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Month: April 2017

The Mysterial Sequence: The Maiden Wound

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This is the fourth in a five part series on The Mysterial Sequence. To receive insight and support, join us here.

This series on The Mysterial Sequence outlines a developmental pathway that I’ve spent two decades decoding, which helps women unlock their innate potential.

The Mysterial Sequence has a very intentional and powerful order, which you can sample by journeying through each of the videos:
1. The Mother Wound
2. The Hero Wound
3. The Father Wound

And then return to this fourth gate: The Maiden Wound.

I am most passionate about the awakening of consciousness and leadership capacity in women today. Two decades of my work were spent researching with hundreds of women in my University Certificate Leadership Programs. From that body of work, a new developmental pathway was discovered, very specific to women, which showed five distinct ‘nodes’ along the pathway, in which either a feminine (Yin) or Masculine (Yang) essence was awakening.

Through this journey of the five gateways, we saw a release of limiting beliefs, awakening of liberating beliefs, and ultimately a powerful balance of a woman’s Feminine and Masculine capacities. Through this transformation and empowerment, women seemed to become a more true match for these complex times. I am deeply honored and continually inspired to teach The Mysterial Sequence in my online programs.

The Maiden Archetype

To arrive here in the pulsing energy of The Maiden is a significant step forward when the healthy Father Archetype has been cultivated within. Many of us have tried to access the freedom and joyful creativity that comes with The Maiden essence. But because we have not fully prepared the way for this fiery, volatile force, it has led to painful and unintended consequences.

This, as you can imagine, constitutes a threat to the powers that be. We have created a society that honors The Father’s values of order, rationality, and linear thinking. It’s no wonder that The Maiden has been repressed in Modern and Traditional consciousness, domesticated into a virginal daughter or debased into a sex object.

The Maiden Archetype is both creative and unpredictable because it opens us to the power of our dynamic Feminine life force, a libidinal surge very closely connected to our sexuality. The Maiden harnesses the flaming energy of The Hero to bring her creativity out into the world, but unlike the focus of The Hero, this blazing Yin archetype likes to break things open. She seeks connection and intimacy with others, unconcerned with rank, status, or differences. She rides the carrier wave of her intuition and doesn’t take herself too seriously.

The Maiden’s Grand Entrance

While the Maiden archetype is an ancient and universal pattern of innocent aliveness, she is a relative newcomer in terms of influencing the direction of modern society. She burst on the scene in the 1960’s as flower power, sexual freedom, psychedelic art, hunger for diversity and change, and a flat rejection of the Establishment (a.k.a. The Father Archetype). The energy she brought created an explosion of creativity, innovation, social breakdown and transformation.

For many women who worked hard to fit into the structures of the patriarchy, it is very challenging when this second force of the Feminine activates in the psyche. All of a sudden the world in which they were once happy feels suffocating and limiting. They don’t know what happened to their joy, aliveness and dreams, and they want them back. It is a very confusing time.

Without a developmental model that shows The Maiden as a natural step forward (as The Mysterial Sequence does now), women either repress this dynamic force or totally over-identify with it. They often feel they have failed or been on the wrong path, numbing down this firey essence with work, TV, food, anti-depressants, and more. We want to turn off this flame, that is trying to engage with and move us to the next level of our potentiality.

Another common assumption when The Maiden energy comes online is wanting to ‘go back’ to being a free, young girl. Women often falsely believe that the only way to reclaim this essence is to leave everything that they’ve worked to build in their life during The Father Archetype timeframe – their marriage, career, employer, etc. They want to break things up and loosen the hold of the structures in their life that they feel imprisoned by. They want to find their wild self – either again or for the first time. It’s a beautiful lighting up of the Maiden gate.

The Maiden Wound

The Maiden Wound doesn’t trust intuition, and leans back into The Father Archetype’s rational logic. From the imbalanced shadow side of The Maiden Archetype arises the core limiting belief:

“I am not free to express myself fully.”

An overdeveloped Maiden energy may express by way of:
  • Sexual promiscuity
  • Excessive bohemian experience as a wild free child out there in the world
  • Forcing
  • Distraction
  • Thrill seeking
  • Inability to stay with the challenges of transformation
Conversely, lack of access or expression of The Maiden energy results in:
  • Fear of change or our wild nature
  • Feel shame of body and it’s sensuality
  • Puritanical rigidity, cutting off or shaming deep pleasure and desire
  • Keeping a tight lid on your life force – not coloring outside the lines
  • Insecurity
  • Holding onto things longer than they serve
  • Assume specific ‘shoulds’ around sexuality, feeling we aren’t normal
  • Allow ourselves to be objectified

It is interesting in today’s world to see the shadow Masculine return – wanting to dial things back, shut down women’s rights, stop globalization and the spread of more feminine values. This is why it is essential for us each to traverse the first three gates, in order to welcome and work with The Healthy Maiden energy.

