Burning the Five Lies: The Great Unlearning of the Wild Woman.
{Photo credit: Atomic Photography}
The warm and soulful embrace of Wild Woman Spirituality should be a sweet homecoming.
Late on a lonely evening, you raise your head just a bit higher, squint through the maternal moonlight, and, for the first time, you see Her. In the fixed gaze of the hooded Crone, you fiercely and irrevocably affirm your unapologetic sexuality, soulful creativity, and authentic ritual. You refuse to separate your sex and your spirit, and you embody a newfound but permanent awareness that magick exists in all things.
Too often, this sacred coming-home-to-self is tainted by the inflammable fabrications buried deeply and stinking in the hidden crevices of the feminine psyche; these untruths are subtly perpetuated not only by the usual suspects, the enduring and powerful patriarchal structures, but also by the so-called New Age culture.
Woman, these falsehoods must be uncovered and set aflame with all the Summer fire you have in your belly, for only when you have incinerated these five lies will you find Her.
You will first see the Wild Woman while bleeding and covered in ash, coughing up the thick and bitter taste of the untruths you have just burned. You can barely walk, slowly recovering from the melting of soft body-mind parts and the energetic severance of outmoded beliefs. You have undergone a Great Unlearning and subsequent re-wilding, your soft, sensual body now forever fused to your enduring spirit-light.
The Wild Woman waits for you while you learn to walk again. You, a stumbling butterfly, and Her, with arms hefty and wide, bidding you to keep moving forward, urging you to resist looking over your shoulder at the smoldering remains of the pervasive deception. She will wait for you, all the while begging you to spread your beauteous wings for every Witch who has begun the re-wilding:
Lie #1: You are a woman, and you deserve to live in spiritual poverty.
Since you were a young girl, you were told that divinity was to be equated only with masculinity. Faced with the few and insufficient options of rigidly paved religious paths which offered you a male god along with quite a bit of shame and guilt, you proclaimed yourself an atheist; in doing so, an essential third of your being begins to starve.
In burning the lie of women’s spiritual poverty, you not only reclaim the truth of the Divine Feminine’s power and merit in the human community, but you also begin feeding your undernourished spirit.
Truth: You are a woman, and you deserve wild, spiritual abundance.
Lie #2: To be wild is to be out of control, selfish, and alone.
In equating the human wild to immaturity, our language has divorced us from nature. In acknowledging your spirituality as wild, you affirm that your practices of ritual, magick-making, spell-craft, communal hand-holding, mournful prayer, holy sexual union, and any other activity you deem sacred, at any given moment, will ebb and flow as ocean tides.
You affirm that the bright sun of your spirit coexists with, and indeed symbiotically nurtures, your sacred sexuality and precious, individual soul. You reject the notion that your spirituality should be tamed or fit neatly into any cage, and you embrace your true nature as a woman of this world, muddy feet and all.
Truth: To be wild is to be fiercely and compassionately authentic, creatively raw, and sensually awake.
Lie #3: Deny your darkness, for it lowers your consciousness.
The language of the light-worker is often grossly riddled with the denial of darkness. They tell you to bury deeply your righteous rage and shadowy grief, to tuck the so-called negative emotions away in the hidden crevices of your body and psyche so that the world cannot see beyond your brilliant smiling face.
Such emotional suppression is an act of treason against the Wild Woman; she wants your wounds to be harvested and slathered with the thick salve of creative work and nature’s medicine. She tells you to feel it all, permitting the darkness to move through you before it takes root. Do not let your darkness fester and rot inside of you; rather, become a wholly open and feeling channel for fluid emotion.
Truth: Your darkness is a part of you, and it is just as holy as your light.
Lie #4: Goddesses are magickal tools to be used and wielded as you see fit.
No; this is one of the common pitfalls of the newly awakened wild woman. A Goddess belongs to no one, and yet She is an essential, sacred, and integral part of you. A Goddess is not a soft and malleable bit of energy to be consumed and directed; She is feminine divinity embodied, as are you. The framing of Goddess nature as pink and fluffy is an unfortunately common and largely invisible act within some traditional Pagan circles.
The Goddess is not external to you, but lives within and throughout your entire being, her energy waxing and waning within your womb in moon cycles of vibrant warrior birth energy, pure and fruitful love, and destructive, ego-cutting independence.
Truth: The Goddess is pure, pranic power that vibrates within you and all things.
Lie #5: There is only one way to be a Witch.
You can be a Witch but have no religion. Witchcraft is a way of being in the world, a way of seeing and working with magick, a way of affirming your soulful presence, and, most saliently, an acknowledgement of the union of your sensual body with your creative mind and enduring spirit; it is as mutable and dynamic as the cosmos. It is mysterious, beautiful, and the stuff of alchemy.
You can have high-fire spiritual seasons during which the ways of the Witch are thoroughly integrated into all aspects of your life, with these intense times intermittently spaced with the spiritual fallows. Give your spirituality permission to cycle. Give yourself permission to shapeshift into the spiritual forms you need at any given point in your life.
There will be times when the healer archetype resonates deep in your bones, when every spell you cast is supportive of the global community and ailing kin. So, too, there will be selfish seasons in your Craft when you feverishly cast your circle for personal protection and prosperity. All of this is valid. All of this is real. The best Book of Shadows is the one you write.
Truth: To be a Witch is to reclaim your birthright as the Wild Woman who will not have her body, psyche, or spirit trapped within a single and dogmatic practice.
Find the soft arms of the Wild Woman now, my love. Stretch your aching wings wide. Honor the liberation of your spiritual homecoming, and lend credence to the five lies no longer. Live in spiritual abundance. Be wild. Honor the darkness as well as the light. Bow down to your own divinity as pure, alchemical, Goddess She-Fire, and affirm yourself as the Highest Priestess in the coven of your womb, heart, and diamond-light third-eye.
From Her heart to my heart to your heart, all blessings be.
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Danielle Dulsky is a longtime activist for wild woman spirituality and the divine feminine’s return. She is the author of the soon-to-be published Woman Most Wild: Liberating the Witch Within (coming May 2017, publisher New World Library) and is on a mission to inspire women to be fearless creators of their sacred work. She holds the highest designation from Yoga Alliance as an E-RYT 500, is the founder of the fully accredited Living Mandala Yoga teacher training programs, and believes in holistic healing for the sensual, creative, and spiritual self. Her work is grounded in holding space for women to harvest their inner Priestess through personally relevant movement alchemy, intuitive artistic practice, and divine feminine spirituality. Danielle leads women circles, Witchcraft workshops, energy healing trainings, and basic (200-hour) and advanced (300-hour) Yoga teacher trainings in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania. She believes that all women alive today are meant to be instrumental in supporting positive social transformation through wild woman spirituality, reclamation of the name Witch, and the magick of sisterhood. You could contact her via email.
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