Why Myth and Fairy Tale Are Maps of the Feminine Psyche

Modern women are drowning in information, yet yurning for meaning, we are gulping in the air that will sustain our lungs and heart .

We have more language than ever for trauma, attachment, nervous systems, boundaries, patriarchy, embodiment and self-development....yet so many women still feel lost inside themselves. They can name the problem intellectually, but the body still feels tired, our hearts are still guarded and we just cant seem to find the voice to share how we really truly feel.

Worst of all the sensual self remains hidden. I have lost count the amount of women my age who look astounded as they exclaim 'Wow! you still love sex?' and my body full of life force weeps for women that lost theirs. Its so important to feel the life force running through your body, the sexual energy that at least keeps your breath in the lungs and you gulping for meaning . Our souls are speaking to us quietly underneath all of this ...

The soul still asks: What is really happening to me? Where am I in the story?

And..... is why myth and fairy tale matter.

They speak to the psyche in a language older than analysis and the therapeutic terminology we know yet feels like an impossible 3D puzzle to put the self back together. We cannot explain the soul in flat concepts, we need to be shown the soul in images: the sleeping woman, the forbidden room, the dark forest, the devouring mother, the lost girl, the old woman at the spinning wheel, the poisoned apple, the tower, the beast, the prince, the serpent, the red shoes, the impossible task, the descent into the underworld. We neeeeed this !

"Fairy tales are the purest and simplest expression of collective unconscious psychic processes... They represent the archetypes in their simplest, barest, and most concise form."

Marie-Louise von Franz wrote that fairy tales are among the clearest expressions of the collective unconscious, describing them as the “purest and simplest expression” of these psychic processes. She understood fairy tales as archetypal stories where the basic patterns of the psyche appear in a stripped-back and powerful form.

This is what makes them so potent; a fairy tale does not simply tell us what happened once upon a time, It really does shows us what is happening inside us NOW.

The castle may be the symbol for the body, the thorns may be our defences, the spindle may be the moment we meet blood, fate, sexuality, mortality and feminine knowing. The sleep may be numbness, exhaustion, dissociation, waiting, or the part of us that withdrew because life felt too sharp, too lonely, too unheld. The Prince could well be the animus, the inner masculine, the principle of consciousness that must approach the feminine with reverence rather than conquest.

When we begin to engage with myth and fairy tale, we begin to think and feel differently as women because we stop seeing our inner life as random, they begin to help us recognise pattern and we see that what we are living has shape, symbol, ancestry and meaning.

If you feel frozen, you may begin to understand yourself through Sleeping Beauty, if you continually ignore red flags you may recognise yourself in Bluebeard, if you lost your intuitionyou may find Vasilisa’s doll in your pocket. Feeling stripped, broken or emptied may realise that you are in an Inanna descent. Finally, if, just if you have been dancing to please others you may suddenly understand the terrible wisdom of The Red Shoes .

The symbol does what ordinary advice cannot do., it bypasses the defensive mind and speaks to the deep imagination, giving the psyche an image to gather around. It allows the somatic body to say, Yes, this is where I am. This is the chamber. This is the wound. This is the threshold. This is the medicine. So easier than having to deal with a confronted ego!

Marion Woodman’s work constantly returned women to the body as the place of feminine knowing. In one talk, she asked, “Where in my body” do I feel the integrity to speak from that place? This is exactly why we do not only analyse fairy tales in the Temple. We ask where the tale lives in the body. Where do the thorns live? Where does the forbidden room live? Where does the old woman live? Where does the sleeping princess live? Where does the wild instinct live? Because your body often knows the story before the mind does.

I have found with many women working in the Rose Temple that they may well say : “I am fine,” while her body is covered in thorns, “I have moved on,” while the girl in the tower is still asleep, “I am strong,” while her sensual self has retreated into a hidden chamber. She may also proclaim, “I want love,” while her inner animus is still undeveloped, critical, absent, or unable to approach the feminine with true consciousness.

Myth and fairy tale give us a way to enter these places without shame. They allow us to say: this is not only my personal failure, its an archetypal pattern., an old story moving through me and if there is a wound in the story, there is also a medicine.

This is especially important for women because so much of the feminine psyche has been silenced, flattened, sexualised, shamed, idealised or split apart. We have inherited images of the good girl, the beautiful girl, the selfless mother, the dangerous seductress, the mad woman, the witch, the virgin, the whore, the saint. Fairy tales allow us to go beneath these cultural masks and meet the deeper feminine figures living in the soul.

The old stories remember what the modern world forgets.

They remember that women descend.
They remember that women sleep.
They remember that women bleed.
They remember that women lose their hands and grow them back.
They remember that women enter forests, speak to bones, bargain with witches, marry beasts, open forbidden doors, grieve, rage, awaken, and return changed.

The Myth & Fairy Tale Temple.

Is a monthly space to enter one myth or fairy tale as a living map of the feminine psyche. Each month, we will explore the story, the archetypes, the wound, the initiation, the body-symbols, and the medicine. You will receive a set of deep psychospiritual questions to help you discover where the tale lives in your own body, relationships, choices, desires, fears and soul.

We begin with Sleeping Beauty, beacause she is a map of the sleeping feminine: the woman who is outwardly functioning but inwardly quiet, guarded, numb, silenced, waiting or disconnected from her own beauty, voice, eros, instinct and sacred sexual self.

Sleeping Beauty asks:

Where have I gone to sleep inside myself?
What have the thorns been protecting?
What part of my feminine self has been waiting to be met?
Where am I waiting for the prince, the beloved, the rescuer, or the masculine to awaken what must first be found within?
What would it mean for my own inner animus to approach the feminine with reverence, consciousness and love?

This is the power of myth it opens a deep unconscious doorway for us to walk in and I have witnessed that when a woman enters the doorway consciously, the psyche begins to movee and the body will begin to speak. The symbols begin to rearrange her inner world so that she no longer feels lost in a private confusion. Instead, she begins to see the story she is inside and from there, she can begin to choose differently.

MYTHS ARE

They are maps.
They are mirrors.
They are initiations.
They are medicine for the feminine soul.

The Myth & Fairy Tale Temple begins Monday 1st June.

Enter the Temple here:
https://www.templedelarose.com/myth-and-fairy-tale-temple

And if the Sleeping Beauty work stirs something deeper in your body, womb, eros, sensuality or sacred sexual self, this is also the deeper path of 13 Roses.

The fairy tale shows us the chamber.

13 Roses is the deeper temple of the sacred sexual self.

Explore 13 Roses here:
https://www.templedelarose.com/the-13-roses-feminine-sacred-sexuality