Women’s life transitions can bring profound periods of change, uncertainty and transformation. From menarche and motherhood through to menopause and elderhood, each stage of a woman’s life carries its own challenges, initiations and opportunities for growth. In this Field Note, I explore women’s rites of passage through the lens of archetypal psychology, embodiment and psycho-spiritual enquiry, offering a framework for understanding the deeper shifts that unfold as we move through the seasons of our lives.
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The life phases we move through as women have been a growing thread of inquiry in my work. Sitting with women across the decades, from their twenties through to their seventies, I am continually struck by the deeper developmental journey that weaves itself beneath the surface of our individual experiences. While each phase carries its own challenges, initiations and gifts, there is a common movement I observe: the gradual shift from unconscious ways of being, towards conscious embodiment.
In Western culture we have no framework to name or support our initiatory rites of passage - put simply, the different life phases that we move through. We will invariably experience our changing energies, shifting awareness and values as our lives progress and part of that will mean navigating inevitable endings and new beginnings. But, with no framework to hold or contain our experience, it can so often result in a feeling of internal chaos, confusion, shame and a feeling of all round destabilisation.
Initiations, by their very nature, push us to the edge of our limits so that we may come face to face with the deeper questions that our lives invite. Working with the different archetypal phases can help give context to our changing experience and having a framework can support us to anchor and centre ourselves, especially helpful for those thresholds, where we find ourselves standing on ever shifting ground. Below are the archetypal phases that track the general arc of a woman’s life, which may offer a framework that supports you to reflect on your own initiations and to see them as such. The way in which we move through and experience these rites of passage will determine how we emerge out of them. When we live through these phases consciously, with awareness, understanding and compassion, we hopefully emerge initiated and transformed.
The Grey Heron: A symbol of stillness and liminality, standing between earth and sky, water and land, the known and the mystery. She reminds us that transformation often unfolds in the quiet spaces between what has ended and what is yet to emerge.
Maiden - Becoming
The Maiden - initiated by her first bleed, menarche - is the archetype of becoming: the woman in the process of discovering herself, her desires, her gifts and her place in the world. She represents possibility, curiosity, imagination and the unfolding of potential. Her journey is one of exploration, learning who she is separate from the expectations placed upon her and beginning to listen for the quiet voice of her own inner knowing.
The Maiden is not simply a symbol of youth, but of new beginnings. She lives within us whenever we enter a new chapter, embrace a new identity, or step into the unknown. Her medicine is openness: the willingness to wonder, to experiment, the freedom to follow the call of life before certainty arrives. She reminds us that becoming is not something we complete but a lifelong process of continual renewal.
Mother - Creating and Sustaining Life
The Mother archetype represents the creative and life-giving forces within a woman. While she may be expressed through the literal experience of bearing and raising children, her deeper meaning extends far beyond biological motherhood. The Mother is the one who nurtures, tends, creates, protects and brings something new into being -whether that is a child, a relationship, a body of work, creative project, a home, a community or a vision.
The Mother teaches us the wisdom of tending. She knows the rhythms of growth, patience, sacrifice and surrender. Yet her initiation is also one of discernment: learning where her giving nourishes and where it depletes her. In her fullest expression, the Mother does not disappear into service of others, but discovers the balance between loving deeply and remaining rooted in herself.
Maga - Initiation into Sovereign Feminine Power
The Maga marks a profound threshold: the transition beyond the years of fertility and the beginning of a new relationship with power, identity and purpose. Rather than moving directly from Mother into Crone, this archetype recognises menopause as its own initiation - a time of transformation, shedding and awakening.
The Maga is the woman who has gathered the experiences of her earlier life and is now called to reclaim what may have been lost, silenced or given away. She no longer measures herself through her capacity to nurture, please or fulfil external expectations. She begins to stand in her own authority, guided by inner wisdom rather than external approval.
The passage through menopause can be understood as an initiation into sovereignty: a stripping away of old identities and an invitation to live more truthfully. The Maga is passionate, discerning, creative and unapologetically herself. She brings the gifts of experience together with the courage to begin again, not as the woman she once was, but as the woman she is becoming.
Crone - Elderhood, Wisdom, Stewardship and Transmission
The Crone represents the ripened wisdom of a life fully lived. She is the elder, the keeper of stories, the one who has walked through many seasons of change and carries the medicine of lived experience. Her wisdom is not acquired through knowledge alone, but through having met life’s joys, losses, initiations and weaving its many mysteries.
The Crone turns towards stewardship and transmission: sharing what she has learned, guiding those who come after, and tending the wider web of life. She understands that wisdom is not something to possess, but something to offer. Her gifts are perspective, compassion, discernment and the ability to see beyond the urgency of the moment and to trust in Life itself.
The Crone reminds us that ageing is not a diminishment but a deepening into being and presence. She embodies the return to essence - a woman no longer defined by what she produces or provides, but by the presence, insight and love she brings to the world.
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To deepen into this archetypal work, you may be interested in exploring the work of fellow elders:
Marion Woodman
Jane Hardwicke Collings
Sharon Blackie
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
And of course, if you are navigating a significant life transition, feeling disconnected from yourself or feeling called towards a deeper understanding of your inner world, you can explore more about my approach to embodied psycho-spiritual psychotherapy here.