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Psychedelic Mysteries of the Feminine – a Vision of Wholeness

Psychedelic Mysteries of the Feminine – a Vision of Wholeness

by | Nov 1, 2019 | Collective Consciousness, Defence Mechanisms, Depth Psychology, integration, Nature and Self, Political Psychology, Psychedelic Integration, Relationship to Self, Self development, Shadow Work | 0 comments


Caroline Manière Psychedelic Mysteries of the Feminine

Caroline Manière Psychedelic Myster

This book is a stitching process, trying to bring back into contact what has become separated and separate. Trying to reconnect us to a lost feminine wisdom and lineage and to its capacity to bring us back into a state of greater wholeness.  

We are living through times in which huge collective splits are becoming amplified on the wider world stage. We come to see clearly how the wound of separateness has become infected and oozes out of every societal pore. It seems that unless things become infected there is little hope of action. Like most patients that enter therapy, we tend to look inwards once our defenses have collapsed and our symptoms have become intolerable. Our collective defenses are certainly overstretched and we are standing on a dangerous edge, called to either integrate or demise.

This book, the restoration of the feminine, the psychedelic experience, are all deeply political matters. Max Dashu writes:

“The practice and ways of medicine have political ramifications because they represent direct spiritual power, energy that cannot be controlled by man-made hierarchies or systems of domination” ( p.60).

Separateness is systemic. It starts with the Other and it creeps into our most intimate connections including our relationship with Self. Likewise, oppression that arises out of the altar of separateness is also systemic. It is the feminine, it is the colonized nature, it is the underprivileged, the third world countries, the refugees, the homeless and displaced that are the weakest link in our society. In systemic thought they say a system is as strong as its weakest link. The weakest links are not negligible. They are where care and attention need to be directed at the most. Make no mistake, all these things are linked and our response to them is also linked. All these things are political and our response to them can be nothing less than a rebellious one. We have to face our current challenges with solid enough ethics, integrity and determination to survive the tension, or risk being ripped apart.

This collection of essays has come out of a deep sense in us as well as in what we are witnessing in the collective whole, of the need to re-member the feminine essence back into consciousness. The feminine we call on in this book is not confined to female bodies, it is part of every soul. Every collective energy belongs to all of us collectively.  Kathleen Harrison asks of us:

“It’s important to realize how we each hold within us the masculine and the feminine elements-these well-met opposites are swirling, dancing arm-in-arm, or sometimes in battle. But they are both always within every single one of us.” ( p. 146).

The feminine we call on in this book resides in women as well as men and needs to be nourished and strengthened in all of us, for all of us.

The feminine consciousness restores our awareness of our interconnectedness, with each other as a species, with all other species and nature, as part of a glorious, incredibly intelligent and purposeful, ecosystem. An ecosystem that is fully alive.  The feminine knowing of interconnectedness points us back to our shared source in the all emerging void. It reminds us that as we stand on the thresholds of life and death, we are all equal in our collective fate, whichever culture, class or creed we come from. In matters of life and death we return to our shared humanity and our true size. We are all but specs of dust in this magnificent tapestry of life. Our part and role here is to be of service to the life of what needs to live and to the death of what needs to die. To take our place fully in the responsibility and the consequence of it all. Humanity in its greed has become destructive and has aligned with the forces of death and disintegration. When disintegration is serving regeneration, like the death of winter that feeds the spring ahead, it is also in service to life. But the disintegration that humanity is engaged with at the moment is threatening life all around us.

This book aims to address the inequalities within psychedelic culture by bringing more feminine voices and matters to the surface. By bringing the unseen into greater view. This book does not address all the inequalities we are fostering in our community, it points to some and there are more to look at. The proportion of those that are well off in today’s world, with the proportion of women that have managed to lead safe lives, to the proportion of nature that is still vibrant, are sadly interlinked. One cannot be recovered without the other. We need a wide systemic lens to address what is infected in our world today. And most importantly, we need compassion, to make space for the dialogues that will bridge all the Otherness this world has fallen into.

Re-membering the vitality of feminine consciousness, her lost lineage and practices, her deeply embodied intuitive wisdom, will be a much-needed resource for our challenges ahead. Chiara Baldini tells us that:

“Women played a fundamental role in the administration of these rites and altered states of consciousness were a “spiritual technology” used to attain mystical knowledge about the paradoxical nature of reality and human’s places within the natural world”. (p. 78).

