Reclaiming Your Inner Pantheon: Embodying Feminine Power

Sometimes it seems I have a badly chaired committee meeting in my head. One inner voice pushes for taking a risk and beginning something new right now, preferably before breakfast. Another would like everyone to stop making demands and to please leave her alone with a book. A third is concerned about energy management and a house in renovation chaos. The inner cynic relentlessly points out that I’m making the same mistakes over and over again, and when will I finally learn? Does that sound familiar?

Rather than asking “which” archetype we are, as especially social media likes to do, this post considers how different moments in life call for different energies that we all carry within us, from Maiden and Lover to Warrior, Queen, Crone and Mystic.

Multiple Selves Inside

I don’t experience these archetypes as separate personalities or identities, but I have become increasingly fascinated by how many different selves we contain, and how differently they meet the world. Perhaps this is a legacy of my training as anthropologist – to identify the selves we carry into our research, so we know what ‘lenses’ we look through, what biases we might carry from that positioning.*)

We tend to speak about finding our ‘true self’ as if, somewhere beneath the debris of conditioning and expectations, there is one pure and consistent woman waiting to be excavated. Ha! More fool us. 

I think that the process of becoming more fully who we are, has to do with developing a functional relationship with different capacities within us. In my mentoring work, I call this ‘getting to know your Inner Crew’. Each ‘character’ that is on board with you has its own approach to life, and the more harmony there is in the team, the easier the sailing.

Archetypes give us a way of negotiating this territory. They are not personality types that tell us who we really are, or roles that we have to perform. I see them as patterns of possibility, ways of being that we can recognise, strengthen, question and sometimes deliberately invite into our lives.

A larger vocabulary of the feminine

Popular culture often invites us to identify with a single archetype: awaken your inner Queen, embrace your divine Lover, reclaim the Crone. There can be power in bringing a neglected aspect of ourselves centre stage, but what if we don’t have to choose? We can call the Maiden when beginning something new at seventy, lean into the Mother to hold us through grief at any age, or connect with the Mystic to help remind us of perspective.

In Goddess Qi Gong, I propose nine specific archetypes: Maiden, Lover, Mother, Warrior, Queen, Crone, Unmaker, Healer and Mystic. Each offers a different expression of feminine power, although the word ‘power’ needs some unpacking here. I don’t mean ‘power over’, as dominance, status or control, but ‘power from within’: the capacity to meet life, respond, choose, create, protect, surrender, repair, perceive and… change.

The Maiden dares to begin before knowing where the path will lead. The Lover brings intimacy with sensation, beauty, pleasure and desire. The Mother asks what we are willing to nourish, whether that is a child, a community, a garden, a book or a new, young part of ourselves. The Warrior knows the clean edge of a boundary and the fierce simplicity of protecting what matters. The Queen carries responsibility and asks us to inhabit our own authority. 

Some archetypes take us into less comfortable territory. The Crone is no longer interested in pleasing everyone like her younger sister might have been. The Unmaker knows that things sometimes have to come apart. The Healer works with what has been wounded, recovering the mysterious human capacity to create meaning and wholeness without denying the scars. The Mystic turns towards silence, symbols, intuition and the possibility that our ordinary ways of knowing are not the only ones available to us.

You have all these characteristics inside of you. Wouldn’t it be great if you can fluidly move between them?

When we give the job to the wrong woman 

The archetypes have shadow sides too. The Mother, for example, is wonderful at nourishing what needs care, but can become exhausted when she believes that everything and everyone is hers to tend. Perhaps what she needs is not better self-care (again, more responsibility, something else on your to do list!) but a Warrior standing beside her, protecting her space and setting a clear boundary: ‘No, that is not yours to carry.’ The Warrior is magnificent when she needs to put her foot down, but would make a terrible hostess if she is permanently in charge. And so I can go on, each character has strengths and shadows. (more on the shadow sides of archetypes in The Lover’s Relational Alchemy).

This is why archetypal work is more than an exercise in mythology. It helps us to ask different questions of our actual lives:

• Which part of you has been running the show lately?
• Which capacity is overdeveloped because that provided safety from a young age? 
• Which one have you mocked or mistrusted?

These questions come alive especially when we are in transition. The strategies that carried us through one chapter of life do not necessarily serve the next. There are times when trying harder is the wrong medicine (and which most of us are hardwired for, “let’s push a bit more, that will probably solve things”). Maybe we need to invite another part of ourselves in the driver’s seat, the Maiden’s sense of adventure, the Unmaker’s courage of breaking down the status quo and structures, or the Mystic’s capacity to sit in stillness…

Inviting them into your body

What would happen if we shift from relating to them only in our imagination, to inviting their qualities into the way we breathe, stand, move and feel?

How does your body know that it has a boundary? What happens to your spine when you inhabit authority from the heart? Where do you feel pleasure before your mind has decided whether it is permissible? What does letting go actually feel like in the muscles, the breath, the belly? Can you recognise the physical difference between withdrawing because you are afraid and becoming still because something is asking to be heard?

This autumn I will be taking another circle of women through this landscape, with a new Goddess Qi Gong group that begins next week. We will meet each archetype through imagination, movement and conversation, and I’d love to invite you on the journey! This weekend is the LAST possibility to sign up, so if you feel called, now is the time!

Here is a short trailer video – with 3 Crone movement examples at the end! This way, archetypes and the divine feminine grow beyond ideas and beliefs, into something we recognise in our cells…

Invitations

If transformation is an ongoing process of coming home to who we truly are, these magical places help us to reveal and see with different eyes! If you are Ritual Curious, let me know via this free sign up, and I’ll keep you posted of coming events! In the meantime, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this essay…

Small print & further inspiration

*) in terms of exploring your lenses, you can find a guided audio practice that I developed at the Centre for Dance Research, together with 9 other embodied enquiries into the research cycle. After many institutional changes, it now lives on my personal website, where it remains accessible for free: https://www.elinekieft.com/somatics-toolkit. It has an extensive reference list for each practice, including Reinharz, S. (1997) ‘Who Am I? The Need for a Variety of Selves in the Field’, in Hertz, R. (ed.) Reflexivity and Voice. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications, pp. 3-20.

This post is a re-write from an earlier Substack post Nine Women Within You. You might also like related posts here on FAR and on Substack:

• Archetypes in the Body
• Goddess Qi Gong
• Crone at the Crossroads (with link to 90 minute masterclass with a 30-minute crone movement routine!)
• Midwinter and Midlife (with a 30 minute movement class to explore Arianrhod as a Mystic guide for threshold times
• Goddess Architectures: How Cultures Shape Sacred Feminine Power

Bio

Her book Dancing in the Muddy Temple blends theory and practice in service of land, body, and spirit. Now leading Wild Soul Centre for Embodied Consciousness, she offers coaching and courses to support deep transformation and inner strength through movement and the body. Try out her Qi Gong Membership for free! You can also find her on LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram and Substack.