BOOK 3 – Excerpt

Cauldron of the Feminine

A Journey through Dreams

The past, filled with patriarchal demands to be accountable, responsible, respectable and silent, nods to the future. I offer my dreams in the belief that we are all connected, so my dreams may resonate with yours. I am just beginning to live my life out loud; that is, in public. I like to think these dreams play a small part in the emergence of feminine consciousness, the coming of the Cosmic Mary.

The decades of struggling with my interwoven and repetitive dream motifs, through new grief, joy, mystery, power and awareness, now, in October 2017, feel like a promise tinged with excitement. The dreams Pushed and Pulled: Joining the Dance, October 17, 1990; Recognizing Feminine Power, March 21, 1991; Worthiness, January 9, 1992; and Negative Fearful Masculine, October 16, 1992, demonstrate changes in my inner feminine energy. I make a major breakthrough toward integration, synthesis and understanding when I pull together and study these dreams.

I sincerely wish I had been much more knowledgeable in 1991. I may have saved myself years of angst. But no, it is apparent I was not ready. Today, in the #MeToo era, as I look around at the fingers of blame pointed at men, I come to understand my own complicity in continuing the status quo. I was too unhealed; too fearful in my inner self. I was animus possessed—that is, unaware of the depth of my own repressed feminine disguised as a man. Now, I work to take my own power. I recommend that every woman, every daughter and every man, every son study the story of “The Handless Maiden” and let it seep into their bones. You can find it online from Sounds True Publishing or in one of the many editions of Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes.

BOOK 2

Authoring Self

A Journey through Dreams to the Feminine

This is a highly provocative and original book about rebirthing the feminine soul through dreams, meditation, prayer and reflection. It is a combination of the experiential and theoretical rooted in both psychological and mythological research while firmly anchored deeply within one woman’s transformational journey. This book is filled with some of the many questions asked by a midlife woman in her search to recover her Self.

How much is Pearl willing to sacrifice in her search to find and heal the inner obstacles to woman’s psychological freedom? For it is said that entry into the underworld, the transformational journey of a soul, demands a very steep price. Learning to work with images, using active imagination and the principles of transpersonal psychology, Pearl grapples with the use of inclusive language, learning that she has grown up steeped in patriarchal religion, language and imagery. She learns she has been betrayed by her own life. Reading extensively only to find that the early church fathers consider women “flawed men,” “evil” and “responsible for the downfall of humanity,” Pearl struggles with the deepest feminist issues. Under the tutelage of wise teachers and many books, she finds that she can stand and speak without anger or tears in the face of the authority of man. She must heal her own molten inner rage.

Images of ancient patriarchal authorities from the textbooks of her many years of education appear in her dreams. She is faced with the fact that her own psyche has been colonized by the patriarchy centuries out of mind!

Now, she must learn about the Truth from within her Self rather than the Truth of Authority. Dreams abound with multiple images from the depth of both her personal unconscious and the even deeper collective unconscious. When leaving New York, one of her guides says clearly, “Pearl, you must deal with your issues of church.” Suddenly, her dream world is flooded by images of ancient goddess religions, the dance of the feminine, the ring and the cosmic egg symbolic of wholeness. Some images, such as the yellow wallpaper, feel like direct comments from psyche on the gaslighting faced by women within patriarchal structures that rely on power, violence and beliefs in woman as “less than.” Progressing through many dreams highlighting the structure of her psyche and aspects of transpersonal psychology, Pearl works to integrate the spiritual and the transcendent aspects of her experience.

This is the story of the greening of the soul in the language of Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich and other ancient women mystics. The images are nurturing, frightening and deeply transformative. In her story, Pearl confronts the depths of oppression in a patriarchal church, government and social institutions. This work will appeal to those honest enough to seek to come to terms with their own complicity in the silencing of the Feminine in Western culture. This memoir brings to the surface the rage, anger and ugliness of her own inner world. It is the thesis of this memoir that relationships must come to honour the deep mutuality possible in the depths of the fully awakened person. Authoring Self beckons us to embrace the coming of the Cosmic Mary, the Cosmic Christ Consciousness. This is more than mere words. This is a life in practice. This work honours the beauty and the blackness, the good and the ugly.

Book I

I, the Woman, Planted the Tree

A Journey through Dreams to the Feminine

Yet another nightmare, one more black depression, hearing voices, more psychiatric appointments, the threat of foreclosure, and disappointment in God, her Catholic church and her weak faith–a midlife mother, wife and high school administrator embarks on a frantic journey to heal clinical depression.

Months later, a member of her large family, concerned about her possible involvement with the occult, sends her a large box of books. One book about dreams begins a lifetime of inner work with a dream of falling, prayer and a safe landing. This is the story of Pearl Gregor’s deep and arduous journey into the darkness with the light of dreams to guide her. Little did she know, but that first dream held the energy of the archetypal descent to the underworld. Within every woman lies the energy of the Sumerian myth of Inanna.

A few months and a few thousand mantras after her first Sunday evening meditation, strangely mystical experiences, transcendent light, and a deeply moving vision of sunflowers, seeds, a forest of trees and a beautiful river of silver coins promise deep joy and healing. A series of events including a charismatic breakfast healing service releases floods of energy. After more weeks of intense inner work, the memory of preverbal childhood sexual molestation emerges. From deep within, floods of intense energy transformed her very cellular structure.

The clinical depression never returned. That should have marked the end of the story. Everlasting peace, miracles and sublime peacefulness. Right? No. Only in the movies and televangelism. Pearl’s soul journey took her through the repressed emotions of early childhood trauma and its impact on body, mind and spirit. Through dreams, Pearl learned to question every detail of deeply held and centuries old tribal beliefs. Such a process of finding the repressed feminine, aspects of the goddess and eroding deeply held fears in search of the authentic self requires hard work. The truth is it would take years to integrate, assimilate, and accept that these experiences were in fact real. The path leads through dreams, multitudes of books on feminism, Jungian psychology, spirituality, Catholicism, religion and history. While the road is strewn with barriers, boulders and bogey men, it also provides the resources to work with deeply symbolic material arising through dreams. This book contains 66 life-changing, healing, frightening and transformational dreams as ancient as the Eleusinian Blood Mysteries. Pearl filled dozens of journals.

In her relentless search for her own authority, she learned the depth of generations of inherited cultural constructs about woman’s invisibility, passivity, insignificance and silence. Struggling with fears of ridicule and alienation, and the crushing weight of unhinging the many fixed positions of educated, liberal arts, progressive, spiritual, religious and scientific beliefs, Pearl managed to establish the right to her own beliefs.

This is her story of life seen through the eyes of a midlife woman and her spiritual transformation on the way to becoming Crone.