Marion Woodman Quotes

The longing for sweets is really a yearning for love or "sweetness.

This is your body, your greatest gift, pregnant with wisdom you do not hear, grief you thought was forgotten, and joy you have never known.

Love is the real power. It's the energy that cherishes. The more you work with that energy, the more you will see how people respond naturally to it, and the more you will want to use it. It brings out your creativity, and helps everyone around you flower. Your children, the people you work with--everyone blooms.

It takes great courage to break with one's past history and stand alone

Kill the imagination and you kill the soul. Kill the soul and you're left with a listless, apathetic creature who can become hopeless or brutal or both.

To me, real love, the move from power to love, involves immense suffering. Any creative work comes from that level, where we share our sufferings, just the sheer suffering of being human. And that's where the real love is.

When the power comes from within us and we claim it as our own, then we no longer have to affirm ourselves by dominating others. The irony is that we are actually afraid of our own power.

There is no growth without real feeling. Children not loved for who they are do not learn how to love themselves. Their growth is an exercise in pleasing others, not in expanding through experience. As adults, they must learn to nurture their own lost child.

If we could allow the pace of our meetings to slow down to the pace of our hearts, we might find genuine understanding.

Only by discovering and loving the goddess lost within our rejected body can we hear our own authentic voice.

William Blake says the body is 'that portion of soul discerned by the five senses

We can hardly bear to look. The shadow may carry the best of the life we have not lived. Go into the basement, the attic, the refuse bin. Find gold there. Find an animal who has not been fed or watered. It is you!! This neglected, exiled animal, hungry for attention, is a part of your self. —Marion Woodman (as quoted by Stephen Cope in The Great Work of Your Life)

I yearned for lightness; I still yearn for lightness. Lightness is freedom -- freedom from the heaviness of too much stuff, too many words, too heavy a pull toward inertia. I feared being buried in stone -- becoming stone.

What a paradox is there: flying higher into heaven, at the same time being forced to work deeper into the hell of my addiction, the hell of my own unconscious body.

I use the word mystery,rather than magic. I love magic. something magic was always going to happen. When it did, it never did anything but land me in trouble. MYSTERY is the depth of the sacred. Page 33 coming home to my self

This is the beginning of a road whose end is totally unknown and totally known.

Women are, by nature, disposed to relationship and connectedness; yet true relationship cannot be embraced until a woman as a deep sense of her at-one-ment. Without this essential independence from all roles and bonds, she is a potential victim for servitude.

When Matisse was asked whether he believed in God, his response was, 'yes, when I'm working'.

The Goddess is the unspeakable wisdom that grows into the very cells of the body. She lives with this sacramental truth at her center: the beauty and the horror of the whole of life are blazing in Her love. She is dancing in the flames.

When the power comes from within us and we claim it as our own, then we no longer have to affirm ourselves by dominating others. The irony is that we are actually afraid of our own power.

In psychologist Marion Woodman’s Leaving My Father’s House I read: “When humans suffer they are vulnerable. Within this vulnerability lives the humility that allows flesh to soften into the sounds of the soul.” Maybe this was what was happening to me. I felt lighter, as if a space had been cleared around me allowing coincidences (God’s way of remaining anonymous) to manifest. Maybe these coincidences had been happening all along and I just hadn’t been open to them. Now it was as though I were being led to them.

Recognizing the difference between power and love is difficult if we were raised in a home where power was disguised as love.

Can I really believe I am worth an hour a day? Am I, who have given my life to others, selfish enough to take one hour a day to find myself?

You think of yourself -- light, fast, free -- free of earth, free of bondage to your body. In your 'perfect' body, you are in control, addicted to the light that keeps you out of body. You're a swan maiden, addicted to wings, addicted to spirit. You refused to eat in order to fly.

The Crone has been missing from our culture for so long that many women, particularly young girls, know nothing of her tutelage. Young girls in our society are not initiated by older women into womanhood with its accompanying dignity and power. Without the Crone, the task of belonging to oneself, of being a whole person, is virtually impossible.

Children who are not loved in their very beingness do not know how to love themselves. As adults they have to learn to nourish, to mother their own lost child. 1 Marion Woodman

The solid line throughout was my trying to make space to fly and forever smashing my wings against the bars of the cage. Granted, the cage grew bigger and very big, but I was always beyond the collective in my soul and always cut back by the collective in my body.

She dreams she is in a glass coffin. From her prison, details have beauty. In her aloneness, she imagines emotions. Her husband is the perfect bridegroom, the trickster, the small boy looking for mother. She is goddess and mirror, siren and friend, femme fatale and sacrificing wife. He is attracted to her girlhood purity, her desire to sacrifice, to serve. At first he may be flattered: she sees him as a god.

In the absence of role models for the new feminine in our culture, the Goddess speaks through dreams and creative imagination, giving guidance to those who chose to listen.

How does it feel to say no to the one man to whom you have always said yes? How does it feel when you stand up to him and reject all he has never questioned?

