Mother’s Day is on its way.

Some of us are looking forward to it. Some of us are bracing for it. Some of us lost our mothers years ago and still feel the tenderness of that. Some of us are mothers, carrying our own quiet questions about whether we did it right.

Wherever we are with our mothers, here’s the invitation:

We can love our mothers free.

Free from our opinions. Free from our judgments. Free from our thoughts of lack, attack, and limitation. Free from the long list of ways we wished they had been different.

And in setting them free, we set ourselves free.

This is the beautiful teaching of A Course in Miracles: all forgiveness is self-forgiveness.

When we hold our mother in judgment, the heaviness lives in our own mind.

When we release her from our ideas about who she should have been, the lightness shows up in us first.

I walked a real journey with my own mother. We were like oil and water in certain ways. I felt for a long time that she didn’t really get me. I had a strong desire for a different kind of mom, one who could braid my hair and be my best friend.

For years, I held that against her quietly. The grievance was always there, humming.

Then she got a cancer diagnosis, and I drew a line in the sand. I said, “My mother is not getting off this planet until we have a total healing in our relationship.”

That became my priority.

What I discovered was this: the healing didn’t depend on her changing. The healing depended on me being willing to love her free. To let her be who she was. To release every judgment I had stored up.

It was the most healing work of my life.

If you’d like to walk into Mother’s Day with a freer heart, please join my FREE Forgiveness Workshop on Saturday, May 9, the day before Mother’s Day. We’ll do this work together.

The healing is happening NOW!

THIS SATURDAY:  If you’ve got some grievances you’d like to lay down before Mother’s Day, please join my FREE Forgiveness Workshop on Saturday, May 9. We’ll work it out together.

New PODCAST EPISODE:  You’re Not a Victim  What if life isn’t happening to me at all? This week I’m sitting with one of the most foundational sections of A Course in Miracles — Chapter 27, Section 7 — and walking us into a teaching that took me a few years of real willingness to fully accept. Why does almost every problem feel like something the world is doing to us? What’s the difference between responsibility and blame that most of us have never been taught? And what was the one tiny shift that helped me realize I’d never actually been a victim at all? This is part one of a two-episode arc. Listen with me on Episode 737.