Extract from 'Woman as Custodian of Life' by Ann Baring

I have enjoyed the work of Ann Baring for a few years now. Her work on the Goddess and the feminine principle is wonderful. Her videos are well worth checking out especially the ones on the tragic split in the Western psyche. I believe that many sensitive women channel this wound and struggle with the pain of it. Here is an extract from Ann Baring's essay 'Woman as Custodian of Life'.

 So what is the present focus of the feminine principle? I believe it is to put us in touch with what has been lost to consciousness, to relate us to the deep sources of our psychic life and draw up from these depths the living waters which nourish and sustain the soul. The recovery of the feminine principle is the key to the transformation of our world culture from decay and disintegration and progressive regression into uniformity, banality and brutality, into something longed for and extraordinary. 

----- Woman's own awakening to the realization of her value is part of the recovery of the feminine principle. It is as if a momentous birth is taking place in the collective psyche of woman. This birth may be experienced as something that is deeply perplexing and difficult as well as something exciting and challenging. As woman gives birth to herself, to her unique individuality, to the emerging awareness of her value as woman (not an imitation of man), the feminine principle will also emerge in the consciousness of humanity which for so long has suffered from its repression and rejection. Woman, whose essential nature is to respond to suffering and need, is now responding to life's own need and is experiencing herself as the vessel of transformation in which a new consciousness is being born. If anyone personified and lived this process of birth and awakening for the whole world to see, it was the late Princess Diana. Tragically, she did not live to realize how significant and important her contribution was.
----- There is a Hasidic saying which goes: "When the moon shall shine as bright as the sun, the Messiah will come." Woman through her struggle to understand herself and to articulate the highest values of the feminine principle, could begin to make the moon shine so that it softens the sun-brightness of our present consciousness. In accepting her depression, her suffering, her loneliness, her longing to outgrow the inarticulateness and powerlessness of her past existence, she may accomplish something truly heroic and extraordinary for life, something which humanity in centuries to come will recognize and cherish. Each woman who gives birth to herself and responds to what life is asking her to accomplish, contributes to the survival of our species and the diminishment of human suffering.
----- For this reason, nothing is of such value or of such importance as woman's rescue of herself. This is something very difficult for woman to accept because in the past the whole impulsion of her nature has been to respond to the needs of others. The fact that she herself is in greatest need of her own help, support and understanding is the very first step in the direction of polishing the moon. It will only shine as brightly as the sun when woman has become Orpheus to her own Eurydice and has rescued herself from "the powers of the underworld" which symbolize her unconsciousness of her value and her bondage to the subservient pattern of the past.

VIDEO TALK HERE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ckie9Kt2KcM