By women’s author and teacher Miranda Gray.

Depending on where we live in the world at the moment, there are varying levels of regulations, restrictions and recommended or enforced isolation. With all the concerns and responsibilities about managing everything, helping children and our elderly, and the worries about our work, finances and finding food, our awareness of our four female archetypes becomes crowded out by more urgent things. And in a crisis, our archetypes – the pre-ovulation Maiden, the ovulation Mother, the pre-menstrual Enchantress and menstrual Crone – move into a ‘fight or flight’ setting.

For a short period of time this ‘fight or flight’ way of thinking and response can be helpful to our wellbeing and to those around us. Mother Nature doesn’t want us looking at a tiger as it stalks us, thinking “Oh how beautiful this animal is, I have never seen a tiger this close before,” or “Oh poor tiger, I guess you must be very hungry?” Instead Mother Nature wants us to suppress the subtle aspects of our curious Maiden intellect and of our empathic Mother, and just RUN!

But after a longer time of continuing stress our archetypes can settle into this unbalanced and limited mode as the ‘norm’, and we lose contact with the wider benefits and gifts of the phase and archetype. So, as the scientists predict that the virus crisis will be going on for a number of months and many women will be experiencing their cycles in isolation, we need to know how to not only stay safe and well using the ‘fight or flight’ gifts of the archetypes, but to also tend to the subtler aspects so that we do not lose touch with our deeper and broader sense of self. It is within the weaving of subtle energies in our cyclic nature that we women hold our power and our creative gifts. These energies and gifts are not only needed in a crisis but also when the world emerges afterwards, and we need to build something new.

To help us through this crisis, to feel mental wellbeing and self-empowerment in challenging circumstances, to create balanced archetypes that are not stressed, and to create a menstrual cycle that is without increased physical stress, we need to meet the needs of our archetypes in each of their phases so that they can feel loved and accepted and be expressed into the world as who we are.

The key to establishing wellbeing and cycle balance is simple:

When we express an archetype in an activity 
which is in alignment with an archetype’s needs, 
in the phase of the archetype… 

we will feel stress relief, wellbeing and happiness.

For example: we need to actively do something to express our increased Maiden physical energy and intellect in the Maiden phase to bring the phase and ourselves into balanced empowerment. So, this could be dancing to music and then reading, or Googling to learn something new.

By being more aware of our archetypes in a crisis we can not only stay more balanced and open to the extra skills and abilities that we have, but we can also help those in isolation with us to understand our cyclic nature better and what we offer and need in each phase. This crisis has the opportunity to create true realisation of the authentic female energiesfor lots of women, couples and families.

We are all unique in our circumstances and in our experiences of the archetypes. We have an opportunity to give our body and the archetypes more attention, to explore and to discover what we can do better or more easily in each phase. We need to listen to our body, observe our emotions and thoughts, keep track of our phases and archetypes so we can judge if we are fully in a phase or in Transition Days where we experience some abilities and energies from two different archetypes. 

In every phase there is a gift; if we can meet the expressive, creative and physical needs of the archetype and therefore bring healing and balance to the archetype, then we can unwrap the gift and share it with others. 

We women are blessed with these amazing abilities so that we can share them with others for the benefit of all and for the benefit of the future.

To learn more about activities to balance your female archetypes of Maiden, Mother, Enchantress and Crone, there are more articles on: www.mirandagray.co.uk and www.wombblessing.com