Female Embodiment

Earth: Through All Things, Part 2

Learning to see the Mother in the world begins with learning to love our physical bodies—their transient materiality, limitations, and pains, as well as their capacity for awe, joy, and transcendence. By listening to what they communicate, we cultivate their unique wisdom, increasing our capacity to connect with ourselves and each other in loving ways.

Reapproaching our relationship to the female body opens us to wisdom unique to the female experience and rooted in the cycles of the female body. The overly masculinized world doesn’t adequately value the balancing of these cycles, which are intrinsic to our Mother and mirrored in the earth. Reverencing Her has everything to do with trusting in the mysteriousness and sacredness of these cycles. How menstruation, for example, is seen as something dirty, secret, and outside of the world demonstrates this disconnect. Disdain for and ignorance of the reproductive cycle of a woman’s body, and the embarrassment women are taught to feel about their sexuality, negate the sacredness of their place as the source of life from which we all come.

Many women are taught from a young age, directly and indirectly, that the primal workings of their bodies are something to hide and never speak of, unless they are mentioned somewhat disparagingly. Yet these processes are the very fabric of creation, allowing the sacred work of soul union—spirit and body—to happen, allowing all our heavenly parents’ children to come into mortality. If Mother God is the archetype of the woman, it makes sense that seeing the sacredness in Her daughters is a precursor to seeing and honoring Her. The generative power in a woman’s body—a tree of life in its own right—is the representation of the creative mystery that is the Mother.

Many women face the life-death-life cycle of creation in pregnancy. For many, carrying a child can feel like balancing on the precipice of life and death, waiting for the mysteries of creation working in one’s womb to unfold. Within that hidden chamber of the womb, cells speak to cells, and life is either granted, refused, or taken. In that holy of holies, cells become heart cells or lung cells—the Gods brooding over the face of the waters—singing into being, speaking the language of fiber and tissue, of marrow and sinew.

Pregnancy is nine months of unparalleled transformation. More chemical changes occur in a woman’s brain during pregnancy than at any other time of her life. The DNA of her male child or children becomes incorporated into hers. Many women leave pregnancy scarred with a range of ongoing complications: hip and spinal misalignments; diastasis recti; tinnitus; receding gum lines; incontinence; joint pain; postpartum depression, anxiety, and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), to name a few. After my first child was born, I experienced post-partum depression that lasted for over a year. In this absence of vitality, I found myself often feeling ambivalent about life and my new child. While I tried to work through the root cause and seek help, I struggled to verbalize my experience to anyone; it felt like an illness of loneliness. Even in my husband’s care, there was no way to communicate with him in a way he could understand, as a man who would never birth a child. It felt impossible that many of those I loved continued on without grasping the severity of my condition and were unable to truly ever reach me; mental illness is not something you can see. I did not really know of its severity until I found my way out of its grasp. I am different now. I live with a new capacity for both disconnection and vulnerability, which can be scary and has brought me to greater intimacy with those who have suffered in similar ways.

What it means to carry an unborn child, surrendering oneself in order for someone else to live and breathe, is known only in the female experience. It’s impossible to convey the massive alterations that happen during this time of abundance and breaking. Many women connect to the Divine Feminine in this unparalleled way, yet we continue to grapple with how patriarchy has normalized the treatment of women as subordinate, born with inferior abilities. Why the true realm of women goes unacknowledged or often dismissed has everything to do with the creative powers they hold. Across the world, these powers are feared, and we see all too often how this fear leads to control. It is a societal refusal to accept at-one-ment to try and control the bodies of women. Female bodies are served up in the media and marketed as eroticized objects of desire, property for male consumption. In Church culture, the control over women’s bodies can look like an inordinate amount of attention paid to asking girls to cover up, focusing on modesty talks to young women, placing the responsibility of men’s thoughts on young women, editing middle and high school portraits to cover cleavage and shoulders, and generally viewing women’s bodies as ornaments, not instruments. In the face of the understudied creative powers of women, we all have a choice. We can fear or revere the mysterious; we can give space for what we do not understand, or we can belittle it, mock it, fear it, attempt to dominate it, and treat it as “other,” outside of our realm of concern.

While pregnancy and childbirth are quintessential in their expressions of the divine ordination of women to creative powers, mothers aren’t necessarily privy to a greater understanding of our Mother. As children of Mother God, we are all formed from Her sacred being, and every woman carries the symbolism of the tree of life in her body, whether or not she is a mother on earth. Like any other spiritual knowledge, the specificity of how we, all of heavenly parents’ children, come to understand the symbolism of the female body and its unique meaning in the world is dependent on our own personal inquiry and development.

In coming to understand the female body, we all live our unique doctrine that affirms our physicality as divine, capable of sacred union with spirit and mind, from which the wisdom of our heavenly parents emerges and expands our eternal capacities. Our bodies are inherently wise, not inherently sinful. Learning what it is to truly inhabit our bodies and to respect the bodies of others is a major part of our earth-bound quest.

So much possibility for connection comes from making room for the feminine experience in conversation and story-telling, in learning and speaking with reverence about lived experiences. Female wisdom about the cycles of life can inform the way we all live—moving in harmony between periods of productivity and rest, for example—and weave into how we demonstrate reverence for sacred life all around us as we make small and large decisions.

Beautifully, the female body stands for the opposite of hierarchy; it represents networks of healthy systems that are dependent on each other and that cannot exist in isolation or prize one life above another. The female body expresses the beauty, value, and love found in relationality. Understanding its real power and sacred symbolism allows us to love wholly and integrally, to create space for the feminine in our collective healing, which is the same as creating space for the Mother. Changing our discussion about, and portrayals of, the female body to reflect eternal truths communicates to our Mother that we want Her to be a part of our lives and that we want to hear what She has to say.

Discussion Question:

Within our metaphor of the Divine Feminine as the Tree of Life, what are some ways She brings forth new life? Do you see a similar symbolic structure in the embodiment of Her children?

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Kathryn Knight Sonntag is the Poetry Editor for Wayfare and the author of The Mother Tree: Discovering the Love and Wisdom of Our Divine Mother and The Tree at the Center.

Art by Hilma af Klint.