A new year is fresh upon us – fresh with new energy and open with potential.

This is the year, you may be telling yourself. The year to lose weight, start and stay with an exercise program, make better food choices; perhaps you want to begin or deepen your meditation practice or have more love and connection in your marriage, or want more fun and closeness with your children and grandchildren. Or you want something deeper, more ephemeral; hard to capture in words, yet you hunger for inner freedom and something substantially deeper, richer, and more fulfilling and truer for you in your personal life.

We have just come through the holidays – that time of year so filled with family and memories, expectations and nostalgia, and for many women, reopened family pain.

Ow. Reopened family pain. For many women, the holiday season is a time of mixed emotions, longing for family connection and love, playful happiness and lightness in the present, yet dreading the resurfacing of old dynamics you so desperately want to be done with and can’t seem to avoid no matter how hard you try. Many women come through the modern holiday season feeling stressed and exhausted, when the holiday season on the Wheel of the Year is intended to be a time of gathering with close loved ones and friends in a season of rest and quiet, rekindling the Light and “wintering”, just as the land winters in preparation for spring.

Now the Wheel of the Year turns, and 2023 is upon us, fresh with its possibilities and potential. 2023 can truly be different, if we know how to work with and use the energies and potential the New Year brings.

The Energies of 2023

Every year opens with patterns and energies that are intended to support and empower us in living well on our Heroines’ Journeys in the coming year. They are intended to guide us forward on the journeys of our Souls – to support and help us in fulfilling our Souls’ purposes for this lifetime. The energy of 2023 is exquisitely designed to support and empower us in healing the mother wound and inner child. Beginning and ending with a Full Moon in Cancer - the sign of the mother, home, hearth, nurturing, feminine empowerment – and a Full Moon bringing a fully lit focus on your emotional well-being. Cancer is the ruler of the Moon and when a planet is in its native sign, its influence is especially potent. The heavenly energies for 2023 will be supporting and empowering us all year long to focus on healing and strengthening our homes and emotions and connections with family.

We have more heavenly energy supporting us in healing our mother wound and inner child in 2023 with Venus retrograde this summer in the sign of Leo. Venus is the archetype of beauty, love and pleasure in the physical world. Leo is the sign of the heart, inner child, creativity, and play. The energy of Venus retrograde during this season of summer – the season of family gatherings and family vacations – will be to support us in healing our inner child within the overall 2023 energy of healing the mother wound.

These 2023 energies are gifts from the Goddess supporting us to come home – to heal our hearts, memories and bodies - and come home in healing with our mothers and ourselves, so that we can be free to flourish in all areas of our lives.

This is the inner work on our Heroine’s Journeys we are each being invited and empowered to fulfill this year. This is why 2023 opened so gently and softly, like being held close in a blanket in your mother’s arms. We are being told she is here, she is with us, and for us, and is supplying so much support to complete this year’s work well.

The fulfillment of all your other Desires and goals for this year, including personal Desires, in your marriage and other relationships, in your career, and in your health, will be so much easier, deeper and lasting, if you heal your inner child first. Research from multiple studies in the Adverse Childhood Experiences studies, show the links for this, including the causative relationship between unhealed childhood trauma and major illnesses including cancer, diabetes, and heart disease, other relationship distress, including challenges in marriage, divorce, and problems fulfilling career and income potential, and painful, difficult challenges mothering your own children, that passes the mother wound to your children in generational trauma.

This is the legacy of unhealed childhood trauma and the mother wound.

In 2023, we are being given so much support and empowerment for healing this, and changing the legacy for ourselves, and our children and grandchildren going forward.

The Sophia Women’s Institute Focus for 2023

The focus for the Sophia Women’s Institute, in 2023, will be this healing of childhood trauma and healing the mother wound. The Heroine’s Journey Healing Programs I focus on, the writing, unique events and women’s circles I facilitate, will all be centered on this focus, because I know how crucial and life-transforming this work is.

For over 30 years, I have been passionate about guiding other women through healing childhood trauma; what I don’t share very often, is that I know this journey personally. I experienced childhood trauma myself, as a child placed for adoption. My own essential bond with my birthmother was broken, and I have experienced the mother wound, which has shown it’s face in other relationships and other areas of my life.

From the years I have been guiding other women, I have witnessed the profound ways their lives and relationships have healed and transformed, as they have healed their inner child of childhood trauma. And my own life and relationships have been profoundly healed and transformed as I have engaged in this inner healing work myself.

I am so grateful and very excited to have this as the focus for The Sophia Women’s Institute in 2023, because I know the potential that opens when you heal your inner child. The fulfillment of all your other Heart’s Desires is built on this foundation, and will be so much easier, graceful and timely, when you first choose to focus on healing your inner child and mother wound.

For all of us, the restoration and strengthening of the original blueprint of balance and substantive partnership in our marriages, and in civic, government, religious, and business organizations and the healing of the Earth herself, will move forward significantly this year as more and more women do the inner healing work of healing their inner child and mother wound.

As women do this first for ourselves, we heal and transform our family relationships with our spouses, children, and grandchildren forever, and open the potential for generational healing going back in our family lines. We will fulfill one of the most sacred works we ever do and transform our family legacies. As more of us do this, together we will change the culture first in our families, then in our communities and groups in which we belong, and ultimately for the world.

2023: A Healing Gift from the Goddess

2023 opened, not with the loud explosion of fireworks, but rather with the soft, loving, sure, embrace of the Goddess that lasts this entire year, and her presence in the heavens through the Cancer Full Moons, and Venus retrograde in Leo this summer.

She’s saying, “I’m here. I’ve got you. I’ve got you. You can do this. Let me help you heal your heart and your inner child. I will help you heal your mother wound, and find the freedom and joy, and full Self-expression you long for. You can do this.

I will help you find the love that makes your heart sing.

I will help you finally come home.”

Receive this gift and use it well; then your holiday season for 2023, can be a season of exquisite joy.

If this speaks to your heart, and you would like to learn more, visit Heroine’s Journey Healing Programs, to learn about my programs for healing your inner child and your mother wound.

Debra Brown Gordy, MS MRET is a women’s childhood trauma and relationship healing Energy Therapist and pioneer in healing the Patriarchy Core Wound™, mentor and teacher, whose work sits at the interface of depth healing, women’s spirituality, and timeless Western wisdom traditions.

From her professional beginning as a marriage and family relationship therapist over 3 decades ago to the present, Debra has found that a woman’s Heroine’s Journey to her True Self to be the path of greatest joy, fulfillment, soul-satisfying love, meaning and highest-level contribution. She is passionate about guiding ambitious, high-achieving women through their Heroine’s Journeys of the inner healing of childhood trauma and the mother wound - expressions of the Patriarchy Core Wound™ - that blocks them from the fulfillment they hunger for, to transformation and reclaiming their Sovereign Feminine Souls. Women become free to create the deeply joyful, rich, and meaningful lives and marriages they Desire, while making the highest, Soul-level contributions they are uniquely meant to give the world.

Debra is the founder of The Sophia Women’s Institute and works with clients worldwide. To learn more, visit The Sophia Women’s Institute.