Welcome to the In Her Image podcast, where we seek and celebrate Mother God through the scriptures, scholarship, mythology, the arts, and everyday life.

I am Jessica Woodbury, your host, and I am so

excited to have with us the wonderful Valerie Hammaker from the latter day struggles podcast today.

So welcome to the podcast, Valerie. Hi, I am so excited to be here. Thank you for having me, Jessica.

I am assuming that many of you listeners know who she is, but we're still going to start

with a little bio of her before we get going in this conversation. Well, actually, first I'll set it up.

So first I'll just say, as hosts of this podcast, sometimes we'll come together and talk about

what do we think are some of the topics that we feel like our listeners are really struggling

with. And so as we were thinking about that and talking about that, we have talked about

how many responses we get from people about navigating the difficult emotions that come with

this journey. And we have the wide range of emotions. People share just how inspired they are and the joy that they are experiencing. But we also the wide range of emotions. You know, people share just how, how inspired they are

and just the joy that they are experiencing. But we also get a lot of messages about the struggles

that unfortunately often come with this journey of awakening to the divine feminine. And it's really

sad that that happens because it's a beautiful thing. But because of other things that we have to

navigate while also going on

this journey, often there can be some wounding or some sadness and other things that are really

hard to work through as well. So we wanted to do an episode talking about the complexity of all

of that. And we wanted to invite someone on who could help us to entangle some of that complexity and to

possibly talk with us about ways to navigate the difficult side of this and then also be able to

figure out how best to move forward in a way that can help us to more fully experience and

embrace the joyful aspects of it as well. So Valerie was one of

the first people to come to mind for us as we thought about that because she has this background in

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