Marion Woodman > Quotes

“Love is the real power. It's the energy that cherishes. The more you work with that energy, the more you will see how people respond naturally to it, and the more you will want to use it. It brings out your creativity, and helps everyone around you flower. Your children, the people you work with--everyone blooms.”
― Marion Woodman

“The longing for sweets is really a yearning for love or "sweetness.”
― Marion Woodman

“This is your body, your greatest gift, pregnant with wisdom you do not hear, grief you thought was forgotten, and joy you have never known.”
― Marion Woodman

“It takes great courage to break with one's past history and stand alone”
― Marion Woodman

“There is no growth without real feeling. Children not loved for who they are do not learn how to love themselves. Their growth is an exercise in pleasing others, not in expanding through experience. As adults, they must learn to nurture their own lost child.”
― Marion Woodman, Coming Home to Myself: Reflections for Nurturing a Woman's Body and Soul

“To me, real love, the move from power to love, involves immense suffering. Any creative work comes from that level, where we share our sufferings, just the sheer suffering of being human. And that's where the real love is.”
― Marion Woodman, Conscious Femininity: Interviews With Marion Woodman

“When the power comes from within us and we claim it as our own, then we no longer have to affirm ourselves by dominating others. The irony is that we are actually afraid of our own power.”
― Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness

“Kill the imagination and you kill the soul. Kill the soul and you're left with a listless, apathetic creature who can become hopeless or brutal or both.”
― Marion Woodman, Bone: Dying into Life

“Children not loved for who they are do not learn how to love themselves. Their growth is an exercise in pleasing others, not in expanding through experience. As adults, they must learn to nurture their own lost child. There's personal anger, but underneath there's often universal rage; and when we are possessed, God help the man who's on the end of that. Deep rage is not about the man; Deep rage is this: Nobody ever saw me. Nobody ever heard me. As long as I can remember, I've had to perform. When I tried to be myself, I was told, That's not what you think, that's not what you ought to do. So, just like my mother and her mother, I put on a false face. My life became a lie. That's deep rage. We have lived our lives behind a mask. Sooner or later —if we are lucky— the mask will be smashed. What a relief to be human instead of the god or goddess my parents imagined me to be or I imagined them.”
― Marion Woodman

“If we could allow the pace of our meetings to slow down to the pace of our hearts, we might find genuine understanding.”
― Marion Woodman, Coming Home to Myself: Reflections for Nurturing a Woman's Body and Soul

“Only by discovering and loving the goddess lost within our rejected body can we hear our own authentic voice.”
― Marion Woodman, Coming Home to Myself: Reflections for Nurturing a Woman's Body and Soul

“I yearned for lightness; I still yearn for lightness. Lightness is freedom -- freedom from the heaviness of too much stuff, too many words, too heavy a pull toward inertia. I feared being buried in stone -- becoming stone.”
― Marion Woodman, Bone: Dying into Life

“I use the word mystery,rather than magic.
I love magic.
something magic was always going to happen. When it did, it never did anything but land me in trouble.
MYSTERY is the depth of the sacred.

Page 33 coming home to my self”
― Marion Woodman

“William Blake says the body is 'that portion of soul discerned by the five senses”
― Marion Woodman, Conscious Femininity: Interviews With Marion Woodman

“Women are, by nature, disposed to relationship and connectedness; yet true relationship cannot be embraced until a woman as a deep sense of her at-one-ment. Without this essential independence from all roles and bonds, she is a potential victim for servitude.”
― Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness

“In our yearning to be perfect, we have mistaken perfection for wholeness. We think we cannot love ourselves until we and others meet some external standard. Depression, anxiety—in fact, most neuroses and compulsions—are ultimately a defense against loving ourselves without condition. We are afraid to look at the damp, dark, ugly yet exquisite roots of being that stretch deep into our survival chakra. We are fearful of finding that the spirit is not there, that our Home is empty, even as our outer home is empty. Yet it is in that place of survival, where the dark mother has been abandoned, that spirit longs to be embodied so that the whole body may become light. Ego wants to be the god of our own idealized projection; spirit wants to be incarnated in our humanity where it can grow in wisdom through experience.”
― Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness

