Bone Woman: Conscious Eldering
My Story with Bone Woman
Bone Woman came bursting through my body, mind and spirit in my 42nd year, heralding the beginning of perimenopause. My comforting role as a breastfeeding mother was ending. I experienced great grief at weaning my last child. The new, post-breastfeeding mother had not yet been dreamed up, and the old, pre-mothering me no longer inspired.
​
I shaved my hair, stripped myself of adornment and prepared for my sojourn with the Crone – however she did not want me yet, and flicked me away. I had come across ‘The Women’s Wheel of Life’ by Elizabeth Davis and Carol Leonard some years before, where they introduced the concept of a woman’s life encompassing four seasons, rather than the ‘mother, maiden, crone’ archetype I knew. They identified a space between ‘mother’ and ‘crone’, now that women were living for longer than before. Not yet winter, not yet crone, but an autumn phase: the harvest time.
​
I felt a powerful resonance with this phase yet I was fearful and did not know who I was. My menstrual cycle had flipped from ovulating with the full moon to now near dark moon. In this place of dark moon I was conceiving a new identity!
​
Out of this dark void space emerged old traumas, memories of childhood, of suffering, abuse, and all the things that had been sublimated so I could cope. They demanded my attention. Feelings of shame, marginalisation, disgust, insecurity, fear, and doubt rose out of this dark space like forgotten shades needing expression.
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
As women start to take responsibility for their own story, they liberate dismembered soul parts, not only of their own hereditary patterns, but the inherited cultural belief systems, and in this space something new is born.
~ Yia Alias
I was unmasked and stripped down. Concepts of Beauty and the values that were enfleshed by the overculture were stripped from me. I became too ill to eat and almost died from pneumonia. My metaphoric skin was scraped away to reveal Bone. There was no distraction to hide behind. Like Inanna in the Underworld, hanging on the meat hooks and left to rot – I was likewise left bereft of identity. Nothing had prepared me for the dissolution of my ego, the loss of beauty, the constant premenstrual symptoms which were not relieved by my monthly flow, and the grief of it all.
​
It became my mission to re-story my SELF, to enflesh myself with things that had meaning, truth, sacredness and substance. Being a dancer, I used movement as a sacred tool. Dancing in front of a mirror, I said goodbye to the person I was up to that moment, then I danced through a doorway and closed the door behind me. I consciously stepped into the unknown, accepting that there was a new woman waiting in the shadows.
​
I had to journey many times into the Underworld – descent after descent into the shadowlands of Bone Woman, scraping away layer after layer of cultural and genetic patterning. These journeys were enriched with the tears of heartbreak, the toil of overcompensation, and an anguish at not belonging. Yet there were also moments of heart racing ecstasy, when the wonder of being an evolving human within an infinite system of creating itself became apparent to me.
Each time I returned I carried with me the gifts of illumination and transformation, which I gathered as my harvest. A harvest whose compost was rich with tears, toil, anguish and ecstasy.
​
And so a new identity began gestating and then birthing. With this birthing came the reality of ageing and with ageing came eldership and new responsibilities. I was moulded and shaped by my relationship with the underworld, with Bone Woman, and now I stood unmasked! She took me deeper still, to reveal the spirit of the earth herself – Gaia – and I was given the greatest gift of all: the recognition of my soul purpose - to illuminate the path for others through their own journeys of endarkenment.
​
It took ten years to reform, regroup and re-emerge. It has now been over twenty-five years since my 42nd year and the beginnings of perimenopause, the year that Bone Woman called to wake me up. She heralded a new beginning and set the stage for the slow and sometimes painful journey of menopause and early eldership. She taught me the value of older women in our communities, no longer tethered by the time constraints of raising families or the constant visioning of cycling. The elder can put her energies into service, firstly by honoring her own needs, nurturing her own soul growth, which increases her capacity to share her accumulated skills and wisdom in support of the wider community.
​
Bone Woman continues to speak to me, to prompt me to be aware of my own Karmic debris in the understanding that I am part of the continuum of Life and to take responsibility for my part in it it. There is an authority in that voice that calls for a Beauty Path to be lived fully with Respect for Creation and to Honour it.​
​
Image: 'Yia Bone Woman Dance' by Carlo Catalano.
Image: Bone Woman Workshop, Hearthground Red Tent.
