The Heroine’s Journey, Part Seven: Heroine Urgently Yearns to Reconnect with the Feminine
This post is the seventh in what will be a series of ten exploring the kinship between the Heroine’s Journey as established by Maureen Murdock, my lived experience of ministry as a female clergy person, and a few familiar fictional characters. Each devotional will end with a blessing for the Heroine at each stage of the journey. In the previous post, we examined the sixth part of the journey where the Heroine is faced with a crisis that they do not have the capacity to avert. The crisis then turns the Heroine toward what they have lost along the way to establish themselves.
In this seventh step, the Heroine renegotiates their relationship to their own past so that they can reorient themselves to both their present and possible futures. They reconnect with younger versions of themselves (or younger versions of their feminine elders). They name and grieve the ways that their femininity has been wounded. They seek out new support, develop new skills, and try out new ways to approach the world so that they can figure out how to integrate their feminine aspects into their life as it is now. During this part of their journey, the Heroine may appear out-of-sorts as they are unable to exhibit the kind of composure they did before their crisis.