Tami Simon: Welcome to Insights at the Edge produced by Sounds True. My name’s Tami Simon. I’m the founder of Sounds True. I’d love to take a moment to introduce you to the Sounds True Foundation. The goal of the Sounds True Foundation is to provide access and eliminate financial barriers to transformational education and resources such as teachings and trainings on mindfulness, emotional awareness, and self-compassion. If you’d like to learn more and join with us in our efforts, please visit SoundsTrueFoundation.org.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Sarah Durham Wilson. Sarah is a women’s rite-of-passage leader and writer. Her offerings are rooted in archetypal mother work and resurrecting the rite of passage from maiden to motherhood. Sarah has taught courses and led retreats for thousands of women over the past decade. She previously worked as an arts and music writer in New York City writing for Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and Interview Magazine. With Sounds True, Sarah Durham Wilson is the author of a new book. It’s called Maiden to Mother: Unlocking Our Archetypal Journey into the Mature Feminine.
Sarah is a gritty, real, and funny truthteller, someone who is here at this time to help us see how we may have internalized—and many of us have internalized—patriarchal values, and how we can free ourselves so we can put right at the center of our lives what we actually value the most. To do this in Sarah’s words, we have to move from the maiden, someone who’s waiting to be saved, to the archetypal mother, the inner mother, someone who leads and takes responsibility for creating a world that’s based on love. Here’s my conversation with Sarah Durham Wilson.
You’re a gifted writer, Sarah. In talking with you, one of the things I’ve learned is that when it came to putting your work out in the world, you searched inside for the idea that you could really stand behind, that would really be something that would come from your heart, that “This is true for me. This is what I want to share.” And that brought you to mapping out the archetypal journey from maiden to mother.
What I’d like to understand more, right at the beginning, and for you to share with our listeners is how this journey, the journey from maiden to mother is so central and important to you that you wanted this to be the focus of your first published book like this in the world.
Sarah Durham Wilson: Well, first of all, thank you, Tami Simon, for telling me that you think I’m a gifted writer. That was a really cool moment for me. I was telling Tami—she was my first rejection letter, and I treasured it because it just had her name on it.
TS: That was many years ago, before this particular Maiden to Mother book came into being.
SDW: Yes, this was almost a decade ago. And all I knew is CPE and Marion Woodman had been at that house, and I wasn’t going to stop knocking on their doors. But then they—
TS: That’s Clarissa Pinkola Estes and Marion Woodman, two beautiful writers. Yes, indeed.
SDW: I owe so much to the work of those women, and they came through this publishing house. So, this is a very big moment for me and this book.
I hadn’t grokked my life’s work yet. And my life’s work turns out to be rites of passage, something we’re so sorely missing in our culture. Around the time that actually Jamie Schwab—who is the associate publisher at Sounds True—and I started speaking, she reached out to me, which was also a dream come true, after taking a course called “Mystic School.” She said, “I want you to write a book.” And at the time I was part of the trend of the witch awakening and the priestess path. And I was helping spearhead that very much. But it wasn’t something that kept me alive and on fire in a sustainable way. The mother is nothing if not sustainable and self-sourced, right? The archetype of the mother. And I was still constantly burnt out, not finding myself, sort of taking stabs in the dark at who I was.
Also, around that time, I was leading a lot of retreats. And these retreats were centered around the idea of wild women—or even there was a quote going around about seven years ago, from the Dalai Lama, saying that Western women would save the world, which is an interesting concept. So, I’m having these retreats and I’m holding this intention. And what’s happening is sort of glorified sleepovers. We’re not moving the needle. Nothing’s really getting done externally. The conversations are very “I” focused. There’s a lot of cattiness. There was a lot of drama. There was a lot of reactivity, a lot of distraction from the dharma of what we are coming to do to heal ourselves in the world as women.
Around that time, I realized there’s something very wrong here. What was wrong was we were incredibly immature in our 30s. We were still little girls in women’s bodies, looking for someone outside of us to save us. I knew Marion had used the term, through her Jungian research, of the “mature feminine.” And she had worked with the mature feminine. She never really talked about the immature feminine. I knew I was so far from the mature feminine. I really like the great mother archetype. I must have been the immature feminine, and I was, because I started to write down all my traits that I saw on me personally. Then I wrote down the traits that I saw on the collective feminine. And they were these very girlish, kind of spoiled, privileged, fragile little girls that we would call women.
I started to look at the opposite of those traits and I was coming into traits like from fragile to resilient, from drama to dharma, from a focus on the outer beauty to a focus on inner beauty, all these. And I was starting to say, “I want that. I want to move in this direction.” The direction became a bridge with every step I took. And then I realized I have gone inside. I have met the dark mother. I have taken the Inanna journey. And I have learned to mother myself, which is to tend to my own cries, to hear myself so as to heal myself.
