Your seventh adornment as a whole woman: Spirituality

by wpengine | Mar 16, 2014 | Healing, Spirituality, Women

Know you are sacred.

You are a divine being, a sacred woman.

You adorn yourself more and more as you come to know how sacred you are.

For you are made of the same stuff as the stars and Light, as the earth and the oceans, as thunder and lightning.

You are that energy, that Light, that Love, that preciousness that walks upon the earth.

For you are a goddess.

All that remains is for you to know yourself as one.

Here are 7 ways to adorn yourself with your sacredness.

1. Seek and find what makes you vibrate with sacredness.

Find your joy, where you feel that this, this, is who you are on a deep core level.

Whether it’s sitting in church, on your meditation seat, swimming with dolphins, growing an orchard, or gathering with friends.

2. Enter that space regularly

    Create and make time to touch that sacredness.

    Enter, breathe in, and nourish yourself with that sacred energy.

    Touch your presence, your essence, your spiritual matter.

    It doesn’t have to “look spiritual”. For everything is spiritual if you feel it to be so.

3. Remain there deep and long

    Drink deep from these depths.

    Open to the mystery and awe of your being. Of just being.

    Of knowing and not knowing. For there are illuminations, gifts, intuitions, guidance, and revelations to be found here.

    A few moments of this, even a faint glimpse in a half hour of meditation, can alter and shift the texture of your life.

4. Call it by any name

    Whether you call it Spirit or Krishna, God, Mother, the Universe or Essence, it is all you.

    For whatever it is that makes a lion roar, a whale spout, a star flicker across years of traveling light, you as you create your day, love and are loved, grow and , it is all you.

    If you are thirsty for it, call out to it so you may know it more.
   

5. Look upon your face

    Whatever depth or touch of the sacred you experience, know that that is you.

    Your sacredness doesn’t live outside of you, in some distant heaven on some distant throne.  It throbs in your heart. You journey with your soul.

    The touches and flickers and enveloping descents of Grace and Peace and Love and Joy are you knowing your true nature.

    Your sacred experiences tell you, remind you who you are.

    This, this is your sacred face.

    This, this, is your sacred body.

    This, this, is your sacred self.

6. Walk in the world so

    Gather up your divinity within you, around you.

    Hold it as the altar in your heart.

    And so walk, step by step, day by day, upon the earth.

7. Let it flow through you

    You are both sacred and a channel for sacredness.

    When you connect with your sacred Presence, with Spirit, it flows through you.

    It touches and sanctifies and transforms your life, your loves and your challenges.

    You touch and connect with the sacredness around you—your garden, your terrier or kitten, wild leopards of Africa, daffodils in spring, people in and not in your life, the bumblebees and hummingbirds.

Know who you are. Really are.

Know great Joy, Grace, Peace, Love, and Beauty.

Blessings…

Your sixth adornment as a whole woman: Intuition

by wpengine | Mar 1, 2014 | Healing, Spirituality, Women

As a woman, you have extraordinary capacities to access your intuition.

You know when your gut tells you something is right. Or isn’t. You have a feeling, a hunch, receive information or an image. Or you just know something about someone or a situation.

You have recurring dreams, images, or visions. You feel beings around you. You communicate with nature, guides, or see beyond physical reality. Maybe you’re a medium.

Your intuition:

• tells you there’s more you know than what you know
• gives you information beyond your rational mind and physical senses
• is a doorway through which you access your Higher Self and spirituality
• accesses your inspiration, visionary capacities, and inner vision
• is your portal to wisdom, light, and information, guides, beings and realms
• opens you to magic and miracles
• helps you evolve faster

You swim upstream if you’re intuitive in a material, rational world

You may have been intuitive as a child. Magic dust still swirled around you, so you were open to seeing, hearing and knowing what adults didn’t. Maybe your intuition got talked out of you.

“What nonsense!”
“You have such a wild imagination.”
“Nothing’s under the bed!”
“What do you mean, a fairy? I don’t see it. You’ve been reading too many fairy tales!”

