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Gratitude. It’s in the Details.

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mumwithdew

 

The morning light that makes its way into my living room is, more often than not, pink.

Each day, the ravens circle outside my living room window, speaking in a language I know in my belly.

My belly skin has a scar that runs across its center from the Hysterectomy I had when I was 29.

For the slightest second, my lips caress the skin of his cheek, and our eyes meet unveiled. We are ‘us’ for just a moment in time.

Time ticks by on my bedroom nightstand.

I pull back the sheets and climb into an empty bed.

I meditate in bed in the early morning hours, sometimes falling back into the deepest sleep when I am done.

I take pictures of flowers for meditation.

There is a beautiful flower shop just down the street.

I walk the steep streets of San Francisco, with homes like walled fortresses.

The wall I am facing holds images and words of things I never want to forget.

My late-husband is always in my heart, even though there are days when he doesn’t cross my mind.

My grandchildren will never know him.

I once remembered everything.

My body heaves with a big sigh.

I see what is here.

I am grateful for this whole life.

 

 

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Bodies of Grace

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softrose
The Feminine Heart

” Women can acknowledge the earth’s deep sorrow and wounding, and through the heart offer it back to God who is the source of all sorrow and all joy. It has been said that God enters through a wound, and through the earth’s sorrow a healing can take place; the consciousness of divine love can be infused in to the hidden places of the earth as well as into the bodies of women. This love can link the two worlds in a a way that has not happened before. Through that connection activated in women’s bodies through their sanctification of their own and the earth’s suffering, grace can flow into the world.” Llewellyn Vaughn-Lee

 

I read these words and something old and deep comes forth. It is a remembering of something that once was. It is a soul’s remembering of a time when women and the Earth were conscious, living sisters.

I’ve been doing this – acknowledging the Earth’s sorrow and wounding. I weep. Yet, I’ve not been offering it back to God. I’ve had a funny relationship with God, one where I don’t quite trust. It’s no wonder I don’t quite trust…God. Yet, I trust Love. I trust Life. I trust in my creativity. And, somewhere deeper than my mind, I know God is not different from these that I do trust.

There was a time like that when we were sisters with the Earth, or perhaps we were her daughters. And these times are asking for us to remember this relationship…with her, and with each other.

 

There is much suffering and chaos in the world right now. There has been for so long. People have asked me if they really need to turn to look at this suffering. I say, “Yes”. I know many women who have no time in their day to do this. Between a job that keeps them running, children to care for, a home to clean, and many worries about how they will feed their children, or if their children will be safe, they have little left for themselves. THIS is a form of deep suffering. I know these women are exhausted.

But all of us women who DO have the time, the resources, the consciousness, and the awareness of our current plight can sit with the earth’s deep sorrow and wounding, and offer it back to the Divine through our feminine hearts. We can sit with the suffering of our sisters, too, knowing how deeply connected we are to each other. And, we can offer a hand to our sisters, offering to help lighten their load in whatever way we can.

Women feel sorrow and we feel joy. We feel deeply. We know suffering and we can feel it in the Earth if we listen and sense. Our ability to feel and sense is a sacred gift. We’ve not been taught about the sacred ways a woman’s body can heal and feed and nourish, yet they are real and true. Somewhere deep within we know this, deep in our bones.

Our hearts and bodies CAN do this, can be the conduit for healing. We are that powerful and that blessed in love.

This IS our sacred spirituality, our sacred role in these times.

So many of us have been turned off by religious dogma that is less about the Sacred and more about control. We turn away from a sense of the Sacred because we’ve been taught that we as women are anything but Sacred. But this is not true. It’s a big fat lie.

So many of us have been taught that what we can’t see or prove is worthless. But do not believe this. Come to honor what you know.

Mother Earth can re-teach us about the Sacred. How can we look at her beauty and not know the Sacred in our own hearts? How can we sit down to a meal of warm food and not realize that She gives us everything and does not ask for anything in return?

It is time to quit believing in or fighting against the patriarchal dogma that keeps our faces turned away from the beautiful gift of being alive in a woman’s body…and the gift of being alive at all on this glorious planet. It is time to re-kindle our relationship with Life. It is time to be in service to her and to all the world’s children.

What is important is that we remember how deeply we are connected to the Earth as women, and that we feel what is here in this connection. Don’t shy away from it. Move into it. Allow yourself to be surprised at the depth of what you can feel and how deeply you are loved…you will feel sorrow and you will feel deep joy.

