This is a beautiful excerpt from the book “Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort and Joy” by Sarah Ban Breathnach. My wife is very interested in this book and with a little research I found that it has been highlighted on Oprah 11 times! This is a well respected book in the self help community and I thought it would be nice to share a woman’s perspective on the feminine aspect of the divine! Let us know what you think!
I hope you enjoy!
– Michael Sunspirit –
Mothering Myself has become a way of listening to my deepest needs, and of responding to them while I respond to my inner child.
– Melinda Burns
There’s a Great flurry of activity downstairs this morning, which I am forbidden to observe. “Big doings going on. . . I can’t possibly tell,” my husband whispers as he closes our bedroom door with a collaborator’s grin. I can hear the clanging of pots and pans, drawers being opened and closed, mixers whirling. Now it sounds as if a breakfast tray is being prepared as the clattering of my best china reverberates through the house. I don’t normally eat breakfast. But I will today. As I write, it’s Mother’s Day.
Later, delicious, daughter-made strawberry muffins, buttery golden, warm from the oven, miraculously appear. I am amazed, proud, perplexed, teary, profoundly grateful. Who is this remarkable your woman with the beautiful, beaming smile bringing gifts from the heart to nourish my body and soul? I believe there has been some spiritual intervention at work here because I have never made strawberry muffins in my life and have no idea how Katie divined the recipe. It’s a perfect moment to quietly meditate on the cosmic Great Mother who can inspire us all; the divine, feminine Spirit of nurturance known as The Goddess, so revered in ancient times and being rediscovered by women today.
Many women I know share a seldom-expressed yearning to be comforted. To be mothered. This voracious need is deep, palpable — and often unrequited. Instead, we are the ones who usually provide comfort, caught between the pressing needs of our children, our elderly parents, our partners, our friends, even our colleagues.
Though we are grown, we never out grow the need for someone special to hold us close, stroke our hair, tuck us into bed and reassure us that tomorrow all will be well. Perhaps we need to reacquaint ourselves with consciously with the maternal and deeply comforting dimension of Divinity in order to learn how to mother ourselves. The best way to start is to create — as an act of worship — a comfortable home that protects, nurtures, and sustains all who seek refuge within it’s walls.
Gloria Steinem has written movingly of the need to reparent herself after she began exploring, in midlife the issue of self esteem. Because her parents divorced when she was ten and her mother suffered from a debilitating depression, the legendary editor of Ms. magazine assumed the role of family caregiver. Decades later, as a leader of the feminist movement, she organized, traveled, lectured, campaigned, and successfully raised money for causes, but she didn’t know how to take care of herself — emotionally, psychologically, physically — even though she had spent her life taking care of others. Nowhere was this truth more apparent than in her home. She reveals in her book, Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem, that her apartment was little more than “a closet where I changed clothes and dumped papers into cardboard boxes.” Gradually she came to the belated awareness that one’s home was “a symbol of the self” and in her fifties created and began to enjoy her first real home.
Today, as you walk through your own home, think about ways that you can start to mother yourself — every day, not just once a year — in small but tangible ways. There should be comfortable places from the living room to the bedroom that invite you to sit, sleep, relax and reflect. there should be small indulgences from the kitchen to the bathroom that pamper and please. There should be sources of beauty throughout that inspire, order that restores and the quiet grace of simplicity that soothes. The poet Ntozake Shange writes, “i found god in myself & i loved her / i loved her fiercely.” There is no more beautiful way of honoring the love of the feminine divinity waiting to mother us than by celebrating the temple where her Spirit dwells on earth.
Sarah Ban Breathnach’s work celebrates quiet joys, simple pleasures and everyday epiphanies. She is the author of “Mrs. Sharps Traditions: Nostalgic Suggestions for Re-creating the Family Celebrations and Seasonal Pastimes of the Victorian Home and The Victorian Nursery Companion. She has written a nationally syndicated column as a member of the Washington Post Writer’s Group and her Featured articles have been syndicated by The Los Angeles Times Syndicate. She also teaches Simple abundance Workshops to help women reorder their life priorities.
Sarah Ban Breathnach is the founder of the Simple Abundance Charitable Trust, a non profit bridge group between charitable causes and the public, dedicated to increasing awareness that “doing good” and “living the good life” are soul mates.
