LunarMusings

My Sacred Life Sunday: Of Women and Wolves

My Sacred Life Sunday

From my readings in Women Who Run With The Wolves:

"Because women have a soul-need to express themselves in their own soulful ways, they must develop and blossom in ways that are sensible to them and without molestation from others."

and

"In a single human being there are many other beings, all with their own values, motives, and devices.  Some psychological technologies suggest we arrest these beings, count them, name them, force them into harness till they shuffle along like vanquished slaves.  But to do this would halt the dance of wildish lights in a woman's eyes; it would halt her heat lightning and arrest all throwing of sparks.  Rather than corrupt her natural beauty, our work is to build for all these beings a wildish countryside wherein the artists among them can make, the lovers love, the healers heal."

I am sitting deep with this today.  Everything in this book takes me to a deeper terrain, a slower pattern of sifting through the details for my makings.  But this wisdom gives me much pause.  I have always thought of the lessons in balance in my life to be about how to give each of my Self parts equal time, each of the commitments, loves, responsibilities in my external life equal attention.  And even after realizing that balance is always dynamic and sometimes one aspect of my life gets more time, attention, priority then others for a time, and then later that shifts again, I still operate from a place that keeps each of these aspects in nice and neat boxes.

I am wondering now how to allow room for all of it.  At once, one at a time, several now, not later... whatever authentic configuration wants and needs to happen in any given moment.  Can I allow for the reality that today my artist self and my lover self and cranky self were very wide awake?  Two of those aspects of me were sorely stifled today, because my brain was so intent on shutting up anything that would deviate me from the task at hand. 

The Woman Mystery here is how to dance with it all as it spontaneously comes up in any given moment.  Or actually, the mystery is not to lead the dance at all, but hold space for it to unfold as is best and as it serves the higher purpose of my full expression as a Woman in this life. 

I take this with me into my week, into my art, into my loving, healing, cooking, and whatever else comes through in me.

Blessings from very muggy Long Beach.  :)

My Sacred Life Sunday: Reading

My Sacred Life Sunday

I am reading this again for the third time.  Its been quite a while and it feels like coming home to an old and significant friend.  I am circling with sisters again after a long break, and the Sacred Space created by a circle of Women is so potent.  It pulls me back into the bones of my femininity. 

I believe every woman should have this book and read it quietly to herself as a meditation, to her sisters in tones of importance, secret keys revealed, and to the young ones in a voice of potent knowing.  This book is a soul reclamation.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D shares in the very beginning of the book,

"We are filled with a longing for the wild.  There are few culturally sanctioned antidotes for this yearning.  We were taught to feel shame for such a desire.  We grew our hair long and used it to hide our feelings.  But the shadow of Wild Woman still lurks behind us during our days and in our nights.  No matter where we are, the shadow that trots behind us is definitely four-footed."

and

"Healthy wolves and healthy women share certain psychic characteristics:  keen sensing, playful spirit, and a heightened capacity for devotion.  Wolves and women are relational by nature, inquiring, possessed of great endurance, and strength.  They are deeply intuitive, intensely concerned with their young, their mate and their pack.  they are experienced in adapting to constantly changing circumstances; they are fiercely stalwart and very brave."

All this by page 4. 

As this new cycle of seasons begins, I encourage you to give this book to yourself.  If, like me, you have already read it, read it again.  Let this be a path back to the heart of your core as a woman.  Lets allow the path for our unfolding freedom and wildness to begin again!

I am so feeling this in the air.  So in-tuned to a drum beating in the far distance, beckoning a huge shift back into the truth of who I am... the Truth of who we are as Women.

Now, I know that my soul brothers out there come and read this blog from time to time.  My intention is not to exclude you, or discount your Sacred Wildness.  But for this day, with this book, I send this note to my Soul Sisters.  Hold space for us as we make our way into more of who we are.

Blessings to all of you,
e

Book: Live What You Love

I finished reading this great book last week.  The Blanchards set out to live a life outside the box, and have had countless businesses, a restaurant and live in both Vermont and Anguilla, because its what their hearts have lead them to.  They tossed the usual 9 to 5 life for one lead by passion, joy, and creativity.

