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The Essence of Woman

Sacred Women's Business

Sacred Women’s Business.
…Our culture has lost the mythic road map which helps locate a person in a larger context. Without a tribal vision of the gods, and their spiritual network, modern individuals are cut adrift to wander without guidance, without models and without assistance through the various life stages. Thus, these Passages, which call for death before rebirth, are often experienced in frightening and isolating ways, for there are no rites of passage and little help from one’s peers who are equally adrift.” ……James Hollis

The ultimate purpose for being on the planet is to bring the power of love into the world. For today’s woman, her call to power and her call to love can be confusing because her knowledge of her authentic self has been misinformed, her vision of her feminine potential has been veiled and her relationship to the power of the moon, the earth and the sacred elements of creation has become disconnected. A major influence has been centuries of suppression and invalidation of the Sacred Feminine by patriarchal structures which has isolated women from maps of inner power that have been used since time began to guide a woman into the deep waters of her feminine essence.

Women grow, develop and learn about who they are in ways that are distinctly different to men. They find their core identity and learn how to embody their femininity through developmental changes that happen physically, emotionally, psychologically and spiritually. These changes contain important steps that evolve their feminine spirit through passages of power. Passages that initiate them through women’s lore, teaching stories, ceremonies, dance/sacred movement and rites of passages/initiations that give women deeply transformative experiences of their essence and connect them with the beauty of their womanhood. These passages into feminine power release energies within the feminine soul that give women an understanding of how to balance their vulnerability and their strengths and cultivate their capacity to honour their emotional and spiritual being. It is essential for all young girls to grow up learning about what women’s business is so that they can steward this precious energy when it is their time to become women. These evolutionary stages contain important life lessons and feminine rites of passages that give women an understanding of their feminine nature, and the tools to apply its strengths and its power in the world.
 

Women’s Sacred Business includes our spiritual responsibility to: 

¥      Care for our earth mother
¥      Love and care for ALL children
¥      Be the Keepers of tradition/culture
¥      Keepers of women’s healing spaces
¥      Keepers of women’s blood mysteries
¥      Keepers of the bloodlines/future generations
¥      Be custodians of the sacred circle of sisterhood
¥      Love, care for and nurture families and community
¥      Learn and pass on the teaching stories/dances/teaching stones/teaching places
¥      Keepers of ceremonies such as birthing ceremonies and women’s rites of passages
¥      Know medicine/teaching plants/foods, where they can be found and how to prepare them
¥      Initiation into sacred sexual practices, some women will also initiate and teach the young men
¥      Understand the medicine wheel of life eg, natures cycles/seasons and how to evoke the sacred elements and sacred directions
¥      Know the location of women’s medicine places such as fertility sites, birthing pools, ceremonial sites, and how to take care of them

In response to the unconscious female conditioning of our society, the essential female qualities often become distorted: Softness can become weakness; receptivity can become passivity or resignation; the nurturing quality can become overbearing; the beauty of surrender can become submission; absorption might turn into sucking; the ability to sustain long-term waiting can shift into indolence; love can turn to jealousy and the use of female qualities for manipulation; the joy of non-doing and relaxation can express itself as the dead weight of inertia and laziness. Feminine fluidity might become a state of collapse; the free expression of individual feelings shifts toward sentimentality or moodiness; intuition and psychic abilities can slide over the line into paranoia and hysteria; the ability to allow events to unfold without trying to control them can become inappropriate indecisiveness or lack of initiative; sensitivity twists into victim hood or is used in the service of fear; appreciation for beauty becomes attachment to outer appearance; the nesting impulse can become a compulsive obsession with security; silent strength can turn to masochistic dependency; the awareness of connection to the universe beyond one's personal boundaries can go too far, resulting in an individual who is vague and spaced out and lacking enough personal definition. ”..…Diane Richardson

In goddess traditions and earth based spiritual traditions young girls also learn to deepen their experience of their feminine energy by learning to embody feminine archetypes. Depending on the essence of each girl, she will be given teaching stories, meditations, vision quests and other spiritual practices to align her with the three main manifestations of the Sacred Feminine.

¥      The loving, compassionate face of the sacred feminine, eg; Quan Yin, Mother Mary, Tara
¥      The fierce, wrathful strong and powerful face of the sacred feminine, eg; Kali, Durga, Pele
¥      The sensual, erotic, fertile face of the sacred feminine, eg; Aphrodite, Isis, Mary Magdalene

The old women of earth tell us that if these teachings die, we die along with them because they contain the essence of woman and therefore the essence of creation and its birth/death/rebirth cycles. These teachings evoke the sacred, deepen our embodiment of love, raise power, feed the earth, evolve the soul and sustains the oneness - the interconnected web of life.

For the main passages of power in a woman’s lifecycle are:

The first passage is ‘The Maiden’ – (3 – 11, 12 -21 yrs). Here she enters into the ‘Lover ‘archetype

Second is that of ‘The Mother” – 21 -42yrs. Here she enters into the ‘Magician ‘archetype

Third is ‘The Guardian’ – 42 -63yrs. Here she enters into the ‘Warrior ‘archetype

And the final passage of evolution is ‘The Crone’- 63yrs +. Here she will enter into the ‘Queen/ High Priestess archetype

Note: The Guardian is a new evolutionary passage of power for women. In goddess traditions the triple goddess is worshipped and honored – Maiden/Mother/Crone.  The triple goddess archetype was formed on the earth at a time when women lived to around 60 years. Women are now living longer and a new evolutionary phase has emerged within the feminine psyche around the ages of 40 – 60 years. This stage is known as the Guardian. After moving through ‘Mother’ a woman now feels drawn to protect, sustain and steward the life that she has brought into this world on a much deeper level. Women within this stage of the life cycle often redefine their sense of self, start businesses, become involved on global causes and they seek adventure and explore possibilities that were not available to them as mothers.