Change means change. We may have all the insights, but if we do not incarnate them, they are all in vain.

Children not loved for who they are do not learn how to love themselves. Their growth is an exercise in pleasing others, not in expanding through experience. As adults, they must learn to nurture their own lost child. There's personal anger, but underneath there's often universal rage; And when we are possessed, God help the man who's on the end of that. Deep rage is not about the man; Deep rage is this: Nobody ever saw me. Nobody ever heard me. As long as I can remember, I've had to perform. When I tried to be myself, I was told, That's not what you think, that's not what you ought to do. So, just like my mother and her mother, I put on a false face. My life became a lie. That's deep rage. We have lived our lives behind a mask. Sooner or later —if we are lucky— the mask will be smashed. What a relief to be human instead of the god or goddess my parents imagined me to be or I imagined them.

The word 'feminine,' as I understand it, has very little to do with gender, nor is woman the custodian of femininity. Both men and women are searching for their pregnant virgin. She is the part of us who is outcast, the part who comes to consciousness through going into darkness, mining our leaden darkness, until we bring her silver out.

Old Mother God, Old Father God— they keep us trapped. And we do give up. We pull the covers over our head, and go back to sleep. Only to dream of old dragons, old alligators, old crocodiles drinking our blood. To dream of cold-eyed lawmakers saying, This is the way it's always been done. It works. It will stay this way. And you will obey.

As a symbol, the Crone had to be suppressed by patriarchal religions because her power 'overruled the will even of Heavenly Father Zeus.' She controlled the cycles of life and death. She was the Mother of God, the Nurturer of God, and, as a Crone, the Slayer of God. While Christianity retained the feminine as Virgin and Mother, it eliminated her role as Crone.

Standing alone today demands even more courage and strength than it did in former cultures. From infancy, children have been programmed to perform. Rather than living from their own needs and feelings, they learn to assess situations in order to please others. Without an inner core of certainty grounded in their own musculature, they lack the inner resources to stand alone. Pummelled by mass media and peer group pressures, their identity may be utterly absorbed by collective stereotypes. In the absence of adequate rites of passage, ad-men become the high priests of an initiation into the addictions of consumerism.

So long as she is obedient to a mother—actual or internal—who unconsciously wishes to annihilate her, she is in a state of possession by the witch; she will have to differentiate herself out from that witch in order to live her own life.

In our yearning to be perfect, we have mistaken perfection for wholeness. We think we cannot love ourselves until we and others meet some external standard. Depression, anxiety—in fact, most neuroses and compulsions—are ultimately a defense against loving ourselves without condition. We are afraid to look at the damp, dark, ugly yet exquisite roots of being that stretch deep into our survival chakra. We are fearful of finding that the spirit is not there, that our Home is empty, even as our outer home is empty. Yet it is in that place of survival, where the dark mother has been abandoned, that spirit longs to be embodied so that the whole body may become light. Ego wants to be the god of our own idealized projection; spirit wants to be incarnated in our humanity where it can grow in wisdom through experience.

never been present, we'll be terrified; our whole life will have been an absence.

The way to healing an addiction lies in finding a connection between body and soul.

Living by principles is not living your own life. It is easier to try to be better than you are than to be who you are.

Since she has not been present in the culture, she has not been readily accessible to the conscious awareness of modern women. Without her, even the dynamic symbols of Virgin and Mother are distorted. The Crone is a woman is that part of her psyche that is not identified with any relationship nor confined by any bond. She infuses an intrinsic sense of self-worth, of autonomy, into the role of virgin and mother, and gives the woman strength to stand to her own creative experience.

A man may be shocked when he sees you've really changed. He thought you'd been scribbling in your journal —a sentimental, little Victorian girl writing in your little book, naive and uninitiated. Suddenly, when you say, Look, this is what I think, he can't believe what's coming out of your mouth. Mother puts up with anything. Mother is unconditional love. When you say, See me as I am, you are no longer mother, no longer his ideal woman. You've changed. He thought you'd been scribbling in your journal.

If we are blindly living out an archetype, we are not containing our own life. We are possessed, and possession acts as a magnet on unconscious people in our environment. A life that is being truly lived is constantly burning away the veils of illusion, gradually revealing the essence of the individual.

Why put them through the danger of the fire? And then, I heard, as though it spoke, the voice of the guardian-head: "Each piece must go through the fire. The cowl, the wings, the pneuma, the source, the flow. All must go the way that I have gone. Each may crack in the process, as I have cracked. But look, the crack has healed. I did not break. Without the fire, the piece is untested, unlived, raw. Each must go through the fire.

Reading ancient myths and fairy tales can be very helpful because these stories came spontaneously from people who had not studied psychology. The stories came straight out of their unconscious and, therefore, show us how the unconscious works unimpeded by conscious intervention. The images are clear and stark. For those of us who are interested in why we do what we do when we want to do the opposite, the stories are gold mines of information.

