Crone initiating
I have been teaching yoga for 11 years and just a few days ago I had a beautiful exchange with a new student in class, about ten years older than I, maybe in her 60s. She joined the room hesitantly, as yoga students new to the practice often do, with a furtiveness and a protectedness that comes with being a beginner in a new space. After class, with a softer, calmer air about her she asked if she could talk to me. When she began speaking her voice became unsteady with the holding back of emotion as she told me that she had a moment in class that was very profound. In that moment, she felt who she once was, a long time ago, before giving herself away to her family. Because of my recent fascination with peri-menopause and the Crone stage of life I felt a deep moment of connection between us, and my response to her was pure, raw, excitement. “Oh good! You’re ready for your Crone initiation! I’m just starting this journey. Welcome to this sacred club.” And as if through a small key hole, two women separated by a generation and the walls of societal designation, saw each other in pure form. We were seeing each other as Crone women, ripe with wisdom, experience and in the process of breaking free from the chiseled labels that define womanhood.
About two years ago there was a huge wave of upheaval in my life. It forced me to slow down, look inward and reach out. When I opened up and surrendered to the fact that I needed to reach out from my deepest, realest and most hidden parts, a circle of women began to slowly appear, women also being pulled by the same force. What I know now is this is a collective calling to connect with the Crone. The Crone, has existed in our cells from conception, carried through from the life lessons and struggles of our mother’s mothers. The Crone which means crown, is the wise woman in all of us. Around the age of peri-menopause we are ready to shed our former selves and put on our crown, step into our Crone selves, let the divine self fully be seen and begin gathering other sisters into the circle of power.
For many years since being pulled out to sea by motherhood I had been getting small tugs at my heart and signs in dreams that began to get more poignant as the children grew and as I grew older. I often had dreams and visions of older women guiding me. At one point I had a dream that my two deceased grandmothers were holding my dad up above a huge abyss. The next morning I found out he had been diagnosed with cancer. The communication to me by way of these female energies is a thread needled through my heart stitched from the residue of longing and yearning from lives un-lived and passions not fully realized. Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963 and described how women repress desire for the care and feeding of others. This tabling of desire becomes a competitive sport in mommy culture. I witnessed this, and found in myself, that even the smallest amount of self care can bring on feelings of guilt. This tabled hunger setting an example for daughters and grand daughters on how to be a good girl who cares for others before caring for herself.
As I work on surrendering slowly, sometimes reluctantly to the aging process and my circle of genuine female connections grows, I recognize that I yearned for a circle of flesh and bone women guides and mentors my whole life. Motherhood is a convenient way to ignore your life’s needs and callings. You can pour all of your energy into your family, and the more you do this the more you are applauded. Women ignoring their own needs to put family first has forever been the gold standard of the matriarchal archetype. Glennon Doyle writes that “mothers have martyred themselves in their children’s names since the beginning of time. We have lived as if she who disappears the most, loves the most. We have been conditioned to prove our love by slowly ceasing to exist.” Engrained in the deepest part of our histories is the pressure for a woman to land a husband and leave her youthful freedom and dreams behind to care for her family. In the current times where women can “have it all” we are still creating our lives within a structure that voraciously fears women choosing not to have children or harnessing power not attached to outward appearance. Times have changed, women have more options, but our archetypes exist and linger around in our bodies for generations.
To examine the “mother” archetype is to dive deep into our psyches. Lurking within the soft allure of this word are a million attachments creating a standard that sets up the perfect idol for the mommy wars. In examining our responses to the word closely we can bring up the shadows cast from reaching for this ideal. These shadows formed from living up to a word as gilded as the word “saint.” This saintliness, this standard that we try to live up to, is of course set up for us to fail. In contrast, the crone as an archetype in our culture is an old witch-like hag. Our society has distorted the idea of the crone but crone actually means crown. Arna Baartz says of the crone: “Her ancient power has been reduced to characterizations as the evil, ugly witch. Our culture so prizes youth and productivity, sending a clear signal to fear anything to do with age.” She also goes on to remind us that the crone is actually a keeper of great wisdom, one of her teachings being that life is a “progression of disappearances.” You build up a structure in your life, you count on it, you think you’ve arrived somewhere, but at some point, you must realize the impermanence of things. The upheaval that I was feeling in my life was not something unique to me. It is a normal but not openly talked about reaction to, not only our children becoming independent, the falling away of our child bearing years, but the falling away of all those things we sacrificed ourselves for. The common yearning among women of crone age, is a calling out that we can choose to listen to or ignore. We can think of it as a calling out of our collective crone, our collective wise woman, begging to be heard.
