The Divine Feminine – Page 7 – Goddess On the Loose

Commentary on Andrew Cohen and Ken Wilber Dialogue in “What is Enlightenment”

What is Enlightenment is a monthly magazine that features themed articles and a dialogue between guru Andrew Cohen and philosopher Ken Wilber. This month’s title was The New Women’s Liberation.

Since my letter to the Editor probably won’t get published anyway, I am posting it here.

See my partner, Gary’s blog on www.garystamper.blogspot.com

Anyaa

Dear Ken and Andrew,

While I very much appreciate you â€œwhite guysâ€ taking up the task of examining the higher evolution of women, and presenting some excellent insights and observations, I feel you are missing some huge pieces. As a transpersonal~shamanic psychotherapist for the past 30 years, and a spiritual teacher of women for the past 15 years, I have traveled the journey with women through victimhood to personal empowerment, and now to reclamation of spiritual authority. My overview is that women walk very differently towards spiritual evolution than men do, and that you are attempting to work with women from a male perspective that does not honor the natural wisdom and source of the feminine, which transcends and includes the biological factors and is very much based in her connection to Mother Earth.

Andrew, I am left wondering why your challenge to women would be to transcend (but apparently not include) the emotional body (which you call relational~biological) and sexual power? In my experience, these aspects of the feminine in ALL of us, are what defines the feminine, not what defines women at lower developmental levels as conditioned egos. Yes, the emotional body and sexual power has been repressed, denied, feared and perverted through the ages, but does that necessarily mean they are to be done away with while transcending? What happened to including?

Certainly I agree that we have been conditioned to be fearful and guarded and manipulative, etc. at lower levels of development, but what of a higher development, i.e. emotional, and sexual enlightenment? In my circles, I find that if emotional safety is provided, and women are encouraged to take responsibility for their shadow conditioning, and own their personal and spiritual authority, they will naturally delight and trust and demonstrate impersonal caring with each other. It is not as rare as you apparently think it is. We who have been on the forefront of spiritual feminism, are bright, evolved and conscious creatures who have been doing personal psycho-emotional~spiritual work for an average of 10-15 years longer than men. The key to the level of sisterly trust you are talking about is that we do this work with other women who also resonate with the female experience, rather than with a male guru. In the context of men, women will naturally take longer to self-actualize and differentiate. We have been so male referenced, especially spiritually, that no wonder it took you 12 years to crack the code and see results! Continue reading “Commentary on Andrew Cohen and Ken Wilber Dialogue in “What is Enlightenment””

Walking between the Worlds: The Path of the Shamanic Priestess by Anyaa T. McAndrew

Power is our sacred birthright, yet many of us have disowned it due to the destructive ways we have felt and witnessed its misuse on the planet. As women, we often view â€œpower overâ€ or warrior~achiever mentality as good enough reason to stay away from power. However, we walk very differently on an empowerment path when we are fully encouraged to be with our soul as the source of our power.
The soul itself is described as feminine by many. She is wild, willful, chaotic, earthy, sensual, sweet, empathic, merging, deeply emotional, passionate and compassionate. The soul could also be described as shamanic. She dives deep into the earth on her human journey, gathering jewels to take back to Spirit, which can be seen as masculine. The soul does not care about rules, dogma, or right and wrong, as she seeks pure experience through all the realms and layers of life in a body. The cycles of life and death, joy and sorrow, change and stability are the natural shamanic realms of the soul, and of the Feminine, once she is reconnected to her inner wisdom.
The priestess archetype is found in all religions throughout time, yet has been lost somewhere in our psyches for the past few thousand years. She is the vehicle through which the Divine Feminine, or the exiled Goddess, is returning to earth. Women everywhere are awakening to their Divine and Sacred selves, no matter what she is called. The priestess path is one vehicle for this return, while the shamanic path is another. Priestess consciousness teaches us to live our lives in a sacred way in service to the world, while shamanic consciousness teaches us about the natural cycles of death and rebirth, shadow and light, human and divine. Both show us how to embody both human and the divine through spiritual inititation and embracing transformation for the greater purpose of living our deepest and most powerful sacred purpose.
Now at the Turning of the Ages, when all wisdom is being resurrected, and we are re-integrating what was exiled in patriarchy, it all seems to fall into the same domain. Womenâ€™s mysteries, earth-based spirituality, sexuality, and the mysteries of death and rebirth all fell into a shadow or taboo realm in patriarchal times. The power of women is equal to the power of sexuality is equal to the power of the ancient mysteries schools that understood the ways of sacred power and life-force energy. Continue reading “Walking between the Worlds: The Path of the Shamanic Priestess by Anyaa T. McAndrew”

Happy SHE Day by Trevor Gray

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Today I feel the beauty of a WOMAN, of every WOMAN

HER thoughts, loves and ideas give birth in extraordinary ways

HER smile the sun, bringing warmth light and the fineness of life

HER breath the cool summer breeze, washes delight over my skin

The moon cycles HER depth with a sense of all pounding hearts

Creation the womb of HER heart gives life all I see and love

SHE as creator, lover and the divine all knowing mother

I stand as a man in awe of your gifts

And bow before your lightâ€¦ You are truely beautiful

With my sword of honour and your love deep in my heart

I pave the way for your loves magnificent creations to find home

In harmony and peace I will fight for you and HER to return

It is SHE who I serveâ€¦

Today I Honour YOU as SHE, HER, MOTHER, CREATOR and as a WOMAN Living, Giving and Birthing the Love you were born for and will die joyfully giving until your final breathâ€¦

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”

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”