The great work of our time is to bring the feminine into this culture. And it is not an easy path. How does each one of us contribute? Believe it or not, it’s done in the most personal ways. Take time to listen to your dreams. Write them down. Take time to recognize that there are things going on within you that need to be felt, or said, or lived, or grieved. Pay attention to these things both in yourself and in the people in your life. Pay attention to the authentic self. – Marion Woodman

Marion Woodman—the great Jungian analyst and author—says that we come to the mythic Crossroads during “moments in our lives where the unconscious crosses consciousness; where the eternal crosses the transitory; where a higher will demands the surrender of our egos.

Kundalini power, the symbol of raising the energy coiled at the base of the spine upward through the chakras, is called by Sri Chinmoy, 'the power of the Supreme Goddess.' Repressed or coiled in a circle, she can be poisonous both to the body and the psyche, but once risen and standing upright, she is beneficent. The power of the serpent, rightly understood, is one of the ways the Goddess overcomes duality.

A few individuals, a few of the great saints, certainly knew what femininity was about. In the old matriarchies there was no feminine consciousness, only unconscious mother. The "I", the ego with values and truths of its own was not operating. In the Celtic world they died for the Goddess but they had no ego that said, "Life is worth living." They were like the terrorists...who don't have the ego strength to say life is worth living so they willingly die for a cause. Feminine consciousness has been operative in some individuals, but not in a whole culture. Now I think we're starting to get free of the old matriarchy and free of the patriarchy. In other words, we are entering into conscious relationship with our mother and father complexes. As a planet we're moving toward maturity. We're trying to find out who we are when we're not possessed by those complexes. And we're fighting against time.

We know we can change ourselves when we realize that we are not dependent on how we feel, nor on how others feel about us, nor on what the situation is around us. The values we hold, the choices we make within ourselves and for ourselves remain our prerogative. In most situations, if we begin to change, to do our own inner work, to accept our own darkness and work toward consciousness, the situation will change. We will begin to emanate a different energy, one that exudes a sense of autonomy and authenticity.

When we face death, if we've lived life, we'll be ready.

Intuitive insights are like fish in the water; they flash in the sunlight and then dive deep again, only enticed to the surface again by morsels of conscious attention.

Marion Woodman shares with us the gnawing sense of fear we may feel when we realize that we are not pleasing people or that they disapprove of us. She says it is as though our very cells were imprinted with a fear of shame, rejection, belittlement, and abandonment. Sensing these things is like seeing Medusa: We close down, becoming numb and overwhelmed with feelings. These, too, are like Medusa’s snakes and must be approached with great care.

The Death Mother wields a cold, fierce, violent and corrosive power . . . When Death Mother’s gaze is directed at us, it penetrates both psyche and body, turning us into stone. It kills hope. It cuts us dead. We collapse. Our life energy drains from us and we sink into chthonic darkness. In this state, we find ourselves yearning for the oblivion of death. Eventually this yearning for death permeates our cells, causing our body to turn against itself. We may become physically ill.

Is it possible my lover is not the man I thought him to be? Does he see me at all? Am I projecting my own inner man onto him? Am I forcing him to take responsibility for my undeveloped talents? Am I treating my body as my mother treated hers? Am I thinking like my father? Where am I blindly reacting as they did? Where am I still reacting childishly? Is my anger coming from my gut or from my head? Is it feminine anger or animus anger? (Feminine anger cleanses; animus anger leaves me tense.) Guided by the response of the unconscious as revealed in dreams, we differentiate grain from grain, question after question, until one day we find our own authentic voice. ~Marion Woodman,The Pregnant Virgin, Page

As I understand the virgin archetype, it is that aspect of the feminine, in man or in woman, that has the courage to Be and the flexibility to be always Becoming. Rooted in the instincts, the virgin has a loving relationship to the Great Earth Mother. But she is not herself the Great Mother. Men and women who can consciously relate to this archetype do not make mothering synonymous with femininity, nor are they hampered by unconscious material from their own personal mothers. They have been through the joy and the agony of the daily sorting of the seeds of their own feeling values in order to find out who they authentically are, and they continue to do so. They are strong enough and pliable enough to surrender to the penetration of the Spirit and to bring the fruit of that union into consciousness.

So long as the meaning of a dream is not brought to consciousness, the metaphors we are dreaming are enacted either in the bodies or in our relationships. If, in the other hand, we work hard on associations to the dream images, and allow the feelings, imagination and mind to move in and through and around the symbol, inevitably, we are silenced by the rightness of the metaphor. There is a moment of YES! or OH NO! when the truth resonates through body, soul and mind, sometimes a painful truth, but nevertheless a truth that leads towards freedom.