::

If you’d like to join a community of people on Facebook who are praying for our Mother Earth and for all the Earth’s children, please come join the Praying True group on Facebook. “Praying True is a worldwide community for everyone who wishes to give back to the earth with simplicity, loving intention and compassion. Our vision is to bring back love to our human relationship with All That Is, to encourage people to pray regularly for our world in whatever way flows through each person, creating ritual from the heart and in the moment with what is at hand. Then afterward, to share their truth through art making of any kind, posting it here to inspire others to honor the gift of life on this beautiful planet.”

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Courage, Sexuality, and the Chaotically Sacred

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pinkroseslainbytenderness
The heart is fluent in the language of courage.

I slept for ten hours last night, but during the night I awoke with tears more than once. Some deep and old energies are moving out of me, energies that settled into my muscles, flesh, and bones many, many years ago. I’ve cried more tears than I remember crying in a long time. And with each instance of tears, a kind of simple, yet palpable, release came. And with each release came a little less fogginess and a little more clarity.

These are deep old patterns of holding myself back for fear of being too much and hurting someone. They are patterns around trust, sexuality, intimacy, boundaries, secrets, and shame. These patterns come out of old stories of imagined responsibility, silent and shameful betrayal, and sudden loss that seemed to bring about a future of chaotic unsafety. (Yes, this is a word. I wrote it because it fit so well, then had to check its validity…not in my experience, but in the ‘supposed’ authority of cultural acceptance. Ha!)

It’s amazing what a child will do with her experiences…how she will explain them through her own agency, since to do otherwise would blow apart any sense of much-needed solidity in her environment.

We create stories of conditionality. We want something firm to stand on, even though it is that very conditionality that causes us so much suffering. In our families, we trade in conditional love.

After a night of tears and release, I see the path of the unconditioned, the path of unconditional love. That is the realm of the heart. For the heart is fluent in the language of courage.

But to truly walk in courage, the way becomes much easier when we no longer place any conditions on others. Those conditions are obstacles that close the heart to its own courage. When we lift those conditions, something entirely within the realm of our human heart’s capability, suddenly courage is simply the courage to be what we are, and to express this being in the world. Suddenly the courage is no longer tied up with trying to get anyone else to do anything at all, or be something they are not – which are really impossibilities anyway.

This is the realm of the unconditioned…it is the realm of the deep heart. And when we drop these, the way opens before us. It is an unobstructed way, because it has always just been our conditional love that placed those obstacles there.

My sexuality, my vital life force, is a beautiful gift that is sacred, chaotically sacred.

I told myself many things about the chaotic beauty of my sexuality in order to somehow manage the chaotic world I lived in.

My sexuality is a force of nature, and it is a force FOR nature.

In these times when our controlling actions as human beings are coming back to bite us, perhaps what we must see is that life is chaotic and unpredictable and mysterious.

Gabrielle Roth said, “Where the feminine and masculine come together…that always creates chaos.” 

Feminine and Masculine coming together within, and outside of us, too, creates chaos. But that is life, real, alive, mysterious life, and to touch it is to touch the chaotically sacred.

We humans (at least most of us in the industrialized world) have spend hundreds of years trying to hold up a world with unbalanced hands where the mystery of the feminine has been sliced and diced into a few ‘acceptable’ ways of being. Our hands embrace the masculine, and shy away from the feminine.

But life is the chaotic mix of masculine and feminine, and in trying to live it any other way, we are trying to live in a world of conditioned love – which we all know isn’t really love at all.

To walk the path of courage is to walk the path of chaos, while grounded in the stillness of the unconditioned heart.

As I sat this morning sipping my tea and feeling just how much I desire to simply live the fullness of my soul in the world, with all of the soul’s chaotic yearnings and knowings, including the truly primal force that is my sexuality, I heard the loud, deep call of a Raven. My eyes were closed and I sat and listened to this call, a deep rumbling call, much deeper than a crow’s call. When I opened my eyes, I saw this wide-winged Raven circling around my apartment windows. I live on the third floor and have windows on two sides. This raven swirled and swooped around my windows, coming closer than I imagined was possible for such a large bird. On the last circle, she looked right in my window as she voiced a loud call.

And then she was gone, but her message stayed with me.

Raven knows the power of the chaotically sacred, and so do our hearts.

 

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The status quo and the status quo keeper are in Cahoots!

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The status quo is only interested in one thing – keeping the status quo the status quo.

Whether it’s our own internal status quo, a community status quo, or a cultural status quo, at the heart of the status quo is a built in defense mechanism for maintaining things as they are. By definition.

