About the Campfire Series:
Here at The Wild Woman Project, we deeply believe in the power of learning from and celebrating each other’s diverse experiences, stories, and perspectives. We also believe there is great power in allowing yourself to be witnessed. The Campfire Series gives us the feeling of gathering with our closest sisters around a fire (or a candle, or a bottle of wine) and sharing intimate stories. Naturally, when women gather, no two experiences are the same. These stories can range from sharing deep epiphanies, “hell yaasss” moments, heartaches, and downright silliness.
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Relationships as a Pathway to Healing & Knowing Ourselves
Relationships are universes coming together to create a third equally unique universe. Each has its own tiny universe of constellations. Relationship is an energetic exchange. This applies to groups, self reflection, archetypal reflections and ancestral lineage. We have relation to all of this in our lives. The complexity is beautiful to me, and I enjoy a multitude of relationships that express the fullness of me as I create tiny universes with anything and everyone I connect with.
That is to say, I get to be a unique version of myself reflected in the mirror of their unique soul at that moment, and together we create a world within that relationship that will never exist again, and has never existed before. Magic!
When I can surrender to the moment, stay present and bring my full self with consciousness…then I get to respond and show up with authenticity and joy, even if we are trudging through the muck of a shadowy time for either of us.
This kind of surrendering and presence is what “holding space” means.
I didn’t always have this awareness, of course.
It is still unfurling to full bloom after years of breathing through it.
So how does relationship become so broken these days?
I was taught as a kid to place others’ feelings above my own. I was groomed to place my feelings, needs and desires secondary to that of all adults, my older brother, my younger brother and anyone else in the room. Even strangers. Even people that made me feel uncomfortable. I was asked to smile to make them comfortable even when I was not. I was taught by example to anticipate others needs as well, and advocate for their needs to be met all the while ignoring my own needs. This was called being polite, being a good girl, and I received praise and love for being good at this intuitive self sacrificial act. This came through cultural messages and familial ones, social spaces like school and eventually inside my own mind.
Some of this grooming is unique to being a girl, but attitudes towards boys and girls are fairly universal when you examine how we force children to hug others, perform for adults and the way we dismiss their emotions that we, as adults, find difficult to hold space for. I am consistently shocked how many parents create impossible tasks for their children emotionally, and then chastise them when they melt down. My ability to show up for my kids is always a work in progress, and I work hard to be the adult who allows my kids to feel their feelings, and not just the shame of being wrong about how they feel. But that starts with me.
I created my victimhood through this lense of second class citizenship, and further through the more traumatic lense of having a broken introduction into my own sexuality, as many girls do. Piling on the patriarchal gaze + sexual abuse resulted in me hiding my femininity for the whole of my adolescence, bringing it out only to use as a seductive tactic, which was enacted to get loving attention, even at the expense of my safety. The Jane’s Addiction song “Jane Says” come to mind…”I want em if they want me….I only know they want me…”
In my adolescence especially, all of my relationships were forged by this feeling that I needed to be wanted, I needed to be loved, and I got that from being in service to, of use in some way, to the person that I was focused on. That is what many relationships in my life had at their core. It is a very interesting space to ponder, and the whole of my thirties have been spent dismantling this truth and rebuilding many of my relationships from mutual and honest exchange. Some with great success, and others…with painful reconstruction.
The first time I shared my sexual abuse with a friend, she reciprocated with something very similar and it healed my need to be witnessed and accepted. It was my first true friendship that I was my whole self, a friendship I still cherish now at the age of forty.
Over the years I have shared my story with many women who also suffered sexual trauma, and the resulting shame and dissociative behaviors we shared. The shame I battled within resulted in several years of leaving myself through drugs, inappropriate sex and other addictive behaviors, some I still carry and work out through circle work with the moon. I know now this is a story that many women share, and we have all fought daily to show up for ourselves and honor a relationship to our inner wounded self, or child. I see that especially dark time as a reclamation of myself, that I needed to feel power in my life.
During college, exactly twenty years ago, I had the privilege to live and learn in the Findhorn Foundation in Forres, Scotland for three months. As I began to engage with people in that community, and learn from them, I came to study the theory of transpersonal psychology along with deep ecology. Two guiding principles of this work are rooted in the simple mystic adage of like attracts like, and as above, so below. But as I learned more about the philosophic teachings within transpersonal psychology, and the way we build relationships, I began to realize that I could not have deep relationships with others if I dissociated from an honest relationship with myself.
Today this truth is being imagined so clearly in our feminine rising movement across the world. The idea that we can only know others as well as we know ourselves. This kind of wisdom when realized can inform us about how we meet the world as a mirror, that we show up for others the way we show up for ourselves. So it goes that when we deny our shadow, it reflects in the way we imagine, expect and even blame others for not showing up for us. In other words, we have habits of projecting our shadows onto others, to dissociate them from our own being.
