As much as we may like to, we don’t live our lives only in the light. No matter how conscious or awakened we are, we can’t live in the light without the darkness. Growth happens in the dark. Renewal, rebirth and possibilities happen in the dark. They wait for us in the form of the Dark Goddess. When other avenues have failed us, when we’re feeling vulnerable, scared, lost, or when we’re ready to let go of our perfectionism and transform, She waits for us, a beacon of light amidst the shadows of our life.
The Dark Goddess, She who is Lilith, Inanna, Pele, Medusa, Kali Ma, Durga, Hecate and more, helps us to get in touch with hidden and often repressed parts of our womanhood. The Dark Goddesses can play a deep and transformative part of our heroine’s journey. If we invite her in. If we are willing.
For she often represents the scary part of the darkness. When we quickly want to turn on a light, she asks us to sit with her in the blackness. Rather than stay on the surface of our feelings, emotions, and life challenges, she wants us to descend, to go deeper and get dirtier than we have ever done before. She knows that our unveiling happens there, deep in places that are sacred but perhaps also scared to be felt, acknowledged, seen.
Embracing the Goddess is a beautiful part of our journey of coming home to ourselves. But to return home as sovereign women, we need to claim all parts of ourselves, our whole selves, not just the parts that we love in the light of day. For the Goddess is both light and dark, calm and fierce, gentle and wild, compassionate and ruthless. Like two sides of the same coin, she is not one without the other. And neither are we.
For us to be fully in our feminine power, we must embrace the darker aspects of the feminine that have long been suppressed through thousands of years of patriarchal reign. Those aspects of our feminine self that we have been told have no place in a paternalistic society – our most sensitive selves, our rage, our sexuality, our fierce feminine power – are ready to come to light, and the Dark Goddess wants to help us unveil them. Indeed, she insists that we do.
In these times of women rising, we see the Dark Goddess everywhere. We see her in women marching through the streets, protesting for women’s rights and human rights. We see her anytime a woman stands up to the powers that be and says no, no more will I stand for this. We see her in women’s movements, with women coming out from the shadows to cast light on how they have had their power taken away, and how they are reclaiming it through using their voices. We see her in women and mothers fighting in all their rage for social justice. We see Her everywhere. And she is a sight to behold.
We experience her when we sit in our pain, our fear, our anger, and yes our rage, for the state of the world and humanity. When we feel into our depths and truly experience our shame, sadness, grief, despair, and our longing to wake up, transform and be who we truly are in a world that never sees us. We feel her when we are ready to embody our wisdom and step into and own all of our feminine power, not just the parts that we think are socially acceptable.
The Dark Goddess asks us to finally take off our masks, and with all of our strength, humility and realness, heal the wounded feminine that resides deep within us. To embrace not just our prettiness, our purity and our positivity, but the depths of our darkest, grittiest, rawest selves, and to fully allow Her to come to us, work through us, and unite the polarity that enables our wholeness.
”Maiden of the Shadows, Great Mother of the Darkness, Wise Crone of the Underworld, I call to you. Enter this sacred circle and grant me the vision to peer into the Dark. Guide me into the Mysteries and give me the wisdom of my own abyss. Be here now.” Amber Zeta
