“Even in the healthiest families, each person suffers from a core wound. From the perspective of the Cocoon, this is not an accident, nor is it unfortunate. Some say that the soul orchestrates the wounding, to catalyze a special type of personal development not possible until the Cocoon, one that requires a trauma for its genesis.”
– Bill Plotkin
My Gratitude for Nurturers
To those who hold us, who bestow on us their touch and tenderness.
To those who love something deeply, at times more deeply than themselves.
Who show us how to catch the rain or smell the dandelions.
Who are sometimes those human beings through whom we receive the gift of life,
and sometimes those other-than-human beings, those beyond-human beings,
who we watch or dream about with wonder and insurmountable awe.
To the Nurturers of our world, and the Nurturers we have the everyday potential to become.
Opening Questions…
- What is the Nurturer?
- What does it mean to embody a Nurturing presence?
The Ones that Hold Us
It seems pretty fortuitous to me that this post follows just after Mother’s Day, a day of regard and celebration for those who bore us, held us and nurtured us.
During my studies some time ago of the archaic runic alphabet and their history, I discovered a three-tiered system that characterized the manner of upbringing and apprenticeship of future citizens to Old Germanic society. The model has a mostly universal appeal to the way in which individuals in whatever society they’ve been raised in, through the lens of their culture, transgress the thresholds of infancy, childhood, and adolescence, into adulthood.
The span of time encompassing nurturing up to (but not limited to) adulthood has everything to do with the interrelationship between we who are in need of nurture and those who perform the role of nurturing us.
Oftentimes we did not receive the full depth of nurturing we needed during the dynamic, sometimes tumultuous and complex period of development we enter as infants and children, dependent as we are on those who take care of us and the degree of nurture they in turn received in their upbringing. How our caretakers were nurtured often directly affects how we are (or were) nurtured by them, and regardless of how well that upbringing went, problems and unmet needs (along with those needs that are met) always at some point arise.
Just as disconnection is one of those inevitable experiences in life that we can expect to encounter, so too is the resulting evidence of past childhood pains or losses around needs that simply didn’t (or possibly couldn’t) get met. This can often be interpreted as the background of our story against which we can project blame on those who raised us for the current traumas we face that result from the experiences of our unmet needs.
However, along the line of the principles we may wish to take to heart, we may want to start becoming aware that our pains and other feelings, as well as the experiences in which they arise, are our own, and that through claiming responsibility for our ownership of them, we can discover an amazing power in ourselves that would have otherwise remained hidden and untapped.
This is the power of the Nurturer, the one within, who is at once us and not us but who embraces us, holding us in the power of its empathy and presence, and can help support us in the transition we must eventually make if we ever wish to become whole, to become fully human.
Great Kelsey, I think the repression of the nurturer or Great Mother archetype is the root of the world’s problem now and for the last 6000 years or so. ‘Power with’ is a characteristic of matrifocal society, patriarchal being the ‘power over’ gang. The shadows that emerge due to the repression of the Great Mother archetype are fear and scarcity. Awareness of this is important so we can change it.
Hey, Howard! It sounds to me like we really resonate around a lot of the same principles concerning power and scarcity. I’d love to continue to hear more about your philosophy on these topics. Thank you, and hope you keep postin’!
As we grow we put more and more all the nurturing pieces together we received through life and the result is a complete new shine nurturer version that would only glow if we are able to be empathic with the ones that need from us. But there is always the moment of fail and there another story begins.
Thank you for your comment, sister Brenda ^_^
I want to make sure I understand you. Are you saying that we combine all our experiences of nurturing (being nurtured) over the course of our lives, into a nurturing energy that we have the potential of experiencing in wholeness and expressing (“glowing” from) if we’re willing to have empathy with ourselves over it? Also, would you say more about the idea of another story beginning where the one before it fails?
I wish I understood, but I do not.
Mom — I feel some sadness around the lack of clarity in this post for you. Would you let me know what parts were difficult for you to understand? Your feedback could potentially help me rewrite parts of the post that could bring greater clarity for others as well!