Finding your Inner Goddess

By John Nutting

In helping the woman to find her Inner Goddess I sometimes use voice dialogue. Obviously if like myself the woman has already found her Inner Goddess that is all the better!.  Voice dialogue is a way of communication with the disowned part of oneself that you have denied.  It is very empowering, not only for the woman, but also the lucky man whos partner finds her Inner Goddess.  Be ready to embrace her! 

The following article is courtesy of John Nutting

The Inner Goddess is not just another inner self. Rather she is a special partner of the grown-up selves. She embraces spirituality, femininity and sexuality in a positive and balanced way (and a way that no male can fully understand.)

She may well be the most powerful of all personal energies and certainly in full flight is above any male self, including her arch rival the Inner Patriarch, hence the Inner Patriarch’s reaction to her - a reaction that includes fear and anger, tendered to disempower and control  her. Many inner patriarchs go further and seek to suppress her totally or destroy her.

The knowledge, experience and wisdom carried by the Inner Goddess goes back far, far into time, to the earliest days of civilization, to a time when woman was probably the more powerful of the species in terms of her sexual and spiritual energy and her understandings of the mysteries of the female psyche. Within her she holds great magic. Her combined spirituality and femininity can be quite overwhelming and can terrify males who try to face her in a struggle for power.

Hal and Sidra Stone refer to the inner goddess by her mythical Greek name ‘Aphrodite’ and describe ways to dialogue with her. They also recognise that as part of the balance between all energies there is an inner ‘Aphrodite’ self in most males as well. However, as far as I can tell after dialoguing with both selves the inner Aphrodite energy in men is not the same as that of the Inner Goddess.

Rachel Swift in ‘Women’s Pleasure’ suggests that part of the Goddess’s mystery lies in the fact that woman is one of the few species to experience female orgasm and perhaps the only species capable of serial or multiple female orgasms. At the dawn of civilization this would have added to her power over the male and suggests a reason why males came to fear the sexual side of the Inner Goddess.

The history of the inner goddess, at least since the fall of the Celtic and Mayan civilisations, certainly shows suppression by males. Mary Jane Sherfey in ‘The Nature and Evolution of Female Sexuality’ takes this idea further hypothesising that female sexual and spiritual superiority was originally the norm in tribal societies.

In early civilisations plants that were able to produce fruit or grain were valued more highly than those that were not “fruitful”. Female animals produced young whereas males produced nothing.

So it’s understandable to a very early civilisation that the females were seen as the more powerful and fruitful than the apparently “barren” males.

This was seen by men as a direct threat to their ascendancy towards becoming the more powerful of the species and as society developed, every aspect of female power, including the Inner Goddess was seen as a disruptive influence and ruthlessly suppressed. Perhaps the saddest outcome from this is the typically patriarchal belief that if a female has a different spiritual energy to that of a male, there must be something ‘not right’ about it. Yet it stands to reason that a woman having so many other different energies might also find her spiritual energy, and her connection with a Higher Self including some additional spiritual strengths that males do not possess.

However, if a female’s spiritual or Goddess powers proved greater than a male’s, in the past, the standard male answer was to declare those spiritual powers ‘bad’ or ‘evil’ and to force her, instead to embrace the male’s spirituality. Refusal to do this, in many cases, meant death.

The Inner Patriarch is the primary self concerned with the disowning of the Inner Goddess, and after some 10,000 years it has been extremely successful in this task. Dr. Sidra Stone, in ‘The Shadow King’ talks of the many ways an Inner Patriarch can set about stifling signs of goddess energy in a young girl, early in her life and ensuring that it never develops. She explains how, if the girl’s mother has an active inner patriarch, then it too will help with the work. Before long the girl’s own inner patriarch is born, ready to work from within, helping her to disown her Inner Goddess, using fear, shame and guilt, the three energies that can disempower the goddess. After that all the inner patriarch has to do is wait until she has children of her own, ready to pass the same negative judgements about the Goddess on to the next generation.

But while the Inner patriarch may have stifled and disempowered the Inner the Goddess, he has never succeeded in fully suppressing her. She may have been exiled but she has never lost her power. Many people feel that the new millennium is already marking the return of the Inner Goddess to her true position of power in the world.  I for one will welcome that and stand ready to dance with her, embrace her and worship her, as is her due.