Our Archetypal Feminine Journey

Together in our Whole Woman Mystery School group mentorship we spiral through nine archetypes of woman for nine moon cycles from The Body to The Soul, following our spiritual, emotional, sexual, and physiological development.

These archetypes are beyond characters in the psyche or roles we fulfill as women. They are celestial and elemental energies of creation, rivers of consciousness with a life force of their own, that weave wholeness through our Earth, our Cosmos, and all that is. When we approach them directly, we awaken their magic in our lives, not only psychologically, but cellularly.

Each archetype is infinite in her gateways and carries unique medicine for each of us personally, ancestrally, and collectively. You can consider them allies for life, as they shapeshift through seasons, cycles, and expansions on your unique path.

This is our journey together…

The Body

Rhythm, Sensuality, Life Force
Gaia, Shakti, Asherah

A woman’s body is her home, temple, and holy vessel in this lifetime. For many generations we have learned to disconnect from our bodies, to shame our sensuality as separate from spirit, and to distrust the magical natural cycles of our blood. We begin our archetypal voyage together in the wisdom of this body, through re-membering our flesh and bones and blood as Earth herself, awakening the pure life force essence of creation within us, and re-sanctifying our sensuality and sexual anatomy as Goddess.

Foundations
We are Nature

As we begin our journey, we ground ourselves into the anchor that will hold us throughout this entire nine month rebirth (and throughout our Earthly lives): The Body. Here we attune ourselves to Her voice within us, learning to listen to the feminine intelligence that is always speaking through sensations, grounding into the safety and sanctuary of choosing to be here.

Gaia
Earth Embodied

In ancient Greece Gaia was our Mother Earth who emerged out of the black sea of chaos. She birthed Uranus the God of Sky and together they created all life. With Gaia as our guide we return to our bodies as our own Mother Earth, allowing Her to guide us through what our unique organism most needs, as elemental beings of both soil and stars.

Shakti
Wild Awakening

In ancient Hindu tradition, Shakti is the feminine principle who creates and governs the universe. Shakti is the pure impulse of creation, the breath of life, the power that animates all things. With Shakti as our guide we learn to be moved by our own life force through our nervous system and our sexuality as conduits for profound healing and awakening.

Asherah
Sacred Pleasure

The Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden is a symbol for the Canaanite Goddess Asherah, one of the most predominant ancient fertility Goddesses predating Judaism worshipped by the indigenous people of Palestine. Asherah was a fertility goddess of both sex magic and nurturing love. With Asherah we return to the places in our bodies that carry the most collective shame, violation, and demonization, and we re-sanctify that which has always been holy.

The Daughter

Innocence, Initiation, Individuation
Artemis, Sedna, Persephone

Through the Earth of The Body, we begin our first initiation of womanhood as daughters of lineages that carry magic, mythos, mystery, and also pain, trauma, and wounds. At this gateway we summon and awaken the inner maiden, guiding us into our original innocence and also into our core wounds which are paradoxically our openings to our greatest power in this lifetime. Healing the injuries and malnourishment of our younger years, we retrace the steps through our initiations of womanhood into menstruation, sexuality, heartbreak, and the loss of naïveté, re-belonging ourselves to the Source of Life as Mother.

Foundations
Lineage of Body & Soul

So often we may find ourselves in the role of The Lover, The Mother, or even The Queen, without the necessary foundational resources that we most needed as The Daughter. With The Daughter, we trace our way back to our youth, acknowledging all that we survived in our younger years, and hold the light and dark in equanimity as we recognize our soul path and the very human pain of neglected parts that may be crying out for love.

Artemis
Wild Belonging

Artemis, the Greek Virgin Goddess of the moon, the iconic wild woman, is the true definition of virgin, a woman whole unto herself. But Artemis herself is captured by Hercules and in the process she experiences a fall from grace. With Artemis we lift the veils of “false belonging” through entrapments of our conditioning, as we unhook ourselves from co-depency and rediscover our own authentic “wild belonging.”

