A BALANCED EARTH, Chapter 1, part 2

Hello beloved reader,

This post is a continuation of the serialization of my book. Please click this following link to read the contents I’ve serialized so far:

A BALANCED EARTH: Reclaiming the Divine Feminine for Personal and Planetary Healing

PART ONE: THE MYTHS WE’VE INHERITED

Chapter 1: The Hero’s Journey Was Never the Whole Story

Section 1.2

While Campbell’s structure emphasizes departure and return, Murdock begins elsewhere—with rupture. For her, the journey begins not with a call to adventure, but with a split, a separation from the feminine within. For many women, this split often begins in childhood, when girls are taught, implicitly or explicitly, to devalue their emotional wisdom, sensuality, spiritual inner knowing and authority, in order to succeed in a world that rewards traditionally masculine traits: logic over intuition, achievement over receptivity, control over surrender. We are conditioned to distrust our inner knowing and to outsource authority to external, patriarchal figures and systems. We learn to hand over the wisdom of our bodies to doctors, the truth of our inner voice to teachers, and the sanctity of our own spiritual experience to religious intermediaries. This disconnection from our Inner Authority and Inner Divinity becomes the wound at the root of the Heroine’s Journey—a wound that must be seen, named, and healed for integration to occur.

The journey then moves into the world of achievement, often mirroring the Hero’s path, only to reach a crisis point where outer success feels hollow. What follows is a descent—into body and psyche, into the wounded feminine—and, eventually, a return to wholeness through integration of both the masculine and feminine energies within.

The Heroine’s Journey: Woman’s Quest for Wholeness by Maureen Murdock (1990). From separation and artificial “success” to descent, reconnection with the feminine, integration of yin and yang; then after this journey, Consciousness beyond gender can come into view.

This is where the story can expand. Not in rejection of the Hero, but in evolution beyond his solitary quest. We begin to see a tapestry of journeys, each one valid, each one offering a piece of the medicine needed now—alongside an evolution of Consciousness that is beyond gender, form, and ego.

Because what if the Earth herself is calling us not to dominate, but to remember our interconnectivity? What if our most urgent task is not to win, but to practice the forgotten art of listening and responding from heart and soul, rather than reacting from ego? What if transformation is less about slaying dragons and more about learning how to tend the fire and listen to the stories that flicker there?

In a culture steeped in speed and scarcity mentality, reclaiming the feminine in myth is a radical act. It asks us to leave the main road and enter the forest—not to be tested, but to be met. Guidance arrives less from the sword than from soil and spirit. Healing, we learn, isn’t a climb; it moves in spirals, with descents and returns, endings that open into beginnings.

This chapter opens a doorway. It invites us to recognize the Inner Patriarch, name the myths we’ve inherited, and to imagine what stories we might write next—for ourselves, for future generations, and for the world we share with all sentient beings.

In order to truly understand how deeply the Hero’s Journey has penetrated our collective imagination, we must look beyond books and classrooms. Remember The Hero with a Thousand Faces was published in 1949. Turn on any blockbuster film—from Star Wars to The Matrix, from The Lord of the Rings to Harry Potter—and you will see the Hero’s arc. A chosen one receives a call, sets off on a dangerous path, defeats the villain, emerges transformed, and brings the healing elixir back to his community. These stories are thrilling, often beautiful, but they are built around the same skeletal form. What’s missing are the stories that center cooperation and collaboration over conquest, inner listening over external mastery, and cyclical wisdom over linear triumph. Missing, too, are the feminine-coded experiences of transformation—tending, grieving, menstruating, birthing, mothering, aging, menopause, dying—none of which fit neatly into a narrative of departure and return, of sword-drawn glory.

Even in education, leadership, and spirituality, the Hero’s Journey exerts its influence. In schools, students are praised for striving and achieving, often at the expense of rest, play, or contemplation. In corporate leadership programs, the language of mastery and resilience mimics the hero’s arc: “find your edge,” “conquer your goals,” “lead the charge.” Spiritual traditions too, especially those filtered through patriarchal institutions, often valorize asceticism, transcendence, and treat enlightenment as a spiritual victory—while also marginalizing embodiment, sensuality, and the wisdom of receptivity. The call to action is ever-present, but the call to stillness, to surrender, to inter-being? That voice is often drowned out or dismissed as unproductive, passive, or weak.

But what about the teacher who nurtures curiosity in silence? The healer who holds space for sorrow? The community elder whose wisdom ripens slowly through decades of tending and listening? These figures are no less mythic—they are simply missing from our dominant myths.

This absence has personal consequences. One of the ways the Inner Patriarch manifests is through what feminist scholar Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés calls the “overculture”—the dominant voice of society that tells us who we should be. The overculture says: be productive, be efficient, be strong, be invulnerable. It is the voice that causes a mother to doubt the value of her caregiving, or a poet to abandon her verse for more “practical” pursuits. It is the voice that turns spiritual seeking into performance, demanding enlightenment as an accomplishment rather than a lived relationship with mystery. It pressures us to package our purpose, brand our healing, monetize our gifts. Slowly, quietly, we begin to internalize the message that our worth is measured by output, visibility, and control—rather than by presence, depth, or the unseen acts of love that truly hold the world together.

Interestingly, in the Buddhist monastery across the road here in Temple, New Hampshire, the male monks actually model the energies of the Divine Feminine: they live in deep presence and devotion, walking slowly through the forest, moving in rhythm with the Earth. Their days are shaped by silence, meditation, receptivity, and interdependence—qualities our culture often labels as feminine and therefore undervalues. The monks do not accumulate wealth or assert dominance, and the more practiced, masterful monks don’t chase enlightenment as though it’s an achievement. Instead, they offer their lives as vessels of stillness, humility, compassion and loving kindness. Observing them, I am reminded that the Divine Feminine is not limited by gender, but is a universal principle of balance, care, and relational being—one that even those within patriarchal traditions, monks can, and often do, embody in quiet and powerful ways. Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk and peace activist, was another beautiful example of a man in tune with the Divine Feminine.

We can begin to bring awareness to the Inner Patriarch through inner work and careful witnessing of our own minds. We can also tell new stories—or reclaim the ones long buried. In Celtic mythology, Brigid tends the fires of healing, creativity, and hearth—not by conquest but by sacred presence. In Sumerian myth, Inanna descends into the underworld not to slay but to surrender, stripped of her symbols of power she learns its essence. In the Hindu (Vedic) tradition, Saraswati—goddess and river of wisdom—flows through music, learning, and sacred speech, reminding us that real power comes from a clear mind and the courage to speak the truth. In these stories, power is not domination; it is surrender, communion, and re-embodiment—the kind of power that creates, heals, and teaches us how to belong.

Please click here to read section 1.3…

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