This very body we have that’s sitting here right now, with its aches and its pleasures… Is exactly what we need to be fully human, fully awake, fully alive.

Imagine yourself standing naked. Behind you stands your mother, naked as well. And behind her, your grandmother. Behind her is your grandmother’s mother, and behind her is her mother. (You can, in fact, in your imagination follow this linage all the way back to the very first mother.) All of them are naked.

If you zoom out for a moment and look at this row of bodies, their shapes and sizes, you will probably see that your body has forms similar to the women behind you, and that they have similar body traits to the women behind them. These are the shapes that have been passed down through generations.

From this perspective we discover that the shape of our body has a whole other purpose than just conforming to the fashion of our decade. It was created a long time ago and passed on. When we judge our body and compare it to cultural dictates of what a perfect body should look like, we are also judging our feminine lineage. To compare it with today’s fashion is to judge a perfect evolutionary unfolding that serves a purpose far more profound than the immediate need to fit in.

Maybe the women standing behind you judged their bodies too; maybe they didn’t fit their times’ ideal of perfection either. Take a moment to feel all these bodies, how they did their best, hearts pumping, lungs breathing, all the cells and blood working hard for so many years without being appreciated, because we all are trapped in a hypnosis of comparison.

We don’t judge our inner organs so readily. We don’t make the same insane commentary on the rest of our bodies, only on our outside appearance. Judgment, criticism, and comparison are all thought patterns and programming we have received from the outside, and unconsciously we keep reinforcing them. They are the result of our deeply ingrained social and cultural tendency to make the body into an object.
It is natural to love and be attracted to beauty. It thrills and fascinates us. When someone recognizes beauty in the color of our eyes or in the curve of our thighs, it can feel nourishing and vitalizing. This does not automatically close us to presence; on the contrary, it can relax and open us so that our radiance can shine through even more. Our suffering starts when we don’t feel our body from the inside anymore, but as an object looked on through the eyes of others.

The French author Simone de Beauvoir wrote in The Second Sex about how this loss of self from within is a form of “hypnosis” that can repress even groups of people. For instance, when a lower class experiences themselves subjectively in the same way that they are seen by the upper class, as less worthy.

In a similar way, collectively women have for ages been looked upon as objects of beauty and sexuality and on many levels this has trapped us in a distorted sense of self and of beauty. We can see this played out to the extreme in movies where women often are just decoration. We see it in music videos and in advertisements and in the explosive pornography industry happening on the Internet. It is too simple just to point fingers at men as the abusive party in this matter. The problem lies in the relationship to the feminine that we all, men and women, have bought into, and we can start the liberation process by questioning our own beliefs and judgments.

Feel into your body as it is right now. Your heart is still beating loyally. Your cells are so sincerely doing their job. Even if you have an illness, you can be sure that your body is doing its very best to heal. Feel your body from the inside, what a miracle it is. It changes with the seasons and with the cycles of the moon. It is such a perfect organism that with the right tending and loving nourishment will move and grow and love in its own perfect way. However, when we fall into the trance of judgment and comparison we are no longer present in the body. The consequences of this are many.

:We separate from our connection with inner wisdom.
How can we listen within when daily we are treated to a cacophonic choir of how wrong our body is? How can we tune in to the wisdom in our womb, our gut feeling, when we are wearing a belt so tight we can hardly breathe? We lose the ability to feel connected with the laws of nature, from the inside.

:We create poisonous competition.
When we measure the body by fixed standards we lose the ability to see and honor the beauty in each unique expression of the feminine. The sight of a woman’s beautiful breasts makes us shrink and compare them to our own. Drunk on a bitter brew of competition, we also eagerly seek out faults in other women to help ourselves feel better, forgetting that we are judging a unique expression of the feminine. This harms our connection with ourselves, since we start judging the feminine in us as well.

:We limit our sense of beauty.
By seeing ourselves and other women from the outside instead of from within, we lose a total experience of beauty, which is multidimensional and permeates everything. We can recognize beauty through our eyes, but beauty can just as well be felt through the skin, and when opening in laughter and even pain, we can feel beauty as a quality intrinsic to life itself. When we view it only superficially, we are seeing beauty as separate from ourselves, ignoring the oneness in the depth of our beings yearning to be seen.

:We lose our healthy sense of boundaries.
When we objectify our bodies we no longer heed, or trust, when something feels off inside. If a person moves closer to us than what feels okay, we normally feel this as a tension somewhere in the body, maybe in the belly, and we can either move away or express our boundaries. When we are not present in our bodies, we don’t register these healthy signals, and we can end up being violated physically or psychologically. Many women report being so trapped in the image of the nice girl—the spiritual version of this is having an open heart—that they find themselves being busy pleasing even people who act abusively toward them. They cannot feel the no inside, and if they do they do not trust it.

