by wpengine | Dec 7, 2013 | Divine Feminine, Healing, Spirituality, Women
How can you become a whole woman? The whole you. The beautiful you. The sexy you. The sacred you.
You know how to adorn your body—you do it every day. You decorate your body with your favorite clothes, earrings and rings, fragrances, textures, and colors. You dress, slum, wear makeup or not depending on your mood, whether you’re at a meeting, having a bad hair day, working out, doing laundry, or out on the town.
You know how to adorn your outside. You may do it to look and feel attractive, appealing, and sexy. To attract others. Which is fabulous.
But there’s more to being beautiful, radiant, and sensual. A truly beautiful woman is just as beautiful on the inside.
Becoming whole is adorning all of you—body and heart, psyche and soul.
So how do you adorn your femininity? See if you find something that helps you be beautiful from within and become a whole woman in this eight-part blog series.
Shringar, the art of adornment
In India, shringar is women’s art of 
adornment. When a woman does her shringar, she enjoys and celebrates making herself as beautiful as she can be. With sixteen ways to decorate, reveal, and beautify herself from nose ring to bindi, henna to perfume, attire to armband to anklet, shringar is an art for each woman to explore and revel in her femininity, sensuality, and mystery.
Shringar is how a woman adores herself. It’s an act of self-love.
When you adorn yourself as a woman, you adorn Shakti, the Goddess, in you. Just as goddesses in temples are bathed and scented and dressed and garlanded, so too, when you adorn yourself, you sanctify yourself.
You may be trendy or comfort-seeking; wear chunky jewelry or delicate sparkles; be lavish or subtly feminine. Your outer decoration reveals how you feel about yourself, your inner life, and your femininity.
♥ How do you adorn yourself? And with what?
♥ What in you do you adore? And not?
♥ How whole do you feel as a woman?
How do other women do it?
We women are always looking to other women to mirror, reflect, and inspire our femininity.
You check out another woman’s clothes, the cut of her jacket, her shoes. How she walks and holds herself. Her sensuality, her self-esteem. How true is she to herself? Will she support you or does she only look out for herself? Does she abandon herself or is she in her feline power?
You compare yourself. You may be judgmental, even catty.
You look to learn. Is she a model for you?
Maybe you feel less than. Jealous. Neutral. Or inspired.
You always know when a woman plays herself down or lives from her fullest femininity. You know, the radiant, magnificent, compassionate, and powerful women. The ones lit up from within. Women who are completely themselves. And believe in themselves. Unabashedly and unapologetically so.
Your journey as a woman
We’re all on the same collective journey—digging ourselves out from the same old patriarchal hole.
Maybe you think that, as a woman, you’re supposed to be quiet, small, modest, and chaste. Take care of others. Sacrifice or give yourself away. That you’re supposed be the woman your mother or father or culture or spouse want you to be.
Maybe you were raised in a masculine model, where you found power by emulating a man. Self-reliant, competitive, and oh-so-individually tough. So strong that no one can ever hurt you. That to be powerful you have to out-man men.
In your journey to become a whole woman, you sift through family, cultural, and social messages of what it means to be a woman. You sort through your fears and insecurities, your defenses and apprehensions. You get to know your strengths, your vulnerabilities.
Every morning you look in the mirror, creating and uncreating and recreating your womanhood.
There isn’t one way to be a woman. But there’s only one way to be truly uniquely femininely you.
And that’s your way.
It’s a process to become a whole woman
It’s a process to stop seeking approval, 
being the good daughter, and taking care of others. It’s a process to soften a hard masculine way of being, to become tender, soft, and warm. It’s a process to open your broken heart to love again. And another to set boundaries.
It’s a process to own being fully sexual and gorgeous. Fabulous. Creative. Powerful. Wise.
It takes inner work. Therapy. Digging into the deep, dark stuff of who you are.
But you want to be seen. You want to be known. You want to be heard and felt.
You want to find your power. Your voice. Your unique mystery.
You want to desire and be desired. Love and be loved. Utterly.
You want to soar.
Somewhere along your own feminine journey, you discover you can only be yourself. That you can’t kowtow to anyone or make them kowtow to you. That, to be a whole woman is to be completely beautifully powerfully you.
Truly.
