{"id":19537,"date":"2022-04-08T16:36:50","date_gmt":"2022-04-08T22:36:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/resources2.soundstrue.com\/?post_type=transcript&#038;p=19537"},"modified":"2022-04-13T12:19:55","modified_gmt":"2022-04-13T18:19:55","slug":"the-archetypal-journey-from-maiden-to-mother","status":"publish","type":"transcript","link":"https:\/\/resources2.soundstrue.com\/transcript\/the-archetypal-journey-from-maiden-to-mother\/","title":{"rendered":"The Archetypal Journey from Maiden to Mother"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"pdfprnt-buttons pdfprnt-buttons-transcript pdfprnt-top-right\"><a href=\"https:\/\/resources2.soundstrue.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/transcript\/19537?print=print\" class=\"pdfprnt-button pdfprnt-button-print\" target=\"_blank\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/resources2.soundstrue.com\/wp-content\/plugins\/pdf-print\/images\/print.png\" alt=\"image_print\" title=\"Print Content\" \/><span class=\"pdfprnt-button-title pdfprnt-button-print-title\">Print Transcript<\/span><\/a><\/div><p><b>Tami Simon:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Welcome to <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Insights at the Edge<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> produced by Sounds True. My name\u2019s Tami Simon. I\u2019m the founder of Sounds True. I\u2019d love to take a moment to introduce you to the Sounds True Foundation. The goal of the Sounds True Foundation is to provide access and eliminate financial barriers to transformational education and resources such as teachings and trainings on mindfulness, emotional awareness, and self-compassion. If you\u2019d like to learn more and join with us in our efforts, please visit SoundsTrueFoundation.org.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In this episode of <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Insights at the Edge<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, my guest is Sarah Durham Wilson. Sarah is a women\u2019s rite-of-passage leader and writer. Her offerings are rooted in archetypal mother work and resurrecting the rite of passage from maiden to motherhood. Sarah has taught courses and led retreats for thousands of women over the past decade. She previously worked as an arts and music writer in New York City writing for <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Rolling Stone<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Vanity Fair,<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> and <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Interview Magazine<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. With Sounds True, Sarah Durham Wilson is the author of a new book. It\u2019s called <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Maiden to Mother: Unlocking Our Archetypal Journey into the Mature Feminine<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Sarah is a gritty, real, and funny truthteller, someone who is here at this time to help us see how we may have internalized\u2014and many of us have internalized\u2014patriarchal values, and how we can free ourselves so we can put right at the center of our lives what we actually value the most. To do this in Sarah\u2019s words, we have to move from the maiden, someone who\u2019s waiting to be saved, to the archetypal mother, the inner mother, someone who leads and takes responsibility for creating a world that\u2019s based on love. Here\u2019s my conversation with Sarah Durham Wilson.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">You\u2019re a gifted writer, Sarah. In talking with you, one of the things I\u2019ve learned is that when it came to putting your work out in the world, you searched inside for the idea that you could really stand behind, that would really be something that would come from your heart, that \u201cThis is true for me. This is what I want to share.\u201d And that brought you to mapping out the archetypal journey from maiden to mother.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">What I\u2019d like to understand more, right at the beginning, and for you to share with our listeners is how this journey, the journey from maiden to mother is so central and important to you that you wanted this to be the focus of your first published book like this in the world.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>Sarah Durham Wilson: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Well, first of all, thank you, Tami Simon, for telling me that you think I\u2019m a gifted writer. That was a really cool moment for me. I was telling Tami\u2014she was my first rejection letter, and I treasured it because it just had her name on it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>TS: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That was many years ago, before this particular <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Maiden to Mother <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">book came into being.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>SDW: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Yes, this was almost a decade ago. And all I knew is CPE and Marion Woodman had been at that house, and I wasn\u2019t going to stop knocking on their doors. But then they\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>TS: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That\u2019s Clarissa Pinkola Estes and Marion Woodman, two beautiful writers. Yes, indeed.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>SDW: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I owe so much to the work of those women, and they came through this publishing house. So, this is a very big moment for me and this book.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I hadn\u2019t grokked my life\u2019s work yet. And my life\u2019s work turns out to be rites of passage, something we\u2019re so sorely missing in our culture. Around the time that actually Jamie Schwab\u2014who is the associate publisher at Sounds True\u2014and I started speaking, she reached out to me, which was also a dream come true, after taking a course called \u201cMystic School.\u201d She said, \u201cI want you to write a book.\u201d And at the time I was part of the trend of the witch awakening and the priestess path. And I was helping spearhead that very much. But it wasn\u2019t something that kept me alive and on fire in a sustainable way. The mother is nothing if not sustainable and self-sourced, right? The archetype of the mother. And I was still constantly burnt out, not finding myself, sort of taking stabs in the dark at who I was.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Also, around that time, I was leading a lot of retreats. And these retreats were centered around the idea of wild women\u2014or even there was a quote going around about seven years ago, from the Dalai Lama, saying that Western women would save the world, which is an interesting concept. So, I\u2019m having these retreats and I\u2019m holding this intention. And what\u2019s happening is sort of glorified sleepovers. We\u2019re not moving the needle. Nothing\u2019s really getting done externally. The conversations are very \u201cI\u201d focused. There\u2019s a lot of cattiness. There was a lot of drama. There was a lot of reactivity, a lot of distraction from the dharma of what we are coming to do to heal ourselves in the world as women.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Around that time, I realized there\u2019s something very wrong here. What was wrong was we were incredibly immature in our 30s. We were still little girls in women\u2019s bodies, looking for someone outside of us to save us. I knew Marion had used the term, through her Jungian research, of the \u201cmature feminine.\u201d And she had worked with the mature feminine. She never really talked about the immature feminine. I knew I was so far from the mature feminine. I really like the great mother archetype. I must have been the immature feminine, and I was, because I started to write down all my traits that I saw on me personally. Then I wrote down the traits that I saw on the collective feminine. And they were these very girlish, kind of spoiled, privileged, fragile little girls that we would call women.