I think very few people grow into their own full stature.

Woodman works with the unconscious both through dreams and the body.

The language of dreams is the grammar of the unconscious, which repeats itself in body gestures.

Together they make our deepest feelings known.

Like a midwife, she works, as Jung would say, “not by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”

“Often, when a woman first comes to me,” Woodman says, “she will keep on a mask that covers up parts of herself so deeply buried she doesn’t even know they’re there.

As her dreams take off her mask, we get to her essence.

It’s there that a woman can see the depth of pain, rage, shame and despair that has been covered up and led her to meaningless suffering, which in turn has driven her to escape through food, alcohol, drugs, sex.”

Woodman, who has worked with individual clients for as long as eight years, notes that there are no quick fixes for making the darkness one’s shadow sidelight.

“I think very few people grow into their own full stature.

Those who are able to open to their own psychic and spiritual energy are often frightened by the thought of responsibility for it.

If you take responsibility for it, and are strong enough to surrender to that energy, you surrender to a higher power.

Many addicts or fatally ill people are forced into that path, and in the darkness, they find a pin-point of light.

If they deny the agony of it, their spirit withdraws. To turn back is psychic death. Once you’ve acknowledged that energy, you can’t turn back.

It is a lifelong process that requires patience, trusting the timing of the psyche. ~Marion Woodman, Conscious Femininity, Page 106