Mother Wound and the Coyote Trickster
Part 2 of a 3-Part Series on the Lifetime Search for Emotional Healing
“Trickster appears to deliberately upset the status quo.” ~Hunab Ku
On April 30, 2019, I was going about my status quo life (albeit a pretty wonderful, interesting status quo life), when trickster energy came trotting in to play. This is the day I first interacted online with some lady from Alaska named Marita, when she commented on my Instagram post with a Richard Rohr hashtag, our mutually favorite author. Marita was already familiar with my name and work from Rohr’s famous “Hell No!” talk (and here), where he gives a coveted shout out to my book, Raising Hell: Christianity’s Most Controversial Doctrine Put Under Fire, so she felt compelled to reach out to me with a friendly hello. This opened not just a door, but a cosmic portal in my life.
Over the next four months, we communicated through innocent emails, getting to know each other. We marveled at our intense spiritual connection and noted that we had read most of the same books. We were also both in a similar liminal stage of life, having deconstructed most of the religious beliefs of our Christian upbringings. I found her unique, easy to talk to, and intriguing; it was the first time in my life I began to feel unprecedented giddy attraction feelings towards a woman. As you can read about in other posts on this topic, my husband was relatively (naively?) unfazed by my growing admiration for a woman, and he encouraged me to explore my newfound feelings. By that time, we were both aware of alternative paradigms in partnership relationships that did not necessitate an “either-or” situation.
My first phone call with Marita occurred in September and felt like a turning point. Fighting my feelings for her was like trying to hold back a river during spring runoff. My research for trying understanding these intense magnetic feelings took me to the concept of twin flame energy. The disrupting magnitude of it all felt full on confusing and even destabilizing much of the time.
A few months into our budding relationship, I told her that I was aware of a vague, guarded place within myself that prevented me from properly attaching to loves throughout my life. Except for the selfless, sacrificial love I felt for my children, properly attached love was like a language I never learned how to speak as a child. There was always a place of reserve where I could not bridge the gap to full vulnerability, and I was upfront that she should not expect too much from my ability to open up. She told me she could already perceive that in me, and that she felt confident that she could help me work through the issue to find my capacity through experiencing her open-hearted love. There is often great power in soft, nurturing love to heal what needs to heal—it feels a lot like motherly love. Her ideals were probably valid, but little did she know that this feminine love was exactly what was about to fully flay open an old wound.
Marita and I first met for a spiritual retreat at the famous center called the Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu, New Mexico, where Richard Rohr was the keynote speaker (we got to hang out with him for a whole morning before the retreat!). We were both trying not to get ahead of ourselves before meeting, knowing people can vibe very differently in person. But everything felt as expected, and we had an amazing week together. She then came back to Puerto Rico for a week to meet Steve, as we felt confident that our feelings for each other were authentic.
During the week she was in Puerto Rico, a seemingly minor incident happened that triggered something so deep within me, that I did not fully recover. Last week I mentioned the ongoing dreams of my mother for the years previous to meeting Marita, and the vague awareness that a wound was being signaled there. I should have been keen enough to put all the pieces together—to identify that Marita had tripped a fault line from my childhood—but I was still too unconscious to perceive it. The triggering event brought about an overwhelming feeling of insignificance that I could not understand or shake. One minute, my life made sense, felt secure and meaningful. The next minute, I felt as if I had fallen into an abyss of cosmic despair.
You could say from that point on, I shifted out of a grown woman persona into more of a child persona within my relationship to Marita. She brought out something in me that felt like a long-lost, unpleasant part of myself. I started noticing my unusual behaviors that I would today recognize as codependent—jealousy, distrust, and extreme anxiety when I had to be away from her or if anything felt like it threatened our relationship.
Both Marita and Steve noticed my shift, but I couldn’t talk to either of them about what I was feeling; I trusted no one with such a humiliating, disempowering realization (#AriesProblems). Suddenly, no one (and nothing) felt safe to me. This took me into a long night of the soul experience, trying to wake myself up to my deepest wound—what was it? Where did it originate? Why now? And what in the heck do I do about it?
