The Mother’s Journey
A Model to support psychedelic experiences as a rite of passage to motherhood
After the birth of my first baby, I felt like I disappeared. On a systemic level, there was no substantive support readily accessible for body, mind, and spirit after experiencing one of the most radical shifts in physicality, identity, and purpose possible. On a personal level I was the first of my friends to become a mother and had no models of motherhood that made sense for my experience. In essence my experience was this: I continued to know myself as a whole person with wants, needs, and limitations but overnight, took on a role in which I was implicitly and explicitly informed that to be a “good mother” I should have none of these. Author Rachel Cusk writes, “as it stands, motherhood is a sort of wilderness through which each woman hacks her way, part martyr, part pioneer; a turn of events from which some women derive feelings of heroism, while others experience a sense of exile from the world they knew.” In pain, doubt, and extreme fatigue I felt vulnerable and excruciatingly lonely. I felt exiled.
Since the beginning of that exile five and a half years ago I have begun to find my way “back,” but toward a mental and emotional reality much different than the one I left behind when I became a mother. Psychedelic experiences and motherhood were a potent combination that intertwined to sharpen the challenges, joy, and meaning inherent in each. The difficulties and ecstasies along the way back from exile informed me of the fundamental truth of the interrelatedness of all creation, and the exquisite pain and love this interrelatedness can cultivate within oneself, one’s family, and the world. Psychedelic experiences were a powerful ally in navigating the depths of the motherhood transition with clarity and openness. I am inspired to propose psychedelic experiences as a rite of passage to honor the transition to motherhood and will present a framework to support the preparation, experience, and integration of the psychedelic journey, a map tailored especially for others who might find themselves in exile. This paper is the beginning of that map, a naming of parts of the unique terrain one might travel in the life-changing journeys of motherhood and psychedelic experiences.
Psychedelic Experiences in the Context of Motherhood
Psychedelic experiences were an unexpected and world-shifting tool as I hacked my way through the wilderness of new motherhood. Healing emerged when I began to recognize myself as part of a larger whole. In my beautiful first experience with psilocybin mushrooms, I was at the Oregon coast. I watched the waves in the ocean and felt my perspective shift. The systems and systematic ideologies we live within are so interwoven into daily life that they are like water to fish; invisible yet within and surrounding at all times. Non-ordinary states of consciousness can expand scope of understanding of how we view ourselves, others, and the world. I began to understand myself and my mother differently, as well as all the generations of mothers before us. I cried generations of tears. I felt clarity and relief. I was confirmed in my suspicion that this challenging shift to motherhood was not my fault, nor the fault of my loved ones. I recognized the core goodness of each individual and located the origin of my pain in societal shortcomings, bigger and older than any individual. Relieved of shame and personalized blame, I could grieve the loss of my pre-motherhood life.
The western medicalized perspective would likely label my challenges in early motherhood as “post-partum depression” (PPD). This was a label I refused, then and now. Of course I cried often, felt low in mood, experienced loss of energy, difficulty concentrating, loss of pleasure in activities I once enjoyed, and changes in appetite and sleep. Overnight, in a culture rife with unrealistic expectations of mothers, I took on responsibilities meant for a village with limited familial support and no meaningful community support, all while grieving the loss of my pre-parenthood life and experiencing the pain of physical birth trauma without adequate medical attention. I rejected the individualistic, pathologizing diagnosis of PPD. Experiencing emotional difficulty in response to a difficult situation felt then, and now, like a mark of sanity. In Sarah Menkedick’s book Ordinary Insanity: Fear and the Silent Crisis of Motherhood in America (2021), researcher and psychologist Paula Nicholson posited, “postpartum depression might be the only ritual American mothers have to express their grief.” Psilocybin shepherded me through an essential part of the grief process, in simply giving me the confidence that I was entitled to it. In this experience of modern American motherhood in which I lost the ways I used to know myself, grieving was the first step in finding myself anew.
I am now five and a half years into the experience of motherhood, and I continue to grieve parts of my life that pass away to make room for new growth in my family and within myself. Psychedelics have continued to support me in enormous ways, including the decision to have another child, who is now nearly two years old. A common thread through my handful of consciousness-expanding experiences is that of emerging from the extraordinary to bring greater depth to the ordinary. This is present in ways that deeply and positively impact my relationships with myself and my loved ones: experiencing awe alongside my children, sharpened after experiencing the world with a renewed sense of childlike wonder during a psychedelic experience. Feeling a spiritual connection to an ancestor with whom I visit in my mind and at her graveside. Developing a stronger relationship with my husband, a partnership that needed care as we both weathered the storms of early parenthood and raising small children through a pandemic. The experience of the extraordinary informing the ordinary is also present in the way I am coming to understand and desiring to shape society beyond my personal relationships: the patriarchal, capitalist, white supremacist, imperialist systems at the root of the challenge of my transition to motherhood.
