She Who Speaks: From a Mother Chapel to the South of France

On January 6, 2021, my book Discovering the Inner Mother was published, which was the same day that the violent insurrection was unfolding at the U.S. Capitol building.

Publishing a book was a long-held dream of mine but it happened in the shadow of a lot of personal and collective tension. COVID restrictions were in full force. No in-person events for the book were possible. The country and the world were in upheaval and breakdown.

My relationship with my partner had just ended several months earlier. Almost immediately after I submitted my final manuscript, our relationship began to transform and dissolve.

After the book was published I experienced a lot of grief and confusion. A long-held dream came true, so why was I feeling so sad, deflated and heavy? It felt as though a huge, unexpected contraction was taking place.

At this point I had spent many years teaching how the Mother Wound exists on four levels — personal, cultural, spiritual, and planetary. What I didn’t know at the time was that I was about to heal my way through the third level of Mother Wound, the spiritual— the one that goes all the way down to the bone: a wound with life itself.

Stumbling upon a Mother Chapel

Months after the book came out I wanted to find a new apartment that was less expensive. Due to a shortage of housing in my area, I found the only viable apartment in the region was actually inside of my own building where I was already living, a large historic building made into condos.

The apartment was unique as it was an historically registered, renovated chapel turned into a studio apartment, which I didn’t even know had existed inside the building. It was a very simple, large, open room with wood paneled walls and interesting architectural details. It was modernized only by a big white cube in the middle of the large room that had the kitchen facing out from it, and bathroom and closets within it. The chapel had an entire wall of windows looking out to the Holyoke Range in Northampton, Massachusetts, facing the sunrise every morning over Mount Skinner. The sleeping area was on the raised altar platform.

The day I got the keys and moved in I experienced an unexpected shock.

Above the altar of the chapel, where the sleeping area was, hung a huge plaque, engraved into the wall itself, about five feet across. The plaque had had been covered by a tapestry by the previous tenant when I had visited the apartment to view it before. So, this plaque was freshly revealed to me for the first time on the day I moved in.

I stood there silently in the empty space, keys still in my hand, as I read the massive plaque which said:

“The Gertrude M. Hubbard Chapel: Dedicated to the memory of a mother whose resolute love gave the blessing of speech to her own little deaf child and formed the inspiration of her husband’s efforts to secure the same blessing for all other deaf children.”

This chapel was the heart of one of the earliest schools for deaf children in the United States, founded by Gardiner Greene Hubbard and John Clarke in 1867.

Having my bed rest on an altar in a chapel dedicated to a mother’s “resolute love” for her daughter, as an estranged daughter who writes about the Mother Wound, felt shocking because I hadn’t known this place even existed. It felt like some cosmic choreography at work. I took it as a clear confirmation that I must be in the right place. Little did I know that would turn out to be true in more ways than I could have imagined.

The chapel had over 20-foot ceilings. My favorite time was the sunrise. I would try to time it to be with coffee in hand at the kitchen island, when the chapel would go from dark to completely filled with an intense pink light. The sun’s rays were like floodlights that would illuminate the entire room in a single moment. Each of the tall windows had a pointed arc design at the top, and so there would be 6 huge arc-ed shapes of light projected through the entire room and onto the expansive back wall. The vastness of the space with the intensity of the light was alone a powerful experience to have on a daily basis.

The acoustics were amazing. I would spend time with all the lights off and just a few candles lit singing or listening to contemplative music. It was also a great place to do yoga and just spend hours staring out the windows at the clouds and mountains. I regularly saw all kinds of birds, including bald eagles. There was a blue heron who appeared to have a flying route across the sky around 4pm a few times a week. I regularly saw rainbows and at night the entire constellation of Orion was visible from my bed with the lights off. I felt so held, blessed and grateful to have this special place to just BE.

While I continued to write, coach and speak online, I did so minimally so that I could focus on an intense re-structuring that began happening inside of me.

Life seemed to be asking me to stop structuring my identity around competence, productivity, and being useful to others.

A lot of my familiar “footholds” of identity had become slippery or non-existent, just at the exact moment I had been expecting to feel more secure in my identity than ever. This was very unsettling and confusing. I had already gone no contact with my entire family back in 2011, and having recently lost my partner of 5 years— even in a loving, amicable way —was triggering and difficult.

My body supported this re-structuring with precision.

