This is the Work of the Feminine

In all my ravenous reading and searching for esoteric wisdom to define the sacred feminine, the work of Dr. Marion Woodman has spoken most directly and concisely to me of what this She energy brings. Dr. Woodman’s work before her passing was as an analyst under Carl Jung and I find her writings to be an articulate and frank representation of the work we are being called to undertake as a collective now. The importance of this work cannot be understated because we are coming into a time when the unchecked patriarchal power of the masculine shadow is on the brink of consuming everything, including itself. And the only way to bring about something new is to embrace the darkness within the womb of creation and transmute the toxic pain of suffering into the nutrients that will nourish new life into existence. This is the work of the feminine. Marion Woodman calls Her Sophia.

“I would describe Sophia as an emerging archetypal pattern, not yet fully in consciousness, that is bringing to our Western culture a new understanding of the relationship between spirit and matter. The masculine Wisdom of God, as many of us have experienced it, resides in theology, dogma and moral philosophy. Because it is a knowable Wisdom it is accessible to reason, and being accessible it is codifiable. It can be and often is reduced to catechism. It is an institutionalized collective Wisdom. The Wisdom of Sophia, on the other hand, is the Wisdom of the unknowable. It is the nonrational, nonrepeatable and nonconsistent. It belongs to the here-and-now, the immediate moment…It is the moment in which life is conceived not in some repeatable fashion, for it is unique and particular to [that] moment.

“Just as there is a dark side to the Wisdom of the Knowable God – the tyranny of the Church – so there is a dark side to the wisdom of the Unknowable God. It is utter chaos, the Void. The dark side of Sophia is the original Void before it was penetrated by Light, that is the matrix in which the Light is first made manifest.”  – Marion Woodman (Addiction to Perfection – The Still Unravished Bride)

Even the thought of this chaos is terrifying. This is why Her wildness has always needed “taming” through rationalism and order. But Terry Real teaches us that the delusion is control. The feminine chaos is perceived as a threat to the control needed by patriarchy to maintain it. But we are stuck in the patterns of it on every level, from the micro to the macro. Terry Real’s 3-Rings of Patriarchy asserts that patriarchy needs 3 elements present to maintain it: 1) Binary – splitting a whole human down the middle calling the left feminine and the right masculine; 2) The Dance of Contempt – defining masculine by making it everything the feminine is NOT – a negative identity, holding everything the feminine represents in contempt; and 3) Core Collusion – Everything on the feminine side of the spectrum has deep, visceral compulsion to protect the masculine side of the spectrum, even while being hurt by it. Do not tell the truth to power. Do not lean in to unmask him, you regulate him. He and Carol Gilligan call this up-regulating.

Carol Gilligan and Terry Real are both psychotherapists with a lifetime of experience working with heterosexual couples. They have come to a profound understanding of what is necessary to heal a relationship between a man and a woman from the values of the domination and power-over structures imposed by patriarchy. They have found there cannot be love in a one-up, one-down power structure. Living in the world today perfectly captures what the attempts to control look like from the one-up position; restricting reproductive rights, no justice for gender-based and sexual violence, gender pay gaps, etc. etc. etc. But there is also an attempt being utilized to control from the one-down position, and this is codependence, enabling, up-regulating, creating beliefs like don’t tell the truth, avoid setting him off. The resultant wounds of these adaptations to accommodate both the masculine and feminine need to control are suffered by both man AND woman, man unable to vulnerably demonstrate his love for her and therefore access intimacy, and woman unable to fully step into herself and truly be known and seen because she cannot speak her Truth. Terry Real and Carol Gilligan assert that the purpose and intent of psychotherapy should be about releasing people from the structures created by this hierarchy of white male superiority, moving the man into vulnerability and connection, and moving the woman into truthfulness and not up-regulating. Terry Real says “therapy has done a brilliant job of helping people come up from shame, but a lousy job of bringing people down from grandiosity.” Terry Real and Carol Gilligan have both found that for change to come on the relational level, the one-down must first be empowered, meaning she must learn to speak her truth, share her perspective, make choices that honor her needs and desires, and only then will the required container of safety and trust be created for the one-up to step down into intimacy.

