Maiden to Mother

The bridge from Maiden to Mother has been broken. When the goddess culture was stolen and buried, so too were women’s rites of passage into our wild, intuitive femininity and maturity. With Maiden to Mother, Sarah Durham Wilson excavates these ancient rites, guiding us through a sacred and crucial initiation from the immature Maiden into the archetypal Mother—the powerful, safe, compassionate, full-bloom feminine life force that exists within all of us. Becoming the Mother is every woman’s birthright—regardless of whether or not she raises children. The Mother is who we needed as a child, who we were meant to be in this life, and who the world needs us to be now. Wilson teaches that while pre-patriarchal cultures honored women’s natural cycles, today’s society infantilizes women, idolizing youthful traits such as “pretty, pleasing, and polite” in order to keep us distracted and dependent. While a healthy version of the Maiden will always remain part of us, there comes a time when we must no longer let her wounds and immaturity guide our lives. We must step into our mature, feminine fullness. In this journey, you will travel with Inanna—the ancient Sumerian goddess who ventured through the Underworld to meet her severed, dark sister and emerged fully integrated and empowered, giving us an archetypal map to inner strength and wholeness. Through personal stories, rituals, teachings, and practices, Wilson helps women heal the Mother Wound and dismantle our internalized patriarchy with its false, constricting standards for the feminine, so we may live with authenticity and feast on the richness of life. “Midlife is not, as our culture proposes, where a woman’s power ends,” writes Wilson, “but where it really begins.”