Archetypes, the Divine Feminine, and the Healing that Finds Us
Have you ever been in the middle of a Reiki session and seen something behind your closed eyes that you couldn't quite explain? A figure. A colour. A woman whose face you somehow recognise, even though you're certain you've never met. Have you woken from a dream carrying the feeling of a presence that was too specific to dismiss, a feminine energy, ancient and warm, that seemed to be speaking directly to you?
You are not imagining it. And you are not alone.
What you may be encountering are archetypes, one of the most profound, far-reaching, and quietly revolutionary concepts in the history of human understanding. This blog is an introduction to that world: to the idea that certain patterns of energy, certain characters and essences, live inside all of us, and sometimes make themselves known during healing work, meditation, or in the language of dreams. And more than that, it's an invitation to look more closely at some of the women whose stories have shaped those patterns, whose truth has so often been held back, rewritten, or simply not allowed to be told.
Because history has largely been written by men. But the feminine has always been at work within it. And she is finding her voice again.
Carl Jung and the Map of the Inner World
Carl Jung gave us one of the most useful frameworks for understanding why certain images, figures, and themes appear across all human cultures, all eras, all spiritual traditions. He called them archetypes.
Jung observed that when he worked with clients from vastly different backgrounds, when he studied mythology, fairytale, religion, alchemy and dream, the same essential characters kept appearing. Not because people had copied one another, but because these patterns seem to be encoded in what he called the collective unconscious, a layer of psyche we all share beneath our individual minds, like an underground river that runs beneath every garden.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” , Carl Jung
Archetypes are not characters in a story. They are energies, patterns, ways of being. They include:
The Mother, unconditional love, nourishment, protection, the body that sustains
The Maiden, innocence, new beginnings, potential not yet expressed
The Crone, wisdom, sovereignty, the one who has seen enough to see clearly
The Warrior, courage, boundaries, the one who protects what matters
The Healer, the one who tends, who restores, who holds space for transformation
The Mystic, the one who seeks direct experience of the divine, beyond doctrine
The Shadow, everything we have hidden from ourselves that asks, eventually, to be integrated
Jung also identified the Anima (the feminine soul within the male psyche) and the Animus (the masculine force within the feminine), suggesting that wholeness, what he called individuation, comes not from suppressing one or the other, but from bringing both into conscious relationship. This is deeply aligned with what we understand in healing work as the balance of divine masculine and divine feminine energies.
“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.” , Carl Jung
The Divine Feminine and Divine Masculine: A Returning Balance
Every spiritual tradition carries both energies, even if they haven't always been equally honoured. The divine feminine is not about gender, it lives in all of us, regardless of how we identify. It is the energy of receptivity, intuition, cyclical wisdom, deep feeling, the capacity to create and to surrender. It is the body's intelligence. It is the still, knowing voice beneath the noise.
The divine masculine, equally important, is the energy of action, direction, protection, clarity of purpose, and the courage to move forward. In its truest expression it is not dominating but steadying, it creates the container within which the feminine can flow.
For centuries, in many cultures and institutions, these energies have been severely out of balance. The feminine has been suppressed, dismissed, or repackaged into something safer and more controllable. The intuitive, the cyclical, the emotionally fluent, the wildly knowing, all characteristics that women embody particularly strongly, have been treated with suspicion or simply ignored.
But archetypes cannot be fully suppressed. They return. In dreams. In healing sessions. In the deep knowing that arrives when a client is lying on the Reiki table and something long buried in their body begins to speak.
A note on healing and the feminine
In Reiki, we work with the body's energy field, a system that does not distinguish between what is 'real' and what is felt. The nervous system holds memory. The body tells stories the mind hasn't yet found words for. When the divine feminine is suppressed, in a woman's own psyche, in her family lineage, in the culture around her, that suppression often lives in the body. Energy healing can create the conditions for those layers to surface, to be witnessed, and to release.
This is one of the most sacred aspects of the work.