Therefore, it is the woman who must first take this step out of patriarchy, embodying the stick that holds the carrot of intimacy, guiding the first steps into love and equity, into egalitarianism. To do this, the feminine must "break the bargain" as Carol Gilligan calls it, we must end our participation in the core collusion. But this is no small feat, because the price for fitting in, the price for advancement for women in this patriarchy has always been her self-silencing. One of the primary methods of ensuring this collusion has been the stripping away of the feminine’ s divinity. The ruling paradigm of patriarchal Judeo-Christian dogma has imposed oppressive belief systems that women are the origin of sin, carnal and base, the root of all temptation and therefore of the opposing force to divinity. Branded with this shame at birth for daring to come into this world with female reproductive organs. Therefore, the new paradigm will come when the sacredness of the feminine is finally honored and worshipped again.

“The return of God is one of the most ancient expectations of the human race. Every world religion has presented itself as preparing for his return. Every religion still awaits it. What does this expectation imply? We already know God in his outward manifestation, by his laws, his commands. His word. That is the Logos, the masculine side of God. What we await in the Second Coming is what we lack: God’s inner dynamic or process. This – God in his creativeness, rather than in his creation – is the essence of the feminine, traditionally enacted in the ancient Mysteries. The return is therefore the emergence of the feminine side of God, which has been gradually taking shape for centuries in what we call the unconscious. The time has now come when we can deal creatively with the concept of God as the union of opposites, and therefore see the feminine no longer darkly through the masculine glass, but face to androgynous face.” – Marion Woodman (Addiction to Perfection – The Still Unravished Bride)

This will require women and girls supporting women and girls in speaking truthfully, and men and boys supporting men and boys in vulnerability. The interesting thing about Carol Gilligan’s research is that boys are initiated into patriarchy through the social norms and expectations imposed by other boys, and girls are initiated and continually confined into silent smallness by other girls. For boys she found it starts between ages 4-7 and for girls, it begins at around age 11 that the gender-based conditioning starts the process of eroding the inner strengths of emotional perceptiveness in boys and the natural and blunt truthfulness of girls.

These norms are bigger than any one family unit perpetuating them, but also any collective change to them must begin within every one family, every one relationship. And the change must first come from the mothers or from the women hurt by their mothers. The individual women making up the generations alive today are being called, one by one, to raise our awareness of these conditioned patterns that have quietly and insidiously been enforced by every one of us. To name it and reject it and choose another way, a more instinctually resonant way. The way of authenticity. The way of Truth. “To be nobody but yourself in a world doing its best night and day to make you into everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.” E.E. Cummings. But to get to this truth-telling phase, first one must heal the wounds that created the adaptations of self-silencing in the first place.

“Children have to recognize negative as well as positive feelings toward their parents, but most of us, at some point in analysis, realize that our parents were in a worse situation than we. Many of them knew they were trapped, but they had no means of finding a way out. The sins of one generation are visited on the next; that is the human situation, and to the extent that parents are unconscious, their children suffer. It is the task of mature individuals to differentiate infantile imagos from the actual parents, to differentiate what was wholesome in their heritage from what was destructive, and to forgive.

“The creative purpose of the neurosis is to bring the woman to confront within herself the negative mother which her feminine body naturally rejects. The negative mother is a foreign substance; it is alien; it does not belong to her any more than do two pounds of chocolates before she goes to sleep. Her body is demanding that she differentiate herself out from it so that she can discover who she is as a mature woman. The task which her own mother may have failed to perform, she must perform. That is the new consciousness, the giant leap, the healing in her own life which she is being called upon to incorporate.” – Marion Woodman (Addiction to Perfection – The Still Unravished Bride).

For more information on the work of Terry Real and Carol Gilligan this video is a great summary of their work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wn4QiDpaWOE