As we enter the crone years around the ages of 42-62, there’s an internal echoing to let go of old stories and to step into our feminine power. Stepping into feminine power while our outer shell is now changing and no longer fitting societal standards of beauty, is no easy feat. The challenge being, what is our source of power if we take away beauty standards, or what society deems powerful for women? I am learning that part of this is getting back in touch with our own needs, appetites, cravings, as we exist now, in this new body, that is ours to live in now, with all of our wisdom and experience. To sow the seeds we planted in our fertile years. To enjoy the fruits available now from setting down those deep roots. To do this we need, more than ever, the connection to other women.
Through my research on peri-menopause I have come to see that this death of the old self and what has been termed “second adolescents” is the norm. The amount of power we hold as wise women who are no longer attached to societal beauty standards really shakes the patriarchy, so it makes sense that at the beginning of my journey, when I reached out to other women my age to discuss the process, these women often responded in hushed tones with shallow comments about night sweats or botox. But these surface conversations are just manifestations of the gripping, the trying to hold on to the attachments to the motherhood ideal, the beauty ideals, and all the facades that no longer serve us as we are touched by life’s fragility in aging. The marrow of what I was feeling was not readily met with the comradery and connection that comes with other rites of passage. This being a sure sign that what women in the crone years are feeling is a call to power that truly shakes up the status quo.
Ursula K Le Guin said “when women speak truly they speak subversively- they can’t help it: if you’re underneath, if you’re kept down, you break out, you subvert. We are volcanoes. When women speak of our experience as our truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.” We need our life journeys, our stories, to be spoken out, shared. It’s through the sharing of our stories that they turn to power and lightness. We must speak our stories into the world and in doing so, back to our younger selves. In giving voice, we have the opportunity to listen to all that we are and are not. We connect our wounded adolescence to our wise woman. This merging of self is the “rebirth” that is so often used to describe this time of our life. Carol Gilligan has suggested that girls lose themselves in adolescents. The result of a girls growing awareness that the things she most fundamentally values are demeaned and trivialized in the wider world. In order to stay connected, Gilligan theorizes that girls “surrender their own perspectives, steer clear of conflict, and focus on what others need and want, learning as they grow to accept traditional feminine mandates about being attractive and nice.” Menopause is a time to also reconnect back with the pre-adolescent selves, or perhaps form brand new selves from those forgotten bits.
Our bodies age and our children start living their own lives and we can either fight against the change or surrender. How powerful to join forces, how far we could lift then. And to reach down to young mothers to share our wisdom. Carl Jung said: “nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children. Then the un-lived lives of their parents.” The Innate Wisdom Women’s Circle is a way of closing the circle of sisters so that women in the crone years can show by example how to bring mothering back to ourselves. Ursula K. Le Guin said “there’s no way you can offer your experience as truth if you deny your experience.” Living in, being alive within this experience, is vital for our power and clarity and it is vital for passing down our wisdom to younger women. Coming together offers us the support we need to grieve the illusions we had about what we thought this age would look like, and step into the roll of wise woman teacher. Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes of women gathering: “The things that women reclaim are often their own voice, their own values, their imagination, their clairvoyance, their stories, their ancient memories. If we go for the deeper, and the darker, and the less known we will touch the bones.” This “reclaiming” happening by truthfully sharing therefore shining light, through communion and ritual, on those areas that western society likes to keep hidden.
This time of life is an intricate dance of opposites. As we begin to emerge from the veil of care taking we begin to hold BOTH/AND. It is a time of the ending of things and also the beginning. Motherhood in many ways is a veil of giving of ourselves that often shields us from having to face those areas that need tending. Mark Nepo poetically references the nautilus in how we age. The nautilus, over time, builds a spiral shell but always lives in the newest chamber. The other chambers, however, contain an element that help it maintain its buoyancy in the rough ocean waters. He also asks if “In this same sense we may break down our past so we may use it but not still carry its weight?” And of course the nautilus becomes more beautiful over time. Often, even moment to moment, I find myself at once feeling the buoyancy created from my vacated chambers and also feeling a sense of desperate reaching to fill all those unsatiated appetites I suppressed while forming myself into the female structure that the world deems acceptable. The reaching out amongst each-other, the fire formed from that small spark of female connection, is what can be used to burn through our embodied expectations. May we, through our raw connections, bring our shadowy selves to the surface for others to witness. May we connect to that ancient yearning and bring it forth for others to feel less alone. May we burn down the “living up to” and begin to LIVE IN the most current chamber of our nautilus shell and all ride together the waves that are taking us home.