THE WOMAN'S MOVEMENT: HER INNER REVOLUTION
by Audrey Hope
"Girl, you made it to the other side." -Sade
Her revolution, that has been turning inside of her, since the beginning of time, has really been about the movement to her true self and soul. It seemed as if her fight was about finding her place in the world, her work, her status, her money and standing tall for equality. Yet, in all her battles, what she truly wanted was to be free to be her self - Again. FEMINISM IS SPIRITUALITY. It is, and always has been, a journey to reclaim her voice, her deep strength and self-esteem. She has been longing to live in her inner temple, her secret garden, and to follow the inner laws of her heart- Again.
Women once gathered in circles under the moon, and watched the changing cycles of the sun and the stars. She listened to the sacred sounds of nature, and the intuitive whispers in the wind. When she was raped throughout history, they took her gifts to revere mother earth and the creation of all human life. The truth is that all people in all parts of the world, in all of time, worshipped the female deity as female. There is too much evidence on the planet to support this. When we stop denying this truth, and allow it back into our lives, we reawaken her magic for divine wisdom, inspiration and compassion. A contemporary reclamation of goddess history is not for the pretty stories, or to imagine her sitting on a golden throne, able to fly through the heavens. She is real. And in her honor, we restore her gentle omnipotence that knows how to guide with loving hands.
When we instill positive images of womanhood back into the culture, into our daily lives, we refuse the destructive forces of hierarchy and racism and sexism and patriarchialism, in all forms. We end the thought system of any group having the divine right to rule over another. We stop false beliefs that one is better than another, that women are less then men, and men are so much more.
A wrong history is damaging, not because it is a wrong story retold to our children, but because it destroys women in the present moment. With the heavy baggage of a false self, she cannot step gracefully into the future. The chains of an untrue yesterday make her always wanting. She then strives too hard to be perfect, to be young and beautiful, and to climb an impossible ladder, a mountain with no top. She thinks that she is never enough. She must always change. Her problems with anorexic, bulimia, rape, abuse, instability, depression, and unhappiness come directly from the rape of the goddess. The emancipation of women has been her cry for personal freedom. It is the kind of freedom that breaks the inner chains, and has a thunder that screams- “I am enough. I am perfect, now in this moment. I love myself.” And in that place, is true ecstasy that needs and wants nothing. It is a present that each woman can give herself - Now.
The goddess lives within all. A woman, who honors herself, is a queen. And a man who knows how to love a goddess is a king. Then both can join together and make the earth a paradise. The goddess is for today. We need her. In her embrace, we relearn the ancient secrets of the universe, and the ways of love. We can find hope in her eyes. Silence the goddess, no longer. Then and now she holds the key to peace.
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Women are the enlightening strength of every civilization. They innately possess the gifts to inspire, create and the power to heal. It is their feminine gifts of love and compassion that is the hope for our world. It is time for women. Women can save the world.
Audrey Hope, www.hopesrealwomen.com,
THE TAO OF MOM: The Wisdom of Mothers from East to West
by Taro Gold
."Too many women in too many countries speak the same language of silence" -Anasuya Sengupta (Indian social activist and poet)
"Don't be surprised when a child's adolescence begins before a father's adolescence ends." -Great Aunt Iko (homemaker, beauty salon owner, Soka Gakkai Buddhist teacher)
"We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something and that this thing must be attained." -Marie Curie (Polish-born French scientist who became one of the greatest scientists of the twentieth century, winning two Nobel Prizes in physics in 1903 and in chemistry in 1911. She performed pioneering studies with radium and contributed profoundly to the understanding of radioactivity.)
"Creative minds have always been known to overcome any kind of bad training" –Anna Freud (Austrian pioneer in child psychoanalysis and daughter of Sigmund Freud)
"I suppose leadership at one time meant muscles; but today it means getting along with people." -Indira Gandhi (Only child of India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Became the first woman prime minister of India from 1966-1977)
"Liberty and equality are the two inalienable rights of the individual" –Madame Sun Yat-sen (Chinese civil rights advocate and political leader)
"The fragrance always stays in the hand that gives the rose" –Hada Bejar
"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." –Anais Nin (French born author and diarist)
"An absence of rainy days in life makes for a desert in the heart." –Taro Gold's mother
Excepts taken from THE TAO OF MOM, by Taro Gold (Andrew McMeel Publishing, 2004)
WE'D EMBRACE THE FEMININE FACE OF SPIRITUALITY
by Tami Coyne
As truly as God is our Father, so truly is God our Mother. (Julian of Norwich, 1373)
When I was younger, it didn't bother me that here in the West the deity is most often referred to as "God the Father." My nonchalance at this gross exclusion of my gender in the Judeo-Christian religious worldview should have made me madder than hell. After all, I've got great feminist credentials. I went to Smith College back in the late '70s--and I'm old enough to have seen for myself that women can do anything they damn well feel like. It's just that until I contemplated creating a new life, it didn't dawn on me that our universe shouldn't be solely run by a single dad.