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I started to look at the opposite of those traits and I was coming into traits like from fragile to resilient, from drama to dharma, from a focus on the outer beauty to a focus on inner beauty, all these. And I was starting to say, \u201cI want that. I want to move in this direction.\u201d The direction became a bridge with every step I took. And then I realized I have gone inside. I have met the dark mother. I have taken the Inanna journey. And I have learned to mother myself, which is to tend to my own cries, to hear myself so as to heal myself.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">What happens when I come back up in the world, I have taken the dissent, the heroine\u2019s journey. What happens when I ascend like Inanna in the myth of Inanna, come back to the surface, whole this way. I now have the tools to not just mother myself and care for the other, which is what the mother does. The word \u201cmother\u201d itself is I call a marsupial word. It fits the \u201cother\u201d into it. So now I can actually archetypally mother the world, by tending to it, by not turning away the way I used to turn away from my own cries. I can now face the pain of the world as well as my own.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That\u2019s why I started to see this change in women taking the courses from little girls to women, from helpless to helpers, from hiding in fetal position to becoming really frontline feminine, like really at the front lines, really using their voice and their power to try to change things. That\u2019s where I got hopeful. And that\u2019s what kept me going. Here we are. I wrote the book.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>TS: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I want to make sure that everybody\u2019s tracking with us and your use of the word \u201cmother.\u201d You say that we need to think about mother in a new way, that it\u2019s about developing a type of inner mothering power, if you will. So talk about that, how it\u2019s not necessarily you and your little baby.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>SDW: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">At all. Right. OK. So almost like\u2014my lovely village with this book kept saying, \u201cTalk more about being Ava\u2019s mom.\u201d I was like, \u201cThat\u2019s actually not the point here. The point here is that this is not biological. This is archetypal.\u201d These were trials I had to go through if I was ever going to stand on my own two feet, if I was ever going to fight my own battles, if I was ever going to have confidence in myself, if I was ever going to move the needle in my tiny little corner of the world. These were warrior\/archetypal mother, like great mother\u2014and mothering as verb. I say in the book, it was one thing I had a physical mother; it\u2019s an entirely other thing to have been mothered, mothering in the way of the way the great mother cares for us as her children, like a deep nurturing, a deep protection, and a deep love, unconditional, mother love in the way we think of Maa Durga, that she fights for what matters, she stands for the sacred, she takes action. She is a protectoress, right? These were the qualities I wanted to move into.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I have a background in New York City magazines and rock and roll and fashion and all this stuff. The only feminine I really saw modeled in media was the fragile, the pretty, pleasing, polite, the weak\u2014and that\u2019s unfortunately what I saw in my own home. I had to create an inner model of an inner, strong, warrior mother, the Durga-loving protectoress inside of myself. Then the work was to bring that to the outside.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It really is about this idea that in the patriarchy, we have triple mother wounds: we\u2019ve been severed from the great Mother Earth; we\u2019ve been severed from great Maa, as in mother goddess; and we\u2019re often severed from our own mothers in the patriarchy, because our mothers have been patriarchalized as well, and their feminine spirit has been oppressed as well.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The healing of this triple mother wound for me is to come back into sort of a pre-patriarchal or a primordial feminine place.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>TS: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">OK. So, look, you\u2019ve already said a lot and I\u2019m going to keep clarifying a few things. In terms of this triple mother wound, I think people probably are tracking with you when you\u2019re talking about a wounded relationship with the earth. I think people also are probably tracking with you when you\u2019re referring to a wounded relationship with our very own mothers who perhaps never really grew out of the maiden phase of their life. But what do you mean when you talk about a relationship with the goddess that is unhealed?<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>SDW: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Well, as far as my personal story, the goddess was buried in my subconscious, but she was not in my consciousness growing up in a patriarchal household and patriarchal culture. I mean, the only goddess I ever got close to was when I worked at GQ and they would put Victoria\u2019s Secret models on hoods of cars and call them goddesses. And they\u2019re naked.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I never heard of the mother goddess, the great mother. There was an external father, God\u2014he was always mad. You were always trying to make him happy. You were always calling him. He never picked up the phone. You weren\u2019t even worthy of him answering, the whole thing. But inside, in church pews, I would feel something entirely different, with like the swell of the music and the movement and the prayer. I would remember the mother, but it would cause me to move my body and stuff in ways in which that I was shut down, punished.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I learned to punish the feelings of the mother very early, the sensuality and the roaring and the grief and all the big feelings of the feminine. The big energies of the feminine, which have been repressed for so long in us. There has been a very small way that the feminine can show up on the planet. Beneath that is a million other ways to express ourselves. You can talk about the way that these binary structures are falling. They\u2019re falling for women and men too. We were put in these tiny boxes.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The good news is we\u2019re all breaking out of those. And the way the feminine could show up was really the ways I\u2019m talking about on the covers of magazines or the women we saw on the screens. And you usually had to be very pretty, very tiny, very pleasing, very polite, or else you were the bad woman. We got to be either good woman or a bad woman. And that was it. And the truth is we\u2019re all of it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The mother\u2014the idea that there was there was a god also inside of us, the goddess, there was the idea that she was all of our mothers, that she created us, that she loves us, that she speaks inside of us, that we can have a relationship to her through our bodies and the earth. I never heard of that. Returning to hear the mother inside of our bodies, the mother in nature, is also very, very healing.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>TS: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Maiden to Mother<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, you don\u2019t write very much about being a mother of your own child, but you do write quite a lot about your own biological mother, your mother, and how her lack\u2014this is my language\u2014but her lack of development created wounds for you that were a big deal in terms of your own moving from immature feminine to mature femininity. And I\u2019m wondering if you can share about that for all of us who were in some ways unmothered by our mothers and how that impacts our journey from maiden to mother.