Healing the Mother Wound with Mother Ayahuasca

My mother died suddenly at 14, and that's a wound I've been carrying for the last 24 years.

“Dave… this is hard to tell you… your mom died last night.” I had gone to stay with friends and my dad came to find us at the mall. My friends and I had the day off, I think it was a teacher work day, and we were being mall rats at the now-demolished Cary Towne Center Mall. Just the day before, my mom’s boyfriend had said “Get your poop in a group!” before carting me and my friends off. He’d been in signal intelligence during the Gulf War and was just a calm presence.

I sort of went into shock. Just numbness. My life hadn’t been emotionally great up to that point. When my parents divorced at age 6, everything changed, and I had no help to process that trauma, but it came back after the first time I did psychedelics. Then my stepdad was abusive and my own dad had become less and less present, also coping with the divorce from my mom. To cap it all off, I was just a highly sensitive kid, something that’s pretty common for us gifted, neurodiverse people.

During my first Ayahuasca ceremony, I was shown a slide reel of how my entire life has revolved around what I came to understand was the Mother Wound. Everyone carries a Mother Wound—we must all leave the nest one day—but mine was worse than typical because my mom died suddenly and traumatically of a massive heart attack, and I was frozen in that moment, unable to differentiate from the sacred mother. I was at the age where it should have happened anyways.

My stepmother was inadequate as a mother, a neurotic mess with her own struggles. My high school girlfriend, Becca, couldn’t fill that hole although she tried. She carried her own wounds, and eventually died in a motorcycle accident many years later. I saw how entire societies revolve around the Mother Wound, how the anger at rejection from the protection given by mother drives so many men and women. How our society has forgotten to recognize how painful it is to lose the sacred mother, yet it is a transition we all go through.

I was drawn to polyamory in my twenties, and I told myself it was because I was high testosterone and that it was perfectly natural! After all, men have a biological imperative to spread their seed and I found an environment where I was highly successful with women! But there was always another side to it, I had immersed myself in as much feminine energy as I could find because, deep down, I still hurt from losing my mom. It was not a conscious seeking out of a mother replacement, but a deeply unconscious wound that wanted healing. Of course, every woman that has come into my life since then has failed to live up to the Sacred Mother.

Once I understood and accepted this, I was shown exactly what the Sacred Mother is; an unbroken chain of mothers stretching back through time immemorial, from egg-laying fish and dinosaurs to birds and reptiles, the rise of mammals and all the way down through today in humans. The Sacred Mother is the guardian of the germ line, the thread of life that has sustained itself for a billion years. She is the one who tends the Sacred Nest, that force around which all evolution revolves.

I saw that the Sacred Mother needed to differentiate from herself, that it was too much to build and tend to the nest, to bring back food and guard against predators. So she created the Sacred Masculine, giving her warrior energy into a part of self whose job it is to build the Sacred Nest and protect the Sacred Mother, and that this is my role in society, to humanity, and this is the core essence of masculine containment. The woman created man to keep her safe, to conquer and make sense of the world, to bring order to the chaos of nature.

Then I came back to my own mother, and found my anger. How dare she abandon me? How dare she fail to take care of me, to prepare me for the world? All the judgment and rage at rejection, at abandonment! But then I saw the truth in it. From the octopus to the squirrel to the bird, all mothers fail in some way, and while they would prefer to care for their young forever, this is not to be. They must leave the Sacred Nest, even if it means violent rejection. Get out! Go! Take flight!

Finally I came to the most painful realization—my mother had worked herself to death caring for us. My father, she had deemed, was an inadequate guardian. My stepfather was worse. So she set about building the Sacred Nest herself. She was provider, protector, nurturer, all in one. She could have given up on me and my brother, letting us live with our dad, or giving in to burnout and let our home descend into squalor. But none of that was true. Our nest was clean and well stocked, and she worked hard to provide stability and safety and abundance. It wasn’t neoliberalism that killed her, it was her sacred duty to carry on her bloodline, and like so many mothers stretching across time and space, she made the ultimate sacrifice for her children.

This revelation went through me like a blade. Not only had she not failed, she had succeeded in the greatest possible terms. My father, for all his flaws, passed on his intelligence to me. My mother, for all her flaws, passed on her tenacity to me. And even though they were too wounded for this world, the alchemy of their conjunction produced someone who was far more suited to this world than either of them were. More flexible, more adaptable, healthier. Darwinism wins again. I am evolution in practice.

And it was beautiful. From there, I sat back and watched the majesty of the Sacred Mother throughout all of history, from the tiniest salamander to the might whales, the eternal instinct to not just procreate, but to protect, to prepare the baby for the Grand Struggle, and the terrible tension within a mother; to nurture but also discern and judge. You are ready, or you are not.