Don't get me wrong--dads are great, but mothers are also great. And since none of us would be here without one, it's more than strange that we females wouldn't have a recognized role in the cosmic creative process. After all, except for one-cell organisms and sea horses, the female of the species is the big Kahuna when it comes to incubating, birthing and nurturing new young.
In late 1997, before I got pregnant, I went on a spiritual retreat. In the company of three laywomen and one kick-ass nun, I finally woke up to the female nature of divinity. And it changed my life for good.
Hidden behind God the Father, I found Sophia, which means "wisdom" in Greek, the female face of God. And anyone, male or female who has ever encountered our ancient, primordial, ever-present mother knows that, as the bridge between heaven and Earth, she has as much to do with creation as our universal father. Sophia is known by many names: Nature, the Holy Spirit, the World Soul. But she doesn't really care what you call her, because she is not some otherworldly egomaniac. All she really wants, like most mothers, is for her children to call her regularly, listen to what she has to say, and take her advice when she gives it.
I needed Sophia to prepare me for motherhood, which she lovingly did. My daughter was born less than a year after I first encountered the glorious Goddess within. I named her Sophia so that she'd always remember that she's not only the daughter of a powerful father but of a magnificent mother, too.
(Excerpt taken from If Women Ruled the World)
FALLING IN LOVE
As time goes on, you begin to realize that all these men, or women, you are so fatally attracted to are all very much alike at their core. You're really falling in love with your own projection each time. Gradually, it gets through to you that it's not the other person you're in love with, but part of your own self that you're projecting onto that person. It's those projected parts of ourselves that we have to pull back.
That [pulling back] is the most painful, agonizing process in the world. Because you have to recognize that what you thought was out there in an other person is not out there, but inside yourself. Most people experience pulling back a projection as isolation, as being cut off from the outer world. But if you have loved a man and you have projected your inner god onto him, you have to recognize that he isn't a god after all. The real god is inside. You have to recognize the illusions, the delusions and the pain of human limitation. Then gradually it dawns on you what a huge mistake you've made.
When you're able to recognize that it's your god you've been projecting, or, in a man's case, the goddess, you learn to hold that divinity within. Then you're able to ask yourself, "Do I love that human being?" And you may find out that you do. That this man is sharing the journey with you, and he's put up with (dare I say) all your shit (that's how dreams image it), and you've put up with his, and there the two of you are, walking through life, together. There's something noble in his suffering. There's something noble in your own suffering. You're not leaning on each other. You're walking parallel paths, you're not holding each other up. That's a marvelous thing, to love another human being like that.
[This means] you have to be able to separate the human from the divine...to say "Last night I was in transcendent space. I was a goddess and I felt myself loved by a god. But this morning I wash the dishes and eat my oatmeal".
(Excerpt taken from CONSCIOUS FEMININITY by Marion Woodman).
NOTE: An excerpt from CONSCIOUS FEMININITY can also be found at Voices from the Underground
THE HEART AND SOUL OF SEX: Doors to the Universe
by Gina Ogden
The following is an article published in THE CENTER POST, Fall 2006.The Center Post is published by the Rowe Center
"Isn't there more to sex than this?" This is what nearly every woman coming into my therapy office really wants to know. Whatever her presenting problem, there's an ultimate longing for connection and meaning in sexual experience—for more than intercourse, more than genital foreplay, more than "was it good for you?"
Over 3,000 women responded to my survey: "Integrating Sexuality and Spirituality (ISIS) and most say that sexual experience can involve an intense spiritual journey. It can open up "doors to the universe"—a universe of vibrant light and color, intense feeling, revelation, and encounters with God, Goddess, Spirit, Higher Power, or whatever name fits your belief system. It can open up the deep stories of your own life, too—profound truths of creativity and resilience. When sex and spirituality meet, you feel at one with yourself, with your partner, with nature, with all that is. All's right with your world.
Our spiritual journeys wake us up. They delight us, inspire us. Women speak of increased energy, power, and pleasure—more positive attitudes, more honest relationships, clearer purpose. A 32-year old woman says connecting sex and spirit liberates her from the doubt that sometimes assails her sexual pleasure. "I feel myself climbing upward, and when I reach the peak, I'm released of any bad feelings, any bad thought. It's as though I've done no wrong and can start over again."
I have experienced sex as a gateway to the soul—my soul, the soul I am making love to and God and all that is. By experiencing sex as a spiritual tool, I have grown strong in intuitive and telepathic abilities and grow closer and closer to God. More one-ness with All and more power to open doors to create what I choose.
