The Dark Feminine - Free To Be She Chapter Nine Excerpt

The Dark Feminine: Midwife of Death and Keeper of the Void

We open the gate to this chapter about the Dark Feminine not with fear, but with reverence.

For there has always been darkness. Not as evil; nor as opposition to light; but as its womb. 

The Dark Feminine is not a villain to be conquered, nor a force to be transcended. She is the fertile black soil of creation, the amniotic void from which all life emerges and to which all form eventually returns.

In her truest essence, She is the death doula of the soul…guiding the cycles of shedding, undoing, and surrender that are necessary for rebirth. She lives within every other feminine expression too: in the Priestess who loses her temple, the Maiden who has her heart broken by first love, the Mother who must let go of what she has birthed, the Queen who abdicates her throne, the Wise Woman who faces mortality. She is what remains when identities have burned away.

The Dark Feminine teaches through endings. Her altar is built upon ashes, in relationships that dissolve, dreams that collapse, illusions that die. She is not cruel, but she is uncompromising. Her mercy is radical honesty. Her compassion is the match that lights the funeral pyre of pretense and falseness.

Many fear her because she arrives disguised as loss, failure, betrayal, or illness. Yet those are only her veils. Beneath them, she is pure love…fierce, unfiltered, and endlessly regenerative. She does not destroy for destruction’s sake, but to clear the ground for the truer self to rise.

In the psyche and soul, she often appears as the shadow of the other feminine archetypes: As the wounded Priestess, shamed for her power. As the betrayed Queen, dethroned and humiliated. As the devouring Mother, unable to release what she loves. As the isolated Wise Woman, bitter and forgotten.

Each of these shadows contains her: the Dark Feminine’s face behind the wound. And when she is felt (not feared, not banished) she becomes the midwife of the next spiral of evolution.

The Dark Mother Herself (in her forms such as Kali, Hecate, Dark Madonna, Lilith, Persephone, The Cailleach, The Morrighan, Mary Magdalene, Black Isis and Gaia herself), stands as the great initiator of this passage. Her love annihilates illusion, her gaze burns through distortion, and her embrace births authenticity. 

You will meet her again and again in heartbreak, in menopause, in the letting go of children, identities, homes, and illusions. Each time she comes, you are offered another descent, another opportunity to deepen your embodiment of truth. In her current, the feminine learns to trust her own depths and to find comfort not in control but in communion.

When you allow her to walk with you and as you, she teaches discernment that is born of love, not fear. She reveals when it is time to end something with compassion rather than guilt, when to speak truth without weaponizing it, when to rest instead of push. Through her, your power returns home to your body, sourced not in dominance, but in presence.

She makes you sovereign not by isolation, but by wholeness. You start to realize that darkness was not absence, but the womb of creation itself.

She holds all that is unholy until it remembers its holiness.

Her temple is silence. Her elements are fire and shadow. 

Her teaching: Nothing real can ever really be lost.

Love,

Jelelle Awen This is an excerpt from Chapter Nine of Free To Be She: The Shadow Feminine. I have been sharing a passage from each chapter of this book, my sixth book about awakening, spirituality, parts work, sacred union, and quantum soul reconciliation. Its release is on January 1, 2026…when it will be available to purchase in E-book, PDF, and print editions (and eventually an audiobook version in my voice).

This book is more like a transmission than conceptual or intellectual, more like a love letter from and with Divine Mother to all women and the men who love them. Long in the gestation, inspiration, and now..finally…the birthing and offering phases. I will also offer weekly meditation videos inspired by each chapter starting in January. You can take in all the chapter excerpts and videos plus links to purchase the book here.