"Go to therapy"
No I'm heading straight to the Underworld, need anything?
If your idea of "therapy' doesn't include rigorous physical exercise, analyzing what you eat, spending time in nature, meditation or breathwork, or giving back, you're not seeking healing - you're seeking affirmation for why life isn't going your way.
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, author of The Psychedelic Blog.
I loved and resonated fully with this perspective from Andrew. It inspired inward reflection for many days. One thing I would add to this from my own experience is how necessary, medicinal and beautiful it is to have a devotional connection to God/Goddess/Cosmos/Higher Power. As anchor, as archetype, as protector to surrender to, as guide. That’s a big part of my idea of therapy, really.
I’m so grateful to enjoy my religion (Hinduism), to have always grown up having worship as an intimate part of my life on my own terms, and to be a spiritual woman. I feel like it’s a privilege. I am sure I would’ve been one of those people who never gets out of therapy, if I was without God and Goddess, without Shiva and Shakti, without the Divine in all it’s expressions.
Without all of the above (especially Andrew’s observations), traditional talk therapy in a chair at a clinic is merely mercurial loops to me, and begins to feel dry. An over-intellectualisation of one’s personal mythology and human experience is not necessarily always healthy. It sorely lacks well lubricated, well rounded nourishment (Yes, I did it, I brought lube into this conversation, and you know you love me). Therapy gets rife with excessive and unnecessary cerebral spiralling — which never deeply, truly benefits a woman’s journey, for I believe that women’s healing begins through the body rather than always remaining up in the mind like it’s Rapunzel’s ivory tower. Women are not meant for remaining always frozen up in the cerebral, stuck in fixating upon analysis of oneself. It feels like our spirit starts putrefying while we’re still alive, something is always off, and we can’t tell why it never feels right. Then we blame ourselves, consume and consume some more, and wonder why nothing is ever enough for the hungry ghost, the void, the emptiness within us. We probably stumble upon some kind of transcendental philosophy, yogic path or meditation designed by a male body for the male experience, loudly touted as The Solution, and pretend it works to help us avoid suffering by escaping ourselves through severe self policing.
We shame and shun pleasure and desire like it will scald us, when all we have ever done is avoid the fire we so yearned to slow burn in. As we age, maybe our generation too will walk the well-trodden path of a suffering-addicted herd mindset, and much like most of our elders, we will embrace defeatist platitudes of how life simply, mostly sucks. Wagging our fingers with brittle omens of ‘Just wait…’ whenever we encounter younger women.
I’ve been to therapy a few times over the course of my life, and it was deeply insightful. I’d recommend everyone to experience it. I’ve also bloomed big and beautiful in the seasons where I intentionally chose not to rely on therapy. I haven’t gone to therapy for about two years straight, while navigating huge transformations and becoming unrecognisable to my past selves. I don’t ‘top up’ on a little therapy here and there like a hair colour touch up. And I hope I continue being like this for more years to come. To ‘raw dog’ life, as they say nowadays. That disgusting metaphor is deceptively fun to use.
This is not everyone’s style, and possibly not right for everyone, but I pride myself for it. I enjoy my resilience, my audacity, my weirdness, my old-fashioned willingness to be thrashed about in the dark by stormy seas, letting it shape me and spit me out, without booking textbook ‘help’ at every turn.
I will never speak in black and white about this. That would be incredibly stupid and ignorant. I love the contribution of therapy in healing me from anxiety, depression, dark traumas, seasons of life where I couldn’t function healthily. I respect the part therapy played in my villain origin story year of severe, dysfunctional burnout.
I am also absolutely certain that it was journeys, shifts and practices completely different from and outside of traditional talk therapy that actually healed me from the inside out. That even began to carry me into the depths of transformation, rebirthing and experiencing a heroine’s journey.
Some of these things sound too simple to be true. Stuff that somebody from your parents generation may tell you to do and you may scoff at for how cliché it is (less phone, more grass, how you sleep, what you eat, how you exercise, you get it). We love the infinite potential of diving into complex, intricate descriptions of exactly how we were traumatized and victimized by our lives. They make us feel a lot more important. They serve a sacred function in our evolution, our understanding of how to proceed. They also sometimes become addictive lore we attach ourselves to, a rabbithole we’d rather not exit.
I think about therapy a lot, as I see it become as commonplace and irreverent as a gym membership and a Spotify subscription in the lives around me. I obviously also think about therapy a lot when I honour all of the wisdom, insight, support and tools that therapy did bring to me.
I think about this piece on the downfall of resilience in our (possibly) excessively therapized generation, a lot.
I think about Dr Roger McFillin’s “Is everything a psychiatric disorder now?” a lot.
