Healing the Feminine
Jungian stack for healing the Feminine.
These have been tomes of healing on my path as a therapist, outstanding all books on theory. Asking where to start, maybe these will catch the soul’s interest?
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“[Keeping in mind that both principles are equally necessary.] The Feminine has been devalued and depotentiated by our global culture, all the life and power have been drained out of it. A soft, frilly pink doll object has been left, out of fear, in the place of a vibrant, awesome, and fierce Mother Goddess. Nowhere is that loss of vitality more clear than in the belief that passivity and chaos are solely feminine and activity and order are solely masculine. There is a whole realm of feminine activity and implicit order, but, as we see in Psyche’s case, it is very different from the direct, phallic activity associated with a masculine approach.
Feminine activity is receptive rather than forcing in nature. A feminine approach is not primarily goal-oriented. The individual harbors hopes and dreams, but rather than going after them in a determined way, a feminine sensibility moves one to surrender to the processes of nature, of life, that are activated now. There is a mixture of attentiveness and contemplation as one tries to attune oneself to the current of one’s development, to let one’s process happen, to avoid blocking a journey that is trying to proceed. In this way, the ego turns toward the unconscious, letting itself be guided by the organic processes of the psyche, immersing itself in its own depths rather than trying to direct Psyche—or divide and conquer—rather she strives to unify.
The feminine orientation is not simple. It involves a painful confrontation with one’s own smallness, of our humanness, of the fact that one’s psyche contains one’s ego rather than vice versa. The core attitude is one of openness to the self and of surrendering to one's fate or as James Hillman might say our soul’s code. There is a recognition and acceptance of the fact that one does not actually have control of one's life and an active relinquishment of the attempt to exert control where none is possible. This is not a case, however, of simply letting happen what will. The ego as a factor in the equation is intensely active. Much of its activity is directed toward keeping in check its own impulses to struggle against the current of life, but, when the time and situation are favorable the ego latches on to that strand of life moving in the desired direction.
The cat, stalking its prey, provides an image of this feminine activity. She lies in wait, attentively tracking the creature she hopes to snare, apparently "doing nothing“ at the same time as all of her being is intensely focused on the web of life, waiting for the emergence of her exact moment in history. How different from the masculine hound, crashing through the brush in fierce pursuit of his prey, flushing the fox out of its lair for the hunters. The cat attempts to capture her prey through perfectly attuning her own being to the life currents of the larger world. This image of the patiently attentive cat, crouching immobile for long stretches of time, reminds us of the essential differences between a feminine view of time and a masculine sense of it.
To the Feminine every minute is unique, some hours more significant than others, some infinite, time is rhythmic. Feminine time attunes itself to the cadence of the soul, masculine time orients to the movement of the sun in the outer world. Feminine knowledge on the other hand proceeds in the dark much like the organic process of conception, out of sight, imperfectly imagined by the intellect, announcing its advent through hints and intuition. Where masculine knowing seeks laser clarity that fosters unwavering perfection, feminine knowing orients toward a state of wholeness that includes imperfection and fluidity, and that blurs edges and differentiations.
This feminine experience of immersing oneself in one's situation as a means to becoming conscious of it means that rather than being guided by the mind, the whole personality is involving itself in the process. The knowledge-the consciousness-gained through this experience can hardly be spoken and yet the knowing is shared. Attempts to share what has been gained in the feminine mode will talk of images metaphors, parables, paintings, poems or stories, like the tale of Psyche. The product of a feminine immersion in life is experiential knowledge. We call this feminine consciousness wisdom, personified by Sophia and Shekinah.
Ecclesiastes reminding us that there is a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to reap, a time of joy and a time of woe. From a feminine perspective one sees cycles of fertility, growth, birth, withdrawal, decline, and death. Each of these kinds of time is equally valid, equally intrinsic and necessary for the wholeness of life.
A feminine perspective recognizes the necessity of death for the continuance of life, and it consequently accepts all the metaphoric deaths that fill our days: the death of a hope, the death of a marriage, the death of a plan. Our resistance to a feminine orientation is tremendous. We are taught in every setting that we should be in control of our lives and that our lives will proceed in positive directions if we control them and tame our animal. We are urged to refuse to give in to depression and despair, to live positively and pull ourselves up by our bootstraps.
In the face of the clearest most consistent evidence, our culture insists upon denying the ubiquitous, inescapable fact of darkness and death and upon maintaining a fiction of the possibility of living happily ever after if we will only manage our lives properly and mute our feelings. As we know these belief systems have not brought happiness, but rather illusive outer shells of a life avoided, depressed, and ridden with guilt about it. Struggling against the truth that the Feminine heralds only distorts reality and exacerbates the pain, when submitting to the suffering of life ultimately brings wisdom." ~BSS
“Psychotherapy Grounded in the Feminine Principle.”
Books mentioned:
Persephone Rising by Carol S Pearson, Weaving Woman by Barbara Black Koltuv, Healing and Empowering the Feminine by Sylvia Shaindel Senensky, The Heroine’s Journey by Maureen Murdock, Knowing Woman: A Feminine Psychology by Irene Claremont de Castillejo, The Book of Lilith by Barbara Black Koltuv, The Cat: A Tale of Feminine Redemption by Marie-Louise von Franz, Addiction to Perfection by Marion Woodman, The Pregnant Virgin: Psychological Transformation by Marion Woodman, Descent to the Goddess: A Way of Initiation for Women by Sylvia Brinton Perera, The Bridge to Wholeness by Jean Benedict Raffa, Psychotherapy Grounded in the Feminine Principle by Barbara Stevens Sullivan, The Creative Feminine and her Discontents by Juliet Miller, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness by Marion Woodman and Elinor Dickson, The Long Journey Home: Re-visioning the Myth of Demeter and Persephone for Our Time by Christine Downing, Encounters with the Soul by Barbara Hannah, Through the Goddess by Patricia Reis, Women’s Dionysian Initiation by Linda Fierz-David, Untie the Strong Woman by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PhD, Leaving My Father’s House: A Journey to Conscious Femininity by Marion Woodman