The word "spiritual" comes from the Latin spirare, which means to breathe—a process that's central to our life force. So your spiritual journey doesn't mean turning away from your body, away from you senses. To the contrary, it may mean tilling your garden of earthly delights as thoroughly as you can. This is a paradox, of course, and women often speak in paradoxical terms of the "divinity" of down-to-earth activities—a familiar smell, a whispered name, an intimate touch that inspires and moves them beyond the physical. They speak of heartthumping excitement and at the same time a peace that passes understanding. A 50-year old woman writes that connecting sex and spirit is "powerful enough to manifest joy through me and bring me to my knees at the same time."
In short, spiritual sex is not an out-of-body experience. It's connected with physical sex, too, as long as it is meaningful sex—from your first earth-shattering orgasm to the alley-cat phase of falling in love to the slow details of intimacy as you mature.
Looking back on my own life, I can see that the connection of sex and spirit was at the center of my most generative choices—certainly for sexual partnership, and motherhood, even my choice of career as a therapist and researcher. For most of my life, I had no language to affirm these experiences. I was a grandmother before I fully understood how intricately woven my physical desires were with what I felt was most precious and holy. I'm totally impressed by the young women I know who already understand this and can articulate when and how they learned this truth.
Most women tell me they connect sex and spirit through relationship with their partners. Some say they've been aware of the connection from earliest memory. "I learned from the good, respectful, and sexy marriage of my parents." "I grew up on a farm and connected sex with birth and death." Some became aware late in life: "I discovered the connection when I was forty-eight" and some as recently as "last week." Others say they're acutely aware of the connection even though they've never felt its full power. Others say they learned directly from their bodies. I love what a massage therapist writes about her capacities for accessing what she calls life-force energy—and her wish for equal partnership:
My explorations and experiences as an energy worker have brought me into contact with others who are as sensitive as I am. However, I have yet to experience a lover with my abilities. When I do have the pleasure of sharing on this level with my partner...well, Planet Earth will get the ride of her life.
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When you integrate sex and spirit, you're likely to meet both religion and spirituality on your sexual journey, for rich connections weave through sex, spirit, and religion.
It's easy to confuse the terms "spirituality" and "religion." They're both about beliefs and values. They both suggest there's something out there that's more than physical, more satisfying than performance. There are major differences, though. Spirituality is about your personal beliefs and values. It concerns your relationships with human beings, nature, and divine presence as you directly experience them. Religion is an established system of beliefs and values about the divine; it involves cultural traditions and rituals, some of them literally carved in stone centuries ago. Your spiritual beliefs may shift over time. Religious doctrine is fixed.
The connections between sex, spirit and religion stem from pre-Christian religions, which worshipped the human body along with sun, moon, wind, rain, and other sacred mysteries of nature. Especially, they worshipped women's bodies and their magical cycles of blood and pregnancy and birth. To celebrate all this natural fecundity, sexual union was built into early worship—sometimes to wild excess, as in Bacchanalian orgies and Celtic Beltane ceremonies with May Day bonfires and gluttonous mating. Lustiness was next to godliness—along with feasting, drinking, and dancing. Pleasure, orgasm, and ecstasy weren't sins. They were routes to the deity.
Some religions are still based on the idea that sex can be a path to spirit: Tantric Buddhism, Chinese Taoism, Wicca, and various indigenous practices. Even some of our major religions carry vestiges of the early sexual rituals. Candles and incense, wine, flowers, music, anointing with oil, laying on of hands—all these come from those pagan rites. We've adapted them into the Catholic Mass and Protestant Eucharist without ever acknowledging their sexual roots. Here's the most interesting part—we've also adapted them into our customs of courtship and mating without ever acknowledging their spiritual connections. When we consciously make the associations, we can use them to bring spirituality into our sexual relationships.
Over the years, I began to understand that women were often using religious terms to express their sexual feelings. The flush of sexual ecstasy is "holy," "sacred," a "revelation," "a sacrament." We cry out "Oh, God!" in both churches and bedrooms the world over. The truth is, the scientific and locker-room language we have for sexual experience describes only a fraction of the whole picture—the performance part. The picture changes when women's voices are factored in.]
The way religion affects our sexuality is complex It can be negative: "I was afraid to be a sexual person because of all the rules laid down by the Baptist church. It can be positive, too: "My deep religious faith has led me to know that sexual love is also sacred love." "My spiritual practice gives me the courage to work through the intensity of my relationships." "It's in orgasm that I've seen the face of God." A 42-year-old teacher braids all of these elements together in a small miracle of a poem about sexual-spiritual-religious communion. Notice that she begins with the word "breath"—the spirit of it all.
Midnight Mass
the breath
of life
between us
as we pray in
near darkness
the door
slightly ajar
lines of yellow light
streaming in on
the pious
sips of water, wine
cleanse us
as we atone for
half-truths and old scars
we dance
on cotton cloth
hymns sung behind us
before the offerings
in praise
of body
and spirit
being in bed
with you
is
receiving communion.
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