You can see how hard the status quo works to maintain the status quo. You can see it in yourself, and you can see it in the culture at large. Even when a big part of us doesn’t like what is happening, there is a part that wants to keep things EXACTLY AS THEY ARE. That’s the inner status quo keeper.

We all have one. Yup, we all do.

For a moment, just feel your internal status quo keeper. Get a sense of how it will do almost ANYTHING to keep things the same as they are right now…forever…and ever.

And, get a sense of how it feels to fight against the status quo keeper. How does it feel? Like a battle of heavyweights going a full 15 rounds?

Fighting the status quo only gets the status quo to dig in its heels deeper.

And…consider the cultural status quo…the culture you live in. Consider how intractable some problems are. Racism. Misogyny. Religious intolerance. Homophobia. The devaluation of our planet. Greed…just to name a few.

Something in our culture, and within us, is trying desperately to hang on to the ‘way things are’ – the way we as a species has been living on this planet. We are in cahoots, whether we want to see it or not.

This something is really good at rationalizing. Really good at it. It rationalizes all over the place why this ‘one little thing’ won’t hurt, or that ‘way of doing things’ isn’t so bad.

This something is powerful, and NOTHING will ever come out of this something that could upend itself or its way of life.

No thinking out of this something will ever bring about the end of this something.

 

This is so important to get. Really important. Nothing will ever come out of the status quo keeper that will end the keeper.

 

So what do we do?

What resource do we have as a species that can show a new way out of this seemingly intractable mess?

Our creativity. Yes, creativity. Not art. Not artistic talent. Creativity, the essential nature of each and every human being, and of all of life.

Life is a creative process. Life in general, and our lives. We are creative beings. I’m not talking problem solving. That’s almost always more of the same thinking…trying to solve rather than allowing, receiving, trusting in a deeper knowing.

The status quo keeper doesn’t like creativity. Not at all. It doesn’t like anything that knows that the unknown is a place of fertile possibility, an unfathomable mystery. The status quo keeper doesn’t like mystery. It holds up logic and reason as the sole arbiter of problem solving. And the more we try to ‘solve’ our intractable problems with more intractable thinking…well you get the picture.

Just look at what’s happening at the top ‘leadership’ positions in the United States. So many keepers trying to keep their idea of what is right and logical in place. At the heart of it all, there’s an ‘established order’ of things we have somehow all agreed upon…even if it was by simply being born into this culture. Institutions and systems all based upon some kind of agreed upon way for human beings to ‘run’ things.

 

We know we are failing and we don’t know what to do about it – but creativity does. Creativity is outside of the keeper. It sees the status quo and it sees the keeper of the status quo. And the keeper knows it.


What can upend the status quo? Creativity. Life. The wisdom of the Body. Embodied Creativity. Sacred Creativity.

We are life and when we embody our creative nature, we know we are deeply connected to life and our wisdom flows in harmony with life. We know we are living in a sacred world, and that we are sacred.

Talking about creativity can get people riled up. Much has been made about how creative people are crazy. They see things differently. They are a little out there. Yup. That’s the point. Don’t we need to see things differently? Is doing the same old thing, getting the same old outcome NOT crazy?

Creativity is a direct challenge to the status quo. It is a letting go of what you want, in fact perhaps even a letting go of the ‘you’ that wants it. It is getting out of the way of what wants to be born.

A creator is an activist. A creator activates something within that is much more intelligent than the status quo keeper – ANY status quo keeper.

Why? Because life is never stopped long enough to become a status quo. Life flows. Always. Life births, grows, dies, and is reborn again. There is no status quo. Everything is in flux. Change is constant.

 

I share this here because we’ve just begun our 24-week deep dive into embodied creativity for women – Becoming a Force of Nature. A force of nature is unstoppable because nature is unstoppable. It flows, moves, creates, lives, dies, and is born again. A force of nature is always transforming…and when we live from our creativity so are we.

I’m calling all women activists to come along
on the journey, but activists who are
willing to lean in to life itself, to nature, for nature.

 

Life lived through human beings CAN be in harmony with nature, rather than attempting to control or dominate it. The status quo keeper is into control and domination.

Take a look at the course. Listen to our Kickoff call, an hour long call where we experience a deep meditation, and talk about the deep erotic nature of women and the feminine, a nature that is at the heart of sustained change.

You’re not too late. You can register through midnight pdt tomorrow night, Tuesday October 22nd. 

If you feel the urge, the nudge, the knowing that you belong in the course, please follow it.

It’s really good material. I know. I’ve taught it for eleven years now to a wide variety of people in a variety of situations, and I’ve seen the transformation that happens. We’re a beautiful group of women and we’d love to have you join us.

