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Marion Woodman

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Famous Marion Woodman Quotes

“Standing alone today demands even more courage and strength than it did in former cultures. From infancy, children have been programmed to perform. Rather than living from their own needs and feelings, they learn to assess situations in order to please others. Without an inner core of certainty grounded in their own musculature, they lack the inner resources to stand alone. Pummelled by mass media and peer group pressures, their identity may be utterly absorbed by collective stereotypes. In the absence of adequate rites of passage, ad-men become the high priests of an initiation into the addictions of consumerism.”

MediaIndividualityConformityConsumerismIndependent ThinkingModern CultureConformism
Book:The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation
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“Once the question is in consciousness, the answer is constellated in the unconscious... the answer often lies in the unconscious waiting for the question to be consciously asked. [...] What has to be let go to make room for the transformations of energy that are ready to pour through the body-soul? I don't want to be here if I can't carry my own weight. As life asks new things of me, I feel I must pause, go inward, and ask, "What is my weight now? What are my new values? Who am I and not-I at this stage? Do I have the courage to live with this evolving me?”

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Book:Bone: Dying into Life
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“We are all unconsciously bound to the wheel of fortune. It goes round and round and we go blindly around on it until one day something happens that wakes us up, face to face with ourselves. What for years we could not or would not see is made visible. The unconscious is made answerable to consciousness. The Self demands a reckoning: the ego must recognize what it has long feared and rejected. Whether we grow or wither in that encounter depends on whether we cling to our ego's rigid standpoint or whether we choose to trust the Self and leap into the unknown.”

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Book:The Ravaged Bridegroom: Masculinity in Women
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“The word 'feminine,' as I understand it, has very little to do with gender, nor is woman the custodian of femininity. Both men and women are searching for their pregnant virgin. She is the part of us who is outcast, the part who comes to consciousness through going into darkness, mining our leaden darkness, until we bring her silver out.”

MenWomenConsciousnessGenderUnconsciousFeminineFemininity
Book:The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation
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“In the turmoil of our time, we are being called to a new order of reality. Working toward that consciousness, we suffer, but our suffering opens us to the wounds of the world and the love that can heal. It is our immediate task to relate to the emerging feminine whether she comes to us in dreams, in the loss of those we love, in body disease, or in ecological distress. Each of us in our own way is being Brough face to face with Her challenge.”

FeminismGoddessJungianGoddess Spirituality
Book:Leaving My Father's House: A Journey to Conscious Femininity
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“In the turmoil of our time, we are being called to a new order of reality. Working toward that consciousness, we suffer, but our suffering opens us to the wounds of the world and the love that can heal. It is our immediate task to relate to the emerging feminine whether she comes to us in dreams, in the loss of those we love, in body disease, or in ecological distress. Each of us in our own way is being brought face to face with Her challenge.”

FeminismJungian PsychologyGoddess Spirituality
Book:Leaving My Father's House: A Journey to Conscious Femininity
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“Conscious femininity...has to do with bringing the wisdom in nature to consciousness. For too long we have taken the instinctual Mother Goddess for granted. In our own bodies, in our Earth, we have assumed she would nourish and protect us. We have wallowed in sentimental images. Over centuries, we have forgotten her, reviled her, raped her. Now we will either integrate her laws into consciousness or we will die. There is an evolutionary process at work on our planet and we can only hope that out of this present death, sanity will come.”

FeminismJungian PsychologyEcofeminism
Book:Leaving My Father's House: A Journey to Conscious Femininity
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“Is it possible my lover is not the man I thought him to be? Does he see me at all? Am I projecting my own inner man onto him? Am I forcing him to take responsibility for my undeveloped talents? Am I treating my body as my mother treated hers? Am I thinking like my father? Where am I blindly reacting as they did? Where am I still reacting childishly? Is my anger coming from my gut or from my head? Is it feminine anger or animus anger? (Feminine anger cleanses; animus anger leaves me tense.) Guided by the response of the unconscious as revealed in dreams, we differentiate grain from grain, question after question, until one day we find our own authentic voice. ~Marion Woodman,The Pregnant Virgin, Page”

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Book:The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation
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“The confusion of spirit and body is quite understandable in a culture where spirit is concretized in magnificent skyscrapers, where cathedrals have become museums for tourists, where woman-flesh-devil are associated, and nature is raped for any deplorable excuse. Dieting with fierce will-power is the masculine route; dieting with love of her own nature is the feminine. Her only real hope is to care for her own body and experience it as the vessel through which her Self may be born.”