Motherhood in the Context of Patriarchy
Like all who grew up in the United States, I was raised within a culture that honored patriarchal values. My childhood in the 1990s in Portland, Oregon held true signs of social progress, and the optimism of this forward momentum perhaps overshadowed the reality of enduring inequality. My parents, each the grandchildren of European immigrants, were the first generation in their families to receive higher education. My experience as an upper middle class White girl gaining consciousness as the second wave of feminism built toward the third informed me that I was equal to my three brothers. I skinned my knees playing tag football alongside the boys that filled my suburban col-de-sac and told my kindergarten teacher she seemed to call on the boys more than the girls. Only in recent years have I begun to realize the brevity of history separating my tree-climbing, school-attending American childhood from forms of girlhood with far less freedom. Only in adulthood did I retroactively recognize the second shift my mother picked up; working full-time just as my father but coming home to another job assumed to be hers: making dinner, folding laundry, packing school lunches. Only in becoming a mother myself did I free-fall into the most challenging experience of my life with so little substantive support. Only recently am I deepening my understanding of the reality that waves of feminism have eroded only the very edges of patriarchal culture underlying these inequities.
In her book The Will to Change, author bell hooks defines patriarchy as “a political-social system that insists males are inherently dominating, superior to everything and everyone deemed weak, especially females, and endowed with the right to dominate and rule over the weak and to maintain that domination through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence.” To name only a few examples of the way in which this appears in daily life, patriarchal culture informs gender inequality in income and career advancement, gendered roles in household and parenting responsibilities, prevalence of violence perpetrated against women, and cultural expectations of women’s bodies and sexuality. Governmental control over aspects of human experience related to motherhood are some of the clearest examples of patriarchy. The 2022 overturn of Constitutional protection for abortion provided by Roe v. Wade, as well as state-level attempts at legislation to limit contraceptive use removes the basic right to bodily sovereignty from people with uteruses. Forced birth will cause countless individuals to endure the physical, mental, emotional, financial, and social risks and ramifications of pregnancy and parenthood in a society that does not offer adequate support for these challenges.
Following the expensive, medically risky (particularly for Black women, see Hoyert, 2020), and highly energy-consuming pursuits of pregnancy and birth, American parents have no federally protected right to paid parental leave and no guaranteed access to high-quality, affordable childcare. The lack of policies to protect and support families, combined with gender norms for women to take on household and childcare responsibilities results in many mothers leaving work or struggling to balance work and parenting. The demands of American motherhood came into sharp focus during the COVID-19 pandemic when mothers disproportionally filled in the gaps left by the absence of what little social support (e.g., childcare centers and schools) existed for working families (Stanford University Rapid Survey Project, Spring 2021). Mothers of Color were especially likely to leave the workforce (Place, 2021) and parented through stress and fear associated not only with the COVID-19 pandemic, but also the “double pandemic” (Addo, 2020) of increased race-based stressors of increased violence toward people of Asian descent, as well as the race-based cultural awakening and subsequent retaliatory messages and actions associated with the Black Lives Matter movement (McKinney, 2022). Pregnancy, birth, and parenthood are some of the most radically transformative and demanding experiences a body, mind, and spirit can encounter, and in the United States are endured within a society that offers little to no support for these challenges, as well as additional strains on those lacking privileged identities. Removing the element of choice in reproduction is to take control over the most fundamental aspects of human existence and is a devastating example of patriarchy’s domination.