What happens when I come back up in the world, I have taken the dissent, the heroine’s journey. What happens when I ascend like Inanna in the myth of Inanna, come back to the surface, whole this way. I now have the tools to not just mother myself and care for the other, which is what the mother does. The word “mother” itself is I call a marsupial word. It fits the “other” into it. So now I can actually archetypally mother the world, by tending to it, by not turning away the way I used to turn away from my own cries. I can now face the pain of the world as well as my own.
That’s why I started to see this change in women taking the courses from little girls to women, from helpless to helpers, from hiding in fetal position to becoming really frontline feminine, like really at the front lines, really using their voice and their power to try to change things. That’s where I got hopeful. And that’s what kept me going. Here we are. I wrote the book.
TS: I want to make sure that everybody’s tracking with us and your use of the word “mother.” You say that we need to think about mother in a new way, that it’s about developing a type of inner mothering power, if you will. So talk about that, how it’s not necessarily you and your little baby.
SDW: At all. Right. OK. So almost like—my lovely village with this book kept saying, “Talk more about being Ava’s mom.” I was like, “That’s actually not the point here. The point here is that this is not biological. This is archetypal.” These were trials I had to go through if I was ever going to stand on my own two feet, if I was ever going to fight my own battles, if I was ever going to have confidence in myself, if I was ever going to move the needle in my tiny little corner of the world. These were warrior/archetypal mother, like great mother—and mothering as verb. I say in the book, it was one thing I had a physical mother; it’s an entirely other thing to have been mothered, mothering in the way of the way the great mother cares for us as her children, like a deep nurturing, a deep protection, and a deep love, unconditional, mother love in the way we think of Maa Durga, that she fights for what matters, she stands for the sacred, she takes action. She is a protectoress, right? These were the qualities I wanted to move into.
I have a background in New York City magazines and rock and roll and fashion and all this stuff. The only feminine I really saw modeled in media was the fragile, the pretty, pleasing, polite, the weak—and that’s unfortunately what I saw in my own home. I had to create an inner model of an inner, strong, warrior mother, the Durga-loving protectoress inside of myself. Then the work was to bring that to the outside.
It really is about this idea that in the patriarchy, we have triple mother wounds: we’ve been severed from the great Mother Earth; we’ve been severed from great Maa, as in mother goddess; and we’re often severed from our own mothers in the patriarchy, because our mothers have been patriarchalized as well, and their feminine spirit has been oppressed as well.
The healing of this triple mother wound for me is to come back into sort of a pre-patriarchal or a primordial feminine place.
TS: OK. So, look, you’ve already said a lot and I’m going to keep clarifying a few things. In terms of this triple mother wound, I think people probably are tracking with you when you’re talking about a wounded relationship with the earth. I think people also are probably tracking with you when you’re referring to a wounded relationship with our very own mothers who perhaps never really grew out of the maiden phase of their life. But what do you mean when you talk about a relationship with the goddess that is unhealed?
SDW: Well, as far as my personal story, the goddess was buried in my subconscious, but she was not in my consciousness growing up in a patriarchal household and patriarchal culture. I mean, the only goddess I ever got close to was when I worked at GQ and they would put Victoria’s Secret models on hoods of cars and call them goddesses. And they’re naked.
I never heard of the mother goddess, the great mother. There was an external father, God—he was always mad. You were always trying to make him happy. You were always calling him. He never picked up the phone. You weren’t even worthy of him answering, the whole thing. But inside, in church pews, I would feel something entirely different, with like the swell of the music and the movement and the prayer. I would remember the mother, but it would cause me to move my body and stuff in ways in which that I was shut down, punished.
I learned to punish the feelings of the mother very early, the sensuality and the roaring and the grief and all the big feelings of the feminine. The big energies of the feminine, which have been repressed for so long in us. There has been a very small way that the feminine can show up on the planet. Beneath that is a million other ways to express ourselves. You can talk about the way that these binary structures are falling. They’re falling for women and men too. We were put in these tiny boxes.
The good news is we’re all breaking out of those. And the way the feminine could show up was really the ways I’m talking about on the covers of magazines or the women we saw on the screens. And you usually had to be very pretty, very tiny, very pleasing, very polite, or else you were the bad woman. We got to be either good woman or a bad woman. And that was it. And the truth is we’re all of it.
The mother—the idea that there was there was a god also inside of us, the goddess, there was the idea that she was all of our mothers, that she created us, that she loves us, that she speaks inside of us, that we can have a relationship to her through our bodies and the earth. I never heard of that. Returning to hear the mother inside of our bodies, the mother in nature, is also very, very healing.
TS: In Maiden to Mother, you don’t write very much about being a mother of your own child, but you do write quite a lot about your own biological mother, your mother, and how her lack—this is my language—but her lack of development created wounds for you that were a big deal in terms of your own moving from immature feminine to mature femininity. And I’m wondering if you can share about that for all of us who were in some ways unmothered by our mothers and how that impacts our journey from maiden to mother.