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>SDW: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Sure. Something I didn\u2019t really say on the tail end of the last question, because I could talk about the goddess so much, is that when patriarchy took over and destroyed the goddess and really vilified her and vilified women, what we also lost when we lost goddess culture is we lost earth religion, rites of passage, the idea of our seasonal reality that we have, just like the great mother, we have a spring and then we have a summer and we have a fall. We stay in spring. The spring becomes plastic and stuck. We stay little girls. We don\u2019t move into mother. And that\u2019s to also due to the severance, the loss of the mother culture, the matriarchal culture.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">As far as my mother never coming into these rites of passage that we\u2019re talking about, her never coming into the full, her full bloom, her full summer, her full expression of herself, to truly offer the gifts her soul came here to give, the assignment caused her great pain and great sickness. If we stay in wounded maiden\u2014think of something that\u2019s dying to burst and bloom open, but it has to sort of stay hidden and small and in the bud. This sort of rot takes over, that, when it can\u2019t, then the soul can\u2019t be expressed. My mother, she couldn\u2019t have her big dream of being a writer, because she got pregnant with myself and my sister very early on in New York City and had to move to a small town.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Here I was, the stealer of her unlived dreams, the thief of her unlived dreams, and also a mirror to her that she didn\u2019t want to look into. Having not been mothered\u2014only having had a mother herself\u2014really having no idea also as a child herself still in maiden, how to be a mother and care for someone outside of her, she couldn\u2019t even care for herself.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That\u2019s why I got to a place that\u2019s in the book where I say I\u2019m no longer mad at my mother. I\u2019m mad for her. I understand now, as her peer, the oppression she was under, the patriarchy she was programmed by. But it did take me having to say to my mother\u2014and my mother died when I was young, 17. It took me having to say, \u201cI love you. I see you. I know you did the best you could. But I\u2019m going to take the reins now. It\u2019s not your job anymore to love me. It\u2019s mine. And I can do this. I have more tools than you. You did a wonderful job for what you could do.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But she also needs a mother. She needs the great mother as well. The great mother is all of our mothers. It\u2019s like all of us on the lap, our mothers\u2019 mothers and their mothers; we all belong in the lap. And my mother never got the lap. She never got the self-sourcedness, the rootedness, the confidence, the faith, the fight. She never got that. She didn\u2019t have the tools.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>TS: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A couple of times you\u2019ve mentioned rites of passage and how important these are. For people who are like, \u201cI kind of get this evolutionary developmental process that we need to go through as women from maiden to mother. But what rites of passage really help here?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>SDW: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I\u2019ve put together a rite of passage, because I couldn\u2019t find it anywhere\u2014necessity is the mother of invention. I did my best to build one, which is to say\u2014a rite of passage is an initiation where you leave one world and enter another. You leave your maiden life behind and your consciousness of maiden life. You move into mother consciousness. You leave behind this wounded maiden or patriarchalized consciousness about who you are, what the feminine is, what you\u2019re capable of, what your story is.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Then you come into this place. You go from this scarcity place of reactivity and fragility and self-defensiveness to this really rooted, open place where you yourself\u2014I say a wounded maiden is always just waiting for the good to come. But as a mother, you are the good that comes. And that\u2019s a really different place to walk into the world, as \u201cI\u2019m not waiting anymore. I\u2019m in.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>TS: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I guess what I\u2019m curious about is\u2014I can see how, [with] 20 years of good therapy and lots of inner development work and good friendship, how we can make a journey like this. Is there some set of rituals or ceremonies that are going to accelerate this process dramatically?<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>SDW: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Yes.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>TS: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">What are those rituals or ceremonies?<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>SDW: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">We start off with meeting the maiden. We start off with a meditation where we go in. And these exercises are in the book, and where you go in. I\u2019m really proud of all the exercises in the book. Like Jamie really pushed me to do them. I was like, \u201cDo people really want these?\u201d Now I\u2019m so proud of them, I\u2019m really happy Jamie gave me that. She\u2019s like, \u201cYes.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The first one is where you go in and you\u2019re guided by me or one of my maiden-to-mother teachers. But in the book, I guide you to meet the little girl inside, meet the little person inside, a little human who\u2019s been waiting to be mothered for a very, very long time. And then you start the practice of hearing them and making reparations that they\u2019ve been down there by themselves. Then you grow a relationship with them. And then you head into the underworld, and you start to do forgiveness and release and let go. And you start to alchemize the maiden pain into mother wisdom, which means you start to hold with your mother hands the greatest pains in this first act of your life. And you wait for the medicine to come. It\u2019s Mary Oliver\u2014that from the box of darkness, you wait for those gifts. And then the work is to, over and over, [\u2026] let the pain go and the medicine stay.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That pain of your maiden life is not in vain. It has become mother medicine to share. So, you\u2019re down in the underworld and you\u2019re doing that either through the book or with a practitioner. And then you meet the cherishing mother. And that\u2019s this new\u2014it\u2019s the opposite of what Marion and Carl Jung would call the death mother. I\u2019d call it the patriarchalized mother, but I use the term the death mother a lot. Marion Woodman has a great interview with, I think her name is Daniela Sieff because she didn\u2019t quite get to write a book about the death mother, but I can\u2019t do justice on the death mother the way Marion did. She talks about that before she died. She did that interview.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Then we start to meet a cherishing mother, which is the opposite of that patriarchal consciousness. It\u2019s like the most loving, most nurturing. And we kind of like titrate how much love we can take in from that. Most of us unfortunately have never really felt that kind of mother love before. So we sort of practice going in and meeting the cherishing mother until it becomes closer and closer to how we talk to ourselves and how we talk to others. We say we invite the consciousness of the great mother in for our own thoughts towards ourselves and our thoughts and actions towards others as well. The work is to see ourselves through the great mother\u2019s eyes, which is to see ourselves with an incredible amount of love.