Sometimes the answer is to be mothered, and sometimes it is to become the mother. This is true on the human level, but it can also happen on the spiritual level. Ariel, who was very undermothered, turned to the goddess tradition to provide a positive model of the mother and the deep feminine, finding it healing and transformative.

As my story illustrates, early interruptions to the mother-child bond can originate long before we’re ever conceived. The effects can remain in our unconscious and live in our body as somatic memories that can be triggered by events reminiscent of rejection or abandonment. When this happens, we can feel entirely out of sync with ourselves. Our thou

So we ignore it, this voice of our destiny, of our ultimate destination. And ignoring that voice will bring us nothing but discontent. But if we can listen to this voice, accept its challenges, and expand instead of contract into suffering, we will find our true selves.

If we listen to dream voices, to images, to stories—especially those from our own lives, and to our art, to those who have gone before, and to each other, something will be handed out to us, even several somethings that are ritual, personal psychological rites, these serving to steady this stage of the process.9