Light

Today is Christmas.

Merry Christmas, dear one.

We’ve just celebrated Solstice, the beginning of the return of the light, and this morning the sunrise over the city is brilliantly painted with glorious colors of existence.

Last night I attended a late-night service at the Swedenborgian church. Much of the service was focused on the birth of Jesus, celebrating this day as a birthday, not only for Jesus, but for us all.

I was wonderfully surprised when the pastor spoke words from multiple faiths, including words from Krishna and about Buddha. And then we spoke this prayer:

“O God, place light in my heart, light in my tongue, light in my hearing, light in my sight, light behind me, light in front of me, light on my right, light on my left, light above me and light below me; place light in my nerves, in my flesh, in my blood, in my hair and in my skin; place light in my soul and make light abundant for me; make me light and grant me light.”

(which is very close to one attributed to Muhammad).

And then there is this Navajo prayer, which I find evokes the same feeling in me:

“Beauty is before me, and beauty behind me, above me and below me, hovers the beautiful. I am surrounded by it, I am immersed in it. In my youth, I am aware of it, and in old age I shall walk quietly the beautiful trail. In beauty it is begun. In beauty it is ended.”

Light, love, beauty… all words that point to something that no word could begin to capture…

At the end of the service we each lit our candle and carried them outside back into the world. It was moving.

I felt the thread of Oneness of all religions, the love and the light.

Perhaps some might feel this mixing of religions to be upsetting. Perhaps, though, this coming together of ways of seeing God and ourselves is exactly right-timing.

Isn’t the realization of our Oneness what we must come to know to survive?

Isn’t the very-real lived experience of the love and light we truly are what will help us to lay down our separateness?

Isn’t that what we all really want? To be loved. To be loved simply as we are. To know the light within us, and the light that surrounds us, as our true nature.

May you know the great love that you are.

May you be filled with the Light of this great love.

May you radiate this Light, simply as an expression of your true nature.

‎

“So the darkness shall be the light,
And the stillness the dance.”

Happy Solstice!

“It does not pay to cherish symbols when the substance lies so close at hand.” ~ Audre Lorde

::

Why do we look for God out there, up there, outside of us, when all that exists is the sacred made manifest?

The substance of the sacred is so close you can touch it, so close you can breathe it, in fact closer than your breath.

I am filled with the light of the sacred.

You are filled with the light of the sacred.

All is filled with the light of the sacred.

A shadow hovers over this light. We fear seeing it.

We fear our own magnificence.

We’ve been taught we are not worthy. That is not so. We are the sacred made manifest in form.

Hide not from your own light.

Hide not from your own darkness.

Turn to look within.

See the light of the sacred shining from the very center of your being.

See the darkness of the mystery, where what is yet to be lies waiting to be known.

I can tell you one thing: I see your beauty and it is breathtaking.

I will not be silent about your beauty.

I will not be silent.

::

image  by Flickmor, shared under cc2.0

Close to the Earth.

Full and ripe.

My body is cooking something up.

She’s been with something unseen and unknown.

She’s been kissed by Creation.

Supple and supine, she dances in the dark.

With quivers and shivers, she responds to an unseen touch.

There is something I know, but don’t yet know.

Something moves within her,

silently waiting to bring forth great light into the world.

Receptive and soft, my heart places trust in

that which knows of things to come.

Woman with a Crescent Moon (or) The Eclipse, by Paul Albert Besnard - 1888

She eclipses the moon. And in response, it’s as if the moon highlights the darkness of the feminine mystery that surrounds her.

The Moon. The Dream World. Mystery.

Last night, I slept within a vivid dream world. The overarching theme of the dreams was the simplicity of life when we live from the truth.

Simple, yes. Painless, no.

I dreamed of the body and it’s relationship to truth. In my dream, I became completely embodied. All the way home. Conscious throughout. The further down I went into the body, the clearer the truth was.

In my dream, when I arrived at the very bottom, so to speak, of my body, meaning I was conscious all the way down from the hairs on my head to the ends of my toes, and in every cell in-between, the truth was sparklingly clear and radiant.

If I attempted to do something that did not come from this truth that my body knows, I couldn’t move. I couldn’t act. My body stood steadfast, while my mind argued like a sullen child.

Then, even my chattering mind dropped away. I was only conscious through the body, but in every cell. All there was was truth. All action came from truth. I didn’t fight myself. I didn’t fight others. I just lived from the wisdom of the body.

In this place, full embodiment meant full truth. There was no choice but to live truth, to act from truth, to love from truth.

I could feel the peace that moved throughout the body as I moved in the world.

Coming down into the sacred flesh and bones that was home for me, I could no longer pretend I’m not powerful beyond any kind of human measure; I could no longer stay quiet in the face of the violence that others face every day; I could no longer choose false safety and security over right action. Choice and action were a fluid dance that flowed straight out of conscious awareness.

In the light of morning, I sat up in bed with a new understanding of the power of embodiment.

