"It is utter foolishness to try to escape from your body in order to be in touch with the riches of the unconscious," she says. "Addicted people yearn for freedom. They want to get out of their bodies and be someplace else. For me, it's important to experience my subtle body here on earth. Gradually, we can bring consciousness to the wisdom in our bodies. That's what I mean by releasing energy from matter, thus allowing the conscious body (the energy body) to become a chalice for the reception of spirit. That's true feminine consciousness."
— Marion Woodman
Woodman is naming a direction almost no spiritual tradition actually travels. The inherited grammar runs the other way: matter is what you escape, the body is what you transcend, spirit is what you finally reach when the flesh has been quieted enough. That is a very old current — older than Christianity, older than Plato, though both gave it authoritative form. What she is insisting on is that this direction of travel is itself the addiction. The addict who wants to be somewhere else, out of the skin, free of weight — that soul is running the oldest spiritual program available, the one culture handed it long before any substance appeared.
The reversal she proposes is not gentle. Bringing consciousness to the body's wisdom is not the same as relaxing into comfort. It is the work of staying where the pain already is, long enough to hear what it knows. Spirit received through matter — the chalice image — means the container must hold before it can hold anything else. What arrives when you stop trying to leave is not transcendence. It is the body's own intelligence, which was never the opposite of spirit, only the part of spirit the pneumatic tradition had no use for.
Marion Woodman·Conscious Femininity: Interviews With Marion Woodman·1993