Years ago, when I was learning to embrace the Goddess aspect of my spiritual nature, I discovered Sekhmet, the beloved Creatix of transmutation. I remember wondering why she was so reverenced and considered to be one of the most powerful aspects of the divine Mother; I was puzzled because there is a climatic storytelling of how Sekhmet, drunken in her energies, set out to transmute an entire humanity and had to be stopped by a cunning baboon. I wondered how she could be a manifestation of the divine Mother.

My confusion derived from the conditioning and belief that in order to be a true manifestation of the Mother aspect, we had to display many of the characteristics that the ideal Mother archetype has played for lifetimes: passive, nourishing, nurturing, submissive, sacrificial, giving, loving, forgiving and unconditionally accepting, above all things.

As I took inventory of the many examples amidst my life, I witnessed many wounded females who had been taught to vibrate purely from the Mother aspect of the feminine field and who had neglected or not yet discovered the Crone aspect of the female divine. I also noted that these women had not embraced the masculine aspect of their female energy.

Yes. When we think of the “Mother,” we usually project a soft, supportive energy that is willing to sacrifice it all for the sake of those that she has to nourish and to protect. The Mother is seen as the womb figure and as such, she is expected to feed and to nurture both in the womb and also outside of the incubation period of life.

As I learned more about the beloved Sekhmet, I realized that unlike how many had portrayed her to be a dark side of the Mother manifestation, Sekhmet was teaching and inviting us to not only to harness the Crone aspect of our makeup, but to also embrace the empowered and strong aspects of our masculine nature.

Offering nurturing and giving unconditional love from our womb energy does not mean that we have to succumb to the tolerance of denser energies or behaviors. Vibrating from the Mother aspect of our being-ness does not mean that we have to condone and accept violating behaviors that only serve to puncture the female vessel and to deplete it of the strength and empowerment that resides within all of us.

When we allow ourselves to fully embody the totality of the female trilogy, we learn how to masterfully navigate from one aspect to the other, without ever having to sacrifice one attribute of our female composite over the other. We also allow ourselves to align with the balanced fields of our female and masculine aspects. We learn how to be nurturing and loving, but we also learn how to empower ourselves and to demonstrate our strength; to speak our truth and to declare it instead of yielding to violating energies and behaviors because we believe that a loving Mother is one who is tolerant—even when there is unacceptable behavior and actions.

The balanced Mother is able to nourish, protect and love the little chicks when they are helpless and frail but also knows when it is time to throw the chicks out of the nest, trusting that they have been nurtured to a degree that they are ready to earn their own flight of life.

The empowered aspect of the Mother knows that she does not stop being a womb mother if she instills and declares her strength and empowerment in the form of discipline, of “tough love” or by practicing lovingly detachment. And by practicing the roar of the Lioness, the Mother also teaches the cubs to find their own voice instead of relying on the Mother attribute to take care of everything for them. This is empowering love and it is also the highest representation of the Mother Archetype.