Mother’s Day: The Wound and the Wisdom

The Ache Beneath the Surface

Mother’s Day arrives each year with flowers, cards, and curated brunch menus, but beneath the surface of pastel marketing lies a quiet ache for many.

From a psychological perspective, days like this can serve as what clinicians call “anniversary reactions” - moments when memories, unresolved grief, or relational wounds resurface, even decades later. For some, the day feels warm and celebratory. For others, it reactivates a deep longing or pain. The nervous system remembers what the mind tries to bury.

The Psychology of Loss

I was eight years old when I watched my mother die in front of me. I was home alone with her. Even with a frozen body, I somehow knew just enough to get to the phone and call for help.

Losing a parent during childhood, what psychology refers to as “early attachment rupture,” can shape how we view care, safety, and connection for the rest of our lives. According to Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development, a child around age eight is navigating the stage of industry versus inferiority: a time when confidence and self-worth are being built through guidance, support, and encouragement. When the mother figure is suddenly gone, that developmental process is interrupted. Healing is still possible, but it requires deep inner work. Often, the child grows up learning to fill that absence with meaning in ways others may never fully understand.

Mothering Myself

For much of my life, I tried to fill that absence by seeking nurture and care outside of myself, especially in toxic or codependent relationships. I found myself replaying the role of the mother for others who also carried a mother wound. I believed that if I could give them what I never received, I might somehow heal myself in the process.

But that approach only buried the wound deeper. I projected my pain outward when life didn’t align with my illusion of safety. I spent years trying to convince someone–anyone–to give me the love I felt had been missing my entire life.

Astrology as a Mirror

During the isolating time of the COVID pandemic, something shifted. With nowhere to run and no one to distract me, I was finally left alone with myself, and with the subconscious patterns I had avoided. That stillness became fertile ground for healing.

I turned to my natal chart and began to see it in a new light. Neptune, conjunct my Sun in my 7th house of Capricorn, helped me see how I had built stories around relationships - how I idealized love, security, and the “way things should be.”

I also noticed Chiron and Ketu (the South Node) in my 1st house of Cancer. Chiron, often referred to as the “wounded healer” in astrology, represents the pain we carry and our deepest capacity for healing. The South Node symbolizes our karmic past. Having both in my first house, the area of identity, in the sign of Cancer, the mother of the zodiac, felt like a clear mirror: I was born into this life with a mother wound that wasn’t just personal but ancestral or karmic in nature.

The Call to Heal

In 2021, I met my Reiki teacher, Michelle. She spoke to me like someone who had walked a similar path. One day, while I was explaining my natal chart, she said, “You’re here to help heal the divine feminine.”

That sentence echoed in my soul. It awakened something deep within me. I knew that to help others, I first had to heal myself. Carl Jung wrote in The Undiscovered Self (1957), “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” Her comment and my self-study illuminated what I had been living – the unconscious patterns masquerading as destiny. This realization led me to enroll in a 200-hour yoga teacher training in 2022, not with the goal of teaching, but to learn, feel, and integrate.

Although I studied yoga in its historical context during a college course in 2009, I wasn’t prepared back then to fully embrace or embody its teachings. This time, I was. The course was led by a thoughtful, committed teacher who honored yogic philosophy and its sacred roots. That was all I wanted. Ironically, despite declaring I had no desire to teach, the studio owner asked me to start teaching right after graduation, and I’ve been teaching ever since.

As a white yoga teacher, I hold a firm boundary around honoring the roots of the practice. Teaching yoga is a privilege, not a performance. Sharing its philosophical depth is not optional for me; it’s a responsibility. (More on this in a future post.)

Yoga as a Path to Reframe

I aim to integrate psychology and yogic wisdom in every class I teach, incorporating a significant aspect of my identity and a key yogic concept. Today, the Saturday before Mother’s Day, I led a class with the theme of shifting our perspective on what this day means.

What began as a heartfelt class centered on Prakriti, the sacred, feminine life force in yogic philosophy, evolved into something far beyond the mat. I invited students to soften into the embrace of the Divine Mother, not just the human role of “mom,” but the earth-based, cyclical, nourishing energy we are constantly surrounded by: sun and moon, rain and soil, breath and stillness. I encouraged them to feel the remembrance of this presence that transcends form and family.

For some, this message landed deeply. For others, it didn’t.

The Wound Revisited in Real Time

After class, I overheard someone say, “I never say Happy Mother’s Day because not everyone has a good relationship with their mother.”

Something about it struck a chord. It felt like a performance of sensitivity, rather than a genuine embodiment of compassion, especially from someone who had helped promote a Mother’s Day partner yoga workshop at this studio for the past few weeks.

I spoke up: “That feels a little hypocritical to me. We’ve been promoting a Mother’s Day event. What’s the issue with simply acknowledging the day? I’m not a Christian, but I don’t take offense when someone wishes me Merry Christmas.”

She seemed surprised by my honesty, but the following conversation felt important. Once again, the mother wound flared, this time, not just in me, but in both of us.

Instead of avoiding the feelings I had during this conversation, I softened into them. Instead of my body turning cold, my heart building up defenses, I opened myself to the experience. A teaching from Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras came to mind - Sutra 2.16: duḥkham eva sarvaṁ vivekinaḥ - "Future suffering is to be avoided." While pain is a part of the human experience, the yoga tradition reminds us that how we relate to pain is within our power. This idea, often echoed in both yogic and Buddhist philosophy, is commonly paraphrased as: “Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.”

We all carry pain, it is part of the human experience. However, it’s not the world’s job to tiptoe around our wounds. If we never take responsibility for our healing, we risk forcing others to walk on eggshells - mistaking avoidance for empathy, and silence for care.

True compassion means holding space for both joy and grief. It means honoring the full spectrum of experience - without canceling moments of beauty just because they might sting. Healing doesn’t require us to erase pain, but to meet it with awareness, and choose not to pass it forward.

Choosing Remembrance Over Rejection

I explained that while yes, many carry pain around this day, we, as a society, have chosen to mark it. And so, rather than avoiding it or projecting it onto others, yoga has taught me to reframe it.

Instead of shrinking into wounds, we can expand into remembrance: of Prakriti, of the cosmic mother who shows up for us daily. This isn’t spiritual bypassing. It’s spiritual reclaiming. It’s the practice of honoring what is sacred, even in the presence of grief.

It’s choosing to meet the wound not with rejection, but with reverence.

This is the most beautiful gift that yoga has given me, and I now have the privilege of sharing it with others.

Closing Reflections

To anyone reading this who carries grief, resentment, or confusion around Mother’s Day: I see you, whether you’re mothering others, yourself, or the wounds you didn’t choose; your path matters. And if you’ve ever been told you’re too emotional, too deep, too sensitive - maybe you’re here to teach the world how to feel again.

May we honor the complexity of this day.

May we hold space for both the ache and the awe.

And may we remember the mother who lives in all things - the breath, the body, the earth, the love that never leaves.

Reconnect with what is sacred, remember your divine essence, and navigate home to your soul.