Episode Six: Divine Assignment

September 22, 2024

Maura Conlon  00:06

Welcome, I’m putting on the tea, just like my grandmother did in County Clare Ireland more than a century ago.

Maura Conlon  00:21

You’re listening to Original Belonging. I am your host Maura Conlon, born and raised in Los Angeles. I’m passionate about the primal nature of our creativity, which allows us to reconnect with ourselves and with a sacred web of life. I hold the doctorate in depth psychology, and I’m the author of FBI Girl, a best selling memoir about my first 14 years a coming of age saga also adapted for stage, whether unfolding upon the page or the stage of your childhood playground. We all have life defining moments from our first 14 years. Stories that often get buried in our adult lives. Yet, these early visceral sometimes mystical experiences remain a treasure trove incubating our original wisdom. When remembered, the stories offered timeless inspiration, and resilience through thread, or our lives. 

Maura Conlon  01:46

Original Belonging is a six part narrative podcast series featuring stories and conversations, where we return to and explore the vital landscape of our early years. In each episode, I go back in time to share my story, a hologram if you like depicting the agony and the ecstasy, and the wisdom learned and these poignant coming of age years. Let’s not dismiss the places that made us come alive when we were young. They hold a key as to how we can open our hearts and evolve into our truest potential. Such primal memories are not long ago and far away. No, they live inside of you. They’re right here. Listen, close. 

Maura Conlon  02:48

Episode Six. Divine Assignment. Today on the episode, I explore how the treasure trove of significant influences and archetypal events that we all experience in our first 14 years of life can go underground as we move into our adult years. And often, decades later, in times of questioning, or transition, some voice inside nudges us. Who are you really at the soul level, at your essence? And what are you here to share with the world

Maura Conlon  03:38

Remember the earliest resonant, even divine moments of all they offer direct access into the root system of our original belonging.

Maura Conlon  03:55

It is a threshold moment to arrive here to witness with adult wisdom, the reckoning of our divine assignment. When we heed that inner call, our hearts open to a new path of unfolding, sometimes full of surprises, some that we may never have expected. As I became a teenager, I started to sense a mysterious connection to my women ancestors, the ones I saw in framed photographs hanging on the walls of my childhood home. I never knew these women. Their stories weren’t handed down. yet. I felt their presence calling out to me. I saw my face in theirs, same eyes, same hair, and the silence became just too painful. I needed to start asking questions. This led to a quest To discover the last feminine stories of my lineage.

Maura Conlon  05:13

So growing up in Southern California, all of our relatives were back in New York City. And in our childhood home, there was the hallway with the photographs, framed photographs of all of our New York relatives. I would walk up and down that hallway every day of my growing up years. And then one day when I was coming of age, maybe I was 12, or 13. I stopped in front of that photograph of my Nana, who was the daughter of German immigrants. I looked at that photo of my Nana. And I thought, how sad that I never knew her. She died when I was two and a half. I just looked into her face and wondered if I was anything like her. 

Maura Conlon  06:02

There’s some blink between grandmothers and granddaughters. It’s a little mysterious, but there was something there. And I felt a sense of sadness, like, Oh, what, how come I don’t know anything about her. There were no stories that were handed down about her very few stories. So I was I was very curious about her. I was intrigued by the fact that she had light hair and light eyes, and my mother had dark hair, and dark eyes. I knew that her family was a Lutheran Family, and that she had married my grandfather, who was Irish Catholic. Nobody really talked about that. But there was this sense that she came from another stream of life. So it takes the photograph off the wall. And I find my mother who is in the kitchen. 

Maura Conlon  06:59

And I asked my mother, Mom, you never talk about Nana, or I know so little about her. Can you tell me just the most important thing that she ever told you. And my mother looks out the window and said Nana was the valedictorian in her graduating class in New York City. And she never got to use her gifts. She was from a very poor immigrant family. And she had to work to support them. So I took that in, and then she looked right into my eyes and said, Now Maura, you make sure that you use your talents. It was a transmission of sorts, like, Oh, this is really serious. It struck a chord deep inside of me. And I looked at that photo of my Nana, and thought, I’m going to do this, whatever you can do in your life as as a young woman way back when I’m going to do this. Of course, I couldn’t know what the importance of this message was back then. 