I began to sense a few years ago that being dependent on traditional talk therapy after a certain point tends to slip into infinite navel gazing without actual momentum, and ends up in never, ever getting out of perpetually filling the coffers of a therapist’s office. For years. All your life, if you consent to that.
To me, that is a big turn off.
It’s not ‘working’ on your mind, it’s … Something else entirely. Something that often becomes a sinister form of stagnation and eternal victimhood (which GenZ seems to looove) when left unchecked.
“Same goes with our attraction to therapy culture. This is why I find the obsession with self-love and self-reliance deeply sad. There are young women whose families fell apart and who their whole lives dreamed of nothing but a stable, lasting love to depend on, and are now being told that’s pathological, that’s needy, they should love themselves more. If you dream of depending on someone then damn, you’ve got issues. I see in so much of therapy culture young people desperate to be loved and trying to train themselves out of it. I see so much abandonment pain. We are reparenting ourselves. We are self-soothing. We are healing our inner child. Nobody is asking why. Please will somebody step in and say to this generation that maybe they don’t need more self-love, more belief in themselves, but something to belong to.”
- Freya India, in her Substack post titled ‘The Age of Abandonment,’ a piece I highly recommend reading, among many very interesting other articles that she has penned on the current state of our generation and it’s mental health crisis.
Just “go to therapy” isn’t the slap-on-bandaid that most people like to believe it is. Nor is it a determinant of high value, wisdom or some kind of inherent ‘betterness’ in a person.
It’s so funny to me how we as a society yo-yoed in extremes from judging everyone in therapy as ‘crazy’ weirdos, and then went straight to (subtly) glorifying everyone in therapy as ‘better than everyone else,’ and making therapy-going a form of value signalling, an ego accessory for the (often chronically online) woke.
Going to therapy being made into something Cool and Okay - almost aggressively, lol - is wonderful. “It’s Okay Not To Be Okay” is a wonderful platitude. It’s also a crutch.
There was no collective moment of a balanced, wholesome in-between. No discernment. Maybe those who do tap into that sweet spot, do so very quietly. Good for them.
I have to say this. I have never, not even once in my life, experienced people who go to therapy as any more wise, sensitive, brave, kind or ‘better’ at conducting themselves in friendships and relationships than the people I know who do not go to therapy. (Many of my personal experiences have actually been the far opposite of this, but that is too subjective and specific to only my life, and hence unnecessary to unpack here).
Healing only truly began for me when I entered through the path of the body.
“I have anxiety” became “I used to have anxiety” when I went through the primal, ancient tunnel of beginning with the body. All the therapy in the world, and the money to keep funding those sessions, mental acrobatics and analysis of my patterns was great, it was also nothing until I began a transformative journey through the body.
Cacao, nutrition, sleep, food, gut, hormonal balancing, exercise, movement, restorative yoga, deep feminine energy work, feminine-centric healing, diving into ancient systems of feminine wellness wisdom. Being inside a women’s circle that reveres rest, romance, poetry, sensuality and beauty as medicine. Learning true embodiment, tapping into the depths of the womanly medicine of shaking one’s ass on the regular, these were my portals for healing to truly begin.
All the mental health talk and journaling, the endless ‘get a therapist’ content by those who sell therapy, it’s all well-intentioned, but just telling people to go to therapy as a response to the occasional and inevitable harshness of human life is overrated, overglorified, oversimplified and just not it.
I regularly encounter idiots who go to therapy, who talk all the performative therapy speak in the world, and somehow never actually rise in the way the conduct themselves in communion with the world.
Just going to therapy did wonderful things for my mind, it helped me see my past in new ways, it helped me feel held and heard, and I knew very early on that I wanted to receive that medicine without slipping into normalizing being coddled by therapy.
Therapy simply did not do enough for me, and I only experienced everything about my life shifting so deeply when I included the body. This is well known in wise women’s circles and among healers who help you journey into the feminine somatic. Therapy doesn’t include the body, and will thus never feel nourishing enough for women.
I often marvel at this stunning excerpt from Women Who Run With The Wolves, a book that dives deep, rich and beautiful into the Underworld of the feminine psyche, by writer and Jungian psychoanalyst Dr Clarissa Pinkola Estés:
‘Like a trail through a forest which becomes more and more faint and finally seems to diminish to a nothing, traditional psychological theory too soon runs out for the creative, the gifted, the deep woman. Traditional psychology is often sparse or entirely silent about deeper issues important to women: the archetypal, the intuitive, the sexual and the cyclical, the ages of women, a woman’s way, a woman’s knowing, her creative fire. This is what has driven my work on the Wild Woman archetype for over two decades.’
