A woman is a wild paradox of contradictions. And this is not a flaw, a fault nor a sin. It is her very design.

As a panther, a jaguar, a wolf, a wild boar, a woman carries fierceness with her tenderness, elegance with her instinct, strength with her softness. She defies logical reasoning as her moods, her responses, her movements, and her creations swirl and flux and die and rebirth day after day.

A woman is the moon. She waxes and she wanes. She is the elements of nature, the sun that warms and melts and the fire that burns and destroys. She is all things. And that is not a problem to fix. That is her inherent, exquisite, natural design.

How deep the ache and profound the pain within a woman who has been conditioned, tamed, and programmed to believe that not all facets of her humanity are divine. That parts of her are Godly and parts of her are sin. That parts of her are desirable and parts of her are deplorable. How deeply a woman yearns for these parts of herself she has not been allowed to embrace.

For a woman to truly be authentic, to truly be free, to truly be herself, she must summon and reclaim all parts of herself as worthy, all parts of herself as whole. Beginning with her heart and her womb.

The emphasis of heart centered consciousness through the ages and the simultaneous repression and demonization of womb centered consciousness has created a severe imbalance in women in general and in our world at large. We see this in a woman’s loss of instinct, of natural self protection, of clear boundaries, and of wild power that fuels her creative energy in the world. These virtues arise from right relationship with our wombs, the center of our power, creativity, passion, and potential to manifest abundance in our lives.

If we look to the most ancient symbols of womanhood, through the Goddesses of myriad cultures across the world, we see animated the dual nature of woman… shadow and light, underworld and upperworld, wild and holy, fierce and tender, pure and passionate. One facet is not superior nor inferior, righteous nor sinful. All is part of her natural design. It is in fact through our distorted belief structures built through the ages rooted in duality that have robbed us of the wholeness of our selfhood and of our humanity.

From a mythological perspective, the roots of racism, environmental destruction, and the suffering from a wound of separation from source, could be profoundly healed through the reclaiming of the demonized, denied, and repressed aspect of our nature: the dark, the flesh, the underworld, the womb. And this IS what is happening now. When a woman chooses to reclaim the shadow aspects of herself, she also heals the fragmented wounds of humanity.

What is “Heart-Womb Consciousness” and Why is it Reawakening Now?

While heart centered consciousness has been at the center of our spiritual systems for a very long time, womb centered consciousness was once integral for our priestess ancestors, and it is re-awakening now in the women who came here to remember it for the wholeness of our world.

What more and more women are coming to learn at this pivotal time in our humanity as the divine feminine is reawakening within us all, is the cyclical nature of death and rebirth. To reorient ourselves with our true nature, we all take the initiatory voyage down into the underworld, into the womb, to rebirth through the dark night of the soul. Here we reclaim our fiercest demons as our greatest powers and use them to inspire the love in our hearts as rightful action in the world. (I will definitely be writing more about this in the future, but for now our article Inanna’s Descent: How We Embrace the Shadow and Integrate Our Wholeness provides a powerful introduction.)

Whether we find ourselves compromising and sacrificing our true desires, blaming and resenting others for our hurts, hiding away our gifts out of fear of persecution, fearing our sexual expression, dishonoring the preciousness of our sexuality in relationships, demonizing power and calling it “unspiritual,” or struggling to feel safe to be vulnerable and tender with another or in the world, the heart in union with the womb offers a key to returning to balance... within each of us and within our world at large. Descending into the underworld and returning from those depths once again to love, is the heart womb awakening.

My Journey of Awakening the Heart Womb

For many years, as a yoga teacher, energy healer, and devotee of love, my focus was exclusively on heart-centered consciousness. I followed male spiritual teachers, love and light transmissions, and practiced compassion and forgiveness as the answers to every ache. While this brought many blessings into my life, raised my frequency, and allowed for much healing, there were deeper layers that eventually rose to the surface of my reality that required I finally meet the other side of my nature: the womb and her wild wisdom.

This journey into the underworld of my own womb awakening began through strange health problems, including daily panic attacks, agoraphobia, extreme adrenal fatigue, and the surfacing of many layers of repressed emotional and sexual trauma. As I witnessed my life as I knew it crumble before my very eyes, none of the practices that had formed my foundation could support me anymore. I felt lost and confused.