The Healthy Maiden Archetype

When The Maiden is awakened and balanced, the Liberating Belief emerges and grounds:

“I am free to express my true nature.”  

In its healthy expression, The Maiden is the transformative awakening of imagination and spontaneity. It is the playful, sensual and sexual, “Aha!,” inchoate and wild part of ourselves that shakes things up and awakens our joy and liberates our passion. This is the place where we stand up in the joy of our own creativity with the dance with life.

She is passionate, fun loving, spontaneous, curious, imaginative, intuitive, and adventurous. She is full and unfettered creativity in expression. She knows how to flow. She is surprised by what she says, does, by life, and by the quality of relationships that unfold around her. It’s about how we connect in relationship in more intimate and sensual ways with the world and with those in our world.

With The Maiden on board you work to live, not live to work. Your life becomes a creative experiment that you enter boldly into every day, curious to see what you will invent. And joy is not a fleeting experience, earned after a lot of hard work and lost as soon as you return to the grindstone. Along with an increased ability to be with the difficult moments of life, you are ready to playfully engage in the fun of living. You recognize that this is your birthright.

The Father archetype helps you to find your purpose and stand in your own true authority. When you bring The Maiden into partnership with The Father essence, the passion and courage that you need to step forward in the direction of your dreams comes online.

Finally you become able to “get on your path,” which can mean changing jobs, starting new ventures, or going back to school. Some set off on adventures of life and love they had only dared to dream before.

“Within every woman there lives a powerful force,

filled with good instincts,

passionate creativity, and ageless knowing.

She is the Wild Woman,

who represents the instinctual nature of women.

But she is an endangered species.”

– Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PHD and author of Women who Run with the Wolves

As always, thank you for exploring with me. I invite you to explore the next and final gate in The Mysterial Sequence: The Crone Wound. I hope to have a chance to engage with you in this unfolding Mysterial movement.

This series is intended to whet your appetite – you can go deeper with the work in order to unravel from the shadow holdings of each Archetype and fully activate your potentiality in this life.

The Mysterial Sequence: The Father Wound

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This blog is the third of a five part series on The Mysterial Sequence. To receive insight and support, join us here.

The Mysterial Sequence is a developmental pathway that I’ve spent two decades decoding, which helps women unlock their innate potential.

If you’re just arriving to the series, please go to the beginning to traverse The Mysterial Sequence in this order:

1. The Mother Wound
2. The Hero Wound

And then wrap back to this third video, and continue to the end.

I am passionate about the awakening of consciousness and leadership capacity in women, by opening the channel which will allow for the unfolding of the next level of our evolutionary potential to come online. I call this innate potential Mysterial. My sense is that this is an evolutionary imperative that we be able to call forth more of our feminine and masculine strengths, to meet these complex times.

The Father Archetype

This is the gate through which we come into belonging, into the community, and into our ‘fit’ with society in some way – often through a job, family context of children, geographic location of a home, and more.

Ideally we would come into adulthood and life, and into our metaphorical ‘Castle’ – to take care of things and be taken care of. We all have a pattern in our psyche – a wiring for having a sovereign place in the world. For being valuable inside of the larger system, not just as The Hero out on her own, but actually making it inside a system where there are others we need to show up in front of and for, and to ‘belong’ with.

When a healthy Father archetype ‘comes online’ in women, we: 
  • Have installed a deep sense of our own confidence
  • Are landed on the ground of our own true authority
  • Have a relationship to our power that is grounded in our own unique gifts
  • Know how to create structure and order
  • Know how to build the systems that will allow our unique gift to be sustained over time

The Mother vessel is the womb and holding container inside of which things gestate. Yet the Father vessel is like a big ship – it is going to move somewhere. It has to be constructed in the right way for this movement to take place. You want your creative seed to come into the world through the Hero Manifestation, after being incubated in the Mother vessel.

One of the things we discovered in our research, was that there was another form of the Masculine which was not Heroic / Warrior. This element was more stable, composed, solid and vessel-like. We needed to distinguish this from the more firey aspect of The Hero.

Since our planet has been inside a masculine construct of wholeness for over 3,000 years, it’s brought us many things from an evolutionary perspective. The Father Archetype came into the culture during a time when it was necessary to build systems and structures – monarchs began to rise, in the modern era the rational mind came in strongly. We certainly would not say that this was the ‘wrong’ development. And yet for women, what has happened in this great sweep of The Father Archetype, is that there has been a ‘Father Wound’ cultivated and passed down through the generations.

Through research with hundreds of women in our University Women’s Leadership Development Programs, the unconscious and often conscious mind held this limiting belief:

The core limiting belief of The Father

“I do not belong.”

