Dark Feminine Shadow Work
My two-decade shadow work journey through raves, strip clubs and dominance — and what it built.
This post is about the dark feminine as a lived experience, not a concept, for women who are done intellectualising their power and ready to embody it.
My spiritual and feminine awakening was a slow burn starting somewhere around 2004 when I began to question the Christian religion I had grown up in.
See, I was a raver. I’d started to go to raves in the mid 90s at the age of 16, and of course partake in the rave culture whole heartedly, enjoying ecstasy and acid trips every weekend and then trying to focus at school or my weekend waitressing job when all I could think of was the next weekend when I got to be free with my friends.
Christianity had all these ideas about who I was that just didnt align with who I knew myself to be. My intuition said to me:
Before you are religious, you are human.
And for me that meant that what I felt was right about me, fundamentally, humanly, naturally, was the real truth, not what some dudes thousands of years ago had decided was written in the bible.
I had also come to this conclusion at the same time that I read a book that changed my entire world view. A world view that had been entirely informed by Christianity.
This book was called Out Of It: A Cultural History of Intoxication1 in which the author studies how humans have been getting high in various ways on various things since the dawn of time.
See, the dawn of time in Christianity, in the bible (as far as I knew at the time), skips a lot of ancient history, culture and beliefs. Back then for me, the world started when Jesus was born.
This book showed me there was a whole human history and existence before Jesus.
His argument that it is natural for humans to get high, to get in touch with dimensions and spiritual experiences before Christianity was even invented resonated with me. It aligned with what I had already been thinking and feeling. That what I was doing, how I was living and who I am, was not sinful or wrong. And, as the natural born rebel I am who survived a narcissistic abusive father, I was not about to let a book and a bunch of rules written by a bunch of guys thousands of years ago dictate my life or how I chose to exist—not when it goes against what feels intrinsically correct for me.
I see this moment in time as the beginning of my spiritual awakening, which lead to my feminine awakening, a slow burn over a couple decades of me continuing my life-long penchant to question everything (to the chagrin of my parents and teachers).
I have never been one to just do as I am told.
First, I must understand why, and then I will decide for myself if that aligns with what I feel is right.
I got into trouble a lot.
And it’s for this reason that discovering and integrating the dark feminine was the beginning of my feminine awakening.
She comes to us when we decide to choose for ourselves, and choose ourselves.
And this requires dismantling everything we have been told is correct and deciding if that is in fact, what feels right to our soul.
The dark feminine requires you to quit abandoning yourself—and this requires the bravery to be radically honest with ourselves.
Shortly after I renounced Christianity and decided to choose for myself, I embarked on a six year career as a stripper at age 25. I learned a lot dancing completely naked in rooms full of strangers (more on that to come in later posts), a lot about the power of feminine energy, about loving yourself as a form of self-preservation, and of validating yourself in the face of men trying to take you down because they are intimidated.
In 2006, I embarked on a 20 year career as a (mostly online) dominatrix where I learned even more about feminine power, self preservation and rightly exalting oneself.
These careers happened in tandem with the deep shadow work journey I was on, long before the term ‘shadow work’ was universally understood. I had no idea that what I was doing was shadow work, but I wanted to understand why I struggled so much with depression, and anxiety, and to heal from my traumatic childhood, and as someone who questions everything, I questioned myself—every thought, every reaction, every trigger.
My journey mirrors the following outline of what shadow work with the dark feminine can look like. There is more, and its all unique to each of us, but this is a summary.
And, this is the foundation of my work in my mentorship and life’s work: Become Unfuckwithable, which is based on my philosophy of being Sovereign, Sacred & Self-Sourced™️.
The “dark feminine” is a concept drawn from Jungian psychology and mythology2 — it refers to the repressed, misunderstood, or socially suppressed aspects of feminine energy. Figures like Kali, Lilith, Medusa, Hecate, and Persephone embody it.
Far from being “evil,” these archetypes represent wholeness — the parts of the psyche that have been pushed into the shadow because they made others uncomfortable.
Think of it like an iceberg. The “acceptable” feminine — nurturing, gentle, accommodating — is the visible tip. The dark feminine is everything below the waterline: vast, powerful, and doing most of the structural work.
What Shadow Work the Dark Feminine Invites
1. Reclaiming Anger (Kali/Medusa)
Anger in women is often shamed into the shadow early. It shows up sideways — as passive aggression, people-pleasing, or chronic exhaustion.
