Category: The Divine Feminine

The Goddess, The Sacred Feminine, The Feminine Face of God, The New Feminine

Indigenous women of the world warn that they will give their lives to defend their lands

 

mujeres indígenas

They demand that the States recognize the authority and competency of their communities in the handling of their lands, territories, and resources.

 

They pledge to be part of the solution to the food crisis that will consequently result in climate change.

 

Unanimously, the indigenous women of the world declared that if States did not restore the control that the women had over their land, territories, and resources, it would not only put the communities’ lives in danger, but all of humanity as well.Through the “Lima Declaration,” endorsed by almost 200 female leaders from Africa, the Pacific, Europe, Asia, Latin America, North America, and Russia, they declared that their role in the preservation of biodiversity and ancestral wisdom of nature is a key piece in order to challenge the impacts of climate change.“In this moment of serious crisis and impending, irreversible loss of biological diversity, indigenous women emphasize the obligation of the States to protect the territories of indigenous communities,” they demanded.The declaration, released today, was prepared in the framework of the World Conference of Indigenous Women that met in Lima, Peru, attended by indigenous women from around the globe.Resources like water, energy, and biodiversity, that contain fundamental economic and strategic value for countries, are located primarily in indigenous territories. This represents a risk for the lives of the communities, especially indigenous women.A recent study produced by CEPAL shows that in Latin American the growth of mining, forestry, and other industries has resulted in the displacement of millions of indigenous women from their ancestral territories to urban areas. Nevertheless, this does not mean a change in their life conditions. On the contrary, they already make up part of the most vulnerable populations, having been exposed to various forms of violence such as racism, exploitation of labor, and sexual trafficking.

 

“Indigenous women experience, in relation to our land, the same pain and effects caused by physical abuse and excessive exploitation,” they asserted in this declaration. Moreover, they warned that they are prepared to defend their communities’ lands, water, and resources with their lives.The leaders demanded that the states recognize the authority and competency that indigenous communities hold over their lands, territories, and resources. They demanded that all development projects that affect their lives should be made with free, prior, and informed consent of their communities.Moreover, they indicated that any policy or social program about health, education, or any that focuses on the well being of indigenous women should be carried out with their direct, full, and effective participation. “Nothing about us, without us. Everything about us, with us,” is the protest they adopt in this declaration.This document, coupled with a plan of action, will be presented in different moments and mechanisms of the United Nations systems focused on the right of women and indigenous communities. The World Conference of Indigenous Communities will be held in 2014 in New York City.At said conference, they will ask to guarantee the full and effective participation of indigenous women, above all the wise elderly and the young, and that the results of the findings prioritize the concerns of indigenous women.

http://en.mujerindigena.com/indigenous-women-of-the-world-warn-that-they-will-give-their-lives-to-defend-their-lands/

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”

Priestessing During Gaia’s Dark Night Before the Dawn

Anyaa McAndrew, MA, LPC, NCC, Ordained Priestess

What an amazing time to be alive! What is occurring on the planet these days is moving us at lightening speed. Can you feel it? Depending upon who you talk to, listen to, and read, you may feel depression, anguish, grief, anger, hope, inspiration, and upliftment all in the same day, or even in the same hour! Are we all becoming bi-polar, or is something else happening?  We are collectively finding ourselves faced with some of the most difficult situations, circumstances, challenges and patterns, depending upon what it is we need to move us into a place of surrender. For me personally, some days life is magical and grace-filled, and some are filled with complete disillusionment and frustration.

Would it make a difference if you knew that every day you are living the equivalent of 274 days? That every month you are living the equivalent of 8,000 years? The Pleiadians, keepers of the 5th Dimension, and through teachers like Barbara Marciniak and Barbara Hand Clow, tell us we are now moving at a frequency of 100,000 years per year! We are clearly at the Great Shift, the Turning of the Ages, the Collapse, the Planetary Dark Night of the Soul, the end of Patriarchy and the Mayan Calendar, and the end of time as we know it. We are also in a process of Ascension, moving into Unity Consciousness, and birthing a New Earth. That is a lot to hold spiritually, as tiny 3-D beings.  We are asked to do just that, to hold this vast terrain of consciousness within our consciousness, to hold the tension of the opposites, so that we can come all the way through these times into a new world on the other side. The more beings that have eyes to see, and ears to hear what is happening, the closer we get to the Tipping Point that gives us the momentum we need for the ride through to the other side. And what a ride it is!

