From Wounded Woman to Glowing Goddess: There and Back Again

By Vanessa Soriano PhD

Most of us have wounds that shape our beliefs and behavior. Whether from cultural conditioning, heartbreak, or trauma, we develop ways of being that contribute to our pain and suffering. At times, we get lost in unhealthy patterns. we forget that there is always a divine, healthy self within that offers us wisdom, clarity and love. From Wounded Woman to Glowing Goddess: There and Back Again is a book designed to help you remember this sacred self. Using research, personal stories, and spiritual philosophies, Vanessa Soriano, PhD, uncovers her journey with the wounded and soul self. She presents insights and practices to help you reclaim your beautiful inner light (which is always there even on the hard days).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: May 5, 2024
• ISBN: 9798765250969

Vanessa Soriano PhD

Vanessa Soriano, PhD, is part yogi part wild. She has her doctorate in Women's Spirituality and is a 500hr yoga teacher. She co-hosts a podcast called Soul Sessions with Amy and Vanessa. Using her educational background and personal experiences, Vanessa aims to unearth beliefs and practices that lead into healing, empowerment, and self-love.

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Copyright © 2024 Vanessa Soriano, PhD.

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Scriptures are taken from The Holy Bible, American Standard Version (ASV), public Domain.

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The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

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ISBN: 979-8-7652-5097-6 (sc)

ISBN: 979-8-7652-5096-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2024907206

Balboa Press rev. date:  05/01/2024

To Kali Ma

CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1     When the Wounds Were Conceived

Chapter 2     Entering the Unhealthy Feminine

Chapter 3     Becoming the Wounded Woman

Chapter 4     Seasons in the Underworld

Chapter 5     The Wound is Where the Light Gets In

Chapter 6     The Soulmate Saga

Chapter 7     The Liminal Space – Half-Wounded & Half-Goddess

Chapter 8     Divine Timing and Revisiting the Underworld

Chapter 9     What the Pain Taught Me

Chapter 10   The Glowing Goddess – Who You Already Are

Acknowledgments

Notes

INTRODUCTION

I tend to skip over the introduction in books, but I recommend you read these few pages to get some context on my personal background and the terms that I use throughout the book.

When I was seventeen, I got into a horrific car accident. My car flipped over several times on Pacific Coast Highway and my left eye came out of my face. When I crawled out of the wrecked vehicle, I knew something was terribly wrong when I couldn’t see out of my left eye. There was nothing but darkness (and blood). Within a short time of the accident, an ambulance arrived, my mom and brother had shown up, and I was taken to a hospital. This entire time I had not cried.

When I got to the hospital, they stripped me naked and started cleaning the blood, glass, and asphalt off my face. A doctor must have pushed my left eye back up to its proper place and squirted a cleaning agent on it. For a brief moment, I felt like I was in a tunnel, but I could barely, and I mean barely, see out of my left eye. After I knew I could see, I landed back into my body and began sobbing and shrieking. For the next month, I lived in the hospital while a team of doctors repaired my eye and face.

As I lived in the hospital bed for a month, I was barely able to walk because I was so weak, and the left side of my face was bandaged up. Nurses would come in throughout the day and night to take off the bandage and pour medicinal eye drops into my left eye. It burned immensely every time they did that. It zapped me of all my energy. At that time, my father was in my life. He, my stepmother, and my mama stayed with me around the clock to keep my spirit alive. My father and stepmother would buy the nurses and doctors coffee and food and feed me special treats. I remember my dad just leaning against the wall, watching me and giving me anything I needed. My stepmother was tender and loving as well. My mama was my guardian angel. She had the night shift. She would sit on that little hospital bed and pray over me and read spiritual texts. She was the conduit between me and God.

One day, my dad looked at me and asked if I was ready to see my face. After a month of lying in a hospital bed, I was. I had not looked at my face once. He helped me get out of bed and I shuffled over to the mirror. There I was: The right side of my face looked fairly normal, but my left eye looked like a swollen purple baseball with huge scrapes underneath it. I didn’t cry. I vaguely remember a strange feeling of peace. I knew that I would be OK.

When I left the hospital, I felt different. I was still a sassy seventeen-year-old, but I felt like I had made contact with the Divine. After the dust settled, I enrolled in a community college and instinctively signed up for a Buddhism course. Within the first few minutes of being in that class, I knew I wanted to study religion and spirituality. I felt that this was my key to understanding what had saved my life and my face. I believed that studying different aspects of the Divine would give me clarity on this otherworldly experience I just had. Additionally, I felt that I saw life differently. It was like I was instantly spiritual. I know that sounds bogus or strange or woo-woo (and I’m down with the woo-woo, of course), but what I’m trying to elucidate is that when my left eye was repaired, I felt that I was given spiritual sight. That is the best way I can describe it. And what I mean by that is that I knew, at seventeen, that there was more to life than the grind of the everyday human experience. There were divine energies of wisdom, love, grace, and peace that were omnipresent and that we could tap into.