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Coming out of that, we move into the mother work. We learn to build an inner model of the mother we needed when we were little, the mother that our little maiden inside needs now, and the woman the worlds needs us to be now. And through that work, we build this model. And the work is to keep meeting her, keep talking to her, keep feeling into her, keep seeing her through these meditations.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Eventually, the last stage of that is to bring that model, bring that energy to the surface, to the world, that mother energy, where a woman walks into a room, not looking to get\u2014she is in there to give. She\u2019s not walking in a room, thinking about what other people are thinking. She\u2019s walking through rooms, deeply attuned to how she\u2019s feeling. She is not someone that is in a room to be seen and heard and to suck up all the attention. She\u2019s there to hold things, to keep things safe, right? Safety is the number one thing of the great mother. She makes us feel safe in a terrifying world.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>TS: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I love that description of the whole arc. Absolutely loved it. I want to make sure I understand what you mean by the death mother or the patriarchal mother when you were referring to those two faces of mother energy.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>SDW: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Sure. Did you ever see <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Carrie<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> by Steven King, the movie?<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>TS: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Yes. Yes.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>SDW: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">OK. Remember \u201cthey\u2019re all going to laugh at you,\u201d and the mother keeping the girl in the dark house? That\u2019s death mother consciousness. \u201cDon\u2019t even go outside. Don\u2019t even try. You\u2019re a failure. They\u2019re all going to laugh at you. Because you can never supersede your mother in death mother consciousness. You can never do better or be happier or get further or shine brighter.\u201d Right?\u00a0 The mother\u2019s all about keeping the maiden very, very small as an act of protection. Because remember that mother is like, \u201cI\u2019m doing this for your own good. The world is cruel.\u201d Right? \u201cStay here. At least you\u2019ll be safe. It\u2019s not a life, but you\u2019ll be safe.\u201d Right? So that\u2019s kind of death mother consciousness. \u201cDon\u2019t even try. They\u2019re all going to laugh at you. You\u2019re just going to fail.\u201d It\u2019s sort of what our mothers were feeling\u2014the crushed spirit of being a woman in the patriarchy.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">First of all, a patriarchalized mother doesn\u2019t have the energy and the fortitude to be like the primordial femme witch, keeping the patriarchy out of the house. It just bleeds into everything. It becomes our consciousness. So quickly it becomes our programming.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That\u2019s going on inside of us. That\u2019s going on inside of the house. \u201cThat life is hard. Don\u2019t even try. Stay small. You\u2019ll be protected.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There\u2019s also this hatred of the child for stealing her love. They can say, \u201cI love you,\u201d but they look at you and you feel like they want you dead. It\u2019s an \u201cI\u2019ll never be good enough. She\u2019ll never approve of me.\u201d It\u2019s that.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Then you have the opposite consciousness, which is, \u201cYou\u2019re perfect exactly the way you are. Every breath you take is a gift to the world. There is nothing you could do to make me stop loving you. I will always be here. I will pick you up when you fall down. Go after every dream. I\u2019m right here. I love you.\u201d It\u2019s a very different consciousness to work with.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>TS: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In your own life, Sarah, do you at times find yourself in a maiden state of mind, for lack of a better word, and catch it for a moment and say, \u201cOh wait, I have the opportunity here to transform into more of this loving, strong mother.\u201d I\u2019ll use the example of this archetypal mother sitting on a throne. There\u2019s royalty. Tell me like examples of when you\u2019re like, \u201cAh, that\u2019s a moment\u2014that\u2019s an invitation to move from maiden to mother.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>SDW: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Men and money, Tami. Men and money. With money, I go back into my mother\u2019s scarcity. I\u2019m still there with it. There\u2019s a lot of witch wound and healer scarcity out there. And there\u2019s also, there\u2019s the other side of that where people are inflating prices like crazy. That\u2019s a whole different discussion, but I get scared around money.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I call it fetal. I go into fetal, which is to go back into the bud. The bloom is like \u201cI\u2019m part of the ecosystem, I\u2019m giving of my gifts.\u201d I really work with the idea of the mother tree deeply rooted and the fruit is falling effortlessly. And then the fruit\u2019s feeding me and it\u2019s feeding everyone [\u2026]. I usually get there back with money. I just give and I receive, and I give and receive, and it\u2019s awesome.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But I catch myself and I have someone to help me, because I get really scared and really reactive and all the walls go up. Right? So that\u2019s the bud. We\u2019re going back in the bud.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">My next book is about healing the wounded maiden in relationships so that she actually no longer seeks the patriarchal partner. I had my last bout of that.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>TS: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Yes, describe what that looks like to me.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>SDW: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Obsessive, dramatic, projecting my greatness onto him\u2014because he has to be the rescuer, because my programming from when I was little was that all you need is a prince to come and save you. It\u2019s still in there somewhere. When I\u2019m not regulated, when I\u2019m not doing my work, suddenly someone\u2019s going to save me again. I mean the last one was last May, but that\u2019s where I was. This person is going to save me from my life.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>TS: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">What do you do when you catch that? Like, you catch it; you\u2019re aware of it now.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>SDW: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Sure. And I have now a huge coven of mature, feminine women to be like, \u201cGirl, you\u2019re in maiden right now.\u201d Like, \u201cYou\u2019re really in your maiden.\u201d Because when we first start our work, we say, \u201cHow does your wounded maiden present, Tami?\u201d If you were to say, \u201cShe gets really reactive, or she gets really stressed,\u201d then, as your friend one day, I would notice [that] your wounded maiden\u2019s presenting. So I\u2019d say, \u201cOh, it sounds like you could mother yourself now, Tami. It sounds like you should go out to nature for a little bit. It sounds like you\u2019d should go back in for something, because you\u2019re a bit in your wounded maiden.