The journey began some time ago, when we set out to find our own identity in a culture marked by the masculine and distancing ourselves from the feminine.
In that first stage of our life we developed masculine skills, we became competitive and productive, looking for success in the external and in everything that our culture promised us.
**We have achieved all that we had set out to achieve, and yet we feel empty, fearful, indecisive or frustrated.
I think the answer is that we have lost the intimate relationship with ourselves.
Joseph Campbell tells us: "The woman's primary interest is in nurturing. She can nurture a body, a soul, a civilization, a community. If she has nothing to nurture, she somehow loses the meaning of her function." Maureen Murdock adds, "many women who have embraced the heroic male journey have forgotten how to nurture, how to nurture themselves."_
This is how, after facing the emptiness that the male model throws us into, as it makes us feel incomplete, we go out to search for our lost feminine soul.
In this stretch of the heroic journey we go through moments of **confusion and pain, anger and sadness, searching for the pieces of ourselves that we have lost along the way until today.
We must learn again to listen to ourselves, to recognize ourselves, to perceive our body and our heart. We must find our way back home and it is natural that we are afraid, because we feel unprotected and confused in a world of masculine rules, but we have our instinctive wisdom that will guide us from now on.
It is at this moment in our lives, when we feel very strongly the longing to reunite with our feminine nature and heal this rupture.
When a woman decides to stop playing by patriarchal rules, she has no indicators to tell her how to act and feel. When she no longer wants to perpetuate archaic forms, life becomes thrilling, terrifying."_
Maureen Murdock
Change is scary, but where there is fear there is power. If we learn to feel our fear without letting it stop us, fear becomes an ally, a signal that tells us that something we have encountered can be transformed. Often our real strength lies not in what represents the familiar, the comfortable or the positive, but in our own fear and our resistance to change.
Starhawk
In listing the stages of the journey, we have said that after an initial estrangement and rejection of the feminine (which also manifests itself in an estrangement and rupture with the mother) we plunge into the masculine world to get what this patriarchal culture deceptively offers us as valuable.
After this descent that can manifest itself in many ways (depression, anxiety, confusion, panic) we gradually begin to heal the wound caused by the separation from our feminine universe.
Murdock calls this process healing of the Mother/Daughter wound, although this may or may not coincide with a literal healing of the relationship with our mothers. This healing will happen within us as we begin to nurture ourselves, to connect with our intuition, our sexuality, our creativity and our sense of humor.
**It is also important that we can identify and rescue all the masculine that has enriched us in order to integrate both aspects, the feminine and the masculine in our lives.
Article based on the interpretation of Maureen Murdock's book "Being a Woman. A Heroic Journey."
Other related posts
The Journey of the Woman Heroine Part One
Being a Woman a Heroic Journey. Part Three
You may be at the beginning of the journey, you may be halfway, you may be in a moment of struggle, of change, of integration. Whatever moment you are in, remember that it is not necessary to walk the path alone.
I hope this information has been useful to you, and if you want to work on your emotions and process, do not hesitate to get in contact.
Thank you for reading and sharing.