 

Graphic by Prescott Hill

Sometimes I imagine that I am in a room filled with clocks and calendars. There are sundials, and grandfather clocks and pyramid calendars, alarms, timers, astrological wheels, and dates of all kinds floating around in this room. All of the clocks are going off at the same time and the calendars are all marked with intersecting dates and timings. The sense I get in this imaginary room is that I am here for a reason, a really important reason, and I am a part of this Great Timing. I have a part to play, and so do many others who are here with me or come and go from this place as I do.  I and We, are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For, but not quite as simply as it sounds. The We is bigger than our egos, or even our soul’s plan. Our bigger multi-dimensional Selves are here with us and they have all signed up together for this Divine Appointment. What a party!

If Gaia is birthing into a new dimension, then I am going with her. Unity Consciousness implies that we are all in this together, aren’t we? Another way I imagine these times is that we are traversing a very narrow passageway as a Planetary Being, like going through the black hole that so many talk about at the center of our galaxy, the place where the Winter Solstice Sun has been rising for the past several years. In order to move through such a dangerous passageway, we must deconstruct, purify, dissolve, surrender and totally trust the Great Spirit. I imagine it getting very dark in some of our lives and on the planet as we move through this collective Dark Night of the Soul. On the other side is the Great Unknowable Mystery of a New Time on Planet Earth.

The Truth is, none of us knows what the future holds. Those who say they do, are just projecting one of many possible scenarios that are reflected back to us: good guesses and calculated scientific possibilities all the way to ancient prophecies and present channelings. Will we experience more earth changes, solar flares, a polar shift, 3 days of darkness, ETs walking among us, or Mother Earth continuing to give us really clear messages that she will no longer tolerate the rape of her land and the destruction of her species? As a woman of consciousness, perhaps a woman who carries the priestess vibration, what do you intuit about these times? Do you know that you are here for a good reason? Your life purpose has called you here. You have a front row seat in this theatre of Great Change. You have a place on the wheel of time as it ends, and then we start anew.

The calling to the Feminine is very loud these days. One of my favorite teachers, Lucia Rene, says that the Patriarchy has already been unplugged and now is the time for women to stop running away from what scares us. It is the time for us to step into our personal power, and our spiritual authority. Lucia calls this the Solar Feminine, the One who will step into leadership through feminine values like Economies of Care, Networks of Grace, and Communities of Compassion.

The Shamanic Priestess is one who understands that to die and be reborn many times in one lifetime is the hallmark of these times. She is a being who has walked on the edge and lived to tell about it. She is learning to confront her fears, to move her past through her, to a place of peaceful resolution, and to help others do the same. She knows the value of priestessing others. She sees and feels the pain and suffering in the world, and practices transmuting and blessing as much as she can, so that all of life on earth can shift. And she is the woman who knows she is Sacred and that everything she sees and everything she does can be Sacred. Making Sacred is also to bless, to sanctify, to honor, and give thanks for all the life forms that are leaving us, including many of those close to us, including people, animals, land masses, the great oceans, the rainforests and plant life, and all the old patterns that no longer serve us. The Sacred Woman has done this through the ages. She understands that these times call for ritual and ceremony because we are going through the biggest Rite of Passage this planet has ever known!

The Shamanic Priestess is also learning to be a midwife to what wants to come into life. She downloads the light, radiates compassion and love, and tells the truth, to shine on what we all really want to co-create. She learns to draw on the ancient wisdom in her DNA, in her bones, in her lineage as a sacred woman from the past, to inspire and enliven the new visions. Some call these codes of light that are now being activated by the intense astronomical activity happening on our planet. I feel it as subtle knowings that I am shifting my perceptions and things that used to be important to me are falling away. Time is speeding up and my consciousness seems to amp up, and I want to slow way down. I want to savor every moment and live in the NOW, not the future or the past. The teacher of my lineage Nicole Christine used to say “The Hopis tell us that when the world speeds up, slow down.”

We are slowing down so that we can really feel all the ways we exist in every dimension, every space and time, to merge in this time, the end of time, into a new way of being.

This article is written to be a call to the Shamanic Priestess, because her time is NOW.

If you have an inner priestess that wants to come forth into the world of the Shift, now is the time. If you already claim yourself as priestess, then you know the value of holding the field for others, because others already come to you for counsel. You are not afraid of your power and you feel it is part of your Sacred Work to serve in these times. You are in good company with thousands of other women on the planet who are waking up to the Priestess Within.