Many who are intuitive or psychic keep it secret because no one else gets it. Dr. Judith Orloff, a psychiatrist and intuitive, tells how she integrated her intuition with her clinical work in The Second Sight.

Have you noticed the world’s becoming more intuitive?

That’s why more and more people are interested in psychics, astrologers, channelers, shamans, mediums, energy healers, medical intuitives, and animal communicators.

As we evolve spiritually, our interest in these realms grows and we’re awakening more to our capacities in dimensions we can’t see with our eyes.

Intuition is the next intelligence

The mind’s gone as far as it can go. The problems we’re facing require solutions of a quantum leap.

Into our intuition.

We’ve begun a process of exponential evolution. Where intuition is our transportation.

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Historical fears

For centuries religions and patriarchy have been terrified of the irrational, the intuitive and occult, and the feminine.

The Christians persecuted Pagans in the 4th century. In India, Tantra was sidelined by orthodox Brahmins in the 7th century. Shamans and sorcerers, witches and mediums have been burned at the stake for their gifts to travel between human and spirit worlds.

Hugely threatened, mainstream society still carries these fears:

The Reality

The Truth is that there is so much

more to you, your reality and world than what you know.

The Truth is you’re a spiritual being in a human body, and your intuition is a doorway through which you access your spirituality.

You can know everything about your past lives, life purpose, and future potential. It’s available to you through your intuition.

Miracles and magic are very real possibilities, beyond will and life’s mundaneness and suffering.

You are intuitive, even psychic.

If you want to know these dimensions, all you need is to be willing to go beyond your mental mind and open to your intuition.

Here are 7 ways to develop your intuition:

1. Meditate

Meditate to access your spiritual nature. This opens you up to realities beyond what you know.

2. Notice

Intuition can hit you over the head. Or it’s a quick and subtle knowing, so much so that it’s easy for your mind to discount it.

Notice any quick flashes of images, voices, knowings that come to you.

Pay attention to your dreams. Work them with a therapist or dream analyst. They offer you a great deal of information.

3. Ask your guides

Yes, you have spirit guides, guardian angels, angels and all sorts of exalted beings ready to work with you. They’re ready and waiting to give you guidance. Ask them to help you develop your intuition or for whatever else you need.

4. Stay open

If you want to know something, stay open and listen for an answer. Ask for a sign. Ask for three signs.

Be willing to entertain the absurd, the weird, the preposterous.

5. Be receptive

The easiest way to access your intuition is to be receptive, not exert your will. This will be easy or difficult for you, depending on your nature.

The more you open to it, the more it opens to you.

6. Suspend judgment

It’s very easy to judge and dismiss your intuition. Because that’s what you’ve been trained to do.

If you can’t believe your intuition, try automatic writing or drawing. Get into a meditative space and sit with a a piece of paper and begin asking questions. Write down or draw the first thing that comes to you without judging. Do this until you feel complete. After a week or some time lapses, return to the conversation to see what it holds for you.

7. Get to know your pineal gland

Your pineal gland is the physical portal of your intuition. Shaped like a pine cone in the center of your head, it’s a cosmic receiver and sender of spiritual information, including the language of Light.

Try focusing on it to see what comes up. Or when you want to receive guidance.

If you don’t use it, your pineal gland becomes dormant. The more you use it, the more it awakens. Also, toxic foods and substances can block it;  sunlight and moonlight awaken it.

How else are you intuitive?

[ Click here for the Introduction, Body, Sexuality, Power, Love, and Voice + Creativity posts of this 8-part blog series.]

[Images: Christian Schloe]

Your fifth adornments as a whole woman: Voice + Creativity

by wpengine | Feb 15, 2014 | Healing, Spirituality, Women

What does your voice reveal about you?

Do you sound confident or hesitant? Do you reveal, flatten, or hide your true feelings? Are you speaking your truth or afraid how you might be judged?