Maura Conlon  08:17

But later, I would find out that my Nana’s husband, my grandfather, was a drinker. He would come home at night from his job and the newspaper business in New York City. And they could tell by the way that my mother could tell my Nana could tell by the way, he closed the garage door, whether he was totally drunk. And that would create havoc in the house, if he was. I don’t know if that was my mother’s way of saying, if you use your talents in the world, than you can control your life, you can set forward your own path and to have freedom to live your life and not be stuck with somebody. Of course, none of this I would ever know back then. And also, I think that my mother, I mean, she definitely was a very spiritual person, and believed that we all arrived with talents. And that’s why we were here. That’s why God put us here was to use her gifts. 

Maura Conlon  09:27

So she had that element of her this inspired aspect. That was a part of that message as well. This message was also a way to maybe suppress the value of feeling because when you’re really focused on using your talents, sometimes that can mean you know living completely out of your ego and going after one achievement after another. So there’s a lot of different ways to take that message. But it seemed that using talents focusing on ambition achievement was a way to circumnavigate having to be too vulnerable to big emotion. It seemed like a safer way to go, and a way that the world rewarded. I have a Great Aunt, Aunt Mary. And she was another one of those photographs. 

Maura Conlon  10:18

And I asked my mother about her to How come, I don’t know anything about this woman. I look so much like her, we had the same eyes. And my mother got really quiet and finally told me that Aunt Mary died in childbirth, way back in the 1930s. She wanted to make sure I knew that that doesn’t happen anymore. And I looked into her eyes, and I felt very teary, like, oh, a life cut short. And it was occurring to me as a girl coming of age that being a woman is complicated, or has complexities let’s put it that way. I have this transmission to use my talents, while also knowing that the body is a really vulnerable thing. You know, as a woman, you just don’t know what’s going to happen.

Maura Conlon  11:21

In sixth grade, it was becoming obvious that I loved words, I started to write poetry. And I wrote a poem about the divine in nature, which maybe is something precocious for a sixth grader to write about. But my mother got that poem and had it typeset for me, and so it was interesting, because it really was a poem that came from a place of deep feeling for nature, and then to see it engraved like that. That felt like an accomplishment. You know, rather than talking about, oh, you feel the divine in nature. Oh, tell me more about that. What does that feel like to see? To see the sacred and the rose, you know, so that would be a conversation about feeling. 

Maura Conlon  12:06

But I was more focused on Oh, I’m, I’m like a published poet. I’m in sixth grade. There’s my name right there at the bottom. Ah, the light bulb goes off. I started to write poetry wrote in my journal a lot. And when I was 17, my mother bought me an electric typewriter, again, with those serious eyes, said, someone’s going to write a book about this family and died, died thought, it’s probably going to be me. So she was validating a talent that I had. I was on a path to use my talents.

Maura Conlon  12:51

When I was a teenager, I would babysit and I was glad to do that, because I was interested in making money. And one of the neighbors talked about this career that she used to have in some big city as a opera singer.

Maura Conlon  13:09

And I asked her, Why did she leave that behind? And she said, Well, she met her husband, and he got this job out here in Southern California. And that’s, that’s why she was living there in suburbia, now, you know, raising her kids. And at that age, I thought to myself, How could you do that? And I made a pact. I will never leave my career and my city to go someplace to be with a man. I knew that someday I wanted to live in New York and work in publishing. I probably knew that as a teenager, after having gone to New York to visit our relatives there. So I moved to New York when I was 24. lived on the Upper West Side, got a job at The New Yorker, in the business office.