Health problems began coming in waves. Carpal tunnel made typing and even holding a book open very painful. Complications from vascular surgery led to months of recovery. Perimenopause brought daily migraines that routinely stopped my days in their tracks. Meanwhile, many personal and professional relationships began to drift apart or we consciously parted ways.

The most bewildering part of all this was that I was confronted with an assumption I had been unconsciously holding, which was the assumption that after my book was published, my career would continue to expand outwardly. That seemed like a reasonable expectation for my trajectory. But life had other plans for me.

Instead of becoming even more visible and ambitious, it was like a gravitational force was pulling me inwards and downwards, away from the world and into a deeply alone place. Part of me was sad and angry about this. And another part of me was starting to feel deep relief.

The younger version of me who started my public writing career at 35 wanted bigger stages, larger audiences and more recognition. But the more seasoned and mature version of me who was now 43 years old was discovering a much deeper kind of expansion that was about depth, freedom, self-trust and a greater capacity to listen to what Life was wanting from me.

Because I was having so many health issues at the same time, I was very limited in what I could accomplish. I spent many hours looking out of the long line of tall windows from my bed on the altar of the mother chapel, feeling completely exhausted and emotionally thread-bare, like a wrung-out rag.

As a recovering parentified daughter I felt like I was undergoing a painful identity-dismantling.

Questions plagued me, such as:
Who am I when I’m unable to be productive?
Who am I when I am not helping others?
What will happen to me if I am not ambitious?
Will doing less make me less safe?

I developed a new relationship with productivity by necessity. Many new ideas, solutions and perspectives would emerge from simply sitting, being and looking for hours at a time. It was like a new kind of perception was coming online. I began to see that my need for rest was on the same axis as my productivity. When I rested deeply and submitted to the rest without protest, the channel was clear for the flow to tell me “what IT wanted to happen” more than what “I” thought needed to happen. When I listened to the flow and relaxed, things unfolded more elegantly and efficiently than what I would have predicted. It was continuously humbling.

Being a recovering parentified daughter, my mind had always insisted I over-plan, over-give, over-monitor due to the traumatic belief underpinning my nervous system, which had always been “Everything’s on me. If I don’t do it, it won’t happen. I need to be hypervigilant because I’m alone and unsupported.” Even though this wasn’t my conscious thinking, I was witnessing how it was still operating as my primary orientation to reality.

Pulled into the Beloved

Emotionally, this was so bittersweet and brought up a lot of grief. I could feel the visceral support of the universe wanting me to let go of control and let it have the wheel of my life. It was taking everything else away so I could enter into a deeper intimacy with it. It felt like the universe was asking me to become a trusting child again and let it take care of me, which felt terrifying. I had dreams of waking up in the passenger seat of my car, astonished that it was being smoothly and safely driven by an invisible force, crossing a six-lane highway on a curve at intense speed. Instead of relaxing, I got scared and tried to wrestle myself back into the driver’s seat, which led to me being lost and disoriented in the dream, stranded on the side of a highway.

From every direction, inner and outer, the evidence was mounting; it was safe, necessary, even — to trust the higher flow more than my own mind.

I started consenting to it, rather than fighting the stillness. And as I did, I started feeling what felt like devotion pouring through me for Life. There was a long period where I would look out the tall windows at the trees, clouds, birds, squirrels and just weep on a daily basis. Like full-on “ugly cry” every day for about a year. I wasn’t weeping out of grief. I was weeping out of beauty. Somehow, I began to see how love was pouring out of everything, how life was ultimately benevolent and supportive.

The weeping changed over time. It began as devotion — “I love you, Beloved, I love you, God, I love you, Life.” And then it kept going. “I love you, humanity. I love you, earth. I love you, dust. I love you, everything there is.” The love was absorbing and embracing everything. Absolutely nothing was left out of its passionate embrace. In some kind of mysterious shift in perception, I was able to witness Life ecstatically loving itself in all lifeforms; my body was just one of countless forms involved in this eternal love affair between form and formlessness.

What I was experiencing, I would later understand, is what contemplative traditions call 'love without object' — not love directed at anyone or anything in particular, but love as the very nature of awareness itself.

In now perceiving how an unfathomable love was the true essence of life, I felt a swoon of devotion that was almost agonizing in its intensity. Because a byproduct of this perception-shift is a gratitude for existence that feels like a kind of shattering. The preciousness of simply being alive feels like a gift too enormous to fully comprehend. I realized this truth isn’t fully grasp-able by the mind, but can only be FELT as a direct experience.

