Women’s Spiritual Inheritance: History, Embodiment, and Sovereignty with Liz Childs Kelly

The sacred feminine, women’s spiritual inheritance, and the search for sovereignty are at the heart of this conversation with Liz Childs Kelly, author of Home to Her.

Together, we explore the sacred feminine as both a historical reality and a lived experience, discussing embodied wisdom, women’s stories, community, and the longing many women feel to reconnect with what has been forgotten or hidden.

This conversation is an invitation to remember, reclaim, and come home to yourself.

Connect with Liz Childs Kelly’s work:

Website: http://hometoher.com
Book: Home to Her: Walking the Transformative Path of the Sacred Feminine https://womancraftpublishing.com/product/home-to-her/

✨ Women & Mythology Podcast is a soulful exploration of myth as a living force in our contemporary lives.

Hosted by Maria Souza — Comparative Mythologist, Poet, and Educator.

📖 Learn more: www.womenandmythology.com

🎧 Follow on Instagram: @womenandmythology

💌 Subscribe to the Mythic News newsletter for stories, reflections, and upcoming events: https://www.womenandmythology.com/subscribe

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, myth lover, I'm Maria. Welcome to the Woman and Mythology podcast.

SPEAKER_01 0:13

Even if you look at the very beginning of Genesis, in the beginning, God moved across the waters. What is the water? Who was there before? The water was there before God. And then you go into all of this and you find some of these oldest stories about the feminine is she is the water. Mythmaker Podcast Network.

SPEAKER_00 0:35

Hello, Myth Lover. Welcome back. If you're a regular listener of women in mythology, you may have noticed that I haven't released a new episode in the past couple of months. Life with my family has been wonderfully full, but I'm now entering a steadier season and hope to return with fresh conversations for you each month. Behind the scenes, I've also been immersed in research, reflection, and the creation of my next major mythic offering. It has been a season of discernment, asking what stories, symbols, and teachings feel most alive and essential to carry forward. I look forward to sharing more about this work with you soon. For now, I'm delighted to return to this space and bring for you a conversation that feels very meaningful. In this episode, we explore women's spiritual inheritance and the sacred feminine as both a historical reality and a lived experience. Together, we reflect on what has been forgotten, hidden, or left out of our cultural and spiritual narratives, what becomes possible when we begin to reclaim it. I'm joined by Liz Childs-Kelly, writer, educator, host of the Home to Her podcast, and author of Home to Her, Walking the Transformative Path of the Sacred Feminine. Through her research, personal journey, and work with women, Liz has become a thoughtful voice in the growing conversation around the sacred feminine and its relevance for our lives today. In our conversation, we speak about the sacred feminine as a historical reality and spiritual inheritance, mystical experiences, intuition, and embodied ways of knowing, childbirth, the body, and women's lives as sacred, the hidden feminine within religious and cultural traditions, why so many women are seeking the sacred feminine today, community belonging and reclaiming women's stories, and the relationship between the sacred feminine, agency, and sovereignty. This conversation is an invitation to remember what has always been ours, to reconnect with the wisdom of the body, the earth, and the deepest knowing that lives within. Let's dive in. Hi, Liz. Welcome. Thank you so much for being here and joining us today.

SPEAKER_01 3:03

Such a pleasure to be here and to meet you and have an opportunity to talk with you.

SPEAKER_00 3:07

I've been uh in awe of the body of work and the extents of your research. I would love if you can share a little bit with our listeners about your journey and what first called you toward exploring the sacred feminine. Yeah, it's it's a good story.