Right now, we are being supported in untold and unimaginable ways to help us make this shift as a species. It is time for this. 

 

 

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Reclaiming Flesh is Holy Work

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The innermost layers of a woman’s flesh hold stories whose endings can emerge as the most beautiful tales of redemption and liberation.

Redeeming flesh is not easy; yet it is holy work.

~~~

This is a vulnerable post. I won’t tell you details, but I’ll tell you I’ve been weeping – you know that kind of crying where the tears just run out your eyes and down your cheeks? It’s as if the tears have a life of their own. They just flow. You aren’t completely sure why they are flowing, but it is clear the tears know. They flow out from these innermost layers of flesh, places and pockets where pain from long, long ago were secreted away.

There’ve been many little moments this week that seem to be bringing forth these tears – moments where I can feel love wants to move through me, guiding me, yet I feel frozen because of fear. While the culture, and of course my own ego, would tell me I am right to trust my fear, my heart just breaks when I do…when I choose fear over love and offering myself to the moment at hand. These are real life moments, with people I do not know. Love wants me to move toward them in moments that might very well be unsafe. Yet, I can feel the love, and I can feel the grief when I do not move with love.

This week, though, rather than getting upset with myself for my responses, probably because I’ve been softened inside and out these past two weeks, I find these tears flowing from the heartbreak of seeing just how painfully, and beautifully, human I am. And, yes, it is painful when I see myself choosing between ‘staying safe’ and offering myself to an unknown I can’t know.

And there’s been a big moment, an experience that’s really accelerated this ‘undoing’, something that has me feeling into these deep places and pockets where I long ago secreted away experiences too painful to feel at such a tender age.  In the dark, stories of rejection and abandonment grow into what seem like beasts too fierce for reacquainting.

At some point, these stories wake up and begin to make noise. They don’t like being caged. Like everything else in this world, they long to be free.

 

I can feel love behind these tears, right behind them, trying to make its way in on the tail of my tears. The tears soften my flesh and love rushes in.

It feelings like a river of undoing, like the river that is rushing is wearing away my resistance to love. I can feel that to choose love is to let go of a kind of ‘forced certainty’ I can hold onto when I stay insulated. It is forced because I am forcing it. I get that.

The river is rapid and insistent. Love is that way.

It is in these moments of choice that I come right up against my flaws and learned separation, and the habit of responding from fear. The stories the flesh holds about letting love in to these darker places put up some strong resistance. And I see how deeply the pain and shame of past hurts is burrowed into the innermost flesh in my body.

And the flesh holds stories about power and instincts, about unleashing and unchaining, and all the things that could happen. So many damn stories about this power within me

I remember it as a young girl – this instinctive connection to all of life.

 

I remember the power dancing with instinct as if they’d known each other forever.

But now, I sometimes feel like a lioness that has lost her footing. Her power is there, but the instincts aren’t fully conscious, so her big furry paws step guardedly rather than assuredly.

I sense this is why there is fear in some of my choices. When the instincts have been deemed too much or too powerful or inappropriate, they get caged where they can’t roam free. Instincts need to touch ground, feel the wind and sun, and be nourished with breath. They need to be fed and loved. They need to feel the earth.

Four paws that are in divine relationship with the earth know where to take that next step, can feel into the next step, and can sense direction and speed and gait. Four paws that are bound know little of these necessities.

 

The deep love a woman has for life, and her ability to hold the space for it, needs her instincts to ground it. We need this instinctual self to sniff and taste and hear and feel what is so. This love, this power, these instincts – they are all part of our aliveness, our vital life force. They are part of our creativity, and redeeming them out of the stories in our flesh is our necessary work, necessary for our own emancipation and the emancipation of our planet.

The process of reclaiming flesh is intelligent. Tears falling shows us something, especially when they fall of their own accord, as if flushed out of flesh ready to be free again.

Reclaiming flesh is holy work. Your tears can lead you across the threshold into these secreted places. And even though the stories were created in a time when it felt like true love was nowhere to be found, a river of love is riding on the tail of each tear, ready and waiting to inscribe ‘The End’ at the end of each story.

~~~

Update May 18th, 2015:

bafonbadge300pxIf you are curious about the journey of embodiment and coming to know again this sacred creativity, join me for my new course, Becoming a Force of Nature. We’ll be walking on four paws, feeling our instinctual way through a magnificent journey together. You can read more, here. The Early-bird price ends Sunday, May 24th at Midnight PDT.

