First posted on July 28, 2012

Ok, people…Let’s put all the hidden weapons on the table: all the arguments with teeth, the pointed looks, the dismissing gestures – yes, the prayer books, the time-worn copy of The Secret Doctrine and the crystal wands as well… and the crucifixes and malas and everything else that you use to protect yourself when backed up against material existence.

Let’s get rid of the uncomfortably-pitched, holier-than-Thou tone of voice and the tight smiles and the bowing and scraping. Turn off the ambient trance-inducing music, take the buds out of your ears and shut off that Eckhart Tolle CD. Put out the incense and the smudge stick, stash the Ayahuasca, close up that crown chakra  and come sit here by the fire. We need to talk.

Sometimes I wonder whether I will live long enough to see us make it through this shift – to see people really GET the Divine Feminine….

We know that we need to protect the Earth –  Facebook is rife with achingly beautiful photos of this jewel of a planet invoking our love of nature and images of logging and oil-interest devastation evoking shame and incredulous rage (and eventually, hopefully, inspiring action).  The Earth aspect of the Divine Feminine is easy to wrap our minds and hearts around, right..?

But the ideals and principles that we are fighting for –what we would often say is our mission in life – are based on the opposite of what we saw and were programmed with when we were young. We struggle for justice when we have experienced injustice; we dedicate our lives to helping children because we were wounded deeply when we were kids – we push against what hurts us and make this the focus of our lives. The problem is that what was programmed into us – what we experienced between about 0 – 5 years of age – is the foundation of our belief systems. What we consider to be the ideals upon which we found our existence are therefore actually fighting against what we really believe. And so we struggle and fight and sacrifice – all those words based in opposition – but we at the same time are denying what our true beliefs are, and in the end we will sabotage our own struggle. The person who throws herself at the world to prove that she is NOT stupid, ordinary, fragile, powerless, that she will never get anywhere in life, etc. really believes on an absolute cellular level that she is all those things….If we fight for justice, it is more than likely because we truly believe that the world is an unjust place….and it is our core beliefs that create our realities, NOT our ideals. So…we will always have something to fight against…unless we can recognise and release our programming.

We’ve learned through the millennia that life in a physical body is a battle – our bodies are prisons that we must struggle to feed, clothe and protect. On top of this, we come into a body and the first thing the vast majority of us learn is that we must mould our behaviour in order to be loved by the people upon whom we are dependent for our physical survival. We learn that in order to be loved and cared for (and by corollary, therefore to survive physically), we must betray our souls – our true selves…. The soul/body split is underscored and an antipathy toward the body is instilled. At the same time, a love-hate relationship is established with Mother – one that will colour our perceptions of food, of the Earth and of our bodies, particularly if they happen to be female…..

What I am saying here is that the vast majority of us, particularly in spiritual communities, have not come anywhere near admitting, much less understanding, the extent of the distaste /distrust/disgust we really feel about those Other aspects of the Divine Feminine – motherhood, our bodies and material existence in general. Yes, we find kittens and flowers and sunsets beautiful, but they’re not quite enough to balance out the dissonant down side of physicality – old age, war, poverty, cruelty, disease….. We focus on our minds and spirits and all the different techniques we can learn and apply to get out of here as fast as possible.

“God the Father” is the absent daddy who is always a hero and can do no wrong because he is never around – Mother Earth is the ever-present and therefore non-respected mommy who has historically shouldered most of the blame and responsibility for anything that’s gone awry.  Our present state of awareness is similar to that of the person who declares “My mother was a saint”, while never, EVER wanting to be like her….. Daddy may have been a creep – but he had all the power….

Throughout my life, I have often found it wearing and even heartbreaking to be an advocate for the Feminine – for our bodies as part of the Earth, not only as repositories of our human history, but also as the one necessary tool to our ascension – and this has not only been because of being the object of so many mommy projections…. I guess that this particular rant has been a long time coming!

Here it goes:

• Training our bodies to look great (whatever that means to us individually) and to make them do everything and anything we want them to do does notequate with loving our bodies, any more than we are really “loving” a child or an animal as long as it is obedient, or loving Nature only when it is manicured and domesticated, not wild;
• Loving the Earth while hating Humanity is a non sequitur – we are all part of the living being that is Gaia;
• We women are just as, if not more, misogynous as men:  we revere our intellects and dislike and abuse our bodies; we claim to crave sisterhood but so often prefer the company of men – or male-defined women; we are still buying all the negative stereotypes about our emotions, the ability to receive and the ability to simply Be without performing – all of these seen as evidence of weakness and vulnerability;
• To the frustration/amusement of many female teachers, a male voice is almost always given more credibility and therefore more support. A woman can say something for years that will only be heard when it is said by a man. Published authors are routinely favoured for promotion over anyone working in the oral and experiential traditions.
• Most of us are like tourists in our bodies – and we consider it an extreme adventure to even do a day-trip into our hearts. The belly – well – that’s like walking into a war zone. That is where we have stored all the toxic waste of our lives – the sludge of shame and self-hatred that surrounds and eventually suffocates the creative life force that also lives there…. Any activity that pulls us into our bellies – sex, pregnancy and birth, belly-dancing – will end up emotionally far messier than we often imagine

Our work to rediscover the Divine Feminine (she hasn’t gone anywhere, by the way, and exists quite independently of our ability or inability to perceive her) must involve some potentially less-than-pleasant forays into our bodies, to unpack from our cells the mouldering ancestral beliefs about physical reality and our place within it…. In encountering and witnessing these beliefs, we can release them bit by bit and so liberate both our bodies and our ancestors of the limitations of duality… We will finally be able to exercise our true free will to create the future we desire….

We are in the process of birthing a New Human. It’s a normal birth, with the head presenting first….but the body must follow….!  To become fully incarnate, body and soul uniting the duality of Heaven and Earth/ Spirit and Matter, is, I believe, our destiny…and our responsibility.

Stay with me a bit, here by the fire….With feet rooted in the earth, imaginations stretching into the multiverse, hearts connected by our common humanity…our common destiny…Can you not feel it in your bones and flesh, how wonderful it is – what an honour it is – to be in this body, here and now? As gratitude fills your heart and spreads to warm your Being, the Goddess rises within you….

Blessèd Be!

Blessings and Love,

Dawn

For support with living in your body, you can go to:

https://dawnbramadat.wordpress.com/visualizations/    (in English and French)