SPEAKER_01 3:27

I and I and I write about it in my book, How Jar in the beginning, but the short story is I was on a certain trajectory. I own my own company. I had a consulting business in California and also in New York, and I was very invested in performing in the business world, in part because there were a lot of reasons I was ambitious, but in part because it felt like a way that I could be a really strong and powerful feminist is showing up in environments that were not open to my mother or my grandmother and doing them in a way where I was successful and proving that I could do that. That felt very empowering to me. And so I was all in on that career. As part of that, I had a smaller company, but we worked with really large multinational companies. And so a big part of my job was finding new clients. And I went to a really large women's business conference in San Francisco one day with the hopes of networking my way into some new company and some new client. I was sitting in the audience at the very beginning of this conference. There were about 5,000 people there, way in the back. There was a woman who was speaking about, she was a National Geographic fellow and also Native Hawaiian. She was speaking really, I didn't even know this language at the time, but she was speaking about Indigenous wisdom. And she was specifically talking about the original settlers of the islands that we call Polynesia and how they got there. She was telling a story about how they had settled these islands many thousands of years ago without any of the modern instrumentation. And she was explaining how some of it was very practical. It was oral traditions that had passed down generation after generation, start training very young, but there was this deep connection to nature and intuitive wisdom. It's been a while, but the way that I recall her saying it was something about these people being so in tune with the wisdom of their own hearts that they could navigate just thousands of miles just by watching how the waves were breaking across the phone. And when she said that, I had a really physical reaction to her words. I was meditating at that point, passing a style, and mystical experiences were not part of my life. Nothing that I was inviting in. I was focused on being rational and logical. And this was a very non-rational, logical experience, but I started to get hot. My whole body started getting hot and tingly, starting from feet and working all the way up my body. And then the room started doing this weird shimmery thing, and then my hearing felt like it was going in and out, like I was in some vortex. And I realized that could sound scary or like a medical event, and it did not feel that way. It was like exciting and like, whoa, what is happening? There is some level of knowing in me that goes far deeper than I ever imagined. And that kind of landed in me as a question, but almost as soon as I had the question, it was the answer. Like, yep, no, there is. There absolutely is. But notice I said nothing about the feminine. There was a woman who was speaking, but nothing about the feminine. She was speaking about Indigenous wisdom. And so I took this very literally. These people, she called them the Wayfinders, which you're a mom. If you have not yet seen the movie Moana, I am sure it is in your future. But this was before that movie came out, which is about the Wayfinders. This was well before that movie came out. So I had never heard of these people. So I took that experience very literally, and I started trying to find out information about who were these Wayfinders. And then that just sort of led me down this rabbit hole of learning non-Western indigenous traditions and what were some of their ways of knowing that had survived colonization. And the more that I learned, the more those kind of non-linear experiences started showing up in my life, even just from book reading, it seemed to crack open some sort of portal of knowing. But there was still nothing specific to the feminine. There was a lot of information about all of life being sacred, all of it. And how finding divinity later just as common as finding divinity separate from us. And that resonated with me at such a deep level. But it wasn't until I was also pregnant with my son while all this was happening with my second mom. And it wasn't until he was born that this piece of the feminine kind of I had him unmedicated about five months after that initial experience at the conference. And in part that was a choice. My own intuitive wisdom was starting to open, and I wanted to know. I wanted to know what this experience would be like. It was terribly painful. But also it was sort of the second piece falling into place with this all and two things happened during that experience that really sort of solidified things for me. And one was the sense of being connected to women all the way back through time, that sense of lineage, like I was participating in something that had been going on forever. And it was big and powerful and important. At one point, women were actually in the room with me as I was giving birth. And the other was really being brought to the brink I have to let go. I have to surrender. I have to stop trying to resist or direct. I've got to let it happen. And when I did that, I became aware of just like, oh, this is so much bigger. This is something that is moving through me. And I am co-creating with it. I just need to get out of the way because what to do. This doors of life is massive and big, and it is moving for me. And I get to step away and just let it happen. And as soon as I did that, the rest of it progressed very quickly, and my son was born. And so after that, it came all like childbirth must be the most sacred thing a human can experience. It's amazing. Wait, what is everybody talking about? And of course, people are talking about it. But my point, and I think it's still relevant now, is it was but in the cultural retreat? Childbirth, at least here in the US, is a medical event. No, it was not in the mainstream narrative. And it certainly was considered sacred. And this was very mystifying to me because I had been learning about these traditions that treated all of life as sacred. I'm like, but this is how life gets here. Like, shouldn't this thing be the thing that's celebrated everywhere? Should we build like monuments to this? And there was one morning where I was just pondering this and kind of going over it in my head and feeling genuinely frustrated. And I just had an aha, like, well, it's because, first of all, everything that I've been reading and learning had been written by men, and specifically anthropologists, like with an anthropological lens, which is not to say I think they were doing what they could, but they're still men. And then I also realized when I went to church, God was a man, and his sacred son was a man. And I grew up in a Southern Baptist church, so all the leaders were men. And even more recently, when I had begun studying a little bit about Buddhism, my teachers had been men. And I'm like, well, they can't tell me about something that they have experienced. It really is it really is that subject. And I do want to put a caveat here that I have certainly since learned that it is not that the feminine did not exist in those indigenous traditions. It's that the lens at which you were looking at, I think, matters. And the sources that I have I didn't know how to prioritize the feminine in that way. That's a whole multi-layered conversation. But all that's to say is that at that moment I was deeply, deeply upset. I considered myself a spiritual person my whole life, and it really bothered me to suddenly realize that there was this absence of sacred feminine, which is so obvious, right? That she's not there, but it was suddenly in my face. But that very quickly turned to no, it can't be right. There's no way that this is to be a sacred feminine. There has to be a feminine face of God. And it felt very much in that moment, like I had just realized one of the most important reasons why I was alive right now. Like I was supposed to do this work. And I didn't know what that meant. I also knew that it was going to be bigger than me, but I was often running from there. And I do want to give that version of me a hug now and be like, oh, there's so much information about the sacred feminine. But that goes to tell you it's hard to find. You know, I had a master's degree. I was curious, spiritually curious. I was a seeker, like I'm a geek. I like to read. And I had never come across any of this before.

