Ann Moir-BussyHealing the wounded feminine – Part 2
Our column in October focussed on the journey to healing our wounded feminine and this month I want to strengthen that with another powerful myth that helps us to explore how we became so wounded and how crucial and relevant it is for us to embark on that journey of healing. Remember there are many forms and manifestations that the feminine is wounded, in both men and women – self-doubt, that pervasive sense of ‘’ I’m not good enough” or a disconnection from our true self.
This woundedness not only impacts our personal well-being, or our relationships; it is also a collective wound, often inherited from past generations and now present in the stories passed down.
Are you a prisoner or a servant to your own stories?
I’ve spoken before of Ben Okri, the African writer who reminds us that Stories can poison us or heal us. Stories are created from the moment we are born and we absorb them from parents and society and those around us. We need stories because they help us to interpret the world around us and make it more manageable, and as we grow we depend on these stories to carry us through ever new situations. The stories build our knowledge and give us a reasonable sense of coherence, but they also begin to impose a paradigm, creating a limited and limiting lens through which we see dimly. And without knowing it we become prisoners of the very stories we depend on.
We are not what happens to us
How difficult it is for so many women to realize that they are NOT want happened to them. Yet in mid-life they are still driven by the family narratives, living a life of self-sabotage, unworthiness and lack of permission, or on the other hand grand over-compensation. There is a wonderful Greek myth that shows us how we need to free ourselves from being a servant to illusion and uncertainty about who we are – and yes, like many other stories a journey to healing and wholeness!
Psyche and Eros
This Greek myth comes from the great Apuleius’s Metamorphoses (or The Golden Ass) and is one of the richest allegories about reclaiming selfhood – reclaiming our soul from imposed narratives. Psyche’s journey is both psychological and spiritual and shows us how a woman can move from being defined by other’s stories and learn to author her own truth.
Psyche was so beautiful that people (society) began to worship her instead of the goddess Aphrodite. They claimed that she was divine and perfect, ‘the ideal woman’, and so she lost her own identity as everyone projected their desires and fears on to her.
Aphrodite is jealous and sends Eros, her son, to make her fall in love with a hideous creature. But Eros himself falls in love with her, rescues her and hides her away in a secret palace where he visits her only at night – unseen, unknown and unnamed, warning her to never look at him or she will lose everything. However, his love was an imprisonment based on secrecy and there was not an authentic connection. Disobedience led her to discover he was a god. She gained knowledge but she lost him…. Ahhh!
The story unfolds with betrayal, deep wounding and suffering, impossible tasks set by the dark goddess, and finally with Psyche letting go of the imposed narratives and reclaiming her own soul. Then refinding Eros and true marriage.
(And yes, we will unpack this rich myth more fully in upcoming seminars, learning how Psyche healed the wounded feminine and how you too can embark on this journey).
Break free
Are you a prisoner to your stories? Being a prisoner touches on how we see our identity, our expectations, our self-narratives. Where do you feel constrained by the roles or stories that have been imposed on you?
Begin to identify the narratives from which we are operating. Lift them into our consciousness and challenge them with a larger frame of reference.
Separate from the history imposed and live in the NOW – transform that history and become the woman who dares to see, work, suffer and know.
New website: www.annmoirbussy.com.au
This will have all the details of dates and times of the seminars
Contact: ann@annnmoirbussy.com.au
Christine Sanson Maudy
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