On Our Best Behavior: The Price Women Pay to Be Good

by Elise Loehnen

They are an internal guide. The sins are touchstones for where we tend to warp ourselves—both in overindulgence and asceticism. They’re simply signals, GPS points, from the human soul. When understood as guideposts, not cliffs of damnation, they are an invitation to look and come closer to who we are, what we need, what we want, and how we can discover our purpose.

We must strip off the layers of cultural programming so that we can, at last, see and listen to ourselves, just as we are. From that place of clarity and truth and goodness we can heal, realign, and evolve.

As part of this, we must resacralize the feminine and recognize that the death of the goddess, the demotion of Mary Magdalene, and the subjugation of Mother Earth are doing us no favors. This requires no religious belief, only a faith that we cannot rebalance the world until we reconcile the “Masculine” and its pursuit of truth, order, and direction with the “Feminine” and its tendencies toward creativity, nurturance, and care. Each of these energies is critical, in each of us, regardless of our stated gender, in all spheres of life.

We must burn the morality map that keeps us from true self-definition.