Several months later, on March 30, 2020, while struggling with some related insecurities and struggles in my relationship with Marita, I sat down with coffee and some newly purchased oracle cards for insight. After three shuffles, I pulled a random card: Coyote. From the description book:
“The Coyote is the symbol of the sacred trickster, the one who provides detours for growth and understanding, by ensuring that things don’t go as planned. The Coyote brings the energy of divine deception to set you free from the shackles of that which doesn’t serve you. Sometimes it appears that you will get everything you want, only to find that Coyote brings you the opposite of what you hoped for. The lessons offered by Coyote may at first appear confusing, but they are most sacred and always for your highest good. …Remember this: Coyote is a sacred trickster and may be leading you into challenges to ensure that you are ready to handle what you’ve set in motion. Great growth and understanding come to you when Coyote calls your name. Are you being seduced by what you think you desire? …Perhaps you feel that in order to get what you desire, you have to compromise yourself, control others, or manipulate situations to ensure your goal is met? Coyote howls in the shadow to remind you that this may be a lesson too painful to learn.”
“Well, that is a bit disconcerting,” I thought. “I’m sure it was just a coincidence—card pulling is probably random and unreliable anyhow.”
Next, I opened my Hunab Ku: 77 Sacred Symbols for Balancing Body and Spirit book to #30, the number corresponding to the date. The entry was Trickster/Confusion, with the photo of a Coyote. With trepidation, I read the following: “Trickster comes into our lives in the guise of chaos. But he’s a wily survivor and he lends us his techniques. He enables us to see things in fresh, new ways, standing things on their heads. …Are you being tricked into thinking in a new way? …Chaos theory teaches that when our psychological perspective shifts—through moments of amplification and bifurcation—our degrees of freedom expand and we experience being and truth…our true self lies there. Trickster is your strange chaotic attractor. Somebody’s playing a trick on you; maybe it’s yourself. The number thirty is three tens, completion and wholeness tripled. Trickster has come to make you whole! Hunab Ku #30, by Joel Speerstra, (pp. 118-19).
I told Marita about the Coyote card debacle, and she admitted that she had been frequently pulling the Coyote card in one of her decks as well. It left us both wondering if one of us were deceiving the other, or if the Universe was somehow playing a trick on both of us. Only time would tell.
We encountered frequent unusual, sometimes impossible synchronicities (and more here and about feathers here) surrounding the relationship, which felt very coyote-like. Once we were digging in the dirt for crystals at an open mine in Arkansas when we met a lady named Vivian, a self-proclaimed psychic. She was there digging with her husband and young son. Within five minutes of meeting us, she blurted out that Marita had been my mother in another lifetime (perhaps she was picking up on the mother energy in this lifetime, who knows?). Looking back, I recognize it for what it was: howling “coyote energy,” trying to get my attention—or at least to be another flagstone to recognize later. It was all slowly bringing to the surface this mother wound I carry, the one of abandonment and feeling insignificant and unlovable, not able to trust people close to me with my heart.
Through the past five years, the Universe has constantly reminded us that this is somehow play, though it often felt heavy. Imagine being in your 50s and needing a mother…like you are a toddler. Imagine the destabilizing, humiliating, distressing feelings that go along with such culturally shameful feelings and behaviors. At one point, I even felt so strangled by my anxieties and fears, I (lightly) entertained thoughts of ending it all. I have since realized how many of us in the world are walking around with unidentified mother wounds, unable to fully love or experience love. I can see why most would want to keep pushing it down, not ready or willing to look at something so foundationally catastrophic and difficult to heal.
On the other hand, it’s important to realize that WE are the ones who assign meanings to things and who create our reality. Perhaps I could have just as easily believed that my childhood was not that messy or difficult to heal, and that this world is more playfully engaging us in experiences that I get to choose how to perceive. Then perhaps I might have had a different, easier path. Maybe the gravity of this struggle is because I have created it to be so through my beliefs about it. Perhaps all that is needed is a perspective shift and the whole thing will disappear like smoke.
