An excerpt from Woman Most Wild: Three Keys to Liberating the Witch Within by Danielle Dulsky
The ebbs and flows of the great Earth’s natural cycles live within you, Witch. Know the wild feminine as circular, and concerned above all else with the interconnectedness of all things. That logical left brain of yours wants to separate, fragment, and linearize all that you perceive, but your generative, intuitive right brain knows a deeper truth. In your cells you know that this world lives in you as much as you live in it. I call this magickal life for which you are destined your spiritual integrity, but in truth it is your physical, mental, and soulful integrity as well. The rhythms of nature are the rhythms of your energetic womb, the cycles of your emotions and creative work, and the continual, spiraling understanding that divinity exists in it all, forever and always. The recollection of your embodied cycles is the key to the broom closet’s first lock; without this, your Witch consciousness remains dormant.
The intentional embodiment of your wild rhythm is integral to your spirituality because it grounds you firmly in this world; it creates opportunity for continual affirmation of your sexuality and creativity as hallmarks of your very nature. There is no great chasm between your enduring spirit and your holy, sensual self. The rhythms of the wild world are proof of your holistic being. Your sex and your spirit were forced into a divorce long ago, but now, now let these two parts of you be reunited under red satin sheets. The first pillar of wild woman spirituality is the marriage between the Witch’s whole being — that is, her soul, body, mind, and spirit — and the cycles of the world around her. You are not merely in the world, my love; you are of the world.
When a woman’s life becomes isolated from the cycles of nature’s magick, she not only experiences a starvation of soul and spirit; she begins to question her sanity. The psyches and bodies of women are meant to wax and wane, swelling and thinning out with much majestic variability. The feminine is neither even-keeled nor easily predicted. We are changeable creatures. We women experience spiritual winters during which there is a divinely fallowed time when we care not for prayer or ritual. So, too, a woman experiences these sacred voids in terms of love and relationship, body and health, creative work, and every aspect of her way of being in the world. When compared directly and unknowingly to a high-fire inner summer, when deep, purposeful, and fertile transformation is being birthed over and over again, these inner winters can weigh heavily on a woman. She sinks low into a depression made far worse by a rejection of this time’s validity as a dark-moon psychic state during which a woman craves solitude and emptiness.
The rhythms of the Holy Wild give us permission to have our own cyclical nature; we need only frame these highs and lows as part of our bodily and psychic home. We are the living feminine, Sister, and we have a cosmically sanctioned right to check in and check out in accordance with our inner resources. Our energetic wells can only source so much work, so much play, so much nurturing, and so much devotion before they become depleted. Consider the solar and lunar cycles as more predictable metaphors for your own rhythms. We are not meant to be constantly turned on, and the world needs our darkness as much as it needs our light.
From the time we are girls we learn to shut down our natural and intermittent inclination to run into the dark void of nothingness. Idle hands, after all, are the devil’s playthings. Who knows what the wild child might do if her imagination were left unbridled? The technologies of woman taming are as old as dirt, my love, and the most sinister of these has been the strategic condemnation of the Still Woman. Remember that when I say “wild,” I do not mean out of control; rather, I refer to the freedom of both stillness and doing, a sacred liberation that was slowly taken from us when we were young. The wild is your human way of relating to the life-force that is beyond human but wholly natural.
Little girls are kept wild when their caregivers affirm their right, and affirm it often, to be of the world. A good deal of preparation for the battle of adolescence is necessary in order for children of all genders to psychologically survive the woundings that will inevitably occur. Particularly for those who do not neatly match our culture’s presented image of normalcy, the survival skills required are immense, with the suppression of the wild a common response to the threat of abandonment. During adolescence, we fear looking or acting out of alignment with what our peers have deemed acceptable. We conform in order to belong, in order to keep from being left behind, with every act of perceived rejection driving the wild self deeper into the shadows of our psyche.
It is beyond terrifying, I know, to crack wide open the shell that has been layered so thickly around us by so many years of snickers, eye rolls, turned backs, insults, and punishments. Hear me when I tell you that you are not who they say you are, and the greatest gift you can give to the global community is to be fiercely authentic. Unlearn the mechanisms of control that keep you believing that you must keep going no matter how loud your heart-voice is screaming for rest. Reclaim your wild rhythm, and awaken your Witch consciousness; she is sleeping, small body curled with the petrification that comes of allowing ourselves only small movements these past years. Wake her now. Wake her up, and let her show you the way home.
I see you now, my Sister-Witch, ear pressed against the door, hearing the call of your wild nature like a gut-born drumbeat. The ping-pat of raindrops, the mother wolf’s howl, the songs of birds you cannot name: All these things have been nested in your soul since you were a young girl. Remember now. Remember the nourishment of nature-aligned rhythm, and insert that ancient, rusted key into the lock. Remember the electric buzz you felt in your heart when gazing upward at the maternal full moon. Turn the key, letting it groan like the ancient iron it is. Hear the sound of your inner Witch waking up with a soft, sultry yawn bellowed from beneath your ribs. Embodying the rhythms of this strong Earth is your first act of liberation, and it is the most fundamental, central pillar of wild woman spirituality. Once you have acknowledged the organic power of the world around you as kith and kin to that which lies within you, once that is done, there will be no turning back.
Woman Most Wild
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Excerpted from the book Woman Most Wild: Three Keys to Liberating the Witch Within. Copyright ©2017 by Danielle Dulsky. Printed with permission from New World Library — www.newworldlibrary.com.
Author: Danielle Dulsky
Danielle Dulsky, author of Woman Most Wild, is an artist, yoga teacher, energy worker, and founder of Living Mandala Yoga teacher training programs. She leads women’s circles, Witchcraft workshops, and energy healing trainings and lives in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania. Find her online at LivingMandalaYoga.com.