Next…

In part two of this three part series, I will move deeper into the body and the power it offers to us if we’re willing to come home to it. The body knows. The body remembers. The body could tell stories, all the stories of my life from before I was born up to this very moment.

Diana

“Give voice to what you know to be true, and do not be afraid of being disliked or exiled.” – Eve Ensler

For some time now, I have seen a vision of where women must go if we are to discover the true depth of our capacities as women.

I know we’ve been under the shadow of men for a long time, and I know we must step out from under this shadow if we are to discover our nature as women, and bring the beautiful gifts of this nature to our world, a world that is thirsty for it…and the feminine.

When I speak of this, it is sometimes misunderstood as being under the thumb of men, but that’s not what I mean.

Stepping out from under the shadow has more than one layer of meaning.

Under the shadow, we can’t see who we are. We see ourselves in a masculine light, like there is no other way to be than like a man, or to be liked by a man.

Under the shadow, we take on the shadow side of the collective, seeing ourselves as the shadow of the culture, you know, the whole Eve complex, that women are responsible for the fall (and I don’t mean Eve Ensler).

Under the shadow, we don’t see our own light…we simply see the reflection of the masculine, or we see the masculine’s light and believe it is ours, too.

The second wave of feminism helped open the doors so we could discover our place in the world, discover our abilities to make it in a masculine world, and we’ve done that. We’ve proven we can lead alongside men. We’ve also come to see that many of us have had to ‘do it all’ in order to succeed in the ways we’ve wanted. Many of us also see we had to put away something, we had to put away our true nature, our womanliness.

Using words such as womanliness has its risks. To be honest, I don’t know what womanliness is. I know what I’ve been told it is. I know what I experience as a woman, but to know a nature not in relation to men is to relearn what it is to be woman. In some ways we can only know something by way of something else. But when we see our womanliness in response to men, or the masculine, it gets obscured by conditioning, and conditioned responses.

If we’ve put that away, what is it we take back out? What did we hide away?

::

Today I came across this quote by Llewellyn Vaughn-Lee, a Sufi Sheik. I’ve seen him speak many times. He is an extraordinary mystic who sees what can’t be seen, and speaks to us of what we need to know.

“Our spiritual nature, buried under collective taboos.”

“A collective pattern that denies the real nature of the feminine.”

As Vaughn-Lee shares, the feminine is a both/and: the feminine principle (that which is in both women and men), as well as the embodiment of the sacred feminine that is inherent in women.

We women can’t see our true reflection by looking into the cultural pool, for it is laced with ideas, taboos, fears and beliefs that hide the true nature of the feminine.

The cultural shadow is built upon those taboos. The shadow is what we repress, what we put away into the dark, what we learned at a young age we couldn’t be if we were to remain ‘good girls’ living in the collective.

The real nature of the feminine lies buried under the shadow. We can’t know ourselves at the core, until we’re willing to look into the darkest places. We can’t come into balance within, balance between our feminine and masculine natures, until we aren’t obscured by this collective taboo-ridden shadow. And, we won’t come into right relationship with men, until we know ourselves fully as women.

It takes courage and commitment, and I add, a community of like-minded women committed to the journey

::

sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;

~Galway Kinnell

::

To relearn through touch, through words, through connection: the real nature of the feminine can only flower from within.

So we begin with self-blessing: blessing self as woman, blessing self as sacred, blessing self as lovely.

This image, Diana, was taken by gAbY on Flickr, shared under CC2.0 license

There is something amazing in women: beautiful, soft, gentle, strong, vibrant and powerful, the fullness of which is being kept hidden from the world. The world needs this beauty to be brought forward, to shine, to share and to engage with all of life.

Sometimes we catch glimpses of this amazingness of women: a look here, a touch there, words of wisdom spoken with eloquence, strength and grace.

I see this femaleness in my friends, my sisters, my daughters. I see it in strangers as they are with their children, or interact in business, or even simply walking down the street.

I feel this femaleness within my own self, deep within my body. It is my life force and the source of my creativity. When I don’t allow this truth of who I am to be seen, I can feel resentful, but it is only me that can allow it out.

When I coach my female clients to reclaim this femaleness, this vibrancy that is the source of the juice of life, I get to feel the exquisite expression of life dancing as woman. On some level, we are all, men and women, looking to reclaim this vibrancy, this life force that is ever present within. Perhaps we simply need to be the encourager to each other, to radiate another’s beauty so that they may see it themselves. The wonderful part of this assignment is that this is how we will truly come to know our own radiance.

Can you be the encouragement of Light that Hafiz speaks of for another woman? Find one very special woman and be the encouragement of light against her being. See what you find in doing so.

It Felt Love

How

Did the rose

Ever open its heart

And give to this world

All its

Beauty?

It felt the encouragement of light

Against its

Being,

Otherwise,

We all remain

Too

Frightened.

~Hafiz

photo by dragonflysky on flickr