Its inspiring to read stories of couples that find a way to live big, adventurous and outside of the box. Its what Jon and I are striving for. 

I find all sorts of fears that come up when thinking about cutting free and living abroad with no sense of time, or need to return to a job.  Its been such a potent way to really look at all the things we, especially in the US, mistake for necessity and the way things have to be done.

But once the blinders come off, what better way to live life then intuitively, then to be guided by the murmurings of the heart? This is my vision, my desire, and my aim.  It scares me and excites me to think of all the wildest dreams and notions as possible.  And then there is the Beloved.  A person with his own wildest dreams and notions.  Its quite a ride to the heart of matters trying to find a way to make room for it all.

Its our work now.  Its what we are in... the stirring of our hopes and dreams and needs and trying to come up with the perfect batch of a life for us both to live together.  Dreaming for one is different then dreaming for two. :)  And this journey has and continues to be such a Divine teacher for me.  And I am grateful that along the way, books like this one get dropped into my lap to gain inspiration from and to receive messages from the Universe that it. is. possible.

Its a fun easy read... go check it out!

Latest Addition!

 

This is the latest addition to my Etsy Store.  Is a love journal that is actually quite gorgeous, but these pictures just weren't working out for me.  There are more views of the journal at the store!  I am sending this beauty out into the world and into the hands of Beloveds, devoted to love, passion, and romance!

Love Is Everything...

I'm a girl completely head over heals for love.  Its really the only thing we're on this planet for.  Its the lesson at the end of every path, and its the one thing that can and will heal every wound we each have and will carry individually and collectively.

And no where is the ability to learn love more potent then with an Other.  The Other.  A Beloved. 

One of my most treasured books is Enchanted Love by Marianne Williamson.  This book has changed me, healed me and raised me to be the growing and learning woman in love that I am today.  I love this book.  When you look at my copy of it, you can feel the softened covers, the flexible spine, and the countless pen marks throughout the pages.  We are still working with each other this book and I.

So, I decided to pull out one of my favorite quotes from this book in honor of Valentines Day, and realized that there were way to many to just pick one.  So I will just keep adding quotes until I feel its time to stop, or my fingers cramp from so much typing!

"The highest purpose of intimacy is to call forth the beloved's soul."

"Enchanted partnership begins with the conscious understanding, on the part of two people, that the purpose of their relationship is not so much material as spiritual, and the  internal skills demanded by it are prodigious.  High romance is not about past or future.  It is not about practicality.  It is not about society or worldly routines.  It is an audacious ride to the center of what IS, at the heart of every person.  It is a bold and masterful inquiry into who two people really are and how we might become, while still on earth, the angels who reside within us."

"Romance is one of the sacred temples that dot the landscape of a human life.  It is transformative and healing when approached with reverence, but always potentially dangerous when approached with anything less."

"Romance is an emotional and sexual shadow dance, performed by our truer selves behind a spiritual veil.  This veil is not illusion but a gossamer reality.  Within that reality we are all afloat in a liquid amniotic spirit, preparing to be born anew. The art of love is an emotional midwifery.  We hold each other as we emerge together into the light of a new life, both exhilarating and terrifying."

"What love does, if it is allowed to, is to combine people's energies in ways that lift their lives to a mode of divine right order, where new ideas, new possibilities, and new opportunities for growth emanate directly from the heart of God. Our job is to not abort the process."

