Womb Awakening: Coming Home to My Body's Wisdom

*This piece sits alongside my reflections on the Mother Wound and the Mother Archetype — but it goes further back, to where that whole journey actually began: with my womb, and with learning to read my menstrual cycle as a map rather than an inconvenience. It's also the foundation for what comes next in this series: pieces on the Maiden, the Queen, and the Crone — the other three archetypes that live within every woman's cycle.*

Where It Started

In 2011, while I was living in China, a woman recommended a novel to me — *The Red Tent* by Anita Diamant. I was completely captivated. The image of women gathering together to menstruate, in community, activated something deep in me. A longing for sisterhood I hadn't known I was carrying.

It would take years before that longing turned into anything concrete. In 2018, I was living with an autoimmune condition and searching for ways to heal. I had already tried a lot — psychotherapy, which didn't really move the needle for me; family constellation work, which helped but couldn't be a daily practice; Buddhist meditation, which at first even sharpened my inner critic rather than quieting it, because I started judging myself for having "too many thoughts."

In 2019, I saw an ad on Facebook for a three-day red tent gathering in Switzerland. I signed up immediately, with no real idea what I was walking into — just a pull I couldn't explain. Those three days changed my life. The two facilitators held the space with a warmth that told my whole system, instantly: *you're home*. We did embodiment work, meditation, practices that connected us to the Goddess and to the archetypes, and I learned, for the first time, what it actually meant to work with my womb.

On one of those days, we watched a documentary called "Things we don't talk about: Women's stories from the Red Tent". There's a scene where an older woman shares her story and is then laid gently in the center of the circle, held and stroked by the other women. I could feel how much she needed exactly that — to be received, understood, held by her sisters. Sharing afterward how deeply that scene moved me, I was in tears. One of the facilitators simply said: "come, lie in my lap." I could barely believe what I was being offered. I did it anyway. I cried harder than I had in years, while the women around me stroked my head, my face, my legs. It's one of the most beautiful things that's happened to me.

I left those three days transformed — nourished in a way I hadn't been in a long time. I knew, without question, that this work needed to be part of my healing. I signed up for a nine-month training with those same two facilitators, and in 2020, I completed my coaching training with them. 

What Working with Womb Actually Is — And Why It's Different

If you haven't come across the term before: "womb work" isn't only about the physical organs — the vulva, vagina, uterus (sometimes called, in Sanskrit, the *yoni*). When I talk about the womb, I mean something broader: the energetic imprint that lives there too. Even women who've had their uterus removed still carry this energetic blueprint — the templates, the stored patterns, held both physically and beyond the physical.

Womb awakening means turning toward your own femininity — including the parts of it that have been suppressed, dismissed, or shamed by the culture we grew up in — and doing the work of releasing and reclaiming that. It's also, very practically, about learning to understand your menstrual cycle and its different phases, rather than treating your body as a machine that should perform the same way every single day.

What sets this apart from talk therapy, in my experience, is *where* the work happens. Therapy tends to work with the cognitive mind. Womb work happens through inner journeys, through communicating with the subconscious and the body directly — because the body holds a kind of wisdom the mind can't access on its own. There's a limit to how far you can think your way out of a problem or an emotion. When I've tried to out-argue my inner critic with logic, it always finds a way back in. But when I strengthen the mother-force within me — the love underneath the criticism — that voice softens on its own. The subconscious, in my experience, is remarkably intelligent. It already knows what needs attention next, often better than my conscious mind does. By connecting with it more deeply, by listening to it's own way of speaking to you (comparable to the language of dreams) you can access parts of you, your conscious mind couldn't beforehand.

