The Transition from Maiden

Walking the path to Mother

The energetic life cycle of the feminine is seen via the mythology of the triple goddess. The triple goddess is characterized by her 3 faces: the maiden, mother, and crone. Every feminine being cycles through these 3 faces during her lifetime. We cycle through these faces in different phases of life, and at certain time periods of our life we deeply embody one face over the other two. 

The first face we inhabit is the face of the maiden. We are the maiden from the time we hit our mid-teens until whenever we become the mother - likely sometime near the end of our twenties or beginning of our thirties, although the exact timing is different for everyone. 

I started my business as a fresh faced maiden. I was young, young enough that I thought I was already old enough to be letting go of my maiden. At 24, I regarded maidenhood as being a bit silly and cringe-worthy. I judged my maiden, with all of her excitement, naivety, big dreams without much stable backing, and almost foolish expectation that life would always work out for her. And yet, as much as I judged my maiden, that’s exactly what I was. No amount of judging or silencing her was going to change that.   

And so with the energy of the maiden I jumped into service. I poured my heart and soul into my work, my clients, and every creation that came through me. I drank the dream of a nomadic lifestyle, coaching, healing, serving from anywhere in the world. I thought that I had unlocked the key to life. 

Oh sweet one, I’d tell myself if I could go back, you’ve barely scratched the surface. 

I joined sisterhood circles, paid for coaching, completed shamanic apprenticeships, and threw myself into the spiritual business lifestyle. And with the true naivety that is inherent to the maiden, I got burned - a lot. I trusted the wrong people. Craving friendship and sisterhood, I poured myself into friendships that started out beautiful, and degraded as I tried to set any kind of healthy boundary for myself. I opened myself to love from the wrong men, experiencing the wounds of the maiden over and over - betrayal, distrust, violation, eventually leading to freezing myself off and becoming numb to life outside of my work. 

And yet each time I was burned, I rebuilt. Another gift of the maiden is that she is young and able to pull herself back up again and again. And so I constantly reinvented myself. I poured myself into so much healing while at the same time holding space for the incredible healing journeys of every client I worked with. My life as maiden became a life of healing - both for myself and for others. 

And as I spiraled deeply into the healing realms, I spiraled into times when I lost bits of myself. I forgot how to play. I forgot how to shake off grief. At times I felt like my life was simply about holding grief and trauma for myself and others. This again, was a fallacy of the maiden. The maiden is self-centered naturally, something which fades as she grows up, learns to see beyond herself, and approaches the cycle of mother. In the self-centered gaze of my maiden, I sometimes got lost in pain instead of remembering that my gift is one of sacred service, and the honor that it is to be able to hold space for others. 

24, fully in my maiden era

I tried and failed to set boundaries with my work, leading to cycling in and out of burnout. While I may make money from the work I do, I don’t do this work for the money. I do this work because I can’t not do it. It’s like the breath of my soul pulls me forward into service for and with others. Every time I have tried to step back, to look for a “normal person" job, to set boundaries that would help me become less energetically connected to everyone I was working with, I’ve been pulled back. The threads of fate or destiny, or whatever you want to call it, pull me home to healing service every time I test them. And the boundaries that I tried to set never stuck because they were coming from a place of fear. Coming from a place of “I can’t do this like this anymore” instead of “How can I serve fully, without fear, honoring the healing gift I’ve been given in this lifetime?”. 

Here’s the thing I realize now about boundaries in healing work and why they are so hard for me: because I care so deeply. That might sound simplistic or self-congratulating, but it’s not meant that way. It’s just true. I love every person I work with. I am invited into the darkest corners of their lives and inner worlds and I don’t take that invitation and trust lightly. It’s a responsibility, honor, and commitment. I am shamanic practitioner, confidant, healer, and cheerleader for each person. The relationships I form within this work are so deep that they bring me to tears often. I am celebrating every big win, mourning every loss, crying with every big healing moment too. For so long, I have thought of myself as somehow less than by caring so much. Now, I am realizing this is my superpower. 

