You don’t have to wait until this irritation goes away—
or until this sadness turns all pink and frilly,
or until you manage to cool your anger,
or no longer have fear—
before you can live in the FREEDOM and LOVE of the Goddess.
Walking the Goddess Path we sooner or later realize that all our feelings are in their essence shakti—creative life force energy—which is the goddess expressing herself through us.
When we make our spirituality about pushing away so-called negative feelings, we basically push away our life force energy!
Without even realizing it, we are caught in a kind of spiritual bardo, constantly judging and fighting our own nature, uprooted from ourselves and the wild majesty we are made of.
Feelings are energy, and energy is not intrinsically negative or positive; these are human labels, not universal truths. It is rather what we do with our feelings that create negative or positive, destructive or beneficial consequences.
Most of us lack training in staying present with uncomfortable feelings, not to mention seeing them as portals to spiritual awakening.
As daughters of the patriarchy, we have learned to view them as mistakes, and even in the name of spirituality as something we should transcend and avoid “giving energy to.”
We conceptualize, rationalize, pathologize or dramatize our feelings; we numb, we medicate, we pretend they are not there.
But what we resist persists; the energy doesn’t go away.
It gets stuck, it goes underground; it entangles us in endless story loops; coagulates into rigid patterns of control.
Too much of our brilliantly creative life force energy is held hostage in these avoidance games.
In Goddess practice, instead of chasing the perfect feeling or state, we learn to bring our attention from our mental commentary down into body and breath.
We learn to stay present with the felt sense of our feelings as energy in the body. Awareness and breath, movement and sounds, offer a kind of spiritual heat that melts and liberates frozen energy.
Once a feeling can flow unrestricted through our bodies, we discover that it is our own vitality, sensuality, intimacy, connection and power that we are retrieving; that the vulnerability which we spent our whole life trying to avoid is the very portal that brings us home.
~ ~ ~
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
~ Rumi
~ ~ ~
Once we see through the many disguises and forms of Goddess and realize Her true nature as One—that the habitual patterns that bind us are made of the same fabric as that which liberates—we unlock wisdom codes that open doors into a greater intimacy with the Divine and this devastating, splendorous weaving that is our world.