Urgent Message from Mother: Gather the Women, Save the World

The message to all women of the world is, "Wake Up! Arise! Do not ask for permission to gather the women. What cannot be done by men, or by individual women, can be done by women together. Earth is Home."

Jean Shinoda Bolen's life's work — her Jungian-inspired insights in The Tao of Psychology, the blockbuster Goddesss in Every Woman, the empowering Crones Don't Whine, and The Millionth Circle — all lead up to this book. It is an urgent message and an empowering one. "When women are strong together, women can be fiercely protective of what we love."

Bolen's poetic polemic explores the psychological, spiritual, and scientific aspects of women as collaborators for change. She begins with a Jungian examination of the idea of the Holy Grail archetype as "every woman's secret" and the transformative power of the sacred feminine — the Goddess, Gaia, Earth Mother. Bolen explains Rupert Sheldrake's Theory of Morphic Resonance, which describes how societies and even species can undergo rapid evolution when they reach a tipping point. She explains that "we've learned that women gathering together in groups and telling the truth of their lives can actually change the world." She points to a fascinating UCLA study proving that women react to stress differently than their male counterparts. Instead of the "fight or flight" reaction, women have a "tend and befriend" response as a result of an increase in oxytocin, the maternal bonding hormone. While men become more adrenalized and aggressive, women nurture and protect — biologically. From this and other compelling evidence Bolen makes a strongly convincing case that now is the time for women to lead — to fiercely protect all that we love.

Urgent Message from Mother offers a unique combination of visionary thinking and practical how-to and is Jean Shinoda Bolen's most activist work to date. Written in a lyrical language that inspires, this book seeks to galvanize the still untapped power of women coming together to change our world.

Listen to your mother; she is calling.

"'Gather the women,' says Jungian analyst Bolen, is 'an urgent message from Mother to her Daughters,' a call for the women's movement (after the suffragists and the movement of the 1960s and 70s Bolen calls this third movement 'the women's peace movement') to end conflict and violence in the world. Drawing on the archetypal gender differences she elaborated on in Goddesses in Everywoman and Gods in Everyman, Bolen believes women have the nurturing and caring gifts that the world needs right now. But Bolen, who is a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California Medical Center, draws on scientific research showing that women's brains make them better able to be 'whole people,' able to develop both their intellectual and emotional sides, and thus better able to respond to the needs of children and the suffering world as a whole. Bolen's history of the relationship between patriarchy, authoritarianism and violence focuses only on the three monotheistic religions, overlooking the history of warfare in Asia; and she is not fully correct in saying that Judaism, Christianity and Islam have banished the Sacred Feminine; the Jewish conception of God does incorporate a feminine side (the Shekhinah), and the Virgin Mary is certainly a sacred maternal presence in Christianity. Nevertheless, women attracted to Bolen's Jungian and spiritual approach will find inspiration and sustenance here." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Jean Shinoda Bolen's Urgent Message from Mother is a book whose time has come. Our earth home and all forms of life in it are at grave risk. We men have had our turn and made a proper mess of things. We need women to save us. I pray that many will read Bolen's work and be inspired then to act appropriately. Time is running out." Desmond Tutu

"This is the most inspiring and optimistic book I've read in years. It tells how women working together can bring us peace and save the planet. Jean Shinoda Bolen invites us all to join the next, most powerful wave of the women's movement. Count me in!" Isabel Allende

"Always urging us into circle and into peace, the healing power of Jean Shinoda Bolen's work and thought transforms all who will allow encounter. Jean never tires of wanting, and working for, our freedom, our healing and our health." Alice Walker

"Jean Shinoda Bolen shows us how the cult of masculinity is endangering us all. Women and men are equally human and fallible but at least women don't have our masculinity to prove — and that alone may make us the main saviors of this fragile Spaceship Earth." Gloria Steinem

"Urgent Message from Mother is a heart-shaking book which offers a powerful vision of why the world must change and how such a pivotal undertaking might be accomplished. In these compact pages Jean Shinoda Bolen courageously brings us to the brink of an erupting and necessary wisdom and to a feminine spiritual activism whose time is here and now." Sue Monk Kidd, author of The Mermaid Chair and The Secret Life of Bees

"Never have we needed the wisdom of Jean Shinoda Bolen more. This book brought me back to my spiritual center reminding me how much we need the stories of women to restore empathy to the world. Bolen has given us all an assignment: Gather, circle, act. Mother Earth is asking for our help. How can we not respond?" Terry Tempest Williams, author of The Open Space of Democracy

Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D., is a psychiatrist, a Jungian analyst in private practice, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California Medical Center, and an internationally known lecturer.