Sedna
Emotional Healing

A guardian of the depths of the oceanic underworld, Sedna's wounds inflicted by her own father birth the whales and creatures that become sustenance and food that ensure the lives of others. As we dive into the deep waters of Sedna, we meet our own Skeleton Woman, the desperate needy shadow feminine who emerged as an innocent response to neglect, trauma, or abuse. Through receiving the full range of our emotions, and welcoming our shadows back into our own embrace, we love Skeleton Woman, the hurt little girl, back to life again.

Persephone
Coming of Age

The timeless reflection of a woman’s maturation through natural cycles is profoundly woven into the iconic story of Persephone’s journey to the underworld, and her harsh initiation from Maiden into Queen. With Persephone as our guide we revisit our own timeline of initiations and re-sanctify the holiness of our coming of age into womanhood. We give ourselves the rites of passage we may have always needed, yet never received, as we reweave a celebratory red thread of belonging through our feminine lineage.

The Sister

Projection, Totality, Celebration
Lilith & Eve, Inanna & Ereshkigal, Sappho

With The Daughter’s magic, authenticity, and innocence retrieved, we now meet ourselves deeper, through our relationships with other women. For many generations women have been turned against one another to create division and disempowerment, just as we have been conditioned to fragment parts of the feminine within. Together we journey with the polarities of woman, recognizing what we reject and project in the reflection of sister, to access a fuller range of ourselves, and in turn appreciate a wider spectrum of womanhood.

Foundations
Mirrors of Sisterhood

What lives at the roots of our judgements, jealousy, and codependency in relationships with other women? As we approach The Sister together, we do so through the understanding of our collective trauma surrounding the feminine that causes us to project and deflect our own nature in other women. We look to the witch trials, patriarchal white supremacy, and the many ways women have been cast against once another to survive. We arrive with curiosity surrounding the sister wound as a doorway into the wound with Goddess Herself.

Lilith & Eve
Virgin & Whore

Many of us have learned the lie that there is the “good girl” and the “bad girl”, the “virgin” and the “whore", and that we must choose which category we fit into within our society. This division, which causes us to fragment ourselves and judge our sisters, originates with the first women in the Old Testament: Lilith & Eve. With Lilith and Eve as our guides, we journey with the dual nature of woman through the archetypes of the virgin and the whore, uniting these necessary aspects of life within us all.

Inanna & Ereshkigal
Shadow & Light

Every woman has a light side and a dark side. Yet, we may have learned to reject one and exalt the other, within ourselves and within other women. In truth, we all need full access to the “negative” and to the “positive” in order to be whole. The reunion of the light and dark feminine has been iconically illustrated through the story of Inanna’s Descent to the Underworld to see her twin Ereshkigal. With Inanna and Ereshkigal as our guides, we explore the dark side and the light side of ourselves to bring our own fragments and all of our sister relationships into the mirror of reunion and reconciliation.

Sappho
Goddesses in Every Woman

What changes when the sisterhood is no longer a place of comparison, and instead becomes a sanctuary to worship the feminine, to worship Goddess through the celebration of one another? There is perhaps no greater role model and muse for what it means to love a woman and to worship her in all of her expressions and her forms as Goddess, than the Greek poetess Sappho, as famous as Homer before her many works were burned and destroyed. We reawaken Sappho together as a beautiful and joyful remembrance of our right to celebrate the feminine within ourselves and within one another as the living Goddess Herself.

The Lover

Yearning, Communion, Divine Union
Radha, Aphrodite, Mary Magdalene

Across the thresholds of our Maidenhood we dive now into the deep waters of our womb desires and heart longings to merge with another through our sexuality. As we awaken this deep yearning for divine union with “The One”, we also meet our wounds of past relationships and betrayals. With The Lover as our guide, we reunite the soul mates of the sacred masculine and sacred feminine within. We create a new blueprint for soulful relationship through cherishing, respecting, and revering our sensuality and emotionality, merging our heart and womb nectar as we retrieve the Holy Grail of our Love.

