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The Feminine: Presence in a Lullaby

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I’ve been wanting to include some examples of the feminine in real life here on the blog, so you can have a sense of what I am talking about when I speak of the sacred feminine. She is revealed, more and more, each day.

I’ve created a new category, The Feminine in Real Life, that will include some great examples of how She is rising in the everyday world.

A Lullaby

The first post is this absolutely gorgeous lullaby in the video below. It cuts right to my heart. Her voice, the words, and what is unseen all come together to create such beauty. It brings me to tears, and to a feeling of deep relatedness to life.

Before you watch,

I want to share these words that I saw just yesterday from Marion Woodman:

“…when we’re talking about that feminine that’s missing, we’re talking about the heart energy. That can fill a room. Certainly in a relationship it’s the energy that holds presence. By which I mean the child comes in or the person comes in, has something to tell you or they have prepared a little bouquet. Have you got the time to see it? Have you got the time to see the love that went into it? Can you hear the anguish in the voice that is talking to you?”

The feminine principle would attempt to relate. Instead of breaking things off into parts, it would say, where are we alike? How can we connect? Where is the love? Can you listen to me? Can you really hear what I am saying? Can you see me? Do you care whether you see me or not?

…it is so difficult… to talk about the feminine because so few people have experienced it. What I’m talking about here is presence, and relatedness.”

The video:

The lyrics:

I Have Never Loved Someone, by My Brightest Diamond

I have never loved someone the way I love you
I have never seen a smile like yours
And if you grow up to be king, or clown, or pauper
I will say you are my favorite one in town
I have never held a hand so soft and sacred
When I see you laugh, I know heaven’s key
And when I grow to be a poppy in the graveyard
I will send you all my love upon the breeze
And if the breeze won’t blow your way, I will be the sun
And if the sun won’t shine your way, I will be the rain
And if the rain won’t wash away all your aches and pains
I will find some other way to tell you you’re okay

::

The presence of the feminine, receptive, tender, and powerful: “I have never held a hand so soft and sacred.” “When I see you laugh, I know heaven’s key.”

You can feel the presence as she sings the song. You can see its effect on the people in the restaurant. Tears. They have been touched. She, the singer, is touched by the presence moving through her.

In fact, in the description below the video, the person filming writes of the effect:

“After the concert I finally dared to ask her what I wanted to ask her that morning, to sing us this lullaby that struck me down. It’s Sunday morning, a morning of hangovers. The whole hotel seems suspended in the air. We ask her to get to the bar, to make it sing for her, to sing for her son (for whom she had written this song). We erase ourselves. She, she doesn’t. After we’re done filming, I cry. She cries too.”

Struck me down. Powerful words on the effect of this presence. It is clear that this presence touches everyone. How did it touch you? How does this radiance affect you?

What would our world be like if we embodied this feminine receptivity more deeply? Would we come to know, as experience, that the hands we hold are ‘soft and sacred’, that when we hear laughter from those we love, that we are knowing ‘heaven’s key’? Would we listen, deeply listen?

To embody the feminine in life is to come to know it as experience, not just as an idea in our heads but as real life experience. We haven’t experienced it much, for it has denigrated, called weak.

This is the receptive radiance of the feminine in us all, women and men, that aspect of self that can simply receive and bear witness.

It’s a beingness, and it calls for a not-doing, a letting go of doing so you can be with.

::

 I discovered this lullabye (by way of Jamie Wallace) on Amy Palko’s gorgeous post, Whispering Lullabies to the Goddess. Amy’s words speak to the goddess within each of us.

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Growing Whole in the Darkness

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“All beauty contains darkness.” ~ Daniel Odier

Learning to see, and then act, outside of the current patriarchal structure has been a journey of ever widening circles, much like a spiral. It is the journey of living the feminine, a way of life that is very different than that which I was taught to know. It means trusting what is revealed in each moment of present awareness, and feeling for what is ripe with the promise of birth. I go in and out of living this way, but as the circles of understanding grow, I find myself opening to the darkness of the feminine to receive Her guidance.

When this guidance is revealed, the only thing that lies ahead is darkness, the darkness of the unknown. The only thing known is that one choice, the one thing that is the most obvious choice. My mind struggles with the darkness, wanting desperately to know what lies ahead, and yet I also know in my heart that this darkness, this unknown, is the mystery of life waiting to be revealed. The divine mystery is the new, is this darkness from which all emerges.

