My Recent Experience

Over the weekend, I spent 4 nights in Mexico participating in Moondance with over 300 other women. Moondance is an indigenous ceremony where women opt to not sleep, fast, and dance and sing under the full moon for 4 nights. There are a lot of other aspects and details to it, but ultimately it is a prayer circle for the healing of the Feminine principle.

For me it was a way to connect with a time before women we were thought of as the ‘weaker sex’, a time when women were respected for their spiritual connection to the power of creation and manifestation. A place where women’s strength is trusted, exalted, and fully experienced.

We sacrifice our comfort to deepen our attention on our prayers and make them sacred. Prayers for ourselves and our families. Prayers for our relationships and relations. Prayers for our lands and Earth. Prayers for our ancestors and legacies. Prayers for conscious change and remembrance. Prayers for all creatures, plants and the elements.

As I am taking space and integrating what was a deeply alchemizing and profound experience for me, I am seeing the power of women remembering their strength.

Damsels

There is a strong collective story so many women play into of the “damsel in distress.” On a symbolic level this story says that women are weak, powerless, and need a man or something to save them.

This story says physical strength trumps spiritual strength. This story says logic trumps intuition. This story says mental academia trumps embodied experience. This story says winter is bad and summer is good. This story says death is scary and to deny/erase it. This story says faith is only for those who are impractical, dumb and delusional. This story says money is worth more than integrity. This story says our difficulties in life are victimization not initiation.

The Feminine does not need saving. She is the creator and the destroyer.

We, the beings that are the altar through which spirit comes into form, do not need saving.

We, the beings that raise up the next generation of humanity in spite of wars, famines, unthinkable abuse, and dangers beyond comprehension, do not need saving.

We, the beings that give of our bodies so that Life may continue forward, do not need saving.

We, the beings that die and bleed only to be reborn, every single month, do not need saving.

Women are strong. And yet, it is not a dominating kind of strong. It is the strength of the Earth, who will always hold you, no matter how high up in your tower or how deep in the ground you are. It is the strength of spirit, in form. We may not have the brute physical strength that men have, but, weaved into our very bodies, we have a strength that comes from our connection to nature, cycles, creation and destruction. So many of us have forgotten this strength. It’s like this strength has been put to sleep, lulled into a drowsy, comfortable, slumber, and we have forgotten who we are. I can’t help but think this is partly due to how few contained and guided initiations we have in modern life.

Instead of owning our power, we waste our energy comparing ourselves to others. Instead of owning our power, we use up our energy tearing down other women. Instead of owning our power, we park our energy by agonizing and ruminating over our unworthiness.

What if we remembered we are all the daughters of Creation, Herself? Sisters to each other?

How do we remember this?

Initiation

We remember through initiation.

We remember through seeing and watching ourselves approach, cross, and be transformed by thresholds. Facing our fears and experiencing our own strength, not with force and gritting our teeth, but through surrender.

Initiation demands that we put our small minds to the side and walk, willingly, into the flames.

So many of our built-in initiations in life have been corrupted and stalled.

Menarche is shamed and rushed through unceremoniously for most young girls.

Childbirth and pregnancy has been medicalized and pathologized.

Menopause also pathologized, stalled and stopped completely if possible.

Death is only spoken about in whispers and swept away as soon as possible.

Even our monthly cycles and bleeds, which can be mini initiations, are expected to be hidden, kept under wraps, and largely experienced alone and ignored.

If you feel shame or confusion about any of these initiations there is a great likelihood it has been stunted, stalled, or is incomplete.

We can also have plenty initiations that are unique to us, through life events, painful experiences, and coming up against the dark, unknown and mysterious.

Initiations shape us. They change us. They allow us to become. They allow us to experience Feminine strength which is directly connected to our embodied experience of Creation.

Cultures that still have a connection to the natural world as sentient and alive in and of itself, revere the Feminine principle. They revere matter as holy, because they know all things are imbued with spirit. They would create containers and rituals that would complete the initiation of a woman into her power and connect her to all those before her through all time (like the 40 days sitting in practice post childbirth, for example).

Tyson Yunkapora (aboriginal philosopher and writer) says, “You know a culture is really domesticated when the women are considered weaker.”

Women’s strength has almost been forgotten in the Western world.

We infantilize women and call it femininity.

A woman is not meant to be held as trophy or an object of sexual satisfaction, this is perhaps the biggest travesty of our modern times. A woman has access to creation and destruction. She has access, through her very physical form, to the forces of nature.

Her value is not in how small her waist is or how big her lips. Her value is in her beingness, the radiance of God that shines through her eyes.

Her very aliveness and her ability to allow that aliveness to flow through her, unimpeded, is what feeds the world.

Women do not need to be saved; from men, from the world, from corporations, or from the Patriarchy, women simply need to be fully and completely initiated, because then they save themselves and their families and the world.

When a woman truly experiences her strength she will no longer feel the need to subvert her power through looking for saving, comparison, or validation.

A woman’s strength does not come from gritting her teeth and getting it over with. It doesn’t come from what or how much she produces or how much she can ‘do’, it comes from her ability to sit in the dark, with herself and for herself.

If you feel called to explore this concept of initiation I am going to be speaking at a 3 day online gathering called INITIATION next weekend October 19th at 1pm Mountain Time alongside some other incredible women who hold deep wisdom about this concept of initiation as well.

You can get more information and register here.

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