|
|
|
Return to the Feminine Because we have grown up and lived in a patriarchal system, there is an empty place for most of us where feminine strength and values of would have been incorporated fully into our individual lives, and also honored by the external culture. In that vacuum we may feel ourselves lost, living lives that are not congruent with our deepest desires. And that's the good news!
That assumes that we know what our deepest desires are and only lack the roadmap to get there. The bad news is that so many of us have had to compromise with the roles that are available, and the accomplishments that have been possible, that we can arrive at the second half of life without a clue as to what is the most important thing, the essential thing for each of us.
This is not a problem limited to women, of course - everyone is constricted not only by social roles and responsibilities but by biology and psychology. At this age, we are lucky - as the veil of hormones begins to lift, we may find it harder to accept unquestioningly many aspects of our lives that have limited us.
One approach to discovering our individual truth is to follow the paths hacked through the jungles of convention by intrepid women who have been reconstituting the concept of a woman-centered culture, and reinvesting it with the sacred significance it may once have had. Any one of these books will give you a hit of the transformative power of reclaiming our feminine values.
|
|
 Reap the wisdom, feel the power, embrace the joy
Marian Van Eyck McCain
2002
Website
Buy this book new or used from Amazon
Originally a social worker and a transpersonal psychotherapist, workshop leader, and health educator, Marian now concentrates on writing and environmental activism and is secretary of the Wholesome Food Association. She leads a women's group and a writer's circle. There is a wonderful email newsletter available through her website.
It was such a surprise and a pleasure, finding this book well after my sense of what is necessary and possible for us as older women had taken shape, to discover that Marian McCain’s vision is so similar to mine. She is some ten years further down the path than I, living in England rather than the U.S, yet we are tapping into the same ethos—as if it is an archetype waiting below the surface of our glitzy culture to re-manifest as we realize our deep need for it, and the earth’s need for it.
|
|
Read more...
|
|
 Our History, Our Future
Riane Eisler
|
|
Read more...
|
|
 The First and Future Culture
Christina Baldwin
This is a beautiful book about awakening and relating. Baldwin has applied the insights that come from the attempt to live a more conscious life to the ways we relate with all the others in our world. It is a deeply feminine reworking of the mechanistic culture of separation we live in. She provides a completely practical, and ancient, format to begin to integrate a way of relating that is affiliative instead of dominance-based.
|
|
Read more...
|
|
 Woman’s Quest for Wholeness
Maureen Murdock
The hero’s quest reinterpreted for the contemporary work world of women. Using myths, archetypes, psychology, dreams, and personal histories, Murdock attempts to separate out and identify the cultural imperatives that smother our internal urges toward wholeness which are at odds with our culture.
|
|
Read more...
|
|
 Journal Writing As a Spiritual Quest
Christina Baldwin
1990
http://www.peerspirit.com/
Buy new or used from Amazon.com
A good place to start what Baldwin calls "marking passage,” or read this to re-inspire yourself to sift your experience for the hidden meanings and directions that will emerge. "The journey is already ongoing; it's simply a matter of acknowledging it. And the journal is an adaptable practice that can absorb as much or as little attention as you apply to it. It will fluctuate cheerfully without complaints. The journal takes you and your journey as you are.” Read more for Baldwin's excellent discussion of journaling and despair.
|
|
Read more...
|
|
|
The Rebirth of Feminine Wisdom
Stephanie Demetrakapoulos
1983 (OOP)(Reviewed by J Zamost)
Buy new or used from Amazon.com
This is a book that I discovered over 20 years ago when it was first published within the newly emerging epistemology of women’s philosophy and theology. Its publication coincided with explorations into my own experiences of deep female body wisdom. It helped me to understand and how such knowledge was not only not recognized, but how nowhere in the culture into which I was born was it honored or reflected. It had a profound effect on my life, giving credibility and power to what I had instinctively always known.
|
|
Read more...
|
|
 Woman’s Journey to Herself
Judith Duerk
A small book that is a meditation on a big question:
"How might your life have been different if there had been a place for you, a place for you to go to be with your mother, with your sisters and the aunts, with your grandmothers, and the great- and great-great-grandmothers, a place of women to go, to be, to return to, as woman? How might your life have been different?" . . .
|
|
Read more...
|
|
 Motherhood as Experience and Institution
Adrienne Rich (Reviewed by J Zamost)
1986
Buy new or used from Amazon.com
Explores how motherhood has been institutionalized in our culture, the mother/daughter bond, mothers and sons, etc. Rich sees all women raised in this culture as psychologically crippled, disinherited and culturally bereft because they have been denied the love of strong figures of their own sex. Rich writes of her own mother as having given up a career as a pianist and composer to give her life over to the enhancement of her husband’s medical career, and of the acquiescing to his rigid rules of child-rearing.
|
|
|
|
|
|