SDW: Sure. Something I didn’t really say on the tail end of the last question, because I could talk about the goddess so much, is that when patriarchy took over and destroyed the goddess and really vilified her and vilified women, what we also lost when we lost goddess culture is we lost earth religion, rites of passage, the idea of our seasonal reality that we have, just like the great mother, we have a spring and then we have a summer and we have a fall. We stay in spring. The spring becomes plastic and stuck. We stay little girls. We don’t move into mother. And that’s to also due to the severance, the loss of the mother culture, the matriarchal culture.
As far as my mother never coming into these rites of passage that we’re talking about, her never coming into the full, her full bloom, her full summer, her full expression of herself, to truly offer the gifts her soul came here to give, the assignment caused her great pain and great sickness. If we stay in wounded maiden—think of something that’s dying to burst and bloom open, but it has to sort of stay hidden and small and in the bud. This sort of rot takes over, that, when it can’t, then the soul can’t be expressed. My mother, she couldn’t have her big dream of being a writer, because she got pregnant with myself and my sister very early on in New York City and had to move to a small town.
Here I was, the stealer of her unlived dreams, the thief of her unlived dreams, and also a mirror to her that she didn’t want to look into. Having not been mothered—only having had a mother herself—really having no idea also as a child herself still in maiden, how to be a mother and care for someone outside of her, she couldn’t even care for herself.
That’s why I got to a place that’s in the book where I say I’m no longer mad at my mother. I’m mad for her. I understand now, as her peer, the oppression she was under, the patriarchy she was programmed by. But it did take me having to say to my mother—and my mother died when I was young, 17. It took me having to say, “I love you. I see you. I know you did the best you could. But I’m going to take the reins now. It’s not your job anymore to love me. It’s mine. And I can do this. I have more tools than you. You did a wonderful job for what you could do.”
But she also needs a mother. She needs the great mother as well. The great mother is all of our mothers. It’s like all of us on the lap, our mothers’ mothers and their mothers; we all belong in the lap. And my mother never got the lap. She never got the self-sourcedness, the rootedness, the confidence, the faith, the fight. She never got that. She didn’t have the tools.
TS: A couple of times you’ve mentioned rites of passage and how important these are. For people who are like, “I kind of get this evolutionary developmental process that we need to go through as women from maiden to mother. But what rites of passage really help here?”
SDW: I’ve put together a rite of passage, because I couldn’t find it anywhere—necessity is the mother of invention. I did my best to build one, which is to say—a rite of passage is an initiation where you leave one world and enter another. You leave your maiden life behind and your consciousness of maiden life. You move into mother consciousness. You leave behind this wounded maiden or patriarchalized consciousness about who you are, what the feminine is, what you’re capable of, what your story is.
Then you come into this place. You go from this scarcity place of reactivity and fragility and self-defensiveness to this really rooted, open place where you yourself—I say a wounded maiden is always just waiting for the good to come. But as a mother, you are the good that comes. And that’s a really different place to walk into the world, as “I’m not waiting anymore. I’m in.”
TS: I guess what I’m curious about is—I can see how, [with] 20 years of good therapy and lots of inner development work and good friendship, how we can make a journey like this. Is there some set of rituals or ceremonies that are going to accelerate this process dramatically?
SDW: Yes.
TS: What are those rituals or ceremonies?
SDW: We start off with meeting the maiden. We start off with a meditation where we go in. And these exercises are in the book, and where you go in. I’m really proud of all the exercises in the book. Like Jamie really pushed me to do them. I was like, “Do people really want these?” Now I’m so proud of them, I’m really happy Jamie gave me that. She’s like, “Yes.”
The first one is where you go in and you’re guided by me or one of my maiden-to-mother teachers. But in the book, I guide you to meet the little girl inside, meet the little person inside, a little human who’s been waiting to be mothered for a very, very long time. And then you start the practice of hearing them and making reparations that they’ve been down there by themselves. Then you grow a relationship with them. And then you head into the underworld, and you start to do forgiveness and release and let go. And you start to alchemize the maiden pain into mother wisdom, which means you start to hold with your mother hands the greatest pains in this first act of your life. And you wait for the medicine to come. It’s Mary Oliver—that from the box of darkness, you wait for those gifts. And then the work is to, over and over, […] let the pain go and the medicine stay.
That pain of your maiden life is not in vain. It has become mother medicine to share. So, you’re down in the underworld and you’re doing that either through the book or with a practitioner. And then you meet the cherishing mother. And that’s this new—it’s the opposite of what Marion and Carl Jung would call the death mother. I’d call it the patriarchalized mother, but I use the term the death mother a lot. Marion Woodman has a great interview with, I think her name is Daniela Sieff because she didn’t quite get to write a book about the death mother, but I can’t do justice on the death mother the way Marion did. She talks about that before she died. She did that interview.
