The Path Back to You

I’ve heard it said that an emotionally neglected child doesn’t stop loving their parents. They stop loving themselves.

That’s why this section on reparenting is so essential. Because each of us has ways we’ve felt neglected or under-nurtured. Our parents are humans, after all. But when those wounds occur in childhood, we assume we’re the problem.

And we stop loving ourselves. 

Until we gain the wisdom to reparent ourselves and break the cycle of generational trauma.

“Daddy issues.”

We’ve all heard the term. When a woman finds herself in another relationship with a “deadbeat” guy, or a man keeps running into problems with the law, we tend to say they have “daddy issues.” 

And while that might be an unfair stereotype, there is a reality to the impact of father wounds.

Today we’re going to talk about mother wounds.

A mother’s presence is a powerful thing. It has the strength to uplift and inspire, and the potential to damage and disparage. Any kind of literal or emotional neglect can sow seeds in childhood that take all through adulthood to identify and root out. Like a weed left to grow for decades, it can grow as large as a tree. 

How can we learn to hear, see, and heal the inner child in ourselves? The first step is to recognize what unmet needs look like when they’re ignored or unanswered for years, if not decades. 

Because sometimes our most familiar patterns aren’t choices we’re making but habits we’re falling back into, and we must learn to differentiate between our intuition guiding us and our traumas– both big and small– misleading us. 

The New Moon reminds us that new beginnings are always possible. 

The New Moon in Virgo is inviting you to the places in you where you feel unloved. It’s a time to have compassion for yourself. It’s also a time to define your boundaries with yourself and others. 

Reparenting your inner child is one of the most powerful tools for healing we have in our toolbox. What do I mean by “reparenting?” What do I mean by “inner child?” Some of you may be familiar with these ideas, and some of you maybe not so much.

Leo is symbolized by a lion, which is known as the king of the jungle. Leo represents confident and sometimes brash energy. Leo represents the part of you that knows your own mind and doesn’t hesitate to become the leader of your own life. The energy of Leo is passionate and fiery. 

Up to this point in this series of coming home to ourselves in The Path Back to You, each chapter has consisted of four parts, but as I began to write the next chapter, I realized I wanted to go a little deeper with this word, “should” and why we need to do our best to eliminate it from our vocabulary. 

Among the astrological signs, Cancers, represented by the crab, are stereotyped as being emotional, sensitive, and even moody. The New Moon in Cancer is the perfect time to focus on personal goals that lean into those traits in a balanced way: honoring our most intimate feelings, noticing when we feel safe and at home, and receiving support from others - personal goals that express the positive energies of the sign of the Crab.

As we close out our chapter on removing shame and shedding limiting beliefs, we’ve gotta talk about triggers and glimmers. 

We all know what triggers are. Trigger warning! Painful stuff is coming! Triggers are ways we respond– even in ways we can’t control– to things that bring up past pain. It’s a way our body remembers threats, to try to protect us. 

Glimmers are similar, except instead of remembering pain, our bodies are remembering joy. They are welcoming back beauty and saying, I see you. I remember you. 

The thing is, both triggers and glimmers are good things, because they act as arrows pointing to growth.

How am I still dealing with these same issues, I wondered. I thought I had looked through everything. I had peeled back layers. I had done some major healing. For a year. 

And that’s when I woke up to the real cause– and purpose– of these wounded cycles we inflict upon ourselves. 

In general, Virgo symbolizes the goddess in her perfection, and therefore Virgos tends to be in control. This is amplified during the full moon; the full Moon illuminates these tendencies, allowing us to see them clearly and encouraging us to relinquish the need to orchestrate everything. 

Often, a limiting belief isn’t something we even realize we agree with until we… stop believing in it. That’s what makes them so hard to identify! But typically these are beliefs we have about what leads to success, what’s going to get us a “good” life or make us a “good” person. 

It’s like some sort of script we believe we have to stick to if we want the fairytale ending. And usually, we’re so young when we get handed this script that we don’t even have the tools to question whether it’s true or real or leading to any kind of happy ending that we actually want!

Let me give you an example… 

Like most women throughout history, but even specifically those growing up like I did, in the American south in the last half a century, showing any amount of skin was met with disapproving glares, gossipy whispers, and choruses of “bless her heart.” 

Can you relate?

Our bodies aren’t evil. They’re not bad. There’s a reason we’re not disembodied souls floating around a spirit world made of fog and twilight. But we’re often so busy telling our bodies what to be, what to do, and what to look like, that we forget to listen to their inherent wisdom. 

Your mind will often lie to you about your body. But your body never lies. 

Have you ever been going about your day, doing something totally normal like getting groceries, logging into your email, picking your kids up from school, or going on a hike, and something happens that stops you in your tracks… some little coincidence or a moment of deja vu, or a text from a long lost friend you just had a dream about the night before?

I think most of us have.

If you’re following along week by week, you know that last week we talked about the difference between ego and soul. This week, we’re going to talk about what soul freedom looks like. 

My kids recently lost their great grandfather. It was an open casket. Before the visitation, I told my kids that even though they’d be looking at their great grandfather’s body, his soul was not there. 

Have you ever noticed that the body never really looks like the person did in life? There are many reasons for this, but the most important one, to me, is that a body isn’t really anything without a soul.