Cerridwen: Divine Great Mother

In this article Priestess Bee Helygen talks about Cerridwen as the Great Mother and how She helps us deal with all the wounding that we have around issues of mothering and acceptance, and how the most important relationship that we have in our lives is with ourselves.  Bee speaks of walking the dark path back to our own hearts and that is where we truly find the love of Cerridwen, the Dark Mother.

 

This season we celebrate together the archetype of Cerridwen as divine Great Mother.

This particular archetype is the whole crux, crucible and psychic gateway to this Goddess. She is the Great fierce Mother, determined against all odds to be there for Her children, to protect them, guide them, and make them safe. She sees the cruelty of the human world against those who are not ‘of the norm’ and She represents the energy of the unconditional loving mother, who sees the flaws and faults in all of us and accepts us: unconditional ACCEPTANCE just as we are. No judgement! No expectations! No obligations! 

Can you even imagine what that would mean to the majority of us — the freedom with which we could expand in whatever direction we wished to, without ever fearing losing the mother’s esteem or love?  

This is the real beauty of Cerridwen for me. I was the rejected child, in the worst possible way, and I carried that wound all my life. It blighted everything I achieved, even down to my own Motherhood. I felt that I could never do right by my children because I had not been loved by my parents. How many people have I had in Goddess House, in the Keridwen Room, telling me exactly that same story, bringing the reflection of unloved-ness to me. 

In this life I will never know what it would feel like to be loved by my Mother. Hands up who feels that too? 

In every course I teach, this is the hardest season because so many people feel that pain and suffer from that rejection. Often it comes from the lack of ability to love because our Mothers were not loved overtly by their own. Some of that is cultural, some of that is generational, some of that is specific to the generation that was born to the parents who went through the horrors of war and bloodshed. The trauma of survival, of deaths of loved ones, of fear of death for themselves. The ever expanding field of post-war trauma in psychotherapy shows us how present these issues are, even with this generation. 

 

Breaking the cursed cycle

How do we break that cursed cycle and come back to us? People keep talking about “Letting go”, “leaving the hurt behind”, but that does not work. I have tried. I have tried to cover that hole in my heart with all sorts of achievements, accolades, ‘see me see me’ relationships, and each has failed. Why? Because it was me that I needed to show that I was worthy of love, not anyone else. It was me who had to love herself unconditionally, even when I mucked ‘it’ up. It was me who had to stop going into my sense of unworthiness,. to reflect on my neediness to be relevant to others, to see my need for constant validation from people who are not really the saviours of my soul. 

My hera’s journey needed to be my own, not anyone else’s. I am almost around that cycle now, I am almost at the end of the long and winding road to Me. It is a race now to get there before I leave this incarnation. But I know, in this life I have done good work. I acknowledge that I made plenty of mistakes but my soul tells me that in this life I have moved forward in the Hera’s journey of evolution. 

Examine your soul, see what it tells you, see its shine reflected in your own soul mirror and celebrate the wins. Learn from the mistakes — it is a natural process that we all fall on our noses once in a while. As I write this I am surrounded by grandchildren, the twins are learning to walk, Aria is up and going but little Sebastian still needs to be able to balance the weight of his head with the weight of his bum. He is getting there, each day less falls, more steps. This is us. This is the most amazing metaphor for where we are in our own soul growth. 

Come, let’s see how many steps we can do today. We can learn so much from the toddlers: determination, ruthlessness, cooperation, and persistence. 

Let us all learn to walk into the golden light of Cerridwen together. 

Blessed be

Bee

 

Bee Helygen

Adoratrix of Cerridwen

Priestess of the Llwyth

Avalon

Website: cerridwen.co.uk

Bee is the creatrix and course tutor for the Priestess of Cerridwen training which has been running as part of the Glastonbury Goddess Temple since 2015. This year she opened the Temple College of Avalon here in Glastonbury and added the Priestess of the Dark Goddess training to the offerings. Full bio