 

 

 

 

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Somewhere, under all those layers, She is a Force of Nature

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We wear many veils, veils that keep us from both seeing ourselves, and being seen by others,  as we really are.

Like this beautiful Iris, the petals protect the soft layers and fragrance of the Feminine. At some point, the petals spread themselves out to slow dance with the sun, and the beautiful soft places within come into the light.

What causes this flower to pulse and push and open to the sun? A fierce aliveness, a fierce desire to be fully expressed, fully seen, and fully held. Held by the earth, held by the hips, and held by One who loves her…deeply.

To know you are held by this Love within yourself, truly, madly and deeply, is what ultimately allows your inner flesh to be revealed. 

Think of the force of nature it takes for this flower to open. Fully. Unabashedly. To the Light.

Within every woman lives the Feminine. But, She almost always lives deep within the shadows, underneath the many layers. For eons, it hasn’t been safe to let her out so women have kept her hidden. She’s been dormant. But no more.

 

She is here.

Somewhere, under all those layers, She is fiercely alive.

Can you feel Her?

Can you hear Her speaking to you in symbol and image, dream and metaphor?

She doesn’t speak the way we’re accustomed to being spoken to. She speaks in heartbeats, pulses, beauty, and fire.

Deep in your pelvis is a cauldron – a cauldron where She mixes her creations, where She nourishes and sustains creation until it is ready to breathe on its own. She lives within you. She is you. You ARE fiercely alive.

When you know She lives within you, when you feel Her pulsing every cell of your body with Life, you begin to feel this pulsation opening you from within.

At one point in my own life, I crossed the threshold from invitation to insistence. She no longer invited me to open, She insisted I open, and as every part of me pushed this away, She stood her ground. Literally. She came up into me through my feet, my legs, and into my core. She was lovingly and fiercely insistent.

I share this here, because She’s been insistent once again.

 

Becoming a Force of Nature

My new course, Becoming a Force of Nature, has been gestating for a long, long time. I was telling my mentor, Michael Ray, just this past Wednesday, that I feel like the gestational period must have been that of a dinosaur, ’cause it feels much longer than the 12 months of an elephant, and I don’t know anything much bigger than an elephant except for a dinosaur.

Becoming a Force of Nature is a potent, provocative, and highly practical 24-week journey. The Stanford curriculum has been taught for over three decades, in various places, with wildly successful results. It became famous, really, at the height of the boom of Silicon Valley because so many of the valley’s successful people were students in the course. And, with the rising feminine infusing all of us with a new way to be conscious in the world, the timing of these two aspects coming together is perfect.

The course is also an opportunity to hear and share experiences and stories of the Feminine making herself known within us. This is one very important way we come to see what is happening within us as women as we awaken to Her. I’ll have interviews with women who share their experiences, and there will be plenty of opportunity to share yours, or even to begin to articulate it.

 

The Inaugural Offering

The first one! A little wet behind the ears; assuredly a little messy. Fur needs to be licked. Legs need to be shaken out. But, She’s here. And, from what I can see, She is beautiful. And rich. And powerful. And tender. And waiting…

Waiting for you…if it’s right. And, you’ll know if it’s right by reading about Her, feeling Her in your body, sending into what might be possible if you allow Her to move you from where you are to where your soul is calling you to lead, live, and love from.

This course is a container to hold whatever transformation is right for you at this time, and it is indeed a time of transformation for us all and for the planet.

 

The Unknown IS a Creative Process

Whether we call it the Hero’s journey, the Shero’s journey, or the Human journey, it is about entering into the mystery of the creative process. If we are stepping out into the unknown in the world from a place of action, we must ultimately surrender to this creative process because the unknown is just that…a creative process. If we are going within, as this journey requires, in order to rescue ourselves in the deep way the feminine is asking us to do, we must disrobe, unveil, and offer ourselves into this mystery.

The creative process is this. If it is truly creative, it is a transformational process. If it is truly creative, it is a receiving of what comes. If it is truly creative, it is a letting of what we want and becoming a vessel for our soul to express in the world.

I’ve been teaching this Stanford curriculum for eleven years, and I’ve been living into the feminine for about the same time. That is no coincidence. These two pieces, married together, are a vehicle to bring together, into balance, the masculine and feminine within, bridging the two worlds within us that have been divided for so many centuries.

I tell you all of this, because I want you to know I understand this is not easy, but it can be filled with ease. It will be filled with grace.

You can learn more about the course, here, as well as listen to two audio pieces: one where I talk about the course, and one that is just a small sample of the kind of guided meditations and exercises you’ll do as part of the course.