With the naivety of the maiden, I believed one big thing: that every single person could heal, just like I did. What I’ve learned with wisdom, time, and more experience: everyone can heal, but not everyone’s healing will look like mine. Sometimes, healing may not translate to the physical body coming back to full vitality. Sometimes the healing someone is meant to experience happens in the internal, spiritual planes.  

Earlier this year, I experienced the devastating loss of a beloved soul friend and client who passed after a long and courageous battle against Lyme. Her loss rocked me. With the naivety of the maiden, I was not prepared for it. With the naivety of the maiden, I believed my one big illusion: that everyone’s body could and would heal like mine did. And this is simply not the truth. We all have different paths. All of them are divine. And not every path is about the healing of the physical. 

With the naivety of the maiden, I declared, “I cannot do this anymore”. The maiden is young and at a certain point, as we outgrow our maiden phase of life, her youth becomes evident. The maiden, when in her shadow, says, “I can’t, I can’t”. She hides, scared of the weight of responsibility that stepping into the mother will ask of her. And so I hid. I grieved. I cried. I told myself that perhaps I am not meant to do this work in this way. In short, I succumbed to the selfishness of my inner maiden. 

And then, my partner called me out. After another instance of me wallowing in the naive “I can’t, I can’t”, he sat me down and told me I was a coward. That to hide away and say I can’t do it anymore when I have a gift was the move of a coward. And that as my partner, he could not watch me do it any longer. 

And at that moment, I knew he was right.

With my partner. His advice and wisdom have been invaluable on this journey.

One of my favorite mystical systems is the Gene Keys transmission. In the gene keys, each person is born with a chart of keys that illustrate the growth and development of their life cycle. In my gene keys chart, my first gene key, known as the life’s work or brand key, is gene key 47: Transmuting the past. The journey of this gene key is to move from oppression and suffering to transmutation and transfiguration. This gene key teaches the cycle of accepting suffering and learning to transmute oppression into light. Essentially, this gene key is one of my major lessons in this lifetime. The lesson of how to learn to surrender to suffering, to witness it, love it, and invite healing with and through it. Both for myself, and for others. 

In order to put down the “I can’t” and to hold the responsibility of stepping past the stage of being a maiden, I have to claim that I can. I have to accept the weight of being a mother. 

As I’ve contemplated this journey, I have contemplated motherhood. Long ago, I decided that having children was not going to be part of my future. I believed that decision was complete. And yet, this transition has brought me back face to face with motherhood. 

I am at an age where so many women around me are marrying, having children, and growing families. Every time I look at my social media pages where I’m connected to everyone I went to school with, I see another marriage, pregnancy, or birth announcement. And I started to question if I want that myself. 

I believe that motherhood is the most important job in the world. Having children and raising them to live in alignment with their soul’s purpose is the most beautiful gift we can give. My own mother taught me this, and looking back on how she raised me, championed me, and nurtured me from my adult perspective is something that makes me emotional very often. As I contemplated motherhood more and more, I felt a strong stirring in my womb. That stirring was, perhaps, the call to be a mother. And so I surrendered to it and listened. I let myself imagine a world where my partner and I had children. Imagine being pregnant and experiencing the initiation of birth. And while I felt a deep connection to this process, I also was continuously pulled back to a feeling that it was not meant for me. Not in this life.

And yet I persisted with feeling into motherhood. I talked to my womb, allowing her to guide me into deep journeys of pregnancy, birth, and mothering. I considered my view of what my life may look like - how might it change if I had children? I allowed myself to surrender to the longing to be a mother that grows within my womb every day. 

That longing for motherhood is not literal, not for me. A few months ago, during a journey with my inner crone and cervix, my womb shared her final answer with me on motherhood: not in this life. She told me that she was castrated when my left ovary was surgically removed years ago. That her physical fertility is low. That she is not meant to grow babies. But that she is meant to be a mother. 

