Once we begin to see these patterns of the Good Girl, the Rebel, and the Tyrant King, how do we dismantle them to find the wildness that we truly long for? 

 

The Good Girl believes that perfectionism and performance is the way to get out of the cage. If only she could finally be good enough and have everything “just so”, then she can relax and feel more free. 

 

The Rebel believes that fighting is the way out of the cage. But in her efforts to dethrone the Tyrant King, she often serves to further entrench him by utilizing the very strategies that she learned from him. 

 

We cannot utilize what the Tyrant King has taught us to dethrone him. That means we cannot fight or fawn our way out of the cage. We can longer comply or defy. We can’t strategize or analyze or problem-solve our way out. This is not a mental exercise.

 

The only way out is down. 

 

I imagine that there is this cage within us that lives in our minds. We try to dismantle it bar by bar by looking at our thoughts and logically trying to think our way out. We read all the books. We theoretically understand the dynamic. But what we don’t realize is that the cage has no bottom. It’s just earth beneath us. We have to dig down into the earth, into our bodies, and into the experiential world of the wild feminine to tend to our souls that have been buried. 

 

This is how we shift the dynamic of the Tyrant King; we make his consciousness obsolete. 

 

We transmute it. 

 

Digest it. 

 

Break it down and compost it so that when it rises, the absolute light of judgment is transformed to a more nuanced form of discernment that is responsive to the moment.

 

When we reclaim the buried feminine, the Goddess within, we begin to see the Tyrant King for what he really is: one-dimensional. He looks imposing from the front, but when you peek behind the curtain, you see there is not really much substance to him. He’s quite flimsy. A facade. And his worldview is entirely dependent on you not daring to ask questions as to why things are the way they are and if there might be other, more nourishing possibilities and ways of living. 

 

What does it mean to dig down?

 

The split between mind and body is often the first split that we need to heal, so we must find ways to climb back into our bodies. To learn to exist joyfully in your body, rather than thinking about your body as if you exist outside of it. Instead of judging your body for how she looks on the outside, you begin to wonder about how she feels on the inside. You bring the light of consciousness into matter. 

 

It means that you make loving space for all the feelings that you buried because they were not in line with your cultivated persona. Your anger. Your grief. Your tenderness. Your vulnerability. Your spirituality. Your practicality. You love your shadow back into wholeness, telling your frightened and defensive parts that, “Yes, even you belong and have a home within me; I will not banish you to the dungeon again”. 

 

It means that you learn to self-mother. Instead of your inner Tyrant King telling you what you should be doing, how you should be feeling, etc. your inner Wise & Wild Woman asks.

 

What do you need?

 

How are you feeling?

 

What would make you feel better?

 

And then holds loving space and a non-judgmental listening ear to hear the most true answer. It might be that your feet are cold and you need slippers. You might be thirsty. Tired. You might need a good ol’ fashioned temper tantrum to let the stagnant energy move out of your body. You might be hungry for beauty and soul and possibility. You might yearn to work with your hands, to make food, to grow a garden, to sit quietly in the sunshine listening to the leaves rustling in the trees. 

 

When we venture down and in, we allow the external world to fall away for a time in order to find that which is most true for us. We allow the daily duties to take a back seat so that we can lose ourselves to find ourselves in our soul dreams. We allow the constant stream of to do’s and shoulds in our minds to quiet, and the hardened personas that we wore like protective shells to begin to thaw out. So that we can become whole. Fully human. Real. 

 

So that we can know ourselves for the first time. 

 

So we can share of ourselves and one another in this short span of time we have here on earth.