Five books that shaped the path of my feminine awakening, healing, and empowerment
I hope they inspire you to pursue deep healing with courage.
The Antidote is a newsletter and meditation community featuring essential healing modalities for the modern woman. Our mission is to inspire women to realize their fullest potential through educational content, guided meditation, and self-reflection tools.
The following books have rocked my world and inspired my own healing path and offerings. I hope they inspire you to pursue deep healing with courage.
Yoni Shakti: A Woman's Guide to Power and Freedom Through Yoga and Tantra by Uma Dinsmore-Tuli
This is a bible for yoginis. After nearly a decade of practicing asana lineages intended for the bodies of 15 year old boys, I was yearning for a feminine approach to yoga and meditation - one that recognized female anatomy and honored natural feminine strengths and rhythms. I found answers in Yoni Shakti. Uma Dinsmore-Tuli explores the sexual politics of yoga from a perspective that sees women's spiritual transformation as a revolutionary force. She offers insightful historical explorations including the fundamental origins of yoga for women and a philosophical debate supportive for any yogini’s journey toward spiritual empowerment, self acceptance and contentment. The practices Uma shares are practical, grounded, and nourishing for feminine health, self-esteem, sexuality and spirituality.
The Heroine’s Journey by Maureen Murdock
As a young Hollywood film executive, I bought this book as a resource for female character development for a script I was writing...but it turned out to be the most valuable resource for studying myself! Maureen Murdock was a student of Joseph Campbell and the first to acknowledge that the Hero’s Journey didn’t properly address the psycho-spiritual aspects of a woman’s experience. The Heroine's Journey is a woman's mythic quest to heal the deep wounding of her feminine nature on a personal, cultural, and spiritual level. She undertakes this spiritual and psychological journey to become whole, integrating all parts of her nature. Sometimes the journey is conscious, but in many cases it is not.
Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype by Clarissa Pinkola Estés
This is food for the female soul. I return to this book again and again. Storytelling is one of the most powerful tools to allow deep healing to take place in our minds and hearts. Clarissa Pinkola Estés is an author, poet, Jungian analyst, and “Cantadora” a keeper of old stories. Her incredible work focuses on the nature of the wild woman archetype, and her aim is to help those captivated by her rich stories to discover and reclaim their passion, creativity, and power. This isn't just a book. It's a journey. It is meant to be dissected and digested carefully and thoroughly. Be warned, the stories are magical but the psychological debriefing can be intellectually dense. If you’re not ready for that level of study, there is alternative experience: opt for the abridged audible version read by the cantadora herself. Clarissa Pinkola Estés' voice is warm, soothing - a healing experience in itself.
"The story is not told to lift you up, to make you feel better, or to entertain you, although all those things can be true. The story is meant to take the spirit into a descent to find something that is lost or missing and to bring it back to consciousness again.”― Clarissa Pinkola Estés
Women's Power to Heal: Through Inner Medicine By Maya Tiwari
A living testament to the healing efficacy of her teachings, Maya Tiwari healed herself from terminal ovarian cancer at the age of 23. This book teaches women how to renew their health, reconnect with their feminine natures and reclaim their own innate power. It offers practical guidelines for maintaining optimal health through food choices, herbal baths, compresses, internal cleansing, aligning with the cycles of the moon, and spiritual practices. Maya’s work has shown me the path to nurture my deepest feminine essence by slowing down and working with ritual, reflection, healing plants, and lunar cycles. It’s a treasure trove of caring for the womb, healing menstrual disorders, women’s fertility, menopause, and healing osteoporosis. All practices described are based on time-tested Ayurvedic remedies for women’s health and well-being and the profound wisdom of the Vedas.
Eastern Body, Western Mind: Psychology and the Chakra System As a Path to the Self by Anondea Judith
When I was 22, my roommate let me borrow this book and it forever changed the way I understood childhood development and the patterns we live by. It would be many years before I embodied my understanding, nevertheless, this was an intellectual initiation of the chakra system and the connections between Western psychology and Eastern philosophy. This book sews together the yoga-based Eastern chakra system and Western framework of Jungian psychology, somatic therapy, childhood developmental theory while offering tools and insights for important modern social realities and issues such as addiction, codependence, family dynamics, sexuality, and personal empowerment. Each chapter focuses on a single chakra, starting with a description of its characteristics and then exploring its particular childhood developmental patterns, traumas and abuses, and how to heal and maintain balance.
I’ve had the great pleasure of studying with Anondea Judith in person. She is a force of wisdom; a writer, therapist, spiritual teacher, and the founder and director of Sacred Centers.
With so much love,
Christina
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