Unearthing Venus: My Search for the Woman Within

by Cate Montana

In the tradition of Eat, Pray, Love and Cheryl Strayed’s Wild comes a fresh voice in women’s non-fiction.

Cate Montana was raised in a man's world to be "just one of the guys" and swiftly rose to success as a network TV editor and journalist. Then, on assignment, a shocking interview with a shaman changes her life and sets her on the path of discovering the illusive power of the feminine. In a wrenching recapitulation of her life, she realizes the devastating absence of feminine qualities within herself and the terrifying global consequences having only one paradigm available for women to express through: the masculine world of Power, Control, Possessions, Profit, and Progress. A riveting, intelligent, and frequently funny memoir, Cate takes readers on an amazing journey into the heart of the Amazon jungle, up staggering peaks in the Andes, and halfway across the globe to the consecration of a temple to the Great Goddess in southern India as she searches for the missing Feminine within herself and Western Culture. Unearthing Venus is a visionary everywoman story and social commentary that brilliantly captures what it is to be a woman today and everyday.

Genres: Memoir

300 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Raised on a cattle and thoroughbred horse farm in Virginia outside Washington D.C., I followed society’s happiness formula for the first 30 years, attending prep schools and graduating from university with a bachelor’s degree in English. Instead of pursuing my original career plans as a newspaper journalist, I fell into television (hint: met a guy), and ended up building a highly successful career as a freelance television editor with the global networks including ABC, NBC, CNN, and BBC.
Unfortunately both career success and a socially equitable marriage to Mr. Right failed to lead to happiness or answers to life's perennial questions. At age 30 I took the only other road available in life: within.
While freelancing around the globe from Atlanta, I explored everything from Christian mysticism to Zen Buddhism, yoga to Chi Gung, quantum physics to hands-on healing. Fascinated by the mind and human potential, in 1984 I went back to school, graduating with a Master of Humanistic Psychology Degree from the University of West Georgia in Carrollton.
Soon after graduation and I left television and husband #2 (agh!) to live in the middle of nowhere in a one-room 100-year-old stone cabin in the North Georgia mountains near Gainesville. With no worldly distractions, I spent three years meditating, writing magazine articles nobody wanted to buy, playing the harp and writing music. I also started work as a feature reporter at The Times, a Gannett newspaper in North Atlanta.
Moving near Olympia, Washington in the Pacific Northwest in 1989, I continued working as a freelance journalist for newspapers such as The Seattle Post-Intelligencer and The Tacoma News Tribune. In 1999 I got hired as the Northwest editor and bureau chief for the national Native American newspaper, Indian Country Today.
Eventually I moved into marketing in 2004, working with the filmmakers of the international indie hit film What the Bleep Do We Know?!, publishing the film’s online newsletter, The Bleeping Herald, writing articles about consciousness and breakthroughs in quantum physics that were leading scientists to a new understanding of mysticism and a unified cosmos.
In 2007 what can only be called a 3-day enlightenment experience occurred, shattering everything. For the second time I dropped career and all my personal endeavors, leaving the US to travel extensively in Central and South America, studying with ayahuasceros deep in the Amazon in Peru and with shamans in the Andes of Ecuador.
In June 2009 I returned to the United States to work with Hollywood filmmaker Betsy Chasse writing the screenplay Killing Buddha. Although disenchanted with spiritual teachers, at this time I also met my guru Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev from Coimbatore, India. From Sadhguru I learned ancient yogic kriyas (energy processes), traveling to his ashram in South India to study and participate in a yogic alchemical consecration of a lingam dedicated to the Goddess.
Returning to the states in March 2010, I started writing Unearthing Venus - My Search For the Woman Within. I also co-authored the book The Heart of the Matter: Gifts in Strange Wrapping Paper for Hay House Publishing with Dr. Darren Weissman. I currently live in Washington State and am writing a sequel called Unearthing Shadows.

Reviews

[N.N. Heaven · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unearthing Venus is the story of Cate, a newspaper reporter, searching for answers about who she is, where she belongs, what is her purpose in life and what it means to be woman. It starts with a question asked by a Brazilian shaman she’s interviewing and her soul begs for answers.



Let’s start at the beginning, I always say, and so Cate starts her memoir at her childhood. She doesn’t hold anything back and her insight is refreshing to read. She tells it like it is and as a reader, I was immersed in her life experiences. From losing her virginity to working on Monday Night Football, I couldn’t read fast enough. Her point of view is from a woman abused in every way from a male-dominant society; it’s something every woman can relate to.



What really drew me in was her spiritual journey. Fed up with life, she starts meditating. One night she opens herself up to the spiritual world and what happens over the next ten years will shock and surprise you.