A free woman has a strong neck—an open connection between heart and head, a balance between reality and ideals. To fall into the complex is to damn herself for her imperfections; to accept the attitude of the virgin is to accept her human life and open herself to her own truth. Then Lucifer turns his other face; he becomes the Light Bringer, the Christ. So long as the virgin is unconscious, she is unable to surrender to Light. The very Light blocks her acceptance of herself and becomes the demon lover because she cannot receive. Once she is conscious enough to forgive her own and other people's imperfections, then her positive animus becomes the bridge between conscious and unconscious. Psychic incest is the energy source of creativity. Incorporating the Light at the center of the father complex is the soul work of the receptive virgin. In the Middle Ages, this task was symbolized in the taming of the unicorn. The unicorn symbolizes the creative power of the spirit, and was seen in medieval times as an allegory of Christ. Its energy is so fierce and so dangerous that only a virgin can tame it, and only then through deception. She must deliver it into the hands of the human hunters who kill it and allow its red blood to flow. In its transformed, resurrected state, the unicorn is the powerful energy contained in the virgin's holy garden.

Semnul principal al căutării perfecțiunii este obsesia. Obsesia apare atunci când toată energia psihică, ce ar trebui să fie distribuită între diferitele părți ale personalității în încercarea de a le armoniza, se concentrează într-o singură zonă a personalității, excluzând orice altceva. Obsesia este întotdeauna o fixație - o înghețare a personalității, astfel încât nu devine o ființă vie, ci un lucru fix, ca o sculptură, blocată într-un complex. Există întotdeauna ceva catatonic în privința sa; în spatele său se află teama care se poate precipita în teroare oarbă, astfel încât persoana poate să devină ca un animal sălbatic prins în lumina farurilor, incapabil să se miște.

Once the purging has taken place, the woman often dreams of a black goddess who becomes her bridge between spirit and body. As one aspect of Sophia, such an image can open her to the mystery of life being enacted in her own body. Her "mysterious and exotic darkness" inspires a particular depth of wonderment and love. For a woman without a positive mother, this "dark" side of the Virgin can bring freedom, the security of freedom, because she is a natural home for the rejected child. The child born from the rejected side of the mother can bring her own rebel to rest in the outcast state of Mary. In loving the abandoned child within herself, a woman becomes pregnant with herself. The child her mother did not nourish, she will now nourish, not as the pure white biblical Virgin who knew no Joseph, but as the dark Montserrat Virgin who presides over "marriage and sex, pregnancy and childbirth." The Black Madonna is nature impregnated by spirit, accepting the human body as the chalice of the spirit. She is the redemption of matter, the intersection of sexuality and spirituality. Connecting to this archetypal image may result in dreams of a huge serpent, mysterious, cold­blooded, inaccessible to human feeling. Seen as an appendage of the negative mother, it is the phallus stolen from the father and used to guard inviolate purity. Yet this same snake, when seen in relation to the moon, symbolizes the dark, impersonal side of femininity and at the same time its capacity to renew itself. The daughter who can come out from under the skin of the negative mother will not perpetuate her but redeem her. The Black Madonna is the patron saint of abandoned daughters who rejoice in their outcast state and can use it to renew the world.

Paradoxically, the feminine soul in our culture subsists on dimes, while millions are spent to dramatize her victimized condition. Imagine what would happen if images of the victimized feminine were banned in our culture. We would lose many of our classical dramas Tamberlaine, Othello, St Joan. Opera houses would not resonate with the anguish of La Iraviata, Lucia di Lammermoor, Madam Butterfly, Anne Boleyn. Theaters would not play Tennessee Williams, Eugene O'Neill, Samuel Beckett. Bookshelves would be depleted without Anna Karenina, The Idiot, the poetry of Robert Browning, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton. The list is endless. The cruelty of the victimization is veiled by the beauty of the art form in which the images are enshrined. Without those diaphanous veils, we have something quite different -Dallas, Dynasty, Miami Vice and ubiquitous examples of advertising where the feminine is raped by male and female alike. At the bottom of this barrel is pornography.

Many people are being dragged toward wholeness in their daily lives, but because they do not understand initiation rites, they cannot make sense of what is happening to them. They are being presented with the possibility of rebirth into a different life. Through failures, symptoms, inferiority feelings and overwhelming problems, they are being prodded to renounce life attachments that have become redundant. The possibility of rebirth constellates with the breakdown of what has gone before. But because they do not understand, people cling to the familiar, refuse to make the necessary sacrifices, resist their own growth. Unable to give up their habitual lives, they are unable to receive new life. Unless cultural rituals support the leap from one level of consciousness to another, there are no containing walls within which the process can happen. Without an understanding of myth or religion, without an understanding of the relationship between destruction and creation, death and rebirth, the individual suffers the mysteries of life as meaningless mayhem—alone.

