Did you know that number 13 holds the energy of the divine feminine? The number 13 in many ancient beliefs represents death and rebirth. Friday the 13th is in fact, not a bad omen but the day of the goddess, Friday is Venus day. There are 13 moon cycles in a year, and a woman has 13 menstrual cycles on average per year.
I collected 13 books for you to dive deeper into your feminine wisdom. These are books I personally read and they each hold wisdom of our divine feminine.
Exploring our feminine wisdom is important because we live in a world where we are not that familiar with the practical values of our feminine aspects, as in what they can do for us and how to use them in our daily lives. I promise you that through these great books, you’ll get to reconnect with your feminine aspects, and have an insight into how you can leverage them in a tangible way. Through these books, you’ll also be on a journey of your femininity, allowing yourself to rediscover and reawaken deep parts of you as a woman.
This list is not an order from the most important to the least, it is a collection, each holding values aligned with the divine feminine.
SEE ALSO: How I Learned To Manage Chronic Pain Naturally
Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of The Wild Woman Archetype (1992)
I absolutely adore this book for so many reasons. It was recommended to me many years ago by a modern shaman. It was written by an author who was raised by her Hungarian adoptive parents and community. As I am originally from Hungary, I felt I was given a deeper connection to the traditions of my land, to Mother Earth, and the feminine wisdom that comes from remembering our roots through this book.
This author is Clarissa Pinkola Estèt, “an American poet, psychoanalyst and post-trauma specialist who was raised in now nearly vanished oral and ethnic traditions. She was born in 1945 and is a first-generation American who grew up in a rural village, population 600, near the Great Lakes. She was adopted into an immigrant and refugee family of majority Magyar (Hungarian) and minority Danau Swabian tribal people. Her families could not read or write, or did so haltingly. But they were wise in the ways of nature, planting, animals, making everything from scratch, from shoes to songs. Thus she was raised immersed in the oral tradition of old mythos and stories, songs and chants, dances and ancient healing ways.” (ref: http://www.clarissapinkolaestes.com/ )
For me, Women Who Run With the Wolves is a collection of fairy tales, stories that are helping us to understand our female psyche, our intuition, innate feminine energies and especially our power to create. These stories can take us deep into our subconscious, and we cannot resist this descent as our human self and our mind is fine-tuned to the power of stories. Stories help us to feel and imagine which are cornerstones of our feminine aspects, because through our feelings and imagination, we create.
Estèt describes how stories and especially fairy tales have been distorted through the ages of our patriarchal world. In this book, she helps us to find the lost symbolism of these stories to reveal their true messages, and through that, reveals our innate feminine powers. She talks about the ‘cantadoras’ or ‘mesemondòk’ the storytellers. Women, sitting together around the fire corn husking, doing chores, and one of them telling stories, passing on wisdom from one generation to another and keeping the fire alive. The fire of lineage, love, community, and support.
The storyteller, the cantandora or mesemondò is about recognising our innate human need for connection through stories and sharing our lives. It is a book to pick up the deeper threads of your own story and life, exploring who you are, connecting with your heroine within. Through these stories you can allow your metaphoric death of your old self and rebirth into your power, into your wholeness.
The Path Of Least Resistance
This book blew my mind when I first read it in 2011. I see it as a manual of how to be the predominant creative force in your life. It literally takes you through the process of the cycle of creation. The author Robert Fritz is a musician, an artist who recognised that when he creates a musical piece, there is a pattern in his process, which can be applied to life, and in this book he shares this cycle of creation.
For me, the cycle of creation is always the biggest and most powerful aspect of our feminine. The path of least resistance is giving us a manual to our power to create. It gives us steps. It makes it accessible to all. In my journey as an entrepreneur, I learnt a lot about structures, and step by step processes using technology to build a business. This book opened my eyes to something very fundamental about building structures.
When you set out to create anything, I mean, anything in life. A business, a book, a relationship, good health, a great holiday, yourself, it is not the external structure you need to begin to build with. It is your inner technology that you need to bring into motion, and then, grow and expand from there. This is why I would like to invite you to look at the cyclical nature of life, and the female body, in a metaphorical sense, realising the cycle of creation within us. Our womb, the stages of our womb cycle, and the stage of pregnancy as the map of how to create anything from thin air in this life:
The first step of having the idea/desire to have a baby, the conception, slowing down and allowing the new life to develop, going through birthing, and finally having your creation in your arms. We know this process with our intellect, and as women, we can experience this first hand. But when we look at this process metaphorically, which The Path of Least Resistance helps you to do, we could take advantage of it in our daily practical life. As you read this book, involve your imagination, have something in mind you created before, and ‘see’ the process coming alive through that. You’ll take your ability to create to the next level.
Rise Sister Rise, & Pussy: A Reclamation
These are two absolutely amazing books. I suppose I want to mention these two books together because they bring you into your feminine in a caring, mysterious, and truly awakening way. These books allowed me to deep dive into my feminine and heal. I realised, that there is a thing called womanhood. A journey, a rite of passage unique to women that we have been missing out on for the past few centuries.