Then we start to meet a cherishing mother, which is the opposite of that patriarchal consciousness. It’s like the most loving, most nurturing. And we kind of like titrate how much love we can take in from that. Most of us unfortunately have never really felt that kind of mother love before. So we sort of practice going in and meeting the cherishing mother until it becomes closer and closer to how we talk to ourselves and how we talk to others. We say we invite the consciousness of the great mother in for our own thoughts towards ourselves and our thoughts and actions towards others as well. The work is to see ourselves through the great mother’s eyes, which is to see ourselves with an incredible amount of love.
Coming out of that, we move into the mother work. We learn to build an inner model of the mother we needed when we were little, the mother that our little maiden inside needs now, and the woman the worlds needs us to be now. And through that work, we build this model. And the work is to keep meeting her, keep talking to her, keep feeling into her, keep seeing her through these meditations.
Eventually, the last stage of that is to bring that model, bring that energy to the surface, to the world, that mother energy, where a woman walks into a room, not looking to get—she is in there to give. She’s not walking in a room, thinking about what other people are thinking. She’s walking through rooms, deeply attuned to how she’s feeling. She is not someone that is in a room to be seen and heard and to suck up all the attention. She’s there to hold things, to keep things safe, right? Safety is the number one thing of the great mother. She makes us feel safe in a terrifying world.
TS: I love that description of the whole arc. Absolutely loved it. I want to make sure I understand what you mean by the death mother or the patriarchal mother when you were referring to those two faces of mother energy.
SDW: Sure. Did you ever see Carrie by Steven King, the movie?
TS: Yes. Yes.
SDW: OK. Remember “they’re all going to laugh at you,” and the mother keeping the girl in the dark house? That’s death mother consciousness. “Don’t even go outside. Don’t even try. You’re a failure. They’re all going to laugh at you. Because you can never supersede your mother in death mother consciousness. You can never do better or be happier or get further or shine brighter.” Right? The mother’s all about keeping the maiden very, very small as an act of protection. Because remember that mother is like, “I’m doing this for your own good. The world is cruel.” Right? “Stay here. At least you’ll be safe. It’s not a life, but you’ll be safe.” Right? So that’s kind of death mother consciousness. “Don’t even try. They’re all going to laugh at you. You’re just going to fail.” It’s sort of what our mothers were feeling—the crushed spirit of being a woman in the patriarchy.
First of all, a patriarchalized mother doesn’t have the energy and the fortitude to be like the primordial femme witch, keeping the patriarchy out of the house. It just bleeds into everything. It becomes our consciousness. So quickly it becomes our programming.
That’s going on inside of us. That’s going on inside of the house. “That life is hard. Don’t even try. Stay small. You’ll be protected.”
There’s also this hatred of the child for stealing her love. They can say, “I love you,” but they look at you and you feel like they want you dead. It’s an “I’ll never be good enough. She’ll never approve of me.” It’s that.
Then you have the opposite consciousness, which is, “You’re perfect exactly the way you are. Every breath you take is a gift to the world. There is nothing you could do to make me stop loving you. I will always be here. I will pick you up when you fall down. Go after every dream. I’m right here. I love you.” It’s a very different consciousness to work with.
TS: In your own life, Sarah, do you at times find yourself in a maiden state of mind, for lack of a better word, and catch it for a moment and say, “Oh wait, I have the opportunity here to transform into more of this loving, strong mother.” I’ll use the example of this archetypal mother sitting on a throne. There’s royalty. Tell me like examples of when you’re like, “Ah, that’s a moment—that’s an invitation to move from maiden to mother.”
SDW: Men and money, Tami. Men and money. With money, I go back into my mother’s scarcity. I’m still there with it. There’s a lot of witch wound and healer scarcity out there. And there’s also, there’s the other side of that where people are inflating prices like crazy. That’s a whole different discussion, but I get scared around money.
I call it fetal. I go into fetal, which is to go back into the bud. The bloom is like “I’m part of the ecosystem, I’m giving of my gifts.” I really work with the idea of the mother tree deeply rooted and the fruit is falling effortlessly. And then the fruit’s feeding me and it’s feeding everyone […]. I usually get there back with money. I just give and I receive, and I give and receive, and it’s awesome.
But I catch myself and I have someone to help me, because I get really scared and really reactive and all the walls go up. Right? So that’s the bud. We’re going back in the bud.
My next book is about healing the wounded maiden in relationships so that she actually no longer seeks the patriarchal partner. I had my last bout of that.
TS: Yes, describe what that looks like to me.
SDW: Obsessive, dramatic, projecting my greatness onto him—because he has to be the rescuer, because my programming from when I was little was that all you need is a prince to come and save you. It’s still in there somewhere. When I’m not regulated, when I’m not doing my work, suddenly someone’s going to save me again. I mean the last one was last May, but that’s where I was. This person is going to save me from my life.