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The main question we ask at the beginning of the work is, can you see every challenge or every trigger as a moment of \u201cAm I going to be in maiden in this, or am I going to be in mother\u201d? That\u2019s when I just come back. I just come back to my lap. We say, when you come back to your own lap, where you sit, you take a breath, you come back to the great lap, right? You come back. You feel her behind you. You take a moment. With all the tools we use for the maiden, the mother, it becomes easier to feel her hands on your shoulders and centering back in, her lap behind you, waiting to see the vision of your inner mother again, and \u201cWhat would my mother do here?\u201d And then that really offers a chance for love to respond and our maturity to respond.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>TS: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">When you say seeing the image of your inner mother, what does that image appear like to you?<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>SDW: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">She\u2019s on this great golden throne and she has this long brown hair. She has a golden crown. There\u2019s a moon on it. And she\u2019s draped in red and white silk. And she speaks very\u2014we\u2019re so chatty now\u2014but this primordial feminine, one word, two words, one look, and you know. It\u2019s not very wordy. If I would go in there, she would just say probably one word or like two words, \u201cCome back. Come back. Stop reaching out for all that love and validation and attention. Come back home. You can get it all here.\u201d And it\u2019s unconditional down here. Yes.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[<\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Advertisement<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">]<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>TS: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">You\u2019ve been listening to <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Insights at the Edge<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In 2013, Dr. Lissa Rankin\u2019s bestselling book, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Mind Over Medicine<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, ignited a revolution in the way we look at mind-body healing. But when letters about miraculous healings and spontaneous remissions started pouring in from readers, she realized she still had more questions than answers.<\/span> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Certain that if she looked hard enough, she would discover the science behind why and how we heal, Dr. Rankin embarked on a decade-long journey, bringing her medically trained eye to healing practices from around the world. Her new book, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Sacred Medicine <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">is the result of that quest. You can learn more at thesacredmedicinebook.com. And now back to <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Insights at the Edge<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[<\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">End of<\/span><\/i> <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">advertisement<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">]<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">All right. Let me ask you a personal question here. This is something, Sarah, I\u2019ve thought a lot about, and I\u2019ve never talked to with anybody, but this is the moment. I\u2019m really interested in this whole notion of sitting on a throne and feeling like royalty and wearing a crown. I\u2019m interested in it because this kind of imagery occurs to me. I feel it. I feel this sense of taking a royal seat and what that means.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>TS: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">My question is, I\u2019ve always wondered, is that just because we\u2019ve been so influenced by monarchies historically, or is this something actually even deeper in our psyche than watching historical movies and things like that? What is it that\u2019s so deep in us that has this notion of royalty and a crown and a throne? What do you think about that?<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>SDW: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Well, it\u2019s archetypal. For me, it\u2019s the priestess work. For me, I can meet a woman and I can remember her from temple work. I can have a flash of sitting across from her. There\u2019s a fire. I can see what details paints were on her face. I can see what colors she was wearing and kind of like her tribe, whatever her tribe was.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I think when women start to have these sort of visions or flashes of a seat like that, I think there is an archetype in all of us, in all the women that are attracted to this work. It\u2019s so nice to hear that you also have that. I remember being a priestess, or I remember standing for what was sacred, or there\u2019s nobility in me as child of god or child of goddess, that rises above what we see outside right now, which I call the patriarchal nightmare. There\u2019s more of a dream of ritual, of sacredness, of leadership, of ceremony, of village hood.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I think crowns were ways we were adorned in ceremony, not so much \u201cI was queen of England,\u201d but it was something we did. We took ceremony quite seriously. And if you have any inklings of a past life, those will stick out. Those would be big moments for you.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>TS: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">When you say I remember images of women from temple work, what is temple work?<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>SDW: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">When we gathered together to remember the great mother and do rituals and ceremonies and rites of passage in her honor. [\u2026] There\u2019s a part in the rites-of-passage book, the <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Maiden to Mother<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> book, that my dear friend Jessica helped me with, where she said, \u201cYou know what this needs? Describe a rite of passage. Describe a maiden-into-mother rite of passage back at the stones of Avebury.\u201d It\u2019s crazy how I just can put my pen to the paper and remember these ceremonies, remember what they felt like, because I remember Avalon very, very well, the isle of the goddess and that time.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Coming together and witnessing each other\u2019s great rites of passage in their lives, whether you lost someone or you came of age, or you had a child, or you came into mastery of your gifts, or you went on a vision quest to find them and then you came back, and we all welcomed you home, or you got married, or whatever, you never did any of this alone. You were honored. We did put crowns on you. We did celebrate you, and your rites of passage as a human. You weren\u2019t just here to be a cog in the wheel, in the wasteland of the machinery of capitalism. You were celebrated as a human, as an individual, as part of the village or the community or the collective. And your bones and soul would remember\u2014when soul life mattered.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>TS: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I\u2019m going to have to pick up on something you said relatively casually: \u201cI do remember Avalon.\u201d Tell me about that. What do you remember?<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>SDW: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">As many of us are going through, at midlife, these diagnoses around\u2014as many women are\u2014ADHD, low spectrum autism (I myself have had those diagnoses recently), looking back at patriarchal schooling and how damaging it was for so many of us, how traumatizing it was for so many of us, I began to\u2014I had past life memories very early in my childhood. And they were very, very real to me. And I was very confused as to why I was here and why everybody was so fucking depressed. Excuse me.