Mary Magdalene: The Truth Waiting to Be Told
Of all the feminine archetypes whose stories have been distorted, few carry as much significance as Mary Magdalene. For centuries she was presented as a penitent prostitute, a characterisation with no foundation in the Gospels, introduced by Pope Gregory I in a sermon in 591 CE and not formally corrected by the Catholic Church until 1969. By then, the damage to her archetype had been done.
The Gnostic Gospels, texts discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945 that were not included in the canonical Bible, tell a very different story. In the Gospel of Mary, she is described as one who understood the teachings of Jesus more deeply than the other disciples, one to whom he appeared first after the resurrection, one who held the grief of the community and then spoke from a place of extraordinary spiritual clarity. She was a mystic and a teacher. She was trusted with the deepest teachings.
She was, in the truest sense, the archetype of the Magdalene: the one who loves with absolute devotion, who stands at the foot of the cross when others flee, who carries sacred knowledge, who grieves fully and completely and then rises. She is the one who understands that love is not sentimental, it is the most radical and enduring force there is.
“She is not who they said she was. And neither are you.”
When Mary Magdalene appears in a healing session, in a dream, or in a reading, she tends to carry a specific message: your knowing is valid. What you have been told to doubt about yourself, your intuition, your wisdom, your version of events, deserves to be revisited. She invites reclamation.
Voices That Weren't Fully Heard: A Few Sacred Heroines
Mary Magdalene is not alone. Across history and across traditions, there are women whose stories have been minimised, misrepresented, or told only through the lens of the men around them. When these figures appear in healing work, and they do, they are worth knowing.
Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179)
Mystic, composer, healer, theologian, and writer. She documented her visions, developed a system of holistic medicine, composed extraordinary music, and founded monasteries, all in a time when women had almost no formal voice. In healing: Hildegard appears in healing work as the archetype of the visionary who trusts her own direct experience of the divine above institutional doctrine. She reminds us that the body and soul are not separate, and that creativity is itself a healing force. If her energy enters your sessions, you may be being invited to trust your own visions more completely.
Isis (Ancient Egypt)
The great mother goddess: healer, magician, the one who gathered the scattered pieces of Osiris and breathed life back into them. Her name in hieroglyphs means 'throne'. She is the original healer, the one who knows the power of the Word, of sacred sound, of love as a force of resurrection. In healing: Isis carries the archetype of the healer who works beyond the limits of what seems possible. She appears when a client needs to believe that something can be restored, a relationship with themselves, a sense of wholeness, a life that has felt fragmentary. Her energy in Reiki is often felt as a warm, golden, enveloping light.
Kuan Yin (Buddhist)
The bodhisattva of compassion, she who hears the cries of the world. She chose to remain rather than pass into nirvana until all beings were free of suffering. Her name means 'she who perceives the sounds of the world'. In healing: Kuan Yin is one of the most frequently encountered presences in Reiki healing, particularly during sessions involving grief, self-criticism, or deep emotional pain. Her energy is profoundly gentle. If she appears, she is reminding your client (and perhaps you) that compassion begins within, not with the world's permission.
Mary, Mother of Jesus
Across traditions she carries the archetype of the divine mother, the one who says yes to something immensely difficult, who holds her child through suffering, who stands in grief without being destroyed by it. She is the model of compassionate endurance. In healing: Mary's presence in healing often signals a need for the mother energy: not the perfect or the sentimental, but the unconditional. She tends to appear when the inner child needs tending, when a client has not felt safe or held, or when forgiveness, of self or another, is the thread that needs following.
The Unnamed Ones
The midwives, the herbalists, the village healers, the women called witches for knowing what plants could do, for knowing when someone was about to die, for knowing things they had no right to know. Millions of names lost to history. In healing: When clients come to healing carrying the sense that they have 'always known things' without knowing how, or that they have always felt most themselves in nature, or that they carry some inherited knowing that their rational mind cannot account for, this lineage may be present. Honouring it can be profoundly releasing.
Archetypes in Reiki, Regression, and the Language of Dreams
So how does this connect to what happens on the treatment table, or in a past life regression, or in the imagery that floats up during meditation?
