Winter has landed. Darkness settles in. The rush of holiday chaos bids us farewell. There is nothing left to do now but turn inwards.
As we cross this quiet threshold into a new calendar year, we begin our first month inside Feminine Mystique: A slow, sacred study circle devoted to the mythic voice and creative lineage of the Feminine woven through literature, art, and story.
Beneath the Full Wolf Moon of January, we stand at a doorway peering into liminal space. Here, we pause at the edge to listen, to descend, to remember.
This month, Feminine Mystique enters the terrain of threshold, Crone wisdom, and the fertile void—spaces our culture rarely honors, yet ones the Feminine knows intimately.
What This Month Is (and Is Not)
Feminine Mystique is not a book club or a race through a text. There is no pressure to keep up, catch up, analyze, or prove.
Our time in this space is slow, rooted in presence, intuition, and an inner cyclical rhythm that asks us to listen. As we move through this month, you’re invited to read slowly, to linger, reread, skip pages, or sit with one paragraph for the whole of January.
Stillness, observation, and quiet reflection are all encouraged.
Pressure, obligation, goals, and anticipated outcomes can be gently released from your space.
January’s Arc
This month we will move through three mythic portals:
Threshold — standing at the edge of what has been and what is becoming
Crone Wisdom — reclaiming intuition, discernment, what has been dismissed within us, and our inner authority
The Void/Underworld — staying with what is dark, quiet, unknown, or unresolved long enough for wisdom to emerge
We are not seeking clarity as an outcome. We are cultivating relationship with these states.
The Main Text of January
Our primary companion this month is Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés. We will be exploring specific chapters throughout the month (outlined below), but I urge you to move at your own pace. Let yourself wander through the text however feels resonant.
Women Who Run With the Wolves offers both a resting place and a mirror to the wintering feminine psyche. It is a remembering text. It asks to be read slowly so we may live inside the stories rather than analyzing them to exhaustion.
The wild feminine does not reveal herself all at once. She waits to be met in the right season.
Our Flow Through the Month
Week 1 — Threshold
Suggested Chapters:
Introduction
The Howl: Resurrection of the Wild Woman
(La Loba — the Bone Woman)
We begin with the Crone at the edge of the desert, gathering what remains.
Reflection:
What bones are left after the year strips us?
Week 2 — Crone Wisdom
Suggested Chapter:
Nosing Out the Facts: The Retrieval of Intuition as Initiation
(Baba Yaga)
We move deeper into the forest, where discernment and instinct are tested.
Reflection:
Where is inner knowing asking to lead?
Week 3 — The Void/Underworld
Suggested Chapter:
Hunting: When the Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
(Skeleton Woman)
We descend into the place we often avoid—fear, stillness, intimacy, and staying.
Reflection:
What wants to be stayed with, rather than fixed?
Week 4 — Integration
A spacious week for rereading, resting, reflecting, and allowing the work to settle.
This is also a great week to work with any of the supplemental offerings you feel drawn to, but remember it isn’t necessary to take anything new in. Only what wishes to integrate.
Supplemental Offerings
Alongside the main text, I’ll share gentle, optional offerings each week—a poem, an essay, a piece of music, an image, a film—meant to echo and deepen the themes we’re exploring.
None of these are required. You’re not meant to engage with all of what’s offered, especially not at once. Explore what calls to you and save the rest for another moment in time when you’re asked to revisit these themes.
How to Be Here
Feminine Mystique is a portal that welcomes you into relationship with the mythic feminine voice and psyche in whatever way She shows up for you. There is no right or wrong way to be here. Let this space be about curiosity, expansion, and act as a special corner carved out where you can meet the deeper parts of yourself and your life.
If you’re reading this, you’ll receive one email a week with gentle prompts and reflections to carry you through the suggested reading. Move at your pace. Listen to your intuitive intelligence. You can always revisit the material at a later date.
This space is built to resist urgency and restore trust in your own rhythm.
And so, we begin not by striving, but by listening. Not by moving forward, but by going inward. Not by seeking answers, but by honoring the questions that winter asks us to carry for awhile.
Welcome to January inside Feminine Mystique.
This is super synchronous for me - I’m reading this for the first time now!!