Motherhood and Psychedelics as Portals to Understanding Interconnectedness
It is a signal of my privileged existence as a White, well-resourced, able-bodied, heterosexual ciswoman that only after becoming a mother myself did I hurtle into a series of challenges that personally informed me of the systemic justices imparted by patriarchy. The protection that my race and social class provided to me is illustrative of the fact that patriarchy coexists with white supremacy, capitalism, and colonialism. In American culture, patriarchy cannot be properly understood without an intersectional lens that considers the way in which these ideologies work in tandem to systemically privilege the White and wealthy. As a person with many intersecting privileged identities I conceptually understood and accepted my privilege, but the understanding did not reach far beyond intellectual. I attribute my embodied sense of awakening to the realities of privilege and oppression to a powerful amalgamation of psychedelic experiences and becoming a mother. At their core, both experiences contained the felt sense of the interconnectedness of life. This held enormous meaning that was at once full of beauty at the primacy of love and belonging, and sorrow at the ways in which harm can be caused by misuse of our interconnectedness. On the other side of privilege is oppression, and our culture is steeped in historical and present-day injustices that leverage the health, happiness, and humanity of the less privileged to serve the continuation of inequity.
Social Justice
Taking on the role of mother functioned to divest me of my personhood as I knew it and as society saw it due to generations of misogynistic social expectations. On a systemic level I became a body gestating a fetus, and then an unpaid provider of care. While challenging, motherhood is (for most, and hopefully) a chosen experience and cannot be compared to the brutal and inescapable historical and present-day denial of the personhood of Black people, Indigenous people, and People of Color through individual and systematic expressions of racism (e.g., stolen land, slavery, internment camps, mass incarceration, police brutality). That said, my experience of the challenges inherent in becoming a mother in America did function as a portal to a more embodied understanding of inequity. Taking on a role not adequately respected or supported by my community (while maintaining my multitude of protective intersecting privileged identities) was an indication of what it might be like to exist as a relatively less valued member of society. Similarly, my psychedelic experiences offered an expansion of consciousness that facilitated a more visceral understanding of myself as part of a whole, and the way in which interrelatedness impacts others, for better or for worse. It is a challenging social quirk of humanity that we can so much more readily find empathy for situations we have also experienced. If experiences such as motherhood and non-ordinary states of consciousness can function as a pathway to increased compassion, may we be so lucky to experience them. If we experience them and also inhabit the social context of a relatively privileged individual such as myself, I believe it is our duty to integrate this knowledge into our lives by taking action towards righting the scales of injustice.
Climate Justice
Another way in which embodied knowledge of interrelatedness facilitated by motherhood and psychedelics affected my worldview was a deeper understanding of ecosystem imbalance, both within a family and within the natural world. The role of “mother” can be enacted in a multitude of ways, including but not limited to pregnancy and lactation. Biologically, socially, emotionally, perhaps spiritually, the role of mother relates to the creation, nourishment, and nurturing of life. Terms such as “Mother Earth” and “Mother Nature” invoke these roles of the mother to illustrate the ways in which the natural world can support human, animal, plant, and other life. There is enormous output of energy needed to create and sustain life, and imbalance is apparent both in the system of a family and the broader context of the Earth’s ecosystem. Climate change is a present and growing danger caused by the imbalanced use of energy. According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA, 2022), greenhouse gas emissions as a result of fossil fuel burning for human activities have increased precipitously since the 1950s, causing the Earth’s surface temperature to rise. The Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) reports that human-induced climate change is already resulting in extreme weather, putting 3.3 to 3.6 billion people living in areas especially vulnerable to climate change in immediate risk, with further harm to come to life on Earth if emission output does not decrease (United Nations, n.d.).
Family Imbalance
Within a family system, imbalance is a recipe for parental burnout, an experience of stress that outweighs coping resources and includes stages of exhaustion, distancing from children, and loss of fulfillment in parenting (Mikolajczak & Roskam, 2020). Burned out parents are at greater risk of escape ideation and suicidal ideation, as well as neglect and violent behavior toward their children (Mikolajczak et al., 2019). Sadly, emotional distress experienced by parents can affect their children’s long-term well-being. In a study controlling for the effects of other forms of childhood adversity, parental mental health problems were shown to have an enduring effect on children into adulthood, with level of distress increasing in proportion to the severity and duration of exposure to parental distress (Kamis, 2020). Between the inherent biological differences in demands on the role of a gestational parent versus a non-gestational parent, and the outdated yet continuously present imbalanced gender norm demands placed on women versus men in heteronormative relationships (i.e., division of labor in household and parenting responsibilities), mothers are especially at risk for burnout. It is no great leap to imagine the way in which parental mental health problems affecting the well-being of children into adulthood would put future generations of children at risk for distress until and unless the cycle is broken. Among human mothers and for Mother Earth, overuse of energy creates imbalance, and the resulting harm has generational ripple effects.
