Here All Dwell Free: Stories to Heal the Wounded Feminine

Every human being has both masculine and feminine characteristics, but because our civilization undervalues the Feminine, she hides within each individual and stands in need of healing. In Here All Dwell Free, Gertrud Mueller Nelson shows us how the wisdom of folk mythology offers us both the diagnosis of our ills and the healing prescription we seek for our feminine natures. Nelson takes two Grimm's fairy tales and demonstrates how they refect the dilemma of modern women, and men, as they struggle to free and heal the feminine within their own personalities and their very culture. In "The Handless Maiden," a miller's daughter sacrifices her flesh-and-blood hands to preserve her father's material, mechanical world. In "Briar Rose," a princess is cursed by a forgotten mother-goddess to sleep, deathlike, until her dormant feminine nature is awakened. In a mesmerizing interpretation of these two women and their passages to healing, Nelson shows us the difference between passivity and receptivity; the wounded healer and her spirituality; Earth as the wounded feminine; and the inner and outer synthesis of masculine and feminine polarities that must redeem the whole kingdom, so that all can live free. . . "Superbly wise . . . A wonderful book which brings hope and healing to the urgency of our broken world." Robert Johnson