Work with your Inner Mother to soothe your
​Inner Child and become the Elder you want to be

We live in an increasingly fragmented and polarized world. How do we keep ourselves from following the overculture into the breakdown of relationships, family, and community? How do we hold strong, preparing for the time when we all come together to create a more life-affirming world?
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We begin with the teachings of the natural world. We find that our strengths and our struggles are reflected all around us. Humans have forgotten that we are part of this system of life force energy flowing through all that is. 

And if it’s true, that we inherently belong, that we are already connected, that we just need to remember, where would we start? We start at home. We start with ourselves. We cultivate in ourselves that which we intend to bring to our relationships, families, communities… and even to our lineage. 

Landscape of Mothers was born out of a personal need to coalesce a life-affirming way of moving through the world. It was my search for belonging, anchoring, support, and encouragement. Humans can be tricky sources of these things, but I learned I could find them in nature. 

Landscape of Mothers was dropped into my life by Wind Mother… who whispered in my ear one night on a full moon about archetypes and the natural world. I started writing them down only to discover that they held the foundation I was looking for. If I didn’t want to go through life feeling out of sync with the rest of the world, like a zebra among horses, then I was going to have to find a structure or foundation for living in accordance with my own values.
Whether you're a parent or you're healing from family of origin wounds, I help people who are transforming painful generational patterns. The key is the Inner Mother, who can be incompletely matured, creating difficulty caring well for yourself or others. 

If you want to stay in touch with the latest at Landscape of Mothers you can follow me on YouTube or TikTok. To get curated collections of videos, blog posts, and information that are more cohesive and oriented toward solutions, please consider signing up for my newsletter.
It turned out that a lot of my values aren’t mainstream values. It was always clear to me that the world wanted strong and powerful people. People who could fight and dominate. Don’t get me wrong… I have opinions and I will state them loudly… but I also had a deep calling to find the benefits in soft, slow, and gentle. 
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It seems I came into this world on an apprenticeship to grief, and that grief invited me to see something about life as precious, vulnerable, and needing presence. At first, I thought that it was all weakness, but over the years I’ve found the strength and delight in moving with softness; not just softness, but a culture of care, a gesture of love, and honoring humanity. 

Why grow your Inner Mother now?

There are so many reasons to do this work right now, but in the interest of time and space, here are a few:
  • As chaos is getting more powerful, we need deeper roots
  • What we can’t do on the world stage, we can do in our homes
  • Breaking patterns of family pain is one of the biggest contributions we can make to future wellbeing, and it begins within us
  • It's a powerful act of reclamation to stand for our Inner Child getting the kind of parenting she/they needed.
  • Some of us need to hold the legacy of the soft and gentle through these hard times, so that when it’s time to rebuild community there will be those who are ready to do it
  • When we build something that goes against the grain it can be hard to hold it alone, having other people to work on it with helps us be steady
  • Instead of feeling like something is wrong with us because we don’t agree with the chaos, we can anchor our belonging in what we do believe in.
  • Amidst the noise we can work together to weave the care and calm into our local webs so it has the opportunity to spread support and love through our networks of relations.

I had to find my own way too

Hi, I’m Jill Doneen Clifton, daughter of Anne (Phyllis), granddaughter to Lucille (Sammy) and Virginia (Ginny), great-granddaughter to Maud, Mary, Maria, and Mary. I am a mother to three children and two grandchildren. 

It was through parenting that I found out how much I needed a foundation for my sense of self. I knew that I couldn’t repeat the kind of parenting I received, but I didn’t know what else to do. I could imagine kindness in parenting, but found that it was difficult for me to do because my nervous system was so used to chaos, punishment, and neglect. I had to do some serious self-parenting.

It became clear to me at some point that, as an adult, I was responsible for taking care of these gaps left by how I was raised. It felt unfair to not receive adequate parenting, and then to be required to teach it to myself fast enough to do my best to deliver to my own children. It is, it was. But it’s also how we change our family legacy.
There it was. Historically undermothered, it became my job to do what my parents couldn’t. The more I’ve learned over the years, it seems likely that even with “good parents” we can be undermothered because of how isolated mothers have become. 

While there’s so much more to say about being undermothered, the antidote to passing on the wounds is to begin with ourselves. To acknowledge the Inner Child and what they did not receive, and to develop a soft, caring, loving Inner Mother to meet them. 

There has been a lot of talk in psychology circles about the Inner Child for decades. But it is rare to talk about who takes care of the Inner Child. Knowing the pains of the child self isn’t enough. It often re-opens the wound without tending to its care.

And who takes care of the Inner Child? The Inner Mother does.

But how do we grow this in ourselves when our models of parenthood and caregiving didn’t offer us what we needed?

Landscape of Mothers is a map

Landscape of Mothers is a wheel of nature based archetypes – a Council of Mothers – within you – that can guide you. Archetypes give us a lens through which to see our lives, but they leave room for us to approach with our own blend of autonomy, capacity, and choice to find our way through life in a way that feels correct for us.

Landscape of Mothers is based in the natural world. Nature can provide the soothing, holding, and nervous system regulation that you may have missed as a child. The natural world can also be a map, helping us find our way when we're looking to build a family culture (and community culture) that we have not yet known.
You can read more about how we build a relationship with nature in this blog post. And in this post I talk about some innate patterns that support communal living that we see in nature.
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Building a connection with nature and learning to regulate the nervous system restores the ability to tap into your intuition and your inner guidance. It grows the Inner Mother who can now care for your Inner Child as well as your current/future offspring. Nature is the map, it locates us where we are. And from there we can see our strengths and struggles so that we can know where we might go.

How I can help

Sun and Moon Mother
​Wounds around care in infancy and childhood can make us feel trapped in what is familiar. Cycles of criticism, isolation, and judgment damage the innate mechanisms that help us find our own way. Landscape of Mothers helps us restore and reclaim trust in our instincts, capabilities, and discernment.

How Landscape of Mothers helps:
  • Archetypes illuminate aspects of ourselves that we hadn't considered or been able to see before.
  • In Landscape of Mothers the archetypes are arranged in a wheel, which provides options for a more complex understanding and options for responding to our own particular struggles.
  • Nature provides soothing, a sense of belonging, and a foundation for tending to childhood wounds. Once tended they will be less likely to hijack your ability to be the person you want to be.
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The pattern breakers I know are probably your kindreds too

My clients are both intensely dedicated and gently kindhearted. They feel deeply and know when things aren't working, even if they aren't always sure how to fix it. They are devoted to a world that values one another, though they've been hurt by the world we are living in. Most often they cheer for the underdog because they see the injustice of being undercut by the system. 

Find out more about the Landscape of Mothers Book here. 
​Contains full descriptions of the eight archetypes that make up the Landscape of Mothers as well as how to get the most out of working with them.

Want to get to know the Landscape Mothers?
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