Larry and I were married in July, 30 years ago this year.
July is the month of Cancer – the month of home and family, mothers and mothering, and activating the archetypal Mother. Beginning with Summer Solstice, Cancer is the month energetically that focuses our energies on nurturing relationships, and also healing relationships. The Mother Wound can be potently activated during this month, and healing the Mother Wound is especially supported by the heavens during July. A water sign, Cancer supports us in attuning to our deeper emotions and emotional needs, as well as others’ emotions and needs.
The month of Tammuz in the Hebrew calendar (1) includes most of the month of July. Tammuz opens a season of light and heat at their peak. This light brings the Harvest to fruition and can also bring fires and heat and destruction. So in the month of Tammuz we experience and remember both light and dark, the joy of creation and the sorrow of destruction, loss and grief.
We began our marriage in this month of July/Tammuz and these energies and dynamics of the joy of marriage, home and family, nurturing and healing relationships, contrasted with loss, destruction and grief have been part of the energies we have lived with from the beginning. While one of us was married previously in the season of Summer, the other of us had a previous marriage formally end in July. We have had a beloved child leave home too soon during this season, and another also marry in July. New grandchildren to love and nurture have been born this month, and my beloved mother passed away in this season.
As a remarried couple and step-family, our marriage and family was born from the loss and grief of previous marriages that ended through divorce, and the joy we feel in our marriage and family today, is contrasted and made all the more precious, potent and real, because we have previously experienced relationship loss and grief.
As with many couples and families, we have had difficult experiences that have been impacted by an unhealed Mother Wound. Through these 30 years, we have learned some things about creating soul-satisfying love and a flourishing marriage that lasts and healing the Mother Wound; wisdom that goes beyond self-help books or professional knowledge.
I want to share 4 of them to encourage and light the path for you.
Wisdom Lesson One: See Your Beloved Through the Eyes of Love
We are so emotionally, spiritually and energetically attuned to those we love, and who are important to us. Just as children attune to their mothers, so we are attuned to the thoughts, feelings, emotions and attitudes of our beloveds, and they to us. Our thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and inner sight of each other have a very profound influence on each other. When we combine that with spoken words that express these thoughts, feelings and inner perception of each other, the influence is greatly magnified.
According to Jewish wisdom, Tammuz is the Hebrew month to rectify our inner sight. We can elevate and bring out the best in each other, by seeing the best in them in our inner view and feelings about them, and nurturing this inner view of our Beloved, first within ourselves. Look for the sparks of Light, of goodness, of the Divine within your Beloved. Then express this to them through your outer expressions and interactions. Just as a mother shows her complete love and delight for her child through her words, her tone of voice, her facial expressions, her eyes, her touch and her close proximity, all of which creates safety and a secure bond, and teaches her child what love looks and feels like, we can show our love for our Beloved, by similar, appropriate nurturing actions.
On a deep, visceral body level, we communicate to our Beloved our love this way. They sense and feel it in our presence. They relax inside, and it strengthens safety, security, trust, emotional closeness and bonding. They see our delight in them, and they will respond similarly, because this is what we as humans are innately born to need and to do, so that we establish secure, flourishing relationships. This creates the secure emotional foundation we all need to grow, function and live as our Highest Selves. It is the foundation we need to have in place first, before we can successfully have tender conversations about difficult topics.
And it all starts with seeing the goodness in your Beloved through the eyes of love.
Wisdom Lesson Two: Keep Your Heart Soft
There is so much hardness in the world today! Hard thoughts and attitudes, hard lines in the sand, divisions and rigidity that lead to bitterness, resentment, emotional coldness and closing your heart toward your Beloved. Learn to keep your heart soft. Learn how to talk heart to heart about tender topics and remember that it is your relationship that matters most. Learn to turn toward each other and seek solutions that protect your bond and put your marriage first. Issues and mistakes can be solved and resolved if we keep our hearts soft. It is violations and betrayals of the primacy of your relationship and your bond that are hardest to resolve and take the longest to heal.
Wisdom Lesson Three: Attune to and Develop the Deep, Soul Connection Between You
You came together for reasons beyond your outward love story. Like my Beloved and I, you have a Soul Connection that goes beyond this life. Your marriage today is part of a bigger, longer story for both of you and you came together to further this purpose. What is it? Do you have glimmers and gleanings of what your Souls promised each other, that you would do with and for each other, in this lifetime?
