Honoring the Sacred Feminine – unabashedly female

November 14, 2013November 14, 2013

Bodies of Grace

” Women can acknowledge the earth’s deep sorrow and wounding, and through the heart offer it back to God who is the source of all sorrow and all joy. It has been said that God enters through a wound, and through the earth’s sorrow a healing can take place; the consciousness of divine love can be infused in to the hidden places of the earth as well as into the bodies of women. This love can link the two worlds in a a way that has not happened before. Through that connection activated in women’s bodies through their sanctification of their own and the earth’s suffering, grace can flow into the world.” Llewellyn Vaughn-Lee

I read these words and something old and deep comes forth. It is a remembering of something that once was. It is a soul’s remembering of a time when women and the Earth were conscious, living sisters.

I’ve been doing this – acknowledging the Earth’s sorrow and wounding. I weep. Yet, I’ve not been offering it back to God. I’ve had a funny relationship with God, one where I don’t quite trust. It’s no wonder I don’t quite trust…God. Yet, I trust Love. I trust Life. I trust in my creativity. And, somewhere deeper than my mind, I know God is not different from these that I do trust.

There was a time like that when we were sisters with the Earth, or perhaps we were her daughters. And these times are asking for us to remember this relationship…with her, and with each other.

There is much suffering and chaos in the world right now. There has been for so long. People have asked me if they really need to turn to look at this suffering. I say, “Yes”. I know many women who have no time in their day to do this. Between a job that keeps them running, children to care for, a home to clean, and many worries about how they will feed their children, or if their children will be safe, they have little left for themselves. THIS is a form of deep suffering. I know these women are exhausted.

But all of us women who DO have the time, the resources, the consciousness, and the awareness of our current plight can sit with the earth’s deep sorrow and wounding, and offer it back to the Divine through our feminine hearts. We can sit with the suffering of our sisters, too, knowing how deeply connected we are to each other. And, we can offer a hand to our sisters, offering to help lighten their load in whatever way we can.

Women feel sorrow and we feel joy. We feel deeply. We know suffering and we can feel it in the Earth if we listen and sense. Our ability to feel and sense is a sacred gift.Â We’ve not been taught about the sacred ways a woman’s body can heal and feed and nourish, yet they are real and true. Somewhere deep within we know this, deep in our bones.

Our hearts and bodies CAN do this, can be the conduit for healing. We are that powerful and that blessed in love.

This IS our sacred spirituality, our sacred role in these times.

So many of us have been turned off by religious dogma that is less about the Sacred and more about control. We turn away from a sense of the Sacred because we’ve been taught that we as women are anything but Sacred. But this is not true. It’s a big fat lie.

So many of us have been taught that what we can’t see or prove is worthless. But do not believe this. Come to honor what you know.

Mother Earth can re-teach us about the Sacred. How can we look at her beauty and not know the Sacred in our own hearts? How can we sit down to a meal of warm food and not realize that She gives us everything and does not ask for anything in return?

It is time to quit believing in or fighting against the patriarchal dogma that keeps our faces turned away from the beautiful gift of being alive in a woman’s body…and the gift of being alive at all on this glorious planet. It is time to re-kindle our relationship with Life. It is time to be in service to her and to all the world’s children.

What is important is that we remember how deeply we are connected to the Earth as women, and that we feel what is here in this connection. Don’t shy away from it. Move into it. Allow yourself to be surprised at the depth of what you can feel and how deeply you are loved…you will feel sorrow and you will feel deep joy.

If you’d like to join a community of people on Facebook who are praying for our Mother Earth and for all the Earth’s children, please come join the Praying True group on Facebook. “Praying True is a worldwide community for everyone who wishes to give back to the earth with simplicity, loving intention and compassion. Our vision is to bring back love to our human relationship with All That Is, to encourage people to pray regularly for our world in whatever way flows through each person, creating ritual from the heart and in the moment with what is at hand. Then afterward, to share their truth through art making of any kind, posting it here to inspire others to honor the gift of life on this beautiful planet.”

May 22, 2013May 22, 2013

The Gift – Women’s Sacred Power of Creation

This past weekend, I led a retreat for a remarkable group of women. It was a church sponsored retreat. The women were courageous in their willingness to look within, as well as their willingness to consider the beauty, power, and profound sacredness of living life in a female body. It was truly an honor to midwife such rich and courageous experiential exercises, which brought forth this deep wisdom of the feminine.