 

Why It Is Wise to Worship a Woman

Arjuna Ardagh

A few days ago, after a particularly exquisite evening with my wife Chameli, I put this post up on Facebook before going to bed:

“I have had many, many great teachers in my life. A super abundance. No one and nothing comes close to the woman who is now asleep in the bedroom. My marriage has become the guru, the salvation, the muse, the crack through which the divine shines through.”

When I woke up the next morning, there were the usual offerings of people who liked the post as well as comments. One man had the vulnerability and courage to post this on facebook:

“Thank you Arjuna for this sharing, I feel like [I’m] in front of a choice which is between feeling envious of what you have and I don’t, or instead to decide that ‘I want that too,’ and, as you show, it is possible…”

I was touched.

Over the next days, I got several more messages like this from men: vulnerable men, honest men, rare and courageous men. They came in as private messages on Facebook or through our website, and they all said basically the same thing: “I read your Facebook post. I want what you have. Show me how to get it.”

So, friends, here it is. The short guide on how to worship a woman, and why it’s the wisest thing that a man can do. First of all, lets pop a few very understandable doubts that you might have. I’m familiar with all of them.

1. “I’m wounded and damaged in my relationships to the feminine.” So am I, dear brother, so am I. My parents divorced in a messy way when I was four. I grew up alone with my mother. She did her very best to provide for me, but she was unhappy and insecure. By the time I started to have relationships with women myself in my early teens, I discovered that I had a mountain of resentments, fears, and separation in my relation to the feminine. The conscious practice of worship can become a part of healing the wounds.

2. “Arjuna, you’re lucky. You’ve got an incredible partner. I’m together with a woman who’s not like Chameli.” I really don’t have the ultimate answer to that doubt or question. It certainly could seem to be the case that I’ve been lucky in finding a great woman, but here’s how it happened for me. I’ve had a lot of less lucky connections in my life. I’ve experienced my share of the manipulative side of the feminine: the victim, the rageful, the vengeful. And I have seen the ugly side of the masculine psyche in myself. A few weeks prior to meeting Chameli, my wife, something deep and profound shifted in me, which I believe can shift for anyone in the same way.

3. “I don’t have a partner at all, and I sometimes doubt if I’ll ever meet anybody.” Being with a partner where worship is not flowing, or not being with a partner at all, are basically two aspects of the same situation: you’ve had an intuition or a glimpse of the possibilities of a deeper love, and you want more of it. The solutions are the same.

4. “I feel my heart is closed down. I live in my head a lot, and I wouldn’t even know what worship was if it broke into my house at 2 o’clock in the morning and held me at gunpoint.” That’s where the whole thing starts for all of us, when we realize that we don’t yet know how to love. And that’s that the big question that you have to consider: “Is that okay with me?” Never mind how much money you make, or how many friends you have on Facebook, no matter how nice a house you live in, or no matter how big a car you drive, no matter how impressive your partner’s bust size, or how much you meditate and become spiritual… have you loved for real, in a total and undefended way? If not, and here’s where you have to be honest with yourself, is that OK with you? Is it OK to die one day without the heart’s gift having been fully given?

Eight or nine years ago, I came to that question in myself, exactly that, and I discovered that the answer was, if I was was raw and vulnerable and uncomplicated, that it was actually not OK. If I died one day without having fully loved, it would not have truly been a life well lived.

Many many years ago, I went to Bali for a vacation, on my own. I met up with some other young travelers there and we hired a Jeep to take us on a tour of the island. We drove up right to the highest point of the island, where Tourists don’t usually go. Our guide took us to one of the most sacred temples. It was surrounded by a big brick wall with an ornate entrance. After removing our shoes and wrapping scarves around our heads, we stepped together through this entrance. Inside, there was a short courtyard and then another brick wall with another entrance. After more preparations of lighting incense and giving offerings, we stepped through the second entrance. We were allowed to go through the opening in one more wall, but that was it. All together there were ten walls around the deity in the middle. Hindus could go beyond the fourth wall. Devotees of that particular deity could go beyond the fifth wall, and so it went on. The only people allowed to approach the deity directly were those who had given their lives completely and totally to its worship. Everyone else could come a little closer, a little closer, to the innermost beauty, but not all the way to the center.