Maura Conlon  14:07

I remember sometimes after work walking around the Upper East Side, where my Nana, the valedictorian in her class, who I never knew was born. I tried to imagine her as a young girl on those same streets, wondering about her dreams and wishing she could see me now living here in New York City.

Maura Conlon  14:37

One day, I was sitting in Central Park, looking around at all the skyscrapers and everybody playing frisbee and softball walking dogs and just that rush of human life. I felt as if I wasn’t a dream. Like I’m here. I live here I work here to dreams really come true. I guess so. Because I made As happen, and I moved to New York with a couple $100, maybe $600 to my name. So it was, you know, it was like an opening to, oh, well, what else can I create? Eventually, I moved outside of Manhattan. And now I could ride my bike on the weekends. 45 minutes or so to the family beach bungalow at Breezy Point, Rockaway point, are sometimes called the same thing to the beach of my mother’s childhood where she had been a beauty queen and where an uncle still lived. I learned that my Nana had actually bought the bungalow during the great depression for $250. And nobody knows where she got that money. I remember feeling so proud of her. And grateful that we still have this family beach bungalow all these years later.

Maura Conlon  16:07

Several years before my living in New York, I bought the Eurail pass and travelled to Europe solo, after I had left my interest paper job at the time, and met a fellow in a train station in Innsbruck, Austria. And we just hit it off. We both were from California. We both had a grandparent born in Ireland, we both loved poetry and nature. So we developed a relationship. And by the time I was in New York, that relationship had been going on for quite some time, a couple years, at least. He was leaving journalism to become a doctor. One of the cities he was exploring living in was Philadelphia, which I thought is great, because I could be in New York, and Philly was just a train ride away. 

Maura Conlon  16:55

Long story short, he decided to do his medical education in North Carolina, which I knew was not just a train ride away. And I was happy for him, but my heart kind of sank. Because I knew that I loved him. And I knew that if we were ever going to live in the same city, and maybe have a life together, that that would mean my leaving New York. I think at that moment, that transmission of using my talents from my Nana was enveloped in another feeling which was love. And that desire to be in a relationship with this man. And love is a powerful force. And so I remember one day, taking the stairs, down into the subway station, and waving goodbye to Manhattan as I got ready to hop on the train and go out to Brooklyn where I had an apartment at that time, and get ready for the next adventure.

Maura Conlon  18:17

I think the feeling was like getting on a big ship. And you know it’s going to somewhere new and adventurous. And not knowing how the journey is going to be. There’s a lot of uncertainty. But I felt as if I was listening to my heart. And that’s what was most important for me. At the same time. I knew that I wanted to keep going in my pursuits. And so I applied for graduate school. And I was able to study Irish poetry and the Irish poets. And that was really a gift to be able to have that experience.

Maura Conlon  19:05

After North Carolina, it came time for my then husband to do his medical residency, which brought us to upstate New York for five years. It was important for me to keep working and to keep my career going. As my husband then was very busy with surgery training program. After five years in upstate New York, we move back to the west coast and I was thrilled for that. And I was at a time to where I had just lost access to so much of my creativity in this full time career focus on achievement, writing marketing plans, involved in strategic business discussions and that earlier self that had been so creatively expressed in so many ways writing poetry and Designing and sewing my own clothes and playing the piano and all of that, that seems so long ago and far away, it seems so irrelevant to being this career oriented person focusing on ambition, and was I using my talents in the world? 

Maura Conlon  20:19

I mean, I think my ego felt proud that I, I was focused on a career a lot of times when you’re married to a physician, at least back in those days is this was the 1980s that sometimes someone would say to me, Oh, well, if you’re married to a physician, why are you applying for this job, you don’t need to work. So there was this odd societal expectation that a woman who was married to a physician would drop her life dreams, essentially, that’s how it really hit me. I think in my 30s, I really felt that my then husband had trained so hard to become a surgeon, that I felt that his career would take priority. 