TS: What do you do when you catch that? Like, you catch it; you’re aware of it now.
SDW: Sure. And I have now a huge coven of mature, feminine women to be like, “Girl, you’re in maiden right now.” Like, “You’re really in your maiden.” Because when we first start our work, we say, “How does your wounded maiden present, Tami?” If you were to say, “She gets really reactive, or she gets really stressed,” then, as your friend one day, I would notice [that] your wounded maiden’s presenting. So I’d say, “Oh, it sounds like you could mother yourself now, Tami. It sounds like you should go out to nature for a little bit. It sounds like you’d should go back in for something, because you’re a bit in your wounded maiden.”
The main question we ask at the beginning of the work is, can you see every challenge or every trigger as a moment of “Am I going to be in maiden in this, or am I going to be in mother”? That’s when I just come back. I just come back to my lap. We say, when you come back to your own lap, where you sit, you take a breath, you come back to the great lap, right? You come back. You feel her behind you. You take a moment. With all the tools we use for the maiden, the mother, it becomes easier to feel her hands on your shoulders and centering back in, her lap behind you, waiting to see the vision of your inner mother again, and “What would my mother do here?” And then that really offers a chance for love to respond and our maturity to respond.
TS: When you say seeing the image of your inner mother, what does that image appear like to you?
SDW: She’s on this great golden throne and she has this long brown hair. She has a golden crown. There’s a moon on it. And she’s draped in red and white silk. And she speaks very—we’re so chatty now—but this primordial feminine, one word, two words, one look, and you know. It’s not very wordy. If I would go in there, she would just say probably one word or like two words, “Come back. Come back. Stop reaching out for all that love and validation and attention. Come back home. You can get it all here.” And it’s unconditional down here. Yes.
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All right. Let me ask you a personal question here. This is something, Sarah, I’ve thought a lot about, and I’ve never talked to with anybody, but this is the moment. I’m really interested in this whole notion of sitting on a throne and feeling like royalty and wearing a crown. I’m interested in it because this kind of imagery occurs to me. I feel it. I feel this sense of taking a royal seat and what that means.
TS: My question is, I’ve always wondered, is that just because we’ve been so influenced by monarchies historically, or is this something actually even deeper in our psyche than watching historical movies and things like that? What is it that’s so deep in us that has this notion of royalty and a crown and a throne? What do you think about that?
SDW: Well, it’s archetypal. For me, it’s the priestess work. For me, I can meet a woman and I can remember her from temple work. I can have a flash of sitting across from her. There’s a fire. I can see what details paints were on her face. I can see what colors she was wearing and kind of like her tribe, whatever her tribe was.
I think when women start to have these sort of visions or flashes of a seat like that, I think there is an archetype in all of us, in all the women that are attracted to this work. It’s so nice to hear that you also have that. I remember being a priestess, or I remember standing for what was sacred, or there’s nobility in me as child of god or child of goddess, that rises above what we see outside right now, which I call the patriarchal nightmare. There’s more of a dream of ritual, of sacredness, of leadership, of ceremony, of village hood.
I think crowns were ways we were adorned in ceremony, not so much “I was queen of England,” but it was something we did. We took ceremony quite seriously. And if you have any inklings of a past life, those will stick out. Those would be big moments for you.
TS: When you say I remember images of women from temple work, what is temple work?
SDW: When we gathered together to remember the great mother and do rituals and ceremonies and rites of passage in her honor. […] There’s a part in the rites-of-passage book, the Maiden to Mother book, that my dear friend Jessica helped me with, where she said, “You know what this needs? Describe a rite of passage. Describe a maiden-into-mother rite of passage back at the stones of Avebury.” It’s crazy how I just can put my pen to the paper and remember these ceremonies, remember what they felt like, because I remember Avalon very, very well, the isle of the goddess and that time.
Coming together and witnessing each other’s great rites of passage in their lives, whether you lost someone or you came of age, or you had a child, or you came into mastery of your gifts, or you went on a vision quest to find them and then you came back, and we all welcomed you home, or you got married, or whatever, you never did any of this alone. You were honored. We did put crowns on you. We did celebrate you, and your rites of passage as a human. You weren’t just here to be a cog in the wheel, in the wasteland of the machinery of capitalism. You were celebrated as a human, as an individual, as part of the village or the community or the collective. And your bones and soul would remember—when soul life mattered.
TS: I’m going to have to pick up on something you said relatively casually: “I do remember Avalon.” Tell me about that. What do you remember?
SDW: As many of us are going through, at midlife, these diagnoses around—as many women are—ADHD, low spectrum autism (I myself have had those diagnoses recently), looking back at patriarchal schooling and how damaging it was for so many of us, how traumatizing it was for so many of us, I began to—I had past life memories very early in my childhood. And they were very, very real to me. And I was very confused as to why I was here and why everybody was so fucking depressed. Excuse me.