It’s then, when you shake your mane and swing your hips, feel passion and power in your belly, your full-throated voice, your loving beating heart, your sexual magnetism, and playful creativity that you know you’re a live woman. A live wire. Fully alive.
In body. Mind. Heart. And Soul.
The seven adornments
Over the next few weeks, this eight-part blog series adorns your femininity not with precious stones, but with the jewels of your chakras.
Pristine and powerful, these seven energy centers are aspects of femininity, which when alive and balanced, integrate to make you a whole woman:
♥ Body
♥ Sexuality
♥ Power
♥ Heart
♥ Voice + Creativity
♥ Intuition
♥ Connection to Spirit and your own Divine Femininity
Stay tuned to travel with me on the chakra caravan to whole womanhood.
And meanwhile, adorn yourself!
by wpengine | Sep 14, 2013 | Divine Feminine, Spirituality, Women
Change knocks at your door in so many different ways.
Sometimes it’s a gentle nudge, a push, or even a shove.
But when Kali enters your life, she bangs open and blows down your door. And often, it’s after you’ve received several messages to change, which you may have ignored or simply not known how to put into practice.
When she enters your life, your transformation becomes center stage.
Kali
She strides into your life with a tempestuous stomp of her legs, shakes her unruly mass of thick black hair, the smell of smoke and sandalwood wafts from her earthy powerful figure, and deep, rich laughter gurgles up from her dark belly. She is bold, strikingly beautiful, and powerful.
“Come,” she says. “It’s time.”
She won’t let you dilly-dally or hesitate or deny or wheedle. She won’t wait for you to finish a project or wash the last dish or complete a conversation. None of the ploys or defenses or resistance you typically use to stall and procrastinate have any effect before her unyielding gaze.
She won’t take “no” or “just a moment” for an answer. She washes you away from your sweet, safe, secure shore in a wave of her wisely fierce love.
Because it’s your time to transform.
Now.
Who is Kali?
Kali is the Dark Mother who destroys in the service of creation. The third Hindu goddess in the cycle of creation-sustenance-destruction, she destroys what’s served its time, its usefulness, and any cloaked ignorance.
But hers is no senseless or merciless destruction. She severs with her sword of infinite compassion, wisdom, and love.
She is the great awakener of all that is asleep, stagnant, and as yet undeveloped in you.
Black as the night, she is goddess of the dark void, of destruction, the mystery of not knowing, and the slow, quiet search of becoming.
Her faces are many: violent, terrible, maternal, furious, tender, destructive, cruel, and indifferent. And she shows you what you need to see when you need to see it.
Her lolling tongue feeds on life, prana–your life. She must eat what’s alive so you can give birth to who you will next be. She must also taste what you forbid to yourself.
All her destruction is to make space and give life to what’s waiting to transform, come alive, and be born anew in you.
She is transformation
Everything must transform—this is a universal law. We get so accustomed to, identify with, and grasp who we are and what we do. We clutch at life to have it stay the same.
But to be alive, we must change. Otherwise we’re stagnant, diseased, or dead.
It can seem cruel, impersonal, even heartless when your relationship, career, or what matters to you is going so well to have it be torn down or blown away.
But there’s a wisdom to her violence: there’s more to who you are. So much more. And she’s going to help you become that.
She is here to rebirth you.
She breaks structures
Violence is her way. Swift, shocking, and direct, she shatters all structures, outer and inner. She tears down your environment so you question your reality. So that you ask yourself:
- What is really true for me now?
- What is most important?
- What have I not been listening to?
You may find you lose your job, relationships, and often, what you believe and hold as true.
It’s her way of guiding you towards your purer truth.
She mirrors your shadow
Kali calls you to face what’s taboo, repressed, and denied. Regardless of social, familial, or cultural dharma, she makes you look at everything you’ve closeted away. Because what you forbid to yourself is a life you don’t allow.
She forces you to step out of what you know. She forces you to find new ways of being.
She makes you look at what you’re most afraid of. She summons the warrior in you who can stare right back at your deepest, darkest fears.
And so, she frees you from fear itself.
She takes you into your nakedness
She disrobes you of your pretenses, excuses, denials, defenses, illusions—of any and all falseness. Until you’re able to stand alone in your nakedness and know yourself as you fully are.
There, surrounded by her quiet, still darkness, you can finally see and know yourself. There, you find and know all that is true to you and for you.
There, you are naked, true, and real.
