Awakening the New Millennium Priestess: An interview with Anyaa McAndrew by Tim Miejan July 2005

It’s widely acknowledged by those attuned to the energies of the Earth that much more balance is needed. The Divine Feminine, once a powerful force on the planet, has been overshadowed by a patriarchy that diminishes the presence of the feminine. The result: few women in the role of spiritual leader and a culture lacking in compassion and nurturance of all. Cries can be heard, if one listens carefully, for the sacred feminine to be restored as an equal player in the consciousness of this planet.

McAndrew’s work is grounded in Transpersonal and Shamanic psychology, as she walks the spiritual path of the Goddess. Anyaa is an ordained Madonna Ministry Bishop, a Magdalen High Priestess, a Certified Shamanic Astrologer and Shamanic Breathwork facilitator, and teacher of Tantra and a Certified Imago Therapist. Her Priestess Circles empower women to reclaim the lost soul essence of the priestess within, while learning to walk in the underworld of their own fears to gain power, playful passion and magnetism.


She spoke with Edge Life about the role of the Priestess and why the awakening process is vital in the lives of those who experience it.

For those who have never heard of the Priestess Process, describe its intention and for whom it’s intended.
McAndrew:
The Priestess Process is intended for women only and women who are interested in expanding their spiritual life and also stepping more into their own personal and spiritual authority. It is to assist women in stepping fully into their spiritual authority, their personal authority, and also something that we call “individuating from the patriarchy.” A lot of us feel like we’ve done that, but there are little places in our psyche where we’re still attached to the patriarchal culture, so the process really gives us an opportunity to be centered around our own Divine inner feminine.

Regarding the patriarchy, do you mean that within women there is still something within them it’s okay to go along with it?
McAndrew:
We do an interesting process on the second weekend. It’s a process of getting in touch with what we call our inner patriarch. We’ve found that the inner patriarch is an aspect of the super-ego, like the inner critic or the inner judge, and it gets passed down to us from our mothers. It’s a set of unconscious beliefs and judgments and rules about women and about how to get along in a patriarchal world.

In our process, we interview each other and get to hear our own inner patriarch; it’s a sub-personality, so it comes through in this exercise. We get to see those limiting beliefs. Each woman has a ceiling, and that ceiling is a place that each of us have to push through to be able to be a woman of power. These internal beliefs would have us believe that, somehow, women are inferior, or we should keep our mouths shut.

All of this was created in the Collective for good reasons. If you think about it, 200, 500, 1,000 years ago, for a woman to be in her power meant certain persecution or even death. So these rules, or this inner patriarch, that’s been passed down from generation to generation…

Protected them in the past.
McAndrew:
Yes! It was a way for our mothers to actually keep us alive, to keep us safe. So, that’s an example of what I’m talking about in terms of the individuation process.

Continue reading “Awakening the New Millennium Priestess: An interview with Anyaa McAndrew by Tim Miejan July 2005”

If Men Could Menstruate: A Political Fantasy by Gloria Steinem

A white minority of the world has spent centuries conning us into thinking that a white skin makes people superior – even though the only thing it really does is make the more subject to ultraviolet rays and to wrinkles. Male human beings have built whole cultures around the idea that penis-envy is “natural” to women – though having such an unprotected organ might be said to make men vulnerable, and the power to give birth makes womb-envy at least as logical.

In short, the characteristics of the powerful, whatever they may be, are thought to be better than the characteristics of the powerless – and logic has nothing to do with it.

What would happen, for instance, if suddenly, magically, men could menstruate and women could not? Continue reading “If Men Could Menstruate: A Political Fantasy by Gloria Steinem”