wellspringswoman's Blog

How much needless suffering could be averted if we learned more about our cycles – their biological and archetypal impact on our lives, the weaving of our fertility and creativity, the influence of the moon and other women on us? How then might we find our power in our lives? How then might we learn to celebrate what is uniquely ours?

On the journey of opening up to the wisdom of the divine feminine, I am understanding that the rhythm of the feminine is the slower, grounded, embodied energy of Mother Earth. . . I am inviting you to also begin playing with the idea of slowing down to that point where you feel grounded into your essence as a woman and are allowing the nourishing energies of the earth to radiate through you.

“The feminine is rising to restore balance, but this is not merely a recurring cycle. This time a new reality will emerge, completely transcending the old yin/yang cycle. This new cycle will span 26,000 years.”

At this point in history, the masculine needs to learn that its trajectory away from earth is not its sole function. The masculine does transcend limitations to acquire vision. But it must then “come back” to earth with its vision, and re-seed earth with it. Conversations with the Goddess, Dorothy Atalla

We rely on the left brain, with its close attunement to the outer world and to logic, to order most of our action and control our responses to events in our lives. Meanwhile we neglect and discount the other half of the brain, a half that’s more inwardly oriented and gives us our greatest capacity for intuition. Awakening Intuition, Dr. Mona Lisa Schulz

No other era has so totally divorced outer reality from inner reality, the matrix of which is the Great Mother. Never before have we been so cut off from the wisdom of nature and the wisdom of our own instincts. Addiction to Perfection, Marion Woodman

In the beginning was blood and the moon. . .

Blood, Bread and Roses — How Menstruation Created the World,
Judy Grahn

In Judy Grahn’s book, Blood, Bread and Roses – How Menstruation Created the World, she traces the development of our cultural traditions back to a very female version of beginnings. We know that the female body was seen as having the same life-giving powers as the “feminine earth.” The fact that a woman’s menstrual cycle coincides with the cycle of the moon forms the foundation for origin stories that were grounded in a woman’s experience of life.

A stone carving at the entrance of a cave in France, dated 25,000 – 20,000 B.C. shows a full woman’s body that was painted red. Called Venus of Laussel, the woman holds a horn in the shape of a crescent moon in her right hand. The horn was incised with thirteen markings, corresponding with the 13 lunar/menstrual months in a year.

In her book Judy follows the menstrual practices that developed over time and were grounded in the wisdom of what she calls “the menstrual mind.” Over time those practices became more complex, creating culture and extending to every aspect of culture.

Those traditions are still with us today only disguised by the patriarchal overlay that co-opted women’s wisdom, imbuing practices with their own origins and meaning. Women and their bodies were shamed in the new stories as well as “gifted” with the origin of suffering. Over time women came to be seen as culturally insignificant, even a necessary evil.

In Women Who Run With The Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estes states, “Over time, we have seen the feminine instinctive nature looted, driven back, and overbuilt. For long periods it has been mismanaged like the wildlife and the wildlands. For several thousand years, as soon and as often as we turned our backs, it is relegated to the poorest land in the psyche. The spiritual lands of Wild Woman have, throughout history, been plundered or burnt, dens bulldozed, and natural cycles forced into unnatural rhythms to please others.”

The “man in the moon” is only a small symbol of an enormous shift that fundamentally changed the status of women and the nature of the relationship between men and women. A few examples of what we are left with in this revised version of the origins of life and culture: blood power is now about taking life as opposed to giving life; the development of Kingship in a transfer of the innate powers of the feminine Queen to the masculine; the power to create life is now solely the domain of a male creator; children that are labeled illegitimate; the Great Below is transformed into a Hell ruled by a male figure. The world was turned on its head.

The path of the divine feminine is about reconnecting women to the innate wisdom of their bodies and the practices that honor a woman’s experience of life. It is about learning to own the truth of our experience, our voices. It is learning how to sit in the power of our knowing and having the courage to speak that truth.

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“During the excavation of the Upper Paleolithic site known as Dolni Vestonice, they found a pair of shoulder blades from a mammoth. The bones had been placed so as to form the two sides of a pitched roof, one of them leaning against the other. Beneath them was a human skeleton, and in the earth that covered it and on the bones themselves were traces of red ocher. The body had been painted red before it was laid to rest. . .This burial was of no ordinary person. . .A flint spearhead had been placed near the head of the deceased, and the body of a fox had been placed in one hand. . .the fox was a clear indication that the person in the grave had been a shaman: the fox had a long history as a shamanic guide. . .skeletal analysis revealed that the shaman was a woman.” The Woman in The Shaman’s Body, Barbara Tedlock

From the earliest of times women have embodied the role of healer, herbalist, medicine woman, wise one, and one who knows. They have ministered to the physical and spiritual needs of the community and individuals within the community.

In ancient Greece women were refused the right to participate in the public sphere, yet they continued to officiate at the temples. The Pythia, the Priestess at the Temple of the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi, was consulted by leaders far and wide. (Delphoi comes from the same root as delphys, meaning womb). Even in the early Christian communities there were women who were acknowledged as having the gift of prophesy.

Barbara Tedlock states, “That women’s bodies and minds are particularly suited to tap into the power of the transcendental has been ignored. . .All to often women who enter medicine or the ministry still believe they are stepping into a strictly men’s field; in fact, these are historically women’s fields that men have since entered.”

