Guest blogger Dale Allen continues our journey into the Crone archetype and her relationship to our personal power and inner knowing. She can show us how getting to know the wisdom of the Crone helps us to harness our leadership. Join us in this journey and learn more about why you just might want someone to call you a Crone!
BTW - I loved my interview with Dale from Tuesday, March 6, 2012. I first saw her show at a conference in NYC where we both were keynoting on the wise feminine. I was blown away by her creativity.
Part 2
She’s been with you since you since the day you were born: Meeting the Crone within.
Let us continue with our journey. Here we are, standing in a winter landscape where all is barren, frozen and covered with snow. You can no longer see the road you were traveling. You are tempted to quickly fill the void with something familiar because it’s just too painful to stand in the unknown. Yet you know on the deepest level what you must do.
Within this metaphor, turn your focus and your energy into the vital organs of your own body. This will be the pathway for going down, deep down beneath the snows—down into the groundedness of your own Being. Hold in your mind an image of a cave underneath the cold, frozen ground. It’s lit orange by a small fire tended by a very ancient, sage woman.
She is a WiseWoman with long, white hair and long, thin fingers. She tends the fire. When she looks at you and your eyes meet, you see timelessness. She’s so very ancient, yet timeless. In many ways, it’s like looking into a baby’s eyes. We say a baby is “fresh from the lap of God,” because, as you look into a baby’s eyes, you’re taken out of the earthly realm and brought into a place of soulful eternity, very much like this ancient Wise Woman’s eyes. You sit with her in the silence. She knows you deeply.
She makes no judgments about you or your life. She makes no judgments about what you constructed and what has fallen. All that she cares about is whether you are living in your own authenticity. “Did you make mistakes?” her eyes ask you. “Yes, of course I did,” your eyes answer. She smiles. She’s very pleased about your journey. You have revealed to her that the mistakes you made were yours. Your efforts to live in alignment with your soul all along the way are evident. It was because you poured your life, your love, into something—maybe it isn’t there anymore, but you did it and it made you stronger and you learned. She’s very happy that you are doing your best and coming from a place of love and learning, even with all its pain. As you sit with her in the stillness, you simply take account for where you are, and breathe for a while in the not-knowing, in the winter—quite suspended, but also very alive.
The Crone asks us to just look around at what is. In doing so, we are looking through eyes of authenticity. The key is to not employ an immediate storyline to fill the gap. We should not try to make ourselves comfortable and make things look like what we knew before. We might be tempted to do that because it’s just too painful to not know. If we resist, we resist a culture that perpetually asks, “What are you doing? I need to know what you are producing! What can you show me? If you can’t show me something you’re producing, you don’t exist!” Our only answer to this discomfort must surely be, “Ahh, but I do exist. I am breathing. I am here.”
If we’re willing to stay in the stillness, even though it’s painful—if we just breathe with it—we open up a fertile space. As we look into this ancient woman’s eyes, she reveals to us that she holds the seed to the bloom of our destiny. It is through the Crone that we come back to the Maiden.
If we try to harness our leadership without bringing forth the sage wisdom of the Crone, we will miss the very seeds of our own creative contributions. We will be hollow, plastic, robotic. Taking time to just be in the stillness—in the not-knowing—pays off in an ability to sow the seeds of our souls’ offerings. The Archetypes That Shape A Woman’s Life – The Crone© — By Dale Allen
In tomorrow’s blog I’ll bring our journey round to how the Inner Crone goes beyond the personal to the collective.
Thank you Dale! Please visit Dale’s website to learn more about her beautiful work and listen to some of her powerful dramatic talks. — http://www.inourrightminds.com
I celebrate you, your wisdom and your leadership – in connection for the benefit of the world!
Karen