What Remains Unbroken

Isis and remembering the parts of yourself you lost

There are times when we become so accustomed to seeing ourselves through our flaws, failures, and shortcomings that we forget to look for anything else.

We notice the parts that don’t fit. The places where we disappoint ourselves. The dreams we abandoned and the truths we swallowed. We forget the pieces of ourselves we tucked away because others didn’t want, welcome, or understand them.

It can begin to feel as though those missing pieces define us, and our wounds matter more than what has endured.

I know that feeling well.

For much of my life, I believed there was something fundamentally wrong with me. Something that needed fixing before I could be worthy of love, belonging, or acceptance.

Self-Love and Self-Worth

Most often when we think of love, it is romantic love. But there are many types of love: the love between parent and child, the love of friends, or the love of life. However, I believe the most sacred love is self-love—the love we have for and show to ourselves.

The relationship we have with ourselves sets the tone for all our other relationships. I’ve found that when I don’t love myself, it’s difficult for me to love others. When I didn’t love myself, I wondered if I was even capable of loving another person.

I loathed everything about myself; from my body size and shape, to my actions and behaviors, through who I thought I was as a person. As a teenager, I remember sitting in the dark with only a candle for illumination, staring at myself in the mirror, and repeating over and over, “I hate myself. I wish you were dead.” Not just once, but multiple times. Talk about negative affirmations and reinforcement!

I didn’t reach that level of self-hatred on my own.

Religious and Family Conditioning

It didn’t help that I was raised in a patriarchal religion, Mormonism, that taught me my only value was to be a wife and have babies. The church and my parents drilled into me that I didn’t have a voice or say in my life. They taught me that I had to follow the dictates and wishes of first my father, then my husband.

The greatest achievement for me as a woman was to be a good housewife, taking care of my husband and children, and never myself. I was never, ever to say no to a church calling or defy the “authority” of my parents, especially my dad, the patriarch of the family. My mother especially believed that a woman couldn’t be whole or complete without a man. Partly because in Mormon theology women can’t even go to the highest level of heaven without being married to a man.

None of that ever sat well with me. Even at a young age, I questioned the validity of those beliefs.

I saw the extreme co-dependent relationship of my parents and didn’t want anything like it for myself. My mom bought into the belief that she’d be a failure if she didn’t have a dozen children, even though her love for my dad completely consumed her. (Thankfully, she only had three.)

Since she couldn’t admit that she resented the time her kids took away from her time with my dad, I also experienced emotional abandonment. In eighth-grade, my dad had to work out of town because that’s where his job took him. I witnessed her make herself so sick and put herself in the hospital to force him to come home.

My mom taught me children were to be rarely seen—even in my sixties, my bedroom is my safe sanctuary—and never heard. My words, my voice, my thoughts weren’t taken seriously or listened to.

For a long time, I held the belief that I didn’t have anything worth saying, and quieted my own voice. I became skilled at silencing myself long before I realized I was doing it. Speaking my truth or speaking up for myself is still something I struggle with, especially with my mom.

Learning Love Was Conditional

My parent’s love for me was conditioned on living up to their standards, doing what they wanted, being the person they wanted me to be. I learned to cut off those pieces of me that didn’t conform to their expectations and hide them. Sometimes so deeply I no longer even remembered they existed.

But at the same time, my heart and soul sensed the loss and longed for wholeness. For a long time, I didn’t realize how much of my life was shaped by the belief that love was conditional and had to be earned. Even so, some part of me knew those beliefs weren’t right for me, and I kept pushing against them.

My parents encouraged me to excel at school—so I’d be a good wife. My school years were during the 70s and the early days of feminism. I saw women marching for equal pay, for basic civil rights, for the right to live how they pleased without the need for a man. I can remember when I had to have my dad co-sign on my bank account because I couldn’t have one on my own!

These images and the philosophy of feminism sparked something deep within me. They called to the part of me that questioned everything my parents and their church tried to instill in me, especially about the roles and value of women. For the first time, I saw women in a new light, and I could imagine the possibilities for me being a different type of woman than my mother.

I didn’t know it then, but some of my self-hatred was because I felt and believed differently than my parents. How could I be worthy of love or deserving when I didn’t follow the church teachings? I wasn’t worthy of their god’s love, so how could I be worthy of any love?

Finding a Different Spiritual Path

One of the best things to happen to me was to be excommunicated from the Mormon church. (I had a child out of wedlock, oh, no!) My excommunication freed me to begin looking elsewhere for a spirituality that spoke to me as a woman.

I found Goddess Spirituality. And when I did, my healing toward self-love and acceptance began. At first, I didn’t understand what I was searching for. I only knew I couldn’t be part of a religion that taught me my worth depended on obedience, sacrifice, and who I was to someone else. Isis offered me something different.