SPEAKER_00 12:24

So, but she's absolutely out there, as you well know. Thank you for sharing your story with us, hearing it from your heart right now, and seeing how it striked you. Because of course, I read it in your book, but listening, it feels like living it with you. And in my experience, it has been a very similar some kind of mystic moment. I had that. It took me longer to make sense of it, though. My mother always encouraged me to read, and I loved it growing up. And she would say, books are a portal to the world and are a way of seeing the world. But if we're reading books written by men with a very patriarchal vision, we are looking at the world through men's eyes, right? True, a very patriarchal vision. So it was also when I selected and began this work with women and focusing on women's perspectives in the world that things began shifting really deeply for me. And your work is both an excavation and a remembering of this knowing. And you use the language of sacred feminine. I would love if you can share and describe a little bit what do you mean by it? Because I think women have different feelings about the terms, right? And there are so many languages to describe sometimes the same archetypal force that we're talking about. But I would love to hear your thoughts on this. How did you come to find the right words for you that feels authentic, that goes beyond that surface level spirituality?

SPEAKER_01 14:06

Yeah, and it's one that I struggled with a lot. The word sacred was a little bit easier for me than divine, because just from a practical standpoint, the research that I did, there were definitely examples of, you know, female divinity, you know, like deities in female form or having feminine characteristics. But there's also a body uh and ways of knowing and people's ways of knowing the world is sacred that they don't divide themselves into God is out here and I'm in here. And so there's, but there is like a layer of sacredness to the feminine experience. So it might be, for example, ancestors, like you're, you know, the grandma that is revered. And so sacred felt more all-encompassing of that. And the the feminine was just tricky because what I noticed is I had a negative reaction to the word feminine. If we think about language and the rise of language, it is patriarchal in and of itself. Like the English language is certainly very patriarchal. And feminine usually means lesser. I mean, just does, you know, like where do you see that word even use? Like, you know, or whether there's like it's boxed into this, like I'm soft and squishy, or you know, you see it in the drugstore for your feminine hygiene products. It's like something that's sort of boxed over here. I ultimately use the word because I wanted to sort of reclaim it. And also because there's a whole conversation and dialogue that I think is ultimately distracting about who is and who isn't a woman and it's this biology or whatnot. Like, I am not, I don't need to have that conversation. I think what's important is that, and it's also not mine to have. I think those are for other people to have, but I think what is important is that bodies and attributes and experiences that we have labeled as feminine, we've considered bless her. And I think that's BS. I want to reclaim, I want to say no to that. I want to put sacred and feminine racide because they belong to segue there. At the most practical point of like, what do I mean by sacred feminine? I literally mean knowing that sacred stuff in female or feminine form. And then the book, in a way, is like a deeper dive into that at different levels of how I have that evolves for me over time. But usually if somebody asks me this, I put it into three categories. And one is that she's a historical. Um, I start there not because I think that is the most important thing, you know, that lived experience I think is huge and deeply important. But I start there because I think we are the literate in some ways in that knowledge. And as you mentioned, you know, my work has been broad as opposed to deep because I wanted to go and see where the sacred feminine was. And literally every culture I've looked at, she's there. She is buried somewhere, sometimes farther back than others, sometimes like still right here. We just haven't heard of it. But there's a mountain of evidence that points to her existence that I really, really, really want women to know. Whatever you do with it is completely up to you. But it is your birthright. Have this as part of your historical near. So that's the first. The second is that when you start to get into learning about the sacred feminine, and again, you're talking about multiple traditions. So I don't want to blanket anything, but what you do see is that there's often a counterbalance to patriarchal, spiritual narratives. So a different idea, sacredness, and even like values and how to live in a world that I think for if you have been raised in a more traditional patriarchal religious structure, it can feel really different and welcoming. Let those aspects in. And there are things like, you know, one of the things that I already mentioned, which is finding the sacredness in everything. It's not outside of you, it's everywhere. Or like, what does it mean, you know, as opposed to hierarchy where there's a God sitting up here and then everything else that's lesser? What does it mean to understand that the ant is literally that life is just as important as mine? So that's the second kind of represents a different set of sacred ideas and principles. And then third is what we were already talking to, which is the lived experience of the sacred ourselves. I think that is probably the most important like, oh, okay, well, of all of this, how is my sacred? How are my experiences sacred? Really starting to embody that is a for me, that's been it so far since I got on the path. It is a primary focus of my life, and it feels like a lifetime journey to work with understand.

SPEAKER_00 18:47

You spoke so beautifully about the sacred and the feminine coming together. It's like they belong together. We should reclaim it. And the birthright of the sacred feminine as a historical fact feels for me so important. Even when I recommended your book, I said to many women, if you like Maria Gimbuta's work, if you like Merlin Stone's work, you are going to love Home to Her because I feel it's right there at it with it. But actually, for women who are new to this work, it might be the best place to begin because it has your lived experience. It feels more contemporary. It is more fresh in this way. And all your references and expanded research that you have in every chapter, like how you can move forward with these ideas.

