The Future of Female Shamanism

Last week, I had the opportunity to speak on The Future of Female Shamanism and I would like to share the marrow of that thread with you as well.

Most of my life and my spiritual path I internalized the belief that spiritual authority belonged only to men. That they were the only ones that knew, that they were the only ones that carried the medicine and bestowed the blessing. I believed that my role was to sit beside them as a devoted student, assistant, counterpart or their shadow.

But this belief didn't begin with me or my story. It is part of a cultural inheritance we have all carried for centuries. You may call it programming. You may call it Kali Yuga. You may call it the Epoch of Forgetfulness.

We were indoctrinated to look outside ourselves for spiritual authority. As religion became institutionalized within patriarchal structures, expressions of feminine spiritual authority were diminished, reinterpreted, excluded and pushed underground.

More and more of us are now drawn to the streams of direct revelation and embodied wisdom that survived outside institutional authority. We are drawn to what had to go underground: the feminine mysteries, the body as a portal, the oracles, healers and mystics. To the women who knew God through their own direct experience.

And this is why the conversation about The Future of Female Shamanism matters so deeply right now.

I don't believe we are witnessing more women becoming facilitators, healers, shamans, doulas, medicine women, priestesses, or spiritual guides. Something much bigger is happening. The feminine wisdom is returning as the feminine principle of consciousness that lives in all of us. So this return is not limited to women only.

The feminine wisdom brings in another layer of intelligence.

That wisdom brings: embodiment, relational capacity, attunement, receptivity, intuition, descent, mystery, paradox, death and rebirth. And the willingness to enter darkness rather than immediately trying to escape it or intellectualize it.

The Tantric Left-Hand Path is not demanding that we become more pure by amputating parts of ourselves that scare us. It asks us to enter the shadow consciously, and to courageously descend and enter the realm of the unconscious. To meet sexuality, rage, grief, desire, death, power, ecstasy and the places within ourselves that polite spirituality tends to exile.

Not to indulge the shadow, but to bring it into relationship with awareness.

This kind of spirituality doesn't require us to escape our humanity in order to encounter the divine. It actually asks us to discover the divine through our humanity: through the body, through the relationship, grief, pleasure, and initiation.

Through cultures and lineages, women have served as healers, medicine women, priestesses, oracles, midwives, birth and death doulas, mystics, and wisdom keepers. Women have stood at thresholds of birth and death, sexuality and creation, illness and healing, grief and transformation, the human and the divine.

So when I speak about the future of female shamanism, I am actually speaking about our ancient future.

Remembering ourselves as healers is simply not enough.

The moment we reclaim our spiritual authority we have to ask ourselves if we've become worthy vessels to carry that authority forward.

The return of feminine spiritual authority must also be the return of feminine spiritual responsibility.

There is tremendous power in being a devoted student and we should never diminish that. Structure matters. Apprenticeship matters. Humility matters. Lineage matters. Being willing to learn matters. Being humbled by your own mistakes and corrected by your elders and peers matters. And so the purpose of apprenticeship is to initiate us into greater capacity, authority and mastery.

Are we becoming healers who can be trusted with power?

We have to understand the difference between intuition and projection. We need the capacity to descend without drowning, to meet eros without exploitation. We need to be able to hold altered states without making ourselves the authority over another person's experience. And we need the humility to know where our capacity begins and ends.

This is also the question at the heart of the mentorship work I do with guides and facilitators: how do we grow into our own authority while we remain humble, discerning and willing to keep learning?

I am opening 2 spaces for women who feel called to work with me in a year long 1:1 Advanced Mentorship. If you feel the call to deepen your skills and offerings please reach out. I would be honored to walk alongside you in service and love.