Leaving My Father’s House: A Journey to Conscious Femininity
ix. As each of us wrote and rewrote from out thousands of pages of journaling, I realized that our inner worlds were communicating across the seeming emptiness of time and space.
1. Conscious femininity is not bound to gender. It belongs to both men and women.
2. For me these words [masculinity/femininity] are not gender bound.
3. From her present perspective, she was able to hold a detached position that allowed her to discern an emerging pattern. Like a detective in search of herself, Kate was determined to find the thread through the labyrinth of her dreams and compulsions.
4. None of us would suggest that we have reached a goal; none of us pretends to have the answer; all of us agree that the meaning is in the process.
4. I recognize that in writing we fictionalize ourselves as we do in storytelling. In telling our stories, however, if we can allow the story to move with its own momentum, we can distill our truth from our fiction. And the truth changes from day to fay, sometimes from our to hour. #narrative
5. Always my imagination is creating a form that gives shape to otherwise sporadic events in everyday life. That creative fire molds my inner chaos into a reflection of the sacred order I feel in nature.
5. Without stories, we have no way to recollect ourselves when our personal world shatters.
6. Our culture is riddled with the loss of feeling values because so many stories go on in the soul but are never heard.
10. Here were three little princesses who, like many little girls, knew that so long as they pleased their parents, they were lovable. They strove to be the best. Part of each of them was the obedient, self-effacing daughter, forever seeking, forever powerless. Part of each of them was disconnected from her source in her female body and, like her mother and generations of grandmothers, she carried deep body memories of sexual guilt and shame.
10. Hair comes straight from the head as ideas come straight from the head. In dreams, as in life, the coiffure, the cutting, growing, and dyeing of hair are symptomatic of significant changes in the psyche (soul) or the persona (the mask we show to the world).
11. Women who have adored their fathers may project their inner King onto a simple man, crown him with light, invest him with their own intellectual and spiritual potential, and then wonder why he isn’t big enough to fill his royal vestments.
12. Unconsciously, we are driven to fulfill expectations that may have little to do with who we are.
13. Archetypes are energy fields innate in our psyches. They are like hidden magnets. We cannot see them, but we can see their images and we are propelled by their energy.
13. If our ego is strong enough, we can choose whether “to fall in love” or not. If it is not strong enough, we are already in the soup.
14. Identification is unconscious; relationship is conscious.
Identification with archetypal energy breeds inflation that swings into deflation. False hope, false power, fake gods collapse in agony.
14. The father who projects brilliance onto his daughter may create an over-achiever who unconsciously yearns for the darkness of her own earth in an eating addiction. The very unreality of the projection activates an overcompensation that attempts to restore the human balance.
15. As energies shift inside, so relationships change outside.
18. We run up and down our psychic stairs, we know there’s a dark hole, we frantically run around it or fall into it in our addictions. The Great Mother–creator and destroyer–is waiting there.
18. What we eat physically and psychically becomes us. It is our task to choose what is right for us to eat, how hot to make our own fire, and when to throw out our own ashes. The dreams will tell us.
19. Cranky and subversive as he appears, his very negativity goads the heroine into acting from her own desire.
23. Clothes in fairy tales, like clothes in dreams and life, create an image. They cover and reveal our naked truth.
26. Life is not ordered according to our perfect schemes… Anyone who is compulsively in love with the wrong person knows that.
26. Energy that is not allowed to transform toward creativity too often finds a destructive outlet.
27. The heroine’s task is to break from her unconscious father complex and make her intellect and her spirit her own (sunlight), to break from her unconscious mother complex and make her body and soul her own (moonlight), and ultimately to experience herself as part of a greater reality (starlight).
28. Kitchen work would have taken them right into the confrontation. Working it through–fighting, holding firm, reflecting, meditating, being patient–leads to initiation. Sifting through the ashes of our broken hopes, empty stereotypes, inflated ideals, we let the dead world go and, at the same time, attend to the new energy flowing in from life’s source.
29. If the sensitive little child was never allowed to fly with its own creative spirit, if its wings were repeatedly cut off by “should, ought, and have to,” then it has no faith in itself. Its feelings, intuitions, imaginings count for nothing. Poetry, music, dance–all the creative outpourings of soul reaching for spirit–have been relegated to some kind of fluffy fun and fantasy world. In the so-called real world, creative fire is not to be tolerated unless, of course, it leads to financial success and climbing the social ladder.
30. In the transformative process, something of immense value is sacrificed to something of even higher value.
35. She hated herself for going where [her parents] could not go. Yet guilt seems natural for maturity. When the parental figures are consciously differentiated, the god and goddess within lose their contamination. They are then free to become creative guides.
Turning Blood to Ink – Kate Danson
42. I allowed myself to become less demanding of others, less critical of myself.
49. These children represent my potential creativity blocked by my attitude of guilt and shame toward the past.
50. I had to free these children. They were innocent victims just as I once had been.
50. I had to learn to grieve for this abandoned child that I carry inside me to this day.
57. In psychological terms, defenses cut me off from feelings and from my instinctual side. They kept me from answering he question “What do I really want?”
61. Yet, at the base of each was a sad reality: both worlds could exist only if I was willing to be satisfied with a kind of partial existence.