I noticed every time I surrendered more deeply to the energy of the Life/ the Beloved (which was simply the energy of trusting life) my inner child’s fears of annihilation would occasionally disrupt the process. I could see how my inner child experienced this deepening trust as life-threatening because as a traumatized child it simply wasn’t safe to just relax, surrender and trust I would be supported and held by my parents, who were volatile, neglectful, and emotionally shut down.

That profound level of trust and openness was dangerous when I was a child, but I was being shown that it is safe now.

I began connecting with many old memories of being a child in which I had a strong knowing that love was the heart of everything, but it got pushed out by the traumatic experiences in my childhood. For example, I have a photographic memory of being around 7 years old and standing in my bedroom alone while hearing my mother yell at my little brother. I felt myself on a strange precipice in my consciousness, like a crossroads of sorts. I solemnly said to myself “I have to say goodbye now to my openness in order to fully participate here.” Like I had to close off and go the way of ego defense in order to fully adapt. I experienced that as a moment of intense weight and sadness because it meant somehow departing from a loving quality of my own soul.

It was as though I was coming full circle now, being asked to re-open the portal back to this original, childlike openness again.

I was reading about Sufism, which helped me understand what I was experiencing. I found comfort and inspiration in the following passage, by one of my favorite Sufi teachers and writers, Kabir Helminski, the current leader of Mevlana Rumi’s lineage, from the book Living Presence: The Sufi Path of Mindfulness and the Essential Self.

“For the lover who is sincere and true, the transformative power of love is relentless. The attributes of will and consciousness you developed to be a better person are eventually realized as the effect of the Beloved on the lover. And all that you thought you loved—other people, the beauty of nature, all that held meaning for you—turns out to be veils the Beloved wore. The lover comes to know, mysteriously, how everything is a gift of Being, and with this realization gratitude grows. The gifts may be beautiful, but the Giver is even more beautiful. Love gradually replaces every other love with love of the true Beloved. And finally, everything except love is devoured by Love.“

A powerful turning point in the chapel came with a deepening peace about my estranged family. One night I had a dream in which I witnessed all of them without me, at a family gathering, mingling and being with each other. I saw how they were loving each other at the highest level of development that they could, and I saw that level was valid, had dignity and meant nothing about me at all. I saw that they have the right to be at the level of consciousness that they now reside at, even if their definition of love was different than my own.

I awoke from the dream with an unprecedented sense of peace about my family of origin. I saw that they played their role perfectly in my life so that I could be where I’m at now. It was a sense of completion that felt very physical. Coincidentally, it was Easter morning. I wrote in my journal: “I feel like a living circle.” Some gap had fully closed; something was resolved in that seeing and acceptance.

I started to have many insights about my book and the heaviness I had initially felt around it years prior. I realized that the book had represented to my inner child a kind of longed-for vanquishing of the original trauma. Understandably, to her it represented a final vestige of the “impossible dream,” that somehow my published voice would make my goodness and innocence finally legible to my family.

The gift was that I got to achieve the dream of publishing my own story. I got to tell the truth about my life and help other women tell the truth about theirs.

Getting to the top of a mountain is a gift. But once there, you also get to see what the mountain cannot give you. And perhaps that realization is the greatest gift of all.

As the chapel years continued, I found myself genuinely uncertain whether I was meant to continue the Mother Wound work. The wound itself no longer felt like my primary orientation. I wasn’t focused on pain and excavation anymore — I was living something different. I went through a period of wondering if I needed a career at all.

I applied for lots of jobs including a custodian position, a local library assistant, a coordinator at a local Buddhist center and even interviewed for two different roles at Brown University. I briefly worked on a project for a fellow entrepreneur. None of them became anything. Looking back I can see the grace in that — each door that didn’t open was the path refusing to close around the wrong thing.

By process of elimination, something became undeniably clear: I was being asked to continue as I had been, as a kind of “field guide” on the Mother Wound path, but now to show what comes next. To map the territory of integration after the years of excavation. The work wasn’t ending for me, it was simply evolving. Which feels, in some ways, even more vulnerable — because I’m teaching it from inside the living of it, not in retrospect, but in real time.

As more clarity finally began to arrive, my safety and fulfillment felt more securely inner than ever. The main bond was now with the Beloved (with Life itself) and everything else was centered around and mediated through that one primary, loving relationship. While my outer, public life had been relatively minimal and quiet, my entire internal architecture had now shifted to reflect this.