The body and the unconscious speak in symbols. When rational thought quietens, as it does in deep Reiki relaxation, the deeper layers of the psyche have more access to conscious awareness. This is when archetypes can make themselves known: not as instructions, but as presences, as feelings, as images that carry meaning.
A client might describe seeing a woman in white at the edge of their awareness. They might feel hands other than the therapist's. They might emerge from a session feeling that something has been said to them that wasn't in words. In past life regression, full narrative scenes may arise, complete with character, relationship, and unresolved emotion from another time. In dreams in the days following a session, the imagery may continue, as if the unconscious, having been given permission to speak, keeps speaking.
“The soul always knows what to do to heal itself. The challenge is to silence the mind.” , Caroline Myss
How to Begin Making Sense of What You Receive
If you encounter a presence, an image, or a strong felt sense during healing or meditation, here are some gentle starting points:
Notice without analysis. In the moment, simply receive. The meaning can be explored afterwards, not everything needs to be decoded immediately.
Journal immediately after. Even a few words. The rational mind moves quickly to dismiss what the deeper self has offered. Writing anchors it.
Ask what feeling it carried. Not 'what did it mean' but 'how did it feel'. Archetypes communicate most clearly through emotional resonance. Peace. Recognition. Grief. Longing. Courage.
Research the figure if you recognise them. If a specific figure appeared, a goddess, a saint, an historical woman, look into her story with genuine curiosity. There may be something in her history that mirrors something in yours.
Bring it to your next session. The thread can be followed. Energy healing, past life regression, and guided meditation can all be used to explore archetypes intentionally, to go back in, to ask questions, to receive more.
Themes that may signal archetypal presence during healing
A sense of being watched over or accompanied by a benevolent presence
Visions of figures in historical or non-modern clothing
Feeling emotions that don't seem to belong to your own story, grief, rage, love, longing far larger than the moment
A strong sense of recognition, 'I know her', for someone you've never met
Recurring dream imagery involving temples, gardens, fires, water, specific colours or symbols
A knowing that arrives fully formed, without reasoning, something true that you cannot explain
Love Thy Neighbour, And Thyself
There is a thread that runs through every archetype discussed in this blog, every feminine figure whose story has been suppressed or misrepresented: love. Not the greeting-card version, but love as the most formidable, enduring, and revolutionary force available to us.
Mary Magdalene stayed. Isis gathered and restored. Kuan Yin chose to remain. The unnamed healers knew which plants would ease the fever, and they used that knowledge because someone was suffering and they could help. The impulse beneath all of it was love in its most active, most costly, most real form.
As women, we are asked to love greatly, our families, our communities, often strangers. We are often not equally well taught to direct that same love inward. Healing work, in my experience, tends to return again and again to this same invitation: to extend the same compassion inward that we already know how to offer outward.
The archetypes can help with this. Because they have faced what we face. They have grieved and endured and continued. They have held truth when the world preferred a more convenient story. And in their presence, felt in a dream, sensed in a Reiki session, glimpsed in the pages of a long-overdue history, we remember that we are part of something far larger than our individual lives.
“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.” , Alice Walker
You Are Invited to Remember
If this blog has stirred something, a question, a memory, a feeling of recognition you can't quite place, that stirring is worth following.
Reiki, past life regression, guided meditation, and intuitive readings are all ways of creating the conditions in which the deeper self can speak. They are not about finding someone else's answers, they are about creating enough quiet to hear your own.
The archetypes are not outside you. They are patterns within the collective unconscious that you carry, that have shaped your lineage, that live in the stories you were told and the ones that were withheld from you. When they appear in healing, they are not random. They are the psyche, in its extraordinary wisdom, offering you exactly what you need.
She has always been here. And so have you.
Book a Reiki Divine Experience, Past Life Regression, or Guided Meditation session, and see what comes through for you.
Nici Pickering, Reiki Divine Therapy, Accredited Therapist, Reiki Master, certified Spinal Flow® Practitioner.
24 High Street, Whiston, Rotherham, South Yorkshire, S60 4HH, 07545 053 129 | nici@reikidivine.co.uk | www.reikidivine.co.uk