She fires up your power
If you’ve been 
disempowered in your life, as so many have been in overt and subtle ways, Kali rouses your warrior. Bold, fearless, fierce, and rippling with righteous rage, Kali barges right through social norms to tell you it’s okay, good—no, absolutely essential—to be powerful.
She draws out your boldness, assertiveness, and rides alongside with you, cheering your power.
Most of all, she gives you permission to be angry, powerful, and rise up against everything that’s kept you down, kept you silent, kept you small, kept you “in your place”, kept you going along with what you haven’t wanted to”… (you can keep going).
For she’s the most powerful of Goddesses. And she wants you to have, stand in, and live from your incredible power.
She awakens you
She awakens you to a new reality. She stretches you to step out of your limited view, perspective, and stance to see the larger whole of who you are and your life.
She awakens you to the polarities of the Divine—life and death, creation and destruction, tenderness and cruelty, pain and pleasure, light and dark. And when you can see and hold them, with all the accompanying shock and awe, then you truly enter into the Divine Dance with her.
She asks you for everything you have
Kali represents the ultimate surrender. She asks you for everything you have—your identity, ego, beliefs, wants, desires.
She asks you to let go of everything you hold dear. Only when you’re ready to destroy and let go of all that you are now, can you open and discover who you are more deeply, more truly.
When you do, you become even more the precious pearl of who you are. You radiate your divinity even brighter. She gathers you into her arms with the most tender maternal love. And you receive more than you can imagine is possible.
In what other ways do you dance with Kali? I’d love for you to share here.
by wpengine | Jul 10, 2013 | Divine Feminine, Spirituality
How do you flow through the river of your life?
How do you let life flow through you?
When you flow you are open to what you don’t know. You are so completely in the moment that you let go of your past and your future. You are entirely in the present. In the full awareness of now. Alive and vibrant.
You are at the intersection of knowing and not knowing. You are in the very moment of becoming.
Saraswathi’s flow
I love the goddess Saraswathi (Saras means “to flow”) whose body is, literally, a river. Beginning in the mountains, she falls and tumbles down to the plains. She widens and deepens. She narrows and becomes shallow. She gurgles and rushes over boulders and pebbles. Wet, fluid, and alive, she is water itself.
She nourishes as she moves, bringing new life to all that comes across her way. She carries and cleanses all that is decaying and dying.
She is always moving. Always present.
Flow Moments
When I feel her flow through me I am fully present. I am one with what I’m doing, whether it is moving fluidly from one yogasana into another in my salutation to the sun. Or the effortless ease of chopping and sauteing vegetables as I cook a dish that my body needs. Or when I sit down at my piano, listen for, and allow music to emerge from my fingers on the black and white keys.
When I walk on trails among the redwoods, I am in my body and being. And out of my mind. I allow another sense and wisdom to take over. My steps have a different rhythm, a different mind. And I let myself be taken. On the winding trail sometimes flat and sometimes steep. Sometimes craggy and sometimes smooth. By the trail into the deep moist darkness of the woods. Off the trail to sit on a mossy fallen tree trunk. Or to gaze into the wide open hearts of white lilies in early spring.
Then, I am Wathi, “she who flows.” I am one with my river. I give up control. I shift from doing to allowing. I allow a deeper wisdom than my rational mind to take over.
How do you step into flow?
7 ways to step into flow:
- Stay open to what you don’t yet know. Our minds with its judgments and beliefs can close us off to knowing. When we bring curiosity and possibility into our lives, we stay open.
- Tune into yourself. Our instincts and emotions are our guides. When we keep thinking about something we want to do, chances are we’re wanting to grow in that area.
- Nourish yourself. Go the the beach. Ride your bike. Sit on a park bench with a friend or watch the world around you. Do what feels good and connect with people from whom you receive.
- Do something different. Are you doing the same thing and expecting the same outcome? Just as the river broadens or narrows, deepens or gets shallow, we need to change our ways of being and how we do things.
- Laugh, play, and get creative. When we step out of trying to figure things out and into play, it creates and opens space for solutions we haven’t thought of.
- Let go. Maybe there are past events, relationships, or ways of being that don’t serve you anymore and hold you back.
- Keep moving! When you feel stuck, do one thing that takes you even one step forward.
Are there other ways in which you flow? I’d love you to share them here.
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