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>TS: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Say it like it is. Go for it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>SDW: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I just looked around and I was like, \u201cWhat?\u201d There\u2019s no magic. Everything seemed black and white and gray. The adults were all angry\u2014and all the women were supposed to be goddesses. Where was the goddess in my mother? Just all of it. So, I disassociated really quick here.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">When they\u2019d send me to public school in my little plastic seat, \u201cEverybody, shut the fuck up. Don\u2019t think for yourself. Don\u2019t move.\u201d I would go back there to Avalon, and I would remember. So, I\u2019d be sitting in these plastic chairs, and I\u2019d be getting yelled at for having to go pee or asking a question. I was always in trouble for asking questions. I\u2019d be there in this plastic chair, under these fluorescent lights, always in trouble. I would go back, and there\u2019d be these rolling hills and these big stone walls. And we\u2019d all be in circle on these green cliffs over the sea. We were learning about the earth.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There was no hierarchy in this circle. Everyone was equal. Every voice mattered. Everyone. No one had more goddess or god in them. And everyone had a remembrance that was just being stirred up by the teacher by asking questions. There was no, \u201cI know more than you and you listen to me.\u201d It was, she was asking us questions. That\u2019s the way I teach, to help each woman know that, remember they already know. I\u2019m not teaching them. I remember, we would learn about the site phases of the moon and the cycles of the earth and all the different animals and all the different herbs and all the different plants and all the different seasons. I just remember joy.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I remember how ecstatic it was to learn about this beautiful earth I lived on. Then I would get snapped back to reality and be sent out to the hall or to the principal for not paying attention.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>TS: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Why do you think these images of Avalon are so alive in you? For what purpose? For what sacred function now?<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>SDW: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Tami, are we really doing this? OK.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>TS: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I\u2019m doing it. We\u2019re doing it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>SDW: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I didn\u2019t know I\u2019d be fully on display today, but sure. In mother season, we say, \u201cIf not now, then when?\u201d That\u2019s the season of mother. I signed a contract in a ceremony at Avalon to come at this time on the planet and help women remember their primordial power, along with thousands of other incredible humans at this time doing their work. I said I would come help remember the old ways. And that\u2019s why say I\u2019m not new age\u2014I\u2019m old age. Yes. The ways of the old, wise women, the ways of the priestess, the ways of the witches, the ways of the healers. Yes. The medicine women.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>TS: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">You have this interesting quote about witches that I picked up on from <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Maiden to Mother<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. \u201cWhen women hide their witch, they are repressing their natural power.\u201d So, tell me what it means for us not to hide our witch. What does that mean? Because we\u2019re doing that now, you and me, Sarah. We\u2019re not going to hide our witch.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>SDW: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Oh no, I know. It\u2019s hard to with a tattoo of a moon on your forehead, hide your witch. Do you remember <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Practical Magic<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, the movie with Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman? I teach on that movie, because it was written by Alice Hoffman and there\u2019s the archetype of the woman that\u2019s playing the good girl, which is Sandra Bullock, and then there\u2019s the woman that\u2019s playing the bad witch, which is Nicole Kidman. And the truth is that there\u2019s no such thing as just the good woman or just the bad witch. And there\u2019s this moment where one of their very out witch aunts says, \u201cIt\u2019s such a tragedy. You have all this power, and you don\u2019t even use it,\u201d to Sandra Bullock, who hides her witch.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Why that was so important to me\u2014you have all this power and you don\u2019t even use it. That line is so important to me because it\u2019s how I see all women, basically that I work with. I see all this repressed power because women have learned to fear their witch or fear their power, because they\u2019re afraid of people being afraid of them. They\u2019re taught that you shouldn\u2019t be spooky; you shouldn\u2019t be scary. I have this line now that like, \u201cFuck pretty. I want to be terrifying.\u201d You know? Pretty doesn\u2019t do anybody any good.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The tragedy of my mother passing at 45\u2014I\u2019m 43, so my peer\u2014was that she did repress her witch. She did repress witnessing her inner power, her feminine power. We\u2019re talking about the alignment with body, the alignment with earth, the alignment with moon, but something far deeper when you really do the work to go in to hear the mother inside of you. When you leave this patriarchal consciousness and you go into the dark feminine, you go into the first layer of that, witch-hood. That was my awakening to something outside of what I was told was my power within the patriarchy. It was something that was very repressed within the patriarchy, and with the earth consciousness and within my body.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">When that started to rise, my true feminine power started to rise. When my mom passed away and there were all these boxes in the attic that we had to move, we found boxes of runes, tarots, spell books that she hid away. I always wondered if she had really let that part of her witch out. What could have happened\u2014because a witch is a healer, a witch is a priestess, a witch is a goddess, a witch is a powerful woman and one who learns how to become their own healer and their own guide and their own mother\u2014I just wonder what could have happened if she had started truly down that path of power.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>TS: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Sarah, your work in <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Maiden to Mother<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> is helping women make this journey as you\u2019ve described here in this conversation. One of the things that I was reflecting on is it seems like in a way this would be a natural maturation process, but somehow in our time, in our patriarchal culture, it\u2019s interrupted. It doesn\u2019t happen naturally unless we do all of this inner work. How do you understand that?