Erotic Awakenings
Resurgence of Women's Mysteries—Writing through the Messy Middle
“When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, an all aboard powerless to stop it. It's only afterward that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or someone else.”
― Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace
Thank you for stopping by to read my reflections. I love that you are here.
Erotic Awakenings—Women’s Mysteries—Messy Middles—Writing. Hmmm. Let’s see where this takes us. Be forewarned, there is not a final destination.
In my last essay, Space for Joy, I wrote about The Heart of the Rose Festival and the Call to the Ancestral Drum. After I led my workshop on Emerging Conscious Feminine, I was invited to be a recipient of several other workshops. I dove in, without children or the responsibility of holding space for others. Imagine being surrounded by hundreds of vulnerable strong women with thousands of stories, told or untold—their own and their ancestors.
I’ve observed and listened to women’s stories for over six decades. I listened to Kamala Harris's recent speech in Georgia. She named women who were denied healthcare and died as a result. Kamala asked pertinent questions:
Do WE trust women to decide what is right for themselves? Do women have fewer rights now than our mothers did? Could these deaths have been PREVENTED?
These are the types of questions that burn inside of me welcomed or not. Each time, I recognize more clearly the personal, spiritual, political, and erotic are NOT separate especially when it comes to women and their bodies. We are born from a woman—all of life is impacted when she is violated.
THERE ARE MANY kinds of power, used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise. The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feelings. To perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change. For women, this has meant a suppression of the erotic as a considered source of power and information within our lives.
—Audre Lorde, Full Essay: Use of the Erotic: Erotic as Power
In 1996, my twins were delivered by an unnecessary C-section without my consent. The consequences of the 'power over' my body by the industrialized medical complex are beyond messy. It’s a multilayered story that stretches the tension of opposites that weave through the blood and bones of my family. I wrote this story in Edge of Grace: Fierce Awakenings to Love if you want to read a true heroine’s journey not only my own but my daughters. They are Fierce Love—all three of them.
The Power of Menopause was the name of a workshop I attended. I rarely thought about menopause. As the facilitators, Alexandra Pope and Sjahie Hugo Wurlitzer, authors of Wise Power spoke I felt full resonance, bought their book, and signed up for a workshop on Menopause. I received a golden thread to weave, unlock, and understand more of who the post-menopausal Crone is. Their exquisite tenderness allowed me to acknowledge that my menstruation cycle was disrupted by the C-section. At thirty-nine, I entered premature menopause but missed the powerful significance of this initiation. Dang! And Menopause is a powerful rite of passage. One that I am learning about and will write about later.
The Through Line is the Blood Line—the Messy Middles of Women’s Mysteries.
As I unpack the grief and relief of this realization I am enlivened with an unexpected vision that is not yet ready for articulation. I am emerging from menopause with creative magic and medicine—what has been with me all along. Now, I understand why I had to close my private practice and cocoon myself.
As a reader, you may wonder: how is this relevant to me? Maybe it isn’t—unless we consider that we are all born from the womb of a mother. Mother Earth herself is a womb. Indigenous people have always known this. Sacred tobacco, her firstborn, provides an ancient healthcare system to restore balance and a deep knowing that we are NOT alone with our questions.
Womb wisdom is as relevant now as it was before any of us were born, and even more so for our future.
• Why has our erotic power been suppressed, slayed—'powered over'?
• Why has it taken so long for us to reclaim and honor the cycles and rhythms of women and the Earth, as Indigenous people like our early ancestors did?
Why have the Sadhanas—Mysteries of Women been hidden, denied, locked away?
Unveil Women’s Mysteries—Receive Dragon Water Medicine—Course here for prior retreat participants.
Will you look beneath the veil with me, roll up your sleeves, and get messy together?
My wish is that fragments of my back story will show an early betrayal of our collective Herstory that echoes through our bloodlines. A bit of what went wrong and a course correction that is emerging for tender feelings, vulnerability, and clarity to find us.
I believe that stories happen for us, NOT to us. But we don’t find this out by pretending they aren’t real, jumping over them, silencing them. By not giving them air to breathe us, time to crush us, space to stretch us, waves to wash over our eyes and hearts to polish the jewels of the wreckage. Can we harvest possibilities to unplug from the anxious critical voices, relax conclusions, and enter the muddy messy middles of our stories for healing, change, and meaning-making?
Meet the critic as a worthy opponent, for at its heart lies what we like to call a ‘holy role:’ that of waking you up to yourself. Behind the naysaying and the put-downs, there’s a figure with ambitions for you. The critic is, if you like, a frustrated leader. It speaks to a frustrated or latent power in you that needs out.