The internal dialogue often went, “No matter how hard I try, I can’t quite fit into this pattern that emphasizes and values:

  • The rational mind over being intuitive
  • Order over free-flow
  • ‘My’ group over ‘your’ group
  • Belonging and fitting into the rules of this way of being – if I want to be taken care of.”

This has often tilted women into a collapse of our own authority. And at a time, more than ever before, when we need to stand on the ground of our own value (The Mother Archetype ‘I know that I am enough just as I am’). But we can’t show up in our sense of sufficiency, if we buy into the limiting belief that we don’t belong in the world. How does this limiting belief show up in your life, or feel in your body when you speak it out loud?

Ways this manifests for women often include:

  • The uber-attempt to try to belong: to fit in no matter what
  • To become ‘one of the boys’
  • Judging others who don’t belong
  • Giving up on even trying to fit in, because you don’t feel you ever will
  • You so reject the system, that you live on the fringes, and don’t honor your need for structure in order to create a sustainable contribution

Many women who have worked very hard to fit into this hyper-masculine patriarchal power structure can be very judgmental, and not reach back to mentor other women, or may try to mentor them into being ‘one of the boys’.

This embodied wound of not belonging must be healed. It requires that the first polarity – The Mother and The Hero – be addressed. And when the shadow work in the Father Wound is done, the liberating belief becomes:

The Father’s liberating belief

“At home in myself, I naturally belong.”

Often this liberating belief ripples out through experiences of:
  • Being willing to be seen in the world
  • Opening to being recognized for your being and your doing, your own unique creative essence in the world
  • Having a sense of a Friendly Universe, of not being alone, of being part of a web of connection, to bring your own vital seed contribution to

It’s vital that each of us is willing to grow up, to do the work to open the channel so our deepest innate potential can come through and we can be seen for the beautiful ways that we are stewarding the world, using all of our feminine and masculine gifts together.

As always, thank you for exploring with me. I invite you to explore the next gate in The Mysterial Sequence: The Maiden Wound.

The Mysterial Sequence: The Hero Wound

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This is the second of a five part series on The Mysterial Sequence. To receive insight and support, join us here.

For several decades, my work has been dedicated to the awakening of women and of their leadership capacities.  Through my University Women’s Leadership Development Programs, we were able to decode a developmental pathway that unlocked ‘evolutionary capacities’ in women, empowering them to be a match for these complex times!

We called this developmental path ‘The Mysterial Sequence’ and I’m honored to be giving you a glimpse of it in this 5-part series. For those who are ready to unlock the fullness of their brilliance, I offer my renowned global online course Mysterial Resilience Essentials.

If you’re just joining us, I highly recommend you begin with the first gate in The Mysterial Sequence: The Mother Wound. In our research with hundreds of women, none of the five gates arose in isolation—there was always a critical relationship between the Feminine/Yin essence and the Masculine/Yang essence. The Mother gate is where we land in the sufficiency of our being and relax into who we are. We overcome the limiting core belief ‘I am not enough’ and grow into the liberating belief ‘I am enough just as I am’. It is from this grounded place that we can then source our most creative actions in the second gate: The Hero.

The Hero

The Hero energy in women typically arises between the ages of 8 and 10, often before we receive too many messages from our culture about what we should and shouldn’t do as women. Before we are held back through these limitations, we tend to have a lot of energy and desire to express ourselves in specific ways which are unique to our individual gifts. But what happens to that natural impulse for creative self expression?

Why does it matter?

The Hero energy allows us to be a dance partner with the world! For over 5,000 years we have been in a paradigm of hyper-masculine culture with tremendous Hero energy. That was not wrong…it was evolutions way of moving the human species forward. But at this point in the global story, in the absence of a relationship to the deep ground of our Feminine being, that Heroic energy often burns too hot. We need to learn to harness this energy In order to engage in the world and make our creative contribution without burning out. We need to have the heroic courage to claim what is ours to do and then act on it.

The Hero energy is the aspect of our nature that helps us to:
  • set and achieve goals and objectives
  • hold an intention and a desire
  • see a clear way ahead and move toward it
  • say “No” and draw boundaries (in order to cultivate and say “Yes” to higher priorities and values that we hold dear in the deep ground of our individual being – related to The Mother gate)
  • take risks: moving towards the edge and leaping into the unknown
  • differentiate from others
  • know when to pulse into action and when to be still

By first healing The Mother wound (our sense that we are enough just as we are) and then The Hero wound, we have access to the Yang energy and clearly know and can act on what is ours to do.

The Shadow Root of The Hero

Within the collective unconscious resides the limiting belief of The Hero gate:

The limiting belief of The Hero

“I have to do to be of value.”