<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>SDW: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Well, just like it\u2019s one thing to have had a mother and it\u2019s another thing to have been mothered, it\u2019s one thing to age and it\u2019s another thing to mature. Maturity takes the inner work. The inner work isn\u2019t something that\u2019s touted in our culture. We are completely guided to focus on money and materialism and stuff and how we look and how many followers we have. That\u2019s not a path to maturation.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Unfortunately, you will have many invitations into the underworld to grieve in this life, but unfortunately, also many people are very good at refusing those invitations and numbing to those invitations. But if you accept the invitation into your grief, into the underworld to meet the dark goddess, dark mother, that\u2019s where\u2014if you think about the Inanna journey where she is killed by her dark sister, Ereshkigal, she wants Ereshkigal to kill her\u2014we\u2019re asking for the dark feminine to kill off our patriarchal parts that are killing us. Those are the immaturity.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I mean, look at who\u2019s running the world\u2014toddlers that are calling themselves men playing with guns and fighting over stuff, oil, money. That is probably &#8230; that\u2019s someone who\u2019s not been initiated. They have not met what matters\u2014that\u2019s patriarchal conditioning to think that money and materials matter more than life. Mother consciousness is, life is the most important.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">When you go down into that grief and meet the dark mother through this feminine sort of work, she tells you what matters, she prioritizes your life. You meet what matters down there, which for me is the earth and children. I was in my midlife crisis last year. I was brought to my knees. [I was] very, very sick with COVID and met the black Madonna, the great dark mother, and met what matters to me.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>TS: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Tell me what you actually experienced when you say, \u201cI met the black Madonna.\u201d Tell me what happened.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>SDW: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Sure. I forget to explain myself, thank you. To me, what matters to become initiated\u2014usually the invitation is written by some sort of loss, loss of health, loss of hope, loss of a dream, loss of youth, loss of the maiden, loss of safety. Mine was loss of health. It was also my midlife crisis. So, I was going to be invited to a big underworld journey.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">When I was very, very sick with COVID, I found it to be an incredibly dark, shamanic-like experience; an energy was in the room with me when I was very sick, holding my little girl with no help. I knew it as the black Madonna. Again, this is mother-tongue language coined by Maureen Murdock; this is soul speak. I can\u2019t prove this to you. I can\u2019t weigh it. I can\u2019t put it on a PowerPoint presentation. But I was told I was with the black Madonna. And I began to learn about her as the grief of the earth. If you look at the black Madonna, she\u2019s always centering a child, always on her lap.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I met her as the great mother of Isis, great mother of Kali, great mother of Magdalene. I met her as the mother of my lineage. It changed my life even more, because we talk about going through a ring of fire with teeth in the underworld where it gnaws off everything that you can\u2019t take with you on your soul journey that\u2019s weighing you down or is a veil between you and your truth.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>TS: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">What did she take from you?<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>SDW: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I was still conflating spirituality and money. I still had a lot of patriarchy in my business mindset. I was still sort of pulled into this kind of celebrity idea. When I rose from that sick bed, I was like, \u201cNone of this matters. We\u2019re on the wrong track.\u201d When I talk about getting back on track, I talk about something called the mother river\u2014my mother river is children and the earth. And I know when I get lost from that. When I get lost from that, I just have to stop, like I\u2019m lost in any forest and find the water again and get it back to what matters to me.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I had gotten off track again with people building this big team and everyone needed more money and we needed to just make more money. And I had lost my service. I was more back into the lip service and lessened to the true service. I was back into \u201cI have to make all this money.\u201d [But] I got whittled down, back to the bone of why I\u2019m here, and it\u2019s been a relief.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>TS: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[What would you say] to someone who\u2019s listening who says, \u201cI\u2019m in some type of journey. I might not have used the language underworld, but it\u2019s clear that there are some patriarchal values that I\u2019ve internalized that are being stripped from me right now. I\u2019m in some kind of underworld journey.\u201d What would you say to them that might be helpful as they passage hopefully through and come out the other side?<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>SDW: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Sure. I mean, when we said like eight years ago that we were having these retreats and we were using that Dalai Lama quote about Western women saving the world, the joke for me now is Western women will save their world when and if they unlearn their capitalism, their ableism, their misogyny, basically their patriarchy. It does feel like you are being on the operating table in the underworld, because what is being stripped from you is over and over is all this oppression, all these lies, all these veils about what\u2019s true.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">If someone\u2019s on the underworld, I always say, like Winston Churchill, \u201cIf you\u2019re going through hell, keep going,\u201d and to start to look for signs of light. Like here we are in the Northern Hemisphere and my teacher training is just moving out of the underworld. And it\u2019s when you start to see signs of spring, when you start to see signs of hope, when you feel that little sliver of the new moon starting to awaken you after it\u2019s been dark for so long, the lights in the cave start cracking through.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">We make it through the underworld by surrendering. We never make it by fighting it or denying it. So, she knows she\u2019s in the underworld. She can ask for more help. What else can I do? What else do I need to see? Because that dark mother down there, she doesn\u2019t want to kill you. She just wants to kill what\u2019s killing you. She needs to show you what you can\u2019t see. That\u2019s why you\u2019re down there. That\u2019s why you\u2019ve gotten so slow. You can\u2019t change your life in the patriarchal pace. You can only change it when something stops you in your tracks and you\u2019re brought down to hear and to see and to listen.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">She loves you and she wants you to see what\u2019s holding you back. And the way to get out of the underworld is to give up what\u2019s killing you, right?<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>TS: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Yes.<\/span> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Now here\u2019s a quote from <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Maiden to Mother<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. You write, \u201cThe mother is the throne. She\u2019s the lap of humanity. The maiden rests on her lap. The crone is at her back whispering wise woman wisdom in her ear.\u201d I wanted to hear a little bit about the crone, because here you are\u2014you\u2019re coming into this cherishing mother, beautiful giving energy, and yet you have some intuitions about the presence of a crone figure, even now in your life.