Maura Conlon  21:07

And as a writer, I could be more flexible, in what I would do for a living where wherever we ended up, that’s part of this narrative of allowing myself to take a secondary role in terms of what I’m contributing to the world. And that was my choice. But that involved a surrendering of certain aspects of my my valuing, but felt like soft traits, I was very relational. I felt deeply, you know, I loved creativity, I perhaps could be a little dramatic. And I did not see a place in the world for those qualities to really come together, and integrate and be seen as a way of using my talents in the world. It seemed, I really needed to be logical and linear, and rational, and survive in the business world and succeed there. And that became my way of using my talents.

Maura Conlon  22:17

Within a year or two, my mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. At that point, I also was looking for more meaning in my life, it was clear that we were not going to have children. My soul was dying for something to connect me to who I was, for my my soul to be expressed. For my creativity to come out. I had been searching for doctoral programs. I love to study I love to learn. And I came across a program in Jungian oriented depth psychology, which really looks at the soul, and creativity, and the imaginal. It was like a breath of fresh air for me, because that’s what I had been pushing down for years, in favor of the analytical and the logical, and the black and white, which really seemed to be rewarded in society with more power. 

Maura Conlon  23:19

My heart just burst open, because here was a discussion of the deeper aspects of the psyche, and the body and wholeness. holism, I felt the strangulation of a society that was really so focused on the left brain, that the right brain seemed so irrelevant, diminished, devalued. And so I started a Ph. D program in Southern California. I was going down once a month. And I would fly down from Oregon, and also visit with my mother. After my three days of my course were over, she would be curious about what I was reading in the field of depth psychology. And she would listen very patiently and just smile. 

Maura Conlon  24:07

And then finally, one day, she just said, Oh, so you’re getting your PhD. You’re going to be one of those important women with that fancy degree. And when she was getting close to dying, I was with her in her bedroom. She was in her hospital bed. And I would go and just sit next to her and just watch her sleep and watch her begin her transition. And then just one of those moments, she just opened her eyes. And she started rubbing my arm, which she didn’t normally do. And she said, looking at me straight in the eyes. Maybe that’s my problem. I felt too much. And she went back to sleep and I sat there and I was full of opposite emotion

Maura Conlon  25:11

On one hand, I thought, oh, yeah, it is really bad to feel too much. I mean, my mother modeled stiff upper lip and go ahead and chase chase after the obstacles and solve the problems and don’t get taken down by emotion. And so I thought, oh, yeah, you know, yeah, you don’t want to feel too much. But then I felt something underneath that emotion, which was, maybe you were, were meant to feel that much. And I also felt, Oh, God, what if I’m just like her? What if I feel too much, too? We just can’t allow ourselves to feel that much because its feelings are overwhelming. And what can you do with them when you just need to march ahead. She was excellent at marching ahead. 

Maura Conlon  26:04

But I was there and I was the writer. And I was the one asked to use my talents. And I was the one who was this conduit for these painful stories of silence, as well as joyful stories. But I was having to face myself in that moment, too, because I did not know how to respond to her. And I thought of myself as this woman who was going for her PhD. So much I was learning. But what I was feeling was beyond any theory, any words, and I felt that split between what we accomplish in our heads, as we use our talents, and what emerges from the depths of the heart. It was like another transmission. And in that moment, I felt that what really mattered was not the degree or the title. But the tender intimacy that my mother was communicating, radiating from the heart as the most important contribution in the world, allowing oneself to feel love in such a vulnerable, tender way. That might be the true talent.

Maura Conlon  27:39

I took a class at a local community college, on nonfiction writing, and I started to write and I could feel some juices coming back to me. And then the teacher asked me to join a critique group. And I went, and I kept writing. And these stories started to come out stories in my first 14 years, essentially, all of a sudden, I felt bullied for the first time in a long time, like, oh, there’s a voice somewhere inside of me that is coming out. I think I was in a place of desperation to express myself. And so in this writing group, I started telling stories from my growing up years, growing up with a father in the FBI who never spoke, and a brother with Down Syndrome and a mother who was keeping it all together, and my Irish ancestors and a murderer in the family. And it was just pouring out of me. 

