The Feminine Mysteries- Damsel

The Longing to Saved

I am always in admiration of women and our remarkable capacity to hold so much, to tend to multiple projects, responsibilities, and demands, and to relate across vast places of difference. Women carry such incredible strength and depth and I see this capacity in myself, I hold responsibilities and roles with a level of ease and capability. I also recognise a part of me that is waiting to be saved by someone.

and If I’m being fully honest here…

By a man.

This part of me feels like an ancient, primal memory, perhaps from a time when women relied on men for protection, when survival depended on their strength. When I tune into this place within, she is in a state of suspended waiting, as if I am living my life fully on the surface, but some part of me is quietly observing, scanning the horizon for masculine reinforcement.

I have wondered if this experience reflects a recognition of the gender divide, incarnating in a female body, while some part of my soul, beyond gender, searches for the counterpart to feel whole. I am still pondering this possibility.

During my Magdalene trainings, I have asked women: “What is your greatest fear?” One of the most common answers is the fear of dying alone, of facing the end of life without companionship. There are many places within my psyche that need my constant and conscious awareness, it is so easy to fall into the longing of the romantic dream, the longing to be cared for or for someone to lead my life for me.

I have had many moments of telling these parts

Nobody is coming.

Nobody on the outside is coming to save you.

Gosh, this was hard to digest. I met walls of grief, ancient grief, when I allowed this truth to sink in. There is something profoundly tender about having a womb and about the deep receptivity woven into us. The feminine body and psyche are attuned to a frequency of openness, gestation and receptivity, far beyond the literal experience of pregnancy. The womb is also a site of immense potency, a centre of creation, transformation, and generative energy. But the tenderness I speak of is something more subtle: it is the part within us that, like the full-bodied, pregnant Empress in the Tarot, that longs to rest with the seed of life growing quietly inside. It is the deep, instinctual desire to turn inward, to draw all energy toward the fertile darkness, to tend to the hidden, unfolding life within.

To fully inhabit this place, we need support. We need someone or some container to hold the outer world so that we can surrender safely. tending the fire, providing resources, and maintaining safety. I feel this may be the deeper layer beneath our longing to be saved. It is the longing to be allowed to sink inward,

into the womb space of myself, To retreat into the depths without worrying that something outside will collapse if I let go. There is a part of me that wish someone could create that space for me, someone who stands at the edges of my world, guarding the perimeter and the practicalities.

“Go. Rest. I’ve got everything out here.” But I also cannot expect any outer masculine presence to save me from my own patterns of over-functioning, over-responsibility, and inner overdrive.

So the journey I am currently making is one where I am becoming my own guardian and truly deciding that I have myself.

I am attempting to be the one who watches my own edges stay in tune with the ebbs and flows of my own cyclical nature and prioritising the space of my inner life.