Cate does a masterful job describing her spiritual journey without appearing less than authentic. This is her story about her spiritual journey. I laughed, cried, gasped and smiled. She’s filled with the Light and this book will enlighten you.



Am I in touch with the Goddess? This simple question kept echoing in my head while I was reading, Unearthing Venus. My answer is yes and my spiritual journey continues.



While I feel this book will appeal mostly to women, men who are searching for enlightenment and spiritual peace will be inspired by Unearthing Venus. After all, we’re all just souls searching for a place to call home.



My Rating: 5 stars



Reviewed by: Mrs. N


This review first appeared: https://www.nnlightsbookheaven.com/si...

[Grady · Rating 5 out of 5]

The search for and finding of the Woman Within

Cate Montana has made the rounds and in many places she is a household name. She began her career as a newspaper journalist and advanced into television where she made her mark as a freelance television editor with the major networks. A failed marriage turned her attention inward and she `explored everything from Christian mysticism to Zen Buddhism, yoga to Chi Gung, quantum physics to hands-on healing. Fascinated by the mind and human potential, in 1984 I went back to school, graduating with a master's degree in humanistic psychology Degree.' Married and divorced again she turned to mediation and isolation and writing music and taking on job as a feature editor for a small newspaper in North Atlanta before moving to the Pacific Northwest, working as a freelance journalist for newspapers such as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Tacoma News Tribune and the national Native American newspaper, Indian Country Today. Turning to marketing she wrote the online newsletter that was associated with the film `What the Bleep Do We Know? and through that portal, writing about quantum physics and mysticism, she had an enlightening experience, left the US to travel in Central and South America to study with the ayahuasceros in Peru's Amazon and the shamans in the Andes of Ecuador. She retuned to the US and met her guru Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev from Coimbatore, India. `From Sadhguru I learned ancient yogic kriyas (energy processes), traveling to his ashram in South India to study and participate in a yogic alchemical consecration of a lingam dedicated to the Goddess.'

All of that experience led Cate Montana to write this book UNEARTHING VENUS - an intensely fascinating exploration of the Equality of Feminine with Masculine. `The feminine and Masculine transcend gender and are, at their most abstract, archetypes of complementarity....Polarity is the fabric of creation...This inherent balance of opposites is reflected in everything, including man and woman But complementarity transcends physicality and includes qualities defining the two genders - qualities that balance and support one another.' `My native monoculture celebrated one thing and one thing only: the Penis values of Power, Possessions, Profits and Progress....Endless corporate expansion was the dream, control the ultimate victory, and the economics of scarcity the whip employed to keep people busy, insecure and bid-able. My culture was the precise opposite of the feminine expression whereby ease and grace were the ethics, health and happiness the criteria for success, ongoing creation the dream, freedom of expression the ultimate victory and the economics of unlimited abundance the rule, keeping people harmonious and fulfilled.'

The manner in which Cate Montana shares her unearthing of the feminine - confronting Gaia, participating in an 11 year relationship with her partner Tess, losing Tess to a woman younger and more feminine that Cate - all of this Montana shares in an at time raspy raunchy manner that at first feels out of place in a book of this value, but in the end keeps the narrative grounded, more accessible to readers. The writing technique is not elegant, eloquent or profound, but the revelations are incredibly impressive and stimulating. It all makes perfect sense.

Grady Harp

[Kingsley L. Dennis · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful, honest, well-written book - a poignant and revealing read. Recommended

[Asha KRISHNA · Rating 4 out of 5]

An honest and fascinating memoir.

Thanks to Goodreads, I get to read books that I would be normally be sceptical about and I am glad to have had the chance to explore new genres through this one.

Cate Montana's memoir is something like a spiritual quest to understand the feminine, the concept of a woman. Well, that is good but when I first read the jacket my immediate thought well, here comes another sob story.

To give you an idea, Unearthing Venus instantly reminds one of Eat, Pray and Love (EPAL). There, you get the gist of what this one is all about now. This one though similar, in the sense it is a life story, is an interesting read mainly because of the way it has been handled. To be honest, though I liked what I read of EPAL, I couldn't bring myself to persist till the end.

But where Eat, Pray and Love was about a divorcee who was trying to make sense of her life by going to Indonesia, India and Italy (what soured it for the reader that apparently she was commissioned to these places to write a book). However Montana here traces the concept of the role of woman and applies it to her personal life and upbringing and explores it through her experiences.

Gist:

Montana begins by saying that what she wanted to write a book about being a woman and then flashes back to her background, growing up in the 50s and 60s, the kind of society she lived in. What makes it personal is her narrative about her female role model, own mother and seeing the role of women through her. Years later, she makes a career for herself in the cut throat world of television and takes us through her personal relationships but her mother still plays a pivotal role.

