Exiting the cocoon; when the spiritually powerful woman embraces sacred transformation

I spent most of my teenage years wanting to be like other people. Specifically, I wanted to be like other people my age who seemed to have ‘normal lives’. Extroverted, allowed to go out with friends whenever they wanted, and in some kind of romantic entanglement.

By this time I had spent most of my life in a dysfunctional, strange environment. I did not always have the language to express what I felt, but I knew I wanted out in some way shape or form. I wanted to run away somewhere where nobody knew me so I could live the life I thought I wanted.

I can best express the environment I grew up in as seemingly functional with a whole lot of chaos, darkness, and spiritual binds that if you were honest enough to say, was not hard to miss. I lost parts of my innocence at a young age and always felt out of place. I had a deep mistrust of people but yearned to be understood, I knew that humans could be extremely dark and destructive, yet I craved their acceptance.

As I entered my late teenage years, I began to feel ‘seen’. Not in a liberating way where people saw and felt various aspects of my being, but in a way that validated whatever image of myself I wanted to project. I became known for my intelligence and quickly became a ‘star student’ that teachers boasted of. My acceptance into the University of Cambridge shook people and most could not help but admire and respect me in some way shape or form. My young adult beauty began to shine as I became more sexually appealing to the opposite sex and I quickly forgot about the years I spent feeling outcasted…

I became drunk with the validation I received. Younger me did not know that the years of shame, damage to my self-esteem, and emotional complexities was quietly brewing underneath the very thin layer of cohesiveness I was projecting.

You see, spiritually powerful women don’t always start off knowing they are powerful or knowing that their soul contract requires them to confront their complex and layered underworld of emotional, psychological, and psychic pain they have most likely learned to numb or ignore. They are also usually unaware that most people seek their demise - that the envy, sabotage, and bullying they experience was not just a coincidental part of their story. Indeed, it fits into a broader theme of persecution they will experience precisely because of the power they possess. This means when they are operating broadly through spiritual immaturity and continuously seek to forfeit what their path requires of them, they will be gently or violently forced to confront their demons. Usually, the latter consists of some kind of tragic horrific event that tries to break the spirit of the spiritually powerful woman but equally gives her the chance to pick up the broken pieces of her spirit and fuse them together with her capacity to sit with the vastness of their complexities.

The spiritually powerful woman’s seemingly insatiable desire to fit in and have a normal life usually lays with her initial reluctance or inability to understand why she has been placed on this planet in what may seem like the most inhospitable environments. The secrets, abuse, misunderstandings, and spiritual attacks do not yet make sense to her especially as she perceives that nobody else around her has been dealt those same cards. Thus, when she inevitably attains admiration for standing out, it can become so easy for her to remain stubbornly attached to the facade that grants her humanity recognition. Indeed she will until she is forced to reckon with herself.

In ‘Women who run with the wolves’ by the glorious Clarissa Pinkola Estes, she recounts a story of a young girl who after going her entire life without shoes, makes herself a make-shift shoe which happens to be red. After getting adopted by a wealthy women, she takes the red shoes from the little girl. However, on a shopping trip with her newly adopted mother, the girl sights a pair of shiny red shoes and convinces her mother to buy them for her. The little girl becomes obsessed with the red shoes and continues to wear them albeit her mother’s warning. Eventually, she begins to dance in the red shoes and is unable to stop dancing. She dances all around town and cannot seem to take off her shoes, until she finds liberation from having her feet chopped off.

While this story consists of the macabre, Pinkola Estes demonstrates how it represents the psyche of a woman who has been starved of wilderness, seemingly finds her liberation through something, just to have that ‘thing’ lead her to destruction. Indeed, the spiritually powerful woman, after being deprived of basic human decency may go ballistic when she finally experiences love, affection, care, and interest even when it is surrounded by thorns. This is why the spiritually powerful woman must endure many ego deaths where she learns to give up the personas and facades that seemingly kept her safe from judgment, criticism, and persecution. The core fear the spiritually powerful woman may have when she is faced with letting go of the unhealthy ego is the fear of returning to her former state where she was ridiculed and abandoned. Because the bridge between the harsh treatment she received and the latter sense of admiration, she may see the choice of letting go of the facade as a self-destructive option.

Nonetheless, if she must evolve, and she knows she must as the facade most likely brought her more pain, she must sit with the perplexing and sometimes debilitating thoughts and emotions that arise from this process. While this is a grueling process and a deeply spiritually one as she not only faces how her facade has held her back, but the former pains of neglect and shame she sought to ignore. Here, she is literally agreeing to retrieve the lost parts of her soul that were robbed from her or that she ignorantly gave up.

As she goes through this process, she learns that there is indeed no ‘normal life’ or ‘normal person’. While her experiences may stand out, she quickly realizes that each and every person has their own underworld to face - including (and especially) those who unleashed their violence onto her. She also learns that there is a place for her ‘strangeness’ in this world. She need not self-destruct or chase fulfillment in unhealthy habits, her innate wisdom from enduring many initiations become a well that many want to drink from. The spiritually powerful woman is encoded with the power to utilize her transformation to transform others. She becomes a natural at this and the many forms her transformative abilities manifest because she was quite literally built for this.

The spiritually powerful woman learns that her intimations - even the ones she endured as a child did not occur because there was inherently something wrong with her, but because she has always been a mirror to others and has yielded more power than them. The power to alchemize, the power to transform, and the ability to tear away all that which is false.