The Revelation Project - Episodes Tagged with “Rites Of Passage”

Episode 135: Sarah Durham Wilson - Maiden to Mother: The Archetypal Journey to the Mature Feminine

Monica Rodgers | Revelation Media LLC — Wed, 13 Jul 2022 00:00:00 -0400

This past year I completed my 8-month rites of passage teacher training with Sarah Durham Wilson. It’s by far one of the most provocative and potent trainings I’ve ever done. It helped me truly understand the core wounds of women conditioned by patriarchy and how to assist women in healing those wounds.

In this episode, I have the honor of introducing you to my teacher and her work and celebrating with her the publication of her first book with Sounds True: Maiden To Mother, Unlocking our Archetypical Journey into The Mature Feminine.

When the goddess culture was stolen and buried, so were women’s rites of passage into our wild, intuitive femininity and maturity.

With Maiden to Mother, Sarah Durham Wilson excavates these ancient rites, guiding us through a sacred and crucial initiation from the immature Maiden into the archetypal Mother. This powerful, safe, compassionate, full-bloom feminine life force exists within all of us.

Becoming the Mother is every woman’s birthright—regardless of whether or not she raises children. The Mother is who we needed as children, who we were meant to be in this life, and who the world needs us to be now.

Sarah teaches that while pre-patriarchal cultures honored women’s natural cycles, today’s society infantilizes women, idolizing youthful traits such as “pretty, pleasing, and polite” to keep us distracted and dependent. While a healthy version of the Maiden will always remain part of us, there comes a time when we must no longer let her wounds and immaturity guide our lives. We must step into our mature, feminine fullness.

Through personal stories, rituals, teachings, and practices, Sarah helps women heal the Mother Wound and dismantle our internalized patriarchy with its false, constricting standards for the feminine so that we may live with authenticity and feast on the richness of life. “Midlife is not, as our culture proposes, where a woman’s power ends,” writes Wilson, “but where it really begins.”

In this episode, Sarah and I talk about:

Sarah’s diagnosis and her more recent understanding of how being undiagnosed has impacted her in her work.
Sarah losing her Mother to Cancer when she was still a teen and how her Mother’s life and death shaped her work and healing.
Activism as a potent medicine for what the world needs now, how she’s helping to dismantle racism through her work, and being a faithful ally to black, brown, and indigenous women, and the connection to the colonization and capitalistic trance of patriarchy.
White feminism and white fragility and how they are related to “The Wounded Maiden” archetype.
Why Climate Justice and Racial Justice are Married.
Inner misogyny, its impact, and how it becomes internalized in both men and women.
Making the rites of passage journey to the mature and why this is the work for all of us at this time.

Links:

Episode 130: Gina Clover - Our Lady of the Apocalypse

Monica Rodgers | Revelation Media LLC — Wed, 08 Jun 2022 00:00:00 -0400

Meet Gina Clover.

I adore her for sharing her mind and heart through her substack writing by challenging the dominant narrative in our culture around money, capitalism, and business as usual.
Basically, she’s not buying it when it comes to consumer culture and the insidious ways that it undermines the fabric of our society. Join us as we take a deep dive into the disguised gift of a personal apocalypse and how it disrupts the trance as well as the mind virus that infects our culture with the toxic myths of scarcity. This episode will either piss you off or have you cheering, but either way - your response is welcome. Sometimes we have to get messy and real in order to reveal and heal what’s been ailing us.

In this episode you’ll hear Gina’s exploration of Capitalism and how it’s intimately tied to other systems of oppression.
Gina’s future vision and her invitation to co-create a better world.
What is animism and how to distinguish it from spirituality + her endeavor to build a community where people can co-create a future, grieve the current reality, and honor what they most value.
The story of her own personal apocalypse and what it taught her.
Why she decided to call her substack “A Girl Has No Brand”
Learn what “collapse-aware” rites of passage mean and how it applies to where we are now.
Hear about what Gina describes as life’s invitations to radicalize. Why humor, collaboration, and community are the keys to the future.

Gina is an animist witch and rites of passage guide who centers her work around anticapitalism and ecological re-enchantment. She offers radical presence and compassion to those who want to move into the seasonal reality of their lives in full awareness that the world as we’ve known it is disintegrating, bringing a collapse-aware approach to moving into maturity and relational leadership. She believes we break the spell of modernity by doing this work together. Gina is also a plant medicine integration guide who loves to help people bring animist enchantment into their lives. In the secular world, Gina holds an undergraduate degree in Critical Theory from NYU, as well as an MFA from USC’s School of Cinematic Arts in Writing for Film and Television, and is a professional writer.

She currently lives in a 150-year-old Victorian Church in New York’s Hudson Valley, where she and her partner are creating a sanctuary called “Our Lady of the Apocalypse”, creating a community space for grief, skill-sharing, ritual, beauty, and unlearning, finding our way through the darkness together, awake in the burning forest of the world.

The ways in which the intertwining of capitalism and spirituality is actually at the very heart of the climate crisis and ecocide – the ecological crisis is a deeply “spiritual” crisis arising from the intentional erasure and destruction of ancestral traditions and animist relationships to land and earth– erasure and destruction that was very explicitly in the service of colonial capitalism. So what is needed in the face of these crises is a spiritual response/atonement/reconciliation, but perversely, almost all of what passes for spirituality right now occurs in a deeply capitalist, neoliberal framework that neuters and sublimates all spiritual impulse back into the patterns of hyperindividualism, commodification, consumption, and the society of the spectacle, perpetuating the root causes of the crisis instead of offering a potentially vital response to it.

Links:

Episode 86: Sarah Durham Wilson - Heartbreak as a Rite of Passage

Monica Rodgers | Revelation Media LLC — Wed, 04 Aug 2021 00:00:00 -0400

When I experienced my first dark night of the soul in 2008, it would have been so helpful to know that what I was experiencing was a rite of passage and a descent that would assist me in my ascent into greater awareness and consciousness.

What I was experiencing was a transition that had me face and heal my inner wounded maiden so that I could cross over into the mother archetype and change my life for the better.

When I stumbled upon Sarah’s work, I felt so deeply seen and nourished. In addition to the fact that she helped me understand my journey at a deeper level, she is also a wealth of information, teachings, and stories about the goddess, the divine feminine, the heroine's journey. She also mentors women on their own paths. What I love the most about Sarah is her potent story-telling and her raw authenticity. I hope you love listening as much as I loved interviewing her.

Sarah Durham Wilson is a women’s rites of passage leader and writer. She is the founder and creatrix of The MotherSpirit, which focuses on archetypal Mother work and resurrecting the rite of passage from Maiden to Mother. Sarah works with private clients and has taught courses and led retreats for hundreds of women over the past decade. She previously worked as an arts and music writer in New York City, writing for Rolling Stone, VH1, GQ, Vanity Fair, and Interview Magazines. In 2010, she launched the website DOITGIRL, which inspired women called to the work of the witch and priestess. She lives on Martha’s Vineyard with her daughter Avalon and her black cat, Odin.

Listen in as we explore:

Heartbreak as a rite of passage.
Why do women keep choosing the same type of men again and again - especially abusive or narcissistic men?
If we were raised in a patriarchal house, did we ever truly experience what love is?
Why does it feel like a death when you are rejected or left behind?
What is “the wounded maiden,” and why is she so thirsty for love and validation from the outside world?
What does it mean for us that we live in a matricidal and misogynistic culture?
Why is nature so essential to the unbecoming process and untangling from the clutches of patriarchal conditioning?
Why learning to love and accept ourselves in our full self-expression and for our whole selves is the deepest and most authentic love we will ever know.

Links: