The Heroine's Journey: Woman's Quest for Wholeness

Women's bodies are public domain, as evidenced clearly at the present time by the furor over abortion. Everyone has an opinion about what a woman should or should not do with her body.

Being is not passive; it takes focused awareness.

During this part of the journey, the woman begins her descent. It may involve a seemingly endless period of wandering, grief, and rage; of dethroning kings; of looking for the lost pieces of herself and meeting the dark feminine. It may take weeks, months, or years, and for many it may involve a time of voluntary isolation—a period of darkness and silence and of learning the art of deeply listening once again to self: of being instead of doing. The outer world may see this as a depression and a period of stasis. Family, friends, and work associates implore our heroine to “get on with it.

There is a danger in the repudiation of the feminine when the daughter who rejects the aspects of the negative feminine embodied by her mother also denies positive aspects of her own feminine nature, which are playful, sensuous, passionate, nurturing, intuitive, and creative. Many women who have had angry or emotional mothers seek to control their own anger and feelings lest they be seen as destructive and castrating. This repression of anger often prevents them from seeing the inequities in a male-defined system. Women who have seen their mothers as superstitious, religious, or old-fashioned discard the murky, mysterious, magical aspects of the feminine for cool logic and analysis. A chasm is created between the heroine and the maternal qualities within her; this chasm will have to be healed later in the journey for her to achieve wholeness.

Women have to learn where their true source of validation is.

The mother/daughter relationship and the separation from the mother is so complex that in most women’s literature and fairy tales the mother remains absent, dead, or villainous.

so many women having taken the hero’s journey, only to find it personally empty and dangerous for humanity. Women emulated the male heroic journey because there were no other images to emulate;

Society places enormous responsibility at the feet of mom without giving her the financial support, prestige, and acclaim due to a job of such momentous import for the entire culture.

This stage involves clear choices and sacrifices that to anyone with a patriarchal focus may look like dropping out.

To protect patrilineal descent, men have for centuries tried to control women's sexuality. Although man needs woman, he tries to keep her power under control, legislating against women's free use of her sex in case she compromises the fragile but tenacious social structure of our patriarchal society.

Women have to find autonomy before they can achieve wholeness. Examining

You can be anything you want to be—just be good at it. Put your mind to it, learn what you need to, and go for it!

The sense of loss these women express is a yearning for the feminine, a longing for a sense of home within their own bodies and community. Most women today have spent their early and mid-adulthood developing and fine-tuning qualities that have always been considered masculine, including skills in logical, direct linear thinking, analyzing, and setting short-range goals. Women who brought emotions into the workplace were quickly told they did not belong there. Although many companies are now training upper management in a more feminine or “Beta-style” mode of leadership, which values feelings, intuition, and relationship, many women complain of undervaluing the feminine part of themselves.

A woman who has felt rejected by her mother because of adoption, illness, depression, or escape into alcohol will feel deeply unmothered and will continue to look for what she never had. She may function forever as a “daughter” looking for approval, love, attention, and acceptance from a mother who is incapable of giving these. If she experienced her mother as either absent or too busy to mother her, she may set out in search of a positive female role model, perhaps an older woman with whom she can bond.

To destroy the myth of inferiority a woman needs to carry her own sword of truth, sharpening her blade on the stone of discernment. Because so much of women's truth has been obscured by patriarchal myths, new forms, new styles, and a new language must be developed by women to express their knowledge. A woman must find her own voice.