Rise Sister Rise is written by Rebecca Campbell an Australian born spiritual author and mystic who is here to guide us back to Soul. I adore her work.
Pussy: A Reclamation is written by Regena Thomashauer, A.K.A Mama Gena, an American author and Creatrix and CEO of The School of Womanly Arts.
Both these books were transformational for me, taking me on a journey of soul discovery, of remembering my purpose, stepping into my sensual and sexual power and really claiming myself as a woman. In fact, I think I read both books around the same time in 2018. They introduced me to the mysteries of being a woman and following my soul. I rediscovered my body, female body-wisdom, and how to use pleasure and desire to create the life I want. As I was reading these books, I can remember all the synchronicities and how much I resonated with what the authors shared about their own lives and their spiritual healing journeys. These books took me to my next level of awakening. I felt inspired in my soul and re-empowered as a woman. Everything the feminine represents are in these books – intuition, soul purpose, emotional healing, sensual and sexual energies, divine timing, the support of your tribe, rituals, cyclical nature of life, and mysteries.
These are books of true embodiment of the divine feminine within us. And I cannot emphasise enough how they called me to think about the words ‘woman’ and ‘womanhood’ over and over again. I needed to taste, feel, hear and experience these words, their meaning for me, and in our world. Although I had been on my femininity journey for a while when I read these books, they added a layer of softness, compassion and passion to my perception of myself as a woman. These books are not to be missed.
Eat Pray Love
You might wonder what this book is doing here… But as Rise, Sister Rise, and Pussy: A Reclamation talks about doing all your inner work, Eat Pray Love, for me, is living it all. Our divine feminine has a life cycle: Maiden-Mother-Maga-Crone. These four archetypes represent the wisdom and stages of life; the journeys we go through as women and how we find ourselves and our power. Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert is a story of this life cycle in reality where a woman stands up for herself, makes her voice heard and embarks on a journey to fully find herself. It was only about 110-120 years ago when we women in the western world began our fight to have more freedom and independence. It has not been so long since we can choose for ourselves.
Eat Pray Love is a story of a woman who struggles to fulfil the traditional expectations society still puts on women, like being married and having children and taking care of a home. Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of the book, tells her own story of claiming back herself and her power. In my view, she is a ‘cantandora’ a storyteller Clarissa Pinkola Estèt talks about in Women Who Run With The Wolves, passing on the wisdom of our womanhood from one generation to the next, because wisdom, through story can never be lost again. There is nothing better than a great story to show us how to actually bring and use the divine feminine in our daily practical lives. Eat Pray Love is this kind of story.
The divine feminine is not just a nice concept so we can look at life through pink glasses but an actual practical and spiritual tool to use. If you have read this book before, I invite you to read it again with a new eye and be conscious of what it awakens in you. Elizabeth Gilbert shows us that following our desire is not easy. Our deepest desires can make us do things that other people or society may not approve of. We however, follow that intuitive hunch, knowing, if we followed it, it would change everything and bring on uncertainty. Nevertheless we follow our soul into the unknown. In fact, this unknown is making space, allowing rebirth. Eat Pray Love is an inspiring journey into the unknown, giving ourselves the chance to be our most authentic self.
Chillpreneur, & Energetic Selling And Marketing
Two books for the women who are here to change the world as an entrepreneur. Chillpreneur is by Denise Duffield Thomas who herself is a successful entrepreneur and writer helping mainly women with their money mindset. Energetic Selling And Marketing is by Lenka Lutonska, another highly successful entrepreneur and creator of business methodologies that balances the energetics with strategy. Denise, in her book, is talking about how to create and lead a successful business without being in a hamster wheel and ditching the masculine business paradigm. For me, this is exactly what qualifies this book to put on this list.
Chillpreneur is teaching us how to build and grow our business in a way that is more designed for a female experience of life. Our feminine calls us to just be, be able to stay still, to slow down so that we can focus on our inner-guidance. Our feminine calls us to listen and follow our intuition so that we can take inspired and aligned action, which we cannot do if we are constantly engaging with our masculine call for pushing and hustling and being busy. Lenka, in her book, leads the reader through creating a business that is energetically aligned with her on all levels. She is helping the reader to unlearn using only the masculine paradigms and re-teaches the reader to merge the feminine with the masculine.
If you have been applying strategy after strategy in your business and not getting the results or aren’t able to take it to the next level, this book will help you to find the missing insights. And let me tell you, it won’t be another strategy you need to implement. I highly recommend Lenka’s book to dig deeper into the energetic landscape of your business.
The Great Cosmic Mother
This is not a book to read from cover to cover. I call this an academic piece of written work where you get to dive into the history of our human race from the female perspective. You can dip in and out of chapters exploring ancient times and past centuries. It is written by Monkia Sjöö and Barbara Mor and you can rediscover our human history from the female perspective that is missing from our history books.