MayRealSelfBodyCareSpiritCultureBornDevilExcuseFleshConfusionFeminineMuseumsFierceMagnificentRoutesMasculineVesselTouristsWill PowerCathedralsDietingSkyscraper
Author:Marion Woodman
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“Their [those with eating disorders'] task is to rescue themselves from a drive that is destroying them. Food embodies the false values that their own bodies refuse to assimilate, by which I mean that their bodies become edemic, bloated, allergic, or resort to vomiting the poison out. The unconscious body, and certainly the conscious body, will not tolerate the negative mother.”

MeanBodyMotherValuesEatingConsciousNegativeTasksRefusePoisonUnconsciousDisorderDestroyingRescueTolerateResortsEating DisorderAllergicVomiting
Author:Marion Woodman
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“For the first time in history, men and women are seriously exploring the possibilities of relationships based on separateness rather than togetherness. Instead of clinging to Yahweh, to a rigid set of laws established by a jealous Father-God who will rant in fury if he is disobeyed, they are simply ignoring that ranting, walking away from it, and attempting to put their trust in the irrational. In other words, they are trying to live by the spirit.”

IfsMenTryingFirstsLawSpiritFatherPossibilityWalkingMen And WomenFirst TimeLive ByJealousIrrationalExploringAttemptingTogethernessFuryClingingWalking AwayRantSeparatenessYahweh
Book:Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride : a Psychological Study
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“The body has a wisdom of its own. However, slowly and circuitously that wisdom manifests, once it is experienced it is a foundation, a basis of knowing that gives confidence to the ego. To reach its wisdom requires absolute concentration: dropping the mind into the body, breathing into whatever is ready to be released, and allowing the process of expression until the negative dammed up energy is out, making room for the positive energy, genuine Light, to flood in.”

GivingMindBodyLightEnergyProcessRoomsKnowingReadyExpressionEgoNegativeBasesAbsolutesFoundationGenuineBreathingConcentrationAllowingFloodDroppingPositive Energy
Author:Marion Woodman
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“Soul, to me, means “embodied essence,” when we experience ourselves and others in our full humanity - part animal, part divine. Healing comes through embodiment of the soul. The soul in matter is what I think the feminine side of God is all about... The feminine soul is what grounds us; it loves and accepts us in our totality.”

ThinkingMeanSoulMatterHumanitySidesAnimalHealingAcceptingDivineEssenceFeminineTotalityEmbodimentDivine Healing
Author:Marion Woodman
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“Without an understanding of myth or religion, without an understanding of the relationship between destruction and creation, death and rebirth, the individual suffers the mysteries of life as meaningless mayhem alone.”

InspirationSufferingIndividualUnderstandingMysteryCreationDestructionAddictionMythMeaninglessRebirthMystery Of LifeMayhemDeath And Rebirth
Book:The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation
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“If you are living for an ideal and driving yourself as hard as you can to be perfect - at your job or as a mother or as a perfect wife - you lose the natural, slow rythmn of life. There's a rushing, trying to attain the ideal; the slower pace of the beat of the earth, the state where you simply are, is forgotten”

IfsTryingHardStatesEarthJobsSpiritualMotherLosesNaturalPerfectWifeBeatsIdealsForgottenDrivingPaceRushingSlower PacePerfect Wife
Author:Marion Woodman
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“Healing depends on listening with the inner ear - stopping the incessant blather, and listening. Fear keeps us chattering - fear that wells up from the past, fear of blurting out what we really fear, fear of future repercussions. It is our very fear of the future that distorts the now that could lead to a different future if we dared to be whole in the present.”

IfsWellsDifferentWholePastFearHealingListeningDependsFutureEarsStoppingInner VoiceDistortionListen To Your HeartPower Of NowRepercussionsChatterListen To YourselfIncessantPast Present FutureFear Of The FutureDeep ListeningBlather
Author:Marion Woodman
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