To the maiden, the idea of being so deeply intertwined with another person or persons is scary. The maiden wants her independence, she wants to dance by herself and explore, adventure, discover her path without having to worry about anyone else. And then when she becomes a mother, she learns that the act of giving of herself to nurture her babies or who/whatever she is mothering is the most important thing she could do. That all the boundaries and adventures she needed as a maiden are not as resonant anymore. That yes, she needs time to herself, to mother her own inner child, to laugh and play with her inner maiden, but that nurturing her babies or people or creative projects is so much more fulfilling than she imagined it would be as a maiden. 

My fear, that I needed more boundaries in my work, that I needed more anything in my relationships, this was the fear of my maiden. Fearful of stepping into even deeper nurturing and responsibility with my healing work, I have held myself back, on the precipice of the maiden. Wanting to dive in deeper, but scared to make the leap. 

But my soul-womb calls me to something more. 

She calls me to step into motherhood. She shows me that my path is not to mother children in this life, although I do hope that my work will continue to allow me to support mothers and maybe eventually babies and children. She shows me that my role as a mother in the spiral of my feminine evolution is to learn to hold my work and every client I serve with loving, nurturing, empowering mother energy. That my role is to be a shamanic mother, as it were, to my community. 

I believe that I am in a soul contract with every person I support. My clients are not just clients, they’re like family (this is one of the reasons why I actually struggle with the word “client” because while it’s the most straightforward word to use, it just doesn’t feel like it accurately represents the depth of the relationships formed and work embarked upon). I learn from every single person I sit with. And this painful yet beautiful lesson, with the transition of a soul friend, has brought me to meet a new depth of my wounds. While our soul contract was for me to support her in physical life, she has taught me so much in her transition. I have learned to look my fear of death, motherhood, deeper responsibility and nurturing in the eyes. And I am surrendering to it all. 

Accepting the responsibility of Mother is hard. It is a true calling forward. To accept this transition, I must be willing to let go of the young maiden within me who wants to cling onto her old ways. 

As a maiden, my growth journey was ancestrally led. This started when I was healing from Lyme disease for the second time. I was in the midst of a great opening and connection to spirit, and I called upon my ancestors for help. My paternal grandfather came through. He told me that my illness was ancestrally based, that I was transmuting the karma of his lineage via my body, and that he could help me heal. And so I accepted his help, and every day I connected with his spirit and he gave me steps to take towards healing. Within a few weeks, I was in remission (and have never gone back out of it again). 

My ancestral healing did not end here though. I spent the next 6 or so years deeply embroiled in ancestral patterns. I unwound lineage beliefs and pains around the body, illness, sexuality, career, money, and trauma. I sat with the ancestral pain that lived in my body and cried, looking at everything and vowing to be the cycle breaker. I saw myself as the black sheep of the family, and in some very real ways I started to see myself as the oppressed lineage cycle breaker. It became a part of my ego identity. At this time, I temporarily distanced myself from my family. I felt so overwhelmed by the work that I was doing that I didn’t want to be around anyone. I became a bit of a lone wolf, following a karmic path of separation as I healed. 

This all started to change, and in hindsight I can see that it started to change as I neared the end of the maiden cycle and began preparing for transition to mother. I started to step out of my maiden identity, letting go of the ego ideas around being the black sheep of the family. I started to come back into a deeper relationship with my family, seeing the fruits of the ancestral healing I had been so focused on and the growing up I had undergone. 

Then my maternal grandparents both died within two weeks of each other. My grandmother started her transition first. I felt the pull from her ancestral line to tap in and see if her soul desired support in her transition; when I checked in with her, I saw her preparing to go, but needing a few ancestral patterns released first. And so I sat with her lineage, calling forward the ancestors to help me complete and release the karma and cycles that my grandmother’s soul wanted to be free of before she left this life. On the final night of her transition, I was called into practice with the somatic womb of the ancestry, and entered into one of the most powerful somatic release practices I’ve ever experienced. I felt the last energies complete, heard a thank you from my grandmother’s spirit, and less than twelve hours later she passed. 