SPEAKER_01 19:39

I am so glad that you say that, Maria, because that's exactly what I wanted to do. Like when I started researching the sacred feminine, this is the kind of book that I want. And I happen to be geeky. I mentioned I have a master's degree. I thought a lot about going back to school and getting a degree in women's spirituality, and ultimately decided that was not the path for me, primarily because some of my greatest openings had been intuitive and embodied. And I didn't think I was going to get that in academia. But I love academic research and I'm happy to like dig into works that maybe other people wouldn't touch. But I didn't want, you know, I I love Maria Gambutis' work, but it is not super accessible. Like she's an academic, you know? You gotta be kind of a certain kind of person that wants to sit down with her work. And it seems with Merlin Stone, she wasn't an academic, but it's pretty heavy. And so I I wanted to bring this information to women in a way that if you read nothing else that you at least knew, and and I've got it documented, like it's it even go track down all your footnotes. This is a real thing. And then I really did need to pair it with the experiential because that's been such a huge part of the journey for me. It wouldn't have been an honest book had I not included that as well. That also felt like counter, what's the word I'm looking for? An antidote to more sterile, intellectual, heady ways of knowing. It felt like, no, like this, that's part of the absence of the feminine is that we think the only way we can know is through the head. And so I really wanted to put these things together because to me, that is the essence of the feminine. It's not that your brain goes offline, it's just that all these other ways of knowing come forward and work with it. You become more expansive and powerful. It's amazing.

SPEAKER_00 21:33

Absolutely. And that actually what makes the book so special, right? And so feminine in many ways. And I think it becomes a book written by a woman for a woman. Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 21:46

And I yes, Anne Baring and and um Maria Gamers, all of these women that Max Deschue, I'm sure you've come across her work with Suppressed Histories Archives, but I have so much profound respect. I cannot even imagine what it was like. Doing this kind of research and trying to be taken seriously in the 70s and the 80s with this. Even now, I feel like we're working against cultural norms, but I owe such a debt of gratitude to them. Besides my ancestors, I think they may have been the very first people I thanked in the acknowledgments in my book because what I really wanted to do was just like rethink about like we are trying to rebuild our story. Like, let me pick up where you were and try to keep carrying it, keep carrying it. And I feel like your work is the same and the women that come after us will do that too.

SPEAKER_00 22:31

It takes immense courage to live a life in which your creative work and your professional work becomes about remembering, reclaiming imagination, the sacred feminine. I think within the field it's accepted, but it's still hard to explain to the pharmacist, if you know what I mean. One little thing that I wanted to mention as well about the sacred feminine and the language, this reclaiming of our bodies as sacred. Because yes, a lot of this work, it is about reclaiming ideas and knowing and knowledge, but then there's a lot of the work that happens in the body and reclaiming the wisdom of our body. I am also someone who don't have a problem with the word sacred. I come from a religious diverse country where we have so many different sacred practices and understanding actually reclaiming this idea of our bodies as sacred, I find it a key piece for us as women to also reclaim our vitality, our birthright in the world, because our bodies are such targets, really. They need to be molded and they need to appear in a certain way and they need to serve 100% of the time. So reclaiming the sacredness of our bodies feels definitely a strong thread.

SPEAKER_01 23:52

Yeah, you were saying that was coming up for me is for me, curious if this is true for you too, but one of the easiest ways or the most natural way to do that, because there's so much cultural noise about our bodies and it can get so tangled. But when you start to listen to that inner wisdom first before trying to be like, no, I'm going to love the shape of my body or whatever. I mean, there's people who are looking to commodify that at every angle. Like, you deserve this, or trade that like there's there's so much stuff coming at us. But the things that are opening up that intuitive voice within that is coming, that is embodied, that is not coming from the head, that nobody's controlling that. That is yours. That is a hundred percent yours. And giving that space and giving it respect, I think sometimes trickles out to like, no, my body doesn't want that, or no, I'm not going to do that because that does not feel good in my body. And so that is a really good place to start, like that deep, deep inner inner place.

SPEAKER_00 24:55

It has been for me. This is such an important reminder to listen to our bodies. I was about to ask you if there was anything you had to unlearn spiritually or culturally in order to truly encounter the sacred feminine more deeply.