You know how your body responds when you listen to an amazing actor, singer, or speaker, or someone tell it like it is with full feeling? You nod your head. A soft “mmm” vibrates in your throat. You throw your head back in laughter. Or tears well up in your eyes.

That’s because they’re using the full range of their instrument, their voice.

♥ How do you speak?
♥ How do you express yourself?
♥ How do you create?

What’s your voice tone like?

• Is it aggressive to shield your frightened little child?
• Is it soft, pretending weakness in a man’s world or one in which you have no authority?
• Is it a pressured brightness where “everything’s great!” to hide difficult emotions?
• Is it arrogant trying to bury insecurity and panic?
• Is it practiced and cultivated so as not to to reveal your vulnerability?
• Or are you rich and deep and resonant, transparently sharing the full range and nuance of your embodied emotional life?

Your fifth chakra, physically housed in your voice, neck, and mouth holds your creativity, self-expression, bridges body and mind, and is a portal to your imaginal realms.

Your early beginnings

As an infant, you whimpered and wailed, cried with the full immensity of your little being. Every cell in you told your mother or father what you needed. Now!

But as a child, you may have been told to “Stop crying!”
“Nice girls don’t ask for such things!”
“Be quiet! ___ is looking at you!”
“Ask nicely!”
“Shut up or I’ll ___”.

So you learned to control your expression and suppress your voice. You learned to learn to control your mouth and jaw muscles. Your wild and hungry needs. Over time, your emotions became civilized, that is, silenced or buried. Your nervous system impulses were blocked or rerouted.

Your voice shut down from a full expression your body and was driven up into your head or anywhere else, where it was safe and approved of.

Yes, socialization is essential, but it’s also hugely damaging to your self-expression and creativity.

Why is your voice important?

Your voice is a barometer of your truth. Who you are. Your feelings and your power. It’s a direct expression of your heart.

The center of your self-expression, you express (or don’t express) your needs, your wants, and desires with your voice. You claim your right to take up space, to speak, and to have. To will, act, and manifest. In fact, all your rights as a whole woman. And from which you also claim the rights of others.

It’s the source from which you manifest. From where you put out and share your uniqueness with others.

Your creativity

Creare, in Latin, means to make life, to produce where there was nothing before.

As a woman, you create. Whether you birth a child, a sculpture, or a corporation, your creativity is your unabashed expression of your true self.

So many women think they have to do something special to identify as creative. You are creative! No matter who said otherwise or what you believe about yourself.

Because every day you weigh options and make decisions. Whether you cross-stich, hoe your garden, pen poems, raise your children, manage your team, or play the clarinet, you create your life every day.

Here are 7 ways to feed and water your creativity:

1. Nourish your creative juices

Take in and be around others who are creative. You may have not been given permission to be creative, so stopped giving it to yourself.

The first step is to feed yourself. Explore different art and creative forms. Even what’s outside your familiar interests.

Go to a concert, an art show, a poetry reading, a craft fair, or a rose garden competition. Check out events in your area. For a mere hour or two, you receive a whole lot of food for your creative spirit.

2. Play!

What makes you feel playful? Access your inner child for she knows how to play.

Give yourself permission to be simple, ordinary, ridiculous, frivolous, indulgent, and child-like. That’s where your beauty and flow and wonder live.

When you play, your mind stops and you open up to another dimension. You open to allowing and receiving inspiration. It’s a way to simply do and not judge.

3. Open to and own your creativity

Cultivate your creativity, your life-juice. Whether you love to garden, beautify your home, paint animals, do stand-up improv, or dance, give it to yourself.

What are some things you loved and longed to do as a child? Begin now.

What you create won’t look like what someone else will create. That’s the point—it’s to be totally you.

If your fears or blocks come up, work with a coach or therapist or art teacher.

4. Embrace your animus

You may be wildly creative, but unable to express and manifest your talents in the world. This is where your animus or masculine energy comes in.

Your animus is an inner force that acts for you ( and no one else!) to put your gifts out into the world.

