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 3, 2014 | Healing, Spirituality
Your body is an instrument of love and desire. Of passion.
Your sexuality is what makes you most feminine, most woman.
Becoming a whole woman is to discover and own your temptress and seductress, your skilled lover, even your sacred prostitute. Your love goddess…are you Aphrodite or Venus, Rati or Kali?
Becoming a whole woman is discovering and playing with the full range of your sexuality.
Find your unique sexuality
Your way is your way. Different from any other woman’s.
You may be comfortable in your naked skin or prefer to cover up. You may thoroughly enjoy your body and sex. Or feel fear, pain, or numbness. You may relish flirting, foreplay, and sexual intimacy. Or you may have a mix of feelings, both enjoying and struggling with it.
Sexuality is incredible. Yet it can also be incredibly complex.
You inherit so many judgments and prejudices that your original sexual innocence is often lost. And abuse, assault, commercialization, and religion stifle free flowing sexuality, casting a net over its wild and free and open nature.
Women’s sexuality has been oppressed and often under assault for centuries. And still is. You may need to work to become a whole woman and return to original playful innocence.
Here are some ways to do that.
12 ways to adorn yourself sexually
1. Presence
Your presence is, perhaps, the most important aspect of your sexuality—it’s an aphrodisiac. How present are you to your sensations and emotions, to yourself and your partner? The more in the moment and present you are, the more you experience your sexuality’s heat, light, and love.
2. Desire
Attune to and enter the experience 
of desiring and being desired as much as you are able. Flow with the river as far as you can go. If you’re in a long-term relationship where the fire of newness ebbs, learn how to continue desiring your partner—essential to keeping intimacy fresh and alive.
3. Take responsibility for your sexuality and passion
Know your turn-ons and turn-offs, safety and edges, pleasure and boredom, whether self-pleasuring or with a partner. Be open to change and evolve as the tides of your life and partners shift.
4. Become intimate with your own unique eroticism
Know your needs and edges. What do you need to feel safe and move through the different stages of lovemaking. What pleasures and satisfies you? And what are your edges? Your erotic growth and capacity is often around your edges—work them. And if you can, with your partner.
5. Become a sex goddess
Develop your skill and subtlety just as you would any art or science. Inform yourself. Give yourself a travel guide to the world of sex, whether it’s about techniques, the Kama Sutra, erogenous zones, or the range of sexual possibilities that intrigue you. Explore sacred sexuality. Take a workshop.
6. Conscious breath
Your breath is a portal to your senses and sensuality. It carries you into your experience. Discover and experiment with it. When intense feelings and sensations arise, learn to use your breath to ride their waves as well as to surf you more into pleasure.
7. Cultivate pleasure
You have vast capacities for pleasure. For ecstasy and bliss. Your body, as an instrument, can play and be played in an endless variety of ways. Enjoy your practice!
8. Seek out professional help if you’ve been sexually abused
Get therapy. Find a sexual healer. It’s easy to minimize abuse since so much secrecy, shame, and guilt often accompany it. It’s critical that you not be alone with this but get help.
You’re not alone. 1 out of every 6 American women, and 1 in 4 internationally, have been victims of abuse. Almost half the women who enter therapy want to work on their sexuality.
9. Work through your emotional triggers and constrictions
Perhaps you’ve inherited guilt about pleasure. Or have emotional ties to a parent which you need to cut. Or inherited ideas from your family, culture, or religion about how a woman needs to behave or be sexually. What’s true for you beyond what you’ve been handed down? Get beyond ideas and ideology into the warm experience and wisdom of your body. Again, get help for these often bury deeply in your psyche.
10. Communicate and attune
If you’re with a partner(s), express what you appreciate, want more of, or how to be touched differently. Likewise, encourage and welcome feedback from your partner(s). How attuned and connected are you with your partner?
11. Expand your sexuality to your other chakras
Choose whether you want to include 
more levels to your sexuality, such as ground, power, heart, expression and play, intuition, and Spirit. How much can you open to feeling on all levels? The more aligned with other chakras, the richer and fuller is your experience.
12. Dance with the masculine and feminine
Explore these powerful polarities, and play with receiving and asserting, with giving and taking. You have both energies in you and can dance fluidly between and with them.
In what other ways do you adorn yourself sexually? I’d love to hear more about it here.
[ Click here for the Introduction, Body, Power, Love, and Voice + Creativity posts of this 8-part blog series. ]
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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