To feel the wildness you long for, to find the truth that you want to speak and the wisdom that you want to own, you have to reclaim the feminine. 

But she doesn’t respond well to demands or orders or “shoulds”. You cannot force the eros energy of the wild feminine into your life; rather you must learn to court her. To evoke her through how you relate to yourself, your body, the natural world, the great mystery, and all that remains outside of your control and logical grasp. These are my favorite three ways to court the untamed energy of Eros back into your life.

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

– Mary Oliver from Wild Geese

Way #1: Come back into your BODY.

In the beautiful words of Mary Oliver, “let the soft animal of your body love what it loves”. Drop out of your head. Stop thinking so much. Start feeling more. Your body is your connection to the wild feminine because she IS your wild feminine. She is of the earth. She is your wild nature. We have simply forgotten. She is your instinct. Your boundaries. Your gut feelings. In this journey, our relationship with our body is the first piece that we need to reclaim because it is often the first piece that we dismembered. 

Your body will speak her singular and unique truth. Your personal lived experience is lived through your body. When you come home to your body, you come home to this truth that is highly personal. That belongs only to you. The amazing thing is, when you speak from this embodied and subjective place, you will touch the embodied and subjective places in everyone else. Through fully embracing the personal, you will reach the universal, the places of our shared humanity and experience. 

You will also reclaim your deep feeling. Your ability to know what is true for you based upon how it feels. You will remember how to trust it. This will also be your bridge back to your relationship to the great mystery.

 If you try to skip reclaiming your relationship with your body, a relationship with your wild feminine is impossible. Your body is the wild feminine within you. To skip this phase is to continue to search for the wild feminine in books and other people’s stories and experiences without ever having an embodied sense of it within yourself.

Way #2: Mystery. 

Ahh. Learning to dance with the mystery, with the great unknown, is another facet of reclaiming your wild feminine. Being in relationship with the mystery, trusting it, allowing it to guide the flow of our lives without needing to grasp on or take control or trying to make it all known, these are all ways that we court our wild feminine. Nothing will make the wild feminine flee faster than trying to pin her down. To make her known. To dissect and define her. Trust me, I know because I have tried. 

Instead we are asked to dance with her elusiveness. Evoke it through movement and dance and art and poetry. We listen to our night dreams and remember the symbolic language of the soul. How an image can hold multiple meanings and that when we attempt to say “this means that” we squeeze the very lifeblood out of it that we are most seeking. We allow the energy of mystery to infuse our daily lives, to be the unseen source of our wellspring. 

The mystery never bends or caves to the will of the rational mind to make itself known. To make good, logical sense. In fact, it prefers our mind to be bewildered in order to be opened. To be wilder. It thrives in the world of paradox. Of both/and.

The Thunder, Perfect Mind

For I am the first and the last. 

I am the honored one and the scorned one. 

I am the whore and the holy one. 

I am the wife and the virgin. 

I am <the mother> and the daughter. 

I am the members of my mother. 

I am the barren one 

and many are her sons. 

I am she whose wedding is great, 

and I have not taken a husband. 

I am the midwife and she who does not bear. 

I am the solace of my labor pains. 

…

I am the silence that is incomprehensible 

and the idea whose remembrance is frequent. 

I am the voice whose sound is manifold 

and the word whose appearance is multiple. 

I am the utterance of my name.

If you skip nurturing a relationship to the great mystery, to the unknown, you will continue to try to bend the wild feminine to your own will. You will want to define her. You will try to solve her like a math puzzle. It will leave your mind exhausted and your soul bereft.

Way #3: Embracing Whole Cycle Consciousness

Paradox leads us to the third main aspect of reclaiming your wild feminine: embracing whole cycle consciousness. The crone within who has seen all the phases of the moon, all the seasons of the year. She who can hold the energy of the whole and the holy. She who understands that balance in this earthly human realm is not a still point in time, but one that can only be understood through the movement time. Like how the new moon can only be understood when it is seen as one point on a cycle that repeats itself over and over again. It is this consciousness that allows her to surrender fully to the wisdom of each phase, to deepen into it with every spiral while never losing sight of the whole. 

Embracing whole cycle consciousness ties her back into her body and the instinctual body of mother earth, as it is what Clarissa Pinkola Estes calls the “life/death/life cycle.” This is what makes embodied life possible. Life leads to death which in turn creates more life. Without the shedding of fall and the death of winter, spring would not be a possibility. Life feeds on death and death feeds life, if we allow it to. 

If you skip this step, surrendering to the wisdom of the wild feminine will be difficult. If you see life as linear, every season will feel final and you will fight and resist its medicine. You will not allow the death of fall and winter to create space for new life to blossom come spring. You will hold on when you most long to let go. You will remain trapped in black or white thinking, not realizing that it is both black and white. Night and day. Summer and winter and everything in between.