The habits of judgment and comparison often run deep. Once we feel we have kicked them, another layer reveals itself. As we are restoring a healthy relationship to our body, the feminine within is patiently waiting to be revealed and shared. I have found that taking part in women’s circles has provided the most healing and awakening support to me in seeing through these habits.
It takes commitment, gentle support, and ruthless honesty to find our way through the thick forest of beliefs, to move closer to our bodies.
When fully inhabiting every curve of her body, a woman is relaxed, open, and soft. Maybe you have noticed how soothing it is to be in the presence of a woman who is in her body. This healing radiance can emanate through all ages and skin colors, all shapes and sizes. It is the radiance of an innocent heart, of deeply felt feelings. The glow comes from being intimate with the moment itself.

A woman’s relaxed belly makes you let go in trust. Her fully inhabited hips emanate aliveness, and her face makes you remember the love that you once came from. Her eyes look fearlessly into the darkest corners of your being. A body like this doesn’t activate your comparing mind, because your heart is involuntarily touched, and you are subtly guided back to the deeper waters of existence.

From Embodying the Feminine by Chameli Ardagh.

Dancing in the Flames

“Dancing in the Flames is a brilliant and intimate documentary into the life of Jungian Analyst, Marion Woodman, who is known for her ground breaking work as a teacher and author on feminine psychology and addiction. We are taken into a metaphoric representation of the unconscious imagery that Marion discusses so passionately and, in doing so, are invited to examine our own lives. Brilliant mystic and author Andrew Harvey interviews Marion as she explains the mysteries of her soul’s journey and reveals a series of psychological ‘deaths’ and ‘rebirths’ that have formed the consciousness into which she has evolved. The film presents a philosophy of dynamic opposites, the bridging of seeming contradictions. Life and death, love and grief, courage and submission are not at loggerheads for her—they’re part of a harmonious whole. By embracing these opposites we come into the totality of human experience.” From www.cultureunplugged.com

Just click the link above and you can watch it free online.

As it is in Heaven (Swedish with English subtitles)

This is one of my favorite movies of all time.  The three main female characters are reflecting deep beauty and truth on an archetypal level.

“An internationally renowned Swedish conductor returns to his childhood village and agrees to help the local church choir hone their singing skills. The harder Daniel works draws out the singers’ hidden inner talents, the more he realizes just what he’s been missing by living in the big city. Before long he’s made new friends, and found a new love. As It Is In Heaven was Sweden’s official submission for Best Foreign Film at the 2005 Academy Awards.” ~rottentomatoes.com

I feel a subtle tremor in my soul, similar to what I imagine animals feel right before an earth quake.
Durga tends to crack open the stale surfaces, revealing the luminous inside of the inside. If we are lucky.
If we are willing to be broken.

In facing Her power, I have been forced to drop all my ideas about power. My ambitious attempts to “get it”, to pump myself up with self esteem, to be better than, to play smaller than, my clumsy attempts to copy the ones I thought have “got it”, my clever games, my spiritual correctness.
She kindly ignored it all and kept pushing me down on my knees, reminded me to soften my tight fists, insisting that I let Her take the wheel.

The path to Her power is a path of surrender, a surrender to your own Self, to your Big Self.

In surrender you find your power, 
in bowing down you find your dignity.
In that moment of getting out of your own way,
you find your way.

The longing to show up, to contribute with the unique flavor of you,
is shared by all of life. Look at the flowers, the animals, look at children,
everybody wants to take part, with all we got.

So why make it so personal? Why do we make it about “being good enough”,
or the “right moment”, or “getting it”?

Here is a secret key, sister:
it’s not really about you.

From the inside of the inside you remember. Songs of outrageous freedom ~ of giving it all.
They come as whispers, they come as howls, or as a silence wrapping itself around you.

Small or big, right or wrong, unworthy or “the best”,
It. Does. Not. Matter.
This moment, this is it. This is life.
Get out of your own way and give it from that deep warmth of you.

See you on the other side.

Join us for the online  21 Day Durga Sadhana Immersion, starting April 25th

When you hear yourself say yes, or no, again, shrinking inside.
When it’s not enough, or way to much.

When his/her every movement is all you can talk about, think about, dream about.
When it feels as there is no way out, when you can only see an either-or solution,
and both are impossible.

The drama is endless.

We think that happiness will come if the story goes right,
so we push, and we pull, with all we got.
We get plugged in.

Yes, you are living this life in a female body, it is inevitable that you will feel
pleasure, you will feel pain, and you will feel everything between.

But there is a deeper suffering:

When we get plugged into the stories, when we get caught in escalating reactivity,
when we forget who we are, we feel what the Buddhists call “the root disease,”
we feel the pain of separation.

If I unplug will I still be engaged,
will things still get done, will I still fall in and out of love?
Will I still make choices, what about right and wrong?
Will I never raise my voice?

Breathe deeply, take a risk, let go.
Remember that Presence is infinite creativity.
Connect with the Presence inside of the inside of all things, first, then lean in with all of you, into the dance of form.

Practice: Pull the Plug

Your practice is to pull the plug from the drama.
Notice what happens when you “sit back in the saddle”, connect with your breath, and expand your awareness to
include the source moving as you, moving as the other, moving as all things.