Multe persoane din societatea noastră sunt condamnate la dependență, deoarece nu există niciun recipient colectiv pentru nevoile lor spirituale naturale. Predilecția lor naturală pentru experiența transcendenței, pentru ritual, pentru conectarea la o anumită energie mai mare decât a lor este distorsionată într-un comportament dependent. Ritualurile de orice nivel sunt o parte foarte importantă a vieții de zi cu zi. Ne iubim micile noastre rutine care ne ajută să trecem peste zi. Ne imaginăm că suntem conștienți atunci când ne trezim. Trecem prin ritualurile noastre de abluțiune, facem mișcare, bem cafeaua, sucul de portocale și mâncăm pâinea prăjită. Trecem din dormitor în baie și apoi în bucătărie. Apoi, într-o dimineață, avem un oaspete în casă. Nu putem intra în baie. Mergem la bucătărie și scăpăm pe jos cana noastră preferată de cafea. Suntem morocănoși. Urâm să facem conversație la micul dejun. Pierdem autobuzul. Întreaga zi este ratată. Pe astfel de detalii ne construim ritualurile profane, ritualuri față de care suntem practic indiferenți până când nu mai merg cum trebuie. Atunci ne dăm seama cât de inconștienți putem rămâne atâta vreme cât avem aceste modele repetitive care nu permit lumii noastre să se dezintegreze.

The undercurrent of despair in our society is epitomized in a German word that first appeared in English in 1963, and is now incorporated into the Oxford English Dictionary. It is torschlusspanik, (pronounced tor­shluss­panic), defined as "panic at the thought that a door between oneself and life's opportunities has shut." The doors that were once opened through initiation rites are still crucial thresholds in the human psyche, and when those doors do not open, or when they are not recognized for what they are, life shrinks into a series of rejections fraught with torschlusspanik. Torschlusspanik is now a part of our culture because there are so few rites to which individuals will submit in order to transcend their own selfish drives. Without the broader perspective, they see no meaning in the rejection. The door thuds, leaving them bitter or resigned. If, instead, they could temper themselves to a point of total concentration, a bursting point where they could either pass over or fall back as in a rite of passage, then they could test who they are. Their passion would be spent in an all­-out positive effort, instead of deteriorating into disillusionment and despair. The terror behind that word torschlusspanik is what drives many people into analysis—the last door has shut, the last rejection has taken place. No door will ever open again. Nothing means anything.

What I learned is the difference between of destiny and fate. We are all fated to die. Destiny is recognizing the radiance of the soul that, even when faced with human impossibility, loves all of life. Fate is the death we owe to Nature. Destiny is the life we own to soul.

Whether we like it or not, one of our tasks on this earth is to work with the opposites through different levels of consciousness until body, soul and spirit resonate together. Initiation rites, experienced at the appropriate times in our lives, burn off what is no longer relevant, opening our eyes to new possibilities of our own uniqueness. They tear off the protective veils of illusion until at last we are strong enough to stand in our own naked truth.

What then do we mean by "virgin"? It may help us to examine those ways in which we use the word which are not directly concerned with sex. We speak of a "virgin forest" as being one in which the powers of nature are untrammelled and untouched by man. But we can think of this from two diametrically opposite points of view. We can think of it either from the view of the agricultural pioneer, who would regard it as something to be destroyed and uprooted as soon as possible; or else we can think of it from the point of view of a nature lover who would regard the virgin forest with awe as a supreme manifestation of pregnant nature, and who would oppose all the most enlightened efforts of the agriculturalist or town­-builder to destroy its primitive beauty,—who would, in fact, treat it as inviolably holy. The one would represent "law and order" and the other ''nature". So that we have here two opposite principles, both valid, the law of man in apparently open conflict with the law of God. Yet it is the law of God, the untrammelled law of pregnant though as yet chaotic nature that we dub "virgin", and it is the reduction of that chaos which we call Law and Order. Thus in this sense the word "virgin" does not mean chastity but the reverse, the pregnancy of nature, free and uncontrolled, corresponding on the human plane to unmarried love, in contrast to controlled nature corresponding to married love, despite the fact that from the legal point of view sexual intercourse within the marriage bond is the only kind which is regarded as "chaste".

And again Joseph turned himself about and saw her laughing, and said unto her: Mary, what aileth thee that I see thy face at one time laughing and at another time sad? And Mary said unto Joseph: It is because I behold two peoples with mine eyes, the one weeping and lamenting and the other rejoicing and exulting. The "two peoples" Mary sees are aspects of herself, the one "weeping and lamenting" at the sacrifices foreshadowed through the child within, the other "rejoicing and exulting" at the imminence of new life. Death and life meet at the threshold of birth.

Eve chose to take a bite of the apple, and woman was cursed by the Father God for Eve’s disobedience. The curse condemned women to bear their children in pain and to live under their husband’s rule (the Father God claiming dominion over women’s business). As daughters of Eve, we are now faced with a choice: Do we continue to live under this ancient curse? Or do we call to Lilith and find out where She has been all this time? There are many modern women who would say that they are already free of Eve’s curse. They are independent and can choose whether or not to bear children at all. And, if they do, there is pain relief on hand. The only problem is that somewhere in this freedom, something fundamental has been lost. Where are the mother’s ways? Where is the ancient pact between women and the Goddess? As Marion Woodman says, modern women have learned to ‘”take it like a man” in order to achieve independence and success in the world.

