Liminal Knowing: A Winter Curriculum on Power, Wildness, and Wise Woman Healing

December 21, 2025 - February 4, 2026

The December New Moon is the start of my year. Something about a dark, cold night on the precipice of the Winter Solstice feels more nurturing than a rigid date. It’s reminiscent of death and rebirth, and of cycles coming to a close. A celestial shedding, welcoming new energy when the sun rises the next morning. Unlike other lunisolar calendars that start closer to the Spring Equinox, this tradition is something I’ve practiced since 2021 and might be unique to me. Feel free to adopt it. 🙂

Anyways–why am I here?

This winter, I'm building a personal curriculum centered on what I'm calling Liminal Knowing: the wisdom that exists in the space between learned ideas and lived experience. This kind of knowing becomes visible when we weave together traditions that exist outside institutional frameworks. Some truths are already in us—they just need different perspectives to become clear.

For me, this wisdom reveals itself through claircognizance—that psychic knowing that arrives without explanation. But without knowledge passed down from my ancestral elders, I had no language for what I was experiencing. So I sought wisdom from traditions outside my own.

For years, I was living this without words for it. Then I read J. Allen Cross's American Brujería, and the concept clicked. Cross writes about how first-generation Americans navigate between the cultures their families left (or fled) and the ones they found themselves in. This threshold space I'd been navigating had a name: liminality.

Enter The Wise Woman Tradition

One year ago, I became an apprentice of the Wise Woman Tradition—a lineage of herbalists, midwives, and healers who worked outside institutional medicine and religion. 2025 was my first full cycle since beginning this path, and my teacher warned everyone that things might get weird. Well, they got weird.

The year began with birth doula work. While supporting new life professionally, I experienced the loss of a loved one for the first time in my personal life. Grief heralded me into a depressive state, and triggered a manic episode, common among those who live with Bipolarism. In my mania, I was accepted into a graduate program of Traditional Chinese Medicine. And that was just the last year. So many experiences were culminating and integrating in the background, calling me toward a deeper, more intuitive way of knowing. The Wise Woman tradition was teaching me something I couldn't yet name.

I’m learning to tell the difference between what I was taught and what I actually know in my body, how to see from outside the dominant story, and how to access power that doesn't depend on external validation. This is the work of the Wise Woman tradition.

The Wise Woman tradition has always lived in a liminal space. It's knowledge passed through oral tradition and apprenticeship rather than academic institutions. It works with plants, cycles, bodies, and darkness. It’s an earth-based knowing that can't be fully systematized or controlled. Historically, this position at the margins has been dangerous. The Wise Woman has been persecuted precisely because her power comes from within and from the earth, not from the church, the state, or the empire.

Finding The Language for What I Lived

Last year threw me into a liminal space—between grief and new life, between mania and grounding, between a career in institutional medicine and the start of my education in TCM. I didn't choose these dichotomies. At the end of 2024, I expected to follow my structured apprenticeship, maybe read some books, take a vacation. I had no idea what was coming.

To make sense of the past year, I'm going back to formally study what I survived. This winter, Estés and Starhawk are helping me find language for the wisdom that emerged in the chaos. I’ll be working primarily with two texts: Clarissa Pinkola Estés’s Women Who Run With the Wolves and Starhawk's Dreaming the Dark. On the surface, these might seem like different books with different aims. Estés is excavating the wild woman archetype through fairy tales and Jungian psychology, inviting women to reclaim their instinctual creative nature. Starhawk is writing about magic and social transformation, about how we vision and manifest new realities from a place of power-from-within rather than power-over.

But what they share is this: both authors position themselves deliberately outside the village, outside the empire, outside patriarchal consciousness. Both invite us to see from that vantage point. Not to reject civilization entirely, but to refuse to be consumed by its logic. Both understand that real transformation—whether personal or collective—requires wisdom that doesn't live inside institutional structures or dominant paradigms.

The Wild Woman, in Estés's work, is the one who hasn't forgotten. She remembers the old ways, the instinctual knowing, the creative life force that civilization tries to domesticate. She's been banished to the forest, the desert, the edges of the known world. But from there, she can see clearly. From there, she howls truth.

The Witch, in Starhawk's framework, stands in a similar position. She works with power-from-within—the immanent magic of earth, body, community, vision. She creates change not by appealing to external authorities but by accessing deeper currents of consciousness and bringing new realities into being through ritual, through imagination, through collective dreaming.

