REDISCOVERING AND RECLAIMING THE FEMININE CONSCIOUSNESS

Marion Woodman, Kate Danson, Mary Hamilton, & Rita Greer Allen, Leaving My Father's House: A Journey to Conscious Femininity (Boston & London: Shambhala, 1992) ("The eternal feminine is thrusting her way into contemporary consciousness. Shekinah, Kwan Yin, Sophia, whatever her name, she is the manifestation of the divine matter. Among her many faces are the Black Madonna, White Buffalo Woman, Shakti, Kali, Aphrodite. Hers are the ways of peace, compassion, reverence for life and death in the oneness of nature. Knowing her has nothing to do with blindly stumbling toward a fate we think we cannot avoid. It has everything to do with developing consciousness until it is strong enough to hold tension as a creative energy. In the turmoil of our times, we are being called to a new order of reality. Working toward that consciousness, we suffer, but our suffering opens us to the wounds of the world and the love that can heal. It is our immediate task to relate to the merging feminine whether she comes to us in dreams, in the loss of those we love, in body disease, or in ecological distress. Each of us in our own way is being brought face to face with Her challenge." "Conscious femininity is not bound to gender. It belongs to both men and women. Although in the history of the arts, men have articulated their femininity far more than women, women are now becoming custodians of their own feminine consciousness. For centuries, men have projected their inner image of femininity, raising it to a consciousness that left women who accepted the projection separated from their own reality. They became artifacts rather than people. The consciousness attributed to them was a consciousness projected onto them. That projection was sometimes an idealized image of beauty and truth, a sphinx, or a dragon. Whatever it was, it could not be an incarnated woman. A man does not have a womb, and the embodiment of his femininity is, therefore, different from a woman's." "The fact remains, however, we are all human beings. We are all the children of patriarchy. While our culture depends upon three thousand years of cultural process focused through masculine eyes, it has been won at high cost. What began as masculine values has degenerated into lust for control. Power has bludgeoned both our femininity and our masculinity. We all function with these two different energies. As health and growth depend on both dark and light, so maturity depends on an inner balance between Yin and Yang, Shakti and Shiva, Being and Doing. I prefer to call these energies femininity and masculinity because their biological image appear in dreams and their interaction or lack of interaction reveals harmony or chaos in the psyche. For me these words are not gender-bound."  "Conscious femininity, as we will be discussing it in this book, has to do with bringing the wisdom in nature to consciousness. For too long we have taken the instinctual Mother Goddess for granted. In our own bodies, in our Earth, we have assumed she would nourish and protect us. We have wallowed in sentimental images. Over centuries, we have forgotten her, reviled her, raped her. Now we will either integrate her laws into consciousness or we will die. There is an evolutionary process at work on our plant and we can only hope that out of this present death, sanity will come. Thus far in our history, the unconscious feminine has been associated with instinct; now the conscious feminine is bringing light to instinct, illuminating nature with new images that comes to us in our dreams and in creative work." "The task of releasing the feminine from the tyrannical power of the driven, crazed masculine is long and arduous, The process is just as difficult inside as it is outside. Observing it abstractly is one thing; experiencing it personally is quite another." 'This book look inside...." Id. at 1-2.).