Please consider joining me. We’re gathering a beautiful circle of women who feel called at this time to let go of the old way and to receive the new, the truly creative that is hungering to be expressed.

 

 

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In My Skin

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I’ve come here to live in my skin. Not to hide away from life, but to shimmy right up to this ever-so-thin layer of dermis so I can truly touch and be touched.

I’ve come here to live in my skin. To relate to life, caressed by breeze, by sun, by dew.

I’ve come here to live in my skin. It’s the only thing that separates what I sometimes believe is me from what I sometimes believe is not me. It’s a tender line, isn’t it? This thin skin – a membrane so thin it defies rationality.

I’ve come here to live in my skin. A soft wrapping around the tender-most flesh, it gifts me with what many only speak of in hushed tones – one of the most joyous experiences of life – that of being touched, deeply, reverently consciously.

I’ve come here to live in my skin. To know the true intimacy of life is to know the sublime interaction that happens here. It is so simple, yet so profoundly mysterious. We can describe these bodies in scientific, physiological terms. We can say, “Oh yes, I know how it works.” But when we touch another with our whole being, our whole awareness, at the point of connection there are no words to describe it. Nothing we can say can capture this moment of exquisite intimacy.

I’ve come here to live in my skin. To be alive, fully and vulnerably, is to offer this skin to the world. To do so is to allow yourself to be touched by what greets you.

I’ve come here to live in my skin, yet along the way I learned so well how not to live in my skin. Each of us has moments when what we experienced was too much, too painful, or too frightening to feel the immensity of the sensations of those experiences.

Over these past many years, I’ve been taking this long journey back into the body. Along with many things, one thing I’ve discovered is that sometimes what I long to say can only be said through my body. Sometimes, there is no way to say with words what the body longs to say. It must be said with touch, with movement, with song or dance.

Maybe that’s our journey, to come back into the skin. We are here in bodies.  We are alive in these bodies, in this skin that was created to know the sublimity of touch and sensation and life.

Why are we alive if not to fully live in this skin?

 

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Weather Report for Today: Hips, Hands, & Heart

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“Movement never lies.
It is a barometer telling the state of the soul’s weather to all who can read it.”
Martha Graham

The truth is close at hand. Just move and you will know it.

::

Today at dance, a different teacher played the music and guided us through our two-hour practice, a teacher I’d not yet danced with. As with each 5Rhythms teacher, he played a unique blend of music and guided us in his own unique way. And as has always been the case, my dance today was another unique expression of where I am, right now, a as a soul, dancing with another 149 other souls, to another unique soul’s musical selections.

I think back over my eleven years dancing the 5Rhythms as a moving meditation practice and how my soul has moved over those years. If my thousands of dances had been recorded and put into one long stream, it would be a long weather report showing the changes in the state of my soul over the years – and there have been infinite state changes along the way.

When I first started dancing all those years ago, I felt called to it – even though it freaked me out to dance, freeform, without steps, in a room full of strangers. I kept showing up, week after week. This taught me so clearly how we know where our soul wants to move even if we fight it or fear it.

Yes, I felt embarrassed often. Yes, I even felt like I might die of embarrassment – and I didn’t. Something pushed me to go. Something without words. It was instinct. It was knowing. It was intense.

Eleven years later I can’t imagine not dancing. I can’t imagine not knowing the people I’ve met through dance. I can’t imagine not having come to know myself so much more clearly. I can’t imagine not being more deeply awake in the cells of this body. I can’t imagine NOT knowing that this powerful joy is possible to know on a regular basis.

Joy comes even when my soul is in the middle of stormy weather, because the joy comes from movement itself, not from being ‘happy’.

Movement is like that. It shows us what’s up inside. It shows us how we are unfolding.

Creative expression is movement through the body. Whether we’re moving the pen across paper, brush across canvas, feet across the floor, the body loves to move and the soul loves to express. We are creative beings by nature.

But here’s the thing.

Anyone or anything that tells us our expression, movement, disposition – basically the expressions of who we are – should be all sunshine and blue skies all the time doesn’t know a damn thing about weather.

Being human is not always sunny and blue skies – not if we’re truthful.

When your hand is moving across the paper or your feet across the floor, don’t stop your soul from moving the weather at hand – or foot. Let your soul pour rain onto the paper, or dance a dark star-lit sky across the floor, or move strong confident wind across your vocal cords.

We are nature. Why should our movement and creative expression be any different than the weather?