"We were taught to go after things that we could control.  Love, of course, drives you, and not the other way around.  Most of us, both men and women, are terrified of merging our hearts with another.  We say we're not, but we are.  Even when we're in relationships, we avoid their mystical power.  We turn lovers into roommates, butlers, or maids.  We avoid the real light at the center of romantic passion.   We're afraid it would swallow us up.  And thats because it would, and it does!  Overwhelming our sense of separateness is in fact love's spiritual purpose.  The alchemy of love turns the small into the infinite.  Enchanted romance is a fire meant to burn up our sense of otherness, from other people and from God Himself.  So many of us went around saying for years, "I lose myself in other people too much.  I need to stay out of relationships."  And often that was true.  but after a period of time, that thought just became a rationalization for the avoidance of love.  The day came, once we had developed ourselves and knew who we were, when many of us were only too happy to give up the trappings of our separateness.  To resist intimacy, out of fear that if you love you will risk codependency or enmeshment, is like resisting eating food our of fear of obesity.  That, as we know is not wisdom but severe dysfunction.  At a certain point, once you've established your separate identity, its imperative that you let yourself lose it again.  Otherwise, you can never know love.  The reason intimacy is so important is that it does force us to surrender our sense of separateness, not in a neurotic way, but in and enlightened way."

"We are in relationships to experience aspects of ourselves that cannot be experienced when we are alone.  Some of those aspects are facets of our more solitary existence, expanded to include another being."

"And then, he comes.  People had said that you might meet him in this way or that, but when the day arrived, he just appeared.  Funny.  He's not who you would have thought capable of snatching your heart from your chest.  - Love is simpler than it appears, in this complicated world of ours.  The secret of love is to tell the beloved how wonderful he or she is, constantly and sincerely, at least a million times every day.  Give and then give some more and then give a little more than that.  To the extent that love has dried up in my life, it was always because I became miserly with my expression of affection.  To the extent that love has blossomed in my life, it was always because I expanded my willingness to express the love that often cowers like a child in a corner of my heart.  I have learned that everyone has that corner, and the childlike place where we cower within it.  When we honestly speak from that place in ourselves, we encounter that place in someone else, and then two frightened children become two courageous adults, with a very adult capacity to love and to be loved."

Enchanted Love by Marianne Williamson

That was alot, I know.  And there was more I could have shared, but really, its best to get the book!  Much love to all of you on this day!  Muah!

Sunday Scribblings: The books I would write...

    Rose garden at Magee Park, Carlsbad, May 2006

Oooo this is a biggie for me... I could have written about this yesterday, but wanted to let it sink in, wanted to drop deep within and bring up the treasure from far below. 

I am just now reconnecting with my dream to write.  To be a writer.  As in write and express myself as my work in the world.  I learned to write fairly early, and from that first Hello Kitty journal, I have never stopped.  My writing life has very much been this Anais Nin quote.

"We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection."

Poetry and I have played together on and off through out the years, but it is the journal, the confessional, the explorational, the combing over of the internal details that has sustained me all these years.  I have never been a fictional story teller, and for a time in high school I wrote for the school newspaper. 

For a thousand reasons, all of them unknown to me at the time I pursued Social Work in college.  Some part of me forgot the simple vision of sitting at a desk and writing for ever, for life, for sustenance, and picked up the work of people.  But I have never stopped journaling.  Its like breathing.  I don't have to think about it, I don't have to schedule it.  It just happens.  And it has to happen.  It completes my experiences, it settles me down, it drains the storms that stir up and blesses the gifts that come to me each day.

Throughout the years I have compile a list of the books I would write.  A zine, a journey, a visual, a search.  All of them not possible if not for the last 34 years of life and experience.  All of it lead and informed by my call to human relationships, the human soul, the Feminine Divine, and the weaving that occurs when your heart shifts the very ground you walk on. 

I would write about beauty as a practice (wink and smile to Meg), I would write about loves journey, women's rituals, birth, the body's universe, the Ocean, Luna and Her pull on our lives.  I would write our blood, our blood lines, our blood secrets, and our blood truth.  I would write about touch, Yes, and the Inbetween Spaces we travel when uncovering ourselves, and the Mother.  I would write about Sisterhood, revolution, peace and freedom.  And of course, I would write about food.  Who would I be if I didn't write about food?

So much.  I love blogging.  Its my new practice and entry way into the old and safely kept part of myself.  I realize just how formless my writing has become, and how foreign a simple essay is!  I am finding my voice in a new way, as when I write I have you in mind.  I certainly couldn't give you the extremely free form stream of consciousness that occurs in my journals.  Although I do realize that I give you alot of that here as well!