Maura Conlon  28:42

It’s like I had opened a vein. And eventually, the leader of the group said, you know, this might be the makings of a book here. And at the same time, I started my Ph. D program. So I had reached this place in my life where I was ready for the next chapter. I had moved, or my husband’s medical schooling and surgical training and for his first position, and those were all decisions I made because I was in love. But something inside of me was just screaming to come out. And I didn’t really know what it was because I had kept it at bay for so long. So all of a sudden I’m writing stories they’re being recognized as striking a nerve and then I come across this program where I can study about soul and and union oriented thoughts on synchronicity and the collective unconscious and archetypal influences and you know, this whole plethora of ideas and values that were not part of mainstream society. So it felt edgy. 

Maura Conlon  29:55

I was going to an edge that was very different from This black and white world in which I was living. Doing that writing, it was as if something inside of me was reclaiming me something that had first risen up like a geyser, when I was 14, and my uncle had been murdered. And my only response to the grief was to put words on the page. And now here I was decades later, after putting aside that kind of expression, and that desire was back. I knew that I needed a new life that was somehow reflective of who I was as a person. I felt as if there was a forcefield coming back, that was very, very powerful. It was not weak at all. It was like this huge current of the ocean that was taking me out. Honestly, I it was it was a force much larger than myself. 

Maura Conlon  31:15

You know, my ego self was shaking in her boots, like, what am I doing? And I think when you enter into that field of creativity and alchemy, you know, we are taken away, we are transmuted, we are transformed. And it’s through this aspect of telling the deepest story that was incubating for decades. Back then, I felt as if I was some sort of conduit for rivers of grief to come through me. And somehow, I trusted that I had the capacity to take that grief and let it course through me to allow the tears to come, the tears that so many did not shed, and I had the capacity to bring it on. To let it flow through me onto the page. And to allow myself to be turned inside out.

Maura Conlon  32:29

I came in with it. But it aside, nearly lost it and then reconnected to an ancient soulful power. From the center of my being. It was a place of honest feeling, and trusting raw emotion when it came up. I felt as if I had landed within some new Horsfield telling me that my vulnerability was healthy. To claim this acceptance sparked a rush of creative expression, singing, writing, drawing, dancing, painting, dreaming, all of that just started bursting forth from my heart. There was no going back to the world of black and white. No more constraining myself to fit in. My body was the wise teacher coming alive again.

Maura Conlon  33:39

That was a huge change from a life of being a shy girl and keeping things quiet. I was being taken away to a whole different field of expression, and risk. Think to finally get to this place of expressing truth. There’s a fear that we won’t be witnessed that if we finally get to the place where we can speak authentically, like this is what is important to me in my heart. I know I had a fear that I’ll be all alone when I say that. There won’t be anyone around to witness me at a point like that, because there’s so much vulnerability there. I’m out of my role. I’m not doing my responsibility. I’m just exposing my raw self. 

Maura Conlon  34:33

Well, I know that we get rewarded when we hide that raw self, because then that exposes the raw self and somebody else and nobody wants that to happen because we all have our protections. There’s a lot of talk these days about trauma, trauma with a big T trauma with a small t. And I think what’s happening is that there is a desire to live from this more honest place because the old rules are not working anymore. Institutions are falling down the planet is in its current state of despair. You know, Carl Jung says we are in that time between myths, the old one is dying, the new one is yet to be born. And it’s up to us. 

Maura Conlon  35:18

We are the mythmakers From which place are we going to create our myths, it’s not going to be where we have been, it’s not going to be fulfilling old contracts. It’s like a truth and reconciliation of our own hearts has to happen to be reconnected to that author inside each one of us, that honors our original belonging, and how we were shaped. And then we get to this place where it’s like, oh, I’m writing an original contract for myself, and creating an unfolding a new future. So it’s really a place of owning the wisdom that’s come from the journey. And that’s the time that we’re in right now. We have to believe that it’s possible for each one of us to do this and that it’s a gift. And it’s a responsibility.