It only is when we try to control it by hanging onto it, forcing it, or telling a big story about it that we stop the weather from rolling out across the plains of our lives.

Let your expression move and you will come to know clearly, and beautifully, exactly the state of your own soul and a profoundly grateful joy. Our hips, hands, and hearts know what’s going on inside and they’ll be the first to report the weather if you’re willing to move.

 

 

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Feel Her

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photo by Anne Jablonski

 

There is one thing we MUST do right now if we are to survive as a species…if we are to respond to the mess we’ve made.

One thing.

We must begin to feel, deeply. We must open our hearts to the world, to each other, to the Earth.

To do that we must find our way down to our bodies. To the heart. To the soul.

We cannot bypass, either mentally or spiritually.

We have to re-learn how to feel what is here. We’ve been so strongly conditioned out of our natural feeling state, and yet, when we do feel, we respond.

Our hearts are meant to feel. We are designed to feel. It’s how we relate to each other. And, it’s how we can re-learn to relate to the Earth, for She is alive.

Imagine for a moment the Earth as a radiant being. She breathes. She feeds. She is alive. Now, for a moment, consider everything that has been done to her and is being done to Her, all across Her body. Let yourself feel. Her pain is our pain. We are not separate from Her. We are born from Her and we die back into Her. There is no way we cannot feel Her pain, and there is no way She cannot feel ours. We are in relationship with Her. The only way we don’t feel it is if we are not conscious in the places where those feelings are experienced: in the body, in the heart.

No one is going to feel this for us. No one is going to take care of this so we don’t have to. It is our responsibility as Her children to care for Her. We are the only ones who can stop abusing Her and protect Her from more abuse.

Deep feeling leads to responsiveness. When we are open in relationship we see and hear and come to know each other.

You have a relationship with Her. Your body is waiting. Your heart is waiting. Mother Earth is waiting with open arms. She always has been.

Love Her. Share your joy with Her. Bring Her an offering. Sing Her a song. She loves song.

 

::

EARTH MOTHER PRAYER SONG
(Click on the link above to listen to the song)

Dear Earth Mother come to me
Allow me in thy prayers.
May this moment speak to me.
Allow me to prepare.
Come Dear Mother be with me,
The sweat that we partake.
All who enter in your womb
Seek within your grace.
BLESSED MOTHER
Hold this Earth,
The mountains at your feet.
The lake behind us sources us,
The trees keep company.
In this mix may we partake
And taste of your sweet space.
Divinity will come through us,
Today we can embrace.
See as far as you see,
Hear as far as you hear.
Be as far as we can hold
And laugh and sweat and eat.

 

During our Waking the Inner Teacher retreat at Feathered Pipe, one morning this song came through Tracey, one of the women on retreat. We’d been singing and giving thanks to Pachamama all week. We’d begun to remember, and deepened that remembrance with profound practices of gratitude to Her. And so, we all sang Tracey’s song. It was a beautiful moment (reflected in the image above). After our time together, Karen Chrappa recorded Tracey’s song and I share it here, both lyrics and recording.

[Recorded at The Creative Arts Studio with Karen Chrappa, Stefanie Lipsey, Tracy Warzer, Lorraine Aguilar, Aimee Schiff; Sound edit by Abhita Austin of Hidden Chapel Studios.

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A Return to Relationship With Life

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“…how calmly, as though it were an ordinary thing, we eat the blessed earth.” ~ Mary Oliver

Seeds are planted, food comes forth…as though it were an ordinary thing.

The moon returns after having gone black…as though it were an ordinary thing.

We open our eyes to live another day…as though it were an ordinary thing.

The Earth sustains us, each day of our lives, and we act as if it were an ordinary thing.

 

Around us, within us, between us, is the sacred.

Every atom is filled with it. And every atom is it.

Every breath is this mystery gifting us another moment of life. It is quite simple, yet life-changingly profound when we come to really take it in. And, yet, we grow to see it as an ordinary thing.

::

Wonder and Awe

The nature of the structures and institutions we live in is one of domination and control over life and that which is symbolic of life-giving power. In these structures, the sacred is seen as something above us, outside of us, and in some cases, something that only certain people have access to. It is also seen, by some, as something that does not exist.

For some time, we humans have thought that we can solve any problem simply through our thinking process, even the problems our thinking has created. It’s actually not very logical at all, but then the logical mind that doesn’t acknowledge reality isn’t very logical.

The logical mind run amuck has a quality of cold lifelessness. There is no heart in it, no warmth. When there is no heart, there can be a feeling of the stiltedness that’s somewhat robotic.