73. In truth, the gifts lie within myself or nowhere.
82. In the past, my emotions had been turned against myself; pent-up rage had led to a sense of futility and worthlessness. Now I began to realize that if I intended accomplishing authentic and creative work, I would have to develop toughness.
84. …my fear, particularly with respect to my parents, was that I would kill them.
84. The problem was this: the child in me who had never felt secure attachment to these primal forces was now expected to make the leap to adult maturity and, wielding the sword of discretion, cut away what was inappropriate in the parent-child bond while maintaining a healthy family connection. But there was a good deal of confusion in me as to what constituted “healthy.” In addition, it was as though the child, traumatized at an early stage of development, not only existed side by side with the adult, but also had a hand in the adult’s decisions. Where the adult needed freedom to grow, the child I was unconscious of was screaming out for parental bonding and attachment. But the adult I had become, having lost all conscious connection with this young, demanding figure, was carrying an enormous load of guilt each time I made a burst for freedom.
86. The young woman in the dream was beautiful but savage.
96. True salvation (and not merely survival) means sacrificing the old, whether it be old attitudes, old value systems, or long-standing complexes.
103. Again and again, I have disobeyed my body’s needs and settled for shoulds and oughts, a simpleton’s litany of songs my father taught me.
—- back to Woodman
109. Repeated images, slightly transformed–these are the yarn that holds the story together. Tiny as details are, they are the yarn that is spun and woven, and transformed in our own soul story, whether we know it or not.
110. Her mother’s energy was in her hair; she probably never knew what was in her body.
114. If they decide to work their relationship through, both will hit the repressed rage that lies hidden beneath depression.
Redeeming Eve’s Body – Mary Hamilton
128. Inner voices natter in my head. “The death occurred in your body. Within you is the reason he died. Your journey is to find the answer.”
129. My life in my madness is better than my death in drugs.
“I’ll commit suicide,” I think to myself.
“No,” answers a voice in my head. “Death is only a short escape from life. You will return to a body and be forced to face your madness.” #reincarnation
131. Bad Mary: “I know that the vagina is a divine-smelling jewel box. That fool in your head keeps trying to scrub it clean. I know that my body is a flower opening to the Gods.”
131. Medicine Woman: “Allow yourself to enter into the labyrinth of your darkness.”
“But this is insane,” I say. “You are an illusion.”
“No,” says the image of the Medicine Woman in the mirror, “you are the illusion.”
131. Eve’s energy makes Good Mary’s life a physical hell.
Medicine Woman tells me to dig into the earth of my body and find the healing waters. My body is knotted and twisted in pain.
132. On my inner screen I see the old Medicine Woman. She is a weather-beaten, ugly old crone. Although I am terrified of her, I am irresistibly drawn to her.
132. “Do not give me your power,” [the Medicine Woman] says sternly to me. “Keep it for yourself. You need it. Listen and obey me but never cling to me.”
132: “Live your death, or die and live your life.”
139. “People threaten you because your inner characters threaten you.”
142. “I am your body speaking. Your world of the head is very belligerent, arrogant, and know-it-all. The character traits you hate in others, especially in men, are the very qualities that you possess in your head.”
143. “I am dissolving, Medicine Woman.”
“Yes, there can be no you. You hold onto the safe patterns in your head, the knows realities. Relax and fall apart.”
144. When Witch rules my house , I am severed from the life of my body. I see children as make-work projects for me and hate the endless errands.
…I loathe other women when I look through Witch’s eyes.
144. Witch has no joy, no love, and no laughter. Mechanically she runs the house hoping that others will see how much she has sacrificed.
144. Both little girl/Witch and son-lover Daddy/husband suffocate in the marriage, while believing they are intoxicated with love.
145. I am depressed and tired all the time. The only way I have any energy i to be driven by the power of the Witch, but I can’t let her drive me anymore.
147. “I am Black Dog,” speaks the dream symbol to me in meditation… “You indulge because you have no understanding of what life of the flesh needs in order to sustain itself… There is no life behind indulgence; indulgence is death.”
148. Our culture is dominated by “successful” victims of Witch.
149. After many careful observations I learn to sense the difference between being supported by the inner masculine as compared to being defeated before I even get started by the fierce negative animus. When the negative animus controls my body, my insecure and performing persona has to hold me up. It is the distinction among three postures: proper alignment with my positive masculine; a collapsed upper body with my negative masculine; an assumed rigid and inflated posture with my persona.
152. With Eve’s energy alive in me I discover I no longer see bodily “imperfections” in myself or in others, only incredible woundings and emotional scars where the love of Eve has been denied life.
154. Being conscious of the sensations in my body requires a disciplined vigilance that usually I am unable to maintain. However, when I do, I start to notice that I can differentiate between my own unconscious material and the unconscious material that others project onto me.
158: [Dream which is a lot like a dream I have had] I walk down the mountain. I notice that my body is similar to other bodies of Light around me; all of us are sexless forms, like ancient monks dressed in long, hooded, earthen robes.
160. I instantly recognize that it is possible to consciously shift my psychological position. In dreams the shift appears as staircases and elevators.
164. Love for Nellie is an action–an immediate action in life whenever it is required, regardless of the personal sacrifice.
173. Sometimes life for me is like watching a series of events that I am free to enter into or remain outside of.
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