SLEEPING BEAUTY - MOTHERLESS AND THE SLEEPING FEMININE

Psychologically, Sleeping Beauty reveals what happens when the feminine psyche falls asleep beneath conditioning, survival and unconsciousness. The story speaks of a deeper feminine life force that becomes frozen or dormant, often protected behind psychic “thorns” formed through wounding, fear or adaptation. The sleep itself is symbolic of disconnection from instinct, eros, creativity and soul and the sexual self .

Yet beneath the silence, life remains present, this force remains in us , felt by others and silently working itself into coming into conciousness. Sleeping Beauty reminds us that many of us are 'sleeping' to parts of ourselves that long to awaken. The tale is ultimately an initiatory story about the return of feminine consciousness, feeling, embodiment and inner aliveness after periods of psychic dormancy.

Almost every woman knows what it feels like to have parts of herself fall asleep through:

• heartbreak

• patriarchal conditioning

• survival

• overgiving

• trauma

• performance

• motherhood without self

• relationships

• spiritual bypassing

• endless caretaking

• nervous system exhaustion

When sitting with the current stories of the Motherless website and the men plotting to put their wives and partners to 'sleep' I intantly made the connection to the Fairy story of Sleeping beauty. Having studied this fairy tale I am well aware that the original version (before Disney got its hands on it) had a far more sinister ending; sleeping Beauty is not awakened by a loving kiss at all. In Giambattista Basile’s version, the sleeping woman is found unconscious by a king who sexually penetrates her while she remains asleep. She later gives birth in her sleep. The children eventually awaken her when one suckles the flax splinter from her finger. The “romance” arrives after violation. The collective psyche softened the story over centuries, yet the archetypal residue remains.

The story still active in our collective , hidden in the dark recesses of the shdaows of our psyches.

Fairy tales are not merely entertainment, they are psychic maps and they reveal the unconscious structures of culture. For centuries women have been culturally conditioned into versions of sleep:
sleep from instinct,
sleep from anger,
sleep from sovereignty,
sleep from erotic intelligence,
sleep from intuition,
sleep from embodied power.

Sleep from their SACRED sexual self.

A woman who sleeps is easier to project upon.

Easier to idealise.
Easier to possess.
Easier to consume.

The sleeping feminine asks for nothing because she cannot speak, this is precisely why the modern confrontation with pornography culture feels so psychologically profound. Much of the imagery that increasingly disturbed women involved unconsciousness itself — women asleep, intoxicated, passive, immobilised, filmed without awareness, transformed into objects disconnected from personhood.

The archetype repeats and therefore Sleeping beauty was never just a fairytale, she is a psychic pattern , a cultural wound and calls for the feminine to awaken herself. The woman who descends consciously into the forest of the psyche, cuts through the thorns, confronts shadow, reclaims instinct, and returns to her own body as sacred territory once more.

I have to mention here the king too , even though my work is focused on the feminine , but i do not wish to place 'blame' on the feminine, rather the opposite , to bring transformation and empowerment. The King has to be mentioned here ( or the Prince as he was later known) as he represents a form of masculine consciousness disconnected from relationship, reciprocity, and true encounter. He does not know how to meet the feminine awake and encounters her through unconsciousness, passivity, silence, projection, and possession.

This represents a masculine consciousness split from soul, a masculine psyche taught to seek access rather than intimacy, he consumes here in his own shadow fantasy. I pondered where this kind of archetype may come from:

From generations of emotional suppression.
From systems that sever men from vulnerability, grief, tenderness, embodiment, and feeling.
From patriarchal structures that taught men conquest before connection.
Performance before presence.
Power before devotion.

From mens wounding with the Mother and there fore the feminine.

The sleeping woman and the disconnected king belong to the same wounded psychic field, neither is fully alive, neither is fully conscious. She sleeps beneath enchantment and he moves through the world unable to truly meet what is alive before him.

This is why the story still grips the collective imagination, because it is not only about women awakening, It is also about a masculine psyche learning how to approach the feminine without domination, projection, consumption, or unconscious entitlement. The healing belongs to both.

The awakened feminine, awakened to her sacred sexual life force
And the awakened masculine capable of reverence, emotional depth, reciprocity, and soul-level encounter.

Only then does the fairy tale truly transform.

In Love and Devotion

Collette

This is why I created the 13 Roses — a deep psychospiritual journey for women ready to awaken from the inherited sleep of disconnection, shame, performance, and numbness, and return to the sacred intelligence of their bodies, eros, instinct, sensuality, and feminine life force. The 13 Roses begins June 9th at 7pm CET for women ready to reclaim themselves from the inside out. 🌹
The Sacred Rose Temple – 13 Roses