When I entered a four-year university degree, I declared myself as a religious studies major. I studied religion and spirituality for nearly a decade before getting a PhD in women’s spirituality. This degree incorporates scholarship from women’s and gender studies, ethnic studies, religious studies, and various spiritual philosophies. Throughout learning about religion and spirituality, I came across terms like Goddess and Divine Feminine. It was the first time of ever conceiving of God as a woman or part woman. As you will see in this journey of wounded woman to glowing goddess, despite my car accident, I have had a very complicated relationship with God (and males). While my car accident gave me spiritual sight, I still had layers upon layers of conditioning and trauma that stood between me and the notion of a loving male God. As you will read, these layers of conditioning and trauma were also hindrances to attuning to those beautiful energies of wisdom, love, grace, and peace that always surround us. Remember, I was only seventeen when this car accident happened. I was a young adolescent. While I always carried the spiritual experience of the car accident within me, I still had major issues to address and painful lessons that awaited me.

Back to the Goddess, though. Throughout the journey of studying and life experiences, I encountered a Goddess Temple in my local town in my mid-twenties. This was a real deal, brick-and-mortar church dedicated to worshipping all facets of the Divine Feminine. I was part of this temple for a few years. I was even declared a priestess at one point and helped facilitate rituals and services. Every part of this temple had life-size goddess statutes and altars dedicated to different aspects of the Goddess. Sunday services were all about female spiritual empowerment, honoring the earth, being loving and kind to people, and remembering the divinity within you (and others too). It was the only place in the world that made sense to me. Even though the Divine Feminine was primarily venerated, the Divine Masculine (or God—but not the patriarchal God who we’ll come to review) was also honored so this was not a space that man-bashed or excluded males (although some events were for women only).

While this place undoubtedly helped my psyche, I still felt like a lost soul the moment I left the temple. There were too many years of hurt that lived in my cells and spirit. The Goddess Temple was a brief stint in my life, and while it had a tremendous impact on me, it did not instantaneously cure past trauma or prevent future painful experiences. It would take decades for me to deeply heal and let go of what destroyed me inside. I can say, though, that after I encountered the Goddess early in the journey, I knew that there was a part of me that was separate from all of the pain I identified with. Even through the muck and the mud, I knew that there was a me that transcended the heartache and hurt. This me was never disconnected from the divine energies of wisdom, love, grace, and peace. This me knew that the Divine was an unconditionally loving force, and it was always present.

I ended up calling this me the inner goddess. It was important that this me was linked to the powerful, loving, wise, forgiving, kind, beautiful, compassionate, fierce Goddess I was learning all about. It was important that this me was connected to the feminine face of the Divine. Slowly, but surely, this helped me counter all the negative messaging I received from male-dominated religions and a patriarchal culture (we’ll get into the definitions/realities of these terms in the book). I end up identifying this me with several terms, which are inner goddess, soul, glowing goddess, and higher, wiser self. I use these terms interchangeably because they all connect me to the powerful, loving, wise, forgiving, kind, beautiful, compassionate, fierce Goddess. After studying Goddess mythologies, these are the predominant attributes that comprise the Divine Feminine. I use the terms Goddess and Divine Feminine interchangeably as well. These are synonymous terms.

Even though I encountered the Divine Feminine in my mid-twenties, that did not in any way mean that the past twenty-some years of growing up with an oppressive male God were instantly erased from my consciousness. It also did not immediately erase childhood trauma and a convoluted relationship with my dad. While my dad and I did have loving moments (I’ll never forget his all-encompassing love in the hospital), our relationship was a hard one and, in the end, he left my life (again) on a harsh note. My dad had been in and out of my life, but almost ten years ago, he left for the final time. My relationship with my dad was similar to the one I had with the Christian male God I grew up with. It was deeply confusing. I did not understand how fathers and gods got all the power, and I felt that the power was completely imbalanced and emotionally abusive. After years of studying and personal spiritual experiences, I came to realize that the God I believed in had nothing to do with the oppressive male God I grew up with. This God I had come to know was just like the Goddess—kind, loving, wise, compassionate, protective, and forgiving.

