“All beauty contains darkness.” ~ Daniel Odier

Learning to see, and then act, outside of the current patriarchal structure has been a journey of ever widening circles, much like a spiral. It is the journey of living the feminine, a way of life that is very different than that which I was taught to know. It means trusting what is revealed in each moment of present awareness, and feeling for what is ripe with the promise of birth. I go in and out of living this way, but as the circles of understanding grow, I find myself opening to the darkness of the feminine to receive Her guidance.

When this guidance is revealed, the only thing that lies ahead is darkness, the darkness of the unknown. The only thing known is that one choice, the one thing that is the most obvious choice. My mind struggles with the darkness, wanting desperately to know what lies ahead, and yet I also know in my heart that this darkness, this unknown, is the mystery of life waiting to be revealed. The divine mystery is the new, is this darkness from which all emerges.

What I am learning to trust in is the strong pull of this knowing. You might call this intuition, but for me, as I live deeper into the cells of my own body, it is knowing.

I found, what I guess you could call the ‘best’ book of 2009, this way. I saw it on a friend’s desk and knew I must read it. The pull was unavoidable. A friend had given him the book, for reasons he couldn’t understand. He had no intention of reading it, but for some reason had not yet given it away.

I would call this book a gift. A gift given and gratefully, and voraciously, received. Not all of the book kept my rapt attention, but the parts that did carried me deeper into the darkness, deeper into the parts of myself that were thirsting for light. I was yearning for gnosis. Through a marriage of the wisdom of this book and my own willingness to allow a new kind of knowing to emerge from within, I began to deepen my trust in this darkness.

The book that has so many dog ears, cracks in the spine, lines underlined, recommendations to others, is Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness. The authors are Marion Woodman and Elinor Dickson. In my knowing, this book can be a guide book for the journey into darkness that we all, and most especially women, must take. As Woodman states, “The evolutionary imperative within the collective unconscious is pushing us toward a new level of consciousness.” We must learn to stand alone, in our own wholeness, if we are going to survive. And, learning to stand alone means diving into the darkness, to come to know ourselves again in a whole new way.

As Odier shares, there is beauty in darkness. It is the rich soil from where all of life emerges.

Today’s post is Day 4 (best book) of Gwen Bells’ Best of 2009 Blog Challenge.

I have found some wonderful new books, which focus on the transformation of consciousness in which we are smack in the middle of. Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness, by Marion Woodman, has opened a flood of light deep within my cells. Woodman is an incredible prophet of the sacred feminine consciousness rising in women and men.

I’ll write more about her book in the next few posts, but right now I want to share another great book, Women of Wisdom, by Tsultrim Allione. Allione was a Buddhist Nun, but she renounced her vows because she felt the pull to become a mother. Her life has been extraordinary, and she shares so much of her experience in the newly revised edition of Women of Wisdom.

Within the pages of Women of Wisdom, Allione speaks to the reason I created this blog, Unabashedly Female. In my own experience, I could see that what was, and is, happening to me as part of consciousness awakening was reflected nowhere in the cultural stories of the world I live in. Everything we see, the stories we hear, are all part of a culture that is male-centric and still highly patriarchal. The structures and systems in place were designed with men in mind to fill their needs. We, as women, are inundated with messages that, at their core, come from these systems and structures.

Allione writes, “We try to relate our experiences to the stories of others and thereby edit our perceptions according to what fits.” (Women of Wisdom, pg. 83) Allione then quotes from Womenspirit Rising:

Women have lived in the interstices between inchoate experience and the shaping given to experience by the stories of men. In a very real sense, women have not experienced their own experience. There is a dialectic between stories and experience, Stories shape experience; experience shapes stories. Womenspirit Rising, pg. 228

If the stories we swim in reflect male systems and experience, then we never really become conscious to our own experience, what is happening to us if we continue to look to these systems for reflection. This, coupled with the understanding that the ONLY thing we can truly know is our own experience, is mana for our souls, for when we become aware of what keeps us circling in our own illusion, we can begin to wake up from it. 

For the sacred feminine to awake and rise within our own consciousness, we must wake up to the stories we have believed and aligned ourselves with, and realize they are not our stories. The truth is what is happening to us in our own experience, both individually and collectively. Part of what we do as humans is try to make sense of our experience, and if we hold it up against our conditioned world view, then we make links and assumptions that lead us to conclusions that can never be true, at least in an absolute sense.

Being Unabashedly Female is allowing ourselves to really look within at our own experience and trust that it is true. Being Unabashedly Female is about trusting ourselves, trusting our experience and opening to the transforming energies that are within our physical beings, that primal matrix of creation that resides within women. Being Unabashedly Female is also about coming together as women to share our stories and experiences so that we may develop a deeper understanding of what is happening within and without.

Unabashedly Female is ultimately about aligning with the awakening sacred feminine within all of life, and supporting a newfound respect for women and men to live together as balanced beings in our own right, knowing that our own truth can only come from within. As beloved Amma said in a talk over six years ago, “men and women must bow down to each other.”

And, we must bow down to Life, to all of Life. We CAN live into a way of life where we honor and serve the sacredness in each other, and in all of Life.