The Mother Within

Where she comes from and who supports her

If you soften your gaze around these words on the page, and you take a gentle breath, you can place some of your attention on your insides. That attention may go first to your organs and all they do for you; the way they digest, move nutrients, create and dismantle proteins.

That might lead you to consider your blood flowing through your body, delivering these nutrients, and oxygen, and removing waste. You might notice your heart and lungs as focal points of this rhythmic cycle. And then you may become aware of your bones, strong and stable and part of the structure that organizes you, holds you up, holds you together.

You may also notice the subtle softening around the physical processes and structures within you. It becomes clear that the physical holds metaphors for your non-physical self. You recognize how digestion happens in your mind too; you have an experience, then you break it down in order to understand what happened. You absorb it and finally come to a place of acceptance, integration… or not!

You feel the life force of your heartbeat and your breath; the movement in and out, the tension and relax, the gather and the release, the cycles and rhythms that keep you going. And the bones, which are the archetypal expression of that which cannot be taken, cannot be reduced, the essence of you.

The inner mother lives between the physical and the non-physical. She lives in the processes of how life flows through body and soul. She knits together the possibility, hope, reality, and action to form the inner narrative of how it all works.

The inner mother begins as an implant in us. We create her based on our experiences of begin cared for when we were young. We model her on our caregivers and we assume they were correct about what we deserve, what is possible, and how much we can expect to get what we want. This inner mother, unfortunately, often gets stuck in her early forms and, as we grow up, she becomes our inner critic, the voice that tells us that we can’t ask for more, that hope is useless, that it’s too hard, too much, too loud, too disruptive. She tells us that WE are useless, unimportant, not enough, too much, too loud, too disruptive. She becomes entwined with the critic, the protector, and the saboteur.

This creates an inner mother, or an inner guidance system, that is not in service of our irreducible essential selves, but is, instead, a compilation of all of what others told us we could/should do/be. It is our oppressive voice that keeps us tied to what we think we can get rather than what we really want.

At the same time, this inner mother lives in this internal territory that is centered on your bones. She lives close to your heart, your breath, your digestion, your stability. Because she is already in this inner landscape, she has the ability to derive her support from within you, by resonating with your heartbeat, your breath, your digestion, your stability, instead of with the external sources.

How can we begin to bring our inner mother into alignment with ourselves as we are right now? How do we begin to grow this inner mother, from a past experience that was limited by our caregiver’s capacity, support systems, personal experience and growth toward our own?

Question: Where are you? Locate yourself relative to your inner mother. Is she an ally or someone you’re constantly in tension with? Is she trying to get you to go one way but you really want something else?

Maybe some definition can help here. A competent Inner Mother is focused on nourishing and protecting you. Other things in life may be important, but they fall outside of her expertise. She is the one tasked with caring for your basic needs which include food and shelter, but also our very human needs for connection, attention, and love.

This becomes the discernment. If your internal world is being undermined by old stories and limitations, a horrifyingly tenacious inner critic, or a sense of fear of stepping into the world differently, how can you orient toward what is nourishing and protective? What would that action be?

I know there is a lot of “just do it” - “don’t let fear stop you” kind of encouragement out there, and that’s not what I mean here. What I’m offering is an in-between place. One where we can tend to our fears and also know what we are capable of doing on our own behalf. These actions are the ones that, over time, grow the competent and strong Inner Mother.

Question: What is an action that you can take on your own behalf that feels nourishing and protective?

This can be a simple act of self-kindness, like putting your hand on your heart and taking a deep slow breath. It can be a moment of soaking in the sun and flowers or whatever makes your heart happy. It can be a warm mug of tea on a cool morning. Or it can be time with a candle letting yourself tap into hope and possibility.

Small things build us. Small actions tend to us. We grow our Inner Mother through small actions on our own behalf.

This is Sun and Moon Mother territory, if you follow Landscape of Mothers. She is the one who holds the cycles and rhythms. She works through increment and interation. That is, she is all about the small stuff repeated in a rhythm, over and over again, so that they seep into our bones as simply the way things are. So, these simple acts of self-kindness, repeated as a rhythmic ritual, change the Inner Mother and reinforce the acts of nourishment and protection that sustain you.

Sun and Moon Mother is where I always begin with clients and those Landscape-Of-Mothers-curious. She is the chop-wood-carry-water, the coming back to the essence of ourselves, so that we can move forward with the life we want to live.

And, I’d like to invite you to an 11-week course where we’ll meet each of the Mothers in turn and get to know her strengths, her struggles, and her particular magic (we also have 2 integration weeks planned with open office hours so that we can take our time and go at a pace we can sustain and still feel supported).

We start July 29, 2025 at 3pm Pacific Time. If that time is passed as you read this, I invite you to sign up for my newsletter on my website for the next time I run it.

For more details about the Growing Your Inner Mother course you can go here.