THE DIVINE REBIRTH THROUGH GRIEF: A PORTAL INTO THE FEMININE SOUL
By Lillian Snellenburg
Grief is inevitable. It arrives as surely as ageing, as certain as dusk. It weaves its way into every life, eventually. Grief claims all we love, unless it claims you first. This is the rhythm of life. And equally the rhythm of death.
Grief returns us to something ancient. It strips language from the tongue and modern comforts from the hand. In its deepest expression it reawakens a self that treads barefoot through memory, that keens in the dark, that kneels before rivers and fire with offerings clutched tight. This grief does not dwell in the clean symmetry of condolence cards. It pulses with the rituals of ancestors; bone, breath, salt and ash. It teaches that some losses are not to be overcome but to be honoured with every step, every sound and every silence that follows.
My dear friend recently said to me, “Women are stronger than men”. She’s 96, so I trust her judgement. She has seen almost a century of life, of loss, of love, of strength, of failure, of resilience. She lives on, alone in her big mansion, for the simple fact that she was stronger than a man.
THE DIVINE FEMININE RISES
There is a misconception that the divine feminine is all light and softness. All wombs and moonlight and gentle wisdom. She is not the curated image of Pinterest boards. She is not filtered calm, seated below planets with glitter dancing at her feet. She is the one who walks into the underworld and survives.
The divine feminine does not rise in fire. She rises with salt in her mouth, mud on her hands, and silence around her name. She rises barefoot, eyes bloodshot, hands trembling. She wears the scars like tattoos of life that she did not ask for, but paid for in far more than silver and gold. She rises as the mother who has tasted death. As the healer who has befriended pain. She does not transcend it. She becomes it. This is the divine.
Modern neuroscience now echoes what the ancients have always known. That in trauma and loss, the prefrontal cortex quietens down and the language of reason fades, the primal brain takes the reins. The body begins to lead. It is not madness, but memory: an ancient inheritance. Thought gives way to instinct and in this raw state, the woman becomes creature. She is not unravelling; she is remembering. She is reverting to a default neural system. Survival rewrites her, not with words but with the pulse of the earth and the hunger to endure. The woman is designed at her base function, to survive.
Some griefs are too profound to soften with time. They resist resolution, because they do not belong to things that can be repaired. This grief will never be tamed. It is a weapon. Grief reduced the body to stone, shattered in a riverbed. The self scattered like ash across the floor of time unbound and unshaped, forgotten by the wind. A raw flesh wound. The very soul goes septic. There is no grace here. No beauty in this grief.
Lady Death will strip you of everything you are, obliterating you to shards that will forever divide your life into before and after. You will be a fragment of the former self.
THIS GRIEF MAKES YOU ANCIENT
Grief is a moratorium. A halt, a suspension, a holy pause where time loosens and life is measured not in days but in breaths between collapse and rising. Grief is the initiation.
Psychologically, grief is a full-bodied alarm. The amygdala fires, the nervous system floods, the world becomes hostile. But within this chaos, a second layer unfolds. The brain’s default mode network; the place of reflection, memory and identity, begins to stir and rumble like a brewing summer storm. It is here the question of who we are without them rises. And so, through rupture, the mind begins to reform. Not back to what it was, but into something raw and enduring. A new mythology of self.
It dismantles the old structures… the ones that whisper: be pleasant, be polite, stay composed. What rises in their place is a quieter knowing. A knowing of raw truth, of reverence, of protection. She becomes the wolf. The feral, rabid dog. The one who whimpers when the rusty edge of grief’s knife impales her gut. She hears the wind whisper to the memory of who she once was. She is less human, more elemental.
In the early storms of grief, the language centres dim. The thinking mind recedes. What remains is breath, heartbeat, hunger. The primal self emerges… ancient, alert, unspeaking. She walks not with logic, but with the compass of instinct. She becomes myth, because she must.
This grief makes you ancient.
You forage the shoreline and scour for bones, cartilage, sinew. Searching for what? The pieces of the woman who came before. You collect them, hang them by the door like charms. Lady Death lives here now. No longer do you sit in comfort at dinner tables playing with the surface of conversation. For you are no longer she. You are no longer performance, but presence. Not perfection, but embodiment. She will not ask you to transcend pain. She will not be the palatable black and white photos of loss. She holds the rot and decay in withered hands and wipes the blood of the covenant across her wrinkled face. She asks you to meet pain, breathe with it, and carry it on your back.
THIS IS NOT STRENGTH, THIS IS DEFIANCE
Strength is often admired as a badge handed to those whose world has split and yet they still rise. As if she had a choice. As if strength is anything more than surviving the unimaginable. This is not strength. This is defiance. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned after all.
She must love for the one who is gone, when all she wants is to rage against the few battered cards she was dealt. She must breathe love even when she forgets how. She must clutch at love that bends her to her knees on cold tiles in the middle of the night. She must scream love into the silence that reverberates loud around her and aches in every unheld moment. She must cling to the love that death could not steal.
And so the feminine lives in a world that is wept for. Not for its failings, but for its cruel brilliance. A brilliance unseen by those who are gone. The wildness of an ocean unshared. The majesty of a humpback unpointed toward by tiny fingers. The warmth of sun on skin, the pull of tides, the staggering weight of laughter with friends, all lived now in echo. Grief aches not just for absence, but for experience unmet. The mourner becomes a vessel, living not just for the self, but for the one who could not stay. Every breath, every wonder, becomes an offering and a whispered hope that somehow, through the body of the living dead, the taken might still behold the beauty they were denied. Because the world is so beautiful and they don’t get to see it.
The divine feminine, once reborn, lives in a mythic world wrapped in paradox, where beauty and brutality braid themselves into the same breath. Where sorrow and splendour coexist. Where awe lives beside ache, and every sunrise is both a wound and a wonder.
The divine feminine is not a soft return to light. She is the dark moon. She is the cave. She is a relentless howl. She is the steady and deep voice that chants, defies, endures.
THE WOMAN BEHIND THE WORDS
Lillian Snellenburg is a registered psychologist, writer, and director of a private psychology practice on the mid-north coast of New South Wales. Her work is grounded in the treatment of anxiety, depression, trauma and major life transitions, with a special focus on the reclamation of feminine identity and power. After the stillbirth of her son, Sunny, she began writing from the raw edge of loss, drawing upon myth, nature, and the underworld as her compass. Connect with her @the.millennialpsych.
MUSE PAPER
ISSUE 06