Motherhood and Psychedelics as Initiation Experiences
Gestation, lactation, and care of a child are unique opportunities to viscerally experience interrelatedness, for better or for worse. Particularly in the absence of proper support, these energy outputs may contribute to an experience of loss of the self. In this sense, the transition to motherhood can be thought of as an “initiation” experience. In her book Motherhood: Facing and Finding Yourself, Jungian analyst Lisa Marchiano explains, “an initiatory life event is that which cracks us open, shakes us out of our familiar tread, and challenges us to reconsolidate a sense of ourselves along new, more expansive lines,” and notes “any challenging experience has the potential to cast us into our own depths, but motherhood may be the life experience most effective at doing so” (p. 9). Initiation is commonly understood to include three phases, described by Marchiano as descent, sojourn, and return. The descent “into your depths where a confrontation with your soul awaits you” has the potential to “enlarge our sense of who we are, to clarify our place in the great arc and sweep of time, and to affirm our belonging to the cosmos” (p. 8).
A challenge of motherhood as an initiatory experience is the absence of formal rites of passage to honor the sacredness of this transition. Folklorist Calleigh S. MacCath-Moran describes rites of passage as “customs underpinned by the belief that inform them, much as myths are narratives about the beliefs that inspire them.” As it stands, American mothers descend into the depths of sleepless nights and overstimulating days largely alone and with an absence of beliefs and narratives to bring context and companionship to these challenging experiences. This may contribute to a sense of feeling lost, hopeless, lonely, and missing out on the potential to emerge from the depths with a clarified sense of self and of one’s sense of belonging to the greater whole. A custom such as a rite of passage to honor the passage into the new social role of motherhood would serve to honor the importance of the transition while also presenting an opportunity to discern and experience beliefs and values underlying the meaning of the role.
My personal experience with psilocybin-containing mushrooms as a portal to greater meaning in my motherhood experience informs my notion that thoughtful, ceremonial psychedelic experiences could function as a rite of passage for the motherhood transition. The three-stage journey of feminine initiation (descent, sojourn, return) outlined by Marchiano is similar to the famous “Hero’s Journey,” a template outlining the narrative structure common to so many myths across cultures that it is referred to as the monomyth. In his 1949 book The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell describes the Hero’s Journey as a three stage arc in which the hero of the story leaves the known world (departure) to venture into the unknown and face challenges (initiation), over which he ultimately triumphs and returns to the familiar world with the power to save the world, himself, or others (return). This template is already in use to inform a context for a psychedelic journey, in fact inspiring ethnobotanist and psychonaut Terence McKenna’s naming of five grams of dried psilocybe cubensis mushrooms as a “heroic dose.”
Criticism of The Hero’s Journey as a Framework for Motherhood Initiation
The model of the Hero’s Journey for psychedelic experiences is outlined by Kile Ortigo in his 2021 book Beyond the Narrow Life: A Guide for Psychedelic Integration and Existential Exploration. Ortigo suggests that the mythological stage of departure occurs during preparation for a psychedelic trip, in which awareness is expanded via cultivating greater awareness of oneself and fostering curiosity for potential possibility for growth or change. The initiation stage occurs during the psychedelic experience, in which existential trials are confronted and opportunity abounds to uncover deeper knowledge of one’s authentic self. The stage of return occurs during integration of psychedelic experiences, in which knowledge and realizations found within the experience is integrated into one’s life and concept of self through habits, practices, and continued exploration. In an experience with as much potential for depth and personal development as a psychedelic experience it is wise to have a context for the experience, often described as set (one’s mindset for the journey) and setting (the physical context in which the journey takes place), and the model and underlying concepts of the Hero’s Journey may especially be a helpful framework for mindfully considering one’s mindset.
Historical Gender Criticism of the Hero’s Journey
While the general structure of the Hero’s Journey outline is a natural fit for the three phases of preparing for, having, and integrating a psychedelic experience, it is important to consider its potential lack of fit as a framework for the mindset and experience of all journeyers. The Hero’s Journey has roots as a story arc describing a male “hero” character with origin in Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s archetypes, which he described as mythological motifs that define our understanding of the world. The Hero’s Journey model is a narrative description of the process of Jung’s concept of individuation, which is the life-long process of integrating parts of oneself to become a unique, whole individual. The applicability of the Hero’s Journey for women’s individuation has received criticism from multiple sources including Campbell’s former student Maureen Murdock, who reported that Campbell advised her: “Women don’t need to make the journey. In the whole mythological journey, the woman is there. All she has to do is realize that she’s the place that people are trying to get to.” This proposition is of course absurd; women are not immune from the challenges of life, nor can or should women transcend the struggle of these challenges, which may ultimately lead to a deeper and truer knowledge of oneself. Murdock went on to write The Heroine’s Journey, a framework for women’s process of individuation that is meant “to heal the deep wounding of the feminine within ourselves and in the culture.”