Foundations
Awakening in Love

The awakening of sexuality can often feel like a return to the roots of our wounding. Indeed, it is through our sexuality that we reunite with the genetic codes of Mother and Father, as they created our body through their DNA and their merging of sex with one another. In our foundations we awaken The Lover within as an alchemical power to heal more deeply not only through The Daughter and our childhood, but also through our lineage within the union of our motherline and fatherline, the masculine and feminine within.

Radha
Sacred Yearning

Created as a deity within the Bhakti movement in 8th century India, Radha is an icon for cultivating a direct personal intimate relationship with the divine. Paradoxically, this profound devotion and union that Radha invites us into begins with the feeling of unrequited and unfulfilled love. With Radha as our guide we open into the vastness that resides beneath the surface tendencies of hunger or desperation for love, and open all the way into the ache of the separation from God. Radha is the doorway to realizing yearning as a devotional path to the true One, a love that never leaves, our Source.

Aphrodite
Sexual Sovereignty

As perhaps the most famous and celebrated lover of all time, Aphrodite represents the beauty, the radiance, the sensuality, the allure, the magnetism, and above all else the unshakeable self worth that a woman can embody in relationship once she has married all parts of herself as sacred and holy within herself. With Aphrodite as our guide, we experience true sacred union as the homecoming of all parts of ourselves into an erotic inner awakening, and we step into her maturity as we rise in love.

Mary Magdalene
Evolutionary Love

The mysterious beloved of Jesus, Mary Magdalene is an echo, a memory and a reclamation of what becomes possible when a woman devotes herself to opening her body as love with her chosen one. With Radha we yearn for The One, with Aphrodite we are The One, with Mary Magdalene we honor our lover as The One. As the Magdalene, we arrive to our body temple with the patience, devotion, and love that awakens the highest potential of our sexuality. As we awaken the beloved within, restoring the inherent sanctity in our emotionality and sexuality, we marry our power with our love and we birth a new masculine consciousness into the world.

The Mother

Devotion, Boundaries, Love
Mother Mary, Durga Ma, Pachamama

Sexuality eventually ripens us into motherhood, either through the birth of a child, or through the maturity of becoming mothers to ourselves and our creations. As many of us have lived, motherhood can be a harsh awakening in a world that doesn’t honor The Mother in her true dynamism. Fully blooming into motherhood we redefine The Mother on our own terms. We allow ourselves to be mothered by the wild herself as we learn to mother through our own wild instincts. We forgive ourselves the harmful expectations of mothers being needless, perfect, and inhuman, and we embrace the full spectrum of mother as dynamic and multidimensional.

Foundations
Trinity of Motherhood

One of the greatest traps inherited by women, is the belief that there is only one way to be a “good” mother. In truth, The Mother is wildly multidimensional, and needs access to her wholeness in order to best support her young ,and to nourish herself to give from abundance. What have we lost in a world that praises the self sacrificing mother and denies her of her humanity? Together we awaken the trinity of The Mother, through her multi dimensionality, and allow ourselves a sustainable way of mothering for life, which includes: being mothered by the wild, mothering ourselves as the wild, and mothering our creations from our wild knowing.

Mother Mary
The Tender Mother

Who is the true virgin mother and how has her saintly expression shaped our perceptions around motherhood? With Mother Mary, now believed to be a womb priestess who conceived Jesus through shamanic temple rituals, we create our own definition of motherhood which includes the acknowledgement of our humanity within our divinity. We create wombs of safety that we can rest within as mothers of our own innocence, holding ourselves in unconditional love as we release burdens from our lineage and heal the mother and father wounds back in time.