The Winter Work

Winter is the perfect season for this work. In the natural world, winter is crone time, elder time, the season that requires going into the dark to find the medicine. The seeds rest in frozen ground. The sap retreats into roots. Life force consolidates and deepens. This is when we learn what it means to trust the darkness, to believe in what we cannot see, to draw on internal resources when the external world offers little comfort.

As part of my winter curriculum, I’ll be exploring practices that cultivate liminal knowing. I’ll work with story as medicine, learning to read fairy tales and myths the way a Jungian analyst reads dreams, as symbolic narratives that reveal unconscious patterns and instinctual truths. I’ll explore visioning practices that help us imagine alternatives to what currently exists, learning to dream from the edges. I’ll investigate what it means to access power-from-within in a culture built on power-over.

And underneath it all, I’ll be asking: What does it mean to become a Wise Woman in this time? How can I integrate wildness into grounded, healing practice? How do I stand at the threshold and serve my communities from that liminal position?

If you've been feeling called to the edges, to the wild places, to the wisdom that lives outside institutions and dominant narratives, winter is inviting you in. The darkness is not empty. The margins are not barren. At the threshold, a different kind of knowing awaits.

The Liminal Knowing Curriculum

This winter, I’m formalizing what I lived instinctively last year. 

Book List

This is a nonexhaustive list of thematic books that can help deepen these studies. I plan to fully read the books listed under "Core Texts." All other books are supplemental, and I'll note which pages/chapters I'm referencing if they add to the learning experience in later posts.

While I do have affiliate links on this page (to pay for TCM school, lol), please don’t feel compelled to purchase any books. I’m a big fan of the app “Libby” and my local library has an app that lets me hold books to be picked up at my local branch. There are options, folks! Or you can be like me and buy an archival book scanner and scan every borrowed book you want to read for on the go. Again, there are options! 

Core Texts:

1. Women Who Run With the Wolves - Clarissa Pinkola Estés

2. Dreaming the Dark - Starhawk

Supplemental Reading (choose what calls to you):

• Healing Wise - Susun Weed 

• The Spiral Dance - Starhawk 

• The Dangerous Old Woman - Clarissa Pinkola Estés

• Weave the Liminal: Living Modern Traditional Witchcraft - Laura Tempest Zakroff

• Poetry by Mary Oliver, Audre Lorde, or Joy Harjo 

Optional/Advanced:

• The Body Keeps the Score - Bessel van der Kolk 

• Caliban and the Witch - Silvia Federici

Traditional Chinese Medicine Centered

*Note: I keep TCM books separate because this medicine is its own system and I don’t want inadvertently confuse myself or other with external traditions. I’m still learning and being a student outside of this culture, I feel it is important to honor this. 

• Daodejing 

• Zhuangzi 

• The Web That Has No Weaver - Ted Kaptchuk

• Nourishing Destiny - Lonny Jarrett

• Between Heaven and Earth - Harriet Beinfield & Efrem Korngold

Experiential Practices

Weekly Practices:

Darkness Sitting

• Sit in complete darkness for 10-20 minutes

• No meditation instructions, just presence in the dark

• Notice what arises when vision is removed

• Journal immediately after

Story Medicine

• Choose one fairy tale per week from Estés or another source

• Read it aloud to yourself

• Notice which character or moment activates something in you

• Let it work on you through the week

Threshold Walking

• Walk at dusk or dawn (liminal times) or walk property boundaries, edges of wild spaces

• Practice "outside-in" seeing - what do you notice from the margins?

Herb Ally Work

• Choose one winter/water element herb (mugwort, nettles, ashwagandha, rehmannia)

• Work with it through the season - tea, tincture, study

• Learn its story, its energetics, its medicine

• Build relationships, not just knowledge

Bi-Weekly Practices:

Tarot as Liminal Tool

• Pull a card asking: "What lives at the threshold for me right now?"

• Sit with the image as a symbol rather than a fixed meaning

• Let it reveal itself over several days

Wild Woman Embodiment

• Movement practice without structure or goal: Howl, shake, dance, make sounds that aren't "nice."

• Reclaim the body's instinctual expression. Optional: Coordinate with moon cycles for added resonance.

Visioning Practice (from Starhawk)

• Create a quiet ritual space

• Ask: "What reality wants to be born through me?"