Isis and Sacred Love

One of the first Goddesses I connected with was the Egyptian Goddess Isis and her sacred love. Her love isn’t about romantic or sexual love, but the deep connection of spirit with ourselves and each other. Her best-known story showed me that her love is unconditional.

The story begins with her brother-in-law, Set, becoming jealous of her husband, Osiris. Osiris ruled Egypt, and Set wanted that power for himself. In a fit of jealous rage, Set killed Osiris, but that wasn’t enough for him. He proceeded to cut Osiris’s body into thirteen pieces and scatter them across the land.

Rather than cower under her brother-in-laws anger or lament her husband’s murder, Isis set out to find her husband. She searched long and hard for his missing pieces, finding them all except his penis, which a crocodile had eaten. Isis took them back to Egypt, where she and her sister performed the first embalming ritual.

Isis loved Osiris so deeply and unconditionally that he rose from the dead. She continued to see him whole, enough so that even without his vital procreative organ, she conceived a son with Osiris.

Isis bringing Osiris back to life didn’t stand out for me, but rather that she never stopped seeing him whole, even after he’d been torn apart. I realized no one had ever held that vision for me—not even myself. Something in me recognized it, and even more, yearned for it.

Seeing Myself as Whole

When I started working with Isis, I began seeing my own wholeness, my own holiness. I started to accept my talents and gifts, and that I did have something valuable to say and offer to others. I discovered my value and worth came from within and wasn’t tied to who I was to someone else, what I produced, or what I did for others. For the first time, I could disappoint someone or do what was right for me and still believe I was worthy of love. I no longer saw someone else’s disappointment as proof that I had done something wrong. Although that realization changed everything, I didn’t change overnight.

It took years of inner work to turn that insight into something I could actually live. Finally, I learned to love myself, who I was, and even love my body. Isis helped me see myself as whole and holy. I now recognize that I am divine, now, in this moment, and I don’t have to wait for some promised reward for blind obedience. That realization changed not only how I saw myself, but how my life began unfolding.

Love Beyond Worthiness

In loving myself unconditionally, accepting myself as I am, and seeing my wholeness, my holiness, I can do the same for others. Even my mom. I can now see that she was trying to do her best through her own painful upbringing. It doesn’t erase what happened, but understanding it allows me to have at least a friendly relationship with her.

My heart has opened to giving love and receiving it freely. I no longer worry or doubt that I’m capable of loving. Love has stopped being something that has to be earned. It’s no longer conditioned on my worth, value, or deserving it. Mine or theirs. My worth is something I no longer have to prove.

The more I learned to love myself this way, the more I understood what Isis had been showing me all along.

Isis’s sacred love starts with loving ourselves, and it radiates outward to encompass those who enter our lives, whether as family, friends, or a partner/spouse. As she wraps her wings of love around us, loving us unconditionally, we can share that gift with others in our lives. Through Isis holding the vision of our wholeness, our holiness for us, we can gather those pieces we’ve cut off and hidden from ourselves and return them to ourselves.

What Remains Unbroken

Through Isis’s sacred love, I now love and accept myself. My self-love makes me whole and completes me. My holiness makes me worthy and deserving to love and to be loved. And being able to see myself differently is one of the greatest blessings the Goddess, and especially Isis, has given me.

I can see myself beyond a collection of wounds, mistakes, shortcomings, and missing pieces. I’m no longer someone who needs to earn her worth, prove her value, or wait to become whole.

Isis helped me recognize something that had been true all along.

Beneath everything I had rejected, hidden, doubted, or feared, the essential part of me remained untouched.

Something in me remained whole.

And I remained sacred.

Perhaps that’s what Isis sees in each of us long before we are able to see it for ourselves.

Many of us learn to see ourselves through what is missing, wounded, rejected, or unfinished. Over time, those stories can become so familiar that we stop questioning them. This isn’t an invitation to fix anything or arrive anywhere. It’s simply a space to notice what has shaped the way you see yourself and what might still be waiting to be welcomed home.

1. Were there parts of yourself that felt unwelcome, misunderstood, or unacceptable growing up? What did you learn to do with those parts of yourself?

2. What parts of yourself have you spent the most time judging, hiding, or trying to change? What do you believe would happen if those parts were fully seen?

3. If you viewed yourself through the same lens Isis held for Osiris—seeing yourself as whole even where you feel fragmented—what might you notice that you’ve overlooked?

Continue Exploring with Isis

If something in this essay resonated with you, Isis’s Sacred Love offers a way to continue the exploration through relationship and devotional practice.

Through time with Isis, the Guide invites you to consider love beyond the familiar ideas of self-love. You’ll explore acceptance, belonging, reclaiming the parts of yourself you may have hidden or set aside, and what it means to recognize your wholeness.

There isn’t one right answer or a particular place you need to arrive. The Guide offers different ways to spend time with Isis, reflect on your own experience, and discover what becomes visible for you.

I invite you to join the conversation on my Substack, Lunar Ink & Alchemy, to share your experience and insights from reading this essay.