Embracing the Realities of Female-Bodied Rites of Passage and the Psychospiritual Descent to Soul

In this episode of the Kinspirit podcast, I talk about the realities of queer / feminine rites of passage and the psychospiritual descent to soul. These realities are the secrets (or the mysteries) that many women carry and have been taught to silence themselves in the same ways we have been taught to hide and hush our blood, the realities of childbirth, and the ways of the psychic nature.

When I sought to create a study group for Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes' book, Women Who Run with Wolves this Spring, I was nearly after plunged into a psychospiritual descent of my own that cracked open a layer of awakening in me that I would not have been able to access if I treated my experience the way many women are taught to treat their experiences – through the lens of skepticism, partial digust, and trying to "figure out" whats wrong."

What I learned is that you can't "study" the goddess. You have to embody her. You have to live her. These mysteries that she offers us are not just cute annecdotal stories. They are medicines to be kept in vials on our belts at all times as we descend into the vast wild dark of the future. We each, in our own way, are living these myths. The ancient stories of Wild Woman, La Loba, La Heusera, Inanna, Persephone, Ixchel, Isis, Hecate are not just tales to memorize and sound smart with. They are guideposts to help us find our way as we live in the world.

If you want the medicines of the deep world and the magic of the mystery in your life, you have to surrender your body, your pride, and the construct of your knowing. Because if we're listening, we know that to live – to really live – we have to honor the fact that the life will call us to journey the depths, the womb of the world, and be reformed there.

At the gates of the deep world, we are each asked to shed our preparations, achievements, accolades, studies, shields, and weapons before we enter. The underworld of the psyche is a vast and viscously dark place. None of the preparations will do any good there. We have to come bare. We have to come curious. We have to come naked.

Mentioned in this episode:

Women Who Run with Wolves by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Descent & Rising: Women's Stories and the Embodiment of the Inanna Myth by Carly Mountain

Nature and the Human Soul by Bill Plotkin

Journey to Soul Initiation by Bill Plotkin

Learn more about Thresholdkeeper Retreat:

Thresholdkeeper is a midsummer, threshold-crossing respite for healers and medicine keepers in the redwood forests of Mendocino, CA taking place on July 27 - 30.

This is a retreat for the ones who hear the unmistakable call to surrender to the wisdom of the Pysche's Song. It is for those who know that their life's work is to traverse the deep world – the liminal spaces of mystery, death, change, birth, and initiation – in order to gather the ingredients of the medicines they know will serve their people in these times of immense cultural change.

Thresholdkeeper is for those who honor that the path of becoming is not rainbows and fairies, but the daily work of firmly walking upon rich, dark soil of a changing Earth.

Learn more about the Thresholdkeeper Retreat at www.thresholdkeeper.info and use the code Kinspirit25 at checkout to receive 25% off your your registration until May 24.