Maura Conlon  36:23

Given all the challenges and the despair in our world, right now, this is an anchor that we hold inside of us the sense of original belonging, and we don’t need to look outside anymore. And we can really look at our distractions and see what gets in the way of this. Returning to this remembering these stories of who we are, start there. This special terrain inside of us is actually our most vulnerable. Because once you go there, you find the answers to who you really are. So as my mother was dying, I was also studying depth psychology. And I was reading Carl Jung’s book, memory, dreams and reflections. And in that book, he talks about a time in his life, maybe around midlife, where he’s going through huge difficulty. And no sense of reasoning or rational analysis can help him break through his issues. 

Maura Conlon  37:26

He writes how he finds himself back to back to the lake of his childhood, where he used to build stone forts. And he’s on hands and knees, and he’s building those stone forts again, almost as if that same forcefield has taken him over. And he realizes that, Oh, there’s the presence of a 10 year old boy inside of me, that speaks to the future. So quantum really when it comes right down to it. But reading that gave me this realization that maybe we all have this inner younger person that is both afoot in our paths in terms of this original sense of belonging to the world. But then the other side of it is like, oh, there’s a sense of future that this child Energy wants to point us towards. So that became really critical. I realized that I can channel that in myself. And that opened the floodgates really, to go, oh, well, there’s this inner feeling person inside of me. And it comes from this early time of my life, when all these things were going on in my family. 

Maura Conlon  38:40

So I had the permission to realize that I could bring all those early stories forward, and that they had never gone away. I mean, all of a sudden, the question came to me, What if our childhood isn’t long ago and far away? What if it’s actually inside of us this very second, all of it, all of it? You know, we think that time is linear, and that all of these early experiences happen forever ago. But what if that’s a lie? What if the truth is that our body experienced are right here right now, just waiting for us to tap into that? This is that imaginal landscape inside of us, that we all can go to? And then what happens? Liberation. Permission to truly feel our our feelings our deepest longings, those dreams of becoming brilliant

Maura Conlon  39:54

so after my mother passed away, I realized it was time to finish that book that I had have been working on for several years. I was very lucky in that my book was bought pretty quickly and experience good success for a first time author. I had my photograph and People Magazine, the book hit the LA Times bestseller list. The playwright Tammy Ryan adapted it for stage, I was so lucky to do book tour around the country and share my stories and hear other people’s stories. And I came back home after that, that long journey, and something had shifted inside. I was so happy and proud and moved and changed. And then it just occurred to me that, well, what else is there beyond achievement. 

Maura Conlon  40:51

Like this had been a goal of mine. Since I was young, I remember telling my brother when I was, oh, gosh, 13 that I wanted to write a book about love for the entire world to read, and that I was going to charge a nickel for it. So this seed was planted all those years ago. And then here I was at age 45. With that love story out in the world. And so I asked, what’s next? And what if what’s next is a different conversation that’s outside of ambition, and achievement. I remember when I was maybe four years old, and I was crawling in and out of the kitchen cabinets. My mother was hanging wallpaper. And I asked her mom, When is my birthday. And she said, your birthday is in November. And I started to cry. 

Maura Conlon  41:47

And she wanted to know what the problem was. And I said, Well, November, November, that means I will never have a birthday. My birthday needs to be an yes member. And so ever since that time, she would think of me or call me the yes, vembur girl and she sent that story up to the Reader’s Digest. But I think that was an early seed of this sense of original belonging. I wanted to say yes, not just to my birthday, but I felt the yes to life. And I think we all have those kinds of moments where we do feel a sense of Yes. To something in our life that we discover as our own in those early years. For me, it was that word Nov had to become yes member. That’s a part of my original belonging. And so I think we all can look back and remember a moment or something somebody said to us, or, you know, some sort of magical place that we had in our childhood or toy image. 