Without embodied soul, spirit cannot manifest through human spirit.

Without embodied soul, spirit cannot manifest through human feeling.

That first love warrants careful consideration. In recognizing what was projected then, we can often see the same projection recurring in every serious relationship. Part of the projection is neurotic; part is a genuine yearning for the Beloved. The projection itself may become a betrayer— in a man, the maiden in the tower; in a woman, the rescuing knight. If not recognized as projections, these inner images become the ultimate betrayers of oneself. We cannot look to another human being to complete our soul process. The inner marriage is a divine marriage, the outer marriage a human one.

Birth is the death of the life we have known; death, the birth of the life we have yet to live.

A dream can often tell us what and where a problem is long before a doctor can diagnose. The dream arises from the instinctual world.

Marion Woodman. Rolling Away the Stone. Sounds True Recordings: Boulder, CO, 1989.

Marion Woodman. Bone: A Journal of Wisdom, Strength and Healing. Penguin Putnam: New York, 2000, p. 15.

Marion Woodman. The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation. Inner City: Toronto, 1997,

Linearity does not come naturally to me. It kills my imagination. Nothing happens. No bell rings. No moment of here and now. No moment that says yes. Without these, I am not alive. I prefer the pleasure of the journey through the spiral. Relax. Enjoy the spiral. If you miss something on the first round, don't worry. You might pick it up on the second—or third—or ninth. It doesn't matter. Relax. Timing is everything. If the bell does ring, it will resonate through all the rungs of your spiral. If it doesn't ring, it is the wrong spiral— or the wrong time— or there is no bell.

A trăi potrivit unor principii nu înseamnă să-ți trăiești propria viață. Este mai ușor să încerci să fii mai bun decât ești decât să fii cine ești. Dacă încerci să trăiești după idealuri, ești în permanență frământat de un sentiment al irealității. Undeva crezi că trebuie să existe o bucurie; nu poate fi totul „trebuie”, „ar trebui”, „este nevoie”. Iar când vine criza, trebuie să recunoști adevărul: nu erai acolo. Apoi castelul din cărți de joc se prăbușește. În încercarea de a trăi conform propriilor principii și idealuri, partea care contează cel mai mult a fost pierdută. Prin urmare, ironia îngrozitoare trebuie să fie confruntată. După cum mi-a spus o femeie: Am totul și nimic. După standardele lumii, am totul. După standardele inimii mele, nu am nimic. Am câștigat bătălia pentru independența mea prețioasă și am pierdut ceea ce era cel mai prețios pentru mine. Vreau să iubesc și să fiu iubită, dar ceva din mine îndepărtează iubirea. Nu înțeleg.

Femininul adevărat este receptaculul iubirii. Adevăratul masculin este spiritul care intră în necunoscutul etern în căutarea sensului. Marele recipient, Sinele, este în mod paradoxal atât masculin, cât și feminin și le conține pe amândouă. Dacă acestea sunt proiectate în lumea din afară, transcendența încetează să mai existe. Sinele - totalitatea interioară - este pietrificat. În lipsa adevăratului spirit masculin și a dragostei adevărate feminine din interior, nu există o viață interioară. Dacă încercăm să facem perfecțiune în exterior, dacă încercăm să ne concretizăm idealul interior inconștient, ne ucidem imaginația. A fi liber înseamnă să spargi imaginile din piatră și să lași viața și dragostea să curgă.

Fiecare arhetip are latura sa negativă, precum și pe cea pozitivă. Aspectul negativ al fecioarei poate fi cel mai bine văzut, poate, într-o dorință paralizantă de perfecțiune. În această stare de paralizie, ea preia aspectul demonic al mamei negative sau al vrăjitoarei. Separată de înțelepciunea corpului, fecioara este înghețată. Pentru perfecționista care s-a antrenat singură să devină, simplul fapt de a fi sună ca un eufemism pentru neant sau încetarea de a mai exista. Când energia care a dispărut în încercarea de a-și justifica existența este redirecționată spre descoperirea ei și iubirea de sine, apar la suprafață nesiguranțe intense. Golul abisal pune la îndoială prezența ei aici. Lupta ei de-o viață pentru perfecțiune a creat acumulări de disperare. Aceste neliniști și rezistențe trebuie să fie respectate, deoarece ele maschează teroarea și furia adânc înrădăcinate, cărora trebuie să le fie permis să iasă la suprafață numai atunci când este timpul, adică atunci când eul este suficient de puternic pentru a le face față. Primul obstacol este angajamentul interior. „Chiar cred că merit să beneficiez de o oră pe zi pentru mine? Eu, care mi-am dăruit viața altora, sunt suficient de egoistă, încât să-mi iau o oră pe zi pentru a mă regăsi? Unde pot găsi o oră? Ce anume trebuie să dispară?” Aceasta este o problemă mai profundă decât ar putea părea la început, pentru că mama negativă urăște bucuria, iar, dacă face orice îi place, persoana trăiește un sentiment de vinovăție. Să își facă datoria, acest lucru este acceptabil, oricât de compulsiv ar fi. Să renunțe la a mai depune efort pentru a-și face datoria, astfel încât să poată folosi acea energie în vederea realizării unui lucru creativ pentru sine, este ca și cum cineva te-ar arunca în mașina de spălat, învârtind tamburul, ba într-o parte, ba în alta. A înceta să mai dăruiești înseamnă să încetezi să mai îngrijești ca o mamă, și acolo unde eul este identificat cu atitudinea maternă, el nu știe la început ce să facă. Este atât de obișnuit să dăruiască, încât nu crede că este demn să primească sau crede că faptul de a primi este degradant sau egoist.