I write.  I love words.  I love books.  I love the expressionings of the the soul.  It is one of the first things I have ever known about mySelf.  That knowing that is rooted in stone.  I don't question it, I don't think about it - it just is.  I am grateful to have this, and grateful to you who stops by for a spell and takes it in.  You bless me and honor my words, and I thank you!

For more Sunday Scribblings go here.

New Moon in Taurus and Confessions of a Money User

Taurus Lunation...

Fixed Earth, Yin, Personal, Stabilizing Material Security.  This sign is about the need to be resourceful, productive and stable.  Other key words:  earthy, practical, productive, conserving, sensual, physical, steadfast, stable, reliable, artistic, aesthetic, stubborn, self-indulgent...

Its so fitting that the New Moon on Wednesday would begin in the sign of Taurus.  After last months work, and all the journaling I did yesterday while the Moon slipped herSelf fully behind the dark veil, I look up from it all and see how synchronious it all is.

I have spent the last two weeks reading Money, A Memoir by Liz Perle.  Its a book that every single woman should read.  I bought it wanting to delve deeper into my story with money and relationships... boy, did this book hit me hard!

Liz Perle shares her own story of money and emotions while siting studies and interviews regarding the vast difference between men and women and their respective relationship with money.  For instance, where men tend to measure their level of success and power therefore their identity as men by the money they have, women tend to measure their level of security, safety, and level of care (love and value) by the money they have.  But there is the catch... its not so much the money that each woman has, as much as the money that is managed by, or brought into the relationship by the man in her life.  (father, spouse etc.)  Before I continue I will note that she doesn't really go into same sex relationships, but rather the fact that girls are brought up with an entirely different picture of money then boys are.

According to her and studies she sites, we lie about how much we have, how much we don't have, how much something did or didn't cost, how much we owe, how much we make and how much we want, to others and to ourselves.  Alot of this is caused by our own internal conflict over being or seeming materialistic, greedy, and superficial.  Add to that the fact that women are making more for themselves now then they did before the feminist revolution began, and you have a set up for huge identity crisis because even though we can provide for ourselves, emotionally we may still want to be taken care of.

I don't want to get into to much detail over the book.  Suffice it to say that it stirred me in a profound way. What I discovered about myself was that although I am a feminist and have worked to provide myself with an income (that I really couldn't even begin to identify as decent, or sufficient, or nice, or even small for that matter), I walk around with massive ambivalence about handling it, investing it, and using it to provide myself with what would feel like a secure home environment.  Which for me personally is a deep longing.  What I realize is that I look to my partner for that feeling.  Somehow his ability to pay for our outings, his ability to make much more then I, our courtship culture of him taking care of the bill, has provided me with a sense that there is someone else there to help create this feeling of stability and caring.  And potentially the reality of what I can only name as an "arrival."  Arrival at what I'm not entirely sure... actually that's a complete lie.

Which leads me to the other awareness I have uncovered.  I have lived in my apartment for almost 6 years now.  I love my home space, and I love my city, and I love that I have provided this space for myself.  But despite my being a Libra to like the nth degree, and loving beautiful surroundings, I have yet to fully decorate it and move past the transitional furniture I gathered when first starting out.  And what I have realized is that I have a ceiling belief that says I am not enough alone, to provide myself with a home.  When I picture my Home... that place of "arrival", where there is room for everyone I love and room for those yet to come,and when I picture that place, that for me is so much more then a material home, but a place of community, love and family, it is always there because I have married someone, and he has been the catalyst in providing these things.

I am mortified still in admitting this to myself and to you.  I have always handled my money in a very haphazard manner.  Never really wanting to be bothered by it, or the need to count it, save it, plan with it... for as long as I can remember I have also felt that to be truly spiritual is to not care about money and not really have any money.  Not sure where I got all of these ideas specifically, but I'm sure the usual answers apply - culture, family... And added to all of this is this constant roller coaster that takes me through periods where I feel anxiety over pending scarcity that I then rebel against by going shopping, and periods of abundance where I tend to not believe that its going to last and can't seem to just relax into these periods.