My childhood was not filled with religious teaching. My family lineage holds a wide variety of religious traditions, but the day-to-day of my life didn’t contain these traditional teachings or stories. Instead, I was invited to question what life, love, death, and even re-birth were really about. As someone who has reached a point of life where I am coming to understand the wisdom of a life deeply lived, I am grateful I was taught to wonder.

How beautiful true wonder is…childlike wonder…wonder that causes the eyes to sparkle and the heart to open and embrace.

True awakening is a destructive process…so my teacher, Adyashanti, says. And, I can vouch for that. It isn’t becoming anything. It is unbecoming, undressing, undoing. It is shedding beliefs and veils and faces – those faces we pretend our ours, even though somewhere inside we know they are just masks to hide what we believe is the ugly, ugly me that nobody would want to know or love.

As I sat in circle with these women and shared what I know about the sacred feminine and what it has to do with a woman’s spiritual journey, I was, once again, filled with awe by the beauty, tenacity, fierceness of womanhood.

The layers of veils have been heaped upon us through conditioning and socialization.We’ve internalized them. For me, they aren’t necessarily veil-like. They’re more thick and gnarly in how they hide my true and very human humanity.

Every group of women I have led over the past eleven years has been filled with beautiful women that question, deeply, their worth and value. Whether they were groups of women directly affected by 9/11, or women in business, or women who are the web of connection within their church communities, I’ve been struck by how deep the conditioning runs that tells us a number of made-up stories about who we ‘are’, how much ‘space’ we get to take up, and how ‘loud’ our voices can be.

Yesterday, on the spur of the moment as I was traveling on the bus from downtown back to my place in the outer part of San Francisco, I hopped off and entered into an hour within the gorgeous walls of Grace Cathedral. I walked the labyrinth, lit candles for friends who are in the thick of cancer and chemo, and sat in contemplation and prayer. Again, I am not well schooled in churchly ways. Yet, when I walk into this place, something deep and old and vast comes forth, something that knows all on its own the way of the sacred.

We don’t need to be taught how to be sacred. We are sacred. Perhaps the teachings could simply lead us back to knowing this within… Perhaps this is what they were meant to do all along.Â

As I sat, I remembered a beautiful stained glass window I had seen last time I was in the church. So before I left, I went to see it. And, again, I was struck by the juxtaposition of this image alongside the more traditional religious images of the Christian faith. Here, way up high, off in one of the transepts, is this exquisite window named, The Gift, by Narcissus Quagliatta. It is a gorgeous piece of art, and it is offering a different point of view than the traditional stained glass windows of Grace Cathedral.

While I know the point of view I see expressed here is mine, I’m going to share what I see. It’s a point of view that offers us a window into the sacredness of women and of the feminine. This window shows us the sacred creativity that is at the heart of creation, the big vast void out of which everything is birthed. And, this vast void is the very same vast void that is within each woman’s body. It is the place where life comes into being within a woman’s body. It shows us, clearly, that all women contain this. The woman is shrouded for she is all women. All women are one woman.

This IS the gift. Our bodies are not objects. Our bodies contain creation.

Take a moment to consider how your life might have been different if you had grown up with this image as part of your learning. Consider how your life might have been different, as a woman, if you knew your female body was holy and sacred.

This is the power of woman, the power of life and death and rebirth. It is the power of creation. It is the power that has, and still is, feared. It is why our species has tried so hard to dominate and control life…and women.

What matters is that we LIVE this. That we live what we are, consciously. This power is within each of us and when we become conscious of it by seeing through the veils that have kept it hidden from our own awareness, we live it. We embody it. We come to know we are it.

December 16, 2011December 16, 2011

It Is Going To Be Led By Women

This is Larry Merculieff. He speaks Â on indigenous elder wisdom and modern day personal to global challenges.

I feel this is one of the most important videos of this time. It is over fourteen minutes long, and it is worth watching many, many times.Â From this talk:

“Most men and women, and even many spiritual leaders, have forgotten why women were considered sacred. Because, like a hologram inside of their bodies is the direct and exact sacred condition as the womb in the center of the universe, that is physically manifested in their womb.”

“Women, now, are being called to restore their own center of power, because even with all of this violence that has been done to women for thousands of years, you still hold this sacredness in your bodies…in the womb.”

“There is a sacred vibrational field inside of the woman that we have forgotten to honor that is the place of all the things born. Nothing new can be birthed without woman.”

“There is a way out of this and it is going to be led by women.”

“Without restoring the sacred feminine, nothing new is going to occur in this world. Nothing. We canâ€™t think ourselves out of these problems.”

Please share with me how this video moves you, as a woman, as a man.

And, please share this with others.