Waking Up: The Details
Banshee versus Feminazi
When I was young, my cousin called me a feminazi – I had never heard that term before. I didn’t consider myself one. I just believed and still do that simply because my reproductive organs don’t hang down between my legs that I am less than any man. It was and in some cases still is an unpopular view, but whatever. All men are half female anyway. They do after all have an x chromosome.
Regardless, my worldview was still powerfully colored by male-centric thinking, particularly when it came to religion. God is male, which blew in my estimation because there was no divine feminine of the same status. The closest figure we have to a divine feminine is perhaps the Virgin Mary.
I was deeply offended and often felt The Bible was just a bunch of crap written by a bunch of males, who feared feminine power. My women’s studies classes, comparative religious studies, and nonwestern historical and cultural studies certainly supported that view. I always wondered at what point and how it became that women began to be treated as less than and more to the point when we as women began to believe and accept it.
I certainly believed in God, and I believed Jesus was a human being, but I pretty much dismissed the rest of it out of hand except for a few Bible verses that actually sounded like the type of loving God that people talked about, but which seldom seemed evident in my experience.
For better or for worse, I was without a doubt subconsciously indoctrinated into religion whether I wanted to be or not, and this indoctrination indelibly affected my view of the world and of myself. I outwardly rebelled but inwardly accepted it in many, many ways. I thought of myself as spiritually less than because I am female, the inherently evil Eve, who must be punished. I often thought at God with much vitriol in regards to the unfairness of it all. When I was very young, I oft lamented not having been born a boy. A penis meant more freedom to do what I wanted, when I wanted, and how I wanted.
My kid recently said to me, “There should be a button that we push when we want to have kids. Then, we wouldn’t have a period every month.”
I think she is brilliant. I told her to take it up with Divine Source, which is how I spiritually think of God – the big bang theory image; that moment of the creation of our universe.
Truly, at times I wanted to inhabit the Herland of Charlotte Perkins Gilman or an all-female enclave to which men were given limited entrance, like the Amazons of Wonder Woman’s homeland. I had many kickass fantasies in which I went all crouching tiger, hidden dragon on men.
Powerful female role models were nonexistent in my world. Women’s value was in serving men, caring for children, manipulating to get what they want because outright stating what they wanted was taboo and unfeminine. The women of my family subsumed their own wants and needs in service to the needs of others.
My maternal grandmother was somewhat of an exception to the rule. She ruled her home. She had the most incredible, piercing gaze that scorched, and she never hesitated to tell you what she thought of you and your actions. I greatly admired her in many ways, but she was so angry. Her rage was a fiery thing that often inspired fear. Duck, run, and hide was the wisest course of action when Nana was pissed. Forget pistol, she was more an assault rifle with laser scope.
So, to say I had a lack of positive male and female role models in my life would be totally accurate particularly a female one. When you have a void in your life, something will rush in to fill it and that something isn’t always good. Early on in my awakening, I spent many a night dreaming about being attacked by a banshee.
Yes, you read that correctly. My dream life was and still is so weird in so many ways.
I “woke” in my dream night after night to hit, punch, kick, and shove this very awful female presence out of my house. On the fourth night of dream attacks, I found myself saying in the dream, “I bind you with iron. I bind you from harming yourself and harming others.”
I repeated three times “I bind you from harming yourself and harming others.” The banshee disappeared.
It was only after talking to my mentor a few days later about those dreams that I discovered what was going on. It was precisely that I lacked a divine feminine within myself that the banshee archetype showed up in my dreams. I needed to tap into my own power; the divinely feminine power, with which we are all born regardless of whether we are male or female. The divine feminine is creativity, receptivity, and power.
It is belief in myself.
My life truly is outside what most people consider normal. Just so you know, I see dead people, energy patterns, shapes, and movement, as well as many other things. I remote view, I can see people’s insides, read their auras, feel their emotions, and get glimpses into their pasts during healing sessions.
I own the weirdness that is my life.
I find it to be pretty amazing – sometimes freaky, but always wonderful. I had to learn to accept that I experience these things, that I am just tapped into life in a deeper way.