Return to Wholeness: Reclaiming the Forgotten Feminine

We Were Never Meant to Stay Static

Women have been living under a narrative that was never fully spoken, but deeply understood. It has been communicated through cultural expectation, inherited roles, and systems of law. We’ve been shaped by a particular viewpoint that, for generations, has gone largely unquestioned—not because we agreed, but because we forgot we could.

What we are truly seeking is not something new, but something ancient. Something we’ve forgotten. We've been steeped in an increasingly unnatural state that has pulled us out of balance and disconnected us from our essence. The feminine and masculine both live within us, yet our culture has overwhelmingly favored the masculine: linear time, constant output, and a focus on control, structure, and productivity.

In this New World reality, men have generally fared better—not because they are more capable, but because the systems were built in their image. Workdays, economies, and family structures have all been shaped to reward masculine traits, such as repetition, routine, and efficiency. Meanwhile, women have been expected to fit into molds never designed for their rhythms or natural power.

Joseph Campbell’s famous "Hero with a Thousand Faces" reinforced this concept as it charted the expectation of The Hero’s Journey, by which a hero sets out, faces trials, wins the prize, and returns transformed. It speaks of truths uncovered through action and conquest. When asked about women in this context, he acknowledged women’s spiritual depth but didn't see them as needing a quest—believing they already embodied the prize. In his view, women were the symbolic destination, not the protagonist traveler.

But this is the heart of the forgetting.

Women do journey. We do descend, face the dark, wrestle with the underworld of our lives. But our path—The Heroine’s Journey—is not about becoming someone else through battle. It’s about remembering who we already are. It is a return to wholeness, a reclamation of the parts of ourselves we've had to abandon to survive.

Reclaiming Feminine Wisdom

Long before Campbell’s book, women intuitively knew they were missing their own rhythm and narrative. This absence began to surface in our collective awareness when psychologist and writer Maureen Murdock published "The Heroine’s Journey" a powerful rebuttal and roadmap for women seeking to reclaim their identity.

Murdock found Campbell’s model incomplete. She offered a different arc—one in which the heroine begins by abandoning her mother, her softness, and intuition to be taken seriously. She becomes the woman who climbs the ladder of success, only to discover the silence it costs her; the mother who loses herself in caregiving, embodying selflessness; the creative artist who puts down her art to be “practical.”

At the midpoint of this journey, the heroine is often burned out, dissatisfied, and longing to reconnect with her inner, feminine truth. The challenge she must face is not about conquering the world, but about healing internalized patriarchy and cultural conditioning. Her path requires integration of her feminine wisdom, not domination.

In the feminine story, growth is not linear. It honors our natural rhythms—cyclical, relational, and intuitive. The Heroine’s Journey spirals inward through phases of reflection, shadow work, and transformation. It is a return to inner authority, self-love, and wholeness—a path for women who are seeking meaning beyond societal roles or external definitions of success.

Return to Wholeness

In simple terms, women as a collective are long overdue for a return to their natural rhythms and innate wisdom. The rise in women’s anxiety, burnout, and the crisis of “invisible labor” has brought us to a point of reckoning. The glorification of hustle culture and constant productivity is making us unwell. The yearning for meaning, cultivated depth, and inner connection is beginning to outweigh the pressure to perform, produce, and conquer.

Put plainly: our inner feminine journey can no longer wait. We don’t need to get better at the grind—we need to remember who we were before we traded wisdom for approval.

The integration of our inner and outer worlds—our feminine and masculine traits—isn’t about achieving constant peace or perfection. It’s about alignment. Wholeness is embodied by women who trust their intuition, rest without guilt, create without asking permission, and lead without abandoning their softness.

This return is not just a mindset—it is a spiritual, psychological, and embodied process. A homecoming to self. A

The good news? This journey is already underway.

Unlike the Hero’s Journey, this is not a solitary path. Many women are walking it back to themselves and toward each other. In doing so, they’re discovering the rest, support, and community that for so long remained unnamed and unseen.

Yes, the path can be a lonely one. It can feel disorienting, like the dissolution of everything that once felt true but is no longer.

But this is by design.
Those on the journey are not lost, we are becoming whole.