This distorted thinking results in reasonable feelings of resentment, jealousy, guilt, shame and anger. And so it is that I regarded women that I saw as “other.” That I judged and faulted other women for my feelings of unworthiness. This is how we play out the patriarchy. We internalize the shame and think we are bad or wrong…and then we believe that about others. Because “I am rubber, and you are glue, and whatever you say bounces off of me and sticks to you.” Isn’t that the truth. It is our responsibility to own our response, to heal ourselves. Only then are we healing others. By example, not my manipulative control over others actions, thoughts or feelings. Of course I still struggle with this at times and with certain people I consider “other”.
I am so intrigued by the magnitude of this work, the reflective quality of our relationships. How we project onto others what we deny in ourselves. When we respond from the inner shadow, we see others as enemy, someone to blame for our sorrows or a reason to stay trapped in victimhood and powerlessness. In truth we are mirrors for others, as they are for us, and the best way I have found to engage in right and aligned relationship is to do the work of cleaning my own mirror. All. The. Time.
By being conscious of my shadows, owning them and giving them names, I give myself permission to be whole, reclaim my innate power and sovereignty, while giving others permission to to the same. This is how I hold space in circle, and how I aspire to show up in all of my relationships. The operative word being aspire, as I am an evolving being, wild woman; completely and magically imperfect. Human.
I offer this as a belief to you today, wild woman. It is our most intimate relationships where we work out the inner stories of our psyche In action this is paying attention to our thoughts about others.
Believing this transpersonal concept urges me to be fully present, to bring all of my soul into who I am today, and to honor her wisdom from the lies she learned. From the tiny revolutions of my life through relationships.
Five year old Jennie still feels betrayed by being told to dismiss her own comfort and sit on someone’s lap anyways. Nine year old Jennie is still checking out when she is touched intimately when she isn’t ready. Thirteen year old Jennie still feels unworthy of platonic love for exactly who she is. Nineteen year old Jennie still feels like numbing out all of the pain that went unwitnessed and dismissed as dramatic acting out.
Today I witness my inner child when triggered, and without judgement I thank her for the emotional memory of these trespasses. Every time I reparent that part of myself I integrate my truth into my adult self. I breathe into the safety I have created for myself today. And I am grateful for the woman I am now.
This practice now informs my relationships as I notice that others have their child selves with them too, and I can witness that pain and trauma with humility. I notice that when I fight with my husband, we are sometimes thirteen together, being hurt and angry and responding from a well-worn traumatic space.
In circle for this new moon this idea was crystalized by an image that was shared around the circle that touched me deeply. An image of an art installation at Burning Man of two metal adult cages facing opposite directions, housing two silhouettes of children facing each other palm to palm. We are constantly seeking that soft space within one another to heal the past and move forward together. That is what I have come to understand is truly occuring when we are triggered within our most treasured relationships.
I believe that owning our truth, and offering it to others in relationship can crystallize and make real the humanity that lives within us all. We have all been turned against our own self love in some way, which we project onto others. This builds walls that we cannot scale, we can only break down together.
Blessings on this full moon in Taurus. Big love is coming now from mama earth and her wisdom as she sheds the blooms that have lived their lives, and the leaves dead and falling. Showing us how beautiful death can be.
In sisterhood,
Jennifer
On the Horizon
Join us for an hour-long New Moon Meditation Adventure on December 2nd!
Online, from anywhere.
Using a dynamic meditation journey, we will tune into the New Moon, to your own Inner Guidance, synced up with wild-hearted women from around the world. This offering will include music, storytelling, meditation, journaling prompts & intention-setting.
Can’t make it live? No worries. All participants will receive a copy of the recording with 24 hours of the session.
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Join us online, from anywhere. Spring 2025
"The Circle Leader Training Program at The Wild Woman Project was one of the most transformative and healing experiences of my life. I have received many tools, resources, support, and connections that I will carry on with me forever." ~ Hannah Devin, Graduate
Part part skill-building, part wildish personal-development, this course is sure to give you a deeper look into the Wild Woman Archetype, Moon Wisdom, Intuition and Inner Guidance, Circle Facilitation, and community building. With hundreds of graduates in 26 countries around the world, this course has been cultivated over 13 years to be our very best in Feminine Leadership Training.
We have Wild Woman Project-trained Circle facilitators is 26 countries, and 44 out of the 50 United States.
Jennie leads circle at Corestar Pilates in Auburn, WA each month. She is a mystic Momma and Wife, Astrologer, Master Herbalist, Reiki I Practitioner, Tarot Reader and Ritual Artist who loves to share in the magic of spinning through the universe with wild women. In circle, she seeks to co-create an inspired and meaningful experience where women can feel nourished and replenished, invigorated by a renewed sense of the powerful and WILD feminine spirit that we share. A circle leader since May of 2016 in the Wild Woman Project, she leads occasional circles on the full moon with friends to celebrate the community of women in circle prior. She welcomes every woman to come and see what is in store.
Connect with Jennifer at Paintedgoddess.com or on her FB page.
Thank you so much Jennie, this is wonderfully on time for what I’ve been currently going through. It’s never a bad idea to take a step back and ask oneself whether they’re projecting negativity into a situation, or behaving from a place of love.
Your reflections remind me of a beautiful poem called Eleven by Sandra Cisneros. Thanks again <3
https://youtu.be/M_NaeodivR0