Why the Culture Made This So Hard to Access

We live in a culture that, for a long time, taught women that the womb — and menstruation, and femininity itself — was something shameful. It wasn't always this way. In earlier eras, the Goddess was widely honored — remnants from Goddess worship can be found in many places on the planet from prehistoric times and later Sumerian goddesses like Isthar (later called Inanna), Isis and Hathor in Egypt, among many others, were revered and worshipped in temples. Over time, that reverence eroded. What was once honored as sacred — the womb as a vessel of fertility, the yoni as protection and blessing — was gradually redefined by religious and social institutions as unclean, something "lesser", something to hide (If you're interested in reading more about the goddess worship and how God became Male, I included a list of references below). 

Some of that has shifted in recent years, but not nearly enough. Many girls still grow up carrying shame about their bodies and their periods. Menstrual pain is still often treated as an inconvenience rather than something worth accommodating — girls are still penalized at school for missing class on days their bodies genuinely need rest. Cosmetic procedures to alter labia because they don't match a narrow beauty standard are common. Real, embodied sex education — what a woman actually needs and deserves — still isn't mainstream.

This history — patriarchal structures, centuries of suppressing feminine power, the witch persecutions across Europe — has left many women completely disconnected from their own womb. It shows up in which archetypes our culture celebrates, too: mostly the Maiden and an idealized, self-sacrificing version of the Mother. The Queen and the Crone get quietly erased — the older a woman gets, the less visible she becomes in the public eye. It's part of why so many women feel pressure to look perpetually young, why cosmetic intervention is so normalized: the fear of becoming invisible runs deep. That, too, is slowly starting to shift, as more women in perimenopause and menopause start speaking openly about what that transition actually feels like — but it's still far from mainstream.

What Changed for Me

A few things, specifically:

I could finally see how many of my patterns were tied to what I'd call feminine "shadow" material — the mother wound, sister wound, envy, jealousy — things that are hard to name, let alone work with.

In circle, I learned what it actually feels like to be heard without being judged. One of the most important structural elements of the circles I lead — rules I've carried over from the Awakening Women Sisterhood manifesto — is that during the talking circle, you simply listen - deeply. It sounds simple, but it prevents so much of the harm women unintentionally do to each other by trying to fix, or relate before someone has finished being heard.

Through shamanic journeying into my own womb, I was able to release a lot of suppressed power — and to recognize, more clearly than ever, how much strength women actually carry, and how often we suppress it ourselves, or have it suppressed for us. A woman fully connected to her own power is, frankly, a force of nature. And that can be threatening — to others, and sometimes to other women as well. What's sometimes called the "sister wound" shows up here: when a woman steps into visibility or success, she can become a target for other women's envy or criticism — often because those women haven't yet given themselves permission to access that same power. Envy, more often than not, points to a desire we haven't let ourselves claim yet.

Working with my cycle and the archetypes also taught me to meet my own fluctuations with more compassion. I struggled with severe PMS for years and judged myself harshly for it — every month, feeling emotional, negative, my feeling of self-worth at a low in the days before my period. What I eventually understood was that this had far less to do with the luteal phase itself, and far more to do with how I'd been treating myself in the *other* phases. If I overextended during my follicular phase, pushed my feelings aside, barely rested — everything I hadn't felt or processed came due later, and I'd find myself flat on the floor. Learning the different energies of each phase — and, more importantly, learning to actually work with them instead of fighting them — changed that. I used to dread the luteal and menstrual phases. Now I genuinely love them: in the Queen phase, I feel unusually connected to my intuition and to what's actually true for me, and during menstruation, I've learned to let myself simply rest and slow everything down.

Every woman's body is different — some feel much more energized during menstruation, and that's equally valid. These archetypes aren't a rigid formula; they're a way to understand yourself and your cycle more deeply, not a box to fit into. And it's not only about the monthly cycle — every woman moves through all four archetypes across her lifetime, too. The better acquainted we are with each of them, the less jarring the transitions become. Menopause, for instance, is often experienced as a shock — but if we've already done the work of understanding each archetype's gifts and challenges (and shadow material) along the way, that transition tends to land more gently. The same is true of becoming a mother — a shift so total that a new term has been coined: "matrescence," recognizing just how profoundly the whole self is remade in that process.

