Category: Health & Healing

Moving the Feminine into the New Sensual~Sexual Story

Now that we’ve fully entered this New Age of Aquarius, it’s time to reclaim our Divine Feminine power as she’s been hiding in the Underworld far too long.

By Anyaa McAndrew & Sahara Exodus

There appears to be a variety of ways that we are living our lives in 2013. I received a newsletter from a spiritual teacher a few weeks ago that really spelled it out for me. Some of us are busily living the old story, some of us are busy finishing up writing the old story, some are in the Sacred Pause, some of us have begun to catch & ride the Co-Creative Wave, and some of us are actually writing the New Story.

When it comes to women and our body images, our sensuality, our ability & willingness  to receive pleasure in our bodies, and our sexuality, the New Story is directly connected to the Divine Feminine within us. If we can relate to the Great Mother, to Gaia, the Goddess in any way, shape or form, we may have a better chance at getting to the New Story. The old stories are really old, ancient in fact. We have been victims of violence, war, poverty and discrimination for 5,000 years. The V-day “One Billion Rising” to mitigate violence against women and girls that happened worldwide on February 14th, 2013 was probably the largest event of its kind ever. Continue reading “Moving the Feminine into the New Sensual~Sexual Story”

Moving the Feminine into the New Story by Anyaa

Happy New Year, everyone! I took 22 days off this early winter, from 12-21 through January 2nd, 2013. I meditated and slept and wandered around my house, experimenting with new recipes and did whatever felt right in the moment. Now I am back to my Sacred Work and assessing all that has taken place for me, and Gaia, and humanity.

We made it through the Shift, and what I am noticing is a core of joy, and a deeper resonating resolve inside me to move into these next years with grace, ease and a true desire to be here. That was not the case for me early last year. I was feeling tired, complete, and a strong sense that I had done all I could do, served as best I could, and I was wanting to be complete with 3-D reality!  I have spent a lifetime working with the feminine wound: that deep place of self-loathing, self-depreciation, low self-esteem, poor body-image, difficulty receiving, co-dependance, emotional chaos, persecution, rescuing and victimization along with an array of symptoms that we have carried as women for the last 5,000 years. Continue reading “Moving the Feminine into the New Story by Anyaa”

Shifting with the Perennial Principles: Truth, Beauty and Goodness by Anyaa T. McAndrew

My husband Gary & I were talking about what kind of winter we want to experience, and then we pulled the card Abundance, 3 of cups. We discussed how that meant to us that we were to practice more appreciation and express our love to each other more often. Goodness, Goddess, Love, Light….are all the same thing to me. I need Goodness to have a reason to live. They are a basic requirement to move through a winter where Gaia is birthing and the world as we have known it is shattering. 

I watched a short video tonite featuring an amazing song called “Creation Calls” and footage from the Planet Earth: Complete BBC Series. It was some of the most beautiful mother nature probably ever photographed. Beauty. How can we live without it and stay sane? I have never purchased a song from a Christian singers’ album, but I downloaded that beautifully arranged piece. The song calls me to honor heaven and earth and the intense human journey we are walking between them right now. Check it out at www.andiesisle.com/creation/magnificent.html 

Gary & I are hosting Conscious Transition community meetings in our Full Moon Sanctuary here in the mountains. We come together every few weeks or so and talk about how we are feeling, what we are doing to prepare, and what we believe about this Great Turning that we are in. That’s Truth. We seem to need to speak it aloud and express ourselves to feel connected. I noticed something really wonderful happening at our last meeting. The more we moved around the circle and the more personal truth was spoken, the more we all affirmed it in each other and spoke more of it. By the time we ended the meeting, everyone was filled with joy and enthusiasm.

Truth, Beauty and Goodness (Light, Love) seem to engender each other these days, They are bringing people together in ways that has perhaps never happened before, at least on this scale. If you cruise the internet, if you read your emails, if you talk to your people, you will find it, that is, if you are willing to move through your fears and see what is really happening on all levels.

On a physical level, we are hearing about the immanent collapse of the world monetary system, the violence, the people rising up and saying NO, the patriarchy striking back but still being challenged and exposed, the inept governments and silly politics. It’s trufascinating to witness the chaos and how it is all unraveling. On the other side the amazing inventions, ideas and potentials are staggering. I heard an interview last week with Benjamin Fulford and he encouraged us to take faith that the darkness this planet has seen for so long is indeed changing. Soon we may be able to actually invent and create the designs that have been suppressed for so long by the power elite. These days I am not even bothering to capitalize that term power elite as I have in the past. They are an outgoing ruling party all over the world.

