Yes, we are continuing on this series of women’s spiritual leadership. This week, looking at the inner work involved. Look, some of the things I was seeing online and elsewhere around Imbolc have inspired this. And even if you don’t feel called to leadership,. let these articles inform your choice of leader! (previous posts are here, here, and here)
Navigating Power, Vulnerability, and Growth
There’s a part of leadership that nobody prepares you for: the way the role rearranges your inner world. On the outside, the tasks are clear enough. Hholding ritual, making decisions, guiding conversations, offering perspective. But inside, women’s spiritual leadership opens complicated doors.
Old patterns wake up. Tender places ask for attention. You discover that holding space for others requires you to hold deeper space for yourself: the kind that can feel both tender and fierce at the same time. Remember, Brigid is a firm proponent of the slap to the back of the head technique when we’re not listening! And she is particularly adept at highlighting when I’m not attending to the inner work. Spiritual leadership requires it. Trust me.
I used to think leadership was something I would “grow into,” like a coat that would eventually fit. Now I think of it more like a landscape I walk through daily, one that changes with the weather of my life and the seasons of my soul. Some days are clear and bright; everything feels simple. Other days are fogged with self‑doubt or pricked by old memories. Nothing is wrong when that happens. It’s just the terrain reminding me that inner work is not a separate practice from leadership. It is the heart of it.
The Tension Between Humility and Self‑Erasure
Many women were raised to make ourselves small so that others could be comfortable. Then we step into leadership and try to reconcile confidence with care, visibility with gentleness, authority with humility. It can be easy to mistake self‑erasure for virtue. But humility is not the silence of your power; it is the clarity with which you use it. It’s standing in your centre without inflation or apology, refusing to dominate the room, but also refusing to abandon it. When we address the inner work of women’s spiritual leadership, we have to acknowledge this tension.
And ok – sometimes you need to dominate the room. And other times you need to abandon said room. But horses for courses, ok?
When that old impulse to shrink arrives, and for many of us, it does, I take it as a signal to slow down and check in:
Am I avoiding clarity because I fear I will be judged?
Am I softening my language so I won’t be called “too much”?
Leadership asks for honesty here. Sometimes the most ethical, generous thing you can do is to speak plainly and trust the strength of the space you’re holding.
For some of us, speaking plainly comes more easily than others, but it’s a skill worth cultivating.
Meeting the Old Stories with New Courage
Women’s spiritual leadership often collides with old narratives:
🔥the teacher who didn’t believe you,
🔥a priest who shamed your questions,
🔥the community that rewarded your helpfulness but punished your voice.
Those memories don’t always arrive as thoughts. Sometimes they show up as a squeezing in the chest, a need to over‑explain, a jitter under the skin that makes you rush when you could move slowly. The inner work of women’s spiritual leadership can escalate these feelings. It rarely reduces them.
When that happens, I don’t treat it as failure. I treat it as information. The body remembers what the mind tries to tidy away. I ask:
What age is this reaction?
Whose voice am I hearing?
What do I need now to meet this moment as the woman I am, not the girl I was?
Sometimes the answer is a breath and a glass of water. It can be cancelling a commitment and going to the land. Sometimes it is calling a trusted peer who will remind me of what is true. And occasionally, it’s arriving on a friend’s doorstep in floods of tears, begging for help.
Intuition and Discernment
Spiritual leadership invites intuition to sit at the table. But intuition is not infallible, and discernment is not the enemy of mystery. I often imagine these two as companions walking with me: intuition bringing the spark and the knowing, discernment asking the kind of questions that keep us honest. What else could be true? What do I know for sure? Is this mine or does it belong to the other person? Where is my edge here?
Women are often praised for intuition and not taught the discipline of discernment. The truth is we need both. Intuition opens doors we didn’t know existed. Discernment checks that we have the keys we need, the consent we require, and the capacity to walk through without doing harm.
Or, in the words of an ex-colleague of mine: just because it smells like shit, doesn’t mean it will promote growth.
Shadow Work as an Ethical Practice
Shadow is not a moral failing; it’s the part of us that prefers to be unseen. In leadership, shadow can look like subtle superiority (“I know best”), quiet resentment (“I give more than I receive”), or slippery avoidance (“If I’m kind enough, I won’t have to set the boundary”). The work isn’t to banish these impulses; it’s to notice them early and choose differently.
I think of shadow work as a daily hygiene: a quick scan for contractions in the body, a look for places where I’m seeking approval rather than truth, a willingness to say, “I was wrong,” while the moment is still fresh enough to repair. This is not self‑punishment. It’s devotion to clean leadership, the kind that leaves people more sovereign, not more dependent.
Of course, there is deeper shadow work I have done, am doing and will do in the future. That’s normal and human. But it’s also the daily check ins we so often forget. The inner work of women’s spiritual leadership very often forces more shadow work upon us, as we work through the old torments.
The Land, the Body, and the Gods
When the inner weather turns, I go outside if I can. I’m privileged to have a garden that allows this. The land has a way of re‑sizing my concerns and returning me to proportion. I walk until my breath finds me. Put my hand on a tree and listen. Make a drink and watch the steam. (Or I make a drink and appreciate the taste of the grapes in the wine…) Simple practices. Old practices. The body follows the land’s lead. The nervous system remembers what safety feels like when we move slowly and pay attention.
If you are a devotee of gods or saints, bring them into this, not as a task to perform, but as companionship. I don’t ask the divine to erase my humanity. I spent too long remembering that humanity! Instead, I ask for the courage to inhabit it with grace. Leadership doesn’t require us to be perfect. It asks us to be honest, to keep learning, and to return again and again to the practices that make us kind, clear, and steady.
The Inner Work of Women’s Spiritual Leadership: A Quiet Benediction
If you are a woman stepping into spiritual leadership, know this: the parts of you that tremble are not disqualifying. The tremble is evidence that you care. The path you’re walking is not about becoming untouchable; it’s about becoming trustworthy, which is a very different thing. Trustworthiness grows in the soil of felt reality, the days you tell the truth gently, repair quickly, and choose groundedness over performance.
Your inner landscape will keep changing as the seasons change. Let it. Let it teach you. Make you a leader who carries warmth without burning, clarity without cutting, and power without pretending you never doubted. That’s leadership people can breathe around. That’s leadership that heals.