I also started finding new role models. Old, rigid ideas about what a woman is "supposed" to be began to loosen. Myths — Inanna's descent into the underworld and her transformed return, for instance — describe patterns that feel deeply, recognizably true - our dark nights of the soul. Working with Kali connected me to a kind of power I hadn't accessed before. Learning that the divine mother, the Goddess, was once genuinely revered — and that pre-patriarchal cultures existed where the feminine was honored — cracked something open in me. It felt less like new information and more like something ancient I already knew, somewhere in my cells, that had simply never been given permission to surface.

What the Womb Holds

Through this work, I've come to understand that we carry far more than our own personal memories in our bodies — we also carry what our ancestors experienced. Their emotions, their unspoken rules, their beliefs about what was and wasn't allowed. There's a collective layer here too: the weight of what it means to grow up as a woman in a culture where the feminine still isn't valued the way it should be. Even where we're formally equal on paper, the beliefs shaping our daily lives — the ways women are still treated differently — shape how we relate to our own femininity. Instead of embracing it, many of us unconsciously push it away and try to function according to rules that were never built for a cyclical body — denying our own need for rest during menstruation, or solitude during the luteal phase, because we've absorbed the idea that we should function the same way every single day.

As for why the womb specifically holds this kind of material rather than, say, the mind: in the Feminine Mystery School training I'm currently part of, I've learned that in earlier eras, tapping into the wisdom of the womb was a normal, respected practice — many oracles and priestesses were women, believed to be naturally attuned to divine insight because of their creative power. Trauma can live in many parts of the body, but the experiences specifically tied to being a woman tend to settle here.

Why This Matters — Whether or Not You Menstruate

We live in a culture that doesn't honor the feminine the way it deserves to be honored. Most women aren't consciously connected to their womb, and by extension, not to their own feminine power — often without even realizing it, until something forces the question: trying to conceive, PMS becoming unbearable, or simply hitting a wall that nothing else seems to move. Sometimes it's less dramatic than that — just an unexplainable longing for sisterhood, which makes sense when you consider how isolated most of us live compared to almost any other point in human history.

If this all sounds too abstract or "woo" to be relevant to your life — that's genuinely fine. This work isn't the only lens I use; I also draw on parts work, somatic coaching, and other process-oriented tools that have nothing to do with the womb or the cycle specifically. Womb work is one piece of what I offer, not a requirement for working with me.

But here's why I believe it matters for every woman, regardless of whether she wants children, or still has a cycle at all: many traditions, including Jungian thought, point to a kind of internal masculine and feminine — polarities that exist in everyone, and that function best in balance rather than in opposition. Most of us, women included, have been shaped by a culture that leans heavily toward the masculine principle — action, output, control — while giving little space to the feminine: rest, intuition, receptivity. For a lot of women, reconnecting with the feminine isn't optional self-indulgence; it's rebalancing something that's been out of proportion for a long time.

And cyclical living isn't only for women who bleed. Women who no longer menstruate are still cyclical beings — many find themselves attuning instead to lunar rhythms, or to their own internal sense of season. I believe reconnecting with the womb is also, in part, about reconnecting with the Earth herself, and with the feminine more broadly, in a culture that's spent a long time trying to sideline both. All of us, after all, came from a womb. In some sense, that origin shapes every one of us.

What Comes Next

This is the foundation the rest of this series builds on. In the pieces that follow, I'll walk through the three archetypes I haven't written about yet — the Maiden, the Queen, and the Crone — each tied to a phase of the cycle, each carrying its own gifts, its own shadow, and its own questions worth sitting with. If you haven't yet, you can also read my earlier pieces on the Mother Wound and the Mother Archetype, which is where this whole thread of writing began.

If any of this resonates, I'd love to welcome you into one of our circles and/or in a one to one session with me.