But, this is not the path I took. I am a Scorpio rising sign, after all…dark emotions are there to be alchemized into something beautiful. How else would I have something to write about? Looking back, I somehow kept it together on the surface, hiding the truth from everyone about how fragile I felt on the inside. I developed distressing psychosomatic symptoms, feeling some days like I was going to spontaneously combust from all of the stuck energy amassing in my body.
You can imagine the impact all of this was having on my marriage. But I was unable to stop the river. And even if I had wanted to, I intuitively knew it was leading me somewhere crucial to my liberation and wholeness. The only way out is through, as they say. The only thing to do is put my feet up in that river and let it take me.
Over time, Marita came to realize that she was ill-equipped to relieve or resolve my distressing lost feelings. Unable to reach me on my dark days, she had to admit to herself that sometimes love isn’t enough. This was a journey I was going to have to complete alone, from the inside.
Which brings us to this point today. I’ve been working on integrating my mother wound, and it feels as if I am being dramatically assisted by the heavens (more on that next week).
I read recently in a fascinating book by Maxwell Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics: A New Way to Get More Living Out Of Life, that emotional healing is not a list of conceptual steps you follow. E-motions are energy in motion. To heal them requires an emotional body experience of allowing (conscious feeling) and integration. One such ultra-simple technique I have heard of recently is the Havening Technique, which I now try to use when I’m having difficult feelings rise up from the roots of my being.
But there is another path that I am deliberately using this summer, a book with a 10-week transformational experience called, The Presence Process: A Journey Into Present Moment Awareness, by Michael Brown. I went through this book the summer of 2020 and did feel as if it started bringing up stuck emotions for me to process and integrate, but I abandoned the practice too early. It’s a truly remarkable book with profound insights and a practice to help one integrate unconscious wounds, without the struggle and toil of conventional therapy. From the Presence Process:
“Whenever we are triggered in a manner that causes emotional discomfort, we are deliberately being set up. An upset is a setup or a reflection of the past.” (p. 141). Ah, Trickster was here! The Presence Process teaches us that our earliest memories and wounds—emerging as triggers from special “messengers” in our now lives—are only available to us as emotional imprints. We react to these triggers because we are unconscious of the ways they are showing us unintegrated emotions of the past. “Emotional triggers are our childhood leaking unconsciously into our adult experience,” (p. 155).
When people trigger us into excessive emotional reactions, we pause to recognize that they are not the reason we are having such a reaction, they are merely the messengers (or the mirrors) trying to show us that, something painful here needs attention. If we ignore these messages, we remain in a state of discomfort and chaos through unintegrated emotions that affect our current relationships (and health!). This isn’t unique to only a few, it’s the human condition. “On one level, our entire life experience is a setup. This is the so-called ‘cosmic joke’” (p. 145).
Ultimately, these triggering, highly charged situations we all find ourselves experiencing from well-orchestrated messengers are reflections and projections of our own unresolved past pain. I’ve come to see the Trickster set-up appearing in my life in the guise of codependence, twin flame magnetism, depression, anxiety, psychosomatic symptoms—all of it is opportunity for a full circle healing of the totality of my life. My life was set up with chaos, not to throw me into hopeless chaos, but to grow and heal my in the deepest places. “I recognize my reflections and projections” is one of the mantras from The Presence Process.
The words echo in the deep:
“…through moments of amplification and bifurcation—our degrees of freedom expand and we experience being and truth…our true self lies there. Remember, Trickster has come to make you whole!”
Next week I’m going to conclude this series with thoughts on emotional integration and how my recent plunge into learning astrology has helped immensely in making sense out of this life experience with acceptance and patience, since this experience was written into my birth chart! I have also discovered that the astrological influences are aligned (and designed?) this year to be synchronously supportive to help me fully heal my mother wound once and for all. It’s too exciting not to share! See you next week.