Let me begin by explaining what I mean by an initiated woman. She is a woman who is fully aware of and accountable for her physical, energetic, and spiritual responsibilities—first to herself and her own body, then to her family, and finally to her community. Her "initiation" lies in how ably she responds (from the root response-ability) to Life’s offerings and challenges.
By contrast, an uninitiated woman remains largely unconscious of her role as a steward and sacred vessel—both physically and energetically. She has yet to awaken to the weight and privilege of carrying Life’s currents.
As a woman standing at the crossroads of sexual liberation and sacred remembrance, I’ve come to ask: What have we really gained—and what have we unknowingly sacrificed—in our hard-won sexual freedom?
In my previous article, Little Red Riding Hood and The Big Bad Wolf: Missed Rites of Passage in the Feminine Journey, I explore—as the title suggests—the absent initiations in a girl’s life and their far-reaching consequences.
Most of us are descendants of generations of women never properly welcomed into their power. For millennia, the sacred potency of menstrual blood, the womb, and feminine mysteries was feared into silence. Across 4,000 years of patriarchal dominion, women were reduced to property (and sinners by default), branded as weak (yet punished for being "too much"), dismissed as hysterical (while their intuition was pathologized).
Even their life-giving blood—was demonized, labeled "unclean," and locked in shame’s shadow.
In today’s modern culture, we’ve lost the memory—and forgotten the sacred significance—of rites of passage like menarche.
Long ago, when a girl’s first blood arrived, it was not hidden. The women of her lineage—mothers, aunts, and grandmothers—would gather her. They would speak plainly of the changes unfolding in her body: the swelling and softening, the stirring of desires, the slow burn of intuition igniting.
This blood was not shameful. It was a threshold, met with celebration. Her community would welcome her as one of the women—not just with new privileges, but with new responsibilities: to honour the wisdom in her womb, to recognise her body as a bridge between earth and spirit and to be mindful of her blossoming fertility.
My teacher, Katie O’Mahony—an Irish shaman—often reminds us:
“A rite of passage is a rite of responsibility.”
With every threshold we cross—menarche, wedding, motherhood, menopause, or others—our capacity to respond to life expands. Not just in body, but in psyche and soul.
So what happens if we’ve missed some of the initiations? Without these rites, we’re half-formed—like clay left mid-moulding, or a song cut before the chorus. Our bodies age, but our psyche lingers at the threshold, still waiting for the elders to whisper: "You are ready. Step forward."
The uninitiated woman is not childlike—she is starved of her own myth. I know this hunger intimately. I’ve lived its consequences in my bones.
And this starvation is no accident.
The sexual revolution and the second-wave feminism in the 60’s and 70’s marked the peak of the "free love" movement and our hard-won body autonomy (the Pill was introduced to mass public in the 60’s)
And while in their nature freedom and body autonomy should be a given for every being, oral contraception, liberated love and the desire to mirror male sexuality, combined particularly with the absence of sacred initiation rituals and loss of values in modern society, have led to emptiness beneath apparent freedom.
And so the hard-won liberation became a paradox. The pill gave women the sense of biological agency, but without rites to put it into context, it became stripped of its deeper meaning. Women wanted to be treated as equal, not realising that equality does not equal sameness. We took casual sex, one night stands and exposed nakedness as tools of empowerment, ignoring the energetic and spiritual tolls on our systems. Striving to match “male promiscuity" we ignored that patriarchal sexuality is itself wounded, so we never questioned its own lack of initiatory rites.
Result: A culture of disembodied intimacy—sex without soul, pleasure without pilgrimage and too many women (and men) left with a sense of deep emptiness.
In the last decades the smartphones with social media and dating apps made hookups as accessible as takeout. Entire generations of young women now navigate intimacy through disposable transactions and compulsive swiping, largely unaware of the spiritual and energetic consequences.
The naivety of Bluebeard’s bride mirrors modern hookup’s 'swipe-first, think-later' culture.
What happens to us, women—physically, energetically, and spiritually—when we open ourselves to sexual pleasure untethered from sacred responsibility and spiritual hygiene?
Alongside with various STDs, our bodies may respond with confusion: pleasure without reverence can blur the lines between connection and depletion. Over time, this dissonance can manifest as fatigue, hormonal imbalances, physical and/or emotional numbness to true intimacy.
On energetic level sex is a mix and exchange of life force. Without boundaries, we risk energy leaks thus absorbing partners’ unresolved emotions or trauma. Our wombs are alchemical vessels—designed, like the Earth, to receive and decompose. When we invite a lover in, we don’t just take their body; we take on their storms. We take their unhealed wounds to seed in our fertile dark. And because sex is a life-force exchange at the quantum level, the energetic blueprint of every partner embeds in our womb tissues—lingering, as ancient Ayurvedic and Taoist texts warn, for seven full years-their anger, their hunger, their shame, their boyhood wounds. (Not to mention how we absorb all of his previous or current unresolved entanglements with other wombs. Can you already imagine the mess?)
Spiritually we risk soul fragmentation when pieces of our vitality get scattered in unfulfilled and meaningless encounters. The sacred becomes mundane—sex loses its role as a bridge to the Divine or a mirror of self-awareness and it leads to repeated disconnection from our inner source, our well of wisdom as a woman and replaces it with hunger that no lover can satisfy, because it’s really a thirst for soul remembrance.
Allow me a moment to share a personal story- one of the many I carry in my flesh.
In the summer of 2023, I was heartbroken. I had fallen deeply in love with a man who couldn’t commit- not because he didn’t care, but because his heart still belonged to another (and whose presence I could energetically feel in our most intimate moments). I have already opened my heart and my womb to him and I was so confused, so angry, so hurt, that I didn’t see a way out of the situation. I returned to Bulgaria, the home of my ancestors and surrendered to the call of a recently uncovered Thracian cave—an ancient sanctuary of fertility and prayer.
Her entrance was shaped like a giant vulva and her name- The Womb. Her psychic pull was so strong, that one morning I rented a car and drove three and a half hours along bumpy country roads to reach the trailhead. And then I hiked: ninety+ minutes upward climbing, through rocky paths and stone rivers. It was scorching hot and I had forgotten to bring water. I lost the path and had to retrace my steps….until I finally saw her. I was in awe!
I climbed the shaky ladder up to her entrance and the moment I was in I fell on my knees and sobbed. For the pain. For the journey. For all that had led me there.
As I cried, it dawned on me: The path to a woman’s womb, to her essence, is a pilgrimage and a privilege. A sacred quest demanding a humble and open heart. And like all things sacred, it should never be given away carelessly.
Let me be clear: I am not against liberated love, pleasure, or the joyous exploration of one’s body. But we must ask:
How much of this "liberation" is truly rooted in shared values, the wisdom of our bodies and our sovereign desire?
And how much of it is merely another transaction—hunger for external validation, trading power, attention, or material security for the illusion of autonomy?
This is the shadow of our unmet initiations. Both as women and men (and everyone in between.)
And this isn’t a call to regress, but to reclaim:
To weave freedom with responsibility,
To honor pleasure as prayer,
To live in equality without sacrificing our wild, cyclical essence.
To foster intimacy as ecological stewardship—not just as a personal choice.
We must tend its borders, compost wisely, and refuse toxic seeds.
This is sexuality rewilded. This is the Womb as sacred soil.
With Love
-Hrissi