—Wise Power, Alexandra Pope and Sjahie Hugo Wurlitzer
Working hard to sanitize the muddy dark layers of our complex lives is a detour into a story we were conditioned to wear like a cloak—a ‘performative,’ ‘pleasing,’ ‘not messy,’ ‘controllable’ identity that can be corralled like a sheep.
I was a sheep once. Twice. Three, four, five, six. Wait! I cycled through sheephood at least seven times. In the beginning, I wasn’t a sheep. I was little Bo Peep, the young innocent, helpless, and vulnerable girl ravaged by the Catholic Church’s gender inequality, strict dogma, control over women’s bodies, relationships, and preference for male authority—ostracized—corralled like the women who went before, in a bloody ancestral line stationed to reproduction and caretaking. And the gut-wrenching fear of losing their wisdom and genius—the creative powerful medicine that they did not get to receive and pass on. It was silenced, burned—forced underground.
We are all filled with a longing for the wild. There are few culturally sanctioned antidotes for this yearning. We were taught to feel shame for such a desire. We grew our hair long and used it to hide our feelings.
—Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves
My exposure to feminine spiritual practices was slim non-existent—instead, a cauldron of unconscious introjections blighted my body with historical shame and unworthiness that propelled me to seek—escape through alcohol, drugs, and blind sex. Profusely crossing my heart and praying the Hail Mary failed to answer my desperate pleas to live unbridled. I exited the altar of the holy fathers and became a regular star in blackout scenes—on yachts to Tahiti, in snow banks, and other scary, gnarly places.
Yet the call to spirit ignited an insatiable hunger in my soul—one that you and I know—no force can extinguish.
Spiritual vocations in the early eighties continued to dictate one path—the one defined and designed by the council of the fathers within patriarchal institutions. Good sheep were teased with bread crumbs from his table in the form of binary, dogmatic incentives to wash our not-enoughness clean at the altar of Nirvana, the promised land—the luminous state of Enlightenment—the mountain peak of ‘No Me.’ While rebellious, questioning women were slayed like the dragon in the ‘hero’s journey,’ thrown into the belly of the beast, and weaponized. Consider the Myth of Medusa, a multi-layered archetypal story that I’m unpacking in my current work.
Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.
—Audre Lorde, Poet and Civil Rights Activist
Perhaps you were lured to the feet of the Man Guru, granted a private audience with St. Peter at the Pearly Gates, or raced a marathon to the top of Mt. Almighty to wave the ‘I Surrender’ flag—of course, only if you were a good, faithful devotee, and not a regular old sinner, aligned with the work of the devil.
Even though I pursued a decade of rebelling against systemic sexism within spiritual organizations, co-led the Women’s Ordination Council, and marched alongside feminist theologians—shame still festered in the body and blood of women. We were muddied with “power over’ dynamite in a generation that was just beginning to name the destruction of patriarchy. A power dynamic that harms all people not only the female gender. One that generations before us were trapped in or blind to.
I nearly dozed off writing that part—it’s crusty, but it lingers from our messy collective backstory. And it’s rising to heal.
The conscious feminine is about relatedness, not only to others but to our own bodies, our own souls. The feminine forces us into relationship—not only with others but with ourselves.
—Marion Woodman, Jungian Analyst and Author
At eighteen, I had a dream about the feminine face of God. It inspired me with a vision to meet her.
So I fled the sanctioned path laid out for women in the early seventies: marry, have children, craft a home, and endure the misery. I bought a beat-up Chevy with a wooden block for a gas pedal, and a rope to close the door, and sped off to college, determined to mend my split personality. One part was a pleasing peacock, the other lost in inebriation.
Until early one morning, my roommate interrupted the blackout trajectory that engulfed me and opened a portal to a conscious life.
Magic happened. I met Eunice, my first feminine spiritual teacher and Jungian therapist. She tucked me under her wing, understood my longing, and taught me about self-love and trust.
After a few more sheep shifts, I began to break free from purity culture and to understand that Sadhana for Women is the Unveiling of Her Blood Mysteries. A natural appreciation of sisterhood, practices, and rituals that honor women’s rites of passage and resurrect their gifts: the power to rebirth themselves, creativity, ideas, art, herbs, relationships, communities, and children. All that is inherent within her body—expressed through pleasure, deep feeling, exquisite tenderness, rest and repair, magic, and power—in other words, the feminine face of God—Fierce Love.
Embodying self-love and trust is a huge and challenging task for anyone—one that, even after forty years of trying, continues to reveal ancestral scars that resurface, tell their story, and beckon for repair. I still disappear momentarily, but with each reemergence, I see more clearly: challenges as opportunities for unexpected growth, learning, and a reminder to be kind.