SPEAKER_01 25:12

I mean, I'm kind of like if you look at my life, like before and after, it is so different. I feel like I had to unlearn just about everything. I mean, one thing that's coming to mind too that so I was deeply invested in my identity as a CEO and as a business owner and as a successful woman. And I think I mentioned I mentioned this before that, you know, I thought by doing that, I really thought that I was being the best feminist that I could be. All my employees were women, and most of my clients were women because I was working with communications and human resources departments. And most, you know, surprise, surprise, like those are spaces that kind of intuitive knowing still percolates. So you find women there. We're funding a girls' scholarship. I was like, I'm doing the thing, you know, and it really shook me to realize that I had actually been performing a version of what it meant to be a good woman in a patriarchal structure that was never designed with the participation of women. And so my participation there while voluntary was actually programmed, if that makes sense. There were choices that I didn't even know were available to me because I did not have that feminine perspective. And that really did a number on me from an identity perspective. Because I realized how much time and energy I had invested in cultivating a thing that was ultimately not authentic to me. And it explained a lot about why I would feel tremendous anxiety in some of those spaces. And it's oh well, none of this was designed for me. A lot of it really came to head after my daughter was born, you know, because I'm trying to run a business and I have a baby, and start to hit like right there, like that rub of like, I've got nothing more than to hold my child right now. I also like my work, and there's no space in between, like, you know, I'm really supposed to choose one or the other. I'm not supposed to. It is incredibly hard to like hold all of it. And so unlearning the idea of what it meant to be a good and successful woman, it was hard. It was really hard. And there have been so many things since then that I don't even know what to say, but that's probably like the first one that comes to mind because it's sort of like peeling an onion. I wrote this in the first chapter of the book that when he realized that like literally like sometimes I try to challenge people, think of one thing. Think of one underlying cultural structure that was built with the participation or input of women. One. You cannot do it. All of it was built on models that did not have participation or input women. So religious structures, academia, government, the entertainment industry, models of psychology built without the input of women. So literally everywhere you're looking is absent your perspective. That doesn't mean they're all completely wrong. It's just they're incomplete, like they're not necessarily representative of you and your experience. And so there's a tremendous amount of unlearning that has to happen. And it can be a little crazy making, to be honest. We're like, oh my God, like, oh wait, like this, I'm not represented here, and I'm not represented here. And I think it's one reason why it's so important that we talk about these kinds of things because it can also feel very isolating as a woman. If you don't have a community that is aware of this and is acknowledging this with you, that makes it even harder. I love the word incomplete.

SPEAKER_00 28:43

Moving us a little bit into your research. So you do the work of a comparative mythologist, which is something I love. My training is in comparative myth, and I really love how you bring a wide range of figures into the book. And so you bring from the Black Madonna, Kali, Greek goddesses that are more popular, let's say. And then you also bring lesser-known ones like Namu. I was enamored with Namu, and I can't stop thinking of her, and I keep searching all these little things about her. I was just wondering if there was one particular figure that kind of stayed with you that went beyond that body of research out of the pages and uh into your life and accompanied you because as a comparative mythologist, I appreciate and honor all of these different stories and figures that I find across cultures. But then there are some that sometimes speak to my soul. And I wonder if there was someone that spoke to you.

SPEAKER_01 29:51

Yeah. I mean, what I have noticed is that some will sort of get louder for a period of time, which is, I think there's something instructive there for me. I think I told the story in a book. It was before I wrote the book. I actually had a vision of Kali before I knew who Kali was. She showed up in Meditations to me, and I went and Googled her, and I was like, oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That's terrifying. There was a whole period of time where I was learning about her. Kali, I write about this in the book. Kali is a we can't be Kali, you know. In that lineage, that's not the way that works. But like that energy, that that willingness to burn something down, you know, like at all costs in order for something new to grow, was very powerful for me for a while there. And the same Pele, the Hawaiian goddess Pele came through really strong in the same way, which is also philosophically, there's some similarities there, right? Like she, goddess of volcanoes, but what happens after the lava is that you get new growth. Like literally, new islands are appearing, islands are expanding. But the other thing that comes to mind were the origin stories, like the ones that were like with you and Namu, but the ones that were the layer underneath, like the Christian story that I've been given, or who was underneath there. So there was a book that I read, I think it's called In Search of the Lost Feminine. Anyways, he goes into unpacking a lot of the stories around Crete and goes into also unpacking the feminine figures in the Odyssey and what they might actually be representing if they are telling a narrative that is more patriarchal in nature and is trying to reject a cultural story that was more balanced and more feminine, and all of a sudden all of the Circe and Colosso, like all of them become like they take on different meaning and representation. Like that was fascinating to me. And also, even if you look at the very beginning in Genesis, you know, in the beginning, God moved across the waters. What is the water? Who was there before? The water was there before God. And then you go into all of this and you find some of these oldest stories about the feminine, she is the water. So, like, even in, you know, the Christian Bible that I grew up with, she's like right there, you know, or Asherah or Asherah, depending on how you pronounce her. She's in the Bible. She's hiding in the Bible too, but she's been stripped of gender. You know, she's Asherim, you know, she's just like a pole that people dance around. Oh, actually, she's representative of the divine feminine and her embodiment of nature. So those ones that were like sort of like, I got really excited about like the ones that seem to be like hidden encoded, you know, but it's still somehow gotten through.