My wife and I just finished watching season two of The Empress, which follows the story of Empress Elizabeth of Austria and her “evil mother in law” the Archduchess Sophie. But through this lens Sophie made perfect sense; she was surrounded by useless men so she did the same exact thing my mother did; take over the Sacred Nest. She pushed Franz to find the ideal mother, but then resented her replacement. She pushed him to build an empire, to impose order and control, to expand the Sacred Nest as large as possible. She rejected her son Maximillian because we was unfit to lead, an inadequate man. She rejected Luzi further, banishing him from her sight, like a bird evicting a weak chick from the nest. It was terrible and crushing, but also no different from the wolf eating her cubs when too stressed. The dark side of the Sacred Mother lurks just below. The life giver and the judge, all in one.

Madre Ayahuasca then showed me all the ways in which the women in my life have failed to live up to that Sacred Mother archetype, and I was embarrassed. Like so many other men, I’d unconsciously wanted to be mothered. But, is that really so wrong? We have a biological imperative to find an ideal mother to bear our offspring. And anyways, the Sacred Masculine is there to provide containment, and in exchange, we earn back the succor of the mother. This is the cosmic dance between the sexes, that male anger at being rejected by Mother is answered by reclaiming and capturing a new Mother, and the cycle repeats. After all, my wife loves taking care of me, and I make her feel safe. This is not codependence, but true interdependence. Right?

I can wrap any justification around it, and there may be a grain of truth to this arrangement, just as there is truth in my attraction to polyamory. But another dimension of the truth is that I carried this wound, this pain, and even if all men carry this wound, mine was perhaps more pronounced than is typical. I remember the devastation I felt when Becca broke up with me, she’d had enough. I told her that she’d torn me apart, and even my dad recognized that I was trying to replace my mother with Becca. She was two years older than me, and so when she dumped me, my Mother Wound opened again.

The unbroken line of mothers that led to me is glorious and beautiful. It seems like a cosmic joke, that procreation demands such sacrifice and tension, that we all spend our entire lives orbiting this truth. I saw that everything men do; from waging wars to building companies to inventing technology—it all serves the Sacred Mother and the Sacred Nest.

After all, what is technology but a way to impose order on the world? To make the environment more optimal for life and the offspring? This is why technology is so male-dominated. It is the archetypal Magician energy. The Warrior, who provides physical protection, the Lover who indulges in the flesh and pleasure, and the King who brings order and fertility. The ideal man embodies all four of these archetypal masculine energies. The man who best demonstrates these energies earns the best mother.

That’s all there is to it. It’s beautiful and elegant. It is also terrible and painful.

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I want to take a moment to address some nuance here. Some readers will be thinking “we can transcend our evolution” and that men and women can choose roles in society, and there are many niches we can all occupy. Multiple things can be true at once, and I’m not saying that every woman has a singular duty to reproduce, and that every man must conform to a single image of masculinity.

At the same time, evolution plays its tricks. It has a way of convincing us that it was all our idea, that our obsession with porn is a choice, that attraction to big tits and nice asses is just a personal preference. May as well ask the fish if water is wet.

Someone may also point out when it doesn’t work; when a man is gay or a woman is a lesbian, or when trauma turns parents bad. Ah, but these are the exceptions that prove the rule. Just as some chicks must be culled from the nest, so too does evolution do its pruning.

When we’re rejected by Mother, we have a biological instinct to “prove mom wrong.” This was exemplified in The Empress when Maximillian is constantly hatching schemes to get back at his older brother. Like a stronger bird bullying the weaker out of the nest, Max was trying to prove to his mother that he was good enough. His brother was merely the test, the agent demonstrating his inadequacy. Sibling rivalry is just another one of evolutions tricks.

Mother Ayahuasca showed all this to me, and though I already knew it in my head, it’s another thing to fully integrate this information, to live it and understand it, and see the terrible beauty of it.

Luzi, Franz’s youngest brother, was banished to another castle where he wiled away his days in anonymity. It’s suspected that he was gay or trans, and was also given to making scenes. Max died in Mexico, trying in vain to prove that he was as good as his brother at empire. Archduchess Sophie died feeling misunderstood, that she’d done everything in service to the empire, but was unappreciated. Franz himself reigned for 68 years, outliving his mother, his wife, a daughter, and a son. Empress Elizabeth never really took to being an empress, she was too free spirited and wanted to travel. Like my own mother, the terrible price of building and mainting the Sacred Nest took its toll on those women.

I highly recommend watching The Empress through this lens. For less of a commitment, you can also watch My Octopus Teacher, both of these shows are on Netflix. My Octopus Teacher follows the lifecycle of a common octopus who, like so many other mothers, makes the ultimate sacrifice of her body to carry on the bloodline. It is simultaneously beautiful and crushing.