The Inner Mother & Your Internal Relationship to the "Holidays"

It is the Christmas season once again.

It can feel relentless in its energies of giving and getting, buying and selling, family obligations, holiday parties, and traditional food, whatever any of that may mean to you or to parts of you. Memories of love and loss come forward, childhood joy and sorrow, and an ingrained sense of what this time of year has meant to parts of you, for better or worse.

It is also a time when there is genuine joy and love abounding, when Christ Consciousness codes stream in and through, inviting you to feel and honor your most authentic self. These energies can wrap every part of you, in every reaction they may be having, with gentleness and care.

My childhood memories of this time of year include the anticipation of Christmas morning, and then the melancholy of the season feeling “over” as soon as the sun set on Christmas Day itself. I remember the strain of my parents, mainly my birth mother, and her tendency to overextend herself, become very stressed, and quite often become physically sick in one way or another, either on Christmas Day itself or on the days leading up to it.

My mother always loved Christmas when I was a kid.

Our tree would be expertly and thoroughly decorated with some of the most beautiful, nostalgic, and sentimental ornaments you have ever seen. Some of them even moved or sang or both.

Our stockings were always stuffed to the gills with everything from traditional gifts we got every year from “Santa” to little things we needed.

We often received more gifts than we thought we would, given that she would tell us how “this year was going to be less abundant” because of money.

Then there was her miniature Christmas village that she would build every year, with porcelain houses and village staples like a school, church, post office, street lamps, and cotton laid down like snow. She would even create hills to make it more realistic.

She was not the cook in my family. That was more my dad. Yet she would dote and dwell over decorating the family dinner table as if it were about to air on a home show.

There was also the yearly debacle of baking our family’s traditional Christmas coffee cake for just about every family we were friends with in town. She would do this with my Oma, her mother, always with tension and arguments taking up a great deal of space. These disagreements were often in German, so I would not understand every word, yet the energy of my mother’s constant tension mixed with joy that kept tipping into frustration was palpable.

To this day, my own inner mother has been imprinted with these frequencies, especially the joy-and-tension combo, as the sheer love for this season comes forward along with her ideas of what she wants to create, cook, and give. There is an inherited itch she tries to scratch that cannot quite be named.

But then again, maybe it can.

My birth mother gave and gave in an effort to soothe something within that could not be satisfied. An inner punisher with a cruelly critical voice. Her own inner mother or matriarch who likely encouraged toughness over sensitivity, which was the opposite of the nature of her younger parts. An inner child who was only ever asking for love, not really for the Christmas-y things that were supposed to answer her ache.

There was a martyrdom in her that my own inner mother, Felline, inherited. However saintly this tendency may have appeared, over these years of feeling my parts deeply I have realized that personal cost of any kind does not automatically equal true and deep service to others, even if the soul has been conditioned to believe that it does.

These days I can feel Felline so vividly around Christmas. She still feels the pull to over-give, to hold everything and everyone, to make it all beautiful and meaningful so that no one has to feel lack. When I sense her moving in that way, I try to sit with her instead of letting her run the whole show.

I tell her, “You learned this from a woman who was doing her very best with what she had. You took on her tension and her devotion. You do not have to carry it all alone now. I am here with you. We can choose something different together.”

This is where it may bridge to you too, whether you are a woman or a man:

You also have an inner mother.

She is the one who worries about everyone, who notices the atmosphere in the room, who remembers who likes what, who wants the holiday to feel magical or at least “better than last year.” She might also be the one who feels dread about family gatherings, who braces for conflict, or who collapses once it is all over.

Her anxieties and her joys have probably lived inside you for a long time, so close that they feel like they are simply “you.”

What happens if you meet her as a part of you instead?

You may start to feel where her reactions were inherited from your birth mother or caregivers. You may notice that some of what you feel about this season is not actually how your deepest heart or soul wants to feel now. You might even sense a younger part of you who just wants to be held, not managed.

If you feel to, you can close your eyes for a moment and ask:

“Inner mother, how do you feel about this season, really? What have you been carrying all these years that maybe is not actually yours, but something given to you from my birth mother?”

As she lets you in more on the core of “her” stresses and strains, together you can feel the true heart of the season beating within. A heart that would rather embody and radiate an overflow of love within to others, a gift far richer and more meaningful than anything material or edible.

Sometimes that is how a whole new kind of Christmas begins, from the inside out. And back again.

Love,

Kasha

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Kasha Rosa is a Divine Feminine Love Ambassador, Divine Self Embodiment Facilitator, soul scribe, and poetess.  Visit https://www.divineselfembodiment.com for more information about space-holding sessions and free 45-min intro calls, group calls, videos, community, etc.