You can learn, for example:
- that Charles Darwin believed that the movements of the oceans are the origins of our female cycles;
- Even though history books usually focus on representing cave drawings of male figures hunting animals, there are just as many cave drawings of moon phases, female figures and their roles, and even drawings of birth and rituals
- You can learn about the presence and significance of the female & goddess consciousness throughout the ages in different societies
- and many other things all from the female perspective which is truly eye opening and fascinating.
This book is best used as an encyclopedia of history from the female perspective. This is fundamental knowledge we need to rediscover.
Woman Code + Love Your Lady Landscape
These are two books again I want to mention together because they complement each other. Woman Code is written by Alisa Vitti and it is a book teaching you about the endocrine system, your hormones. This is a knowledge we so need to dive into. We must understand how our physical body is governed by our hormones. This is the key to women’s health. Understanding our cyclical nature from the scientific, biological point of view is key to our wellbeing. And of course, Lisa Lister’s book Love Your Lady Landscape is giving us the other side, the spiritual and emotional aspects of our cyclical nature, our menstrual cycle and the transitions we go through as women over the course of our life.
We need this holistic understanding of our mind, body and soul from the perspective of our cyclical nature that these two books help us to explore. It is key for our overall health and wellbeing both on the emotional, mental, spiritual and physical level. We need to educate and empower the next generation – our daughters with this knowledge, and in some sense, our sons too.
Mary Magdalene Revealed
This book truly is a revelation. There is something deeply empowering about it, you can feel it right in your core. Meggan Watterson is sharing her personal journey of exploring the life of Mary Magdalene and connecting with her spirit and wisdom. Meggan is vulnerably sharing her deepest insights as she was revealing more and more about Mary Magdalene. But more than that, through her journey we get to realise that Mary Magdalene was not just an ascended idea, something to worship, but she was a real person, a human being. A woman, humbly standing in her conviction, heart and power. As she reveals Mary Magdalene to us, we can realise that we too are both divine and human.
We contain the same unconditional love, which is at the very core of the divine feminine.
Becoming
Michelle Obama’s story, is for me the story. THE story of the modern woman of our modern world. The story of how we women can be who we are, can be more. How we can break the chains, the generational stories from the traditional role of a woman in society. She was not just in the support role of her husband, she was not just a ‘good wife’. She herself was part of creating history, changing the world in a very feminine and empowering way. In my eyes, anyway.
As she tells her story in her book, I admire her and what she stands for even more. I find that, even in today’s world, we are still fighting against the prejudice of being a strong, ambitious, bright woman and achieving huge things. Women empowering women is such a buzzword nowadays and it is important that it doesn’t become just a nice slogan but we really feel into it and act upon it. Michelle Obama sharing her story shows girls and us women, of any race, background and colour, that we can stay in our power with grace and become who we are meant to be. That we can live from an empowered place and indeed empower each other to do the same. I believe that Michelle Obama sharing her story is adding to the rise of the feminine and female empowerment in the best way.
Awakening Your Inner Shaman: A Woman’s Journey Of Self-Discovery Through The Medicine Wheel
This is the most recent book I read, this is why I left it last, however, its power is not to be missed. I found the author, Marcela Lobos, through going deeper into my feminine healing journey as I healed and connected with my womb through the Munay Ki. She is a powerful, modern shaman, from Chile working together with Alberto Villoldo at The Four Winds Society. The book resonated with me for so many reasons. Marcela tells her own journey of transformation in this book but in a special way. She is using Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, and combining it with the Shamanic Medicine Wheel, applying it to the female experience of life, through the feminine aspect.
I was introduced to the hero’s journey many years ago and I was fascinated with it straight away. It is about the collective human experience on the spiritual level, our collective human myth. The Medicine Wheel is the tool of the shamans, of seeing the world through our intuition and journeying. What Marcela added was the number 13. Remember, at the beginning I mentioned this number and its feminine energy. She tells HER hero’s journey mapping it through 13 stages. She is alchemising the hero’s journey into the HEROINE’S JOURNEY by adding in that subconscious female experience that has been missing from our world for centuries.
As we women cycle through 13 menstrual cycles each year, through our cycles, we get 13 journeys, 13 evolutions. Many of the books I mentioned above discuss and help you to learn how our body through our cyclical nature allows us deeper self awareness and self connection. This book, Awakening Your Inner Shaman pulls many of the elements from the other books together.
It teaches us how we can unfold and deeper understand our own story, our own heroine’s journey with the map Marcela Lobos redesigned using the Hero’s journey, the Medicine Wheel and our very own female rhythm, our body-wisdom and female experience of life. It is a pure celebration of the divine feminine and it allows us to really heal and rise the feminine within us. Plus an amazing story of an amazing woman. I know you will thoroughly enjoy reading it.
Each and every one of these books changed me and my life for the better. They brought me into my heart and power.
It is my heartfelt wish that you would truly enjoy any of the books you choose from this collection.