“The true feminine is the receptacle of love. The true masculine is the spirit that goes into the eternal unknown in search of meaning. The great container, the Self, is paradoxically both male and female and contains both. If these are projected onto the outside world, transcendence ceases to exist. The Self—the inner wholeness—is petrified. Without the true masculine spirit and the true feminine love within, no inner life exists…. To be free is to break the stone images and allow life and love to flow.”

—Marion Woodman, Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride1

Jungian analyst Marion Woodman believes that centuries of “patriarchal thinking” have stripped the soul from our inner and outer lives and placed the world in grave danger. In talks, workshops, and BodySoul Rhythms intensives in Canada, the United States, and Europe, she has urged us to engage with the unconscious energy that erupts beneath the surface of our best intentions, sending us where we may not want to go. Her message is articulated in such books as Addiction to Perfection, The Pregnant Virgin, The Ravaged Bridegroom, Conscious Femininity, Leaving My Father’s House, and Dancing in the Flames. She is also famed for her practical work connecting the human body to soul and spirit.

As she explains in Conscious Femininity, “To feminine consciousness, the spiritual and the physical are two aspects of one totality. Spirit confirms body, articulates body’s wisdom…. ‘As above so below’ translates into ‘as in the head, so in the belly’; the two are simultaneously present, not dialogically opposed.”2

I first encountered Woodman’s work in my early fifties when her second book, Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride, had just been published. Intrigued by the title, I brought it with me on what was supposed to be an idyllic summer vacation by a lake in Maine. Her message, that it’s easier to work at being better than you are than to be who you are, forced me to admit for the first time to a demanding witch and a helpless Ophelia lurking in my depths. Thus began a thirty-year journey into a nether world of psyche in search of the conscious feminine—the heart energy that holds presence. (By feminine and masculine, Woodman means not gender but an energy as ancient as that of the Taoist yin and yang or the Hindu Shakti and Shiva.)

Wood­man herself experienced a radical turnaround at age fifty, quitting her job as a Canadian high-school English teacher and fleeing to India in search of help for illness and pain. The daughter of a United Church minister, she was both shocked and inspired by a culture whose psychic and spiritual energy were so different from her own. She then embarked on a Jungian analysis in Eng­land, and finally trained to become an analyst at the Jung Institute in Zurich..... (CLICK HERE to read the full article on Parabola)