Yoga and meditation, spiritual mentors, and all of the tools that formed my spirituality no longer helped me, and they often made it worse. Nothing could bring me solace. Eventually my days consisted of laying on the floor for hours, barely leaving the house, and asking, praying, for guidance. The words that came to me were: the key is hidden in your womb. At the time I didn’t understand this message, until one night when I was violently attacked in my home by intruders and it was my wild dragon nature who emerged through rage and saved my life. (I wrote more about my personal journey here: When the Divine Feminine Rises Up and Ruins Your Life.)

Mary Magdalene as the Icon for Heart Womb Awakening

In the aftermath of my violent assault, I left my “dream” life in Costa Rica and went on a voyage through Guatemala, Thailand, Bali, and Greece, learning women’s wisdom, Goddess mythology, and the Priestess arts. This learning came from beautiful teachers and mentors, but mostly it came through my own devotion to truth. To diving inwardly and trusting that my heart and my womb carried all of the keys for remembering God-dess within.

One of my most profound teachers on my path of heart womb awakening has been Mary Magdalene, a name gaining more and more power and reverence in the spiritual community at this time. While in the bible Mary was depicted as a prostitute saved through the forgiveness of Jesus, modern day feminist theologians and womb mystics like Meggan Watterson in her book Mary Magdalene Revealed and The Divine Feminine Oracle (truly enlightening), and Seren and Azra Betrand of The Fountain of Life Mystery School and their books Womb Awakening (a treasure trove of mind blowing wisdom) and Magdalene Mysteries, are sharing the deeper evidence that Mary was actually a womb priestess and Jesus’ partner and tantric beloved.

Mary Magdalene’s transmission offers us the red thread of womb consciousness through the Holy Hor (which I wrote about in this article: From Prostitute to Priestess, Reclaiminig the Whore Into Our Wholeness) as well as the white thread of heart consciousness through the Virgin Heart (which I wrote about here: How to Take Back Your Virginity as Woman Whole Unto Herself.) Most importantly and most powerfully, Mary’s heart womb transmission reminds us that God does not exist outside of us, God is within us, as the great Creatrix herself. Our bodies are the blueprint of creation, pillars connection Heaven and Earth through the doorway of our womb that roots us into the Mother and the blossoming of our heart that opens us to divine love.

All that we are is sacred and whole.

The Archetype of “The Mother” as the Essence of the Heart Womb

The story of Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and the Virgin Mary, bears many similarities to the Egyptian mythos of Goddess Isis, her beloved Osiris, and their divine child Horus. Just as it is Mother Mary who immaculately conceives Jesus in her womb and Mary Magdalene who witnesses his rebirth, Mari Isis of Egypt brings her beloved Osiris back to life through her vital sexual life force and conceives Horus through love making with a golden phallus she fashions for Osiris’ dead body.

The message is this: the love of the heart redeems all things back from the dead, and all life re-emerges through the gateway of the powerful womb. This is the secret superhuman gift of the mother, who brings life into the world through the power of her love.

In many mythological traditions we see this dual nature of motherhood, and of love itself, through the dual nature of the Goddess and her relationship with ferocity and tenderness. The lion and the lamb. Mother is not just the sweet agreeable apron clad woman of the 1950s era, she is the warrior Durga who rides atop a tiger and destroys all demons to bring balance in the world. She is the wild awakening of Kali who shatters our lives to bring us closer to truth. She is the sexual enchantment of Aphrodite who births Eros (passion for life itself) through her union with Ares the God of War.

Mother is complex and dynamic, she is heart and womb.

While it is the illusion of duality that has brought us into a sense of separation from our total nature, this same duality offers us a pathway to wholeness. By honoring and meeting the individual energy centers of heart and womb, we can weave them in union once again. Like light and dark, masculine and feminine, heaven and earth, we can meet with heart and womb in their uniqueness and learn to dance them into balance.

Awakening the Medicine, Gifts, and Qualities of the Heart

The heart bestows us with many gifts, blessings, and virtues. The heart enables us to see clearly, to perceive through the eyes of truth, to recognize the holiness and divinity within ourselves and all beings. To set down our resentments, to release all intolerance, to honor all that we are and all that we meet as sacred. To melt away the frozen layers of pain, to grieve our endings, to forgive ourselves and others, to say yes to life on the other side of death, to love.

