Kidd concludes that since images, symbols, and words for God are necessary, they should be balanced and equitable. How do you respond to the word Goddess? Does it create anxiety in you? Why? Do you think it helps to break the lock that patriarchy has on divine imagery?ġ0. How do you feel about the importance of rituals? In what ways have they shifted things for you? Have you had moments in which you felt you had truly crossed a threshold into a new landscape of feminine spiritual consciousness from which there was no turning back?ĩ. Do you remember the first time you encountered a Divine Feminine image? Do you recall the first time you heard prayers using “she,” “her,” and “mother”? How did these things affect you?Ĩ. How can we negotiate through the resistance that might arise in a marriage? How can men become aware? How can they be invited into the struggle and made part of the quest?ħ. Kidd suggests that men need to become aware, but that blaming them doesn’t help, it only polarizes the two sides. Men’s resistance to Sacred Feminine awakenings often grows out of their fear of change, fear that women’s gain may be their loss. The author writes candidly of her husband’s initial resistance to her process. How and when has it been important for you to find a contained space where you could really face and tend what was happening, where “the green shoot of your feminine soul could have its hothouse?”Ħ. Kidd writes about her need to find a “circle of trees,” her metaphor for the container that would hold and nurture her as she began the process of reconnecting to her feminine soul.

If Jesus was a feminist in that he preached a gospel of liberation and mutuality and treated women as equal, why were women excluded for so long from leadership in most churches and forbidden from having authority over men? Where does your tradition stand on women’s positions in organized religion? Are there ways in which we support the very structures that wound us?ĥ. “The truth may set you free,” Kidd writes, “but first it will shatter the safe, sweet way you live.” Has your awakening been difficult and challenging? Was there internal and external resistance to it? Did you experience any part of it as shattering? Dangerous? Freeing?Ĥ.

What was your childhood church or culture of faith like? How did it become part of your internal geography? Did you identify with Kidd’s memories of being a young girl in school and church, thinking God was male?ģ. What experiences have served as wake-up calls for you?Ģ. It frequently takes a series of wake-up calls or collisions with the truth to jolt a woman into a deep awakening to the Sacred Feminine.

The dance of the dissident daughter