This imbalance, or shadow representation of The Hero often expresses in these ways:
  • Workaholic bravado
  • Over-doing – valuing of doing over being
  • Not being able to accomplish things, having an attitude of “I give up”
  • Capitulation “I’m not even going to try”
  • “I have no idea where to focus, or what is mine to do”

When the shadow work is done in The Hero gate, the liberating belief arises as an embodied reality:

The liberating belief of The Hero

“I am empowered to do what is mine to do.”

In contrast to the deep resting of the first Mother gate, The Hero energy is how we move forward in the world. When we embrace the relationship between these two gates, the previous battle between being and becoming is allowed to integrate so it is no longer a polarity that cannot be resolved. Both are held as healthy and necessary; ‘supportive of’ vs. ‘in competition’ with each other.

The healthy Mother and Hero Archetypes often express in our lives so that we are:

  • connected to the deep ground of our being
  • sourcing our doing from that deep ground
  • connected to our unique purpose
  • aware of what is ours to do
  • not over-doing but also not being afraid to do

An Invitation

I invite you to take in these words from the poet Rumi, to inspire the healing of your Hero wound:

“Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”
-Rumi

As always, thank you for exploring with me.  I invite you to explore the next gate in The Mysterial Sequence: The Father Wound.

The Mysterial Sequence: The Mother Wound

Posted on

This blog is the first of a five part series on The Mysterial Sequence. To receive insight and support, join us here.

My work is dedicated to supporting women in the awakening of their Mysterial potential and urging them to the edge of their own evolution. In the 15 years of research through our Women’s University Certificate Leadership Programs, we were asking questions like,

“What does it take for women to realize their full potential, to flourish, to be deeply fulfilled inside and out and become leaders who are able to shape a positive future for all beings?”

What we discovered was a clear developmental pathway for women and how different that pathway is from men’s. We saw how women have exhausted themselves trying to fit into the masculine culture, especially in the workplace—trying to ‘be one of the boys.’ This masculine paradigm has leaked into other areas of women’s lives, leaving them feeling unfulfilled and disconnected.

Thankfully we saw a new path reveal itself—one that integrates women’s Feminine and Masculine leadership qualities, embraces women’s wholeness and addresses all the domains of her unique experience.

We call this developmental path ‘The Mysterial Sequence’ and I’m ecstatic to be giving you a glimpse of it in these following posts.

The first of the five gates in this sequence is ‘The Mother’. Since it’s so foundational, it’s even finding it’s way into the mainstream now, through articles like Healing the Mother Wound, featured on Goop.com.

The Mother Archetype

The Mother Archetype addresses the relationship with the very core of our being; of how we relate to ourselves. We all begin in the womb of the mother. It’s the most ancient and universally recognized of all archetypes.

When we are still holding trauma and suffering around The Mother Archetype, our fundamental value and worth is unstable. We question our own rights, freedom and value. We don’t feel that we matter or are worth of taking up space.

We encountered the Mother Wound within so many of the women in our research. It primarily lives as a strong limiting belief, and although sometimes consciously know, it’s typically embedded in the unconscious as:

The core limiting belief of The Mother

“I am not enough.”

You may identify with this core limiting belief.

Examples of how this often expresses in our thoughts, words or actions include evaluation and disapproval of many things, and especially of:
  • Our physical body: breasts not big enough, waist not small enough, hair not smooth enough, body not sexy enough (ultimately measuring the sufficiency of our body against an old masculine view of beauty and how it should look in order to give pleasure to men).
  • Our emotional experience: not valuing emotional intelligence, don’t know feelings or how to discern their meaning, think feelings are wrong, medicate them away or numb them through addiction.
  • Our intelligence: not smart enough, don’t think like others (especially men, especially at work).

This unhealthy pattern of sufficiency / value needs to be unhooked from an outdated view of the feminine. We’re standing on the edge of evolution, with the potential to transcend old world views. We can include all the women before us, and we can move beyond.

But first we need to find our own inner mother—to take care of the parts of ourselves that got left behind. When we know how to be self-loving, we can move forward. We can care for ourselves, other beings, the planet, and see the universe as friendly. We can be one with all, heart open to self and others and the world.

The deep work here is to go into the body and decode the ‘not enough’.  What arises is the liberating belief in the body (not just mind):

The liberating belief of The Mother

“I am enough just as I am.”

A healthy mother archetype allows us to experience a sense of love, security, nourishment, containment, and being provided for.

The healing of the mother wound is where we begin. If we cannot embrace ourselves and our suffering more fully, we will not be able to do the same with others. We need to be able to have a compassionate heart for others and the world—we cannot hold the global heart if we cannot hold our own heart.

I invite you to take in these words from the Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, to inspire the healing of your Mother Wound:

Go back and take care of yourself.
Your body needs you,
your feelings need you,
your perceptions need you.
Your suffering needs you to acknowledge it.
Go home and be there for all these things.

As always, thank you for exploring with me. I invite you to explore the next gate in The Mysterial Sequence: The Hero Wound.