I felt this to my very bones. It succinctly expresses everything I felt about therapy, both in and out of the therapist’s chair. Continued below,
‘A woman’s issues of soul cannot be treated by carving her into a more acceptable form as defined by an unconscious culture, nor can she be bent into a more intellectually acceptable shape by those who claim to be the sole bearers of consciousness. No, that is what has already caused millions of women who began as strong and natural powers to become outsiders in their own cultures. Instead, the goal must be the retrieval and succor of women’s beauteous and natural psychic forms. Fairy tales, myths and stories provide understandings which sharpen our sight so that we can pick out and pick up the path left by the wildish nature. The instruction found in story reassures us that the path has not run out, but still leads women deeper, and more deeply still, into their own knowing. The tracks we all are following are those of the wild and innate instinctual Self.’
There’s a reason why every woman who has read Women Who Run With The Wolves worships that book, and can never seem to run out of conversations to have about it, whenever she finds a sister who has experienced it too.
When I included my mystical life, my spirituality and my body (which is my spirituality - my womb, my flesh, my nervous system, my temple), I transformed. When I brought these aspects into the folds of my mental health distortions, I started getting down into the dark, swampy, dense physical roots of mental health. By working through my body in my healing journey, not outside of it. By not treating my body like a cute, silly chore, like some ‘supposed to’ on a girlboss to-do list.
You’ll never hear me say that I am so ‘busy’ worshipping my work every single day that if I get to move and be in my body even just a little, ‘that’s also enough.’ As a woman, the womb and the body is the sacred gate to all healing. Being in and with my body, in movement, in sensuality, in pleasure, in ritual, in restorative practices, in yoga, in embodiment, in dance, in food as medicine, in every way, it is all a religious matter to me.
I feel like a dudebro even saying this, and I shouldn’t even need to offer the example, but even the most successful, busy, high-achieving, truly wealthy and deeply intelligent people you’ll meet will have schedules where they give serious time to their body in their own way, non-negotiably. I focus on women, but this example transcends gender.
If a woman journeyed into her body with as much fervour as she keeps booking therapy sessions, she will taste a deep resurrection that will show her, not tell her, show her how her mental health was never an entity separate from her womanhood, never something to ‘fix’ or ‘work on.’
Most modern women live entire lives only in their head and shoulders, disconnected and numb from sensation in the Earth body - the lower body, the seat of power, the feminine body.
As women, our womb is our power centre and our hormonal cycles determine our mood, energetic flavour, emotional and mental state more than anything else. We think certain things are our ‘personality,’ whole time we were just disembodied and numbed out from our womanliness in a world where the subtle, significant realities of the feminine body and feminine cycles are largely ignored by those in white lab coats. The state of our womb rules over the state of our entire being, our entire system.
If women went into the soma, the body, the deep feminine wisdom in flesh, sensuality, heart, womb and pussy, as often and with as much reverence as they sign up for talk therapy, they would experience transformations beyond the beyond.
Most women do this if and when they are ready to receive a life beyond the mediocre. Most women are always found by and touched by the Goddess, at some point in time. They hear her call. They respond to it. They clear off the whole desk and reach towards her.
Timelines, dimensions and the entire experience of our reality changes through descending into our body and our sensual aliveness. The feminine is designed to move life, energy and emotion through her, not stay frozen in her head and shoulders, perpetually dissecting it all. Shakti lives in multidimensional creative motion, and we are all mirrors of the Earth and mirrors of her.
Sitting in a chair and talking, talking and talking to the ends of the Earth about our childhood and our patterns - no matter how brilliant and awesome this world of therapy is - will never be enough for a woman. Those who have tasted the Goddess, the unexplainable truths of the feminine that can only be felt, already know this.
Many of us can admit that we kinda love that capitalism-flavoured idea of ‘buying’ into our healing, having the instantaneous luxury of sitting on our couches and summoning an online therapist, or feeling ‘better’ just for booking and having showed up to sessions we paid for.
For those of us with plenty of money, it’s the easiest thing in the world to just keep buying therapy. A perspective like ‘No, Not Everyone Needs Therapy’ feels outrageous. Even the suggestion that you’re probably not as much the victim of this world as you may be taught to believe you are, is problematic. You’re triggered.
The passivity of sitting there and being therapized, believing that we’ve already done more than enough through this investment of our resources, can sometimes remain a false spell.
Too often, it only reaches the delights of that humble bragging at every table how we go to therapy, making therapy speak outside a therapist’s office our everyday vocabulary, wielding and weaponising therapy speak over our parents, friends and partners, and falling into the rabbithole of seeing all of this wild life through a sanitised, therapized lens. It renders such a neutered, dull way of being human. It’s like there is no spark of life in the eyes, no electricity in the forcefield one emanates anymore.
I love that I got to go to therapy when I did, and I do believe that we all have our own path. Therapy was not the hero of my trajectory, it was more like an irrelevant but memorable side quest in the big picture. Yet, truth is that it has been much more significant and beautiful for so many others, and will always continue to be. There will be so many people in this world who have a completely different and even opposite experience to mine with therapy, they will access deep transformation through it, and I think that’s wonderful.
