Years ago, I worked with a gifted hypnotherapist. He was a newbie to the craft, just starting out, and I don’t think either he or I understood the scope of his abilities then. Suffice it to say I went to places and spaces that were far beyond the price of his introductory sessions!

We worked together in the dank basement room of a rental office downtown, the kind of place where folks set up flimsy folding tables and phone banks, then clear out overnight to whereabouts unknown. A way stop for fly-by-night businesses, filled with all the ghosts of failed dreams, hush and hurry, people in unrest.

My own sessions, however, were deeply productive. I leaned back in a faux leather lounger, closed my eyes, and was transported to amazing places: I saw the Book of Knowledge, a large tome up on a larger table, in which I might turn each page and find yet another picture from my own life, a picture that I might look at, and go deeper still. I found the long path of trees, a winding boulevard of sorts, that we are all somehow destined to walk.

And during these sessions I also descended in, entered deeper, and ended up in a room I had forgotten to remember for a very long time: the living room of the house I lived in when I was perhaps one or two or three. I found myself very young – my head did not reach the countertop – in a small, hot kitchen with the radio on, and my mother, visibly pregnant, dancing. We were listening to the radio, the three of us – my mother, me, and my unborn brother in her belly. We danced to the songs of the times, the radio wailing tinny and small.

Everything in the room rushed forth all at once: the speckled, reflective bits of metallic in the kitchen counter top, the thickness of the mug in the sink, the green bottle of Palmolive on the counter, the window opening to a back hedge, glossy with broad green leaves. My hands were slightly sticky still, as if I’d just eaten lunch. My mother wore capri pants; the kind that were popular back then, in a bold shade of sea green. In my regression, I saw clearly the way her pants ended in the middle of her calf, and I had this overwhelming thought: she was so very young.

And in my session, I began to cry. She was so very young. Not yet 30, on this ordinary day in which she danced to the radio, alone in a small kitchen, finishing the dishes from lunch, no one there, save her tiny daughter and unborn son.

Mother is the first Beloved. Whether this is good or bad, it is your soul’s agreement upon entering the world. We choose our parents, for reasons that may be unclear to us in this reality, but that our soul understands and accepts as an absolute necessity for growth and expansion in this lifetime.

Mother is the first Beloved, the earth soul that answers the new soul, or the new soul that answers the earth soul, and it is not always clear which soul is calling which. The child chooses the parent certainly; but on a soul level, the parent must also welcome, or at the very least allow, the child. Sometimes both souls long for each other with ineffable longing, and it is a mutual calling between mother and child.

Your own mother held you in her womb for 10 months; you were created of her body, you ate of her body, you drank of her like some divine feminine version of holy communion. You were sustained by her womb, her breath, her physical self. In this way you were entered into the world.

Sometimes moving in Divine energy of trance and regression, reveals something you need to remember about your first Beloved: in my case, it was the hem of the sea blue capris that helped me understand how young my mother really was when she raised me, how new as a mother, how undeveloped as a person, how young to have moved away from family to the west coast. I saw for the first time how she might have felt spending her days alone in a tiny house, filled with hope and fierceness for her new life and her children.

Mother is the first Beloved; we have known her many times before in the karmic passage of previous lifetimes, and we will know her many times again. She is the person who makes it possible for us to enter the world, whether she is fully evolved or only beginning her journey to consciousness, whether she wanted to welcome us or not.

The first Beloved gazes at us, holds us to her breast. The first Beloved allows us to live in and of her body. The first Beloved is most times no wise ascended, no saint or master – just a young woman, unsure and unguided, doing her best to bring a new soul into the world.

Close your eyes, and breathe deeply. Go to a place in your mind or your memory, in which you can recall something about your own mother, your first Beloved, when you were very, very young. It may be a special blanket, the way the light falls in a forgotten room, a texture, a color, a smell. Go into this place, and feel everything. Because you were so young, your memory will be two ways: that of a young soul, and that of a soul who has not yet forgotten how to hold the stars in your eyes. Remember it all, and allow yourself to feel gratitude. Learn something new, from this exercise, about your mother, and hold it in your heart.

Excerpted from Living a Life of Gratitude, by Sara Wiseman.

Sara Wiseman is a spiritual teacher, intuitive and author of six insightful books on spirituality and intuition, including Living a Life of Gratitude. She is the founder of Intuition University, hosts the popular radio show Ask Sara, and is a top contributor to DailyOM, InspireMeToday, Aspire and more. Visit her at www.sarawiseman.com.