Mother-Centered Criticism of the Hero’s Journey and Underlying Archetypes
For motherhood-related work in particular, the presence of Jung’s ideas at the root of the Hero’s Journey warrant a critical eye. Jung’s biography reveals that when he was three years old his mother was hospitalized for several months during a mental health crisis, during which time he was cared for by an aunt and a maid. Reflecting on this experience in his autobiography Jung wrote, “from then on I always felt mistrustful when the word ‘love’ was spoken. The feeling I associated with woman was for a long time that of innate unreliability.” After her return from the hospital, Jung biographer Frank McLynn (1994) explains that Jung “remembered his mother as sometimes happy but more often subject to fits of depression. He soon learned to perceive her as two different people, with an uncanny, terrifying second personality. Outwardly she was submissive, but her unconscious occasionally burst through to reveal a deep character of power and resolution” (p. 10).
This dichotomous perspective of his mother informed Jung’s description in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (1970) of the Mother archetype as symbols with a “positive, favourable meaning” (e.g., goddess) or a “negative, evil meaning” (e.g., witch, dragon, p. 16) and holds similarities to the mythology of the “Good Mother,” present in our modern culture. Although in his book Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine (2013) Joseph Campbell cautions that “misunderstanding consists in mistaking the symbol for the reference,” archetypal expectations of mothers have escaped the narrative and a cultural mythology of “Good Mothers” and “Bad Mothers” has taken hold of our expectations, setting mothers and their children up for disappointment when the “goddess” ideal is naturally not achieved.
With the guidance of my own observation and Claire Howarth’s 2017 article entitled “Motherhood is hard to get wrong. So why do so many moms feel so bad about themselves?” I can describe the modern “Good Mother” as an intervention-free birthing, breastfeeding, stay-at-home, selfless caricature of a likely White, well-resourced, feminine-presenting, straight, able-bodied ciswoman who is emotionally even-keeled, “loves every minute” with her baby, and declares her devotion on social media. In her article “The Impossibility of the Good Black Mother,” Tope Fadiran Charlton, a self-described “dark-skinned Black mother, relatively young,” exposes the patriarchal, misogynist, racist roots of this myth, writing, “the myth of the Good Mother is built on the back of scorn for mothers like me.” Modern symbols of the “Bad Mother” might entail classist, racist stereotypes such as The Welfare Queen, the Tiger Mom, the (presumably under-involved) Working Mom. While the myth of the Good Mother is especially unreachable and harmful to people with intersecting non-privileged identities, cultural pressure to embody the role of the Good Mother is crushing to all mothers, who are whole people with ideas, feelings, wants, and needs that cannot neatly fit within the impossibly limiting boundaries of the “Good Mother.”
Further exploration of Jung’s mother’s (Emilie Preiswerk) background via McLynn’s biography of Jung reveals that Emilie grew up in a household in which her theologian father demanded that her mother stand behind him to “ward off evil spirits” while he wrote sermons. Emilie went on to have an unhappy marriage with Jung’s father, the pastor of an evangelical church. In the years before Carl’s birth, she experienced two stillbirths, followed by the birth of her first living child who tragically died just a few days after birth. McLynn writes that “Emilie treated [Jung] as a grown-up when he was a child and confided to him secrets she would not divulge to her husband.” One might consider a likely lack of freedom of expression granted to a woman in Victorian-era Switzerland, a setting described by McLynn as “superstitious, xenophobic, conservative” as an alternate explanation for Jung’s perception of his mother as having a “split mind.” He attributed her aforementioned outward submissiveness and occasional revealing of “deep character of power and resolution” to schizophrenia. If Jung’s legacy of the dualistic Mother archetype lives on (and it does, in the dragon/mother slayed by the hero in the Hero’s Journey narrative), it should do so alongside a reminder of the complex context in which it was conceived.