Two weeks later, my grandfather followed his beloved into the realm of transition. Again, the ancestors called me forward to hold space for him and to help his soul find peace in the first few days of his transition.

In the aftermath of my grandparents’ passing, I felt my maiden rear up. How should she now move forward, without the physical presence of her grandparents, two of her favorite people? My grandparents have always been two of my biggest inspirations and influences in my life. I spent quite a bit of time at their home in Colorado my whole life. During my Lyme years, I learned to listen to my body with the help of the great granite mountains and their nurturing love. I headed to Colorado and their embrace to integrate both of my remissions from Lyme disease. During my second healing from Lyme, I also was there to start taking care of them. This last long stretch of time I spent living with my grandparents, we were on parallel yet wildly different paths - I was undergoing the spiritual awakening that led to my shamanic path, healing myself from my second and final flare of Lyme, and they were learning to accept their lessening health and the reality of leaving their home of 30 years. Together we walked a path of change, led by our parallel health journeys.

Five years later, late last summer, when my grandparents transitioned, I began the final walk with my maiden. Over the last ten months, I have walked the footsteps of death, loss, and grief. I have helped my inner maiden slowly release the reins of power she’s held, helped her step back into a supportive role, and started to invite my inner mother forward to lead. 

As I write this, I have just sat with a last, unseen, fearful part of my maiden. She has persisted with her influence, fearful that if she puts down her reins then her needs will be lost. She has held on, wrapped around my spine and my pelvis like a root, holding me in place, refusing to let me go. She is the part of my maiden who screams what about me? The part who fears that if she no longer leads that my inner mother will become so caught up in service that I forget to take care of her and then what will happen to me?? she screams. She is the core of the maiden’s self-centeredness. 

I often teach about healthy selfishness - a concept that I will summarize as the idea that it’s important to make time for yourself. Like putting the mask on yourself in the airplane first before you attend to anyone else. So many women forget to be healthily selfish, and so this teaching is one that I bring forward into every single client container I hold. But below healthy selfishness is simply selfish. And this part of my inner maiden was deeply embroiled in her own selfishness. She was so scared to let go of control that she forgot my own teaching of healthy selfishness. 

What is beyond letting our selfish maiden die? Well, I don’t have a good answer for that yet. Perhaps, if you’re reading this and you are further along in the journey with your inner mother, you can let me know. For now, I am following the path as it unfolds in front of me. 

I can feel the beginnings of what will be to come as I learn to walk with my inner mother. A prayer I have been praying lately is “In this life of service, let me serve.” For me, this life is about sharing healing medicine with as many people as I am able to. This is a life led by the desire in my soul to bring healing and love - truly a life of service. As a maiden I have served, yes, and yet I have been preparing for this past year to serve from a deeper place. As a maiden, I still catered, to different degrees, to my inner coward, keeping myself safe from depths which still scared me, as my partner so powerfully called me out on. As I walk out of maidenhood, my inner coward does not walk forward with me. Neither does my naive, selfish maiden-self. These parts of me are not being left behind. They have simply served their purpose. They have been integrated into my Totality. They are not separate aspects of self trying to gain control anymore. 

There are many initiations into the Mother archetype of the feminine. They happen over a long stretch of time. Women journey as the mother for twenty or thirty years until they are ready to transition to the Crone or Wise Woman. I am at the very beginning of this new journey. I have not been pregnant or given birth or raised children. I am not experienced in motherhood by any means and I do not claim to be. For now, I am simply noticing that I am no longer the maiden. I have been walking the first path of initiation to my inner Mother, or Queen. I have been learning to Mother myself, and to lead my service to women from this place, instead of from the Maiden. 

