Empowering the Feminine within: A woman who follows her own heart

SoulCollage(R) Card Shamanic Healer & Storyteller

“The things women are most yearning for---such as deeper connection, spiritual awakening, self-expression, creativity, right livelihood, creating an enlightened world for generations to come---all require a new level of Feminine Power to bring them forth.” Jean Houston

A woman who follows her own heart has learned to listen to her intuition.

A woman who follows her own heart listens to her body guidance.

A woman who follows her own heart shares deeply, listens deeply, is present with others.

A woman who follows her own heart feels her fear, acknowledges it, but is not held back by it.

A woman who follows her own heart is always expanding, growing, learning.

A woman who follows her own heart discovers her true desires and interests.

A woman who follows her own heart is impatient to get started.

A woman who follows her own heart believes in herself, and her creative powers.

A woman who follows her own heart is able to say no, and speak her truth.

A woman who follows her own heart knows the value of doing nothing, of rest and recuperation.

A woman who follows her own heart knows that to go down and in is preparation for coming out and up.

A woman who follows her own heart is a source of calm, a balm for others.

A woman who follows her own heart leans inward in times of trouble, but is not afraid to ask for help.

A woman who follows her own heart knows that angels and guides are watching over her.

A woman who follows her own heart knows her own value.

A woman who follows her own heart accepts herself as she is, flawed but fabulous.

A woman who follows her own heart lets her children be flawed and fabulous too.

A woman who follows her own heart stands her ground.

A woman who follows her own heart knows how to be grounded in root energy.

A woman who follows her own heart lets go to the flow of synchronicity.

A woman who follows her own heart trusts the Universe and knows she is loved.

A woman who follows her own heart has a constant companion and Friend within.

A woman who follows her own heart reaches out in compassion to those who suffer, she has been there too.

A woman who follows her own heart creates an atmosphere of love and caring around her.

A woman who follows her own heart remembers where her Joy is.

A woman who follows her own heart laughs from the belly.

A woman who follows her own heart loves her body and knows she is beautiful within and without.

A woman who follows her own heart forgives herself for her mistakes.

A woman who follows her own heart is in love with Beauty.

A woman who follows her own heart is in touch with her feminine power.

Any woman who follows her own heart can learn to be this woman.

Any woman who is aware of where she is and how she feels, and doesn’t try to pretend to be something different, can be this woman.

You are that woman with heart, unfolding, becoming, and realizing herself as the goal.

Heart is the Hearth and Home of you. Come home to your heart!

Union

....I am being reminded to integrate the masculine and the feminine. to respect the Male Divinity as well as the Goddess. Six months before, on the same land, I experienced a deep and spontaneous sharing with a friend. It was as if a veil were pulled aside and I suddenly realized how alienated I had been from the Father God.

My hellfire and brimstone Christian fundamentalist upbringing had turned me off to the image of God as a punishing and critical father. In my twenties I turned to the Great Mother Goddess for comfort and healing. Now I am being guided to the next step. It is time to turn to the male side of the Divine (of my own psyche as well) to clear away the false images and find my own true relationship between the two sides.

As if to acknowledge my surrender to the task, I plunge into the pool headfirst. I am naked except for my gold ring with a triangular blue topaz, the ring I gave myself as a symbol of the sacred trinity - Father, Mother and Divine Child or Christ Being.

Kneeling in the grass, with the hot sun on my face, I pray to be shown a way to be in a true partnership of the masculine and feminine. Opening my eyes, I see two bright red dragonflies beginning their mating dance, swooping joyfully in tandem. ..."See, just like that! We can be like that and dance and fly together."

from The Woman's Retreat Book
(by a woman on retreat by herself)

Tyranny of the Masculine, yearning for the feminine

Here's a telling excerpt from The Heroine's Journey by Maureen Murdock:

"What many heroines want is exactly what their fathers wanted and toook for granted--someone to take care of them....to listen to their woes, massage their battle-weary bodies, appreciate their successes and take away the pain of their losses. They want a relationship to the feminine....but they know not what is missing, so they fill the pain with more activity....

"This obsessive need to stay busy and productive keeps her from having to experience her growing sense of loss. But what is this loss? Surely she has achieved everything she has set out to do, but it has come at great sacrifice to her soul. Her relationship with her inner world is estranged.

...She will depend on no one. She drives herself relentlessly to the brink of exhaustion. She forgets how to say no, has to be all things to all people, and ignores her own need to be cared for and loved. She is out of control. Her relationship to her inner masculine has become distorted and tyrannical, he never lets her rest...."

Reflections on feminine-masculine balance

Marion Woodman has written about slowing down and meeting the inner feminine, and of the addiction to perfection that comes from living from outer instead of inner values. In our society we are driven, strive for outer approval, let our minds rule our hearts, disconnected from our female bodies. There is a drive for competition and always being right, a drive for control that kills the vulnerability in me, that does not accept uncertainty, or not knowing. In my dreams, my male animus is either a rebel on a motorcyle with a knife aimed at my belly, with the power to kill me if I don't escape, or more recently, a dying father, having a heart-attack, crumpled on the floor at my feet, while my son tries to prop him up.