My adult self had grown into a deeper level of stability and discernment. My inner child was reclaiming her trust, her open-heartedness, her capacity for delight. And both — adult and child alike — were now being held by something larger: the Beloved, whose constancy made it safer to be fully alive, fully human again in a new way.

As these realizations were ripening, I knew the time was coming to emerge from the chapel’s walls and back into life again and this brought up a new kind of apprehension and vulnerability. The challenge of the next phase was no longer processing childhood trauma, but how to embody these newly accessed capacities for childlike playfulness, adventure, joy and curiosity alongside my adult stability and discernment.

No, I had not reached some mythical, final destination of healing. But after four dark years of the soul this was a genuinely new orientation to life. It felt as though I was being shown what healing the Mother Wound was always pointing towards: When we sufficiently process the original pain of feeling separated from love, we can come out the other side to see a much deeper truth… that separation from love is actually impossible.

It takes one kind of courage to face your own pain and heal it. Yet it’s an entirely different kind of courage to re-enter the world afterwards — to become fully permeable again, permeable to new people, permeable to new situations. To stay open anyway, knowing that pain is inevitable and yet there is a vast love present and always holding you and holding everything within it.

I saw how those 4 years of monastic living in the mother chapel had eroded my capacity to over-function and over-give. The stillness and the isolation forced me to focus purely on myself and to learn in a painstakingly visceral way, what was essential and what was detrimental to my wellbeing. I think this is a kind of necessary healing for parentified daughters, and perhaps women in general: to reclaim the right TO NOT prioritize other people over ourselves.

This is a taboo thing to name. We never had that right as little girls growing up in abusive or dysfunctional households to focus purely on our own development, interests, and needs. Prioritizing others was survival, prioritizing others was a burden, prioritizing others was forced, prioritizing others stole my childhood. For parentified daughters, what was stolen was the right to come first in your own life. The compulsory care we were coerced into providing wasn’t truly genuine or altruistic. People-pleasing, fawning, and self-neglect are NOT the same as caring for others.

There’s something corrective about finally having one’s own private contentment, to savor and rest in that...that also paradoxically, makes one more capable of true care.

The burden of compulsory care falls on all women raised in dysfunction, as families are the main institutions for the inter-generational transmission of patriarchal conditioning. However, it falls with particular weight on women of color, many of whom carry not only family-system parentification but the cultural and historical mandate to hold everyone else together invisibly and without credit. One could say that the right TO NOT prioritize others is even more radical, even more taboo, even more justified there.

I was considering what to do next. My current context of living in Northampton felt complete. I started longing for a new life outside the chapel with new people, places and things. I explored many different options and ultimately landed on a cherished dream I had for decades but had put aside. The dream of moving to Europe. I remember the day I decided, I was looking out the window of the chapel, and knew it was time for a big leap outward, something that matched the depth to which I had gone inward.

Within 3 months I had sold everything I owned and with French Visa and two suitcases in hand, was on a plane to Nice, a city that I had never been to. I knew all I needed to know; it was a city on the Mediterranean where artists went to study light, and people took slow strolls along the sea to rest during the winters. It was 4 years to the day from when I moved into the chapel to moving abroad to the South of France.

Now being here at the one year mark I can say that life here in Nice has been an ideal place to embody that primary connection with the Beloved, and embrace new opportunities to integrate all the lessons and expanded capacities I developed during my chapel years.

Just recently, I was sitting on the beach with a local friend named Lora. We were talking about our families and our connections to France. My mother’s paternal side is French Canadian from Vermont and originally emigrated there from a region called Yvelines near Versailles. I told Lora my mother’s maiden name which is a French phrase for “She Who Speaks”. As I said the name, she paused and looked down. Her demeanor became more serious, she said slowly, like she was thinking out loud, “That’s wild considering the work that you do as a writer, giving voice to the silence that so many women have carried in their female lineages.”

In the quiet that followed her saying this, I felt some tears start to form in the back of my eyeballs.

I thought of the chapel of Gertrude M. Hubbard, and the years I spent sleeping beneath that plaque, her resolute love giving her deaf daughter the blessing of speech. I thought of all the fear and pain that had arisen and fallen away there in that sacred space, and all the trust, joy, and beauty that had gradually blossomed in their place.

As the waves rolled in before us, I felt grateful for the mysterious path that had led me from that chapel to this beach.

Somewhere along the way, I realized my deeper bond with Life had never been fully broken by the trauma and with that conscious realization, a new kind of life was possible now. A new, undaunted phase of my life was just beginning.

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