Like many of us when sick, we go to the doctor and hope for a quick recovery so we can get back to our tasks. Among Marion Woodman's many gifts to us is her demonstration that the body and its disorders are clear passageways to the soul. The lack of any connection to the feminine essence often creates a hole in the psyche, a yearning, an emptiness in the psyche that manifests as a compulsive drive for sweetness, or fullness, or nourishing of any kind. Instead of a having a positive spiritual mother within, many turn to a materialistic mother, the buying of things that ends up with negative effects. And, she adds, we are knowingly degrading the earth and its systems and inhabitants.
Some people play victim to the bullies and others numb out.
Finding the solution to personal and earth sickness is explored by each interviewee, and all agree that change must happen within each individual soul and that a new integrating image, much as Christianity sustained culture for centuries, must arise. Thomas Berry develops this hypothesis, to be seen a bit later. Each person will have to face tasks that take one into deep despair and confusion before a new reconfiguration of the individual psyche can take place. She of course worked with it daily in dreams, movement, meditation, journaling and realized as she surrendered to it, that it had been long due for her to make a new life-transition. Her description of the ego-stuff that was burned off is one of the most moving aspects of the book.