By Dr. Liza Fox

Since this month’s Telecall with Bishop Bobby and Michelle Zanoni-Chinn (listen here), I have been reflecting on creativity and the miracle of motherhood. In that call, I shared that I could not carry children and how, at the feet of the Indian teacher Ammachi, I explored core mother wounds that led to a series of miracles, including the birth of two incredible babies. I shared how my husband and I sat in a magical garden, wrote prayers on blue doves hung from the trees with our community, and set intentions for the children we were welcoming. I spoke about how an email sharing those intentions circled the inter-webs and landed in a stranger’s email box and how this human angel, Katie, received it and responded to us: “I feel called by God to carry your children”. I shared how Katie, a complete stranger, and I built a deep friendship and how she was a corporate executive who didn’t need money and worked through pregnancy, carrying our Amma-sent-twins to term. The arc of this journey is beyond miraculous – Universal Motherhood midwifed our lives. And yet, I feel like I didn’t do that share justice because beneath all those beautiful images and incredible miracles were three decades of inner work reconciling my experience of the Universal Mother Wound and the challenging self-concepts that infertility, motherhood and the path of living with or without children bring forward. Birth is certainly in the field. My intention in this personal share is to also bring forward the complicated topic of motherhood, identity, and the Divine.

If anyone has a central theme of motherhood this lifetime, I certainly do! I was born on the Feast of Guadalupe to teenage parents who were deeply involved in politics. My mother left the family when I was two and would be in and out of my life during childhood. My father, who was just twenty-one, single parented me as he went to school to become a labor and delivery nurse. His father-mothering coincided with the swell of first-wave-feminism, a revolution that birthed huge and transformative equality for women, but in it’s initial offerings devalued the nuanced and essential Love that Amma describes as Universal Motherhood. So there was, from my first breath, two intertwining rivers: a deep connection to the Divine Mother and rocky rapids of grief, abandonment, and disconnection in my body, heart and mind. I spent years hiding from this pain in unhealthy choices. I then worked to heal myself in all kinds of therapy.

When I met my husband 22 years ago, I was introduced to Ammachi and a new layer of this mother-healing emerged. My husband’s roommate was from the family that first brought Amma to the US, where they reverently host-mothered her. The roommate invited me to a new ashram to meet his “living saint” auntie. I was not looking for a guru or to be re-mothered by the divine, but the river of Universal Motherhood runs strong within and this invitation was just the confluence needed to cross into. What came from that first meeting with Amma was a decade long immersion in healing. At Amma’s feet I chose to face the depth of mother loss, personal and collective, and I witnessed the grief, fear, and longing each person brings when they wait in line to receive her hug. Ammachi showed me how to mother all my feelings like she honored all her children. I would come to her in tears, she would wipe my cheeks, bless me and send me away with nonverbal teachings towards my inner work. She is a fierce Love, a transformative fire and through devotion to re-knowing myself as a child of the Divine Mother I remembered the infinite truth of being the river of Universal Motherhood.

Later, in partnering with Katie through pregnancy, more layers of healing arose. God was gifting me the opportunity to hold gratitude and grief at the same time; too be with envy, scarcity and that old feeling of cosmic brokenness right along-side joy, celebration and immeasurable gratitude. Katie’s open heart was an invitation to witness where I had closed my own heart in vulnerability. I felt broken in my inability to carry my own children and I still believed at some level I was being punished by God. This expressed itself as jealousy and fear that shame couldn’t hide. It took being in relationship with someone like Katie, so patient and free with their Love, to awaken my inner courage and show me these aspects of myself in stark relational clarity. In this mirror of my own creation, I continue to grow in self-acceptance and self-compassion. Self-love is holy medicine and God graciously offers many opportunities to embody it.

My commitment to God after this incredible journey has been to share these healings and to continually face the parts of my heart that close or hide in shame; to drink from that inner river of Love and self knowledge as medicine, to rehome myself as living service. The twins are almost 15, and I am still uncovering the teachings of Universal Motherhood Amma sent through them: unlocking programming, healing karma and clearing lineage agendas. While the river of Universal Motherhood is always running, I certainly never step into the same waters twice.

Each day is a constant unfolding miracle…As a therapist and a healer, I witness and experience daily that healing our emotional life is directly related to our capacity to receive miracles. This is a fierce love of compassionate self-responsibility and when we drop into that river, we can invite others to join in our collective journey of healing. My wish in sharing this very personal story is to invite a depth of reflection in anyone who feels called.

***This weekend is Saint Thomas’s Sunday, Orthodox Easter. Thomas crossed the bridge of skepticism to devotion through direct experience with Yeshua’s wounds. Thomas brought Yeshua’s teachings to southern India, Kerala first, where Amma was born and continues to live. Ammachi arose from this holy land that was seeded in Yeshua’s teachings on Universal Love. This is a voice recording from family who happen to be Orthodox Jews and whose son lives in Ammachi’s ashram in Kerala, India. Last month I received this message sharing the sound of birds while the 108 names of the Mother were recited. Today I was imagining Thomas hearing these same birds and devotions to the Mother as he was in prayer and contemplation. You cannot hear the chant with your ears, but maybe you can hear them within the river of your heart…