Dorica: Thank you for your willingness to entertain these questions for Psyche's Journey, Paula. I look forward to learning from you! Can we start by addressing the kinds of difficulties you hear most often from people who are trying to reconnect with their essence and walk their own true path?

Paula: Our most frequent difficulty is the fear of acknowledging a growing dissatisfaction with a patriarchal path that ignores the wisdom of the body and the richness of dreamtime. The old way no longer fits. Even the once reliable religious rituals or trusted beliefs from childhood seem incomplete, somehow, leaving us feeling a sense of loss or yearning, but for what? The old familiar responses can no longer answer the new questions. And there is loneliness at first. There seems to be no one that dares to travel this path with us. So we search for a safe way to proceed.

In this culture it is difficult to naturally engage our feminine body wisdom and instincts. Beginning in childhood we are diverted, urged to not question the laws of the fathers. Instead, when a feeling or an experience pulls us toward the feminine realm with instinctual questions about the nature of what we feel - in our bellies, our breasts, our hearts, and our gut - we are encouraged to prefer magic to embodied Mystery for our succor. These questions actually begin at birth; long before our intellects can form words our bodies read the situations and respond to the experiences. In fact, there is the most elegant and arresting research in process today on the wisdom of the child in utero.

Dorica: So, these kinds of initiations lead us back to our essence?

Paula: Many of us go through life feeling a sense of something missing - something just beyond our reach. Without realizing it we identify with and value the masculine principles of logic and rationality as if they alone sufficiently explain what we feel intuitively and know instinctually. Meanwhile our embodied feminine instincts beg to be acknowledged. For both men and women this imbalance goes against the very nature of the psyche, causing us to doubt ourselves, to feel confused, defensive, and lost. So, we work harder to fit in, to be less "crazy," depressed, or sad.