Wounding does not happen in isolation, nor does healing. Our social nervous system mends through relationships, not in environments that silence feelings or exert 'power over' dynamics.
—Prajna O’Hara, Edge of Grace: Fierce Awakenings to Love
Writing has become my healing Sadhana—a practice devoted to cultivating ways to anoint and celebrate every aspect of our emerging feminine consciousness.
Women’s Sadhanas are not defined by external dictates. Sadhana is an open invitation to include all the things that spark curiosity, creativity, and the capacity to feel and write it all—the blood, sweat, and tears—at a pace that allows time for digestion, assimilation, and integration.
A Sadhana that shows us how you stepped out of line, lost sight of hierarchies, stuffed the breadcrumbs up the donkey's ass, got lost in the manure, buried yourself knee-deep in compost, and chose to be undone without abandoning yourself. And how you came to own your story—your vocation—your art—your rebirth—your sadhana of messy middles—YOUR AWAKENING TO EROTIC PLEASURE AND POWER.
Would you tell us how you came to discover that the only approval you need is your own?
I used to want both feet in heaven. I was a preacher, a spiritual teacher whispering from the basement. Curating sacred dramas and working closely with women in prisons showed me how much we need to break through the superimposed walls of patriarchy.
Breaching that wall is going to take patience and total dedication. It cannot be done from the outside. The unconscious dynamics that keep the feminine a prisoner of patriarchy are in the marrow of our bones. Yet if we could take responsibility for our own inner victim and tyrant, we could truly depotentiate the old parental complexes. Released from their power, we would be free to love.
—Marion Woodman
Today, I’m earthbound with both feet rooted in our Earth Mother. My Sadhana is a pleasurable, intentional, conscious process of aligning with ancient wisdom—the power that resides in wombs, yonis, root chakras, and love for all of life.
What to do with Old School Sadhana—Dogmatic Patriarchal Spirituality?
Throw it off, burn it, let it rumble under your feet, stamp it out, refuse to comply—collude, or go along for the ride to a cosmetic ending. It won’t last. You will be confined by the parenthesis. Not essential to the main story. Not a character in your own myth-making.
Women’s Mysteries ‘Sadhana’ is not an exact science, it’s edgy, juicy, and has seasons, curves, and stories both told and untold. Like a calling from a cherished friend, she asks us to respond in a way that is unique to us.
It’s that sweet tender ache that doesn’t go away until our feminine energy is nourished and gives birth to beauty. Not all women have wombs, birth babies, marry, or have a partner. But all of us carry scars of betrayal— wounding. And all of us belong. In sisterhood, we have opportunities to repair, reclaim, and relearn the alchemy of mothering ourselves and offering forgiveness.
Each step through this messy middle is a doorway to self-belonging and making peace with a sad, unconscious toxic culture—one that is slowly giving way to healing and honoring women’s bodies and our Earth Mother.
I’d love to hear from you in the comments or send me a P.M.
This story might be a lot to take in for you. Please check in with yourself and take good care of you. I am curious:
How are you feeling?
How is your nervous system?
Do you have a ritual that acknowledges your feminine essence? Or a nod?
© Prajna O'Hara 2024
Thank you for reading and receiving your dose of The Salty Crone.
with love,
Prajna O’Hara @PrajnaOhara.com
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Thank you for being here!
Thank you to for her photography.
Link to Unveil Women’s Mysteries—Receive Dragon Water Medicine: for women who have been on one of my retreats. (4 spaces open) If you feel called to this course, let me know as we will offer this initiation again.
"...that sweet tender ache that doesn’t go away until our feminine energy is nourished and gives birth to beauty." Oh, Prajna -- this longing. This sense of divine discontent pierces my heart and constantly reminds me of a higher calling to make beauty.
Every morning, I light a candle on my desk, and whisper my prayer written decades before:
"I light the light of Divinity, of the One Power, the One Presence, the One love that is law -- that the qualities of this Divine may guide, light and inform my path this day."
I live a constant cycle of remembering and forgetting, of celebrating and weeping, making beauty and making messes, living in focus and living in chaos. The wild inner life is just as tangled as the brambles and vines that grow along the fence line.
Your words have the feeling tone of that now famous line from a Rumi poem: "Let the beauty we love, be what we do. There are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground."
Thank you for another thoughtful and evocative essay. Big hugs.
One of the greatest hurdles we women have to face (and overcome) is shame, especially around sexuality and erotic pleasure. I just wrote about shame (not in the context of sexuality, but in general) on my own channel; go have a peek and tell me what you think. Healed shame = dignity. It's worth the process.