In my last blog, Defying Our Own Best Interests, I wrote that when the masculine in woman has freed the feminine within her, she becomes a powerful change-maker in the world man has made and rises to lift all beings from her firm root in earth and ordinary life.
Through my offering here, I’ve been sharing a conversation with you, dear reader, that I’ve had to have with myself to draw my attention within to the performance of my life. This creative process has turned out to be a re-seeing, re-knowing, re-storying of key elements through the lens of feminine psychology.
Being attached to someone is perfectly natural. We learn in relationship to each other. And the partners we attract are usually, and necessarily, unconscious. That is, there is inner work to do in our union. When that work is complete, and we always know when it is but we don’t always have the courage to admit it to ourselves, we can detach ourselves by contemplating what that person has meant to us. How does s/he allow us to be seen and acknowledged? What remains unhidden when in their presence? Then we are in a position to dissolve our dependency on them while learning to claim the answer to that question for ourselves.
This is growth. This is development. In relationship we have the opportunity to regain a lost part of our own soul. Without relationship, we can become trapped inside of ourselves when there are, in fact, no actual walls of separation. In other words, the perceptual walls we build around ourselves and our relationships don’t really exist. But it’s only in relationship to each other that we can discover this truth.
Marrying Womanhood
The feminine fell deep into the unconscious as a result of patriarchal rule and now she rises to bring what is required to restore the human story to humanity. But without the progress patriarchy has afforded human beings, woman would not have the capacity to discriminate with her thinking mind. As she does so, all that has been created in the denial of feminine presence must be seen and will be healed through the hood of woman. It is time to understand our history lessons in a new way. Then we can define the next steps forward.
It is a major task and a massive undertaking for a woman to hold herself steady in the aftermath of all she will undoubtedly encounter through this process. But if the process is understood then the experience can be trusted, walked through, and risen beyond, which is precisely what modern woman must do.
Never underestimate the paramount value of self-knowledge.
The work is to allow the perceptual distortions to clear through our experience. This is the ultimate journey. It takes courage, fortitude, and patience to walk this walk but knowing the distortions are clearing because you are here, because you bring consciousness to bear on all you encounter, because you have agreed to live and give your presence to this life, makes the journey itself one of wakefulness and it then becomes sustainable. Because you are here, new things become possible. Because you have come, the way may emerge. Because you are known by life itself while on this journey, nothing can ever go wrong when you stay in the process of learning to see love in all, as all, for all. This is everything!
We’re all just walking each other home.
(Ram Dass)
True marriage to another is only possible when a woman is coming from her own inner marriage. All else is codependence, which is rightly a step along the way to wholeness. But let woman not be deluded any longer and know this fact so she may mature herself.
The divine in me is not bound by patriarchy and when I followed its lead, I never was either. It was the grand scheme of my life. All I was required to do was walk the journey back into knowing the divine. Now I know we are one but the truth is, we always were. Even in the biggest messes of my marriages to men, which turned out to be the greatest blessings of my life!
A woman’s true education is the life she travels in the choices she makes and the instruction life brings through the experience in which she participates.
The Alchemy of Autoethnography
Not every woman is an autoethnographer but every woman has a story to live and to tell. In applying depth psychology to my lived experience, my aim has been to process and integrate the understanding that comes to me for my own benefit and evolution. I want to be a better human being. The action of my analysis has been guided by an ethic of accountability. That is, I hold myself accountable for the real effects my interactions have had on others; I reveal the deeper story so I might unknit the hidden beliefs and normative ideas running my life unconsciously. What program is living me and dominating my existence? But I am also inspired by the notion that if I dig deep enough then readers might find themselves in my public confessions and discover different scripts to live by. In other words, by virtue of having been written, my story and the analysis of my story may teach those who are drawn to it. So I offer it as public ethnography.
… we must recognize that our will, our consciousness, our deepest subjectivity is the very will, consciousness, or subjectivity of nature coming to know itself; that this consciousness is what the external world is; and so, consequently, our best and surest pathway to understanding the nature of reality is through this same will or consciousness.
(Jeffrey Kripal, The Superhumanities, p. 123)
This is not work for the unwilling woman. It’s work for the woman who intuits there is something of truth in her wanting to be spoken, shared, and sung through the ages. Our job is to learn who we truly are and how we must manage our own power. Can we muster the courage to withstand our own emotional fires in order to grow through personal love and discover responsible feeling? Can we claim our worth and truly receive all that has been entrusted to us as daughters of life?
Marie-Louise von Franz has instructed that “in order to keep one’s feminine integrity, one must not look toward what one wants, but look only inside oneself and try to find the light.” She also said that for a woman, this work seems like a very long incubation and I can certainly attest to the truth in her teaching. Eventually though, we emerge from within ourselves when we stay with the process until, as she put it, “it can come out from inside.”
It is time to release outworn ways of being and move more fully into the eternal present moment now. Here we dwell in the feminine grace of our foremothers lending us their wisdom, strength, and endurance as we walk in a world of repose donning our true selfhood, our true humanity. For she who is whole knows the high and the low.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