Her quest for the spiritual begins after she decides, when in her mid 40s, she gives up her job and begins the journey for "spiritual upliftment". The reason why I put it in quotes is that, that is something that I can't relate to. I could understand the adolescent awkwardness, the need to excel in her career, her attempt at her marriages but then the spiritual bit alienated me. However, she does manage to make it immensely readable and credit to her for making an abstract and obscure concept of spiritualism into an engaging narrative.


What works:
Great style. Very fluid and effective. Keeps you hooked
Interesting the way she has talked her mother and put into perspective the role of women in western society in the 50s
Spiritual experiences can be a bit off obscure but she makes it readable

What doesn't:


Well the second half was a bit of a ramble, perhaps because the spiritual aspects left me a bit cold. Maybe it is because such experiences is a distant thing for me to comprehend.

However, kudos to her for coming up with such a book. I mean you can relate to some bits, you may fail to connect with the rest, but the point is you can't ignore it. You can't leave the book half way saying well, this stuff is boring, because Montana is a good storyteller. She makes it her business to see to it that we keep going till we get to the end.

I don't hesitate to give up if the going gets boring. But Montana ensures that I stuck to it and I did because I admire the book as a fantastic piece of storytelling. The style and narrative are effective and is a great read without being heavy.

One does not have to have an interest in spiritualism to read it. Montana has had such an eventful life, that it is fun reading through it just to find out what happens to her next.

[Kathleen Maguire · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed the first half of this memoir much more than the second half, which I found myself skimming through at times. Cate Montana's theme--that American society has lost touch with its feminine attributes and values--is one that I agree with her is critical to saving our planet and ourselves. Montana opens with an anecdote: This indigenous Brazilian tribal leader visits America with the head of a nonprofit organization that had been working in Brazil on rainforest sustainability. After a few months in America, this tribal chief, who had never been out of Brazil, asks his American host, "My friend, you must know that, left to their own devices, men will hunt until there are no more animals in the forest. They will fish until there are no more fish in the rivers, and cut down trees until there are no more trees. It is their nature. It is the job of the women of the tribe to tell the men when to STOP. John, where are your women? Why are they not telling the men to stop?"

Where are our women, indeed? They are busy taking advantage of the freedom they have in this country to do anything they set their minds to, as long as they cultivate and make the most use of masculine instincts toward competition, aggression, and acquisition, inadvertently propping up the patriarchy.

The second half of the book bothered me because whenever the author felt the need to go off and seek out her own spiritual journey, lo and behold her trust fund becomes available to her. Then she wants to travel the world exploring tribal cultures and the balances they find between masculine and feminine ideals and, poof, turns out an old boyfriend died and she was named as the beneficiary on his life insurance policy. The author spends no meaningful time discussing the privilege that has allowed her to essentially live her entire adult life traveling the world, taking peyote, and experiencing terrorism but only on a purely spiritual level.

So, the book was ok. I liked it better for its themes than for its storytelling. The author seems to have lucked into a lot of the experiences that led her to write this book, but most women in the world never even witness that kind of "luck," let alone benefit from it. Steph, if you're reading, don't feel bad -- I'm really glad you recommended it! I'm going to see if I can use it with my 10th-grade girls, to help them understand that believing "anything boys can do girls can do better" isn't feminism.

[K · Rating 2 out of 5]

W37.

This non-fiction work tracks the spiritual progress of an individual as she grows to understand her own sense of femininity in an increasingly masculine patriarchal world. Her struggle to overcome the forces dictating her relationship to her gender are examined as she recounts experiences of sexism and sexual abuse at the hands of a male-dominated society. Equally, it functions as a bildungsroman and something of a travel journal, as she seeks a sense of place despite her feelings of isolation.

While I found her initial overview of the nature of femininity as it is viewed in society today quite engaging, the work did tend to lose focus and lucidity towards the end as it became increasingly esoteric and unfocused. The sections connected to the landscape and her love of nature were incredibly readable, but it did tend to descend into personal exploration - with the focus on the personal tending to alienate the casual reader. I certainly agree that modern society is becoming disconnected from the natural world and desperately felt like hiking/swimming/smiling at the sunset as I read about her interactions with the natural landscape.

Her consideration of her youth and relationship to her family reminded me of Strayed's 'Wild' and I also found these sections fascinating and a good basis for understanding the role of womanhood/femininity in her life.

Readable and relevant in a contemporary society - most certainly. A little repetitive at points - perhaps.

