. If you were fortunate, what you did not receive from a mother or father, you might have received from grandparents, a caring relative, a teacher, or youth leader. Your experience of the first three functions may have been less than "good enough," therefore you may never have had the momentum to seek initiation.

Likewise, your mother and your father may have suffered from their own lack of initiation such that providing initiation was simply far beyond them, even though they were good parents in other ways.

Initiation begins with finding an identity within the family and community, then switches to initiation into wholeness within your inner being, and culminates in a sense of unity with life itself. Each stage of initiation is more subtle than the previous one, and the unhealed emotional wounds become more treacherous to deal with at each level. It is never too late for you to experience any of the stages of initiation in your life. Both through your own explorations and by working with those who act as elders, you can achieve a deeper symbolic relationship with yourself and life.

Mindfulness & the Mother Wound
There are a series of reflections that may help you develop your yoga of the mother wound. For instance, throughout human history, the tasks of mothering were shared by members of the extended family, tribal elders, and family friends. The community had rituals that helped in the process, including those that taught you to take comfort in the earth or nature as the Great Mother. Unfortunately, nowadays there is often only a mother and father to do all that needs to be done. Nor is there much use of nature as mother or of group ritual. Is it any wonder that your mother may have struggled with some of these aspects of mothering?

No matter how difficult your relationship with your mother, there is still the singular fact that she carried you to birth. The gift of birth forms its own strong bond. Likewise, there is within your mother experience a level of sufficiency that brought you to this moment. Your having this awareness and capacity means that the mothering you received was good enough for you to go on from there to find your own wholeness in life.

Maybe the most useful reflection is to realize the gift of the negative. This points to the understanding that what was not given or was poorly given is also valuable because of what it elicits from you. Much of your wisdom comes from having to cope with the pain and uncertainty you experienced as a child. The negative mothering experiences helped form your priorities, taught you what was important, and gave you the motivation to be different as a parent yourself. They are a critical part of your inheritance; they forced you to know yourself and to develop a sense of right and wrong.

If you do not receive the negative as a gift, if you see it only as suffering, you reduce your relationship to life and distort the richness of your life experiences. Moreover, you are far less likely to make your life all it can be. It is this failure to manifest your own values that would be the true tragedy. This understanding is a key to your own empowerment. It allows the yoga to transform your mother wound into an enhanced sense of aliveness and freedom. Can you feel this potential in your heart? Can you cultivate this understanding with your own intuition?

As the yoga of the mother wound begins to stretch both your heart and mind, more insights become available to you. One is that much of what you took so personally is in fact quite impersonal. What was done and not done to you or for you arose out of a set of conditions in your mother's life. You need not carry the actions caused by those conditions as a personal burden. Therefore, the wounds you once thought to be intransigent are accessible and subject to change. The wounds do not disappear, but they lose much of their charge. They fail to hook your mind and imprison your heart. Keep in mind that meditation is not psychotherapy. These words are the offering of a meditation teacher, not a therapist. In mindfulness practice, unlike therapy, the specific content of afflictive emotions are not the focus of your attention.

Instead, the focus is on the mind state that is arising. The teachings are concerned with finding freedom from your wanting mind. They guide you to discover for yourself that happiness is not dependent on the external conditions of your present, past, or future life. You may well greatly benefit from working with a therapist as a supplement to your practice, reflecting the principle that "you must first have a self in order to give up attachment to it."

If you make the mother wound your yoga, you may encounter a trauma that is not resolvable in the context of daily life goals. Such extreme experiences are often viewed as the "sacred wound." A sacred wound is that trauma which occurred so early in your life or was so deep that it forces you into the spiritual life because it is not possible for you to find the peace you seek in any other way. Because of the motivation it provides, it is viewed as a gift, though a costly one that renders many of life's ordinary rewards unsatisfactory and can lead you to perform unskillful actions.

When you decide to embrace the mother wound as your yoga and make it your teacher, a miraculous and unexpected event occurs. As you find your freedom from being captured by the wound, you also give your mother back her own life. Rather than simply being a label, a set of responsibilities called "mother," she is allowed to be a woman, a human being with her own story, her own gains and losses, and a life trajectory separate from yours. It is not that she ceases to be your mother, but that she becomes everything else she always was, except in the minds of her children.

The author wishes to acknowledge that the mothering functions described in this article are rooted in the archetypal psychology of C. G. Jung and his successors, including Robert Moore and Joseph Henderson, M.D. "Dharma Wisdom" columnist Phillip Moffitt is a member of the Spirit Rock Teachers' Council in Woodacre, California, and the founder and president of the Life Balance Institute. He teaches vipassana meditation at Turtle Island Yoga Center in San Rafael, California. For a retreat schedule, check www.lifebalance.org.

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