SPEAKER_00 32:38

We're still hanging on there. It does feel like an archaeological work now, an excavation of finding what's beneath and what has been buried, and most of the time not even buried, just there's a replacement because it is easier to replace something than to actually kind of erase it. So many women feel spiritually homeless or disconnected from older feminine images of the sacred. Many women right now feel disconnected from the feminine in themselves as well. And I've noticed a lot of women coming to work with me through myth in search of this feminine in themselves, in the culture, in their lineage. And I wonder, maybe it's something that when we are in the center, we feel it's happening. But I feel that there is now more women searching for this. There is a bigger longing. The calling is getting stronger for women. And I'm wondering if you feel the same way and why, if you do.

SPEAKER_01 33:47

Yeah, that I mean it's such a good question. And I have felt the same thing. And I do wonder if some of it, like you said, it's because we're in the center of it. But also, it does feel really different than when I started looking into this 11 years ago. I mean, even like things on Instagram or whatever. I remember feeling like you know, is anybody else talking about this? Well, now I feel like there's a lot of people talking about it. I have lots of ideas about that. One very practical one is it's safer. We are living in a time where women have more economic power than any time, at least recorded history. We have more freedoms. We also have access to more information easier to find. So that's part of it. There's part of me that's curious. Were women always seeking this, but they just didn't have did they just have that icky feeling inside, but didn't know where to take it? And now all of a sudden there's places to take it. I think there may be a practical part like that, but I also think maybe the gift of god-awful uber patriarchal leadership is that we get to see this is working. This is not representative of me as a human being and how I want to live. And these structures are driving us to disaster and every turn. There has to be a different way. This does not represent me. And seeking the thing that does and that feels more in alignment. That makes sense to me. I'm thinking a little bit about the news cycles here in the United States. There's just one fresh hell after the next, so it's easy to forget the fresh hell from a few months ago. But, you know, I like all of the revelations around the Epstein files here, which have been, I think, so deeply devastatingly painful for a lot of women. Things like that open, they create space. Like it's unfortunate that it takes that, but I think they create space for us to say, how can this how can this happen? And if you know the history, you'd be like, well, this is exactly what happens. It's no surprise, actually. It it can be a portal to saying, like, wait, how did we get here? And if that leaves you to myths that are suddenly like, oh wait, this is not how it's always been, and that means it does not have to be this way. And this is going to ignite something in me that enables me to choose differently. I'm so here for that. And I'm so excited. I wish it didn't have to be as ugly as it has been to get us here, but it it is what it is.

SPEAKER_00 36:17

I resonate so much with what you said and how a social crisis, an economic one, an environmental one has led us to really see how despicable the system is. And because we can also work and participate in the system through feminist rights and all of it, we also realize what do we want to participate in and the need for change, the need for an inner and outer transfer and ways of being in the world. I think you also have a great point with we are talking more to each other, I think. You know, I feel women are talking more. We can find information if we want to, and we can share it with others because sometimes, you know, my physical neighbor might not be interested in this, but I can find someone online who does. Actually, through Woman and Mythology, I run my entire business and my entire work online. And not just because I love the online world, it's not really that. It's because it's a very niche work and it's very hard to find them, you know, in the small town I lived or in the different places. But once we can actually talk to each other and find each other, it becomes a little bit easier. We can restore also that sense of community and reclaiming.

SPEAKER_01 37:40

Yes. And that is also part of the feminine, you know. There's an idea of the individual, you know, there's a narrative around the individual as a is a hero and the individual. This is where our power comes from. And I don't, I mean, you know, that that does not feel feminine to me. And I think that that loss of community on women and our ability to connect with our own inner knowing and our own stories and to feel safe in sharing those, that has been central to the loss of our power and our agency. And so if we reclaim that and we connect with each other and we suddenly realize, like, wait a minute, we are 51% of the population here, and not in every part of the world, but you and I, like, we've got some power, we've got some agency. The fact that we are sitting here doing this says we have some agency. We have choice. And when there are more of us banding together and saying, we have agency, like we novel, we can actually choose something different. And that actually gives me some hope. That gives me some optimism in the midst of everything burning. And it is my hope in the story that I tell myself. And by the way, what is life except stories that we're telling ourselves? Like some people as well make it a good one, you know, is that perhaps this is exactly why it's happening, because this can, you know, if we've got a chance of the human species surviving, we need some balance. We need some balance. And so that there's a there's a bigger sacred storyline that is happening here that is inviting us into connection and community in this lineage so that we know that we're not having to recreate a wheel or do anything alone.

SPEAKER_00 39:17

I love how you put that. And talking about sharing this wisdom, this knowledge, listening and sharing with our community. I know you are a mother of two children, right? A son and a daughter as well, just like me. And I was wondering, how do you go about sharing this wisdom, this knowledge from sacred practices to the historical fact, to the history that they're probably not learning in school and receiving something very different out there in the world? How do you bring all of that in and share it with them? And of course, here I'm opening for all children, but then I also have in my heart, especially your daughter. Would you share that in a way that feels appropriate, encouraging, inspiring, not overwhelming, I guess?