The dark feminine asks: What are you not allowed to be furious about?
Shadow work here means letting anger be information rather than a flaw to suppress.
2. Ending Things Without Guilt (The Crone/Hecate)
The dark feminine governs endings — death, winter, closure. Many people have a shadow around finishing things: relationships, jobs, identities that no longer fit.
The wound is usually: “If I let this die, I am cruel.”
The shadow work is learning that endings are sacred, not failures.
3. Owning Desire and Appetite (Lilith)
Lilith, in Jewish mythology, refused to be subordinate and was demonized for it. She represents unashamed desire — sexual, creative, ambitious.
If you find yourself chronically minimizing your wants or feeling guilty for taking up space, Lilith’s shadow is active.
The work: What do I actually want, stripped of what I think I’m allowed to want?
4. Sitting with Uncertainty (Persephone/the Underworld)
Persephone descends into the underworld — a metaphor for depression, transition, or the unknown.
The shadow here is the compulsion to fix discomfort immediately, to rush back to the light. The dark feminine teaches that some seasons require you to stay in the dark and metabolize experience rather than escape it.
5. Releasing the Need to Be Liked (the Witch archetype)
Historically, women who held power, knowledge, or didn’t conform were called witches.
Many people carry a deep shadow around being too much — too opinionated, too unconventional, too visible.
The work is asking: What have I hidden about myself to avoid being cast out?
How to Actually Do This Work
Journaling prompts: “What quality in others irritates me most?” (often a projected shadow). “What do I judge as ‘too much’?”
Active imagination: Dialogue with a dark feminine figure — what does she want you to know?
Notice your disgust: Strong moral repulsion at a trait often signals a disowned part of yourself
Body-based work: The shadow lives in the body — where do you brace, go numb, or hold tension?
The core lesson of the dark feminine is that what you refuse to own, owns you. Integration doesn't mean becoming destructive — it means the energy stops leaking out sideways and becomes available to you consciously.
The Dark Feminine as the Architecture of Sovereignty
Sovereignty is about self-authorship — and you cannot author a self you haven’t fully met. The dark feminine represents precisely the parts of a woman that have been exiled because they were sovereign.
The dark feminine isn’t a detour into shadow work — she is the mechanism of sovereignty itself.
I have so much more to share about this journey to becoming Sovereign, Sacred & Self-Sourced™️, so stay tuned, and please share your insights or questions in the comments, kindly.
Forward this to one woman who needs it — that’s how the right people find their way in 🤍
Want to go deeper? I work with a small number of women in 3-month 1-1 mentorship. If you’re ready to Become Unfuckwithable — this is for you.
Out of It: A Cultural History of Intoxication
by Stuart Walton (first published in 2001) is a comprehensive examination of the role of intoxicating substances in human society, arguing that the desire to alter consciousness is a fundamental, and often necessary, part of the human experience.
Core Themes and Arguments:
A “Fourth Drive”: Walton argues that the urge to intoxication is a fundamental biological drive that has existed throughout human history, from Stone Age rituals to modern times.
Cultural History: The book explores the use of various intoxicants—including alcohol, caffeine, tobacco, opiates, amphetamines, and hallucinogens—across different eras, including ancient Greece and Rome, the Victorian era, and the modern world.
Defending Intoxication: Rather than focusing on the damage caused by drug abuse, Walton argues that intoxication is a fundamental human right and, when viewed historically, an integral part of human social life rather than a mere vice.
Beyond Alcohol: It examines how coffee, for instance, helped fuel the intellectual revolutions of the 17th century, and how religious traditions have often incorporated psychoactive substances.
Reception and Style:
Kirkus Reviews described it as a “responsible, tightly written account” that avoids excessive polemics and offers a serious look at why we use intoxicants.
The Guardian noted that while it covers familiar ground, it stands out by explicitly arguing that the state of intoxication is not necessarily harmful and should not be criminalized.
It is considered a “heady” and “smart” look at the subject, which is often dubbed “intoxicology” in the book.
Out of It is frequently categorized as both a scholarly work and an engaging, accessible read for general readers interested in anthropology, history, and sociology of drug use.
I have not yet read any Jung, but Ive had a couple books on my bookshelf for about a decade still TBR.