Stepping into the Feminine Wound
I want name a particularly difficult-to-digest root issue that has rotted away the core of our cultural and social structures…as well as our physical health:
Sexual trauma—the rejection and objectification of the feminine/passive/receptive energy that pulsates through every living being.
Though the dehumanization of the feminine began long, long ago—about 10,000 years ago with the birth of totalitarian agriculture—the concept of sexual abuse is relatively new in our culture.
Though the concept is new, the wounding incurred is wrapped up in the shame and secrets passed down through nearly all of our ancestral lineages.
This wounding went unnamed for millennia –taboos tucked tightly into our cell walls: rape, incest, human trafficking, pedophilia…
This shame manifests first in digestion issues and then in our mental health—which can set off a cascade effect wherein the heart, nervous system, and musculoskeletal systems all pay a precious toll.
This happens far too often unless this root issue is faced, and the personality adapts in accordance with the reconstruction necessary for the spirit to find an open and welcoming home and ecosystem to arrive to.
Sexual wounds are more profound than anyone cares to acknowledge.
The twisting of pleasure for pain,
the rejection of your own creative power that must follow the invasion,
the lack of safety and familiarity with your own body,
the hypervigilance and questioning of each signal you receive from your pleasure centers,
the denial of your own flesh.
If sexual trauma occurs repeatedly enough, you might want to deny your body as a vessel for your psyche and soul in its entirety.
If sexual trauma is perpetrated by someone who was supposed to love and protect you, your spirit’s relationship with your body might twist to attack anything that makes you question what love and protection are—ie. autoimmune conditions.
These wounds are stories.
These stories stagnate and fester when they aren’t told.
When our stories aren’t told, we can’t grow into who we truly are or relate with others as such.
It’s not easy to pass into the portal of these stories—to step inside of our wounds…
…we must strip ourselves bare, step into the darkness of the unknown, and regrow the body of whom we must become on the other side.
Some refer to this portal as the dark night of the soul, some think of it as Inanna’s descent into the underworld, and some think of it as the “great crossing.”
However, you name this portal of rebirth and incarnation, it requires crushing humility and a willingness to question your reality, your truth, your fundamental principles, and your values.
We can’t make this passing alone.
We require the sacred mirror of relationship and intimacy to walk through the veil of illusion, dissociation, masking, and distraction that kept us alive and functioning in a broken world with a broken heart.
We require wise and ancient allies to ground us and hold us as we open the floodgates that had been holding back our emotional potency and raw, primal creative power.
But fortunately for us, we are never alone on Gaia—
We have a whole sky of stars. We have whole forests and fields of plant allies. We have endless wells of story water running through our veins.
Are you ready to call them in?
I’ve been doing this work of re-writing stories since I was 22 years old and first took my typewriter to a gala in Pittsburgh to interview people to rewrite their stories as healing poems.
It was a mission that took me alone and on foot across nearly 1000 miles of this continent camping along roadsides and on people’s couches.
It was on that mission that I found my teachers and my plant and star allies who could make this work complete, who could help us hold all of these stories with compassion and grace…
… the defense mechanisms, the chronic pain, the dissociation, the distraction, the projection, the hardened tendons, and inflamed tissue…
…and let them speak.
and let them co-create a body, a world, where they can rest and surrender into the majesty of the watery, feminine reflective power that makes having a human body not only bearable but mesmerizingly beautiful.