The Post-Heroic Journey
Writer, psychologist, and mythologist Sharon Blackie is also critical of the Hero’s Journey model, pointing out in her 2016 book If Women Rose Rooted that the values at the core of the Hero’s Journey are patriarchal in nature: “linear, all-conquering and world-saving.” She proposed the idea of the Eco-Heroine’s Journey, which she described as:
“a path to understanding how deeply enmeshed we are in the web of life on this planet. In many ways, it is an antidote to the swashbuckling action-adventure that is the Hero’s Journey, with its rather grandiose focus on saving the world. … This path forces us first to examine ourselves and the world we live in, to face up to all that is broken and dysfunctional in it and in our own lives. Then it calls us to change – first ourselves, and then the world around us. It leads us back to our own sense of grounded belonging to this Earth, and asks us what we have to offer to the places and communities in which we live. Finally, it requires us to step into our own power and take back our ancient, native role as its guardians and protectors. To rise up rooted, like trees.”
While Murdock’s critical lens toward gender is important to consider and matched the context from which it originated in the 1990 publication of The Heroine’s Journey (i.e., second wave feminism’s focus on “women’s liberation” from traditional gender roles and third wave feminism’s embrace of women’s individual expression), Blackie’s point of view moves beyond an individualistic and gender essentialist model of individuation toward a focus on the dysfunctional systems underlying inequity. Since the publication of If Women Rose Rooted in 2016, Blackie shifted the description from the “Eco-Heroine’s Journey” to the “Post-Heroic Journey,” to more accurately convey the fact that this journey toward interconnectedness is for all people, regardless of gender. She writes in an article proposing the post-heroic journey as a framework for elderhood,
“post-heroic stories aren’t focused on individual glory, they’re focused on community. On diversity. …Post-heroic stories are less about strength and more about compassion… they show us what it might be like to inhabit a world in which humans are fully enmeshed. …That sense of awe, of connection, of belonging to a mysterious world which has many depths and layers to explore, is missing in so much of our lives today.”
For a role like motherhood, imbued as it is with the interconnectedness inherent in raising a child, a framework that recognizes and respects concepts of compassion, awe and belonging as fundamental values is a refreshing, needed structure to guide a new mythology of motherhood. It is time to leave behind the stories of motherhood informed by patriarchal, misogynistic, racist roots and plant seeds that will inform a concept of motherhood that accurately reflects its true values: interrelatedness, belonging, compassion, depth, love, diversity, complexity. Campbell himself would agree; he posited in Goddesses, “the old models are not working, the new have not appeared. …We are the ancestors of an age to come, the unwitting generators of its supporting myths, the mythic models that will inspire its lives.”
Toward a New Mythology of Motherhood
As a person conditioned by patriarchally-rooted sociocultural forces to value independence and achievement, the transition to motherhood was a humbling and frightening descent into unknown territory. I needed a new story to guide this new life, but I lacked one. The focus of my life was no longer myself, illustrated vividly by my expanding belly, my leaking breasts, my mind hijacked by thoughts of the next feed, the next wake-up, the next diaper. Progress in professional and recreational pursuits came to a halt, social life took a nose-dive, and I realized that while I was well-acquainted with the student, the psychologist, the cyclist, and the friend parts of myself, I wasn’t quite sure who I was when these roles fell away. I knew that I did not like this new motherhood role in the form it arrived to me: sleepless lonely nights of nursing beginning as the winter sun set at 4:30pm, bouncing on the yoga ball for hours to coax a nap out of my movement-seeking “high needs” baby, family and friends understandably focused on the adorable baby I held, but painfully no longer asking about me, no longer looking at me. It made sense, in an excruciating way. I also did not know how to look at myself anymore, or even where I existed. I was in exile. The I that I knew disappeared, and the only explanations widely available to explain my experience of this were “baby blues,” “post-partum depression,” “post-partum anxiety.” How I wish for myself that I could have had another explanation, a new mythology, a map for that journey out of exile that informed me that in fact, the loss of that old “I” as I knew her was a necessary first step toward inhabiting a sense of belonging far deeper, wider, and more satisfying than the individually-focused self I once knew.