• Free-write or draw without censoring

• Identify one small, concrete action toward that vision

Monthly Practice:

New Moon Ritual

• Honor the darkest dark

• Release what needs to go into winter's composting

• Plant one seed-intention for the season

Journaling Prompts

Here are a few prompts to override any writer’s block. I’m not expecting myself to answer all of them, maybe one to two bullets from each section.

Liminality:

• Where in my life am I standing at a threshold right now?

• What becomes visible when I look at my life from the outside in?

• What would change if I trusted the liminal space instead of rushing through it?

• Where have I been taught that edges/margins are dangerous? What lives there instead?

Wild Woman:

• When was the last time I felt truly wild? What was I doing?

• What parts of my instinctual nature have I domesticated or suppressed?

• If my Wild Woman could speak without filter, what would she say?

• What stories were I told about women who were 'too much'? How did I internalize that?

Power-From-Within:

• Where do I give my power away to external authorities?

• What does my body know that my mind dismisses?

• When have I accessed power-from-within? What did that feel like?

• What would I do/create/become if I didn't need anyone's permission?

Wise Woman Path:

• Who were the Wise Women in my lineage (biological or chosen)?

• What healing gifts live in me that I want to develop?

• What does my community need that I'm uniquely positioned to offer?

• How do I distinguish true wisdom from accumulated knowledge?

On Winter/Water/Darkness:

• What am I composting this winter? What needs to die?

• What lives in my darkness that I've been afraid to meet?

• What rest am I resisting? Why?

Integration Prompts:

• How does [fairy tale/myth from Estés] reflect my current life pattern?

• What alternative reality am I being called to dream into being?

• Where is the threshold between my personal healing and collective healing?

• What does liminal knowing feel like in my body, distinct from linear thinking?

What I Hope to Learn

This curriculum isn't about mastery or completing a checklist. It's about cultivating a way of being that I've glimpsed but haven't fully inhabited—a way of knowing that comes from the margins, from the body, from the darkness.

I want to learn how to trust my instinctual nature again. I want to understand what power-from-within actually feels like in my body, not just as a concept I can explain. How do I distinguish between the authority I've earned through study and experience versus the authority I've been conditioned to perform?

I want to learn how to read the symbolic language of my own life the way Estés reads fairy tales—to see the patterns, the archetypal movements, the soul's messages embedded in the events that have shaped this past year. The grief, the mania, the unexpected door that opened to TCM school—what stories are these telling? What is trying to be born?

I want to develop the capacity to vision and dream new realities into being, the way Starhawk describes. Not just for myself, but for my communities. What healing modalities want to emerge that don't fit existing categories? What does earth-based, body-positive, justice-oriented medicine actually look like in practice?

I want to learn from three distinct traditions—Taoist wisdom in Chinese Medicine, the wild feminine consciousness Estés excavates, and the embodied magic Starhawk practices—without collapsing them into one another. Each offers a unique perspective on liminal knowing, on power that flows rather than dominates, on healing that emerges from harmony rather than conquest. Holding them in conversation without collapsing them into one another feels like its own practice of threshold-dwelling.

And perhaps most importantly, I want to learn how to be comfortable at the threshold. Not rushing through liminal spaces to get to the "next thing," but dwelling in the betweenness, the uncertainty, the dark. Learning to see it as fertile ground rather than empty void.

By the end of this Winter/Water season, I don't expect to have arrived anywhere. But I hope to have deepened my capacity to stand at the edges and see clearly. To access power-from-within. To read the symbolic language of my own becoming. To serve my communities from a place of wild wisdom rather than domesticated expertise.

This is what winter is teaching me to want.

Follow Along

I'll be sharing reflections, insights, and excerpts from this curriculum throughout the winter. Not as an expert, not as someone who has it all figured out—but as a student, practicing presence with what emerges.

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A year of radical self-study aligned with the seasons. Subscribe to follow along as I share books, practices, insights, and the messy, beautiful process of becoming.

The work is in the practice.

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A quick disclaimer: I'm currently a TCM student and herbalist-in-training. Everything I share here is for educational purposes only—this is my space to explore what I'm learning, integrate new knowledge, and build community. Nothing in my posts should be taken as medical advice or used to diagnose, treat, or prevent any health condition. If something resonates with you, wonderful—but please consult with licensed healthcare professionals for your individual health needs.

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