Dacă stăm goi, oglinda reflectă lucrurile așa cum sunt. Rădăcinile latine ale cuvântului „oglindă” (mirror) sugerează mirare și curiozitate. Este aducătoarea bucuriei secrete, ajutându-ne să descifrăm lumile interioară și exterioară, oferindu-ne obiectivitatea de a râde de noi înșine. Oglinda este mai mult decât reflecție. Orele lungi de ședere în singurătate, înlăturând amăgirile de sine, mila de sine artificială, desfigurarea prin inflație, construiesc conexiunea Erosului dintre lumile conștientă și inconștientă într-un mod care le leagă pe amândouă. Prin intermediul oglinzii, mergem până la capăt, ne ducem propria realitate într-o altă lume, lumea inconștientului, și găsim o legătură cu propriul nostru suflet. Scrierea unui jurnal este o modalitate de a-ți asuma responsabilitatea de a afla cine SUNT EU. Confruntarea cu părțile noastre întunecate este dureroasă. Este mai ușor să știm atât de mult și nu mai mult. Ne este mai ușor să ne îndepărtăm de propria noastră mlaștină de agonie și agresiune și să spunem: „Nu contează. Am prieteni. M-am adaptat bine la locul meu de muncă. Toată lumea mă place.” Oglinda nu ne va lăsa să scăpăm. Ea spune: „Ba contează. Dacă nu-ți trăiești viața, contează. Unde a fost râsul tău azi? Unde îți sunt lacrimile? De ce te-ai trădat? Nu ai curajul să-ți înfrunți propriul adevăr? Atâta timp cât rămâi blocată în acea imagine perfectă, ești condamnată să fii un vas grecesc pentru tot restul vieții tale inexistente. Tu perfect nemișcată, mireasă nerăpită!” Aceasta este vocea Zeiței întunecate, îndemnându-ne să fim reale.

Sinele, centrul de ordonare a personalității, este cel care prezintă eului provocarea de a trece la un nou nivel al conștiinței. Dacă eului îi este teamă să facă pasul - preferând să se limiteze la ceea ce a știut dintotdeauna -, atunci simptomele psihologice și fiziologice se dezlănțuie. Cu ele trebuie să se confrunte eul, deoarece învățarea semnificației acestor simptome și situații este ceea ce duce la un nou nivel al conștientizării și la un nou echilibru armonios între conștiință și inconștient. Atâta timp cât conștiinței îi este teamă să se deschidă înspre „alteritatea” inconștientului, se experimentează pe sine ca victimă. Odată ce este capabilă să se deschidă la noua viață care curge, devine cea iubită. A fi o victimă înseamnă a fi violată; a fi iubită înseamnă a fi răpită.

În primul rând, cred că feminitatea înseamnă să ne asumăm responsabilitatea pentru corpurile noastre, astfel încât corpul să devină expresia tangibilă a spiritului din interiorul său. Pentru aceia dintre noi care și-au trăit viața mintal, acesta este un proces lung, dificil și agonizant, deoarece, în încercarea de a ne elibera mușchii, eliberăm și frica, furia și suferința care s-au acumulat și au fost îngropate acolo, probabil de la naștere sau dinainte de naștere. În noi înșine descoperim un animal rănit, aproape mort de foame și maltratare. Pentru că a fost pedepsit atât de mult timp, reacționează la început ca o creatură nevrotică sălbatică ce nu a cunoscut niciodată dragostea. Dar, treptat, devine prietenul nostru și, pentru că înțelege instinctele mai bine decât noi, devine ghidul nostru către un mod natural și spiritual de viață. (...) În al doilea rând, feminitatea înseamnă să-mi asum responsabilitatea pentru cine sunt - nu pentru ceea ce fac, nu pentru cine par să fiu, nu pentru ceea ce realizez. Când tot ce trebuie făcut este făcut și trebuie să mă confrunt cu mine în realitatea crudă, cine sunt eu? Care sunt valorile mele? Care sunt nevoile mele? Sunt sinceră cu mine însămi sau mă trădez? Care sunt sentimentele mele? Sunt capabilă de iubire? Sunt sinceră cu dragostea mea? Lucrul cu aceste întrebări, zi de zi, este ceea ce eu numesc diferențierea femininului. Acesta este procesul de a deveni fecioară - femeia care este ceea ce este pentru că asta este ceea ce este ea. Trăiește, se mișcă, și își posedă Ființa printr-o anumită putere din ea.

