Healing the Patriarchy Within

"When we are young, we are guided by norms that are imposed by family and society. Striving to become what is expected of us. The results are the development of … the mask which we present to the world. The personae rarely reflect our true self, because over the years we compromise, we adapt, we pretend to be something that we’re not and along the way, we begin to betray our authentic nature. The process of individuation then, is the process by which we begin to understand, in the second half of our lives, that the way we’ve been living is not the way we need to live now. That we need to change and live in a manner that is more in line with our passions and our longings. It is the energy of individuation that hurls us headlong into alchemical crucible and frog marches us through the Negredo."

– Sharon Blackie, Hagitude

I have taken this journey into the jungle to go deeper within, in part, to unwind the ways patriarchy inhabits my body. To free me from the story that my emotions are not useful, that I have to be an academic or successful business leader to be important, that I have to stay within the meaty part of the bell curve – act normal and acceptable to the dominant paradigm to be safe. I do this because I want to be free of the fear that goes with it, and show up fully in my soul’s purpose, not partially hide behind normality and science. Let my medicine woman within grow, expand, and connect.

This will take some time. I have at least five generations of women who have adapted to this way of being, settling for comfort within a tribal belonging based on this patriarchal structure of power over instead of power with. They have put aside and now forgotten their own authentic wisdom and connection to the earth. This ancestral heritage winds itself like a vine through the center of my will, right at my belly button. It intertwines with my intestines, reminding me viscerally of its existence. Its many tendrils choke my second chakra, constraining my innate powerful sexuality, creativity, and eros. It has taken hold in my body strangling my attempts to connect deeply to earth's wisdom and fully inhabit my body strangling my roots reaching out tentatively, and shrinking back depending on my perceived safety. I think of it as the witch wound – an amalgam of the violent and degrading experiences of this lifetime, layered on past lives of burning, drowning, and persecution. This constricting force winds its way up my spine and my diaphragm, and contracts against the constriction of my life force, cutting my breath shallow and clamping my jaw down so I don’t scream. In my sleep, it seems to ball my fists, tense my neck and shoulders, and clench my jaw. I don’t know why this tension overtakes my body in sleep, but assume it is the accumulated stress of not allowing my voice to be heard, filling up those choked-off places.

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Three weeks into my journey abroad and what I begin to feel as I explore this tangled vine is the rage and pain that I have stuffed down and cordoned off. The hardening and calcification of misogyny around my heart, and my allowances and acceptance of it as part of the price for my tribal belonging. I don’t feel these emotions directly, they are still sealed away from my full access for now. But I feel this vine’s shadow, its tar-like energy, and I have been meeting the parts of me that rail against it and those that uphold it. Mapping the territory, I intend to fully explore. I know there are many more parts of me in those dark, unmet, unvisited places and it is my job this year to find them, befriend them, and set them free. I want to understand my own shadow, my complicit participation in this system, then root out the strangler vine that has held me back from stepping fully over the threshold from mother to wise elder, and thoroughly inhabiting my purpose.