SPEAKER_01 40:08

Yeah, one of the fun things about this journey for me is my daughter was three. My son had just been born when I got on this path. They were right there because all of this was unfolding. And there was a time when I felt very self-conscious about how it's like this is just my journey here. Like, how do I bring it into the family? But I did it. They're older now, so once they get older and sort of like they start to pick their own paths. But one of the most important things I think that I tried to do was I didn't hide it. Like in a very literal way, if we were talking about anything divine, God or goddess, I would say, oh my God. I mean it's so simple. But I would introduce this language to them. When we would go out in nature, I would tell them stories about mother nature, and I would talk about how people have known the earth as the mother. I put little altars from sacred places that I've been all over our house. There's little nature altars everywhere. They grew up around that stuff. They grew up paying attention to the solstices and the equinoxes and all that. It was too much for me to honor all of them, but they grew up. They have grown up for years every winter solstice. We keep the lights off all day long and I make old recipes. Yeah, we light a candle and we tell stories about who we want to become and what we're letting go. So things like that where I tried to figure out how can I how can I make this as common as possible. If I came home from preschool with a coloring page of a witch, I would tell them, you know what a witch is, a witch is a wise woman. And my kids could tell you that even now. So what a witch is, they'd be like, she's a wise woman. If we were listening to the Harry Potter books, I would pause and point out any aspect that I felt was negative to the feminine. If there was a story, I would pause and say, hey, you know, if I knew that there was a goddess in that story or there was some sort of feminine aspect to it that wasn't being spoken about, I would insert it, you know? So it's just sort of trying to cede it into their everyday life in the hopes that my experience now, my daughter's 14 and my son is 11, is that they start to really develop their own identity and they'll go whatever way they want to go. That's you know, at a certain point it becomes out of their hands as a parent, but the idea was to give them the ground age so that they had it. And if it becomes more of their lives that they get older, great, but it wouldn't be something.

SPEAKER_00 42:34

This makes me smile so much. Imagining your children with this kind of childhood and experience. I try this with my daughter. My son is very little, he's two years old, so he listens, but still a bit scattered. My daughter can actually stay for a story. And we tell it all the time during, you know, on the car on the way to daycare or that time or when we are outside playing. And she comes here to my study room and she explores the little icons I have and I tell them about it. And I feel that it's exactly that. It's weaved in our everyday life in a natural way, not in an imposing way, in a really way of being and a way of seeing the world and experiencing the world. I kind of joke around that if she reaches 18 years old and she has a wide repertoire of stories, my heart will be in peace. I will know that I have done the best that I could and given her all the inner tools that I know and carry. I have no doubt that your daughter will have that.

SPEAKER_01 43:42

And I would say for my son, I think it's there's a dance there that I think you will find perhaps as a leather that my son's been raised in a really strong feminine inspired household. But when you look around and like what is the masculine story? With like toxic masculine patriarchy. So there's a whole thing of wanting boys and young men to feel it's there's a nuance of like, how do I talk about these things and make it very normal? And also make sure that they feel included and not ostracized or that they are part of a group that has screwed everything out to be really simple, you know? Because their lives and their experiences are incredibly sacred too. So yeah, it's sort of an ongoing journey to figure out that's very true.

SPEAKER_00 44:31

When I think of my baby boy, he's just the most gentle soul there is. It makes me scared for what's out there for him. When we think of our listeners and a woman who wants to reconnect with the sacred feminine in their everyday life through this more mystical spiritual path, can you recommend a simple practice that they can either start if they haven't done something like this before, or experiment if they are used to practices in this realm? Something perhaps that you have found that's been helpful to you, that you enjoy and cherish?

SPEAKER_01 45:11

Yeah, I mean, the first thing that when I work with people, the first thing that I usually ever do with them is I do a grounding exercise with them. And there's a couple of reasons for that. But one is we need to find our way. I am aware that meditation as a practice was developed by men and it was a way to still the brain so that they could access, I think, some of the stuff that women may be able to find percolating to the surface, you know, more naturally. But we're in such a noisy culture, and we've also like we've all been raised to act in that way. So it there's a grounding exercise that I teach people about me literally just anchoring their energy to the earth. And one part it's like just really stilling the mind. The other is that imaginal space, you know, getting yourself into that space of like, what is my inner wisdom saying as I'm making this journey down to the earth? And then the third part, it's it's very practical, which is like this is where it's at. No, we're not exiting the planet, like it's right here, and this is your ancestral wisdom. Like, if you think about what your sacred feminine ancestors were working with, we're working with the stone in the plants that were outside of your house for a lot of human history. People stayed relatively like within a particular ecosystem, which means they had a deep, deep relationship with the earth. And so start there. The earth is your mother, like you are always helped. Connect with her every day. Even better, if you go outside and sit on the ground, it actually becomes not just a theoretical, like heady exercise, but like a physical thing. Put your bare feet in the dirt and go sit out there and do this practice and connect in that way. You're quieting down, you're giving space for that intuitive wisdom to arise. You are consciously and intentionally connecting with a force that people have known as feminine all over the world for millennia. I mean, probably more than anywhere else I saw, like almost every culture. They're calling it's Mother Nature. Like they have a name for the art. She's a monk. So, you know, connect there. That's the one thing. And that's been a part of my life for years. And I honestly can't remember. I had a teacher early on, honestly, cannot remember if she told me to do this or if it's something that came through intuitively. But it's taken on shape and form over years. I don't write about it in the book because I think it should evolve the way you want it to evolve, but it's evolved into a practice of there are guides, there are animals that are from nature and in my life and symbolic, actual in the environment that come forward as guides to me and as protectors to me. And that's been a slow process over years of just getting that space for them to show up. And all that has felt tremendously supported. And it's not that I turn off my brain. My brain is great. I'm smart, I can think about stuff, but it's sort of giving me support in different ways and giving me a sense of power in a different way, like more expanded sense of myself as a being.