As I’ve been trying to end this essay, I traveled to Richmond, Virginia to attend the bridal shower for my soon to be sister in law. My younger brother is getting married this fall, and there’s nothing I’ve experienced before that’s quite like watching your younger brother transition from boy to man. Last time I saw him, earlier this year, I still thought of him as my little brother, despite the fact that he’s an adult with a job, a house and a fiancée. This weekend, I saw him and I realized that he is not my little brother any more. He is a man, which brought me home to the feeling that I am not a maiden any more. 

At the bridal shower

The evening after the bridal shower, we went to a brewery and socialized; this great group of family and friends gathered to celebrate two people we love very much. At a certain point in the evening I sat with some of the bridesmaids, women a few years my junior, and read astrology charts, explaining their Saturn returns that are starting and how a Saturn return is thought of as the transit that matures you into actually feeling like an adult (as compared to the early to mid twenties when you may feel as though you’re cosplaying as an adult). 

One thought that kept circling in my head was, “this is real life”. 

For several years I’ve navigated such darkness. Three years ago this month I underwent a traumatic event that both changed and deepened the course of my life’s work. Two of the few people I called in the first, intense week of pain were my brother and soon to be sister in law. Those three years seem like a lifetime, and as I think back to the maiden who called them and cried, I can see the journey she walked from that moment forward, falling apart and putting herself back together, as my initiatory, death/transition path out of the maiden. 

I didn’t choose a traditional life path. For whatever reason, my soul chose a calling that has demanded a lot from me. Sometimes, when my inner coward or selfish maiden has been in charge, it feels like too much. 

And yet it’s a calling I will never turn my back on. It’s too important. To serve the path of the womb and the gnosis of the feminine is the greatest gift, one I am honored to carry. 

With the support of time and perspective, I see so many gifts. My maiden years were beautiful and fun, as well as dark and painful. And, at this time of transition out of maiden, I understand that the voice whispering to me this weekend that this is real life was my inner mother. She’s whispering to me that there is a whole world full of love and connection to live in, a world that feels much brighter and sparkly when the immature maiden is no longer in the driver's seat. Instead she’s sitting in the back, delighting in the beauty outside, while my inner mother archetype gets to take the wheel. 

The maiden goes through seemingly endless cycles of initiation. She dies and is rebirthed a thousand times. She reinvents herself constantly, searching for fulfillment and who she is. 

The mother / queen goes through initiations, of course. That is the way of the feminine, no matter her age or stage of life. But in her transition from maiden she learns that she doesn’t have to constantly question or reinvent herself. She’s not shapeshifting in the same way anymore. She grows, becomes wiser, and knows who she is. She’s more at peace with herself. Her focus becomes less inward and more outward, because she has responsibilities, whether it’s to her children, her work, her relationships, or whatever her creative projects are. She doesn’t have time to endlessly spiral about herself, and she no longer has the inclination to do so. It’s a learning curve, to trust your inner mother and stop catering to the whims of the inner maiden. 

I’m still very much learning how to allow my inner mother to lead. I’m practicing calling my mother/queen part forward, inviting her to lead over my inner maiden. As with all transitions, this one will, undoubtedly, take time.  

I’ve also been learning how to let myself off the hook of endless cycles of death and rebirth. This became the energetic pattern I was most comfortable with, despite the fact that it’s not comfortable at all. It became almost an addiction for my inner maiden, to question and reinvent herself constantly. As I stop endlessly rebirthing as a maiden, I am ready now to deepen my roots. To plant myself within my womb and be able to grow without the constant reinvention cycle. My journey with my inner maiden has tilled my inner soil; now as I learn to walk with my inner mother, I will be learning to plant and nurture the dreams, visions, healing, and service that I am here creating.

Deeper roots. Deeper service. Deeper medicine. 

Real life. 

Here’s to the beginning of a new chapter in this journey of life.