Maura Conlon  42:58

There’s a yes SNESs to that, that somehow connected to who I am. I mean, you came in with that. And no one can take that away, even if it does get buried, or just associated. And so the goal here is to remember that, yes, SNESs to bring that back in as your birthright as the gift that you came into this world with, and like a sponge, let the water come in and let it expand. And there is the sense of surrender, like, oh, whoa, this is like a forcefield. Where is this going to take me? There’s a sense of trust that really does come with that because it’s you. It’s your cellular structure. It’s the beat of your heart. It’s your sense of wonder, as you look up to the night stars, and maybe they’re looking back down upon you.

Maura Conlon  44:10

I think in my journey I really have faced how in reality, we have separated everything into polarities, you know, black and white, masculine and feminine day and night. I mean, all these different opposites. We’ve separated mine, from body from spirit, from Soul, from the earth, from the cosmos, all these different silos of operations. And I think a lot of us live in those worlds and navigate it. But I think there’s something inside where we feel this greater hunger, that a hunger for wholeness, a hunger to live from a more integrated place that seems radically much more simple and yet so much more. filling. So we each have the capacity to do this internal inquiry. And the thing is, we have our own unique path for that inquiry. Mine is different than yours. 

Maura Conlon  45:15

And the goal here, the challenge, really is to find, oh, what’s my unique path to go retrieve and re enlivened, and give birth to this golden thread? Of Yes, SNESs? Yes, yes, I belong here, and I’m here. I’m here to give a gift to the world. You are here to give a gift to the world just as much as I am here to do the same. It’s so interesting. When we go to parties, we ask somebody, oh, what do you do? And then the conversation goes from there. But what would it take to ask, Oh, and what are your gifts? What are your gifts that you love to share with the world? I mean, what a conversation that would be. Because that’s really coming from the heart. It’s that place of dreaming. And that’s where change happens. It happens from that place of the imagination. We all have an interior landscape that’s just as diverse as the exterior landscape. 

Maura Conlon  46:23

And of course, with our eyes, we’re looking at the world around us, but the world inside of us is just as big and vital, and the source of this wellspring of our unique wisdom. So courage, courage, courage comes from the same root word as the word heart. So what does it mean to walk with your hand on your heart and ask, what do I really care about? I think there’s a sense of fear of loneliness, if I really go to this place of vulnerability, and express my desire to be loved for who I am, to be respected for all I’ve accomplished and whether it had gone through in my life. I think we want both, I think we want to feel respected for what we have put together in our lives. And at the same time, I think we desire to go to that inner archetypal child plays and expose the rawness of our hearts, because I think we all want more love. 

Maura Conlon  47:36

I think we want to receive love, as well as give it you know, a lot of times we talk about our first 14 years and the hard things that happened to there, which are completely valid. But sometimes we forget that moment, or that Synchronicity or that hiding place, we had that really beholds a reflection of our soul. And so I think we need to spend more time in this place to go to that refuge, where we felt fully alive, where we felt this sense of belonging. And yes, SNESs and nurture that place as if it occupies its own real estate inside of our hearts. I mean, imagine your heart and there’s a special continent in your heart. And it’s this everlasting sense of your soul that’s been there from the very beginning. It’s that sense of how you belong to the world with your, your voice, your gifts. 

Maura Conlon  48:41

It’s a visionary process that we all can do is to crawl back in there and ask that voice. There’s a sense of my future here. What am I to do next? What am I to let go of what old fierce sense of protections gotta go for me to reach this next place that I need to travel? First time I guess I’m articulating this, because I think I’m, I think I’m finally owning this place where I’ve arrived, where I have done the journey and taken the risks and surrendered and let go of some big presences in my life, to land where I am. My reason for being here now is to invite others to face the same possibility inside of themselves. Because the sense of original belonging is ultimately about possibility and unfolding a potential that’s completely unique unto you.