“This is the beginning of a road whose end is totally unknown and totally known.”
― Marion Woodman, Bone: Dying into Life

“The Goddess is the unspeakable wisdom that grows into the very cells of the body. She lives with this sacramental truth at her center: the beauty and the horror of the whole of life are blazing in Her love. She is dancing in the flames.”
― Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness

“What a paradox is there: flying higher into heaven, at the same time being forced to work deeper into the hell of my addiction, the hell of my own unconscious body.”
― Marion Woodman, Bone: Dying into Life

“When Matisse was asked whether he believed in God, his response was, 'yes, when I'm working'.”
― Marion Woodman, Conscious Femininity: Interviews With Marion Woodman

“Standing alone today demands even more courage and strength than it did in former cultures. From infancy, children have been programmed to perform. Rather than living from their own needs and feelings, they learn to assess situations in order to please others. Without an inner core of certainty grounded in their own musculature, they lack the inner resources to stand alone. Pummelled by mass media and peer group pressures, their identity may be utterly absorbed by collective stereotypes. In the absence of adequate rites of passage, ad-men become the high priests of an initiation into the addictions of consumerism.”
― Marion Woodman, The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation

“Reading ancient myths and fairy tales can be very helpful because these stories came spontaneously from people who had not studied psychology. The stories came straight out of their unconscious and, therefore, show us how the unconscious works unimpeded by conscious intervention. The images are clear and stark. For those of us who are interested in why we do what we do when we want to do the opposite, the stories are gold mines of information.”
― Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness

“The word 'feminine,' as I understand it, has very little to do with gender, nor is woman the custodian of femininity. Both men and women are searching for their pregnant virgin. She is the part of us who is outcast, the part who comes to consciousness through going into darkness, mining our leaden darkness, until we bring her silver out.”
― Marion Woodman, The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation

“The Crone has been missing from our culture for so long that many women, particularly young girls, know nothing of her tutelage. Young girls in our society are not initiated by older women into womanhood with its accompanying dignity and power.
Without the Crone, the task of belonging to oneself, of being a whole person, is virtually impossible.”
― Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness

“She dreams she is in a glass coffin. From her prison, details have beauty. In her aloneness, she imagines emotions. Her husband is the perfect bridegroom, the trickster, the small boy looking for mother. She is goddess and mirror, siren and friend, femme fatale and sacrificing wife. He is attracted to her girlhood purity, her desire to sacrifice, to serve. At first he may be flattered: she sees him as a god.”
― Marion Woodman, Coming Home to Myself: Reflections for Nurturing a Woman's Body & Soul

“Recognizing the difference between power and love is difficult if we were raised in a home where power was disguised as love.”
― Marion Woodman, Coming Home to Myself: Reflections for Nurturing a Woman's Body & Soul

“You think of yourself -- light, fast, free -- free of earth, free of bondage to your body. In your 'perfect' body, you are in control, addicted to the light that keeps you out of body. You're a swan maiden, addicted to wings, addicted to spirit. You refused to eat in order to fly.”
― Marion Woodman, Bone: Dying into Life

“A few individuals, a few of the great saints, certainly knew what femininity was about. In the old matriarchies there was no feminine consciousness, only unconscious mother. The "I", the ego with values and truths of its own was not operating. In the Celtic world they died for the Goddess but they had no ego that said, "Life is worth living." They were like the terrorists...who don't have the ego strength to say life is worth living so they willingly die for a cause. Feminine consciousness has been operative in some individuals, but not in a whole culture. Now I think we're starting to get free of the old matriarchy and free of the patriarchy. In other words, we are entering into conscious relationship with our mother and father complexes. As a planet we're moving toward maturity. We're trying to find out who we are when we're not possessed by those complexes. And we're fighting against time.”
― Marion Woodman, Conscious Femininity: Interviews With Marion Woodman

“Can I really believe I am worth an hour a day? Am I, who have given my life to others, selfish enough to take one hour a day to find myself?”
― Marion Woodman, Coming Home to Myself: Reflections for Nurturing a Woman's Body & Soul

“Living by principles is not living your own life. It is easier to
try to be better than you are than to be who you are.”
― Marion Woodman, Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride: A Psychological Study