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>SDW: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Yes. I\u2019m so honored. So, in \u201cmaiden\u201d we needed mothers and we didn\u2019t have them, right? But now in \u201cmother,\u201d we can mother these maidens. We can help them. We can bring them through. But who do mothers look to? We\u2019re oriented toward crone, right? Well, Jane Hardwicke Collings in Australia has introduced a third, which makes a third season in a woman\u2019s life, which makes a lot of sense because of fall. Crone kind of skips straight to winter. Unfortunately, Jane has titled it \u201cmaga\u201d\u2014and that\u2019s a very triggering word. So, you can call it \u201cempress\u201d if you like, but it\u2019s between mother and crone.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I was just rereading Barbara Walker quotes\u2014she wrote a great book called <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Crone<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u2014this morning. And Marion Woodman said by the time she got to Crone, the \u201ctruth just sang from her bones.\u201d And feel that. I feel a rage for the planet. I feel a rage for innocent creatures and innocent people. And I know that\u2019s the crone because she just doesn\u2019t give a fuck. It\u2019s not about being liked. It\u2019s not about pleasing. It\u2019s that she\u2019s at the door to the next world. And she\u2019s going to do that. Alan Arkin has this great quote of about, people kind of say what matters right as they\u2019re leaving.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>TS: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Right.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>SDW: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Also, right on the death bed. But it\u2019s kind of like deathbed wisdom walking. Not that a crone is on her deathbed, but it\u2019s got that power, that punch that this is\u2014\u201cI don\u2019t care what anyone thinks. I\u2019m going to say my truth so that I have emptied myself before I leave.\u201d It\u2019s the emptying of the crone, of the wisdom and the release and it\u2019s the offering it back as she comes back to the earth. Everything is whittled down into like truth bullets.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I feel her in me. I look to her. \u201cWhat will make you proud? What will make you happy? In this moment, what do you want me to do so you can be at peace?\u201d And, Tami, the answer is always, \u201cSay the thing, say the thing, disrupt.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>TS: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">You\u2019ve worked with so many women now on this journey of <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Maiden to Mother<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, with the crone whispering wise woman wisdom from behind. What do you see as the biggest obstacles? What are the things where it\u2019s like, \u201cYou know, this is why the people stay stuck\u201d? What is it?<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>SDW: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I clung to maiden until I was 38, because the heaviness of the responsibility. Kind of the biggest teaching in <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Maiden to Mother<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, if there\u2019s any takeaway, is that, in wounded maiden, we react. In mother, we respond. I think that responsibility, the heaviness, and even there\u2019s the crone is that the mother was a crone because she has this orbit around her, this ecosystem that if she\u2019s not well, the ecosystem isn\u2019t well. She has to keep herself so nurtured and self-sourced to keep the ecosystem. And that\u2019s a lot of responsibility.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I was still praying someone was going to come save me. When my ex fianc\u00e9e left me before our wedding, he said, \u201cDon\u2019t worry. You\u2019re still pretty enough someone will want to marry you.\u201d And I was like, \u201cYou think? Like, someone\u2019ll come take this off the shelf before it isn\u2019t patriarchally viable?\u201d Like Amy Schumer\u2019s like last fuckable day. \u201cThey\u2019ll get me for my last fuckable day. They might buy me on sale\u2014but they\u2019ll still take me?\u201d Just really waiting because I never seen anyone go frontline in their life. Do the work. Stand up. I didn\u2019t have anybody in my community, any feminine in my community. I had no <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">durgas<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, no mothers archetypally speaking.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I think of that. I think of frontline feminine. I think of being at the front lines of your life. And that\u2019s scary for someone who\u2019s been in the fetal position her whole life, to stand up and move to the front lines. But I know that is why we are all hungry for the village, hungry for the community, because you can\u2019t do this alone. You have to see someone like me. My whole point in my book is\u2014I was an addict, my fianc\u00e9 walked away from me, I was a mess, and I did it. I want to be that person, like, \u201cIf I can do it, you guys, trust me.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That\u2019s why I tell so many stories all the time about where I was, because now I can champion that you can change it any chance you get. I\u2019m a living example. I stand by this. I see women go from maiden to mother in front of my eyes all the time. And it is radical, and it is awesome.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>TS: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I\u2019ve so enjoyed talking with you, Sarah. You just, the word that comes to me\u2014it\u2019s a funny word\u2014is you\u2019re a hoot. But you\u2019re also a truthteller, a brave soul, a beautiful writer, and someone who is willing to stand and be a responsible voice in a world that needs real loving, powerful, wise mother energy. So, thank you.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I\u2019ve been speaking with Sarah Durham Wilson. She\u2019s the author of a beautiful new book, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Maiden to Mother: Unlocking Our Archetypal Journey into the Mature Feminine<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. Thank you so much. Sounds True: waking up the world.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>SDW: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Thank you, Tami.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>TS: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Thanks for listening to <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Insights at the Edge<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. You can read a full transcript of today\u2019s interview at resources2.soundstrue.com\/Podcast. That\u2019s resources2.soundstrue.com\/Podcast. If you\u2019re interested, hit the Subscribe button in your podcast app. If you feel inspired, head to iTunes and leave <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Insights at the Edge<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> a review. I absolutely love getting your feedback and being connected. Sounds True: waking up the world.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"template":"","meta":{"_expiration-date-status":"","_expiration-date":0,"_expiration-date-type":"","_expiration-date-categories":[],"_expiration-date-options":[]},"class_list":["post-19537","transcript","type-transcript","status-publish","hentry"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>The Archetypal Journey From Maiden To Mother - Transcript<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Read the full transcript from this Sounds True conversation with The Archetypal Journey From Maiden To Mother. 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