What are Feminine Archetypes?
People often want to know which feminine archetype they are, but we are not one feminine archetype — the point is to embody all of them.
Feminine archetypes represent various embodiments of feminine energy. They are symbolic, and they are an access point to embody and bring online more of ourselves.
Our feminine power, which ultimately equates to inner freedom, comes from being able to shapeshift between the polarities within us and the vast and multifaceted embodiments of feminine energy so that we don’t have to deny an ounce of ourselves. When we live in only one or a few channels of energy or perspective, we cut ourselves off from the whole technicolor spectrum of ourselves and life.
As we work with different feminine archetypes, we awaken different facets of our psyche, emotionality, and physiology, and we awaken untapped forms of power, wisdom, and medicine. This newfound embodied intelligence then naturally integrates into our consciousness, behavior, and heart, and it integrates into all facets of our life around us.
Women are typically not living in full capacity regarding the expansiveness and range of feminine energy and power available. We have learned to embody our feminine energy in specific ways, through experiences lived and witnessed, through the imprints of our ancestors, and relational and cultural messaging, both spoken and unspoken. We end up confining and contorting our emotionality, self-expression, sexuality, creativity, wisdom, intuition, and power in specific ways that cut us off from our potential to thrive, love, experience joy and pleasure, and from our potential to give and receive — all in subtle and grandiose ways.
Working with feminine archetypes supports us in expanding beyond the stories, experiences, and imprints that have disconnected us from embodying the entirety of our authenticity as women.
Archetypes, in general, support us to embody a wider range of ourselves authentically regardless of one's gender and sexual identity, and feminine archetypes hone in on the specific experiences, wounds, and facets of the female experience and feminine embodiment.
Feminine archetypes hone in on awakening our full range of feminine energy
The embodiment of feminine energy will look different in every woman. Each archetype will look subtly different for every woman. This work is personal. It’s not about confining what being a woman or the feminine entails, it’s about finding what is authentic to each individual in a framework that supports accessing different facets of ourselves. Just as the essence of our soul is unique to us, the Goddess moves through us in her own way to meet our experience as a woman. She is us, and we are her. We are Woman, and each of us is a single drop in the collective ocean of Woman. You are the Goddess — she is within you, and greater than you — and communing with various feminine archetypes awakens us to an untouched depth within ourselves, and to something that is far beyond us.
We are all channeling Life or the divine through our beings, and being able to shapeshift expands our capacity in what can move through us, reach us, and touch us. What moves through us, is never just ours, and it never only touches us — it touches everyone around us, and this is what binds us all. We are each a drop in the ocean of Life that is ebbing and flowing as one entity.
You are the Maiden, Mother, and Crone. You are the Madonna and the Whore. You are the Mystic, Lover, and Wise Woman. Some parts may be more online than others, but they are all available to access. They are each alive within you with intelligence, medicine, healing, and power waiting to be touched. They each have dark, and they each have light. There is no one way to embody any of them, and they each have medicine specific to you and bound to all of us.
Feminine archetypes are overarching examples of feminine embodiment. They are each a facet of the collective psyche of women. They are a template to traverse something that has no concrete path, or concrete answers — they are templates for you to find the wisdom that is alive within you.
I look at feminine archetypes as the many embodiments of the Goddess through space and time. The Goddess appears as need be, and she reveals herself in certain forms so that we can receive what we need.
Working with feminine archetypes is a way to awaken and receive our untapped intelligence as women — it becomes a transmission from our subconscious to our conscious selves.
Symbolism is powerful in accessing the subconscious and fragmented aspects of the psyche. You can look at it all through the eyes of divinity, through the eyes of psychology, or somewhere in between — it doesn’t matter. Regardless, it’s about awakening, embodiment, and wholeness.
Working with feminine archetypes is a means to give all the parts of ourselves that are wounded, hiding, timid, unsure, or out of reach permission to step up, get their bearings, and lead. It’s about building the capacity to trust the wisdom inside of us that we have been taught to ignore.
We are all fragmented, but we are also all whole.
When we work with feminine archetypes, we are holding space for ourselves to truly get comfortable in our own skin, to build self-trust, and to summon and awaken parts we don’t yet know or have ridden off.
We are each made of many parts, and we are ultimately one living entity, but breaking it down, and deeply dropping into and communing with specific facets of ourselves supports our ability to embody the gold of all of it instead of hushing certain parts, cherry picking, and defaulting to channels we know best — to channels we've been taught are ideal, to channels we have become most comfortable in, and to channels we feel the safest in.
There are so many contradictory parts inside of ourselves — dark and light, wounds, stories, glamor and ugliness. It can be easy to feel this fragmentation and decide what’s good and what needs to be cast aside or fixed — but it’s the embrace of the contradictory and polarizing parts that leads us to wholeness, and the archetypes create a container to do this.
Have you ever sensed a well of rage but genuinely felt so much compassion and empathy, with a bird's-eye perspective and cognitive understanding that you were unable to fully feel angry, almost disassociated from it? Or maybe vice versa?
When we hush either end of the contradictory spectrum or can’t access it, even minutely, we are cutting ourselves off from an intelligence that is there to serve and inform.
What if your rage isn't trying to burn it all down, and what if your compassion isn't saying some wrongdoing was okay? And what if you really do need to burn it all down, and some actions are more selfish or manipulative than you think and ties should be severed?
You’ll never know if you aren’t able, or don’t allow yourself to go there.