Whether you have a good sense of this, or have never considered this idea until now, seek to discover what the Soul Connection between you is about, and to develop this in your marriage. Talk about it together. This can be a part of the most joyous times in your marriage, and knowing what your Soul Connection is and the Soul Work you agreed to do together, will sweeten and make even more sacred these times. Attuning to and developing your Soul Connection will strengthen and sustain you during challenges and difficult seasons.
Wisdom Lesson Four: Do Your Own Inner Soul Work
Learning these principles and this deeper wisdom, and developing the ability and capacity to live them, is part of the Soul Work of marriage. While a dynamic process of growth and often healing within your relationship, these deeper capacities are begun in a secure foundational relationship – the most foundational and formative relationship we all have – that with our mothers. If there was wounding in your relationship with your mother, whether through developmental injuries, lack of nurturance, protection or guidance, or some form of trauma, then your ability to live these deeper principles and capacities in your marriage is made difficult, and in some cases, significantly impaired.
It is within our first love relationship with our mothers, that we develop the capacity to feel and recognize love, safety, secure connection and bonding, self-worth, humility that is not distorted by shame, healthy belief in ourselves, boundaries, and the ability to regulate our emotions and come back into balance when we have become frightened or upset. All of this is the foundation we need first, in order to continue growing and reach our fullest, highest potential, and then to fulfill our Highest Calling. Our first love relationship with our mothers, is the foundation for all future love relationships, especially the one we have with our Beloveds.
This is why healing the Mother Wound is the healing the changes everything, and the doorway to Soul-satisfying love and Partnership in your Marriage.
The sign of both Cancer and Tammuz is the crab. Unlike fish, that swim easily and gracefully, crabs move sideways, often shuffling along slowly, and indirectly moving toward their destination. This can be compared to avoidance. (2) Avoiding pain, difficult conversations and grief anchors them within us more deeply, prolongs the pain and difficulty, and prolongs the time it takes to heal and gain freedom to move forward with joy in our lives and marriages.
In the heat of this month of July/Tammuz we are being supported by the heavens, to turn toward the healing waters, so that we can finally know joy. In the sign of the mother, we are invited to receive the Mother’s compassion for healing our deepest wounds, so that we may grow into our Highest Selves, and create the marriages that fill our hearts with soul-satisfying joy.
Is There Any Joy in the World Today?
A friend recently lamented all the discord, division, conflict, and simultaneously both lack of unity and drive for sameness at this time in the world. She asked, “Is there any joy in the world today?”
Resoundingly, the answer is Yes! We find joy within ourselves, and joy with those we love, on the other side of healing the Mother Wound. Joy is the outcome of turning toward the process of accepting this invitation and support, and doing the Inner Work that your Soul is calling you into at this season.
An Invitation
Larry and I feel deep joy in our marriage, and healing the Mother Wound was a crucial part of our journey. It can be the same for you. Healing Your Mother Would, Healing Your Heart, is my program to guide and support you in your healing journey. If this speaks to your heart, learn more about how I can guide you to heal your Mother Wound, and heal your heart, so you and your Beloved can create Soul-satisfying joy.
(1) With gratitude to At the Well, for their beautiful resources about the Hebrew year.
(2) Rav DovBer Pinson, as referenced in Moon by Moon: A Guided Journal for a Year of Well-being.
© 16 July 2024/10 Tammuz 5784. Published July 21, 2024 - Full Moon in Capricorn.
Debra Brown Gordy, MS MRET and The Sophia Women’s Institute, LLC.
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Debra Brown Gordy, MS MRET is the mentor and guide for ambitious, accomplished, spiritually-attuned women in their prime, ready to heal their Mother Wound and other childhood traumas, so they can stop feeling trapped by the past, and feel peace about their childhoods.
Beginning in her late 30’s, Debra had a series of spiritual experiences that deeply healed and transformed her own life from childhood and relationship trauma. After 2 divorces, she has been happily married to her Beloved for over 30 years.
She is the creator of The Sophia Women’s Institute™, where she combines her deep knowledge and wisdom as a former relationship therapist, with depth healing expertise, metaphysics, women’s spirituality and Western wisdom traditions to empower her clients to feel deep inner security and happiness, create soul-satisfying love and partnership in their marriages, and ultimately fulfill their highest potentials and callings for this life.
Debra works with clients worldwide.
