Dweller in the dark

The Dalai Lama once said that the world will be saved by Western women. Not all women, perhaps, but Burning Women—women who have stepped out of silence and into the fullness of their power.
—Lucy H. Pearce, Burning Woman

I’m writing about a monster that lives inside of me, down in the fiery depths of my emotional body. I have always known it was there, but I preferred to believe that this creature—this force that dwells in the dark recesses of my subconscious—would one day pack up and leave.

It didn’t. Instead, it awakened.

The monster I’m referring to is the collective feminine wound—the aftermath of thousands of years of oppression and denigration. And she is pissed off.

This ancient wound, this backwash from an abused feminine, has created a transpersonal hurricane of animosity, a storm that swirls inside our collective psyche. Occasionally, it bursts forth, spewing fire from a deep volcanic wound. I believe this energy impacts female bodies most strongly, but it also reverberates within the feminine in male bodies.

This energy transmits through a subculture that "puts down," blames, and projects perpetration onto the masculine. She positions herself as the eternal victim who refuses to surrender her post.

The key note that activates this collective feminine pain body is powerlessness, and it is triggered primarily in relationship with a perceived outer masculine figure.

I had a recent encounter with the dark side of my feminine psyche—a force that took me down into its primordial lair. There, I remained for days, writhing in anger, rage, and venom. As I wrestled with this energy, I felt the surge of the collective victimhood behind me—a churning vortex, a hurricane of electricity. I felt the war cries of a thousand years echoing within, and at the very center of the storm, there was pure power.

I felt fucking powerful.

It took an act of will to not fall into complete identification with this energy. Inside this maelstrom, I saw visions of the earth, raging at the pillaging, plundering, and raping of her fertility. I felt the archetypes of maidens and mothers, bound and gagged, gasping for air. I wanted to remain inside this suffering, because it felt good to blame something outside of me. I wanted to point my dark finger and unleash my snarling accusations.

I felt relief in the bitterness.

I share this experience because I’ve witnessed other sisters also drowning in this energy when their emotional bodies have been pierced by the perceived masculine. I’ve seen other monsters awaken around me, watching their Kali madness rise through stories of powerlessness. I’ve seen the vortex of victimhood animate their sleeping wounds.

But here’s what I’ve come to believe: this rising monster is a positive omen. It is emerging, not because it wants to calcify the suffering, but because it wants to be transmuted and healed. The collective feminine is not simply raging; she is seeking a balm for her wounded heart.

This healing requires us to lift this victimhood from the personal into the transpersonal. We must surrender the personal power it offers us.

This shift demands radical self-responsibility—to acknowledge that our reactions, triggers, and emotional responses are ours. We need to disentangle the archetypal energies of the collective wound from our own personal experiences so that we can lift this energy into love. Because as soon as we identify with this energy, it clings to the details of our personal stories—and we fall into it.

To do this, we have to turn toward any personal trauma related to men and the masculine, to acknowledge our betrayals, our feelings of inequality, abandonment, or abuse—and surrender them. We also need to examine our relationship with the inner masculine. We must locate the man within and shift our identity to include this other self, loving him fiercely. At our core, we are inherently non-dual. Our gender is merely a sheath, an outer casing of the soul, through which we experience life. Clinging to gender as a fixed identity moves us further from our essential, unbroken self.

Finally, we must call each other into love when the gusts of victim consciousness sweep through us. We must resist collusion with the energy of disempowerment, and instead, lift each other up in our power. I want my sisters to help me rise above the imprisonment of wounding.

I believe women, and those in female bodies, are in a unique and powerful position to nurse the suffering of the collective feminine on this planet. We have the capacity to be a balm to the gender wars and the patriarchal subjugation of the feminine within everyone. She is speaking directly through us.

But I also believe that empowering the feminine is only part of the remedy. Her festering wound must also be acknowledged, honored, and tended to.

I feel that my soul has chosen a female body in this incarnation to do this very work. And I am determined not to get lost in the churning of the collective feminine pain body, to be just another raging cog in the wheel of historical suffering.

Instead, I long to breathe love into her tender heart, to pray over her earth body, to massage her scars, and implore her to forgive us all.