CELLULAR RESONANCE AND THE SACRED FEMININE 1 CELLULAR RESONANCE AND THE SACRED FEMININE: MARION WOODMAN’S STORY TINA STROMSTED, PH.D. Body work is soul work. Imagination is the bridge between body and soul. —Marion Woodman Background and Contributions y first contact with Marion Woodman’s work was in 1981, when I read The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter: Obesity, M Anorexia Nervosa, and the Repressed Feminine, which, like a good deal of Marion’s writing, draws its title from classical literature. Eight years later, I met Marion in person at a workshop she was leading through the San Francisco Jung Institute. Since then I have studied with her as often as possible, participating in the BodySoul Rhythms Photo: Marion Woodman & Tina Stromsted, Conference sponsored by the C.G. Jung Institute intensive retreats she leads for women. This article grew out of my of San Francisco, 2005. Tina Stromsted, Ph.D., ADTR, past co-founder and faculty of the Authentic Movement Institute in Berkeley, teaches at the Santa Barbara Graduate Institute, the Marion Woodman Foundation and other universities and healing centers internationally. With three decades of clinical experience, she is a Candidate at the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. This article was published originally in Somatics: Journal of the Bodily Arts & Sciences XIII(1) (2000-1, Fall/Winter), 4-11 & 51-54. 2 TINA STROMSTED CELLULAR RESONANCE AND THE SACRED FEMININE 3 dissertation research, in which I interviewed Marion and other leaders At the heart of Marion’s work is the development of “conscious in the field about their personal experiences and work with women in femininity.” The daughter of a minister, she sought her soul through transformative movement practices. dance. Marion’s approach supports women in bringing conscious Marion’s early writings were followed by many other books, tracing feminine energy into relationship with the Holy Spirit. Her lectures and the development of her work and ideas: Addiction to Perfection: The experiential work bring consciousness to and activate healing in the body/ Still Unravished Bride; The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological psyche/soul split suffered by most modern women who have grown up Transformation; The Ravaged Bridegroom: Masculinity in Women; in the context of “a cultural one-sidedness that favors patriarchal values— Conscious Femininity; Bone: Dying into Life; and five co-authored books: productivity, goal orientation, intellectual excellence, and spiritual Leaving My Father’s House; Dancing in the Flames; Coming Home to perfection.”1 Marion values the earthy interpersonal values traditionally Myself; The Forsaken Garden; and The Maiden King, co-authored with recognized as the heart of the feminine, and the inner spiritual light. The poet and men’s movement leader Robert Bly. A Jungian analyst and balance of matter and spirit is at the core of her work. internationally acclaimed author, lecturer, and workshop leader, Marion In her late seventies, Marion has a presence of casual elegance. recently retired from her private practice in Toronto, Canada in order Tall, with thick, rich, wavy, graying brown hair and sparkling blue to focus on her health, writing, and teaching. eyes, she is energetic, vibrant, and articulate, packs a surprisingly wry Marion’s work with the body is rooted in her own healing journey. sense of humor, and loves to dance. Marion’s tone is informative, direct, A gifted high school English and drama teacher for 24 years, she forceful, dramatic, and warm, taking care to engage the audience— struggled with anorexia and the kidney failure that ensued, a struggle even in enormous lecture halls—in something experiential that will that eventually led her to study analytic psychology at the C. G. Jung assist them in connecting with their bodies, and then drawing them Institute in Zurich, Switzerland. There she analyzed her dreams with out in relationship to the material she is presenting. Though the her analyst and continued her healing process by exploring experiential majority of her writing and teaching addresses women’s experience, work at home. She had had a dream instructing her to place healing she is also sensitive to the wounded inner feminine in men. A true images from her dreams into afflicted areas of her body. There in her crone—experienced, unsentimental, forgiving, and conscious of life’s own room, she would stretch, breathe, and warm up her body, and many paradoxes2—she embodies androgynous qualities, weaving then lie down on the floor. After taking time to open her body through rigorous theoretical material with experiential work that awakens deep relaxation, she would place healing images from her dreams into ailing feeling, body awareness, and creativity. She speaks passionately