Please let us know how it goes (post a comment below)

With Love, Always

Join us for our next 21 Day Sadhana Immersion, starting April 25th

Progress is only possible through longing. And as the path of progress is infinite, there should be infinite longing. Thus longing becomes itself a form of the infinite, to be desired for its own sake. This is why the mystics idealize longing. The other name for longing is love.

What a wild ride this human life is. Every moment is an opportunity to show up fully as who we are, an opportunity to create and to be created. The choice is always between turning our back to the moment or turning our vulnerable, open heart and belly toward the moment.

The divine feminine is radical in the way she guides us into a territory way beyond the confined limits of our thinking. Although our minds love to reach conclusions, to achieve goals, to me—at least—this life doesn’t seem to have any goal outside the meaningfulness inherent in this unfolding, this evolution, this play of life itself. While your ambitious mind may desire to reach an ultimate state of enlightenment, your wild heart is fully involved in a never-ending enlightening process.

In the territory of feminine embodiment, we are guided by different rules than just the linear, the logic and rationale. And isn’t this what we long for, to have these golden moments of rest from our chattering minds, where we just are? Where we are immersed in a current bigger, wilder, and wiser than us?

The feminine embodiment practices  are processes of remembering. You will remember, not old dusty dogmas or tidy models of reality, but rather the capacity to stay awake, present and in the body, at the very edge of each moment. It is here at this edge that evolution is happening. It is here—right here in this breath—that you become a co-creator of your future. You will remember how thrillingly alive you feel when you are fully here, fully present. You will remember not mental theories, but life itself, lived in its most awake expression. You remember love.

We dive into the intimate process of embodying our awakening and from here our relationship to our spirituality fundamentally changes. We will no longer seek to “transcend” or get rid of our humanness, but to open ourselves to a multi-dimensional life right here in the midst of it all.

In this directly experienced spirituality, we learn to see through our habits of dividing the “mundane” from the “spiritual”, every dimension of life is experienced as part of the same whole. We sense the suffering intrinsic to any kind of duality, and we start to breathe awareness down into our bodies, welcoming human life as an opportunity to awaken, to learn and to contribute. Our spiritual concepts transform into a tangible, embodied love.

This is text is from Chameli’s book Embodying the Feminine~ Life lessons and Practices for Awakening Women (previously Come Closer.)
Available in PDF or Kindle

Your truth, and the trust and strength to live it,
is not found in the cunning navigation through 
the all too familiar playing fields of the power games (higher/lower, win/loose, superior/unworthy, perpetrator/victim, )
nor is it found in the never ending dance of self improvement,
empowerment or building your self esteem.

Your truth is not something you need to find, reach or create.
It is already vibrating fiercely in the forgotten depths
of that which truly matters to your soul.

Join us for the 21 day Durga Sadhana starting April 25. Read more here.

We were in a gathering with a group of yoginis, we had been diving deep together for many days. This morning it felt as if we were dancing inside the heart of the Goddess, each sound, each movement, pulling us deeper into this unspeakable source of it all.
The moment was holy.

This is when she raised her hand and spoke. I know she was trying, in her way, to dive deeper: to be more “real.”  But when she started to share all her negative thoughts about herself and the others, it felt to me as if she energetically was vomiting onto the altar of her own longing. In this moment, peace, beauty, freedom, it was all there knocking on her glorious heart. Instead of throwing the doors wide open, she went straight down that old familiar road of “the story.”

We often think that the darker it gets, the more “real” it is. That the doorway to intimacy is through “processing our stuff.” If we are simply happy we get bored. We judge the happy people, as superficial and often times plain stupid.

Yes, as feminine practitioners we know that darkness is part of our reality.  Darkness can be the most beautiful there is,  the most horrible emotion, when felt freely, can carry us straight into the lap of the Goddess. Honesty is the doorway in.

Yet, don’t fool yourself to believe that to stay and churn in those yucky waters as some kind of virtue, will get you any faster to Paradise. In your attachment to your suffering it is easy to turn your back on the open door, and you look for a deeper meaning to your pain.

Of course you feel pain, sister, you just turned your back on the open door.

To see the holy is an aspect of the eyes that see. This world is full of horror, and it is also… magnificent. Just the very fact that you are here, and I am here, and we get to experience this moment, means that we get to be alive… that is holy.

Lean in.

Like moss, like warm velvet. Infinite. Still and held. Not in any way airy, it is full. Full of dark softness. And no impulse, what so ever, to do, anything.

This is my inner state. Right now. I know it well, it is the post-shaktiblast-swamp.

Four times a year I pack my gypsy bags and head out for a month long pilgrimage to the European Yogini circles.
After a few days of paying homage to my mother in Norway I practice and teach pretty much non stop. Expanding and expanding, allowing for bigger and brighter energies to flow through my body, this is my path. Embodied spirituality.

With the expansion comes the contraction, and it is in the dance as this pulsation She shows me bliss.

I came home a week ago, and today as the rain is throwing its icy tears at the windows, and the fire is burning hot and holy inside, I curl up in a corner, and I lean in.

Out

Of a great need

We are all holding hands and climbing.

Not loving is a letting go.

Listen,

The terrain around here

Is far too dangerous

For that.

-Hafiz

Photo Credit to Mikaela Larm