The structures we live in do not give much credence to wonder and awe, mystery and uncertainty. When we’re taught we have to know everything, there isn’t much place for these things. When we’re taught that humans own and can control life, not just land ownership but even going so far as to patent seeds, we’ve lost a sense of any relatedness or connection to life. Rather than being in relationship with the life that sustains us, we’ve come to see ourselves as owners and manipulators of this life…sometimes, all for a profit or comfort or supposed safety and security.

But wonder and awe are absolutely necessary if we are to heal the messes we’ve made here on earth. It is our relationship with life that needs healing, and to me that’s the realm of the sacred. And it’s also largely the realm of womanhood.

Why? Because our very need to control, dominate, and fix life is why we are in the mess we are in. And when we continue to act from this mindset to attempt to ‘fix’ our problems without opening to the mystery itself to guide us back into balance, we continue to seal not only our own human downfall, but so selfishly the downfall of many other species.

Our role as humans is of stewards of this beautiful Earth, and, we’ve forgotten our humble role.

 

Life itself regenerates.

That is part of its mystery, is it not?

Life is intelligent, much more so than any human being. But to know this once again, we must come to remember our place in this vast Universe. There is an intelligence far more intelligent than human beings will ever be. And this intelligence is sacred. This intelligence is what animates all of life. It is the universal life force. It permeates existence. And, we’ve lost our awe for this intelligence. We think we have it figured out. We think we can recite words that capture this intelligence. We think our dogmas explain it.

We’ve been so deeply conditioned to believe that the sacred is NOT in the land, the air, the water, the trees, animals, plants, rocks and yes, people. We’ve been taught to believe the sacred is not in our deep feeling nature as human beings. We’ve been encouraged to believe that the very things we are destroying are simply objects for our use. It’s too easy for our conditioned minds to view life as something we can research, figure out, understand, and even patent, that it is this deep misunderstanding that has brought us to the brink of great destruction.

Furthermore, many of us have been turned off to anything that smacks of religion, or if we follow a particular religion, many of those religions teach that the sacred is above this lowly earth plane. In believing this, we come to push away anything that we believe is trying to tell us what to believe, how to act, or how we must be in order to be worthy of access to the sacred.

 

A reclamation of the sacredness of life is needed.

Words can point to so many things, and they point to experiences we’ve had in the past, experiences that might be positive or negative or both. So much gets tangled up in a word. Yet, this reclamation that can help us heal is an opportunity; it’s the opportunity to come to know what the word ‘sacred’ means to each of us by way of experience…our very own real life experience.

Words are powerful. We can’t name this that can’t be named. But we can each guide ourselves to really look at our own relationship with this that can’t be named. We can guide ourselves to remember our own experiences of moments when we’ve been profoundly moved by this that can’t be named. And these feelings, these experiences, can be acknowledged with a word, a metaphor, a scent, a flavor, a symbol that speaks uniquely to each of us. Something that puts us back in relationship with that which breathes you.

The word you use to describe whatever it is that brings this awe to you matters not. What matters is the acknowledgement that there is something greater than you, or me, or us. What matters is that we find our way back to a relationship with this that is greater than all of us.

 

Consider…

What brings out the feeling that you are connected to something greater than yourself? What brings you back to wonder and awe? What helps you remember there is something greater than you, whether it be community, relationship, humanity, the animal kingdom, Mother Earth…something that compels you to come back to the whole and to wholeness?

When you remember this experience, or these experiences, how do you feel? What do you feel? Where do you feel it?

For me, I notice these things in many small moments, as well as some of the ‘bigger’ life moments I’ve known.

I’ve seen the sacred in those ecstatic moments of my children’s births, or the births of my grandchildren that I was lucky enough to witness. I’ve seen the sacred in those moments of death, pain, and illness of those I love deeply. And sometimes, it’s been the way my arm or hand moves to the music when I dance, or how the warm wind feels when it’s blowing across my face. Sometimes, it’s been the miracle of my grandchild’s small hand with big dimples by each finger that causes my breath to catch.

 

Breath catching is a sure sign of the sacred.

 

Just consider this: You are alive. You ‘eat the blessed earth’ each day. You drink Her waters. You breathe Her air. You are here.

The Earth is this Mystery in form. We are Her.

Let yourself see the amazingness of just this. Then, call it whatever you wish. But, acknowledge that Yes, that something is right here, looking out your eyes, breathing your body, beating your heart. Acknowledge just how close this is to you. And, after really taking this in, acknowledge that what this is is not ordinary at all.

I’d say it is sacred. And, what do you say?

 

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