A note on Marion Woodman
Coming Home to Myself · Marion Woodman
She wrote about the body the way most people are afraid to. Every page is a permission.
Marion Woodman was a Jungian analyst who spent her career insisting that the body is not the lower half of the spirit's house. It is the house. Everything else — symbol, story, dream, prayer — happens inside a body, or it does not happen at all.
I came to her through women older than me who were not afraid to talk about the body. I stayed for the prose. She writes like someone who has spent a great deal of time alone in a kitchen at four in the morning. Not romantic about it. Honest.
The book I return to most is Coming Home to Myself — a slim collection of meditations on incarnation. It is the book I lend to women in the second half of life who have lived too much in their heads. They almost never give it back, which is, I think, the right outcome.
If you read her, do not rush. She will not reward speed. She is teaching the body to come back into the room while the eyes read. That cannot be hurried.
There are other books — Addiction to Perfection, The Pregnant Virgin — that go deeper into theory. Start with the meditations. They are her practice made visible.