Psychedelic Support for the Journey
For me, the path toward this sense of belonging was facilitated by psychedelic experiences, especially those induced by psilocybin-containing mushrooms. The parallels between mushrooms and mothers are beautiful: just as mothers connect humanity through the generations, the mycelium network branches underground absorbing nutrients from decomposing material, supporting plant and invertebrate life, and sending up fruiting bodies in the form of mushrooms to release microscopic reproductive spore cells which create more mushrooms. Concepts of death, creation, nourishment, and interrelatedness abound in both human mothers and mushrooms, and are reflected in the psychedelic experience itself. In his book Sacred Knowledge, psychologist and psychedelic researcher William A. Richards describes mystical experiences as including a “common core” of characteristics including unity, transcendence of time and space, intuitive knowledge, sacredness, deeply-felt positive mood, and ineffability (p.10). Richards further explains that unitive consciousness is “preceded by the ‘death’ of the individual personality and followed by its ‘rebirth,’ often accompanied by significant intuitive knowledge” (p. 78).
The transition to motherhood involves the death of the pre-mother self, making way for a “rebirth” into one’s new experience of the self as a mother. The importance of this transition may be lost in the exciting, challenging, and much more tangible birth of the baby. In the chaos of the early weeks, months, and years the birth of the mother may continue to go unacknowledged. Inherent in this lack of acknowledgement is loss of the opportunity for the mother to meet herself anew, find herself rooted within her new family structure, and harvest the fruits of the intuitive knowledge her transition will yield. This is a loss not only for the mother, but for her family and broader community too.
The Mother’s Journey Model
The basic structure of the Mother’s Journey model will include an interrelated three-stage arc of exile, journey, and return, with examination at each stage of three interconnected layers of self, personal relationships, and systems.
Exile
The primary focus of the exile stage will be acknowledging and grieving the loss of what was known regarding relationship with self, relationships with others, and relationship with one’s pre-motherhood conceptualization of the world. Considerations at this stage may include the dying away of roles, stories, and ways of being that no longer fit within the context of motherhood. Embrace of emotion is the spirit of this stage, and the presence of subsequent stages should not be mistaken as pressure to rush or bypass the anger, sadness, despair, rage, or other emotions essential to the grief process yet not traditionally valued or even allowed within the motherhood experience. In fact, this stage will model the act of holding space for oneself in the ongoing dying off of roles, stories, and ways of being inherent in the ever-evolving experience of raising children.
Journey
The primary focus of the journey stage will be exploring and becoming acquainted with one’s burgeoning understanding of self, relationships, and world in the new context of motherhood. Whereas this stage is well suited to be facilitated by a psilocybin journey, this is not a requirement, nor should there be any pressure toward any specific experience that does not fit the needs and preferences of the journeyer. The essential qualities of the journey are that of a safe, intentional, experiential, and consciousness-expanding nature. Expanded states of consciousness may be found in methods such as meditation, dance, and holotropic breathwork, among others.
Return
Finally, the primary focus of the return will be acting on these new understandings by integrating new ways of knowing and being into relationship with the self, others, and the world. The actions upon return will be unique to the individual and may include bringing intention toward practices of journaling, art, movement or other self-reflective and self-caring habits, reconsidering patterns and roles within one’s family, and taking steps toward restoring balance and equity in the social and environmental systems one inhabits.
Conclusion
The Mother’s Journey model will be a practical, personalizable structure intended to support people in their evolution from a life led by individualistic values toward one led by collectivistic values, with specific focus for those who are exploring this shift within the context of motherhood. The fundamental underlying concept of interrelatedness is derived from the synergistic contexts of motherhood and psychedelic experiences, both of which can inspire an embodied experience of unity. The framework will be inspired by the Post-Heroic Journey, as well as myths and archetypes that accurately convey the true complexity of the motherhood experience. The foundational beliefs underlying the Mother’s Journey originate outside of the patriarchal, racist, colonialist context from which modern American individualistic and capitalistic values arose, and instead grow from a base of values that honors connection, belonging, generosity, and balance. In a departure from the concept of the mother as a supporting character in the simplistic and harmful cultural mythology of the “Good Mother” and “Bad Mother” inherent in the Hero’s Journey and underlying Jungian archetypes, the full complexity and depth of the Mother will be centered within this framework. This means that support for preparation and integration of psychedelic experiences will be tailored to the unique experience of the transition to motherhood, which can be ritualized and honored at any stage of the mother’s life. This rite of passage and accompanying conceptual framework of the Mother’s Journey will hold space for the mental, emotional, social, and spiritual deaths and rebirths inherent in the shift to motherhood. My deepest hope is that it will guide her journey out of exile toward connection with values that align with her intuitive and embodied sense of interrelatedness, and deepen her experience of belonging to herself, her loved ones, and her community.
References
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