100 books like Conscious Femininity

This is a must-read for me to understand the archetypes inherent to women. I have not only read it but also reread it and studied it with other women. 

I love anything wild, and so does Dr. Estés. She believes that within every woman, there lives a powerful force filled with good instincts, passionate creativity, and ageless knowing. The wild is instinctual and endangered. Civilization demands women become rigid in roles contrary to the life-giving messages of our own souls. I have always believed this, and this book reinforces my beliefs.

Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés uses mythology, fairy tales, folk tales, and stories to assist the reconnection to our wild nature. Her interpretations are so rich, just reading the forward from time to time makes me weep with recognition of truth.

This has very strong and life-giving implications for me as a writer, but it truly is an astounding book… show more.

When I read this book, I felt much the way I did as a teenager when I discovered astrology and began to appreciate there were patterns of behavior found in humans that were reflected in the vastness of the cosmos -- and vice versa. Who would have thought that what I considered idiosyncratic tendencies within myself and others actually were a part of a much bigger pattern that had existed for millennia in the form of ancient goddesses? I was astounded to see the personalities of my sisters, friends, mother, aunties, as well as celebrities, accurately depicted by Greek goddesses. 

In this book, Shinoda-Bolen brings to life many dimensions of the archetypal feminine that get played out in our modern lives, our individual psyches, and in our relationships.

I have read this book nearly a hundred times. Given that it is less than seventy pages long with sometimes only twenty-five words (or less) on a page, that may not seem like much of a feat. But the exquisite spacing between the words invites the reader to drop deep into the lost feminine, to pause, and to feel her essence. This book allows us to not only recognize what has been lost but also to repeatedly imagine how our lives might be different if we could fully experience and embrace the archetypal feminine.

This young woman is profoundly wise beyond her years. In a style reminiscent of the poetry of the mystics Rumi and Hafiz from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Harkin gives voice to the deep feminine as she is emerging into modern consciousness. This is poetry to touch your heart and quicken your inner feminine. Full disclosure: I was honored to write the forward to this beautifully written book.

Although I was familiar with Harvard Business School professor George Serafeim’s research and work on impact weighted accounting before I read this book, I still found it informative and inspiring.

The first half of this book is a primer on ESG and sustainability highlighting societal shifts and why purpose and impact have moved to the forefront. And the second half details how impact and outcomes can be achieved. 

This book is an excellent introduction for people new to purpose – or questioning its real value financially – as well as for those of us who have long been in this space.

Drawing extensively on his research and that of colleagues, Serafeim emphasizes how doing good creates competitive advantage.

This book is an incredible reference book. I used it as an actor in one of my favorite acting classes. During rehearsal, we used archetypes to help flesh out and explore our characters. This technique felt groundbreaking.

Since archetypes are essential to character development, and we each possess every archetype within us, this book was a staple for me in my creative development. I will go so far as to say that this book was a portal for me to access the teacher in me and expanded me out of my actor self and into my author self.

Jung proposed many fascinating ideas about the inner workings of the mind. His concept of the archetypes and of the collective unconscious are two of his best-known contributions, and both are intimately tied to his conceptualization of dreams. The idea that dreams not only emanate from our personal unconscious, but also from our collective unconscious (a deep stratum of the unconscious common to all humankind) and contain universal patterns, images, and dispositions, has helped countless people develop a deeper understanding of their dreams.

What’s more, this book exposes Jung’s view of dreaming as a wholesome, natural process that can give rise to creative—even transcendent—experiences featuring personal challenges, unmapped potentials, and elements of one’s personality. Not always the easiest of reads, but highly rewarding. 

What I really liked about this book was how it helped me become a lot more self-aware about the incorrect stories I told about myself and how they have held me back. This book does a great job of helping the reader identify their "imposters," the areas in one's lives where we hold onto false beliefs about ourselves which keep us from being the best version of who we can be and achieve our goals and dreams. 

Of seminal importance to an understanding of the world is the conception of a collective unconscious grounded in inheritable archetypes. These evolve: how could it be otherwise—everything in nature evolves. And that means that our consciousness, too, evolves. Its evolution is, in a sense, teleological: from the less conscious to the more consciousness. This is to say that the evolution of the archetypes permits the increasing distillation of consciousness from the vastness of the collective unconscious. I believe that language, which is indivisible from consciousness, did not begin to materialize until about 10,000 BC. I may have been virtually alone in this view, but computerized models of evolutionary linguists today suggest that the key to language capability may have been enfolded in our make-up from our earliest beginnings.

I write character-driven fiction and it is always the people and their relationships that most engage me in any story. I found the characters here complex, real, engaging, and, in some instances, foul specimens demonstrating that existence for survival alone is an inadequate way of life for any person. These are fully developed people, though they are mostly unusual individuals; archetypes rather than stereotypes. The people hooked me from the start. I cared what happened to these adventurers. I also cared that those who deserved retribution would receive it.