The cultural changes that resulted in women being excluded from representing the divine, from practicing the healing arts, from having a voice in the community, have greatly impacted a woman’s sense of self. We have learned to mistrust our experience, our knowing.

Today, women make of half of the students enrolled in medical and law school. They earn more than half of all bachelor degrees. Women are now seated in power positions. That is why this is an important time for women to do the work of reconnecting with the deep wisdom of their bodies. To return to honoring the goddess within. Otherwise we just perpetuate a system that is dysfunctional, disconnected, and unbalanced.

It is important for women to reown their voices from a place of understanding a woman’s unique biology, psychology, and spirituality. From a place of grounding into her experience of life, into her sense of being, a woman can begin to bring forth the wisdom that is needed to the public sphere. This is the path of the divine feminine. This is the voice of the goddess speaking through women once more.

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In all European languages the Earth is feminine.
The Language of the Goddess, Marija Gimbutas

Ancient cultures experienced and named the earth as feminine. They saw the female body as an extension of nature, embodying the same attributes as the earth. Woman as nature. As nature, a woman’s body provided the nurturing that brought forth and sustained life, the same way the earth brought forth and sustained life.

A woman’s body will naturally entrain with the phases of the moon, her monthly cycles arriving with the dark moon, when she is not exposed to artificial light. Her body reflects the seasonal changes of conceiving new life, growth, releasing and preparation for another season of growth.

The cultural changes that led to the devaluation of both women and the earth have dramatically effected the state of the feminine in our personal experience. First and foremost, we do not stand in reverence and awe of the feminine archetype. We have lost our sense of the powerful, multi-faceted feminine.

Here is a portion of Wikipedia’s definition of femininity: Gentleness, empathy, sensitivity, nurturance, deference, self-abasement, and succorance are behaviors generally considered feminine. The feminine nature is considered by some to be more emotional and less logical than the masculine nature.

Is this really the feminine? Or is this the feminine that endured centuries of cultural neglect and entrapment. When I think of those ancient communities, whose very basis was celebrating the divine feminine archetype in the Great Earth Mother, I cannot imagine a diminished feminine. The earth debasing herself, or shaming herself, for her overly emotional nature. Earth wisdom may seem overly reactive when she is ultimately about self-balancing and self-preservation.

I prefer Clarissa Pinkola Estes words in Women Who Run With the Wolves to describe the unbound feminine. She uses the words “Wild Woman” to refer to the pure feminine instinctual nature.

“To adjoin the instinctual nature. . .means to establish territory, to find ones’s pack, to be in one’s body with certainty and pride regardless of the body’s gifts and limitations, to act and speak in one’s behalf, to be aware, alert, to draw on the innate feminine powers of intuition and sensing, to come into one’s cycles, to find what one belongs to, to rise with dignity, to retain as much consciousness as we can.” My body feels the power in those words.

In doing our work to re-own and redefine the feminine for ourselves, we can look to “the feminine earth” as our guide. We can be amazed at her beauty, her diversity, her power, her deep wisdom, her abundant nature, her natural joy. And remember that we are all that too. She is us and we are her. And nothing less. As we walk the path of the divine feminine, learning what it means for us individually to re-own the beauty and power of the feminine in our lives, we can open ourselves up to our true feminine nature that we share with “the feminine earth.”

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In Chartres Cathedral. . .the great Goddess, Mary by name, sits on the cathedra, the throne of her cathedral. She is wisdom, crowned with leaves. Enthroned on her knee is the young king, bearing in one hand the orb and raising two fingers of the other in blessing of her and the world. He is the word made flesh, consciousness sitting on the lap of nature. Without the lap, consciousness is uprooted from its source, assuming a life of its own that can be self-devouring. It is as source that the lap is the throne. The relationship between masculine and feminine is well balanced, if not on a physical scale, certainly on a psychic one. Dancing in the Flames, Marion Woodman

The lap of the feminine is the throne, the basis, the foundation. The divine feminine is the jumping off point. The source of our knowing and our dreams. Without this grounding, the mind uprooted, runs amuck.

We have forgotten the necessity and the power of this relationship with the feminine. The archetype of the goddess, as the source of all life as well as all that sustains life, has become refuse in a world uprooted from its source. We have become disconnected from a belief in the abundance and wisdom embodied in the feminine archetype.

We bring our cold rationalizations, thinking we are smarter than our hearts. We deny ourselves, preferring the cool, objective intellect. We question, resist, disallowing our very basis. In our woundedness, we do not remember how to welcome the resources of the “Great Mother.” She is the seat of our souls, infinite wisdom, boundless love, the creatrix.

We disallow her generosity and instead focus on the meanness of our scars. She is always there, welcoming us back into her arms, back to wholeness, joy, serenity. We have forgotten how to honor the energy of the “Great Earth Mother” within. She is ourselves. She is nature. To a culture that doesn’t value women, she remains hidden.

In our culture women assumed the mantle of the masculine to be seen, to be valued. Now it is time, once again, to embrace the deep wisdom of the Divine Feminine. To honor her sensibilities within ourselves. In reclaiming the voice of the “Queen of Heaven and Earth,” we reassert the value in all life.

A stone carving from Egypt, circa 600 B.C. shows the Goddess Isis (also known as “The Throne”) standing behind and with her wings shielding a much smaller figure, Osiris. The Goddess, the divine feminine, provides the platform for the divine masculine. It is the feminine that blesses and anoints the energies of the masculine. It takes courage to seat ourselves into the divine feminine, the throne of our being. To ground our masculine energies into their source.

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