Maura Conlon  49:53

So I want to hear your story. I want to hear where you felt your sense of yesterday. This are some sense of vital aliveness in your first 14 years, even if nobody witnessed that, even if you were all alone, but it’s something that struck your entire being and made you feel so alive. That’s precious. And it’s a gift to be revered. It’s really tapping into one’s power. Yes, it is time for the masculine and the feminine to come together in all of our institutions. And that’s something that I sensed in my first 14 years. And I think that’s what I’m all about now is bringing together those opposite energies.

Maura Conlon  50:52

I have my parents to think Joe and Mary Conlon are the seeds of original belonging. In the last years and months of their lives, I witnessed my father’s and my mother’s buried stories, those reflecting the true essence of who they really were. The angel blade bottom of a while my father was dying of lung cancer, and could only speak in a rasp. He shared the story of how at the age of 12, he made a stupendous catch his words in centerfield his father, my grandfather, a stoic World War, one veteran, who had been unemployed during the Great Depression, was at the ball field, that day of my father’s shining moment.

Maura Conlon  51:58

I watched as tears streamed down my father’s sad face. He caught his breath, and shared, our his father never said, good catch. I was witnessing the inner boy, the one who yearned to be seen in the glory of his original belonging, and was punished for it, and how painful it must have been for him to keep that story inside for all these years. As an adult, he turned his childhood pain into purpose by transforming a vast weed field lot into a groomed baseball field in our community, and coached Little League. 50 years later, kids are still playing on that same field with a plaque engraved with my dad’s name on it. 

Maura Conlon  53:08

And when my mother was in her last year of life, she had a section of large shrubs torn out in our front yard. The area was paved. And then she placed all of our patio furniture in the front of our house, which sits on a corner suburban lot. She would sit out there and wave to every walk her and jogger passing by just the way she did as a young girl living in Breezy Point, New York, where everyone socialized on their front decks all summer long. I saw inside my mother, that young girl with a brilliant smile, who loves laughing and connecting with people.

Maura Conlon  54:04

I was witnessing my parents with a brand new curiosity. I started to see people differently, wondering if everyone might have hidden stories from their first 14 years of life? What if you had a magic wand and could begin today in line at the market or at the cafe on your next zoom call? What if you were curious about another person’s life defining moment or had the courage to share one of your own stories? This exchange is a gift that connects us and anchors us. I’ve always been fascinated by what liberates people. What liberates us into a sense of play. What lives writes us into a sense of just being unfettered. What liberates us into a sense of trusting that there’s a larger mystery that we are a part of, and that that archetypal child energy is a way, a way back into the mystery away back into the timeless, a way back into how we are interconnected with all life on Earth, that may be this Divine Child archetype. 

Maura Conlon  55:32

The stories of our first 14 years are a way to return to that path. And it can be kind of a scary thing, because for so many decades, we forget that deep connection, it will shake up your life, if you let it. It brings us to a threshold moment in which we discover our mythic nature. And threshold moments oftentimes are disorienting. But that’s when you know you’re on the path. When all of a sudden the shape shifting starts to happen. And you start to feel the impulses of that child energy inside that says, Look at this. Go explore that. Go love this. Don’t hold back anymore.

Maura Conlon  56:41

Thank you so much for listening to Season One of Original Belonging. I’m your host, Maura Conlon. Please subscribe, rate and recommend with love wherever you listen to podcasts. And to find out more about each episode, please delve into the show notes. To learn more about how you can engage with the world of stories within you. Please find me online at originalbelonging.com and on Instagram @originalbelonging. This production was co created by award winning media midwife, Arhi Golden. You can find a link to her work in the show notes. And on her website, ahrigolden.com That’s ahrigolden.com.

Maura Conlon  57:51

Fire up the kettle and I’ll get out the tea for season two, where we’ll explore more life defining stories of our original belonging. Be on the lookout. We’ll meet again.