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instinct, guiding wisdom, and power. It is everything that keeps a woman powerful and grounded in herself, complete in herself, belonging to herself, and yet connected to all that is. Connection with this inner reality is a woman’s most priceless experience.
    I wish someone had told me this that autumn, and I suppose that’s why I’m saying it at the outset. We need to know the root problem when the awakening begins, when all is fuzzy and the feelings are confused and we find ourselves suddenly yelling across the dinner table that we are fed up. We need to know what has happened to women and to ourselves so we can find our way back to our feminine souls with as much purpose and clarity as possible.
    With the connection to my feminine soul broken, I had no idea how to unfold my spiritual life in a way that was natural and genuine for women. I didn’t even know there was a feminine way of being spiritual. If I had, I probably couldn’t have given myself permission to embrace it. Not then.
    Disconnected from my feminine soul, I had also unknowingly forfeited my power to name sacred reality. I had simply accepted what men had named. Neither had I noticed that when women give this power away, it is rarely used to liberate and restore value to women. More often it is used to shore up and enhance the privileged position of men.
    In the beginnings of Christianity, church fathers debated whether women had souls at all. Later the issue became whether or not a woman’s soul could be saved. Today the issue is one of women reconnecting with their souls.
    To reconnect with our souls we need to claim the freedom and power to shed our conditioning, to tear out the stitches from the old fabric, and to define for ourselves who we are as women, what is sacred, and how we relate to sacred experience. When we finally do that, we will weave new lives and a new era. We will take back our souls once and for all.
    This shedding and defining, this tearing out stitches and reweaving new ones became the essential work of my journey. But as author Madonna Kolbenschlag wrote, “Much testing, much reflecting, much living must intervene before we can say, ‘My soul is my own.’” 6
    Sleep Dust
    Like the Sandman from the nursery tale, who stole into children’s rooms and put them to sleep by sprinkling sleep dust over them, our culture, even the culture of our faith, has helped anesthetize the feminine spirit.
    I like the way Clarissa Pinkola Estés says it:
    When a woman is exhorted to be compliant, cooperative, and quiet, to not make upset or go against the old guard, she is pressed into living a most unnatural life—a life that is self-blinding . . . without innovation. The world-wide issue for women is that under such conditions they are not only silenced, they are put to sleep. Their concerns, their viewpoints, their own truths are vaporized. 7
    The sleep seems to descend on females early in life. Studies conducted by Harvard professor Carol Gilligan and Colby Collegeprofessor Lyn Mikel Brown from 1986 to 1990 have revealed that something truly phenomenal happens to girls around adolescence. 8 They undergo a gradual change in which they lose their feisty spirit, courage, and willingness to speak out—qualities they had known in girlhood. Around this time their truth becomes silenced, held back. They become afraid of conflict with males, because they know on some level that males hold the power. They become—perhaps forever—good little girls, settling into the clichés and limits imposed on their gender.
    So sleep begins. For some it can extend throughout life as unconsciousness deepens and numbness sets in. These women lose all memory of the problem they once saw. For other women the sleep is more fitful; they sometimes glimpse the truth, but it never seems to rouse them fully. These women tend to fall back asleep when the waking state becomes threatening.
    But whether our sleep is sound