Durga Ma
The Fierce Mother

In the Hindu pantheon, Durga was The Fierce Mother called upon when the world had been overtaken by demons. Out of Durga’s third eye came Kali Ma, The Mother of greatest ferocity and also deepest compassionate love. With Durga Ma as our guide we reclaim our rage as a vital and healthy aspect of our mothering, as the lioness who is not afraid to roar. Durga commands us to be unwavering in our devotion to that which really matters, and to be willing to destroy that which threatens the health and well being of our precious creations and lives.

Pachamama
The Mother of Life

How does a woman truly sustain her creative process of mothering? For the pre-Inca people of the Andes mountains the truest model of sustainability was The Mother Herself, Earth, called Pachamama. With Pachamama as our final guide in The Mother, we meet the birthing, sustaining, dying, and rebirthing cycles of nature and of The Mother, to create in harmony with life in all of her phases and forms.

The Queen

Purpose, Prosperity, Power
Lakshmi, Rhiannon, Inanna

Grounded in our Wild Mothering instincts, we deepen into our Source as a creative well for our service in the greater world. As we arrive to The Queen, we refine our ability to trust our life force, creative impulses, and deepest heart womb desires to guide our purpose and service from a place of both power and humility. We heal our fears of persecution for being a woman in power, fears of our own gifts and abilities, and we surrender to the pleasure, prosperity, and treasure of our inheritance, residing upon the throne of our own unique life path.

Foundations
Reclaim the Queendom

What is a true Queendom? There are many expressions and examples of “Queens” we may have seen through the ages, and may see in our world now. But rare is it to recognize the true benevolent Queen who is ultimately Queen of her own destiny and of her own purpose that has been given to her by Goddess. Together we create a new experience of Queen, as one who is not at the top of the hierarchy, but who dances in a circle with all of creation, in reverence of true sovereignty, where we are all free.

Lakshmi
Receive Your Inheritance

Lakshmi, the Hindu Goddess of abundance from whose grace all rivers flow, all flowers bloom, all fruits ripen, and the whole world re-members love, is the one who holds the golden keys to our own buried forgotten treasure. We may have learned to restrict this river of abundance, love, nectar, and pure life that wants to unconditionally bless our lives in flow. With Lakshmi we challenge ourselves to break down the dams, to trust our hearts, to trust love within us, to trust the wild impulse from within our bodies and within our wombs, and to allow this love to guide what we do. Love is the only true path to our gold.

Rhiannon
Trust Your Magic

What causes a woman to stop trusting in herself, to stop trusting in her visions, her dreams, and her own inner oracle? What causes a woman to hide her magic? These questions live at the heart of our journey with the Fairy Queen Rhiannon, whose golden radiance could wombifest all of her dreams, who was wrongfully accused of the most horrific crime imposed upon a Queen, and whose innocence was eventually redeemed. With Rhiannon we heal the witch wound, our own self doubts, and the fear of being persecuted for standing in our light.

Inanna
Rise From the Depths

A Queen is not only here to radiate her light, she is here to resurrect herself from the depths, and to serve the truth she discovered there. In The Sister we met the light and dark of the feminine through Inanna and Ereshkigal, Queens of Heaven and Hell. With Inanna as The Queen, we discover and more fully claim the Queendom of our inheritance through our descents. It is indeed our own dark nights of the soul that empower us to serve in the world from our most authentic, embodied light.

The Priestess

Reverence, Retrieval, Rebirth
Magdalene, Isis, Quan Yin

As we learn to navigate our power through The Queen, eventually we are guided to open beyond and to serve not only the world, but beyond and through the worlds. Through the seven sacred centers of The Priestess, we return to a woman’s spiritual knowing, that we are multi-dimensional vessels uniting Heaven and Earth through our spiritual embodiment. With The Priestess, we reclaim a woman’s spiritual authority, that which has never been lost, through reweaving the wisdom of moon to womb to tomb, innerstanding the creation codes of rebirth that heal all things through the quantum field of love.

