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Goddesses in Everywoman

By: Jean Shinoda Bolen
Narrated by: Chelsea Kwoka
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Publisher's Summary

A classic work of female psychology that uses seven archetypcal goddesses as a way of describing behavior patterns and personality traits is being introduced to the next generation of listeners with a new introduction by the author.

Psychoanalyst Jean Bolen's career soared in the early 1980s when Goddesses in Everywoman was published. Thousands of women readers became fascinated with identifying their own inner goddesses and using these archetypes to guide themselves to greater self-esteem, creativity, and happiness.

Bolen's radical idea was that just as women used to be unconscious of the powerful effects that cultural stereotypes had on them, they were also unconscious of powerful archetypal forces within them that influence what they do and how they feel, and which account for major differences among them. Bolen believes that an understanding of these inner patterns and their interrelationships offers reassuring, true-to-life alternatives that take women far beyond such restrictive dichotomies as masculine/feminine, mother/lover, careerist/housewife. And she demonstrates in this book how understanding them can provide the key to self-knowledge and wholeness.

Dr. Bolen introduced these patterns in the guise of seven archetypal goddesses, or personality types, with whom all women could identify, from the autonomous Artemis and the cool Athena to the nurturing Demeter and the creative Aphrodite, and explains how to decide which to cultivate and which to overcome, and how to tap the power of these enduring archetypes to become a better "heroine" in one's own life story.

©1984, 2015 Jean Shinoda Bolen (P)2021 Upfront Books

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Gasp! I’m an Athena archetype at my core

As a woman entering her wife era, I’ve deeply struggled to let go and go with the flow. I’ve been on a very conscious journey this past year of reconnecting and rediscovering my divine feminine self. This book came up a lot when searching for resources of how women can reconnect with their inner goodness.

This book was a total surprise for me. I never realised I could learn about myself and who I also want to become, though storytelling and imagination. Bolen beautifully weaves these mythical stereotypes that truely manifest in todays society in modern women archetypes and weighs up the characteristics and the reasons why these archetypes are the way they are.

I’ve lived a life (like many other women born from the feminist generation) as an Athena or an Artemis. A fiercely independent warrior. A strategist. An equal of men. And I’ve always felt disconnected from matriarchal values held by Hera or Hestia. Bolen’s viewpoint gives you the space and freedom to step back from a default, over-analysing Athena-esque thinking and embrace the possibilities of nurturing and calling forth other sides of your innate feminine soul forth in loving and open ways. It was really exciting and creative to explore and hear all the different archetypes one can become and naturally evolve into, throughout the different stages of life (being a wife, mother, widow, business owner, carer etc).

This book helped me see that at my core, I resonate with being an Athena stereotype. In the book, Boleyn says “metaphorically, Athena women are motherless in many ways. They need to discover the mother and value her, to allow themselves to be mothered. An Athena woman often has depreciated her own mother. She needs to discover her mother strengths often before she can value any similarities to her mother and herself.” This really resonated and struck a cord inside me. It’s something I’d like to discuss with my maternal living mother while I still have the chance to. It’s helped me forgive her in ways that I wasn’t aware that I needed to forgive her.

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Life Changing

I feel like I got to know myself from scratch and from the core throughout this book. It’s already a life changing experience to be able to witness these several parts of me interacting with each other, and knowing even the painful ones have good and identifiable intentions!

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