What I am learning to trust in is the strong pull of this knowing. You might call this intuition, but for me, as I live deeper into the cells of my own body, it is knowing.

I found, what I guess you could call the ‘best’ book of 2009, this way. I saw it on a friend’s desk and knew I must read it. The pull was unavoidable. A friend had given him the book, for reasons he couldn’t understand. He had no intention of reading it, but for some reason had not yet given it away.

I would call this book a gift. A gift given and gratefully, and voraciously, received. Not all of the book kept my rapt attention, but the parts that did carried me deeper into the darkness, deeper into the parts of myself that were thirsting for light. I was yearning for gnosis. Through a marriage of the wisdom of this book and my own willingness to allow a new kind of knowing to emerge from within, I began to deepen my trust in this darkness.

The book that has so many dog ears, cracks in the spine, lines underlined, recommendations to others, is Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness. The authors are Marion Woodman and Elinor Dickson. In my knowing, this book can be a guide book for the journey into darkness that we all, and most especially women, must take. As Woodman states, “The evolutionary imperative within the collective unconscious is pushing us toward a new level of consciousness.” We must learn to stand alone, in our own wholeness, if we are going to survive. And, learning to stand alone means diving into the darkness, to come to know ourselves again in a whole new way.

As Odier shares, there is beauty in darkness. It is the rich soil from where all of life emerges.

Today’s post is Day 4 (best book) of Gwen Bells’ Best of 2009 Blog Challenge.

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Your Experience as a Woman

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I have found some wonderful new books, which focus on the transformation of consciousness in which we are smack in the middle of. Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness, by Marion Woodman, has opened a flood of light deep within my cells. Woodman is an incredible prophet of the sacred feminine consciousness rising in women and men.

I’ll write more about her book in the next few posts, but right now I want to share another great book, Women of Wisdom, by Tsultrim Allione. Allione was a Buddhist Nun, but she renounced her vows because she felt the pull to become a mother. Her life has been extraordinary, and she shares so much of her experience in the newly revised edition of Women of Wisdom.

Within the pages of Women of Wisdom, Allione speaks to the reason I created this blog, Unabashedly Female. In my own experience, I could see that what was, and is, happening to me as part of consciousness awakening was reflected nowhere in the cultural stories of the world I live in. Everything we see, the stories we hear, are all part of a culture that is male-centric and still highly patriarchal. The structures and systems in place were designed with men in mind to fill their needs. We, as women, are inundated with messages that, at their core, come from these systems and structures.

Allione writes, “We try to relate our experiences to the stories of others and thereby edit our perceptions according to what fits.” (Women of Wisdom, pg. 83) Allione then quotes from Womenspirit Rising:

Women have lived in the interstices between inchoate experience and the shaping given to experience by the stories of men. In a very real sense, women have not experienced their own experience. There is a dialectic between stories and experience, Stories shape experience; experience shapes stories. Womenspirit Rising, pg. 228

If the stories we swim in reflect male systems and experience, then we never really become conscious to our own experience, what is happening to us if we continue to look to these systems for reflection. This, coupled with the understanding that the ONLY thing we can truly know is our own experience, is mana for our souls, for when we become aware of what keeps us circling in our own illusion, we can begin to wake up from it. 

For the sacred feminine to awake and rise within our own consciousness, we must wake up to the stories we have believed and aligned ourselves with, and realize they are not our stories. The truth is what is happening to us in our own experience, both individually and collectively. Part of what we do as humans is try to make sense of our experience, and if we hold it up against our conditioned world view, then we make links and assumptions that lead us to conclusions that can never be true, at least in an absolute sense.

Being Unabashedly Female is allowing ourselves to really look within at our own experience and trust that it is true. Being Unabashedly Female is about trusting ourselves, trusting our experience and opening to the transforming energies that are within our physical beings, that primal matrix of creation that resides within women. Being Unabashedly Female is also about coming together as women to share our stories and experiences so that we may develop a deeper understanding of what is happening within and without.

Unabashedly Female is ultimately about aligning with the awakening sacred feminine within all of life, and supporting a newfound respect for women and men to live together as balanced beings in our own right, knowing that our own truth can only come from within. As beloved Amma said in a talk over six years ago, “men and women must bow down to each other.”

And, we must bow down to Life, to all of Life. We CAN live into a way of life where we honor and serve the sacredness in each other, and in all of Life.

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