TS: Say it like it is. Go for it.
SDW: I just looked around and I was like, “What?” There’s no magic. Everything seemed black and white and gray. The adults were all angry—and all the women were supposed to be goddesses. Where was the goddess in my mother? Just all of it. So, I disassociated really quick here.
When they’d send me to public school in my little plastic seat, “Everybody, shut the fuck up. Don’t think for yourself. Don’t move.” I would go back there to Avalon, and I would remember. So, I’d be sitting in these plastic chairs, and I’d be getting yelled at for having to go pee or asking a question. I was always in trouble for asking questions. I’d be there in this plastic chair, under these fluorescent lights, always in trouble. I would go back, and there’d be these rolling hills and these big stone walls. And we’d all be in circle on these green cliffs over the sea. We were learning about the earth.
There was no hierarchy in this circle. Everyone was equal. Every voice mattered. Everyone. No one had more goddess or god in them. And everyone had a remembrance that was just being stirred up by the teacher by asking questions. There was no, “I know more than you and you listen to me.” It was, she was asking us questions. That’s the way I teach, to help each woman know that, remember they already know. I’m not teaching them. I remember, we would learn about the site phases of the moon and the cycles of the earth and all the different animals and all the different herbs and all the different plants and all the different seasons. I just remember joy.
I remember how ecstatic it was to learn about this beautiful earth I lived on. Then I would get snapped back to reality and be sent out to the hall or to the principal for not paying attention.
TS: Why do you think these images of Avalon are so alive in you? For what purpose? For what sacred function now?
SDW: Tami, are we really doing this? OK.
TS: I’m doing it. We’re doing it.
SDW: I didn’t know I’d be fully on display today, but sure. In mother season, we say, “If not now, then when?” That’s the season of mother. I signed a contract in a ceremony at Avalon to come at this time on the planet and help women remember their primordial power, along with thousands of other incredible humans at this time doing their work. I said I would come help remember the old ways. And that’s why say I’m not new age—I’m old age. Yes. The ways of the old, wise women, the ways of the priestess, the ways of the witches, the ways of the healers. Yes. The medicine women.
TS: You have this interesting quote about witches that I picked up on from Maiden to Mother. “When women hide their witch, they are repressing their natural power.” So, tell me what it means for us not to hide our witch. What does that mean? Because we’re doing that now, you and me, Sarah. We’re not going to hide our witch.
SDW: Oh no, I know. It’s hard to with a tattoo of a moon on your forehead, hide your witch. Do you remember Practical Magic, the movie with Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman? I teach on that movie, because it was written by Alice Hoffman and there’s the archetype of the woman that’s playing the good girl, which is Sandra Bullock, and then there’s the woman that’s playing the bad witch, which is Nicole Kidman. And the truth is that there’s no such thing as just the good woman or just the bad witch. And there’s this moment where one of their very out witch aunts says, “It’s such a tragedy. You have all this power, and you don’t even use it,” to Sandra Bullock, who hides her witch.
Why that was so important to me—you have all this power and you don’t even use it. That line is so important to me because it’s how I see all women, basically that I work with. I see all this repressed power because women have learned to fear their witch or fear their power, because they’re afraid of people being afraid of them. They’re taught that you shouldn’t be spooky; you shouldn’t be scary. I have this line now that like, “Fuck pretty. I want to be terrifying.” You know? Pretty doesn’t do anybody any good.
The tragedy of my mother passing at 45—I’m 43, so my peer—was that she did repress her witch. She did repress witnessing her inner power, her feminine power. We’re talking about the alignment with body, the alignment with earth, the alignment with moon, but something far deeper when you really do the work to go in to hear the mother inside of you. When you leave this patriarchal consciousness and you go into the dark feminine, you go into the first layer of that, witch-hood. That was my awakening to something outside of what I was told was my power within the patriarchy. It was something that was very repressed within the patriarchy, and with the earth consciousness and within my body.
When that started to rise, my true feminine power started to rise. When my mom passed away and there were all these boxes in the attic that we had to move, we found boxes of runes, tarots, spell books that she hid away. I always wondered if she had really let that part of her witch out. What could have happened—because a witch is a healer, a witch is a priestess, a witch is a goddess, a witch is a powerful woman and one who learns how to become their own healer and their own guide and their own mother—I just wonder what could have happened if she had started truly down that path of power.
TS: Sarah, your work in Maiden to Mother is helping women make this journey as you’ve described here in this conversation. One of the things that I was reflecting on is it seems like in a way this would be a natural maturation process, but somehow in our time, in our patriarchal culture, it’s interrupted. It doesn’t happen naturally unless we do all of this inner work. How do you understand that?
SDW: Well, just like it’s one thing to have had a mother and it’s another thing to have been mothered, it’s one thing to age and it’s another thing to mature. Maturity takes the inner work. The inner work isn’t something that’s touted in our culture. We are completely guided to focus on money and materialism and stuff and how we look and how many followers we have. That’s not a path to maturation.