Emotionally, the collective is breaking down and many are breaking through. Many of those I talk with express a very strong knowing that now is the time to work through our past and let it go. As my priestess sister Grandmother Ruth Anne says “We don’t need it anymore! I exist right here and right now”. As we complete a 16.4 billion year time wave, the past is in the way of our next step. So, many of us are participating in all kinds of processing work including Shamanic BreathworkTM, couple’s work, forgiveness work, recovery work, whatever works to gets us through the places where there is emotional stick-um. We really can get to a place where we feel good in our own skin, and in some kind of balance with enough truth, enough beauty and enough goodness.

Spiritually, the teachers and healers and celestial sourcers are giving us a mixed bag, but the same essential message. This is humanity’s butterfly moment! This is the time we have been waiting for and we are the Ones.  It is time to become multi-dimensional, loving, spirit-centered without letting religion get in the way, and with an Indigenous Spirit… trusting, open, wise, surrendered and  in love with the Earth. There are many messages about the civilizations here with us, assisting us behind the scenes and those of us who feel connected to the stars being called forward to help. If you are spiritually connected to what is happening, it seems that you are not only happily along for the ride, but ready to assist Mother Earth in her labor. As I am, you may be in awe of what is unfolding before our very eyes, because it is us!

This is the ride of our lives, of lifetimes, and we can choose to go through it kicking and screaming or with grace. It may not be easy at times, but if we can say yes to it, and feel gratitude and appreciation for the learnings, the many, many souls that are riding with us and those unseen realms that are assisting, we can be sure to be in the right place at the right time having just the right experience for our own leap in consciousness.

I myself am choosing to go through it with plenty of Truth; my eyes wide open in bearing witness to the suffering so that those who are suffering do not feel abandoned but blessed. I choose to help put an end to any suffering that I can influence, even if I simply imagine standing and watching on the inner planes. At the same time I choose to invest my witnessing in creating the new world, the promised birth into a new higher consciousness and thousands of years of peace, finally!

I have to have Beauty, too. To feel my own beauty, and the sensual beauty of nature and my four animals who along with the mountains, keep me connected to nature, is part of a daily experience that I ask for the Grace to never have to live without. I love really good healthy food, preparing it and enjoying it with my Beloved, my friends and my soul families. I cherish art and good music and lovemaking. A winter filled with friends and enjoyment of all kinds will deeply fulfill me.

And Goodness, Goddess, Love, Light  is the magnet that draws me forward in this transition. I get to learn how to vibrate faster, to open more fully to the celestial realms, to download more light and to express more love. When I slow down long enough I can feel the quickening, the intense energy that is coming through our atmosphere in the form of solar storms and comets and those energies I don’t have terms for. I feel and hear and see the Unity Consciousness that is taking root as hearts open, as my heart opens and we all collectively heal.

The leaves are turning in our Western North Carolina Mountains, and the view from my window affords me a daily panorama of Beauty. The Truth is that I can only live now and watch it unfold as I stay present with What Is. No one really knows what the future holds for any of us or for Earth. Great Mystery is in her finest hour. The Goodness calls me to seek the Light & Love of the Unseen Worlds and let it in.

May your Autumn be blessed with Truth, Beauty and Love.

This is Where You Came From: Ethical Harvesting By Thea Summer Deer

Living on the Blue Ridge of the Southern Appalachian Mountains is a blessing.  Multiply that by the abundance of medicinal herbs that also live here, and what you have is a rich haven for herbalists.  Having survived the advance and retreat of glaciers during the last ice age, the Appalachians, which are some of the oldest mountains in the world, became a botanical treasure.  It is here that I am blessed to study, gather, prepare, and practice herbal medicine.

I have been coming to these Smoky Mountains of North Carolina for as long as I can remember, and living here full time for the last twelve years.  Like me, lots of folks are finding their way to the mountians in search of a saner, healthier lifestyle, and communities in which to raise families and grow old. Unfortunately, more people also means more scars upon the land.  While it is my belief that there is enough for everyone, I also believe that we have a responsibility to future generations to be good stewards of the land that feeds, sustains, and heals us.  For this reason I would like to share my latest harvesting expedition.

Wild Hydrangea (Hydrangea arborescens,) an attractive shrub, but nowhere near as flamboyant as her cultivar cousins has recently come to my attention as an excellent remedy for inflamed or enlarged prostate.  As a result of this discovery I have been recommending it frequently for men who are experiencing prostate problems. With Wild Hydrangea being native to the Southern Appalachians I was in a perfect position to get to know it more intimately.  Having never harvested Hydrangea before I wasn’t fully confident in my ability to identify it, especially if the flower clusters were no longer present on this shrub that grows between four to six feet tall.  Preferring a personal introduction to this Native plant, which Patricia Kyristi Howell writes about in her book, Medicinal Herbs of the Southern Appalachians, I asked her if she would be willing to take me harvesting, and she obliged.  With summer coming to its close this would be the perfect time to go digging for Hydrangea’s roots.  So on the Full Harvest Moon, my friend and mentor, Patricia, and I, carried a basket and a canvas bag into the North Georgia woods.