If you struggle with putting yourself out there, chances are there’s something in your relationship with your father that needs working through and/or that your mother and women in your family modeled that you’re not supposed to speak out, be assertive, or have power.

Don’t be hard on yourself because women through the centuries have been treated as supporters of males and not as valuable. So it’s in our feminine DNA. But the great thing is we can now reverse that outmoded dynamic.

5. If you’re stuck …

Begin small. Do what’s simple and easy. And most importantly, F-U-N.

Don’t set any goals. Play.

If it’s too scary to draw, buy a coloring book.
If it’s too scary to write a short story, journal.
Find company, like a friend, a group, or take a workshop. You may be someone who likes creating with others, not in solitude.

I highly recommend The Artist’s Way, a fabulous resource to un-stick and open you up to your creativity.

6. If you’re a perfectionist, set out to fail

Plan on failing. Once. Twice. And a hundred times.

Imagine the worst. Then set out to achieve it.

It’s a great way to start. Because if you’re a perfectionist, you’re terrified to begin for fear of failing. So you don’t act.

The best way to succeed is to set out to fail!

7. Share and build creative community

Once you’re creating, begin sharing your creations with the world. If you knit wool scarves, make spice blends or herbal remedies, are a closet artist, sculptor, or musician, share your creations with friends, family, and the community.

You need to be seen and admired by others to continue to grow. Others may receive more than you imagine.

And the exchange of design and concepts and work are fertile fodder for you.

 [If you got this far, here’s a side note: Yes, this blog post is titled correctly. I believe both voice and creativity are equally important! And, its imperfect grammar is a good example of play 🙂 ]

Happy Creating!!

[ Click here for the Introduction, Body, Sexuality, Power, and Love posts of this 8-part blog series.]

[Image: Holly Sierra ]

Your fourth adornment as a whole woman: Love

by wpengine | Jan 30, 2014 | Healing, Spirituality, Women

How do you love? And how are you loved?

As a woman, you are Love. And you need to be loved.

Whether you’re a mother or lover, daughter or priestess, love is what feeds and nourishes you. You need love like you need to inhale, and you need to give love like you need to exhale.

As a woman, you have a singular and unique capacity for love. For kindness, compassion, friendship, appreciation, and gratitude.

Your love as a woman has a very different vibration than that of a man.

Whether you love to camp so you can watch your favorite birds, take care of your little one, serve as a healing practitioner or in a soup kitchen, or simply smile at someone you pass on the street, you know that when you give you also receive. And when you receive, you also give.

Here are 8 ways to adorn yourself with love.

1. Be who you are

Get to know yourself. Authentically. It’s only when you know yourself that you can fully accept and love yourself, warts and all.

Finding real love is finding someone you loves you, not a persona you think you should present.

2. Love yourself first

Learning to love yourself is one of the most important ways to develop yourself. So often, women seek completion in another.

But first, become whole within yourself: be able to be alone, find nourishing contact with friends, and engage in work, art, and activities that fulfill and empower you.

Real love is loving yourself first till you are full and whole, so that you love from a place of fullness, rather than grasping.

3. Know the difference between taking care of, rescuing, enabling, and love

Scores of women come into therapy with quasi-love relationships. They think love is to take care of another at the cost of themselves, enable a spouse or a child, or give themselves away to another by sacrificing their growth and interests.

If you’re a giver, chances are your capacity for receptivity and giving is huge—take great care not to give it away at the cost of yourself! And if you’re a receiver, attune to the other to make sure you give in equal measure to what you receive.

Codependence, abandonment, and low self-worth often play out as “love”, and it’s easy to fault another when you don’t get what you long for. Know the difference. Then heal and develop yourself.

4. Heal your heart so you can fully give and receive

Being alive means inevitable heartbreak, grief, anger, jealousy, bitterness, and fear. But does it get in the way of your heart being fully open?