Unfortunately, you will have many invitations into the underworld to grieve in this life, but unfortunately, also many people are very good at refusing those invitations and numbing to those invitations. But if you accept the invitation into your grief, into the underworld to meet the dark goddess, dark mother, that’s where—if you think about the Inanna journey where she is killed by her dark sister, Ereshkigal, she wants Ereshkigal to kill her—we’re asking for the dark feminine to kill off our patriarchal parts that are killing us. Those are the immaturity.
I mean, look at who’s running the world—toddlers that are calling themselves men playing with guns and fighting over stuff, oil, money. That is probably … that’s someone who’s not been initiated. They have not met what matters—that’s patriarchal conditioning to think that money and materials matter more than life. Mother consciousness is, life is the most important.
When you go down into that grief and meet the dark mother through this feminine sort of work, she tells you what matters, she prioritizes your life. You meet what matters down there, which for me is the earth and children. I was in my midlife crisis last year. I was brought to my knees. [I was] very, very sick with COVID and met the black Madonna, the great dark mother, and met what matters to me.
TS: Tell me what you actually experienced when you say, “I met the black Madonna.” Tell me what happened.
SDW: Sure. I forget to explain myself, thank you. To me, what matters to become initiated—usually the invitation is written by some sort of loss, loss of health, loss of hope, loss of a dream, loss of youth, loss of the maiden, loss of safety. Mine was loss of health. It was also my midlife crisis. So, I was going to be invited to a big underworld journey.
When I was very, very sick with COVID, I found it to be an incredibly dark, shamanic-like experience; an energy was in the room with me when I was very sick, holding my little girl with no help. I knew it as the black Madonna. Again, this is mother-tongue language coined by Maureen Murdock; this is soul speak. I can’t prove this to you. I can’t weigh it. I can’t put it on a PowerPoint presentation. But I was told I was with the black Madonna. And I began to learn about her as the grief of the earth. If you look at the black Madonna, she’s always centering a child, always on her lap.
I met her as the great mother of Isis, great mother of Kali, great mother of Magdalene. I met her as the mother of my lineage. It changed my life even more, because we talk about going through a ring of fire with teeth in the underworld where it gnaws off everything that you can’t take with you on your soul journey that’s weighing you down or is a veil between you and your truth.
TS: What did she take from you?
SDW: I was still conflating spirituality and money. I still had a lot of patriarchy in my business mindset. I was still sort of pulled into this kind of celebrity idea. When I rose from that sick bed, I was like, “None of this matters. We’re on the wrong track.” When I talk about getting back on track, I talk about something called the mother river—my mother river is children and the earth. And I know when I get lost from that. When I get lost from that, I just have to stop, like I’m lost in any forest and find the water again and get it back to what matters to me.
I had gotten off track again with people building this big team and everyone needed more money and we needed to just make more money. And I had lost my service. I was more back into the lip service and lessened to the true service. I was back into “I have to make all this money.” [But] I got whittled down, back to the bone of why I’m here, and it’s been a relief.
TS: [What would you say] to someone who’s listening who says, “I’m in some type of journey. I might not have used the language underworld, but it’s clear that there are some patriarchal values that I’ve internalized that are being stripped from me right now. I’m in some kind of underworld journey.” What would you say to them that might be helpful as they passage hopefully through and come out the other side?
SDW: Sure. I mean, when we said like eight years ago that we were having these retreats and we were using that Dalai Lama quote about Western women saving the world, the joke for me now is Western women will save their world when and if they unlearn their capitalism, their ableism, their misogyny, basically their patriarchy. It does feel like you are being on the operating table in the underworld, because what is being stripped from you is over and over is all this oppression, all these lies, all these veils about what’s true.
If someone’s on the underworld, I always say, like Winston Churchill, “If you’re going through hell, keep going,” and to start to look for signs of light. Like here we are in the Northern Hemisphere and my teacher training is just moving out of the underworld. And it’s when you start to see signs of spring, when you start to see signs of hope, when you feel that little sliver of the new moon starting to awaken you after it’s been dark for so long, the lights in the cave start cracking through.
We make it through the underworld by surrendering. We never make it by fighting it or denying it. So, she knows she’s in the underworld. She can ask for more help. What else can I do? What else do I need to see? Because that dark mother down there, she doesn’t want to kill you. She just wants to kill what’s killing you. She needs to show you what you can’t see. That’s why you’re down there. That’s why you’ve gotten so slow. You can’t change your life in the patriarchal pace. You can only change it when something stops you in your tracks and you’re brought down to hear and to see and to listen.
She loves you and she wants you to see what’s holding you back. And the way to get out of the underworld is to give up what’s killing you, right?
