Marion Woodman - Coming Home to Myself: Reflections for Nurturing a Womans Body & Soul

Advanced Praise for
COMING HOME TO MYSELF You will be grateful to Jill Mellick for this book. In it she takes us slowly through the rich layers of Marion Woodman's imagery and offers us a choice of those treasures which we have cherished for years. She calls them the shining bones of Marion's writing. Marion Woodman's keen observations and intuitions, her touch and humorous stories and her healing voice are all here in their naked essence. MEINRAD CRAIGHEAD, Artist and author of The Mother's Song: Images of God the Mother A profoundly beautiful distillation. Long-time students of Woodman will savor the new light Mellick casts on these golden strands and new readers will hold the key to understanding the essential work of one of our greatest teachers.

ROBERT JOHNSON, author of He and She First published in 2000 by Conari Press An imprint of Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC With offices at: 500 Third Street, Suite 230 San Francisco, CA 94107 www.redwheelweiser.comCopyright 1998 Marion Woodman and Jill Mellick All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be used or
reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission,
except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles or reviews.
Reviews may quote brief passages. Cover Illustration: Copyright The Bridgeman Art Library / Lincoln Seligman, Girl on the Beach, 1992 Cover and Book Design: Suzanne Albertson ISBN-10: 1-57324-566-6 ISBN-13: 978-1-57324-566-1 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Woodman, Marion. Coming home to myself : daily reflections for a woman's
body and soul / Marion Woodman and Jill Mellick. p. cm.

ISBN: 1-57324-566-6 (paperback) ISBN: 1-57324-100-8 (hardcover) 1. WomenConduct of life. 2. Meditation. I. II. Title. Title.

BJ1610.W66 1998 98-10067 158.1'28'082dc21 CIP Printed in the United States of America on recycled paper RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 www.redwheelweiser.com www.redwheelweiser.com/newsletter To: SOPHIA To our ShaSha sisters To the vast community of women
who are loving their femininity,
themselves and each other To the vast community of men
who are coming to grips with the lost
feminine in themselves.
M.W.and And for Tara, Paloma, Ariana, Amiya, Povi,
and those who stand on the threshold. J.M.

Linearity does not come naturally to me. It kills my imagination. Nothing happens. No bell rings. No moment of here and now.

No moment that says yes. Without these, I am not alive. I prefer the pleasure of the journey through the spiral. Relax. Enjoy the spiral. If you miss something on the first round, don't worry.

You might pick it up on the secondor thirdor ninth. It doesn't matter. Relax. Timing is everything. If the bell does ring, it will resonate through all the rungs of your spiral.

MARION WOODMAN Coming Home to Myself is a surprise child. MARION WOODMAN Coming Home to Myself is a surprise child.

Born of the insight of my friend and colleague, Jill Mellick, and my growing curiosity as we revisioned my earlier work, this little book has happened. Our editor, Mary Jane Ryan, dared the intuitive leap that is re-birthing my work in a distilled form. I began writing my journal when I was twelve. I am still writing because I am compelled to find meaning in my experience. In my late teens, I chose to sacrifice my beloved microscope for another kind of poetry, the poetry of word. Still, the scientist in me is always observing with a thinking heart, noting, comparing, articulating.

Twenty years ago, much to my surprise, people were interested in my thesis on eating disorders. Being an addict myself and profoundly introverted, I was fearful of publication. With the encouragement of Inner City Books, the thesis was revised and published as The Owl Was a Baker's Daughter.Addiction to Perfection was my first attempt at writing a book. It came out of an inner drive to understand the repetitive themes in the dreams of my addicted clients. I put rows of dreams on the floor of my studio, organized and reorganized them by theme. I marveled at the overwhelming power of the unconscious and, at the same time, the intensity of its drive toward healing.

One theme became clear as I began work on The Pregnant Virgin. The way to healing an addiction lies in finding a connection between body and soul. Soul needs body as much as body needs soul. Each is out of context without the other, an abandoned fragment of what it is. A great cherishing mother is often the link that manifests in dreams. Sometimes she appears as a striding Presence in the sky, sometimes as a bigger-than-life cleaning lady or a down-to-earth crone. She has many names: Buffalo Woman, Black Madonna, Isis, Anna, Tara.

In the Bible she is called Wisdom, translated from the Greek word, Sophia. Whatever her temporal form, she is divine; she understands our humanity and her love is fierce enough to permeate flesh and bone. Her humor rips away veils of illusion. She is the central figure in Dancing in the Flames, (Shambhala, 1996) which I co-authored with my friend, Elinor Dickson. As I watched the pregnant virgin coming to consciousness in dreams, I became increasingly alarmed by images of ravaged masculinity, masculinity and femininity both being ravaged by patriarchy. Men and women who have worked hard to find a strong feminine standpoint in Being are now working hard to release a masculinity strong enough to partner the evolving virgin consciousness. This theme began by exploring the tragedy of perfection as Keats' unravished bride in Ode on a Grecian Urn.

So the process went on through The Ravaged Bridegroom, Conscious Femininity, and Leaving My Father's House. One thing has been distilled in my consciousness. By whatever name we call the two magnets that create this balance of energies in our bodies and in our planet Masculine/Feminine, Shiva/Shakti, Yang/Yin, Spirit/Soul, Transcendence/Immanence, Doing/Being, we are now responsible for making space for the healing of body, soul, and spirit. We are being directed in the evolutionary process by divine guides through our dreams, our symptoms, our planet. New values are emergingfeminine values and masculine values that are free of patriarchal abuse. A totally new harmonic lies ahead in the new millennium. I write this down not because I am trying to sell my books, but because, as an intuitive, I tend to take too much for grantedI fail to fill in the facts that would make my thinking clear.

As my husband says as he walks past my studio door, You're not a born writer, Marion. Every time I walk by, you're gazing at the trees. You think everything through and then you write down your conclusion. A born writer would keep writing the process down. He is right. People who are not intuitive become frustrated trying to follow my unstated logic and sensation types throw up their hands or the book in alarm when they feel their body responding but not their mind.

I try to put down the facts, but I think in images, so when I try to explain, I end up in another image, which only compounds the difficulty. Moreover, my mind is a tapestry of the many great writers whom I have studied all my life. Their imagery is the warp and woof of my own thinking. As a professor and practitioner of psychotherapy and the creative arts, Jill has worked from my books for many years. As she says in her introduction, she has taken my books and has allowed the armature, the bones of the writing to show through the transparent skin of the prose and emphasized the closely interwoven relationships between images or thoughts by reflecting their relationship in their syntax. Her own book,

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