Author: Janae Weinhold

For me, awakening is a process of becoming self-aware, one that changes my consciousness, raises my vibrational frequency, and brings myl soul into coherence with the Divine universe. The journey of awakening begins within the mother-child attachment system we developed during our gestation and first year of life. What we experienced with our mothers during this critical period shapes the rest of our life.

         Ideally, we had a “good enough mother,” one who was present emotionally, psychologically stable, able to love us unconditionally, and meet our needs for food, comfort, safety, and connected to the Divine. When these conditions are present, we experience bliss and know our Divinity at a body level. We become embodied divinity.

As I said, this is the ideal—and the path that a few avatars and great teachers have walked—Jesus, Buddha, Lao Tzu, Paramahansa Yogananda. They came to inspire us, to serve as role models for those of us who are not yet awakened and walking the path of karma and trauma.

The rest of us, hopefully, experienced at least a spark of bliss with our mothers during our first year and have body memory of it. I believe it is the yearning to re-experience this bliss and our divinity that drives our journey of awakening.  

From my perspective, this journey is a circle. It begins with at least a tiny experience of knowing our Divinity and feeling bliss, then losing this knowing and becoming very materialistic, and then recovering and re-experiencing our Divinity.

Another way of looking at this journey is through the lens of consciousness. Our infant experience of divinity is fused with that of our mother’s. Awakening requires we separate our consciousness from hers and develop our own individuated self. At some point on our journey, we must leave behind our ego and the material world, and re-connect with the Divine as a self-aware soul. Experiencing, mapping, and writing about this developmental and spiritual process of awakening has been the core of my personal development, and also the primary focus of my professional work.

If our early connection to “Mater” and the Divine, is weak, we are prone to fill this hole in our soul with Mater-ial substitutes: substances, activities, behaviors, and belongings. Over time, our desperate search to reconnect with our divinity requires more and more Mater-ial substitutes, without experiencing any of the essential bliss.

Our attachment to the material world makes choosing the journey of awakening difficult. The shift from the material world to the spiritual world is challenging, and requires human support from kind, empathic, and more awakened people. This is why all the 12-step recovery programs are so successful. There is no way to avoid this deep soul work, if you are on the journey of awakening.

I believe we all reach a fork in the road where we come face to face with “suffering” One fork in the road is a continuation of our current materialist life, and it’s easy to imagine how it turns out: a long tunnel with more and more suffering, and no light at the end except death.

The other fork, the road less traveled, is an intense journey of awakening that also involves suffering. It requires shedding the masks of our False Self, feeling old emotions, revisiting developmental wounds, living in our body, giving up our addictions, releasing old beliefs, regenerating our neglected bodies, becoming aware of evil, and learning to ask for and receive help from other people and from higher forces. 

Awakening requires a lot of spiritual courage. And it’s painful—yes. And the outcome—unknown and mysterious. However, there is a light at the end of this tunnel that beckons us to remember our Divinity, and offers hope to end our suffering.

So, there is really no escape from suffering. One is the path of the Victim and the materialistic lfe, the other the path of the Hero/Heroine and spiritual growth. It’s always a choice.

In my continued immersion into the Divine Feminine, I found The Blessed Virgin Mary: Her Life and Mission, book written by Corrine Heline. Nicholas Roerich called the image on the cover, Mother of Light, and he tells of her legend.

It is said there is a.great snow peak among the Himalayas where no human food has ever trod. Here a shrine has been prepared for her, and in the day of Earth’s extreme crisis, she will arise here, and lifting her hand like a shaft of light, she will summon the aid of far-off worlds floating in space. He declares this Mother of Light is the bridge of unification between East and West, and from this unification will be produced the rarest spiritual treasure the world has ever known.

When I read this quote, I immediately copied it into an email and send it to Inna Didkovska, my long-time Ukrainian friend and colleague. I quickly received an affirming and confirming response from her. We both have a deep connection to the Divine Feminine and the work of the Roerichs, and made pilgrimages to their home high in the Himalayan Mountains in northern India.

The legend of Mother of Light gave a deeper meaning to our long relationship . . . along with an appreciation of how we have helped each other become more whole, more global, in our understanding and experience of the world. She helped me develop my Eastern side and I helped her develop her Western side–we can understand issues from both sides of the planet, both internally and externally.

Being with Inna in Ukraine for 14 months in 2020 and 2021 was an immersion experience into a culture anchored in feminine values. It helped me realize that all my reading about the archetypal feminine and HerStory was very abstract and mental, and how much my consciousness and behavior was anchored in mental and masculine values.

I returned to the US feeling like I had left “home,” and was returning to do missionary work with my own people–bringing the message of the experience of the Divine Feminine . . . which is why I created this website.