TS: Yes. Now here’s a quote from Maiden to Mother. You write, “The mother is the throne. She’s the lap of humanity. The maiden rests on her lap. The crone is at her back whispering wise woman wisdom in her ear.” I wanted to hear a little bit about the crone, because here you are—you’re coming into this cherishing mother, beautiful giving energy, and yet you have some intuitions about the presence of a crone figure, even now in your life.
SDW: Yes. I’m so honored. So, in “maiden” we needed mothers and we didn’t have them, right? But now in “mother,” we can mother these maidens. We can help them. We can bring them through. But who do mothers look to? We’re oriented toward crone, right? Well, Jane Hardwicke Collings in Australia has introduced a third, which makes a third season in a woman’s life, which makes a lot of sense because of fall. Crone kind of skips straight to winter. Unfortunately, Jane has titled it “maga”—and that’s a very triggering word. So, you can call it “empress” if you like, but it’s between mother and crone.
I was just rereading Barbara Walker quotes—she wrote a great book called The Crone—this morning. And Marion Woodman said by the time she got to Crone, the “truth just sang from her bones.” And feel that. I feel a rage for the planet. I feel a rage for innocent creatures and innocent people. And I know that’s the crone because she just doesn’t give a fuck. It’s not about being liked. It’s not about pleasing. It’s that she’s at the door to the next world. And she’s going to do that. Alan Arkin has this great quote of about, people kind of say what matters right as they’re leaving.
TS: Right.
SDW: Also, right on the death bed. But it’s kind of like deathbed wisdom walking. Not that a crone is on her deathbed, but it’s got that power, that punch that this is—“I don’t care what anyone thinks. I’m going to say my truth so that I have emptied myself before I leave.” It’s the emptying of the crone, of the wisdom and the release and it’s the offering it back as she comes back to the earth. Everything is whittled down into like truth bullets.
I feel her in me. I look to her. “What will make you proud? What will make you happy? In this moment, what do you want me to do so you can be at peace?” And, Tami, the answer is always, “Say the thing, say the thing, disrupt.”
TS: You’ve worked with so many women now on this journey of Maiden to Mother, with the crone whispering wise woman wisdom from behind. What do you see as the biggest obstacles? What are the things where it’s like, “You know, this is why the people stay stuck”? What is it?
SDW: I clung to maiden until I was 38, because the heaviness of the responsibility. Kind of the biggest teaching in Maiden to Mother, if there’s any takeaway, is that, in wounded maiden, we react. In mother, we respond. I think that responsibility, the heaviness, and even there’s the crone is that the mother was a crone because she has this orbit around her, this ecosystem that if she’s not well, the ecosystem isn’t well. She has to keep herself so nurtured and self-sourced to keep the ecosystem. And that’s a lot of responsibility.
I was still praying someone was going to come save me. When my ex fiancée left me before our wedding, he said, “Don’t worry. You’re still pretty enough someone will want to marry you.” And I was like, “You think? Like, someone’ll come take this off the shelf before it isn’t patriarchally viable?” Like Amy Schumer’s like last fuckable day. “They’ll get me for my last fuckable day. They might buy me on sale—but they’ll still take me?” Just really waiting because I never seen anyone go frontline in their life. Do the work. Stand up. I didn’t have anybody in my community, any feminine in my community. I had no durgas, no mothers archetypally speaking.
I think of that. I think of frontline feminine. I think of being at the front lines of your life. And that’s scary for someone who’s been in the fetal position her whole life, to stand up and move to the front lines. But I know that is why we are all hungry for the village, hungry for the community, because you can’t do this alone. You have to see someone like me. My whole point in my book is—I was an addict, my fiancé walked away from me, I was a mess, and I did it. I want to be that person, like, “If I can do it, you guys, trust me.”
That’s why I tell so many stories all the time about where I was, because now I can champion that you can change it any chance you get. I’m a living example. I stand by this. I see women go from maiden to mother in front of my eyes all the time. And it is radical, and it is awesome.
TS: I’ve so enjoyed talking with you, Sarah. You just, the word that comes to me—it’s a funny word—is you’re a hoot. But you’re also a truthteller, a brave soul, a beautiful writer, and someone who is willing to stand and be a responsible voice in a world that needs real loving, powerful, wise mother energy. So, thank you.
I’ve been speaking with Sarah Durham Wilson. She’s the author of a beautiful new book, Maiden to Mother: Unlocking Our Archetypal Journey into the Mature Feminine. Thank you so much. Sounds True: waking up the world.
SDW: Thank you, Tami.
TS: Thanks for listening to Insights at the Edge. You can read a full transcript of today’s interview at Resources.SoundsTrue.com/Podcast. That’s Resources.SoundsTrue.com/Podcast. If you’re interested, hit the Subscribe button in your podcast app. If you feel inspired, head to iTunes and leave Insights at the Edge a review. I absolutely love getting your feedback and being connected. Sounds True: waking up the world.
