I am discovering a mythic structure that does not require my self-devouring.

For a long time I was inside the myth that did. And the thing about being inside a myth is you can feel that something is wrong without being able to see it. I understood I was participating in a pattern — especially in my romantic relationships, where the suffering was clearest — but I still couldn’t land inside what was actually operating.

Then I started to see it. The minute expressions of self-negation. I began to call it self-devouring — because of its connection to how autoimmune disease moves through women, how it has moved through me. My body wasn’t taking in nutrients. Even when I ate, I wasn’t receiving. I was so hungry the receptors couldn’t tell me I was hungry anymore. The wild self in me was devouring me from the inside, because that is what I learned — before I could speak — would preserve me in the world I entered. I had to pretend I wasn’t a wolf. So I ate myself instead.

That is the mythic level of it. And the bodily level of it. And they are not separate.

Too many women now have an autoimmune disease. The body’s demonstration, in literal tissue, of self-attack. Our suppressed wildness, and the ancestral ways that wildness would have awakened in, turned not against the world but against us. We don’t learn this with language. We learn it before language.

What I was missing was that the thing that needed to shift wasn’t the relationships. It was my orientation to my own mythic structure. How I saw myself. How I didn’t see myself. The jealousy I carried — a structural kind, not obvious — was about what these systems organize around some women, with their compliance, and what they do not organize around others. Around me. I was consuming myself around that, rather than letting it tell me something true.

My mythic structure has shifted. To something dynamic, pulsing, alive. Self-continuity, not self-devouring. Rooted relational aliveness that does not feed on my life-force to sustain itself.

It is not necessarily that we allow our life-force to be fed on. Often we simply don’t see how this is already operating. We feel it. We don’t see it. And that gap — between feeling and seeing — is where I do my work. That has been my curriculum and my study. That is what I carry into the gathering.