I feel that the deepest work, the real work, always happens in movement. In creation and creative endeavours. In your food. In shifts beyond the ‘mental’ health - when you start making slow, seismic nudges in the somatic, energetic, emotional and spiritual tectonic plates that make up your world. It happens standing in the muck of your life, it happens in your physical, animal body, it happens in all the hours outside the chair.
I am not an authority for making a step-by-step instruction list, or handholding anybody into what will propel their healing. The path of the feminine, which so much of my writing all over my Substack largely focuses on, is not linear, logical, instructional, rule-based, nor a ‘template.’ It has no ‘Here’s 5 Things You Should Do’ reels to it.
If you ask me, it simply finds you. And you follow. You are already wise, intuitive and receptive to it. The teachers, books, sisters and glimmers always find you, the more you unfurl, luxuriate, sensualise, slow down, be present and pay attention to life. The more you romance the idea of giving yourself permission to be a woman and love womanhood. We all receive our journey in fated, beautiful ways.
The writings on Soft Moon Rising are mythic medicine for me, every single day, in co-creating my life erotically, in collaboration with the psyche, with Eros, with Hades and with fate, instead of waiting for dark nights of the soul to arrive and rudely slap me into growth.
The archetypes of femininity and womanhood are so, so beautiful to work with. To study as guiding lights for every phase and initiation in one’s life. Fairytales, myths, ancient archetypes, poetry, folklore, all of these realms teach us depths that psychological study has long honoured. Myth was meant to carry us through life, when therapy and therapists as we know them today didn’t exist. And they are still powerful in a way that nothing else can be.
This kind of psychic nourishment is all the more precious in a world of increasingly Reels-brain behaviours, where everyone is addicted to needing handholding, specific steps and instructions to everything. There are riches upon riches to be found in slowing down enough to begin to scratch the surface of contemplating mythological metaphor and symbolism.
Know that therapy is one beautiful pathway that may be right for you and is available for you to explore, and that there are a million more beautiful pathways that may be right for you and are available for you to explore, and there is no hierarchy to this.
I leave you with words and perspectives below that I found very interesting, which rang true for my unique experience. I end this post with a tiny list of threads to pick up that may lead you to delightful places that sing a similar song, should you desire more.
Astrology de-colonises our mental health by focusing on our relationship to natural law and the cosmos, not your relationship to capitalism and your ability to function within its dysfunction.
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, author of ASTROLOGICA and more
Mysticism has done more for me than mainstream “mental health care” ever has. You move different when you understand the interplay between the Spirit and the psyche.
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, author of Enter The Unseen
~ Explore the Substacks of the
, and .~ Please read Pussy by Regena Thomashauer, no matter how much you may want to scream, cry, wrestle, roll on the floor and be triggered about some stuff in there. Being triggered is an everyday opportunity for alchemical pleasure when you walk the path of feminine healing. Women and the feminine trigger, it’s what we’re the best at doing. We merely exist, and we activate and trigger everything and everyone, all the time. We may have triggered the Universe coming into existence.
~ Actually, read more things in life in general, that you do not entirely agree with, that feel outrageous even. Explore the realms of the people that you do not find perfectly relatable, who do not make you feel seen and heard from start to end, without cancelling and ghosting them. We’ve become utterly spoilt, even deranged, by always requiring art to be a mirror of our specific life, to ‘see ourselves’ in every creation, in glorifying only that which is ‘relatable.’ How utterly boring we are making ourselves, really. Edge your way into expanding your tolerance for being able to find tiny drops of gold even within the grey areas that make up all of humanity.
Every floor-mopper at Safeway, every old arthritic coot, every pimple-faced bag boy expects to open a novel and see himself—his smallness, his meaness, his petty virtues and petty vices, his wretched figure, hideous and crooked. If he opens a novel and finds not his own monstrous visage but something fine and fair, a Grecian form full of grace and pride, then his heart fills with immortal hate. As Oscar Wilde once put it, “The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.” - Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.
~ sensual healing initiations that sound too simple to be true - by
~ A little further reading from my Substack:
Thank you for being here,
Love,
O
I deeply resonated with this essay, my god. I always wanted the wise woman in the woods and not the hyper-rational therapist and their stratagems. Thank you so much for this work.
This is so beautiful. I completely agree that “mental health” altogether needs to go from the cerebral to the somatic, from the mind to the flesh. And traditional ashtanga yoga and hatha practices feel patriarchal and about discipline and consistency. But as women we need devotion and understanding of the cyclical. Love that we are exploring these curiosities and sharing our stories as women. This is a beautiful intuitive piece of writing.