about parts of her body, allowing the images to move and change as they the sacredness of matter and sacredness of soul in Sophia (the feminine flowed naturally in the tissue and in the expressive movements that face of God), the relationship between the feminine individuation unfolded. Working alone, with herself as witness, she tape-recorded journey and bodily experience, and the value of dreams and intuition the stream of images, feelings, and associations that surfaced, working in guiding one’s life from the depths of one’s being. with them later through writing, drawing, dancing, and analysis. Marion lives in London, Canada, with Ross, her husband of forty- These experiences provided the seed for her BodySoul Rhythms two years, who is an author and professor of the Romantic poets. Now approach, which integrates analytical psychology, dreamwork, art, retired, he sometimes accompanies Marion in her work, providing a mask-making, voice, bodywork, structured dance explorations, inner- warm and concentrated presence in the background. While we women sourced movement, and improvisation. Assisted by colleagues with are working in the studio, Ross is walking in nature and writing, later whom she has worked for decades, dancer and educator Mary Hamilton joining us for meals and offering a guest lecture on poetry that and vocal coach and mask maker Ann Skinner, she presents these illuminates areas we are exploring. His humor, intelligence, and love explorations internationally in women’s intensive retreats. Each is a for his subject are palpable and his presence brings the masculine temenos (sacred, protected space) in a natural setting. principle alive in our gatherings. 4 TINA STROMSTED CELLULAR RESONANCE AND THE SACRED FEMININE 5 Personal Background on farmers to bring them food. Her mother tried to provide for people who were coming in off the road hungry, and she couldn’t afford to arion grew up in a small town in Southwestern Ontario, Canada, buy Marion even the simplest pretty clothes. the only girl in the family, with two younger brothers. Her M Then, when Marion was three years old, her mother became father and mother met when he was giving his ordination sermon and seriously ill and was, for the most part, bed-ridden for several years. she was a soloist in the choir. Both placed a high value on their Christian While pregnant with her last child, she contracted tuberculosis of the beliefs and on a life of service. An important element in the glands through contaminated milk from the town dairy. With no one transformative movement work is the concept of being able to contact to look after her at home, Marion had to accompany her father on his the unconscious and move freely, bringing feelings, images, bodily ministerial rounds. Relegated to the parlors of parishioners while her sensations, and memories to consciousness in a safe container, in the father performed his duties, Marion made blankets out of doilies, presence of a nonjudgmental “witness.” When I asked Marion about playing in the world of her imagination and “pretty things.” “My her mother as her first “witness,” wondering how her influence may mother was the organizer in our household, and my father was my have informed Marion’s life and work, she replied: witness,” Marion reflected. Marion spent very little time with her “She was a suffragette who was very much ahead of her time in mother during her mother’s illness, and “didn’t see much joy in the conservative London. She drove her own car. She had very lovely clothes. female body” during that time. “My mother hadn’t been all that happy She had a job, and she had her hair bobbed before anybody else in in her [female] body, and the illness took away what joy there was,” 1926. That was big in her life because she had magnificent hair, and she said sadly. she decided to have it bobbed. That was more than her family could Marion’s own body “shut down” during those years as she took on deal with. I’ve still got her magnificent braid that was cut off. But she adult responsibilities that her mother wasn’t able to fulfill. “All the was not in her body. She was very proud of her body and she was a spontaneous playfulness of a child was curbed by my feeling that I very good-looking woman, but she had no sense of herself as a woman, had to be quiet. I had to take responsibility beyond my years,” she in terms of loving her menstrual cycle, or loving being a woman. She recalled. And this, she says, was a potent force behind her later putting didn’t like being a woman. Life would have been much easier for her on a great deal of weight, regardless of the number of calories she in a man’s body. I think that was one of the biggest things she had to actually consumed. “The inner archetypal image was of the maternal deal with all her life: how to get along in a woman’s body.