Lo and behold, the flower clusters, now somewhat brown and faded, were still clinging to the plant and identifying her was easy.  But she was growing high up the side of an embankment that made getting to her difficult.  Following Patricia’s lead I clamored up the bank, digging my heels into the soft deciduous dirt and began to dig.  This was no easy root to free from its tenacious hold.  I sweated, dug, pulled and cut until I held the most amazing rhizome and wildly branching roots in my hand.  I filled the gaping hole that remained with as much dirt and leaf litter as I could manage and clamored back down.

Looking up at the embankment where I had just been perched it looked like a bear had been digging up there.  I had taken one three Hydrangeas that grew in that spot, knowing the importance of leaving enough to ensure continued propagation.  Then we decided to climb up to the ridge above the embankment to continue our search, and to see if it might be easier to dig from above rather that climbing up from below.  Not far from where I had dug the first Hydrangea I saw another small grouping.  In the end I would dig three roots, but not before I climbed down over the edge of the bank I had previously climbed up.  While hanging off the side I lost my footing with nothing to hold me but my body pressed against the loose, humus rich soil and one hand clinging to this small, but very deep root.  I looked down and realized the slide and tumble to the bottom would not be a fun one.  I turned back to the root that was holding me up and was determined that if I was going down, she was going with me.  So I dug my heels in deeper, freed the root from its tenacious hold, and managed to grab a vine and pull myself up just enough to get one foot in the hole left by the root.  I propelled myself up over the top of the bank and was very grateful that I didn’t crash and burn.

This gave me a deeper appreciation for the roots of plants that hold and support the soil and its microorganisms on steep mountain slopes. My clamoring had left the mountainside unmistakably vulnerable to erosion even though I had done my best to fill in the holes.  We should never underestimate the impact that we have on natural systems when we impose our needs, but always do our best to keep that impact to a minimum and never take it for granted.  I thanked the rich soil beneath my feet and Hydrangea for her medicine root.  Even if I hadn’t been totally spent by this point I knew that three roots was plenty.  It was all I needed.  And this is one of the keys to ethical harvesting; not taking more than we need.

The week prior to this I bought some dried and sifted Hydrangea root from a wholesale distributor so that I could connect with the plant and have enough on hand for making medicine.  But I also know that preparing wild crafted medicines from the area where a person lives is 1000 times more potent energetically than commercially prepared medicines.  These roots that we had gathered would become fresh root tincture, started on the full moon and decanted on the new or dark moon — dark like the earth in which she grew.  The roots would more readily release their medicine and active constituents during this phase of the waning moon.

“So that’s all you need?”  Patricia inquired.  And my response was, “Yes, it is enough.”  I had accomplished what I had come for: to feel, smell and connect with the medicine plant that was serving my clients.  Sometimes healing takes a certain kind of aggressiveness, a willingness to go that extra mile, or climb that mountain as the case may be.  Then Patricia made a very, thoughtful suggestion, “Add a little of the fresh wild root tincture to the commercial dried root tincture.  It will remind her who she is.”  And that this is where she came from.

Thea Summer Deer is a practicing herbalist in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.  Visit her on the web at www.theaskitchen.com or at the Southeast Women’s Herbal Medicine Conference Vendor’s Booth.

Women’s Sexual Healing: From Feminism to the Divine Feminist by Anyaa McAndrew and Candy Hadsall

We are priestesses. We are also feminists. In the 1970s and ’80s spirituality and feminism took separate paths. Subsequent changes have influenced us to want more than just power in the world. We want sexual power, freedom and pleasure. It is our birthright and the domain of the Sacred Feminine, the Goddess, the Universal Energy that is re-emerging.

We both come from political perspectives that know women are now standing on the shoulders of a worn-out patriarchal system that has repressed, denied and demonized women’s sexuality. Male dominated cultures down through the ages have defiled the Divine nature of the archetypes of the sacred sexual priestess and healer and made them into servants of pornography and prostitution. As priestesses we see the need for women to stand in their own spiritual authority, re-claim from the religious elite the right to stand between heaven and earth, and do ritual and ceremony with powerful intention for healing ourselves, our planet and all beings. We know this cannot work if we carry shame, abuse and blockage in our sexual centers because our sexuality is the source of our spiritual power.

Continue reading “Women’s Sexual Healing: From Feminism to the Divine Feminist by Anyaa McAndrew and Candy Hadsall”