Foundations
Know Thyself

What is it to truly be a woman who walks between the worlds? The Priestess invites us to realize the spirit within matter, and to walk our sacred path in and within and through the everyday realities of our lives. This is embodied feminine spirituality, where we recognize the divine within it all. In our Foundations we resurrect the ancient priestess remembrance of a woman as God, and reawaken the multi-dimensionality of reality through The Underworld, The Middleworld, The Upperworld, Fire, Water, Earth, and Air.

Mary Magdalene
Holy Grail

Mary Magdalene was not only the beloved to Jesus, she was a spiritual teacher in her own right, and a powerful priestess of the ancient mystery schools. As we return to Mary Magdalene after The Lover, and meet her again as The Priestess, we reawaken a profound knowing that is hidden inside of The Lover: a woman’s body is the temple of God. Magdelene’s teachings expressed the power of the Sacred Human, she who is both human and divine. With Magdelene, we meet ourselves as portals that unite the worlds, and receive the many different expressions of The Priestess as our dance of wholeness with the natural world.

Mari Isis
Medicine Woman

The Priestess is indeed also a sorceress, one who has cultivated her ability to merge the spiritual and earthly realms to create magic. In ancient Egypt Isis was worshipped along the river Nile as the Medicine Woman who taught humanity how to thrive through fishing and farming. However her deepest magic is indeed her priestess power to bring the dead back to life. With Isis, we meet our own fragments, our own bones, the parts of ourselves that have been scattered out into the wastelands of exile, and with our sexual energy, our breath, our medicine, our magic, and our love, we bring ourselves back to life.

Quan Yin
Universal Love

At times The Priestess’ power is cosmic, magical, and elemental. However beneath all of this power is the vastness of an ocean of compassion that she has remembered through the trials of her own initiations, through her own deaths and rebirths. For it is this very compassion, the water of life, that can truly bring the dead back to life, and turn Hell into Heaven. In Buddhism this compassion is the heart of Quan Yin, “She Who Hears the Cries of Humanity.” Embracing the compassion that Quan Yin awakens within us, we become Priestesses of Love through delivering the nectar of forgiveness to all parts of ourselves, one another, and our world.

The Wise Woman

Intuition, Mystery, Endings
Baba Yaga, Hecate, Dhumavati

Wisdom now grounds within us as we have crossed the many thresholds and received the many initiations that come through The Body, The Daughter, The Sister, The Lover, The Mother, The Queen, and The Priestess. We are now ready to approach our final Initiatrix, the keeper of the mystery herself, The Wise Woman. Here we enter the embrace of the Dark Goddess and the song of death as we learn to trust deeper into the mystery and the unknown. With The Wise Woman we receive our intuition as clairvoyants, oracles, mystics, witches, and hags. Unhooking from patriarchal prisons we embrace aging and the end of youth in reverence for all that we have gained as The One Who Knows.

Foundations
Keeper of the Mystery

Why do we live in a society where The Wise Woman has been largely forgotten? What have we lost through the rejection, demonization, or at the very least under appreciation of her? Why do we fear aging and death above all else? With The Wise Woman as our guide, we remember the vital role of the elder, she who has lived to tell many tales, within our own selves and within our world. Together we dismantle the distortions that cause us to fear her as The Witch, and we invite her to reveal her power, magic, beauty, and wisdom for our trust in our path.

Baba Yaga
Wild Initiations

Baba Yaga is the old Slavic hag who lives in the forest and is believed to eat young maidens who knock upon her door. She is the one who gives the maiden the impossible tasks that deepen her intuition, and eventually bestow her with the sacred flame of her own inner truth. While she may appear to be the “villain” she is in fact the initiatrix, guiding us into our power through testing and challenging us so that we too become wise. With Baba Yaga we reclaim The Wild Woman within through choosing to enter our own dark forest and receive the initiations that make us truly wise.

