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 latest Meandering, 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 evolutionary pattern 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, victimhood, 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, the hope is that we emerge initiated and transformed. However, so often, they go unmarked, unnoticed and oftentimes, unlived. If you’ve learnt - growing up for example - that your worth is attributed to productivity and outward success, then it’s likely your experience may have been different to the archetypal phases offered below. The invitation is to work with this framework to reflect and contemplate your own journey thus far, to notice what feelings are evoked in you and to meet yourself with love, compassion and as always, curiosity.
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 still spaces - the fertile void - ever pregnant with possibility.
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 and she holds the tension between following her impulses - her budding freedom and autonomy - whilst becoming conscious of the pressures of adult life.
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, to play without agenda, the freedom to follow the call of life before certainty arrives. She reminds us that becoming is never a destination we arrive at but a lifelong process of continual renewal. Her season is Spring.
The Shadow: When the Maiden is not fully initiated and our sense of worth has become enmeshed with service, caregiving, achievement or meeting the needs of others, we may enter adulthood carrying a tension we cannot yet name. Rather than finding expression through words or conscious awareness, this unresolved burden often speaks through the body and psyche, showing up as anxiety, depression, eating disorders, chronic stress, burnout or physical symptoms that quietly nudge us towards what remains out of balance and in need of attendence.
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 includes and extends 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. She is deeply intuitive, creative, and at a cellular level, knows she is symbiotically interconnected with the Great Mystery from where all life springs forth.
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 abandon herself by merging into service of others, but discovers the balance between loving deeply and remaining rooted in herself. Her season is Summer.
The Shadow: When the Mother remains uninitiated, we may find ourselves frequently tipping into victimhood, feeling martyred by the expectations and demands of life. We may feel depleted, spinning all the plates whilst living way beyond our limits. We struggle to attune to what we need, assert boundaries and instead habitually prioritise the needs of others, likely begrundgingly. Her intuition and discernment may not be within easy reach, instead guilt, shame and an undercurrent of rage may be the organising emotions of this life phase.
Mage - the sorceress! Initiation into Sovereign Feminine Power
*The Mage 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 midlife and sagessence (menopause) as its own initiation - a time of transformation, shedding, integration and awakening.
The Mage 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. She knows she is of worth simply because she lives and breathes. Her worth is no longer enmeshed in pleasing, achieving or being of service to others.
The passage through this mid life threshold can be understood as an initiation into sovereignty: a stripping away of old identities and an invitation to live more truthfully, more fully, more soulfully. 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. Her season is Autumn.
The Shadow: When the Mage remains uninitiated, menopause can become a time of confusion rather than transformation. As old identities begin to fall away, a woman may cling to the roles that once gave her purpose or continue to seek her worth through caring for others, productivity or external validation. Rather than reclaiming her authority and her burgeoning new direction, she may feel lost, invisible, resentful or deeply untethered. This inner conflict can express itself through anxiety, depression, shame, rage, exhaustion or a profound sense that life no longer fits - that she no longer recognizes herself - which further exacerbates a feeling of internal and external destabilization and chaos.
*The MAGE was introduced and included in the arc of a woman’s life by Jane Hardwicke Collings.
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 weaves its many mysteries into a colourful and unique tapestry that she wears as a cloak of protection.
The Crone turns towards stewardship and transmission: sharing what she has learned, guiding those who come after and tending the wider web of life with a straight forward, grounded way of being. She understands that wisdom is not something to possess, but something to offer, model and/or share. 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 society, by what she produces or provides, but by the presence, insight and love she brings to the world. Her season is Winter.
The Shadow: When the Crone remains uninitiated, growing older can become synonymous with loss rather than a growing sense of liberation. A woman may resist the ageing process, grieve the passing of youth without embracing the gifts of elderhood or withdrawing from life and isolating herself, believing the cultural narrative that she has little left to offer. Without the conscious integration of her lived experience, she remains disconnected and her wisdom is eclipsed by disappointment, bitterness or regret.
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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.