[Emily Trinkaus · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this memoir. The author writes from the heart, sharing her story with openness, vulnerability and humor in a way that totally drew me in. Not only is this book completely engrossing and fun to read, I also think the wisdom she conveys - hard-won from her own personal experience - is extremely valuable for this time of collective crisis. The distortion and devaluation of the feminine has led us to this point of ecocide and collective suicide. Unearthing Venus offers (in a totally non-preachy way) important medicine to re-balance our individual lives and the life of the collective.

[Deirdre Thunder · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Hero's Journey

I couldn't put this book down. Everything shows up at the perfect time and this book was exactly what I needed to read at this phase of my journey. I can't help but wonder how many millions of women know this story personally. I am comforted knowing I am not alone. Thank you Cate for sharing your story.

[Betsy Chasse · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finally a book about feminism that is really about being truly feminine! Cate's writing is funny, honest and helped me to find my own feminine self. Not the angry, bitter mad at men one, but the one filled with laughter love and joy! A must read!

[Sharlene · Rating 3 out of 5]

I received this book as the result of a First Reads giveaway.

This book arrived pretty beat up...The hard cover bent, pages barely hanging on but still readable. The parcel was handed to me with the envelope underneath it as if it would be easier to look at the mutilated book versus what was originally protecting it. The lady who delivered it, apologized for its condition and admitted that the men she worked with asked her to deliver it and that she was disgusted with how bad the shape it was in was. Did I want it? Would I rather return it to the sender?

I answered with a negative. After all, why send back a free book if it was still readable. It was just a bit beat up. I notified the author and moved on. I picked up the book and discovered a wonderful journey inside.

I did make the mistake if reading reviews and actually flinched when I read it was similar to Eat, Pray, Love. I was so very grateful to Montana that her story was NOTHING like that other book. (A book where I felt the main character had a wonderful opportunity to do things in her life that most people dream if doing and just wastes her time learning nothing.) In the memoir, Montana, actually grows from the experience. She is mature and doesn't just complain about what she wants but works hard to pursue it and is gracious enough to embrace and enjoy what she does along the way. I appreciate her frustrations but love it when she barrels through barriers that she had perceived to be there.

Such an interesting life with a lot of honesty and her fair share of self doubt. It is nice to see how she wraps around so many ideas of what femininity means.

The editing was wonderful and Montana is very articulate making it very enjoyable to read.

In the end, it really didn't matter what the package I received looked like, when it was received. The message and inner beauty were there all along.

[Lynn Ferguson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have known Cate for several decades and wondered when she would get the attention she richly deserves as an author. Her exploration of the Divine Feminine takes you on a journey that will make you laugh and wince with delight and recognition, giving you a deeper glimpse into your own personal journey that will lead you into the heart of wholeness - oneness. The cultural immersion that Cate shares in this book will introduce you to the vastness of the domain of gender and ultimately to a deeper understanding of the way you might experience yourself in the midst of finding Balance and boundaries with action and restraint from further activity. Enjoy the read and pass your book on to others who labor with curiosity into the mysteries of the Feminine...

[Gina · Rating 2 out of 5]

I received this book as a first read. It got off to a good start and went downhill from there. The premise was interesting but execution was poor. The book seemed self-indulgent and scattered. More editing might have helped; it could've easily been trimmed down by 100 pages. The book was very disjointed and probably would've been better split into two books - Cate's biography and a social commentary on the role of women in American society as compared to women around the world. She tried to write both into one book but it just didn't mesh. The most interesting parts of the book were her tangents on statistics and the roles of women. The book isn't a bad read. It's interesting but just not put together in the optimal way.

[Kathleen Milliken · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely LOVED this book. It was a joy to have Cate on my show to discuss it and more and I have to say, I'm so grateful women like her write. There is so much wisdom within covers that not only explores "what is woman" but "what is feminine".

It is deep, insightful, funny and raw. Her own journey is much different then Eat Pray Love, it is from a different generation, but yet similar.
This is a book I will be reading again.

~Kathleen M Milliken

Unearthing Venus: My Search for the Woman Within

[Lisa Hagan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A thoroughly good romping read. Cate Montana's memoir is everything you would want, drama, laughter, tears, and quite a few flat out, Oh My God's. She digs deep into her soul and bares it all with us. Sometimes, you think, I'm not sure I would have shared that.

Cate is a woman with whom you would want to be friends with, she takes you on an adventurous journey through the study of femininity through the course of her life. She makes you think about the damned glass ceiling and how every dream is a possible. There is no whining, you just suck it up and do it. She's wide open and transparent.

I loved this book.

[Wanda Wright · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a very good memoir, It took me on an inner journey right along with the author and it gave me a lot of insight into my own life experiences and why I reacted the way I did. This is one of the best books I have won through goodreads. I highly recommend it for every woman!

[Jodi · Rating 4 out of 5]

A new favorite!