Hecate
Crossing the Threshold

As the ancient crone goddess of Greek mythos, Hecate guards the thresholds where we meet deeper layers of our power as we ripen and mature. Hecate was the one who accompanied Persephone, the maiden, down to the underworld each autumn, to midwife her through rebirth. With Hecate we meet with our fears of change, uncertainty, the unknown, and learn to be resilient in the face of our own thresholds of life and death. We learn to trust our eyesight in the darkness and our clairvoyance as oracles to guide our way. We reclaim our full intuition as the light of truth within.

Dhumavati
Disappointment as Medicine

What if disappointment was not a sign that we had been punished, rejected, or abandoned by the divine, but was the Dark Goddess appearing on our path to invite us into a vaster knowing of liberation? In Hindu mythology Dhumavati is the Goddess of disappointment and misfortune, the opposite of Lakshmi in The Queen. She is the only Goddess with no consort, no lover, only herself, her rags, and her black crow. Dhumavati is the spinster. With Dhumavati we awaken through our fears of our nectars running dry, of losing our external luster, of no longer being fertile and sweet. We allow the medicine of disappointment to be our doorway to freedom, as we meet the truth within that will never be validated by anything without. There we discover a whole new dimension of feminine power.

The Soul

Quintessence, Immortality, Truth
Arianrhod, Brigid, Sophia

At the end of our spiral we arrive back to the beginning, to the great cosmic star of the self, The Soul, who is the seed imprinted within every cell of The Body. Just as we bloom this seed of the self through the entire life cycle of woman, we also plant it once again into our next incarnation. As we prepare to reincarnate out into the world on the other side of our Whole Woman Mystery School voyage, we devote ourselves to the sacred inner flame, anchor the soul voice more deeply within, and re-unify the split of woman as we re-inhabit all that we are as our divinity in form. We re-member who we are and why we came here as we re-enter the world.

Foundations
Spark of Creation

For our ancestors who lived by the rise and the set of the sun, the movements of the stars and the shapes of the moon, by the seasons of the Earth and the cycles of the crops, everything was believed to have a soul. While The Body is mortal, changes, matures, and eventually dies, The Soul itself is immortal, unchanging, and essential. In our Foundations we open the doorway to the realm of spirit beyond matter, to gain greater understanding and clarity for who we truly are and why we truly came here, so that we can live this life in The Body all the way.

Arianrhod
Born Again

Something miraculous occurs on the other side of death. As we see with the life cycles of all living things, death gives way to new life. As we see through the beginning and ending of the day, and the cycles of the moon, all of nature knows inherently how to Rebirth. In Welsh mythology, the Goddess Arianrhod is the silver moonlight who births out of the darkest night sky. She is the physical wombifestation of immortality through her return to the light through the darkness. With Arianrhod we trace the cycles of our own soul path, allowing ourselves to be born again in a new cycle, as we continue to heal on this spiral path of life.

Brigid
Sacred Flame

As the essence of our being, the spark of divinity within, The Soul is the sacred flame inside of us, and we are her benevolent guardian. It is only when we dishonor our own soul that our inner light begins to diminish. In Pre-Christian Ireland the Goddess Brigid was the keeper of this sacred flame. She was (and is) the Goddess of inspiration, believed to have appeared in the sky just before the rising sun with flames blazing from the crown of her head. Brigid is the light of fire that brings warmth to the Earth within the darkness and cold of winter. With Brigid we return to our inner hearth and reclaim ourselves as the keepers of this sacred flame.

Sophia
Reunion

You may recall that our journey begins with this mythos of the Goddess who descends from the world of Heavenly light into the dark abyss of chaos. There, she births herself out of the black matter as Gaia, The Body of our Mother Earth. Just as we began our journey in The Body with Gaia, we complete our journey together in The Soul with Sophia, the feminine principle of all of creation. In ancient Greece to walk the path of philosophy (philosophia), was to walk the path of Sophia, the path of inquiry, the path of self realization, where we are on a quest to “know thyself.” With Sophia we remember that each of us are oracles of our bodies and our souls, Priestesses of our own lives, and unique expressions of the one whole living body of Gaia, Mother Earth.