In this book we are calling on the Feminine that resides within us all, alongside nature, and her regenerative capacities for integration. In order for humanity to move forward it is essential that we recall and integrate whatever human capacity has remained underdeveloped and delegated to our collective shadow. Instead of consistently relying on an overdeveloped one-sidedness, we need to look for the feminine qualities, that are dormant potential in all of us, and here we will find treasures long lost and forgotten, the secret medicines we all long for whichever side of the divides we fall on.

“In times when the patriarchal excesses of modernity seem to be bringing us closer and closer to planetary collapse, psychedelic and plant medicine seem to be potentially powerful tools and allies in our quest to shake off the grip of those systems from our individual and collective consciousness. This is an essential step towards a more conscious paradigm of integrated and mature masculine-feminine synergy and a better integration between rational and erotic medicine.” (Adam Andros, p. 252). 

Psychedelic and altered states allow us a unique access into our personal and collective shadow. They unearth what has been lost or hidden in this space that holds peril alongside potential, and can return us to a wisdom that we deeply thirst for. In the realms of feminine consciousness, we will retrieve the medicines of interconnectedness, fertility, regeneration, compassion, embodied wisdom, feeling, kinship and belonging. If all these forces returned to our world a deep restructuring would take place.

Humanity has fallen captive to a “great forgetting”. We go through cycles of collective events that don’t get assimilated and we find ourselves compelled to compulsively repeat the trauma. We have come up against immense resistance from the ossified status quo towards the inevitable collective changes we are being called to navigate. As we stand before the thresholds of sociopolitical and environmental breakdown we will need all the resources we can master. We will need to transcend our structural and self-imposed limitations of Otherness, separateness and isolation.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes:

“In intercultural inquiries, I have been impressed with groups that are pushed out of the mainstream, and who yet retain and strengthen their integrity even so. It is fascinating to see that time after time, the disenfranchised group that maintains its dignity is often eventually admired and sought out by the very mainstream that once ousted it”.(p. 490, note 13)

I am glad someone has put this process into words. It lays bare our responsibilities and the consequences of how we attend to our wider psychedelic culture. It is inevitable that psychedelic culture will leak into the wider culture once again, we are already seeing clear aspects of that. I am not here to declare this as a victory or a foe, I think it is a fragile process that will unearth a lot of shadow on the way, but it is essential that we maintain awareness of our values as a community throughout it all. We have to tend to our internal dynamics, knowing that we are caring for a baby that will grow into adulthood and enter society at large. Do we want that offspring to bring something of value to the world? Do we want it to carry something vibrant, integral and potent within its soul? Do we want it to carry the seeds of change forward? If so we have to disentangle our community, movement, whatever you wish to call it, from its embrace with the oppressive discriminatory dynamics of wider culture. We don’t want that child going back and carrying more of the same. If we want it to make a real difference we have to make sure we cultivate its capacity to integrate division and its ability to stand in the potent, fertile wisdom of greater wholeness, where everything has its place and is strengthened by respectful collaboration.

This book aims to bring back the feminine in its many forms and guises into clearer view, for the psychedelic culture to be fed, inspired, touched, and mobilized by. The wider psychedelic community, resourced by the vision of feminine and altered states must meet our current challenges from the forefront of inclusivity, matching visionary poetics with decisive action.

In closing I will leave you with the words of Anna Luke:

“This is a call to the dark tides of menstruation rather than the clinical exactness of mensuration; a call to the slippery, elliptical, wet, delicious, beating heart of the darkness. This darkness is not of the grave, but of the regenerative darkness of the womb”. (p. 166)

Art by Autumn Skye

Art by Autumn Skye

Illuminating the Shadow

Illuminating the Shadow

by | Jun 1, 2019 | Defence Mechanisms, Depth Psychology, integration, Relationship to Self, Self development, Shadow Work | 0 comments

Art by Deepti Nair and Harikrishnan Panicker

Art by Deepti Nair and Harikrishnan Panicker

The journey of discovering ourselves is life-long. Every step forward takes us further into a deeper knowing of who we are, yet in the dormant edges of our consciousness will always lie forgotten and neglected aspects of our Soul. Our sense of Self remains limited, while we identify with qualities we wish to embody, at the expense of others we learn to forget. Never fully aware of all that we are, a lot of us exists unclaimed in the depths of Self and Soul.