In the self-destructive and murderous literalism of our time, caution and careful consideration are necessary to protect the psychic reality.

In any revolution the greatest danger is that the oppressed become carbon copies of their oppressors. They fail to see that fighting back with the same tactics, same values, same psychic weapons, can change nothing. Sudden decisions to draw the line and shout "enough" won't work. Men and women who have worked diligently to liberate their femininity from internal Nazi prison camps dare not rest on what they have accomplished. Too soon they may unwittingly find themselves once again collaborating with the very energies that imprisoned them in the first place. Since these regressive complexes resist giving up control, they become more subtle and more dangerous. Hope withers into despair, unless creative masculinity protects the feminine values.

So long as consciousness is enslaved by the darkness of unconsciousness, we blindly live out these handicaps in our lives, projecting them onto our men or choosing defeated men as an image of our own defeat. The flames of our fear, grief and rage burn without light. Without realizing what we are doing, we can allow consciousness to fall into the service of darkness. If, on the other hand, we are conscious of the darkness, that very consciousness is the light that illumines the darkness. This is the journey into mature consciousness, with arms and legs, heart and genitals, strong enough to bear the lights.

The fear of being receptive also manifests in emotional blocks that restrict dialogue in daily encounters. The feminine side in both men and women is so frail that anything radical coming in from outside has to be censored in order to protect the container against the possibility of shattering. On the other hand, the masculine side often lacks the strength to penetrate; terror of losing oneself in another overwhelms the initial thrust that could lead to deeper intercourse. This biological imagery clarifies the ways in which we all move between our masculinity and our femininity in daily conversation. But how many of us are flexible enough to fully receive another without critical judgment? How many of us are able to trust that we will be received unconditionally? How many of us are able to stand to our own phallic truth when we see our relationships endangered?

The inner dictators enslave more cruelly than the outer.

So long as we are blind to our inner tyrant, we blame an outer tyrant, some person or some system, for victimizing us. That maintains the split because victim and tyrant are dependent on each other, and together they must be healed. Either/or thinking is symptomatic of this split. It is patriarchal thinking and maintains the destructive status quo. It allows people to smile benignly and say, "I don't know what you’re going on about,” when they themselves have had a medically inexplicable heart attack or their own cedars are dying of acid rain. Broken hearted or terrified, they smile, unaware.

We are all unconsciously bound to the wheel of fortune. It goes round and round and we go blindly around on it until one day something happens that wakes us up, face to face with ourselves. What for years we could not or would not see is made visible. The unconscious is made answerable to consciousness. The Self demands a reckoning: the ego must recognize what it has long feared and rejected. Whether we grow or wither in that encounter depends on whether we cling to our ego's rigid standpoint or whether we choose to trust the Self and leap into the unknown.

Once the question is in consciousness, the answer is constellated in the unconscious... the answer often lies in the unconscious waiting for the question to be consciously asked. [...] What has to be let go to make room for the transformations of energy that are ready to pour through the body-soul? I don't want to be here if I can't carry my own weight. As life asks new things of me, I feel I must pause, go inward, and ask, "What is my weight now? What are my new values? Who am I and not-I at this stage? Do I have the courage to live with this evolving me?

Healing needs listening with the inner ear, stopping the incessant blather, listening.

Death Mother’s energy is most destructive when it comes from somebody we love and trust, and who is supposed to love us. This is what happened in the original trauma; we trusted our beloved mother, but suddenly realized that we were not acceptable to her. We realized that our mother wished that we, or some part of us, was dead.

Marion Woodman describes the journey of growth as a spiral: We circle back to the same issues time and again, she says, and on each turn of the spiral we develop an expanded consciousness of what we carry in both our minds and bodies. As I approach the end of this article, I will spiral back to the words of Woodman, viewing them in an expanded light: 'If this child knew in the womb that it was not the gender the parents longed for, or there was no money for another child, or timing in the marriage was bad, or it barely escaped abortion, this child knows it is not welcomed into life.… Not Wanted. Is there anything worse for a helpless infant to experience in its bones?' An evolutionary consciousness would answer: No! There is nothing worse for a helpless infant to experience in its bones than being unwanted. That is because we carry in our collectively embodied unconscious a knowledge of how incredibly precarious life was for young humans during the deep past, as well as an understanding of how difficult it was for ancestral mothers. And however much we might want to deny this unpalatable aspect of humanity, it is this unconscious knowledge which gives the psyche’s archetypal images of the Death Mother such a powerful and disturbing charge, and which makes growing up in the shadow of the Death Mother so wounding.