Ultimately, I came to realize that what I call God and Goddess are words for this ineffable Universal Great Spirit that houses and exudes all these beautiful, divine energies that I keep referring to: wisdom, love, grace, peace, beauty, compassion, kindness, forgiveness, etc. Therefore, I will use the words Great Spirit, Divine Love, Universe, God, Goddess, Source, Spirit, Love, Divine Mother, Divine Father, and Higher Power to give words to what cannot be fully named or explained, only felt and experienced. At times I need the Divine to be perceived in feminine or masculine terms, depending on what it is that I’m going through. As humans, it is helpful to give imagery to the indescribable (aka the Divine). Sometimes I need God to be a Divine Mother who understands my plight as a female on this earth. Sometimes I need God to be a Divine Father who offers me the unconditional love and protection I did not get from my father. In the end, it is the same Great Spirit made up of Love and her offspring of the aforementioned divine energies.

After completing a PhD in religion and spirituality, I have realized that it is beneficial and deeply healing to arrive at the God of your understanding. Sometimes the conception of God we had growing up isn’t conducive to feeling safe in our skin. Sometimes that God espouses ideas of separation and unfair hierarchies. Sometimes the God we were raised with says we were born flawed and sinful. This was the God I grew up with and it shred me to pieces. Before fully arriving at the idea of God and Goddess that I have now, I was mostly a terrified, angry, and sad soul. The car accident may have opened me up spiritually, as did my studies and the Goddess Temple, but as they say, healing is like peeling an onion. I had to unravel. I had to shed. It would take many moons before I aligned with my inner goddess and her glow that is love and light. It would take many moons before I understood that who I really am is that love and light. I am, and you are, a part of the Great Spirit. You are a part of her Love. Her Light. Her unspeakable beauty. For whatever cosmic reason, it just takes some of us a brutal and beautiful journey to remember. May my journey of the wounded woman to glowing goddess serve your remembering.

Chapter One

WHEN THE WOUNDS

WERE CONCEIVED

From a young age, I never felt fully at home (or safe) in my body. I felt that she stood in the way of everything I ever wanted: love and approval from God and males. My religious upbringing in the Christian and Catholic traditions taught me that my body was inherently sinful because I was in a female body. The female body was destined for punishment and submission to male power. I remember sitting in the church pew when it clicked that a woman had caused the fall of humanity. The message was clear: Women are responsible for all the suffering in the world because they are defiant and dangerous. As a result, they need to be monitored and controlled. When Eve went against God’s orders and engaged with the Tree of Knowledge, she marred the female experience. I was around twelve when this ideology settled into my psyche, my cells, and my soul.

The birth of the wounded woman consciousness in me began with this primal fear that I was exiled from God’s love simply because I was born female. In the optimal sense, ideas about God should invoke feelings of peace, safety, and unconditional love, but for me, ideas about God created fear about being left out of some special cosmic club. When you can’t turn to God to hold your pain and your troubles, you feel like you’ve been dropped off in some unending dark void and there’s no way out. At least, that’s what it felt like for me. Having experienced sexual, emotional, and verbal abuse as a kid, I could have really used a God who was on my side, but I couldn’t find her or him. I was too young to question belief systems that devalued women and the feminine. I was also crippled by low self-esteem so I could not confidently stand up to anyone or anything that demeaned me. I’ll weave in the story and details but suffice it to say that the wounded woman within me emerged with my fall from grace with God. Without a spiritual safety net, I spiraled into unhealthy beliefs and behaviors. Not only was a spiritual safety net absent, so was a social safety net. Growing up in American culture, I was bombarded with images and messages that a woman’s worth and value are deeply connected to her beauty and sex appeal. As a Latin girl growing up in American culture, this point was further exacerbated at times.

As we’ll come to see in exploring the wounded woman consciousness, while a woman is celebrated for her sex appeal, she cannot be too sexual because it disrupts her credibility as an honorable woman. She has to balance her sexuality with being a good girl. A woman is most valued when she appeases the male gaze, does not threaten male power, and can simultaneously balance sex appeal with a sweet, nurturing (motherly) disposition. As I saw it (and we’ll see why), men did not struggle with these issues. A man’s value was not based on appearance. He was permitted to be sexually assertive, and he was naturally endowed as the human with more power. Sure, his value is associated with productivity or status, but he dodges the bullet that his worth is on the line if his looks and virtue don’t measure up to unrealistic standards. Moreover, the dominant narratives in major world religions favor males, which gave me the impression that God granted men more freedom. Women, on the other hand, had to follow all sorts of social and religious rules in order to be good enough.

The wounded woman consciousness is ultimately shaped by religion, culture, social conditioning, and personal wounds. I think most women can agree that these factors heavily influence how we show up in the world (and, of course, these factors affect men and all other genders as well). While our stories may differ, most women are up against ideologies that deem us inferior while we navigate a very complicated world of how our bodies are perceived. In my case, the descent into the wounded woman began with religion. It began with the God