Some questions that have been on my mind, in my heart and percolating in my body:
How do we individually and collectively navigate the overwhelming trauma AND the liberatory, evolutionary capacity of the current times?
How do I, personally, actually birth my work into the world in a way that feels generous, in integrity, full of ease and in love?
My personal process of self-inquiry, liberation and embodied understanding is a labyrinthian journey inside my bodysoul. There are no straight lines there, *except* the flaming arrow of my passionate, stubborn heart, which I thank my Moon in Sagittarius for--I picture her as Artemis with a flaming love arrow, requiring me to always come back to myself even if I've lost my way for awhile.
I don't remember exactly when I started to use images and symbols as some sort of sacred reflection, but I do know that when I was in high school I cut out all of these pictures from Seventeen Magazine (!!!) about UC Santa Cruz, redwoods and all. I didn't make it out to Northern California until I was in my early 20s, but there was something calling to me that the imagery grounded, a sort of soul bread crumbs on my path.
Then, in college, I spent a semester in Madrid; I had come out as queer/bisexual in the months before, and I remember how much delight I took in exploring not just the venues for gathering, dancing and being, but all the many many publicity cards I would gather as I roamed the streets--tea dances, art, downtempo lounges, and so much more. I remember collaging both a journal and a large, hard sided folder with all these images of Ani Difranco, Me'Shell Ndegeocello, fierce femmes and hot butches.
The images and stories that speak to us, they tell us things our bodies recognize right away, without filter or intellectual machinations.
They are sacred reflections, visual prayers and narrative reweavings we can use to dismantle old, oppressive soul architecture. They can save our lives when nothing and no one else around us understands or acknowledges us.
They are a red thread to the molten, regenerative core of our personal medicine, the one only we can bring to the world, the one we signed up to embody and express when we chose to incarnate on Earth.
This is how we navigate these epic, challenging, beautiful, heartbreaking times. We nourish ourselves and find our strength, individually and collectively, in our personal medicine.
What at this time we call the Dark Feminine is one of the richest sources of medicine. No matter our gender, the Dark Feminine has something for all of us because the Dark Feminine IS matter, IS the body, IS dark skin, IS sex, IS the stranger in the night crossing the border.
SHE is in all of us, and at the same time, particularly embodied in womxn, in people of color, in sex workers, in queer folk, in refugee and immigrant families, in all those bodies and communities that modern, capitalist consensus reality names as 'other'.
I am called to name here that I am a white, cisgender, bisexual, queer womxn. I have the privileges of being considered attractive within the dominant paradigm, of being married to a man, of being neurotypical, able bodied, born and raised middle class. I don't have a lot of money but I have the white privilege of much greater access to it than many people of color. I say this all without self-deprecation but to make explicit what white supremacist colonization of mind, body and soul wants to erase and or make the default. And to say that I am here for our mutual liberation, that I am working to wake up all the time, that what I have been blessed to receive in terms of teachings and healings is a gift. And that I want to lift up all of our voices, all of our soul work and transformative pleasure and liberatory power.
I am also a witch born of broken lineages from Europe. I can trace my father's French Canadian family back through Quebec all the way to Normandy in the 1500s (a privilege). My mother's line carries the trauma of rape (her mother), birth under twilight sleep and adoption into an ultimately toxic family with possible incest. And yet she also fought hard to birth and parent me with deep love and attachment, so I would have a different ground to work through and alchemize this epigenetic coding. So I carry both deep roots (in family history, in direct parental attachment) as well as brokenness in my bodysoul, as we all do.
But, it is the soup of brokenness and wholeness, together, from which something else is born. Human conception is a translation into matter of a particular reflection of Source/God/dess, and it is innately whole. And humanity, in its wholeness, is messy and broken. We've been conducting an experiment across multiple millennia of what happens when we believe that body, sex and spirit are separate. I don't need to explain the results to you--you see them reflected in fractal clarity through all the pain and suffering of our world. This is the Lilith Wound, the smear campaign run on the wild, fierce, erotic body of the Earth and ourselves. It is the lie embedded where our power and pleasure resides, and so we shy away in fear just when know we have to follow the moon and step away from the straight line.
So what then? It can feel so frustrating--terrifying--and confusing to figure out how to navigate healing when it hurts most in the place where we most want and need to return to within ourselves. The dominant paradigm doesn't have much that is useful to reflect back to us here.
But understanding that the wound is the portal, we can begin to face what has felt hopeless, overwhelming and painful with a thread of faith that we are moving in the right direction.
To turn towards the Dark Feminine is to find our path. In doing this work we create a positive feedback loop--as we seek out stories and images that delight and intrigue us, we give literal food to the bodysoul, and the bodysoul begins to regrid itself within us, to wake up the inherent wisdom in our cells and atoms.
We find ourselves in the process of waking up actual, tangible love within our matter. We feel less alone. We recognize the kindred in each others' faces more and more, and the ensuing joy and relief.
We realize that liberating ourselves, while always requiring courage (coeur=heart) and not always being easy, is the only satisfying way to live. Because living to liberate ourselves and each other of all the ways we have forgotten who we really are (Spirit incarnated as Matter) is living a path of tangible love.
This brings me to the birthing. I find myself at an ecstatic crossroads, at a time when in my 42nd year literally over a decade of prayers have been answered as one big beautiful prayer for my life.
There is something coherent and crystallized within me that is pouring forth, that is so alive in every cell, and that wants to be shared. And because ease has clarified itself as one of my core values (as in, I am experiencing directly that if there is not ease in a situation Spirit is telling me that I am trying to force something), I want to birth this work in ease. What that means for me is to co-create, to be in conscious conversation, acknowledging and celebrating our collective genius waking up all over the place.
What that practically looks like is that I am offering a 5 week online circle working with Lilith and imagery, called Lilith Moon: Finding Our Personal Medicine, offered at a sliding scale in honoring of the service you bring to me, to Spirit, and to our collective liberation by participating and giving me feedback and reflection.
This is a good fit if:
- You are ready to have this medicine for yourself
- and
- Have the time and energy to focus your energy in and out of the circle to pay attention to how the Dark Feminine is showing up to work with you
This work is open to all genders.
We will be meeting online via Zoom Fridays @9:30 AM PDT for about 90 minutes. If you cannot make that time but are committed to listening to the recordings and doing the work you are welcome to join. There will also be sharing in my Facebook group, Sacred Erotic Intelligence.
The suggested donation is $45-$95. No one is turned away for lack of funds, and I trust you to be integrity with your own apprenticeship to money and prosperity.
Conversely, if you are experiencing financial prosperity a larger donation is welcome to support those cannot offer money.
Ultimately, it is your presence, commitment, authenticity that I am asking as the primary exchange, and money can be grounding for those things but not exclusively.
We begin Friday, May 24th. There's a party happening here! A deep, magical, witchy soul party, and you're invited to join. And no matter what, I'm sending my love and gratitude to you.
You can sign up here, and please do share with other kindred souls.