The collective shadow

Prioritising our own underworld journeys to heal feminine trauma

I didn’t get vaccinated for covid. Not because I’m pro or anti vaxx. But because it didn’t feel right for me. It didn’t feel right to me.

Yes, I do believe pharmaceutical companies have way too much influence over western medicine. And I do tend to take more of a holistic approach to my health and wellbeing. But neither were the pure basis for my decision.

Life isn’t so black and white. There aren’t just two sides to anything. There is nuance, there is complexity, there are numerous shades of grey.

And we need to know how to listen to that inner voice within when confronted with what appears to be an onslaught of information telling us things should go a certain way.

This is how I came to my decision about the vaccination. It was a very internal process. But I’d learnt to do this, particularly during the healing of my chronic fatigue. The outside voices weren’t working for me then, actually I was getting sicker because of those voices, so I had to go within to find my truth, the voice that would tell me what’s best for me.

I can’t help but compare the pro vxx and anti vxx campaign with what’s happening in the Middle East right now. If you’re not on board with the Pro-Palestine movement, then you are the equivalent of an ‘anti vxxer' and you are going against the collective goodwill of humanity.

But is that really an absolute?

Because in the end those who didn’t get vaccinated didn’t hurt anyone, did they? The truth is out now. For most, it made no difference.

Yet we were pushed into taking sides to our own detriment and in many cases creating conflict within families, friendships, colleagues, and even strangers on the street. People lost work, lost communities, lost their freedom.

When I compare it to the Middle East, I’m not really comparing apples to apples. I’m just using the polarised analogy that is actually seeping its way deep into our culture — you are for or against, or you don’t belong.

If only it was as simple as that, they’d be peace everywhere in the world.

As a woman, as a Jewish woman, as a human being, I’m honestly struggling right now. I’m struggling each time I turn on social media and see another one-sided attack at Israel and the Jewish people.

Today, as I tend to do via this substack, I wish to zoom in on an aspect of this specifically relevant to women and the feminine.

Although this will be my last post for 2023, it’s not really going to be the typical end of year standard cheer. I wouldn’t be authentic if I wrote it that way. Although there are many things in my life to be cheerful about, there is also a lot of darkness and I’m purposely going to focus on the dark side of life here as we can tend to brush over it.

But we can’t, because the world we live in has light and dark. Both exist, both are valid, both have their time and place. After all we alternate between night and day in every 24 hour period.

For anyone who has looked into it, the feminine heroine journey is different from the more established hero journey introduced by Joseph Campbell.

The heroine is more likely to ‘fight’ an inner demon rather than an outer one. A woman’s journey tends to take her to the underworld where she sees her own shadow and that of the women who have come before her and she rises from there. Her opponent is her dark side.

I’ve traversed that path several times in my life; visited the underworld and returned changed. As women who bleed, we do this monthly. Each 28 day cycle, the moon does the same. And each year, so too does nature, from the seeding of winter to the blooming of summer.

The dark has its place in our lives and to dismiss it I’m coming to learn is at our own peril.

One of the biggest insights I’ve had over the last nine weeks is an understanding that because we’re never taught to embrace the dark, we can tend to project it outwards. I knew this before to a degree, but the last nine weeks has cemented this awareness.

Quite simply, it’s easier to blame another person, another nation, another race, another colour, another country for your own pain than to own it.

This pain may have nothing to do with the other, the other just brings it out in you. And this particular conflict in the Middle East seems to have brought out a lot of collective shadow.

The aspect of this I wish to focus on now and where my current unrest is brewing from — is the world of feminism. What has become evident to me is that there is still a lot of unowned trauma and darkness sitting in the feminist realms. A blame mentality. A you or me, but not both, frame of mind. Again no nuance, no spectrum; just sides.

I believe it is because there has not been enough shadow journeying; enough understanding of the impact of millennia of oppression on the female psyche. Instead there has just been an upsurge in anger and in extreme cases, violence. It may not always be violence in physical form, but it’s violence in words, especially now that women have platforms they may never have had in the past.

This has been happening in social media for a while now. I’ve called it out before, a few times. The fact that most of the online vitriol and hate comes from women. And often, women to women. I’ve ventured down enough rabbit holes of comments — in the name of research — to say this with my hand on my heart.

And I’m not the only one noticing that the majority of hate online about the Middle East conflict is surfacing on the accounts of women.

Personally, I’ve always had a problem with the word ‘feminism’ and it’s becoming clearer and clearer as to why. Firstly it was the word used, rather than the concept. We should’ve called it women’s rights, because really that’s what ‘feminism’ is about. It has nothing to do with the word feminine, when taking it into its true meaning. And sadly, but honestly, there is nothing feminine about modern-day feminism.

The modern feminist movement is verging on fascism, in the sense that opposition is not allowed. It’s us and them. At first it was men taking all the blame, then it was the patriarchy and white colonialists, and right now, there are a whole bunch of feminists putting it all on the Jewish religion (and for them this kind of blends with colonialism because they’re wrongly identifying a mixed race and coloured religion as all white).

The thing is it doesn’t matter who they are blaming this time, the most important part is to work out where it’s coming from.

I’m willing to put my hand up for the source being unhealed female trauma. A lack of journeying to the underworld, the dismissing of a key part of what it means to be a woman.

Healing which doesn’t require an online platform, but an inside job only.

This trauma is understandable, it’s real and it’s valid. But it doesn’t give a right for projection.

As many who read my posts and have taken classes or workshops with me know, my passion is returning us as women to our innate birthright and wisdom and to truly live embodied and aligned with our feminine nature. Going on the oral contraceptive pill, toying with our hormones, forcing us into linear lives when our bodies are cyclical all plays into this. We are living in direct contrast to the way our body was designed or craves to live.

This is where the internal work begins. This is where feminist trauma can start to be healed. This is where we can reclaim our power.

In turn leading me to the part where I rise from the ashes again and emerge from the underworld with renewed vigour and focus for 2024.

As I step into my menopause years, I get, I truly get why we need generations of women living together. For the older, wiser crones to share their life experience. To remind us of the wars they’ve lived through, of the losses they’ve endured, for the pain and pleasure that has made up their days and years.

Social media has turned this on its head. We’re now led by the spirited youth, who tend to forget the past in lieu of a dream of a different future. I wonder how many of the Tik Tok generation that started to turn Osama Bin Laden into a hero and resistance fighter were around when the twin towers crumbled and people jumped out of the windows in droves. Likewise very few will know a Holocaust survivor. Actually a recent survey done in the US showed that when you get down to 18-29 year olds very few believe the Holocaust even happened, despite all the evidence.

There is a beauty in unbridled youth and there is an energy and zest.

But there is also an ego, a desire and a rite of passage like quest for independence and individualism. I know, I had it. We all have.

But this comes at a cost and must be balanced with the more even blessing of grace and sageness that comes with getting older.

We can’t throw the baby out with the bath water. We need all of it together, working as one. The reason I began this substack in the first place; a cross generational community of women.

So as I turn my attention to the future, and as I close this year that birthed much joy alongside pain, I Iook forward to continuing my work in this area, in empowering us as women with our true birthright and in creating a world where women lead from love first.

Blessings for the holiday season.

With love,

Sharon