This chapter is based on the experience of women in midlife who for most of their lives have endured the anguish of an addiction
On a clear evening we look into the sky. We see a few stars.
As darkness deepens, we see the separate stars relating to each other—the Big Dipper, Orion’s Belt, the Pleiades.
Stella is the Latin word for star; thus a constellation is a coming together of stars made visible through darkness.
Sometimes it takes years for the separate points of light in our own dark unconscious to constellate into a meaningful pattern.
This chapter is based on the experience of women in midlife who for most of their lives have endured the anguish of an addiction, until finally the darkness has become deep enough to perceive the pattern constellated within the obsession.
For years they have known they are in the presence of something stronger than they—a mystery that renders them powerless. Already constellated is a “god consciousness”—awesome and holy—that has nothing to do with the church or with groups.
They know they have to engage in a different arena of reality.
That arena is the psyche.
By virtue of their temperament, training, consciousness, these women are blessed (or cursed) with an introspective nature, an exploring mind, an invincible curiosity about themselves which connects them to their own inner microscope.
For better or for worse, they are convinced that the solution to their lives is in submission not to an externally imposed authority which they cannot understand, but to a truth that abides in themselves.
Truth is what they search for, and painful and perverse as the way may be, the addiction is their way to truth. It is the opening to themselves.
Profoundly committed to becoming conscious, they will not, cannot, give up until they know what it means.
In the addiction is hidden the treasure—the knowledge of themselves—and they can take no other path toward it.
It is their particular sacred journey, their Tao, their Way.
Their Way has taken them to the despair that lies at the core of the addiction.
Until the cause of the despair is incovered, permanent healing cannot take place. ~Marion Woodman, The Pregnant Virgin, Page 99
