Medicine of The Midwife of the Soul

Reflections on initiation and restoring the sacred sisterhood

I was meaning to write a piece on the energetic patterns of emergence, but I lost my draft, and now it’s kind of just stuck in the birth canal. So I’m going to write the piece that wants to be written right now.

This is one of my recurring lessons when it comes to tapping into emergence: I am to sense into what wants to come through and then be in service to it, instead of trying to force it.

“Use the Force”, the Jedi Master said.

And the Midwife of the Soul replied, gently:

“Dear one, have you ever birthed a child?

The Force works its way through you. If you work with it, you may bring the good, the true, and the beautiful into the world.”

Motherhood has continued to be a powerful initiation for me. It’s the kind of initiation one can’t opt out of. And it’s going to be a lifelong process.

Communing with nature while being on the land in the last year has only made the initiation more potent. Being with the interconnectedness of all life is intense.

Like a river carving through solid rock on its way down to the sea, persistently, millenia after millenia, the river of Life has been carving its way through me.

As the current runs, it’s crumbling and carrying away the debris of old conditioning, opening up new caverns, crevasses and chasms, excavating giant boulders out of my very core, constantly clarifying the channel.

I am deeply in reverence with the nature of it. Not just in reverence of, but with.

This is a reciprocal process, a dance. It’s about making sacred with Life itself.

A dance of water and rock. Antelope Canyon, USA.

“Your body is an altar to your ancestors”, the Midwife continued, and I felt it in my very bones.

The body has so much wisdom. It has the innate ability to heal, grow, and transform itself. If we can tune in and truely listen to its wisdom, the body will tell us all sorts of things we need to hear. All sorts of things we would perhaps rather not hear.

Sometimes it speaks in the voice of a little child, crying and begging in the darkness.

Other times, it speaks in silent screams. The kind where the whole body contorts and it feels like the windows are going to shatter from the sonic wave. And yet no sound leaves the mouth.

And sometimes it speaks in dull pain, the kind we’ve been numbing for years so we wouldn’t have to feel its pangs. The kind we would rather shove down into the darkest depths of our unconscious and pretend it’s not even there.

But we can’t pretend forever. One day we fall and the whole thing breaks open. And then the pain is once again real, raw, aching, pulsing like electrical shocks.

“Allow the pain to move through you.”

Said the Midwife of the Soul, holding me in her tender motherly arms.

“Breathe with it.

Allow it to break you open.

The pain is the medicine.

The way out is through.”

“Repeat with me”, continued the Midwife. “This is the mantra for re-embodiment:

I welcome all emotions in my temple.

It is safe to feel all emotions fully without needing to act on them or judge them.

I trust the force of Life that wants to express itself through me.

I surrender to a higher power to hold me in tender loving care.

Like waves coming onto the shore and receding,

I allow all emotions to move through my whole body.

I neither push them away nor cling to them.

I am the Earth that is the body.

I am the Water that is emotion.

I am the Fire that burns away untruth.

I am the Air that is the witness.”

The Magic Circle by John William Waterhouse, 1886

One insight I keep getting is that our deepest unmet needs and our greatest gifts are two sides of the same coin. When our needs are met, we are able to show up fully and bring our greatest gifts into the world. And that the act of brinding our gifts into the world is the way we alchemize the energy of the aching void of our unmet needs. When the two become one, magic is unlocked. There is something in there about that.

I keep getting nudged with many recurring insights lately. Sometimes it’s more like being repeatedly bashed over the head.

One of them is the need to restore the sacred ancestral sisterhood. The coven.

This is not just any group of women. It’s a circle created with intention and deep commitment - to collaboration, to mutual healing and evolution, to weaving relationships and community, to restoring health of the Earth, to being in service to Life.

The circle of women is an ancestral social structure. All tribal societies have some version of this. There is a reason why Medieval societies broke up the covens and burned the witches: the power of the Feminine gets amplified in a circle. There is something very potent about the collective sapience in a group of women.

Slavic ritual of purification by water and fire on summer solstice

I’ve been in conversations about starting a circle of women who are deeply connected with nature and the ancestral Feminine. A coven.

The purpose is to create a container for collective sapience so we may incubate and birth an emergent regenerative culture, which we can then bring to the wider community.

I’ve been looking for a balance between inviting the right people and creating the right container to enable emergence. My sense has been that the people need to be agentic yet flexible, and have the ability to co-create the context in service to Life.

To do this cultural transformation, each of us participating will need to show up with full embodied cognition. We will need to hold each other in wholeness.

This is going to take intention, proper energetic containers with human geometry, and the right facilitation.

It’s a calling I have been getting for some time now, and it feels like it is time for something to be born. The Midwife of the Soul is speaking to me again.

I keep having visions of her. At first, I thought she was someone who was supposed to show up in my life. I kept asking, praying for her to show up and help me birth all that has remained unborn in me for years.

Until I realized that she was already here. She lives inside of me.

And so the need becomes the gift. The wound becomes the medicine.

And thus it is done.

Amen.

~

In Honour of the Feast of St. Mary Magdalene, July 22 2022

Midwife of the Soul