Reflections on my Feminine Integration Journey Throughout the Years

[Emerald]

I made a post the other day that it was my last post on this forum because I just get into a ton of pointless debates. And I shared publicly that it's my last post because I thought that to be my best bet for actually honoring that boundary of mine.

But I feel like I need a place to write that isn't a place that I've cultivated for my own online presence. It has to be a space managed by someone else, where I'm not in the leadership position. 

So, I'm going back on what I said the other day. But I am still sticking to my boundary that I will not engage in little pointless debates or engage in the rest of the forum.

I'm just going to use this space as a means to write about my Feminine integration journey throughout the years... as I haven't actually shared a lot about it in any context.

But I spent 11 years of my life deep in the belly of the beast of the millennias-long species-wide zeitgeist of resistance to the Feminine, facing into many very difficult and hard-to swallow realities of being a Feminine human being and a woman... under which are buried the keys to long-repressed Feminine power.

So, if you're interested in reading my reflections about my journey, feel free to do so.

But I won't be replying back to anyone who argues. This is a space for those who genuinely want to learn about the Feminine from someone who has had a very long and varied epic journey of integration with the Feminine... beginning with very deep Feminine repression.

[Natasha Tori Maru]

Say the word and I am happy to moderate this journal with stricter standards for boundaries.

I am happy you have a space to express here!

Looking forward to the insights 

[Emerald]

The Initiation - 2008

To give some quick context for the initiation of my journey into the Feminine at the age of 19 (in 2008), it's important to understand a few things...

• From age 10 to age 19, I identified as female on the outside and male on the inside (not in a trans way)... and I was very proud of that. I had a ton of internalized misogyny. And I considered myself to be very different than and better than other women (even though I identified myself as non-judgmental).
• At this time, I didn't believe that Masculinity and Femininity were real. I believed they were purely social constructs... and I saw Masculine traits as energetically-neutral positive traits and I saw Feminine traits as energetically-neutral negative or unimportant traits. I was anti-Feminist but pro gender equality... but I was very anti-Feminine, because I saw Feminine-principled traits as negative.
• The only Feminine trait that I valued was physical beauty. But I saw all other Feminine traits as inferior, uninteresting, and shallow.

So, with that contextual backdrop in mind, I'll share the story of my initiation into the Feminine.

At age 19, I was sleeping in my dorm room at college... and I had a very powerful dream, which I'll share below...

"I am in a large furniture store with hundreds (maybe thousands) of cubicles that are set up to look just like the interiors of rooms. And each cubicle is about the size of a room and is fully furnished like a room.

I enter one of the cubicles that is decorated like a Victorian-era psychologist's office, like Sigmund Freud. (Note: This is about 4 years before I started getting interested in Jungian psychology)

Once I enter this cubicle, it's as though it's not a cubicle anymore. It's a regular room now. And it looks just like a Victorian-era psychologist's office.

I sit down on a high backed chair that matches the aesthetics of the room. And I am just sitting there for a time.

Then, a tall beautiful woman appears in the doorway. She's wearing a tight red business dress, and she has an hourglass figure. She has medium brown skin and looks like she might be Native American. Her black hair is tied up very tightly in a very neat bun on the top of her head. She is wearing high heals and her demeanor is sharp and powerful like a femme fatale from a film noir movie.

When I see her, I am immediately hypnotized by her beauty. I am in a stupor.

As I sit there with my eyes transfixed on her, she walks across the room and stands directly behind the chair I'm sitting on. 

She is looking down at me with a neutral but mildly seductive expression on her face. 

And I am looking up at her from the chair, completely and utterly enthralled at her presence and the fact that she's looking at me.

We are there looking into each other's eyes for a minute.

Then with a silvery deep voice, she asks me, "Are you ready?"

And I am so ready to do whatever she wants me to do. I am thinking we're going to become romantic, and I feel very desperate for it.

So, I immediately and desperately whisper out the word, "Yes"

Then, there is a 5-second pause, and she calmly exhales. This pause feels like a calm before the storm.

Then, all of a sudden, she inhales quickly and violently. And the inhale makes an other-worldly sound, the strength of a tornado's suction.

And in that same moment of the inhale, it sucks away all her beauty. And she transforms into an ancient hag who looks to be 1000 years old.

Her eyes are now empty black sockets. Her skin is thin, gray, and transparent, and I can see her skull through her skin. Her mouth is a gaping black hole that looks like a hole sloppily torn in a piece of discolored gray fabric. She is bald except for several strands of wiry gray hair that pokes out from random areas on her head.

The space around her is all dark.

Then, the gaping black hole of her mouth grows wider and wider and wider until it becomes the entire space around me. I am in her mouth being devoured by her.

It's like I've been sucked into a void and I can viscerally feel myself floating in the nothingness. It feels like a sleep paralysis/OBE experience, even though it is a dream.

Eventually, I move through the void... and I am deposited in my childhood kitchen. I begin looking under the cabinets where the Tupperware is kept."

This dream was very vivid, and I even drew a picture of the hag after I had the dream.

This was about 6-7 months before my first experience of the Feminine that I had repressed, which happened in my first medicine journey. 

In retrospect, I feel the dream was an initiation into the Feminine. And it needed to use a beautiful woman to lure me in and get me to agree to the journey... as beauty was the only thing I valued about the Feminine at the time.

I was secretly obsessed with beauty... but hid it to avoid being like other women. And I would sometimes do things to make myself less attractive on purpose in order to come across as though I don't care that much about beauty.

I also think the rather violent way that the dream happened was because the Feminine in myself (and perhaps more generally) was angry at me for my rejection of it. 

Then, another piece of context for a future experience that happened 11 years later...

I participated in an Ayahuasca ceremony. And towards the end of my ceremony when there were still some hallucinations but not too intense, one of the female facilitators came up to me and held my hand.

And it was clear to me in that state, that (on some level of reality) she was my midwife and that I was giving birth to a new world.

She was probably around 40 years old. And I looked at her face... and she kept toggling back and forth between age 20 and age 60.

And she said, "That's it. You made it through." And her human grounded self just meant that I made it through my Ayahuasca journey.

But on another layer of reality, I knew then that I had been birthed back out by the hag that swallowed me 11 years prior to that. And she was now showing up in a more integrated form as this midwife who's helping me birth a new world.

I'll tell more about that experience in later entries.

These are more dreams and medicine journey experiences with the Feminine, but I also have more day-to-day experience stories that connect to my journey.

I'll write more later.

Edited 4 hours ago by Emerald

[Emerald]

43 minutes ago, Natasha Tori Maru said:

Say the word and I am happy to moderate this journal with stricter standards for boundaries.

I am happy you have a space to express here!

Looking forward to the insights 

Thank you!