SPEAKER_00 48:22

What a wonderful invitation now to go outside to build that relationship, deepen that relationship with the earth. And uh for my final question, because of our time, I would love to ask you what does it mean personally to come home to her, to become home to her?

SPEAKER_01 48:44

It's an evolving thing. I think my life has changed tremendously in the times since I've done it. There's just a lot that's changed. You know, I let go of a career, my marriage ended. Like there's a lot that's changed as I've got on that path. And I think the word that has been coming to me lately, and I've said it a couple times in this conversation, is agency. That I have agency. Maybe sovereignty would be another way to say is that I am complete in and of myself, which does not mean that I don't need connections with other people. Quite the opposite. But that there is nothing outside of me. There are certainly people that know more than I do and they can help me when I need it, but there is nothing outside of that is going to make me hope and complete, that I have it all here. And I think I would have told you seven, eight years ago, maybe even five years ago, that I had a sense of that. But it gets deeper, deeper because if you think about the cultural environment that we are in and the fact that women's voices have been so erased and so in women's experiences, that awareness of, oh no, wait, I have agency. I am complete in myself. I can figure out how to do this. Oh, I have agency. I know what is right for me. It just keeps unfolding. The visual that I'm seeing as I'm saying that is like a flower that just keeps opening and opening and opening. Like, I've got this, I've got this. This is home right here. It's okay. I could, you know, and yeah, that's what I've got right now.

SPEAKER_00 50:24

I love the image of the flower opening. I love how feminine it is, how much within the life-death cycle it is. The flower itself, the symbol. And what you said about agency and sovereignty, actually, sovereignty as a feeling, as a state is something we do a lot. I actually did a whole program in stories and myths, tracking the sovereignty, tracking stories of sovereignty for us women. So I really love that. And I think it is the state we are searching for, this feeling of we belong to ourselves and we can choose.

SPEAKER_01 51:03

Yes, and what I was also seeing is like as the women do this, you know, if you use the flower analogy or opening, opening, opening, the culture, the winds that are pulling us this way and that can't help but turn towards that because it's beautiful and it's powerful and it's something that you want to pay attention to. And so that again weaves the bigger story of like, yes, let's do this for ourselves, let's do this for our children, let's do this for our grandmothers and our great-grandmothers, because they couldn't perhaps do this in the way that we can now. But like, we're doing it for everybody. We're doing it for people that we may never know. It's benefiting.

SPEAKER_00 51:41

Yes, absolutely. When you bring again the image with the flowers, I also think of the diversity of it, of the experience of this opening. Liz, I am so grateful for you sharing your wisdom, your life, your practices, everything with us today. Before we end, what's the best way for listeners to connect with you and your work?

SPEAKER_01 52:04

Going to my website. Thank you. Thank you so much. That's just really fed my heart and my soul. I so appreciate being in conversation with you. And I can see how deeply connected you are to this work too. And so I love, I love sharing space with you and with others that are on the same path.com is my website. And that's probably the best place. The Home to Her podcast, I had it for six years. I paused it in the spring of 2026. So earlier this year. There's six years of back episodes. I've talked to so many amazing people. It's a great way to hear different people's perspectives on this topic. And they come at it from all different ways. And then what I've been more focused on now is doing one-on-one work with women that are interested in that. Sometimes retreats, but I don't have any of those coming up right now. But if you go to hometoher.com, you can learn more about that. And then, of course, the book is a great site, you know, if you're interested and you want sort of like the beginner's guide to the sacred feminine, it's on Audible as well as you can hold physical copy here.

SPEAKER_00 53:04

Wonderful. I'll make sure that hometoher.com and the link for the book are on the notes of the episode. And I really encourage our listeners to get the book. You will really love it. And share with us your experience as well as you read it. Liz, thank you so much again for your time, your energy, all your wisdom. It's been a great pleasure and an honor. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 53:31

Thank you, Maria. Thank you for all the work that you do. I am so grateful for it, and I'm really glad to know you.

SPEAKER_00 53:37

And to our dear myth lovers, see you in our next episode. Until then, remember your life is a story only you can tell. Stay close to what feels true and sovereign within you.