An Exploration into the Archetypal Feminine Shadow

Something is missing. We have always known this in some way, growing up female in a world where actual women and images of women around us were often incomplete in some deep and important way. We knew something was wrong. We watched our mothers, often wondering why they settled for the smallness of the lives that they were given. We asked but rarely got a sufficient answer. Along the way, some of us may have gotten a glimpse or heard a whisper of a deeper and fuller aliveness at times, but for much of our lives we have known it merely as a longing for something we have not been able to name.

Women have been cut off from our birthright, from the full range of our psychic feminine inheritance. And it is not just women who have been severed from this inheritance. This has affected all gendered beings, with men impacted just as drastically, though it may be less easy for them to recognize and own the resulting psychic damage. Like the erasure of all evidence of Queen Hatshepsut of Egypt by later Egyptian patriarchs, eliminating proof of a women pharaoh, images of the shadow feminine have been buried by our forefathers, sometimes with intention. This obliteration and devaluation of the feminine has cut us off at the knees, kept us from allying together and standing for what is right, and psychically deadened us to the point where we are easier to control and manipulate.

But as pendulums tend to do, that which has been shrouded in darkness for thousands of years is beginning to swing back into visibility. The archetypal feminine shadow is beginning to rumble back into awareness. We see this in planetary and climatic shifts as well as in the voices of children, artists and far seers. Women the world over are starting to say NO.

This 8 session journey will explore the archetypal feminine shadow from a Jungian perspective, through narrative, poetry, fairytale & myth, through image and creativity, artistic and experiential practice, through movement and through dialogue … with other women.

Limited spaces are left. For more detailed information, please message Susan Franck or Tricia Dietrich