By Ixchel Tucker, Keeper of the Women’s Water Ceremonies

Photo above: Four generations of powerful women – Lucy (mom) and Ixchel with her daughter, Heidi, and granddaughters, Julia and Aliyah

One thing I truly love about spiritual practice is that I get insights and breakthroughs in ways I never would have thought possible. My logical mind just couldn’t take me there.

This is what I experienced, once again, with the Holding Meditation. I’ve been using this meditation and other forms of holding space for myself for about ten years now. Yet, I still find new levels of unraveling as I go deeper into my commitment to self.

Lately I have noticed the feeling of comparing myself to others, a lot. It seemed others got more preferred treatment or were better seen and acknowledged.

This is nothing new, it’s a pattern that has been with me throughout life, but in the past I’ve thought it was the other person’s problem. I couldn’t get past my perceptions that they were the way they were and I couldn’t change them.

Even though I knew not to take it personally, I still hurt. Why couldn’t they see me (in the ways I’ve wanted to be seen)? I truly wanted to breakthrough my pattern. I tried seeing my issue differently, as something for me to work with. Why is this bothering me? Hurting me? Why can’t I let it go? I’ve tried telling myself I shouldn’t let these things bother me, but inside I’ve felt hurt and alone and I didn’t see how I could change it.

This time I realized these are all feelings. I can take them into the meditation for holding.

Some kind of magic worked in the way this came together for me this time. I often do the meditation on my own, but sometimes I have a hard time staying focused, so instead I set Misa’s recording of the meditation to play. She always begins with “feeling love, any kind of love.” At times this is easy, other times not so much. I can’t always connect with feeling loved.

Usually I focus on love for myself, or love from the Divine Mother, or love that I feel for others. I’ve never felt that my mom loved me in the ways I wanted to be loved, so instead a Divine Mother could give that love I hadn’t received.

Lucy Tucker (mom) with her youngest granddaughter, Serenity.

But this time, as I was tuning into feeling loved I thought of my mom. I thought of how she had just bought me a nice birthday present. I don’t always get along with my mom and so many times I’ve compared myself to my sisters and brothers and felt not loved enough. This time was different. I could feel her love in its purest form. I felt the love she had for me when I was a baby and as I was growing up. I felt the love she feels for me now and that she’s held for me all my life, with everything I ever did. Her love melted away every wrong I ever felt or perceived in my relationship with her.

Normally in the meditation I am holding myself in love and compassion, this time I felt her holding me. She was right there with me. In fact, she was loving me more than I had even loved myself. I could see that it was never that she didn’t love me, it was that I didn’t feel lovable and I have pushed her love away.

I could see that somewhere around my teenage years I had created the story that my parents were to blame for my faults. I was the way I was because of their mistakes and them pushing their beliefs and ideas on me. Even though I felt I had worked through so much of my stuff, I still had this underlying belief that I wasn’t loved enough. Instead, my story created a wall that didn’t let their love in.

I thought in my wisdom and search for self-improvement I had risen above my need for my mom’s love and approval. It seems more that I’ve distanced myself, while I’ve continued to judge and compare her, and it’s only made me feel more alone. I hadn’t truly seen her or believed in her or allowed myself to just be loved.

In the meditation I felt this all shift. The story dissolved, after all it was only a story I had perpetuated throughout my life. I could just bask in the feeling of love and stay there with her forever. It felt so good.

Lucy Tucker (mom) with 7 of her 8 kids

After some time I extended the loving feeling out further, reaching out to others in my life that have held a similar role. I opened to feeling their love for me as well. My entire being shifted in this new reality.

Coming back from the meditation I feel myself changed on a fundamental level. I will keep working with this until a new pattern sets in. I consciously keep holding and feeling this unconditional love from my mother. I invite it in. And I use this as a reminder. When the habit of the old feelings of comparison or friction surface, I open to this new awareness and let myself simply feel and see the love.