I’m not a big believer of the worship of statues, but there’s a beautiful symbolism to what I saw there, because a woman’s heart is just like that. At the essence of every woman’s heart is the divine feminine. It contains everything that has ever been beautiful, or lovely, or inspiring, in any woman, anywhere, at any time. The very essence of every woman’s heart is the peak of wisdom, the peak of inspiration, the peak of sexual desirability, the peak of soothing, healing love. The peak of everything. But it’s protected, for good reason, by a series of concentric walls. To move inwardly from one wall to the next requires that you intensify your capacity to devotion, and as you do so, you are rewarded with Grace. This is not something you can negotiate verbally with a woman. She doesn’t even know consciously how to open those gates herself. They are opened magically and invisibly by the keys of worship.

If you stand on the outside of the outermost wall, all you have available to you, like many other unfortunate men, is pornography. For $1.99 a minute, you can see her breasts, maybe her vagina, and you can stimulate yourself in a sad longing for deeper love.

Step through another gate, and she will show you her outer gift-wrapping. She’ll look at you with a certain twinkle in her eye. She’ll answer your questions coyly. She’ll give you just the faintest hint that there is more available.

Step through another gate with your commitment, with your attention, with the small seedlings of devotion, and she’ll open her heart to you more. She’ll share with you her insecurities, the way that she’s been hurt, her deepest longings. Some men will back away at this point. They realize that the price they must pay to go deeper is more than they are willing to give. They start to feel a responsibility. But for those few who step though another gate, they come to discover her loyalty, her willingness to stick with you no matter what, her willingness to raise your children, stick up for you in conversation, and, if you are lucky, even pick up your dirty socks now and then. And so it goes on. You’ve got the gist by now.

Somewhere around the second wall from the center, she casts the veils of her personality aside, and shows you that she is both a human being and also a portal into something much greater than that. She shows you a wrath that is not hers, but all women’s. She shows you a patience that is also universal. She shows you her wisdom. At this point you start to experience the archetypes of women, who have been portrayed as goddesses and mythological figures in every tradition.

Then, at the very center, in the innermost temple itself, all the layers of your devotion are flooded with reward all at once. You discover the very essence of the feminine, and in a strange way that is not exactly romantic, but profoundly sacred all the same, you realize that you could have got here with any woman if you had just been willing to pass through all the layers of initiation. Any woman is every woman, and every woman is any woman at the same time. When you love a woman completely, at the very essence of her being, this is the one divine feminine flame. It is what has made every woman in history beautiful. It’s the flame behind the Mona Lisa, and Dante’s Beatrice, and yes, also Penelope Cruz and Heidi Klum. You discover the magic ingredient which has lead every man to fall in love with a woman.

When you learn how to pay attention to the essence of the feminine in this way, you fall to the floor in full body prostration, tears soaking your cheeks and clothes, and you wonder how you could have ever taken Her, in all of Her forms, for granted even for a second.

So just a couple small questions remain. First, do you get what I’m talking about? Does it jive for you? Does it make sense? And second, if yes, how are you going to get from where you are now to being able to the full capacity of your heart to love for real? I’d be glad to share more about this if we get to know each other better, but here’s how you get started.
First, do what I did, and create an altar in your room dedicated to Divine Feminine. Put only symbols of the feminine on it. I have a painting called “Beatrix” by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. I have a statue of Quan Kin. Populate your altar with anything that reminds you of the feminine, and spend a few minutes of the day in worship. Yes, worship. Adoration. Devotion. Offer up rose petals. Offer poems. Offer everything, and beg Her to reveal Her innermost essence to you. This will work miracles whether you’re single and waiting to meet the right woman or whether you’re already in relationship and long to meet your woman in a deeper way.

The second way to get started: make a practice, a discipline, of telling your woman, or any woman, ten times a day something which you adore about her. “I love the smell of your shampoo.” “I love the way you laugh.” “The color of your eyes is so beautiful.” Of course, you need to keep it appropriate. You can go as far out on a limb as you like if you’re in relationship with a woman, but with anyone else remember the gates. Keep you communication appropriate to the gate number that you find yourself at. Appreciation the curve of a woman’s breast, for example, if she happens to be the cashier at the supermarket, would equate more to harassment than worship.
So here’s enough to get started. Of course, there’s a lot more we can say about this. Feel free to post your comments below, and I’ll use them as the foundation for future blogs.

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