by Van Waddy: Honoring the feminine principle in the human body has been Marion Woodman’s hero’s journey. Woodman is a Canadian Jungian analyst, a woman who burst the yoke of perfectionism, battled and transformed an eating disorder in her youth, has outlasted a bout of cancer in her elder years, and has used all of these graces to her spiritual advantage.

Woodman’s complete surrender to her personal encounter with the divine in matter — an inner and outer presence she affectionately acknowledges as Sophia – permeates all of her work. Her individual hero’s journey spirals and wanders around this single feminine value. The mythology and universal story she embodies draws women to her from all over the world who find in her the way through the proverbial forest.

Woodman’s markings through this mythological forest are metaphorical in the finest sense. She teaches us how to embody, how to bring to consciousness in the body incoming spirit; how to contain our center and allow all opposites in us their fruitful play; how to honor the feeling value in us when all outside forces fight to suppress it; and how to identify and speak our truth from what she calls our virgin standpoint, our “I am”. These metaphors and principles apply to both men and women who fight to honor and release the feminine in them, which in our culture is routinely discouraged.

“The new feminine (emerging in our time) stands for a new kind of consciousness which can hold the divine and human in one thought,” says Woodman. It is divinity in matter — “soul living in matter” – that Woodman excavates in the body, in dreams, in metaphor, in the creative life. She shows us how to contain it, dance it, harness it, celebrate it, until our conscious self can act out of both the human and divine of us. “The feminine lives with uncertainty, mystery,” she says, for we can only know the divine through its manifestations, intuitive imagery, not with the mind.

Woodman’s fierce discernment cuts like a knife through our chatter and gets us in touch with our still point — that place within where the dance between body and psyche, between conscious and unconscious, transforms us from merely living into being wholeheartedly alive. Intuition and imagination and images from our dreams become our guide. True healing, she says, happens with imagery.

Whatever is driven by will power alone is left behind, as this depletes the body. Whatever sings the soul into action, stirs passion and vision, is embraced in the dance. “When soul is not heard,” says Woodman, “the energy goes back to the will.” When we are living in survival mode, through will power alone, our soul energy escapes to the basement of our being and goes to sleep.

Around all this, wrap Woodman’s humor, her colorful story-telling, her audacious playfulness. Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson’s rich images color her own, with some T.S. Elliot thrown in, all with poetic cadence. She is well-known for her delightful dialogues with the poet Robert Bly, with Woodman representing the feminine principle, Bly, the masculine. At the Mythic Journeys Conference in June, Woodman will dialogue with Coleman Barks, Robert Bly, Robin and Stephen Larsen, and other provocative panel members, always bringing our musings back to the presence of the feminine, the play of the divine in any of our wanderings.

I was privileged to personally participate in Woodman’s bodywork intensive in Canada in 1996, to dialogue with her at several national conferences, and to bask in her generous openness to embrace anyone who sincerely embarks on an authentic soul journey. If I had to choose one attribute from her long list, it would be her shameless humility.

Woodman’s willingness to be vulnerable and transparent for all-the-world to see is both courageous and liberating. She is fearless in speaking the truth with which most of us play hide and seek. Her beloved Sophia ever at her side, she dispels whatever darkness confronts her in simple, healing language, and invites us in to learn what we can from her ordeal.

Marion Woodman is only one hero on a hero’s journey, but she’s my hero.