The personal shadow in Jungian psychology is a space in our unconscious psyche that holds all the unacknowledged, denied, neglected and rejected parts of who we are. Beyond the boundaries of consciousness lives all that aches to take its place amongst the rest of us. Here we delegate the parts of us that threaten to unstitch our domesticated sense of self. Exiled by a moral compass that has been handed down to us at a tender time in life, a time when being loved and belonging were crucial for our surviving, their exclusion helped us fit into the families we come from, the groups we belong to, the societies we are part of.

The wild creatures of our shadow lands tend to the intricate balancing act of holding a counterweight to all that we think and wish that we are. They compensate for our persona, the mask with which we present to the outside world. This trained and tamed part of our self is absolutely essential for navigating society and our various roles in it, but it can also trick us into believing that we actually are who we appear to be. This hollow husk of Self has no roots into our deep Soul and cannot sustain us in times of trouble or transition. We need to summon the wider capacities of a greater wholeness to navigate the waves of life.

What grows in the shadow of the psyche remains abandoned and starved of its potential for vitality and purpose. Here in our deepest dark we may have relegated the darkness that completes our light or even the light that completes our darkness. If we have found safety in the world behind the fortress of a defensive identity that keeps anything fertile at a safe distance, then all the love, compassion and capacity for connectedness have been entrusted to our shadow. If, on the other hand, we have allowed ourselves to be only right, only kind, only light, then our sadness, shame and rage have been banished into silence.

Exclusions create tensions and what is excluded will always find a way to re-affirm its presence and right to belong. If we cannot trace the edges of our shadow within ourselves we will come across it, time and time again, outside ourselves. What is an outcast within us converts to outcasts outside of us. This is how scapegoats form into reality. Our projections create mirrors where we can catch a glimpse of what needs to be recalled within us. If we have kept our potent capacities at bay, we run the risk of idolising others in search of the light we know we hold but cannot find. If it is our sense of inadequacy and shame that we have kept at bay, we will attack others in our attempts to shore up what needs to be re-membered. Finding a way to sit with whatever creature of the Self crosses the threshold into the daylight of consciousness, will slowly soften their hard-worn edges. What finds its way back to us will have to be slowly assimilated and honoured into consciousness. As we gather stray parts of our Self in their rightful place amongst the rest of us, we also awake to our greater capacities.

Shadow work is inherently strengthening and reminds us that in psychological work wholeness is not synonymous with perfection, it is synonymous with integration and while the end result might be a lot less perfect, it stands in greater truth and wholeness. Our task is never to eliminate our shadow, but to process and relate to it with conscious awareness. We have to be willing and courageous enough to allow ourselves to become contaminated with the breadth and depth of life. To separate from our identification with the Gods and return to our mortal fate of limitations and imperfection. Inhabiting our rightful size and place opens us up to the potent heart-medicine of compassion, which restores us to a deeper belonging with all aspects of life, within and without.

Cultivating Presence

by | May 1, 2019 | Collective Consciousness, Defence Mechanisms, Depth Psychology, Ecotherapy, integration, Nature and Self, Relationship to Self, Self development | 4 comments

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A world that is aching requires more of us to be available as a resource for its healing processes. It needs us to show up fully and engage responsibly with the collective task at hand: supporting the intricate balance of environmental and relational ecosystems that can support the forces of life on our planet. We can only do so by moving beyond a narrow sense of self and into the greater spheres of interconnectedness and oneness. By opening up to an inner and outer wholeness.

The task of cultivating presence is even greater in a world that entices us in constant disruptions and invites us to disconnect in a myriad of ways. A world that is intent on moving us at great distance from our inner worlds. We are persistently removed from our deep despair, alienation and grief as well as our boundless creative and regenerative potencies. Shielded but weakened, we lead fragmented lives that limit our sense of self and presence.

Presence emerges from the act and art of deep inner listening. It rests on our capacity to remain open and available to all that exists within ourselves. On our capacity to re-member our embodied wisdom. When moving inwards we are called to meet our light and darkness in equal trust and measure, with a heart that includes all and touches everything with compassion. Free of judgement and full of curious attention we can move in closer to whatever emerges, cultivating greater intimacy with all that we are. The greater the contact we have with life within ourselves, the wider the space we can relate to others from. Gradually we become more available to ourselves, to others, and to the world around us.

Our capacity to be present is equal to our capacity to be vulnerable. When we commit to the forces of presence we have to show up in our fullness, allowing ourselves to be seen, witnessed and reflected back through the mirrors of intimacy. We enter the relational field of life that supports awareness and growth. Our sense of Self emerges through the intricate web of interconnectedness. When showing up in our fullness we stop hiding behind the longings of who we wish to be and enter the container of who we truly are. We arrive to our responsibility for how we exist in our inner and outer world and to the source of aligned action. This level of awareness is enlivening; to cultivate greater presence is to be brought back to life more fully.