The old way is dying in me, if I allow it.

Reflections on the life lived with controlling animus in charge:

- what seeks to be right, always
- what hates to live in uncertainty
- what crushing weight on my shoulders
- what blocks my breath
- what pushes past my children in a rush
- what stirves to compete, rushes to get things done
- what forgets to breathe
- what outdoes itself all the time
yet leaves basic life supporting things undone
- what ignores the daily tasks that feed the body
- what derives nourishment from thin air and refuses the
real feelings that are food for the soul
- what punishes and never weeps
- what killing highwayman robs me in my sleep
- what nightmares I pass on to my daughter
- what love I withhold in the name of criticism
- what nasty digs and sharp words hurt others
- what refuses to be vulnerable
- what disdains all that is weak, all that is feminine & holy
- what eats up my quiet time with fretting
- what perfectionism destroys my confidence
- what adherence to law and rote ties my stomach up in knots & grinds my teeth
- what need for approval weighs me down
- what sucks all the joy out of my heart
- what puts a crick in my neck & an ache in my breast
- what will never surrender

The unknown within will be known, makes itself known, uncovers my blind eyes.

The heart sees truly, the body signals the need for self-knowledge.

The feeling body tells the truth.

I listen to my own sadness and cry cleansing tears.

It brings me closer to my self.

I hold myself dear.

musemother
alias little jenn

Where is your Sacred Feminine?

Ok - I just googled the Sacred Feminine and came across all kinds of debates about whether Mary Magdalene should be seen as Jesus' wife, a sacred harlot, inferior to the Virgin Mother Mary, and lots of Christian sites that react to Brown's book DaVinci Code, etc for even bringing up the subject of a divine feminine who is other than Mary the Mother of God.

I have read a lot of the literature recently, and have come up with my own idea of what is sacred - and what is feminine. (The question of whether we have a sacred masculine has never even crossed my mind, probably because we are all supposedly made in "god's image" and he was a Father. But Marion Woodman has called it the creative masculine or imagination.)

Here's my take: women have something divinely natural about their bodies that makes them co-creators with the Universe - they have a reproductive cycle that brings forth new life (yes, sperm is part of it too). But women have a monthly cycle that follows the moon in its waxing and waning - two weeks of building creative energy, two weeks slowing down towards the period of rest or bleeding time. Lots of people have written about how intuitive we are at this time, so I won't go on about it here. But that is the female body's link with the Universal Energy, through getting to know our bodies. And if we could link the sexual, creative aspects of our bodies with the divine aspects of universal energy....voila, Sacred Feminine. (Many other cultures have already imagined this by the way: Isis, Ishtar, Shakti, Demeter, Cybele).

To my early Christianized child's mind, it was comforting to hear stories about a Divine Father - but the Divine Mother was a virgin who had never had sex! So for all the people who resist the idea of making Mary Magdalene a spouse or consort of the son of God, just imagine for a moment that the sexual and the spiritual have been divided for so long, it is refreshing and liberating to imagine a beloved in the arms of God (and by her own choice, not as a child sold/given away to a temple to service men sexually, as someone suggested was part of the ancient rituals).

Perhaps the Sufi's have it right (Rumi) when they say we are all the beloved of god. But I like the idea of seeing breastfeeding, menstruating, childbirth and other aspects of physical humanity manifest in the female form having a Divine function as well. And thank god/ss for birth control and freedom of choice so that modern women do not feel enslaved by pregnancy and childbirth, at least in my part of the world.

What I do to balance out my 'language' problem with using the term God or Lord, is that if a prayer bubbles up inside me, I address it to Our Lord and Lady. It's not perfect, I know the universal energy of life has no gender, but I do this to balance the programming I received as a Catholic. It links me to the ancient mythology of the Sacred Marriage, that perfect balance found in the union of opposites, of male and female (see The Hebrew Goddess for a discussion of how the holy of holies in Yahweh's sacred tabernacle relates to the sacred marriage ritual).

Sacred feminine - is the yin as opposed to the yang, the receptive, moist, creative, inward, intuitive side that is in both males and females, and seemingly since it's less active, it's seen as less essential in our busy world. Yet millions of Chinese are dying this year due to overwork (they call it the mattress culture - they sleep under their desks not to miss a minute!). Connection? We are so outward focused, so work and success oriented, so Yang and masculine in our culture of work, that there is little value placed on the yin, the receptive center, the place where we rest.

Sabbath has been lost, the sabbatu or heart's rest, the sacred day off of Ishtar, Queen of Heaven at the full moon, when she was menstruating.

Anyway, getting off topic a bit - Kundalini energy is inside of all of us too, men and women, and it's not yin, although it could be visualized as the fiery hot flashes that menopausal women experience, and therefore connected to the sacred feminine.

Just thought I'd add to the mish-mash of ideas on the topic of Sacred Feminine, a topic close to my feminine (yet father's daughter) heart.

musemother
originally posted on musemother in 2006