In this 4-part series I’m exploring the connections between your female creativity, your power and your understanding of the role your animus (your masculine energy) plays in your psyche. And how these are vital for your business.

Here in Part 2, I talk about how you can recognize if you’re drinking from a poisoned stream. 

I invite you to read Part 1, Creativity – the River of Life for a Woman Entrepreneur, where I shared La Llorona, an ancient story about how the river of life can become the river of death. 

This series is coming from Clear Water: Nourishing the Creative Life, chapter 10 of Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, an internationally renowned Jungian psychotherapist, scholar, storyteller, and poet.

I encourage you to read that first article to set the stage for this one.

Beware: 8 Signs You’re Being Poisoned – For Women Entrepreneurs

Sometimes it’s difficult to see that we’re drinking from a polluted stream. The effects of it blind us and we grope around in the dark, trying to find the light. We feel like “something” has a hold of us or is stopping us but we just can’t seem to see what it is.

The life force water of feminine creativity is pure and clean as it flows into us.

Pollution comes in the form of negating our value, our worth. While this may have started with something that happened to us from the outside, often as children, we keep it going through our internal beliefs.

We have these filters in place, viruses in our operating systems that color and distort what the river looks like, what our possibilities are, what our capabilities are. These take the form of I’m not good enough, I’m a fake, I’ll never amount to anything, I don’t deserve it … on and on and on. The toxic mind chatter residue from our childhood wounding.

8 signs the river is polluted

1. You feel sluggish with no energy – moving from your office chair to the couch is your exercise for the day. You’re easily distracted. Trying to fill up the hole in your soul with food, shopping, numbingly “safe” routines.
2. Ideas are easy, but they’re scattered and disorganized. There’s no cohesion of thought. You try a little of this and a little of that. ‘I need to build up my email list. Wait… no I should get involved with some Facebook groups first… Oh yeah, there’s that new program I want to sign up for on how to give talks to find clients.’ On and on it goes. Spinning from one thing to the next.
3. “Sometimes the problems issue from a woman’s naïveté’ about her own extroversion: She thinks that by making a few motions in the outer world, she has really done something.” You send out one email to your list and then get bummed out no one responded and you don’t follow up further.
4. “Sometimes a woman trips over her own introversion and wants to simply wish things into being; she may think that just thinking the idea is good enough, and there need be no outer manifestation.” This is the wishing, waiting, and hoping syndrome that plagues many of us. Me included.
5. Others might attack your ideas before they have a chance to grow. In the early stages of creating, be careful who you share them with. Sometimes they need to incubate in the dark for awhile. And then tended with nurturing care before planting in full sun.
6. Or, your Inner Critic voices are doing an excellent job of attacking you from the inside… letting you know in great detail all the reasons why this will fail. You’re too old, not good enough, don’t know enough, too young, you’ve tried this before and it didn’t work so why bother, no one wants to hear what you have to say anyway. You know the litany of your own voices.
7. You are the master of creative excuses as to why your business is not moving forward. ‘I just don’t know who to call, what to say, what to do, if I only had that super duper program on my computer to keep everything organized… then I’d be set… I just need to finish my certification first.’
8. All your other responsibilities come first – you put everyone else’s agenda before yours. Your spouse, kids, family, friends… you always seem to be last on the list of priorities.

Do any of those sound or feel familiar?

This is Truly Sacred Soul Retrieval Work

You know, I read and hear from different teachers that the way to go is to drop all of our stories and live in the present moment. That we can NEVER “figure it out” so don’t even go there. That I should “think positive” and all will be well. That dwelling on this “negative past stuff” is the recipe for disappointment and failure. And I agree with that up to a point.

But then I read the following passage from this chapter and I feel hit on the head with a 2×4. The awareness of being in the state of feminine woundedness, and seeing the consequences of that in my business and life, stuns me.

I see how long I’ve been under this spell of devaluing my gifts even as I do everything I can think of to claim and honor them.

As I was writing this I realized I am doing soul retrieval work here. It is vital to my being. And I know I am not alone. That retrieving my wounded masculine self is sacred work. And by doing that, I am also healing the feminine. It’s not about “healing’ in the sense of getting rid of something like the flu. It’s about integrating – a welcoming home to myself this sacred masculine part of me that feels like it was very lost for a very long time.

And only as that soulful integration takes place, can I really be in Present Moment Joy.

What do you think about this passage from Dr. Estés?
Does it ring true for you too?

“During a poisoned or stalled creation, a woman gives the beautiful soul-self ‘pretend eating.’ She tries to disregard the condition of the animus. So she throws a little workshop to it here and drops a little reading time for it there. But in the end, this has no substance. The woman is kidding no one but herself.

So when this river dies, it is without its flow, without its life force. The Hindus say that without Shakti, the personified feminine life force, Shiva, who encompasses the ability to act, becomes a corpse. She is the life energy that animates the male principle, and the male principle in turn animates action in the world.

The destructive hidalgo in the tale (the male who polluted the river) is a deep but immediately recognizable part of a wounded woman. He is her animus, who causes her to struggle, not with creating – often she cannot even get to that point – but rather with her gaining a clear permission, a solid inner support system to create at will.

A healthy animus is meant to involve himself with the work of the river, and this is as it should be. Well integrated, he is the helper, watching to see if anything need be done. But in the La Llorona story, the animus is one-sided; he takes over, prevents vital new life and insists on dominating the life of the psyche.

When a malignant animus gains such power, a woman may denigrate her own work, or else, at the other extreme, attempt to fake real work. When any of these take place, a woman has fewer and fewer creative options. The animus gains power to push the woman around, denigrates her work, thereby inauthenticating it in one way or another. He does this by ruining the river.”

During the wake-up call I had in an energy medicine session a few months ago, this is the same message I got but had no context for it yet. That the primary male aspect I had operating in me was this out-of-control, greedy, dominating part of his energy.

A Return to Feminine Power is NOT Enough

We turn on the news and feel So Sure that we need to return to the feminine. I held onto that belief for close to 45 years! Focusing my energy and commitment to female power, feminine strength, the female voice.

It Is Not Enough.

It’s time to turn and face the part we felt wounded us. To make peace with it and literally welcome it back into our psyche.

In that integration of our Sacred Masculine with our Sacred Feminine, we can find unity within and finally stand in our full power in each moment of now.

Giving thanks and credit to:

Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D., author of Women Who Run With the Wolves; Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype, ©1992, 1995 Ballantine Books

All “  “ quotes from this article are from pages 303-309.

In Part 3, you’ll see the way through this dilemma. Yes, you as the woman must clean up the river, but you cannot do it alone. And this is where we so often got lost along the way. Find out who your partner is in the river clean up campaign in Part 3.

And finally, in Part 4 we’ll zero in on the ways we can reclaim the river and reconnect to our deep Wild Woman river spirit.

Please share your feelings and thoughts in the Comments below.

This article was first posted on Oct 18, 2017 in Linda Kaun ~ The Power of You