The pastor said your body was dangerous. The goddess circle said your body was sacred. Neither said it was yours.

I keep returning to the structural similarity between purity culture and much of goddess culture. Not the language, which is genuinely different, but the premise underneath it: that a woman's wholeness is oriented toward union. That her deepest healing moves her toward him. That she is, in her fullest expression, one half of a sacred whole.

The words changed. Where she was being pointed did not.

What concerns me most in my clinical work is what happens when she notices. When a woman inside these spaces notices something isn't resolving, the beliefs have a ready answer: she needs more healing, she hasn't fully embodied the feminine, her king hasn't arrived because she isn't ready to receive him. Her doubt becomes evidence of her deficiency rather than intelligence about the system. The most accurate perception she has gets quietly overridden by the very thing she trusted to help her.

The question I return to is not whether the practice is producing experiences. It clearly is. The question is what the practice is organised around.

Whether the version of herself she is healing into is genuinely hers, or whether it is a version of herself made acceptable by the same story that wounded her in the first place.

The desire that doesn't want to wait.

The wholeness that doesn't require him or another person at all.

The self that was never the problem.

Those parts of her didn't need activating. They needed permission to exist without being in service of anything.