Return to site

Dear men. Dear Warriors. Women are Not your Healers, Priestesses or Whores—Most of Us, Anyway.

In the long-long-ago, there were women who were trained to help you process your wounds when you returned from battle, when you were hurting and in need of help.

They have been called sacred prostitutes, or temple whores.

They were priestesses who underwent rigorous initiation to be able to alchemize battle trauma so that it was not brought into the home and unleashed on wives and children.

This alchemy was multi layered. It was energetic, emotional, spiritual, psychic and physical communion. Time spent in the temple included ritual bathing, feeding, prayer and sex—with the Goddess—through these trained healers.

We remember this—men and women—in our unconscious. We remember, but we have lost the practice. Perhaps we lost something vital and precious. But women today are not trained for this initiation and neither are sex workers.

Modern women (most of us) are not trained priestesses, and modern men (most of you) are not warriors.

The majority of us are struggling to make ends meet, feed our families, and keep our bills paid. Many of us are anxious, depressed and struggling for connection with ourselves, each other, and source.

This long-lost practice, and it's deeper implications, is a tear in the collective. Maybe we are all, unknowingly, grieving it and still playing it out. But without the skills and awareness on the parts of both men and women to practice it it must be evolved into something else.

We must learn a new way together.

Men yearn for communion with the Goddess—to heal their world weary hearts—but there are very few priestesses who can hold them. Women want strong and worthy men, but we cannot make that journey for them.

Regular women are not cut out for the job, it becomes emotional labor and is an inappropriate burden in the relationship dynamic.

Men, you can only touch within us, women, what you long to meet in yourselves. You must learn to hold it.

Men, you need to find that communion, within yourselves, and with each other. And if you want the kiss and blessing of the Goddess,  find women who are real healers (and pay them!) who can help you in appropriate ways.

Do the work; go to therapy. Sit in circle with other men. Go into the wild—alone and together. Get in touch with your pain, your hearts, your cocks and your instincts.

Then women can meet you.

And gawd do we want to!

~Justice Bartlett