Renewal
January 23, 2022
Last year, I took a class called” Spiritual Psychology” as part of my seminary training. We studied a book called “Awakening With The Tree of Life”. The author Megan Wagner combined several models to examine the seven stages of human development. These models included the Veda Chakra system from India, the Jewish Kabbala tradition, Greek mythology, and Developmental Psychology. She named the seven stages using a physical tree starting from the roots to the trunks and branches. At the roots, a tree gets nourishment from mother earth. As human beings, we get nurtured by our mothers. The mother symbol is an archetype that comes from the relationship between a parent and a child. The bond between them creates healthy dependency and attachment. In this book, Wagner called it the Great Mother Archetype. The roots of our trees are also firmly connected to our ancestors. At these beginning stages, our connection to our family and community plays a major role in our development. The Western culture tends to emphasize more on the father archetype which encourages us to be independent. It downplays the dependency on the mother archetype. Some people end up separating from their root system too soon. I come from the Eastern culture where the great mother energy never stopped flowing. Although I left home at 21 years old, emotionally I was still attached to the great mother. In this culture, I have missed that attachment.
During the class, we plotted our family tree and examined the relationship between several generations. As a child, if we did not receive enough positive mother energy from our family system, we end up carrying this wound into our adulthood. Staring at our family system in one chart, our reactions included sweetness, sorrow, and pain. Close your eyes imagine yourself as a tree and try to answer these questions silently. How and from where did you get nourished as you were growing up? How did your family origin help shape who you are as an adult?
On the subject of renewal, we cannot order up another set of parents or any other family members. And we may not be able to redo our relationship with them, even if they are still alive. But we can re-do the relationship inside of ourselves as part of our own healing. We can learn to call in the positive mother energy to nurture ourselves.
The Tree of Life is a symbol of rebirth as trees lose their leaves and seem to be dead during winter, but then new buds appear and new, fresh leaves unfurl during the spring. This represents the beginning of a new life and a fresh start. To renew ourselves, we can be the Great Mother to ourselves. To renew ourselves, we can reconcile with our past and let it go like the tree dying a thousand small deaths so that we don’t carry our trauma into our current lives and project our wounding onto our relationship with others. Each time we come around we get a chance to rebirth ourselves. Together as a group of trees, we can regenerate our collective great mother energy and provide nutrients for all the generations to come.