Transformation is in the air. I feel it in my circle of friends, my family, priestess community, among my teachers. And I certainly feel it within myself.
We are all in different stages of spiritual development. Like a butterfly cocoons, chrysalis, breaks free and transforms into a completely different creature than it was previously. This magical and often painful journey requires learning, crisis, growth, transition and transformation. In terms of women today, we too are journeying through layers of ancient stories and birthing a new way of being, a new story.
While some women are living an old story, some women are finishing up writing the old story. Some are in a Sacred Pause or have begun to flow within the Co-Creative Wave, and some of brave, courageous souls are actually writing a New Story.
The old stories are old and ancient and speak of a time when we were victims of violence, war, poverty and discrimination for 5,000 years. We have been collectively carrying the wounds of generations of women for so long. Too long. Now in this lifetime we are being asked and guided to let them go.
In the old story, we internalized shame and felt this shame about our bodies. This story we have been telling ourselves is an illusion and a lie. It is distorted and disconnected perspective on sexuality. It is disconnected from the juicy, vibrant goddess that lies with each of us, who knows she is whole and has a divine purpose to bless and heal the earth and all beings with her love, sensual, erotic, passionate and compassionate nature.
We now have a choice to change this story around. Our new choices demand that we connect to the power and protection of the Divine Feminine within us. To our beautiful bodies, emotions and to nature. If we can relate to the Great Mother, to Gaia, the Goddess in any way, shape or form, we may have a better chance at getting to the New Story.
What does this look like? Having values based on nature, ecology, collaboration, cooperation, harmony, wisdom, love, compassion, respecting the wild, loving with an open heart, abundance consciousness, beauty and radiance.
Some women are waking up and discovering that their old story is falling away, and they can let it go more easily than ever before. They can no longer relate to it as who they are, and they recognize the signs that are telling them to release it and heal.
Some women have done the work of releasing the old story and find themselves undefined. In a holy moment, a Sacred Pause of a Great Void. She is pregnant with possibilities for a new way of being, relating to herself and to the world. She is becoming her own sovereign, listening to her inner queen who is ready to rise towards a life based on the sacred feminine: an inner life shaped by connection to her body, the earth, her emotions, self-belief, self-love, self-care, nurturing, inner beauty and service to the community through her wisdom. In this phase of her transformation, she needs rest, renewal, and a nurturing of her life-force energy and a reconnection to the sensual.
Some women have caught and are beginning to ride the Wave of Co-Creation. The impulse and vibration of change is in the air for them, and they are ready to find a new way to be in their bodies. Dancing, moving and desiring a freedom of movement that allows desire to rise up into power. In this dance they are feeling the vitality and shakti of feminine flow in harmony with Gaia and the Goddess within.
Some women are in the forefront, writing the New Story for the Feminine because they have been living it all along. The entrepreneurs, healers, prophetesses, tantrikas, shamans, oracles, priestesses and teachers who walk their talk in all areas of their lives.
The New Story is embracing this Divine Goddess within.
Imagine a woman who gets to choose her life’s experiences. She is no longer attached only to her light nature and limited by her dark nature, her shame, taboos and failures. She no longer fears being abandoned by a man while living in a world of masculine ideals and expectations. She no longer believes that purity is the only path towards the Divine. She is whole. She has lived and is integrating her her dark and light natures. She in balance with herself. Imagine how controversial this would have been in medieval times—in fact, it remains controversial in so many societies even today who do not receive a cherie a woman like this. A sovereign. A Goddess.
In the old story we were split apart. We were not whole. You might recognize it as “slut-shaming,” the Madonna-Whore complex and the curious treatment of the Magdalene. Patriarchal religions did not allow the freedom of woman to be determined by her understanding of Self and the Sacred. Shaktism and Tantricism, paganism, mystic Judaism, Shamanic traditions, nature based practices and Goddess spirituality do allow this. And they also allow for the Divine Masculine to be a counterpart to the Divine Feminine. We are one. That is new path. That is the new story.
These women who are transforming, evolving, healing, learning and growing; have rejected a worldly life where she was once a captured woman rejecting herself, her intuition and her instincts. She may appear as the single mother, the divorcee, the widow, the crone—a woman who has simply rejected her reliance upon a male energy as her only source for love, approval, affection and salvation.
There is a deep, dark wisdom to all of this. The stages of feminine development. In the sacred pause of transformation, when you are alone and scared, fear not as others have gone before you. The Holy Sophia. Dhumvati, and of course Mary Magdalene. She is formless. Smoke. She is the Hermit, She is the Wandering-Sage, She is the Woman Unafraid to be Alone and Unprotected as She moves through the World.
To reclaim her truth, her values, her power, her life, her song, she will sacrifice it all. She’ll burn herself down to ashes. And then she’ll rise up again, unashamedly to the rest of the world singing softly in their ears, “Wake up wake up.”
S H A K T I P R I E S T E S S 