Archetypal energy is not only powerful to greaten our capacity to shapeshift with the wide range of energy that moves through us, and the wide range of life we face, but it helps us get to know and integrate all the unfamiliar, confusing, dark, uncomfortable parts of ourselves that have a lot of wisdom.
Working with archetypal energy strengthens our capacity and resilience to feel and listen to our own knowing.
There are some parts we are less familiar with because for whatever reason, they are more dormant in our personality, and there are other parts that have never fully been given a voice because we have assumed them as faulty, unsafe, scary, or untrustworthy.
When we don't have the capacity or tools to sit with the polarities or the confusing, dark, and uncomfortable parts, we sever ourselves from the pearls of wisdom that live inside of us and are there to serve and protect.
This is where compartmentalizing the fragmentation is powerful. These parts need to witness one another in their polarizing nature for you to find the true pulse. We need to be able to hold both ends of the dichotomy to thrive.
Everything within us is bound.
Everything within us is bound and interconnected, playing off each other, and collectively we are bound and interconnected, and reacting to the seen and unseen all around us. There is power in the bird’s eye view, and the all-compassionate eyes of the divine mother, but being able to compartmentalize, and drop into certain parts giving them the space, and voice to speak, be seen, felt, and witnessed unquestionably gives us access to insight that otherwise gets suppressed, or overridden when we are trying to please and serve all aspects of ourselves as one.
When we try and hear, feel, and validate all parts at once no part can truly and fully express itself or fully be seen or felt, and therefore, the loops they get stuck in, of unprocessed experience and emotion, can never be completed and broken free from. The loops we get stuck in, the habits, the patterns, the repetitive scenarios that haunt us — they are unfinished, unseen, misunderstood loops. Working with parts in this way through the archetypes can allow them to play out so that we can let go, and move on.
All of our parts are us.
All of our parts are one living entity, but breaking it down, and deeply dropping into and communing with specific facets strengthens our capacity to be in relationship with all of it instead of defaulting to channels we know best — to channels we've been taught are ideal, to channels we have become most comfortable in, and feel the safest in.
If we aren’t paying deep attention, different parts of ourselves dominate, and shame others — they create a hierarchy. Different parts start to dictate which parts are acceptable. They hush away other's feelings with logic or shame. They invalidate, and disregard the uncomfortable truths that need to be named. But there is intelligence in every single part of us, and this is the power in working with archetypes. Every part gets a voice.
Working with archetypes allows all our parts to stand on equal ground.
There is intelligence in all of it. There is intelligence in what isn’t politically correct. There is intelligence in the victim, the predator, the people pleaser, and the martyr. It doesn’t mean we have to act on all of it, it means there is value in listening and feeling. There is value in witnessing. This is how we get to know our inner ecosystem.
It's easy to explain away the raw feelings we have with logic, compassion, empathy, and with what we perceive as ideal — but that doesn't change the feelings and reality inside of us.
If we don't give space for what is alive and try to hush or change it, it doesn’t go away, we just sever ourselves from ourselves, and this is where our inner ecosystem starts to break. This is what creates melancholy and despair. We are cut off from ourselves. And if we are cut off from ourselves, the channels in which we receive and experience life are cut off. We sever ourselves from Life, and from our own vitality — and eventually, we flatline.
There is so much emphasis in this world on what we do, where we are going with our lives, and what we have, but life is experienced within us. We often cut ourselves off from parts within to meet the world outside of us in a way that feels safe, in ways that we think we will be received, loved, find security, or will be granted what we want — but life is experienced within. It’s not that simple to just change our minds, and we are conscious beings in physical bodies, bound to responsibilities in a complex reality, but knowing this truth is the awakening that empowers us to navigate the rest in grace.
The archetypes are about accessing the vast potential within that opens us to the vast potential of life around us. Each archetype is a channel to play with, receive, and feel life in a different flavor, color, and texture, and the more vast we are within, the more we can feel, receive, and experience in life.
Working with feminine archetypes is about freedom and living as uninhibitedly as we can in our own skin.
It's ultimately partwork, and about trying our best to allow all the life we feel to move freely through us instead of contorting and hiding and cutting ourselves off from feeling — feeling the tenderness of impermanence, our fragility, and mortality, and from feeling vulnerability of love, and the pleasure, bliss, beauty, and magic all around us.
Working with feminine archetypes is about wholeness — holy wholeness.
The archetypes are here to nurture our resilience, capacity, and power to access, claim, and allow all of ourselves and all of Life — the good, the bad, and the ugly, while burning the illusions of perfection to the ground, and embracing the full and messy technicolor spectrums of existence to flood us freely.
Feminine archetypes are about power and freedom. They are about enlivening ourselves and living as fully as we possibly can.
No matter what we believe happens after life, it will not be exactly as it is now. We get one chance to face our fears and soak our life up as it is. Our bodies are unquestionably mortal, and time and life are fleeting. The more conscious we are in our bodies and hearts, on this earth with those we love most and with those who deserve us — the more we are able to receive life for all it has to offer.
How to work with feminine archetypes?
Feminine archetypes are at the heart of Marigold Women’s medicine.
Woven with shadow work and somatic education, feminine archetypes are the primary channel of Marigold Women’s medicine and foundational offerings. If you want to go deeper Pussy Fire is going through a great rebirth and is being rewoven with a handful of dark feminine archetypes — you can join the waitlist here, and Shapeshifting the Goddess is where all of Marigold Women’s feminine archetype work began — it’s rooted in 8 feminine archetypes and is also being rebirthed with a deeper somatic taproot — you can join the waitlist here.
With Marigold love,
Abby