Practices that quieten the mind, teach us how to inhabit our embodied selves and hone our attention can support us in cultivating greater presence. They teach us how to engage with the attentive stillness that true presence requires. They move us into the deeper layers of our experience of Self and the world, tracking our inner dance with life. But like the movements of nature whose imprints we carry in all that we are, our emotions and states have their own cycles and rhythms of opening and closing, constricting and releasing. Our sense of presence will ebb and flow and like everything else in life it will exist in constant flux. Under the nourishing gaze of attention, we can attend to every stage of our inner journey. Honouring each opening and closing supports their true essence and their service to the forces of change and transformation.

Presence supports intimacy and in return intimacy supports presence. Together they create the freedom to reach and be reached, to touch and be touched, to move and be moved. Throughout our lifetime we have mastered endless disappearing acts that arise from a deep-seated fear of being hurt, harmed, disappointed, let down and abandoned. As adults we have to re-learn trusting our hearts with others. We have to re-learn trusting contact with ourselves. Deep inner work requires presence and intimacy with whatever guides us internally or externally. By surrendering to the deeper movements of our relating self, we remain open to what needs to emerge. This is a potent medicine for the poisons of our world today. In presence we can include it all, in absence all is lost.

Growing Through our Old Patterns

Growing Through our Old Patterns

by | Sep 1, 2018 | Addiction, Anger Management, Defence Mechanisms, Relationship to Self, Self development | 0 comments

Image by Simon Prades

Image by Simon Prades

When we do our inner work, we invariably come up against deeply ingrained patterns of being in the world that have outgrown their purpose. These might be ways of relating or behaving that developed at a young and tender age; ways of seeing, experiencing and being in the world that helped us manage or at times survive our early environments. The Self finds ingenious ways of keeping us safe and intact, of helping us cope and adjust to limitations in early life.

With our young hearts and souls, we found ways to wrap our early imprints of disappointment or trauma with survival defenses, that in time became firmly set into who we know ourselves and the world to be. Such patterns become automatic points of reference through which we evaluate our experiences in the world. They trigger habitual responses that don’t always correspond to our current reality, but emerge from a distant past, threading us to our early pains and troubles. The defenses we develop in order to survive our early wounds are situation specific and in time expire their usefulness. What is a refuge at one point in life can become a restrictive prison further down our life line.

Life has ways of bringing us up against the limitations of our early defenses. It sets us up against challenges that help us recognize the areas in life that require our growth and change. Life will always call on us to grow in step with our new realities. It will find us locked and lost in loops that hold great power over us and the call to break through will often feel like an impossible task. The loop we are called to break through might be an addiction, indiscriminate acts of rage, a difficulty in sustaining intimate connections, a timeless isolation; prisons we resent and at the same time sustain diligently out of a deep loyalty to the experiences and life assessments of our earlier self.

The first encounter on our journey of changing such deep-seated patterns will be with our doubts and sense of despair; our distrust and resistance to change. To become aware of these early parts of us lies at the root of any transformation journey. But insight is often not a sufficient force of change in itself. It needs to be supported by a process of weaving and embedding our insights into our ways of being. This process, like any transformation, has to be guided by patient exploration and regular acts of practice.

We might find the opportunities to practice in a quiet meditative reflective space or in the midst of the deafening thunders of an argument or a panic attack. The opportunity to practice will be disguised in things we dread: a sense of rejection we have to deal with, a conflict with a friend, a requirement to say no and set our boundaries, a compulsion to attack ourselves. We have to recognize times of conflict or crisis for what they truly are. Every such instance is a call to practice, to do our inner work, to build new muscles that will support us internally and externally. Every such call is a great teacher and guide in disguise that opens for us the opportunity to heal the ghosts of the past and arrive in the safety of the present moment, in the holding of our current adult self.

Building new emotional, relational, behavioral or existential muscles in our lifetime is a process that can only arise from a place of deep commitment to ourselves. In these acts of practice and presence we commit to showing up for ourselves and our needs. Inner work, ritual acts of practice and mindful presence, will reward us with new resources and possibilities. In time, new ways will gradually become familiar, awkward attempts at doing things differently will slowly align with us, old obstacles will be met by newer versions of ourselves. This is an act of transformation, of bringing the shadows of the past into the light of the present moment, of turning a challenge into a gift, an obstacle into an ally.