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 ]
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 ]
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 ]
by wpengine | Dec 21, 2013 | Healing, Spirituality, Women
Do you love your body? Or hate it?
Do you feel beautiful? Or are you your worst critic?
Is your body a battleground? Or your home?
So many women war with their bodies. Hate their bodies. Shame their bodies. And are afraid to inhabit it. So many struggle with dissociation, addiction, eating disorders, and sexual inhibitions, abuse, and dysfunctions.
Your emotional life reveals itself in your body. Maybe you have to drink to have sex. Or eat a side salad when you’re out with your girlfriends then come home to gorge on ice-cream. Or dissociate when you’re intimate. Maybe you don’t let your partner see you naked. Maybe you don’t like to see yourself naked.
The previous post talked about seven adornments to become a whole woman. In this post, see if you find something to become more whole in your body.
The four horsemen
There are four structures that keep your body from being whole.
Most religions have damaged women’s self-image and body-image. They split the sacred from the earthly, so condemn Nature and women’s bodies—houses of the soul—to eternal sin. Is a leopard prowling on an African prairie sinful? How can an animal’s body desires be natural and beautiful but not those of a woman?
Patriarchy also splits by perceiving women and the feminine to be inferior, less than, and less valuable than men. How did someone decide that? How did women’s power get stripped away? In every culture, women are subjugated and wounded physically and emotionally.
Media’s commercialization of women defines beauty as external, youthful, and asks you to measure up to an outer image—to the one that sells. In a world with thousands of species of flowers, is there only one feminine model of beauty—that of models on magazine covers?
Each of these three—religion, patriarchy, and media—serve someone else, not you as a woman!
Finally, your own beliefs, self-limitations, and internalizations are your worst handicaps. Are these blinding messages true for you today or can you embody your own authentic ones? For you can shift the trapped past for yourself, and in so doing, transform the circle of women.
Your body sacred
Your body is a work of art.
It is sacred, as your soul’s house and temple.
In Tantra, India’s feminine spirituality, the Earth, the trees and rivers, animals and plants are all sacred. So too, is your body.
Your body lives, pulsates, and breathes. Your life-force, Shakti, is sacred. So too, are you and your body.
As a woman, you are the Goddess. You have, create, and nourish life. Every part of your body—from your arms to your belly to your thighs, your yoni to your breasts, your third eye to your toes—is sacred.
In one beautiful Tantric ritual, a woman reveres her body by touching its fifty sacred sites while chanting a mantra to each one.
Your body whole
A whole woman is at peace 
with her body. She takes care of, nourishes, and adorns it. She finds it beautiful and cherishes it. She enjoys and plays in it. She accepts it for what it is. As she ages, she seeks its endless mystery and change. She discovers and opens into increasing portals of sensation, pleasure, and beauty within her.
A whole woman feels beautiful outside and inside.
It is the time of the Divine Feminine, in which you are being called to embody the fullness of your femininity and womanhood.
♥ Will you question primitive and tribal beliefs that keep you small, in fear, shame, or guilt?
♥ Will you unify and integrate what is split and divided in you to become whole?
♥ Will you emerge into your full radiance, power, and heart?
How to become whole
To be whole in your body, you must first know how you feel about it, towards it. Are you warring against it or are you one with it? You need to heal—to bring peace to your body and nervous system. You need to reclaim and give life to what is repressed.
Second, you must discover and know your body. Feel it. Enter into it. And travel its sensory roadways as far as you can go.
1. Heal and reclaim your body
- Be aware of your internalized messages. What were you told by your mother, your grandmother, your culture? Are these messages true for you or do you want to create new truths of your own?
- Heal your battles against your body. Whether repression, shame, trauma, religious or cultural beliefs, rout out what’s false, ease what you struggle with, and reconnect with your body’s truth, beauty, and wisdom.
- Listen to your body. What is it saying and yearning for?
- Learn to appreciate, care for, and love your body. Substitute negative self-talk with positive self-care, appreciation, and enjoyment.
- Tune into and connect with your life force. What makes your body come alive? Is it yoga, sunning yourself on your deck, or dance? Give your body more of what it loves.
- Cultivate your sensory awareness. Feel into and inside your sensations, instincts, and drives. Your five senses are incredibly powerful and subtle.
- Do your inner work. It takes effort to free yourself from the web of your past but is so worth it. Try therapy, body work, dance, or sand play to shift a scrappy legacy into a living legend.
2. Fully embody your body
You have vast capacities for pleasure, bliss, and ecstasy—for much more than you currently experience.
- Listen to, discover, and trust your instincts and drives. This is your body’s truth and wisdom. Follow it. Let it guide you as you navigate your life.
- Open to life energy and vitality. So many women constrict their bodies and don’t allow the full play and stream of Shakti, the life force. This causes stress and disease. When you open and allow life energy to flow, like when you breathe deeply, exercise, and eat nourishing food, you increase your capacity and creativity.
- Open more to your senses and pleasure. You’ll be surprised how much pleasure you can feel and how much more there is to feel. Pleasure is good for you—for your health, vibration, and aliveness. Your five senses—sight, heaing, touch, taste, and smell—are portals for ecstasy, light, and information.
- Evolve your sensory awareness. Know your body. Feel it. Enter into it. And travel its sensory roadways as far as you can go. This doesn’t need to be sexual—you can sit by a lake or a flower or on a sidewalk in New York and experience what Wilhelm Reich called orgone energy and Tantra calls cosmic sensuality.
In what other ways do you become more whole in your body? I’d love for you to share them here.
[ Click here for the Introduction, Sexuality, Power, Love, and Voice + Creativity posts of this 8-part blog series. ]
[Images: Christian Schloe; Alex Bramwell]
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.
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