Perhaps you have walls around your heart? Spend time in nature and with animals to heal. Do what you love, whether it’s painting mandalas, swimming in the ocean, or planting dahlias. Be with people who laugh, know joy, and are heartfelt.

Perhaps you give too much away? So many women find it easier to give than to receive. Learn to take in a compliment, a close hug, a friend’s joy to see you, and your lover’s deep gaze. Inhale these lovings into your cells.

And work with a therapist or healer to clear any blocks you may be holding.

5. Open to love, whatever it looks like

It’s so essential that the energy of love flow through you, literally on a physical heart level. Love nourishes and lubricates you.

Whether you love your lhasa poodle, cooking a meal with friends, or quality time with your lover, bring love into your life. It doesn’t have to be an intimate relationship; activities, friends, pets, art, and nature can be wonderfully nourishing and satisfying.

6. If you want an intimate relationship…

You draw into your life what you believe. Your external reality is a mirror of how you feel about yourself, and what you believe.

What do you believe? Do you believe you’re lovable, worthy, that you can be seen, heard, and known on all your intimate levels? If not, do your inner work to clear, release, and transform your beliefs. Then watch what happens!

Call out and set your intention for the best relationship for yourself. The best relationships help you grow and transform. They are alchemical—they change you despite yourself, beyond all you know about yourself.

Allow yourself to be changed by love. But make sure it’s really love and not something else in its guise!

And sometimes, it’s more complex than working on yourself intensively. There are other factors at play here, grace and your soul purpose. You may be in a lifetime where your main work and lessons are not about intimate relationships, and your heart will love in other ways.

7. Practice love.

Practice love. Random acts of it. Here and there and everywhere. Litter your home and work and environment with them.

Practice deepening your love from conditional to unconditional, from judgment to empathy, from love to ecstasy and bliss.

This practice is so essential for yourself, for our species as Earth-dwellers, and beings in the Universe.

8. Find your inner Beloved

Sink deeply into yourself and what you love to know the Sacred, whether you call it God, Spirit, or the Divine Feminine.

Meditate and pray to connect with this inner wellspring, drink deeply, and you will find you are nourished from within by a never ending fount of the most beautiful Divine Love—deeply healing, holding, sweet, powerful, and magical.

If you are not one with the Beloved,
Seek!
And if you are in union,
Rejoice!

                                             —Rumi

In what other ways do you love? I’d love to hear from you.

[ Click here for the Introduction, Body, Sexuality, Power, and Voice + Creativity posts of this 8-part blog ]

Your third adornment as a whole woman: Power

by wpengine | Jan 18, 2014 | Healing, Spirituality, Women

How do you wear your woman power?

Do you tuck it away like a secret? Do you swing it around like a baseball bat? Or do you carry it deep, strong, and full within you like a lioness regally surveys her landscape?

You’ve grown up with stories of power. Myths. Fairytales. Ones your mother told you. Ways she carried her own.

Your power is linked to these stories. And of course, to your mother.

Perhaps you’re a Sleeping Beauty, waiting for your charming prince to ride up, awaken, and lead you to your queendom. Or a Little Red Riding Hood, the ultimate good girl who gives her power away, doing just as her mother and the wolf tell her to. Or as the Indian Sita whose power was duty and self-sacrifice and obeying her husband’s word. Or even as Snow White’s evil stepmother, whose power and creativity are so twisted like gnarly roots that she can’t bear to see them blossom in another woman.

The beliefs and models you grew up with shape who you are and believe a woman can be.

To come into your own power, you need to revisit these myths. Debunk all that needs to be debunked. And create your own myth.

Your power, your mother

You may be like your mother, excelling at what she did, whether it’s making the best lasagna, running your tailoring business, or photographing lions in Africa. You feel her sure and present guidance as you take what she gave you to new heights.

Or you may have torn out the back door as fast as you could to be anyone but her. If she baked lasagna, you sprint to become a Wall Street powerhouse. If she ran the snappiest tailoring business in town, you settle into a camp chair to paint sunsets.

