Please Remember…
- You are never as awkward as you think you are
- You are never as annoying as you think you are
- You are never as boring as you think you are
- Your compliments are never as creepy as you think they are
- You are way more wanted than you give yourself credit for
- Chin up, everything’s going to be okay, okay?
“You can be very wild and still be very wise.”
— Yoko Ono
(via goodreadss)
“Most people are not likely to choose to address their Madwoman. Life inevitably brings her energy to us, nonetheless. She barges in upon our lives, defying logic, bringing chaos, usually just when we are trying to control our lives in a rational way. So we tend to try to continue to avoid her. We stress order and routine. We dismiss psychological problems such as anxiety, depression, phobias, low moods, or sadness. We may further suppress our emotional difficulties, which causes additional suffering as they affect us physically through psychosomatic symptoms and illness or resurface as intensified anxiety or depression. When we repress or suppress the Madwoman’s energy in our lives, she will often appear in a startling dream or even manifest herself to us in an event in our everyday lives. Like dutiful daughters, many of us try to lead tidy, unchallenging lives in keeping with the culture. We often seem to be rewarded with material comforts and success, and sometimes even with fame and power, but in orderliness we can lose our connection to the process of life, the continuous flowing river of energy and change. Our days are often dull, our relationships dry, our minds bored and restless, our lives empty. Something in us secretly cries, “There must be something more to life than this!” Seemingly successful and content as we skim the surface of existence, a crisis is often necessary to shake us up, to make us look and explore within. In crisis, the Madwoman appears to shock us out of our complacency, to shake us up with her chaos. Because we can no longer ignore her or our need to change or our inability to control our lives, we have to enter into her chaos and deal with it, one step at a time. The Madwoman cannot be described in quick and easy concepts. Her essence is chaotic. To find her, we must look inside to our feelings and our dreams, where we have encountered her many times.”
— Linda Schierse Leonard, Meeting the Madwoman: Empowering the Feminine Spirit
“The Greek goddess Artemis was the guardian of young maidens, and she taught them to be independent and true to themselves. She was also protectress of the animals and the forest, provider of medicinal herbs, and an aide to all those giving birth. Artemis protected all to be free to follow the rivers and the winds, to enjoy the forests and to honor the women of the woods. Artemis could give life, but she could also take it away from those who broke the laws of Nature. Above all, she demanded respect for Nature and the inviolable integrity of women. Artemis could become a Madwoman, enraged at anyone who defiled her integrity or her laws. When the hunter Actaeon overstepped the boundaries of sexual propriety and spied at the naked Artemis one morning as she bathed in a clear stream in her forest, she was angered, changed him into a stag, and turned his own hunting hounds against him to kill him. Nowadays we see Artemis’ demand for respect of feminine integrity in women’s outrage at child abuse and sexual harassment, and in their demand for the right to live in accordance with their own nature. Demeter, goddess of grain, became a Madwoman when her daughter, Persephone, was abducted and raped by Hades, lord of the underworld. Hades wanted to keep Persephone in the underworld and make her his queen. When all peaceful attempts to retrieve her daughter failed, Demeter, maddened by grief, threatened to withhold all growth from the earth. Finally, a bargain was made between Zeus and Demeter. Persephone could be with her mother half the year, when things grow in spring and summer. During the other half, when things lie dormant, she remains in the underworld with Hades. Persephone’s separation from Demeter symbolizes every young woman’s separation from her mother to enable the awakening of her own sexuality and distinct individual life. Her return to Demeter for part of the year symbolizes the new relationship she can build with her mother, enhanced by her own experience.”
— Linda Schierse Leonard, Meeting the Madwoman: Empowering the Feminine Spirit
“The Mad Mother cannot talk with her daughters on a feeling level. She dominates her daughters through her particular form of behavior, whether she is an Ice Queen with frozen feelings, a Dragon Lady with so much emotion that genuine feelings and their nuances are burnt up in her volcanic explosions, a Sick Mother who controls everyone around her with the threat of her frailty, or a Saint Mother who, needing to be “good,” maintains a superficial and martyred personality, expecting her children to follow suit. A daughter’s emotions and psychology are subjugated by the Mad Mother, and she needs to learn to separate from the Mad Mother’s enforced behaviors in order to recognize her own feelings and inner self. Otherwise, she may repeat her mother’s patterns.”
— Linda Schierse Leonard, Meeting the Madwoman: Empowering the Feminine Spirit; (Mad Mothers, Mad Daughters)
“The witches in fairy tales are another manifestation of the Madwoman. Russia’s Baba Yaga is one of many. Often, by confronting the witch, fairy-tale heroines are transformed into mature young women of great power who have faced the darkest parts of themselves, who have recognized their inner Madwoman and integrated her energies into their lives in a conscious, active way. In the Middle Ages and later, Christian patriarchs projected the witch onto women who didn’t conform, burning them at the stake, as they did Joan of Arc. Most hold in common the mysteries of life and death, light and dark, creation and destruction. When life is not honored, when Mother Earth is not revered, when the feminine is defiled, they warn us with natural cataclysms, disasters, and physical and environmental punishments, as well as emotional and psychological storms and upheavals in the psyche. But at the same time, they are creators, renewing the cycle of existence, transforming old life-forms into new.”
— Linda Schierse Leonard, Meeting the Madwoman: Empowering the Feminine Spirit
“Loneliness does not come from having no people around, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself.”
— Carl Jung