A woman’s right to her heart is her right to her innocence. To compassion. To feel a healthy vulnerability towards love, life, humanity, God. An imbalanced heart center might manifest as closure, bitterness, coldness, meanness, but more likely we see it through over giving, poor boundaries, people pleasing, and self betrayal masked as generosity or forgiveness. In either case, the imbalanced heart center affects our ability to give and receive love, and may appear through financial poverty, non reciprocal or even dishonorable relationships, a lack of personal fulfillment, and a dull vitality due to repressed grief and rage.

Blossoming back open the tender petals of the heart requires profound self trust. The heart authentically opens when the heart feels safe to open. Feeling safe with oneself is the only true way to trust another. The restoration of this self trust often requires a deep purging of grief, rage, resentment, and victimhood buried from a lifetime of past hurts and traumas. An authentically blooming heart emerges like the stunning lotus up from the deep mud, the dark waters of the womb itself.

Awakening the Medicine, Gifts, and Qualities of the Womb

The womb empowers, deepens, anchors, and enlivens the virtues of the heart. The womb inspires our love, honors our sacredness, discerns what will serve from what will harm, protects us from anything that threatens our fertility, vitality, and prosperity. The womb strips away and sheds what is no longer necessary, what will not survive our next incarnation, what must be released for love to thrive.

A woman’s right to her womb is her right to her life force. Her vitality. Her creativity. Her innate wild. An imbalanced womb center may appear through sexual repression or sexual reaction. We see it when a woman “plays small” and diminishes her unique power, judges or envies other women who express their power or sexuality, attempts to control or contain the wild juiciness of her body and of nature itself, and stifles her deep emotional waters. We also see it when a woman manipulates others with her sexuality and power, drowns herself in sorrow or in her rage, feels completely out of control emotionally, and projects all of her pain onto others.

Fully owning the wild oceanic depths of the womb and her power to both birth and destroy life, is a path of mastery for women at this time in our collective evolution. Whatever within a person and within a society has been the most demonized and repressed carries within it the densest shadows to excavate. This is why when many women begin the path of womb awakening, they experience profound ego death, life destruction, the unearthing of unprocessed trauma, and a rushing river of overwhelming emotions. Delivering ourselves an abundance of compassion and tenderness from the heart enables us to resource ourselves, midwife ourselves, and light our way through the darkness as we reclaim our inherent holy power.

Weaving Whole the Heart Womb

When the heart and womb are weaving within us harmoniously, we are enlivened, impassioned, wild, instinctual, creative and free, and this power serves our capacity to heal, to bless, to restore, to nurture, to truly forgive, and to love for the well being of all. A truly awakened heart womb in the world is the rare jewel, and we may initially need to use our imaginations, to look to the great creatures of the ages and the Goddesses of the world for guidance. We can call upon our sweet bodies to show us how. To allow the wild rivers of our sensual flesh to remind us of the truth of our nature that is already here, pulsing us alive.

It is normal, appropriate, and understandable that on the path of wholeness we at times swing in extreme directions. As we remember the womb gnosis that has been forgotten and buried through the ages, we may for a time feel less connected with the heart. We may find ourselves drowning in grief and rage. We may become angry, rude, reactive, and wildly inappropriate as we reclaim the wild wonder that sets the world ablaze. As we remember the immortal love of the heart we may for a time feel less connected with the womb. We may “spiritually bypass” and paint our lives and our world in love and light. We may forgive those before they “deserve” it. We may need to seek solace from our shadows for a time.

Ultimately, what matters is our devotion to love and to life. To being alive. To being in love. To keep showing up, waking up, standing up, until we become the ecstatic awakening that is our birthright. And then showing up, waking up, and standing up all over again. And again. Finding our way to mastery as the heart and the womb find their way home to the throne of holy matrimony once again.

To dive in deeper, come receive our free guide Virgin & Whore with rituals, contemplations, meditations, and more for summoning, reviving, and healing through your pure innocent nature (heart) in harmony with your instinctual wild passionate self (womb). Receive the guide here.