The problem with the divine feminine and my experience with it

I want to talk about how the term divine feminine has been coopted in different circles and also my experience with the divine feminine and what I mean by it. 

When I say divine feminine or feminine energy, I am not referring to gender roles or traditionalism in any way. And I am not referring to aesthetics either. Quite the opposite. 

The true feminine and masculine are frequencies or energies that exist in all of us. We all have both within us. Feminine energy is creative and free thinking. Masculine energy is structured and disciplined. 

Although some individuals can have more of one than the other, regardless of their sex or gender, there should be a balance of both in all of us. Both are needed. But not in some of the distorted, controlling ways that it has been made into sometimes. It is not about polarity between people. If anything it’s polarities within ourselves.

However, the feminine energy has been suppressed in many ways, and especially so in men but also in women. It has been suppressed in all of us and in society and the world as a whole.  

I want to tell you how my journey with the divine feminine started, what it means to me and why I don’t use the term as much nowadays.

I discovered the divine feminine for myself in 2017 through some teachers and also through my interest in mythology and in feminist theory. 

For all of my adult life and since I was a teenager I have been a feminist and when I studied sociology and politics at university I read a lot of feminist theory and also postcolonial theory. 

And a few years after my spiritual awakening through meditation, I then started researching female archetypes in mythology from around the world. 

While doing this I also realised that I don’t need to just draw on cultures that are not my own to connect to divine feminine archetypes, because this can lead to a type of cultural appropriation. I then instead first looked at my own ancestry, which is Scandinavian and Northern European and then made connections from there to other cultures. 

While doing that I realised that there are a lot of women who are interested in connecting to the divine feminine within their own ancestry, and many of them are displaced from the countries that their ancestors are from.

So I created a course called Divine Feminine Ancestry that sought to help women to reconnect to their own ancestry from a divine feminine goddess lens, using my own journey as inspiration. 

And one book that really influenced me in that work is called If Women Rose Rooted: The Journey to Authenticity and Belonging by Sharon Blackie. She talks from the perspective of the divine feminine in her own Celtic ancestry. And her work is a type of eco-feminism, where the connection to land and nature is integral. She talks about patriarchal capitalism as a type of wasteland.

When I researched different female archetypes and goddesses I realised how diverse these archetypes are and how the divine feminine cannot be confined to any one type of energy, which is also why I get so frustrated when the term is coopted to try to tell women to be feminine in a certain restrictive kind of way. 

The divine feminine is as diverse as the psyches of women themselves or the nature of humans and nature in general. 

The famous psychoanalyst Carl Jung, who was also very much a mystic, talked about archetypes being a part of our collective unconscious and also our personal subconscious, and something that we can access. 

I also discovered the dark goddesses at a time when I needed it and the one I connected to the most was The Morrigan from Irish/Celtic mythology  -  she is a shapeshifter, sometimes appearing as a raven and sometimes as a triple goddess. She is associated with war, fate, death, rebirth and sovereignty. 

And although I’m not from the British Isles, I feel a strong connection to that mythology because I’ve lived most of my adult life in the UK, in London, for 14 years and I was still living there then. The Morrigan came to me while I was still in a relationship where I experienced narcissistic abuse. And I woke up to the realisation about what type of person I was dealing with while I was still in that situation. 

This coincided with me finding the divine feminine. And this is something that I have heard from other women too, that many have experienced these two things simultaneously. The Morrigan, as an archetype, helped me through this transition of waking up, and reclaiming my sovereignty and eventually leaving that situation. These are real energies that are within us and that can help us through different transitions in our lives. 

Another book that has impacted my divine feminine journey is by Clarissa Pinkola Estés - she is a poet, a Jungian psychoanalyst and a cantadora (which is a keeper of the old stories in the Latina tradition), so she is a storyteller.

The book is called Women Who Run with the Wolves: Contacting the Power of the Wild Woman. One of my favourite quotes from it is about spending time with the Wild Woman in the underworld. And this is a kind of metaphor for being in the dark night of the soul and waking up from it:

“The time with Wild Woman is hard at first. To repair injured instinct, banish naïveté, and over time to learn the deepest aspects of psyche and soul, to hold on to what we have learned, to not turn away, to speak out for what we stand for … all this takes a boundless and mystical endurance. When we come up out of the underworld after one of our undertakings there, we may appear unchanged outwardly, but inwardly we have reclaimed a vast and womanly wildness. On the surface we are still friendly, but beneath the skin, we are most definitely no longer tame.”

To me that puts it so beautifully how it feels to come out of trialing times in our lives, and be the same person on the outside but there is something that has shifted on the inside. There is a transformation and rebirth and sense of sovereignty that comes from having survived certain parts of our lives, and the dark goddess archetypes are especially helpful with this and with rebuilding our boundaries and our strength.

So to me, the divine feminine is about our own psyche and finding the archetypes and energies that can help us in different parts of our lives. It’s about becoming more of ourselves, not about contorting ourselves to society’s or patriarchy’s idea of what it is to be a woman. 

The divine feminine for me is about reclaiming the word feminine from the limiting beliefs about gender roles or societal expectations. 

Even so, since the word feminine has also been used in such restrictive ways, I nowadays prefer to use the term woman-centered mysticism, because this encompasses much more than the term divine feminine, and it feels more aligned to me at this time.