Is there more to your power than what you’ve received from her or run from?

Masculine power

So often, women assume that being powerful is to be like a man. There are thousands of unhappy women in the corporate world. If you’re one of them, that may not be where your power lies.

You need to find your own power, not follow what society says is powerful. Whatever speaks to you, whether it’s sculpting, teaching, or piloting, is where your power lives.

A whole woman’s power

A whole woman owns her own authority. It comes from within. It’s not handed down. Even if she’s an heiress, she must learn to be a fair queen.

A whole woman searches far and deep within her to grow into her full power. Her quest is like climbing a rock face with crags and crevices. Foot hold by hand hold, she must discover her strength, her resilience, her voice, her talents, her unique who-she-is-ness. She waters and fertilizes herself. She finds others to help her grow and bloom. When finally, she stands tall and straight flowering and fruiting in the clear wild air—free, powerful, and true.

Here are ten ways to adorn yourself with your power.

1. Get in touch with your instincts

Your instincts and drives hold the keys to your power. What do you love? What makes your body sing? Get to know and live from your “wild, instinctual self” as Clarissa Pinkola Estes says in Women Who Run With the Wolves. Follow your instincts’ energy to lead you out of unhealthy relationships and situations towards your joy and strength.

2. Commune with your power animals

Do shamanic work to meet your power animals. Shadow aspects of yourself, they will approach and guide you for they hold some energy or power you need to reclaim. In your everyday life, have pictures of them around you. Commune with them. Embody and dance with them, letting their energy inhabit your cells.

3. Become intimate with your shadow

Your shadow holds all the luscious juices that you may have needed to keep down, keep out, keep away from others’ and your own eyes. Often, the very aspects of power you despise run the show and keep you from fully owning your power.

Get into therapy. Have your dreams analyzed. Do your inner work.

4. Rewrite your myths

The stories you heard as a child and how your mother and grandmother live trap you in a box of what a woman is and can be.

What are your myths? Ferret out what’s true and what’s illusion, like the little boy who said out loud, “But …but the Emperor isn’t wearing any clothes!”

Then rewrite your own …who do you imagine a woman can be? You can be?

5. Individuate

Become conscious of what you’re unconscious of, personally and collectively. When you individuate (a term coined by Carl Jung), you heal, transform, and become whole as you reclaim and integrate all the parts of yourself. And you become your own person, beyond your family’s and the collective’s identity.

6. Be completely true to yourself

Shed everything that isn’t authentic for you, everything you needed to layer on to keep you safe or loved or approved of. Layer by layer, strip away what’s false to go deeper towards your truth, your talents, your joy. Where you’re utterly yourself. Singing your truth. Strong in your walk. Holding your head high.

7. Wield your powers

Your powers are your gifts and talents. Your power is in them. Whether you’re a mother, corporate dynamo, animal communicator or an artist, your power lies in your powers. Nourish them and bloom.

8. Know your life purpose

Your power lives almost entirely in your life purpose. Once you realize what you are to do in this life, your soul power flows into and fuels you from within.

Until you get clear, your life can feel like you’re simply moving furniture around.

9. Be relational

Feminine power is relational. Your power is in relationships—with people, nature, and beings. You flourish when you relate with others. Power is not a commodity or being better than. Share, not hoard, your power and encourage others to have it. If you’re in a position of power, be a queen who rules with fairness and love.

This is not to say that you give at a cost to yourself.

10. Discern and flow

Different people and situations require different amounts of power. You don’t need a baseball bat when a feather will do, and vice versa. Being discerning and fluid with your power is moving through the world like an elephant, powerful yet gentle, subtle, and nuanced.

Now, go forth and be powerful!

In what other ways do you adorn yourself with power? I’d love to hear from you here.

[ Click here for the Introduction, Body, Sexuality, Love , and Voice + Creativity posts of this 8-part blog series. ]

[ Images: Dan Colcer, Alfred Weidinger; Ed Schipul ]