Ancestral heartache and longing : something SO deep!

I just came away from a conversation with my Mum with a heart that was breaking apart with longing.  After 6 days of no contact Mum finally called yesterday.   No matter how much our connection has failed in the past, I still long to hear from my Mum.  The week before I was calling every day knowing it was the anniversary of my older sister’s death, wanting to be there for Mum in her grief, in fact it was probably too much straining that I was doing out of my ‘redeemer’ script, which is becoming more and more obvious to me lately but it was also about longing to share the pain of our loss with each other too so as not to have to carry it alone and have the pain and my sister disappear totally into emptiness.

Last Saturday we had a difficult conversation in which Mum wouldn’t open up and told me I was being ‘ridiculous’ about something that was not at all ridiculous.  I suffered through a painful week this past week with no contact, I had such longing and loneliness in my heart for a  lot of the week but I held myself in it, I dialogued a lot with my inner child and the lost self that so often has been alone, and I felt again the deep ancestral imprints of longing, separation and aloneness that have been a part of our family history on my Mum’s side, passing from the men to the women.  Absence of men wounded by war (a deeper collective wound), absence of men due to alcoholism from unresolved grief over migration separation and the loss of a mother reaching further back to our ancestral lands, loss of my own father when I was 23, loss of a father in childhood due to Dad’s own emotional distance and unavailability emotionally and empathically at times.  Its a huge amount of loss and longing to contain if I really think about it.

Yesterday Mum and I had a peaceful loving conversation.   I felt how tired and sad she was.  I struggled today to think of somewhere to go or take her on a sunny autumn day to ease the pain and bring some togetherness but after liasing with my sister it all became too hard to do.  We agreed that today we would each stay in our separate space and be alone.   When the conversation disconnected I felt the depths of sadness, love and longing and a separation that was perhaps too infinite for words.  I felt it may blow my heart open, but that is just how I experience deep feelings.  And at the time of this, just a few minutes ago now, I had the thought of how these feelings were both ancestral and personal too.  I thought of my Mum’s longing for siblings that never arrived and I thought of the large gaps and difficulties I have had at times connecting with older siblings.    I thought of the wound I carry from my Mum of Chiron in Pisces as wounded healer and how strong that archetype is for me and I thought too of how Chiron occupied Pisces at the time of the Great War that saw so many young men taken from lives, fallen on the battle field in trenches, fallen in their thousands like the leaves that fell this week all over my back deck.  I then thought of how there is always so much more to what is going down than we often realise.

Some kind of deep letting go seems to be happening for me at present.  I have the sense that there is a letting go that needs to happen with my family so I can embrace my adult life, I have a sense of how long I have lived with longings of a baby and a child inside my breast to connect and be connected to others and painful reminders of how fraught with difficulty that has been and of how so many connections over my life time have gone to the wall as a result of them.   And today there have been deeply compassionate thoughts for my ex partner who struggled too with deep issues of mother and father loss and brought those into our relationship.

Earlier I had a conversation with my best friend who is also struggling with his own longing and loss.  I heard how much of it gets transferred onto today, but how much of it is deeply related to his emotionally distant relationship with his now dead mother.  I thought of how the mother wound and longing can dog us all so far into adulthood trailing behind us like a hungry ghost and how at a deeper level it also relates to our longing for connection with the deeper feminine that became so split apart in our heroic cultural and collective development over the past 1,000 years or more.

We each have our portion of that wound to carry.  It lives in the shadows and so lately I have come to feel that so many of us who struggle in this way are really struggling with something far deeper than we realise and are really shadow carriers and shadow witnesses for the lost feminine.  I was trying to write a post about this yesterday in reference to Prince Harry recently coming out about his own deeply buried grief over his lost mother and of how Princess Diana also suffered with her deep emotional abandonment wound in a family that projected symbolic images of power and control that also hide deeper wounds inside.

For today I am grateful to have been let go by my family from a day of commitments to ‘get together’, even though at first I felt so sad.  Perhaps I will never be totally free of that longing but it is not always present, at times it recedes like the tide.     I am grateful for a day in which I can live within the deeper circumference of my own life.  I am feeling how important it is for me to let go of my personal will for connection and instead pray through a higher power to be connected to the deeper spiritual life, the vast plane of interconnected consciousness on which we are all one and can truly never be separated.  It is in that place I find peace, it is in that place I find wholeness, it is in that place that I feel finally at one not only with my own soul, but with the deeper group soul of humanity.  I am not sure how much sense this blog will make to anyone but it has just rolled off my fingers and out from my heart stream today.  Peace and love, love and peace, calm and love and peace these are the conditions, places and spaces where I wish to reside today and they seem to me to be restored to me, when I let go of making the longing concretise into connection by my own will.

And perhaps when I let go, connections will come.  For a long time I may be left in a deep empty space which feels so much like drowning but the more I am able to strengthen in that place and wait in trust, the more I am restored to a deeper sanity that stops me trying to control and heal a wound far larger than I could ever fully explain with words.