Women / Anima / The Feminine

The feminine has been undervalued, which makes real partnership and intimacy difficult. It hampers success and stops our ability to receive. The paternalistic, exaggerated, dissociated masculine has been running the show in society. If nothing else, this makes our lives imbalanced. Valuing the feminine is the way to have our consciousness leap forward. The ability to receive and enjoy is crucial to partnership. It ends sacrifice, inauthenticity and religiosity. It heals competition and its hidden fear of success, and dissolves greed with bonding and abundance.   ~Chuck Spezzano

So long as a woman accepts a man’s archetypal projection, she is trapped in a male understanding of reality. ~Marion Woodman, Conscious Femininity

If (women) find their self-esteem in the approval of men, they need to realize that what most men are projecting onto them is their own disembodied soul or their own Earth Mother. Neither projection recognizes the mature, embodied woman who has the courage to be who she is.  ~Marion Woodman, Conscious Femininity

A few years ago I had occasion to do a news interview with an Israeli woman, then in her early 50s, an ardent feminist and political activist. I was struck by her quiet intensity, sharp intelligence, and self-containment. During our interview she remarked that her twenty-five-year marriage to a university professor had always been very troubled. “Why?” I asked, surprised. “Because,” she said, “we both thought we were him.” ~Excerpt from Dismantling the Animus, written by Lyn Cowan