I suppose that I should also share that I came from a family where I was the only girl among five older very old-school cuban men.  All of them completely emotionally unavailable.  They showed their love by providing.  They paid for everything, and when two or more families would go out to a restaurant, the men would almost create a scene fighting over who would pay the bill for the whole table.... not just pay for their own families, but for everyone elses as well.  It was a very Macho setting, and clearly it influenced my perceptions of men and caring in a specific manner.

So in my dating life, I have always wanted men to pay for everything, but then feel conflicted because I don't want to depend on that and I can pay for my way, but I like the role, but what if he doesn't really like it, and I don't want to build a relationship on assumptions and on and on and on... And heaven forbid talking about it, because how unromantic would that be!!!!!!  Aren't there women out there who have everything taken care of for them and don't have one conflicted thought about it at all?  And wow!!!!! What the hell does this say about me!!!???

(Breathing deeply) This has opened up a path of dialogue between Jon and I.  Which is important.  Its true that we live in a time where our gender roles have so much more room for individual choices.  But who actually sits down and talks about those and specifically maps out and creates their own unique one within a relationship?  I haven't seen a model for this, and we find ourselves in a place where that's necessary.  Communication is key.  What I also found within myself was a fear that discussing our money would cost me a very tangible way of receiving care and love from him.  It was a fear that felt like it came up from my very cells.  I knew it was old, but it felt paralyzing none the less.  And I realized that I would have to find another way to receive this love and care in a more direct way instead of placing it on money.  Whether or not he pays for anything.

This is so charged for me.  And as I continue to do my work I find it a blessing that the Moon is marking a path through Taurus, an earth sign that looks at material security.

As I continue to sit with this... and enter into this new moon phase I have new questions to answer and find clarity with.  New seeds I need to plant,and explore.

How do I separate the need to be cared for and the provision of money?

How can I feel cared for in my romantic relationships while still be an equal and responsible financial partner?

Do I need to give up that wonderful part of dating and courting where a guy pays our ways?

I have always had this criteria for men "Can you take care of us (meaning financially) while I take care of us (meaning emotionally, spiritually, organizationally)?" - Do I need to let that go?

Will my feminist "badge" be yanked away from me?????

What do I need to know, see, feel and do to fly past that self imposed glass ceiling and provide myself with the emotional and physical home I long for?

How do I come to the table of my relationship fully responsible and present without compromising my need for a specific relationship culture?

How do I envision myself being a financial co creator in my committed relationships?

How do I continue to sift out the emotional resistances to taking full responsibility for these things, when my resistance comes from a fear that somehow I am giving up receiving something emotionally vital in my relationships?

This is a hard entry for me.  It has taken me an entire week to come up with and so I am late with the New Moon post.  I admit that there is a level of shame over having this much conflict with money, and putting it out there is incredibly uncomfortable.  People just don't talk about this.  But in service to truth, I am hoping to dispel some of this energy by airing it all out and welcoming feedback from all of you on how you traverse this field of money. 

I will leave you with a quote from the book:

"Put it this way:  If we behaved at work, with our friends, or with our husbands as indirectly, ambivalently, dishonestly, dependently, as we do with money - we would immediately go into psychotherapy."

My intention is to move from a place of clarity and full respons-ibility with money and not place on it the responsibility of my emotional needs.

Yoga and the book I just finished reading

  Blessing stones at Anni and Tim's wedding.  Big Sur, California.  June 2005

I finished reading Eat. Pray. Love. by Elizabeth Gilbert.  I absolutely loved this book and have so much of it underlined, that it would be crazy to try to even share 1/4 of it with you.  But given that I am back in Yoga, I wanted to share some of what really stood out in this book with you.

"The Yogis, however, say that human discontentment is a simple case of mistaken identity.  We're miserable because we think that we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentments and mortality.  We wrongly believe that our limited little egos constitute our whole entire nature.  We have failed to recognize our deeper divine character.  We don't realize that, somewhere within us all, there does exist a supreme Self who is eternally at peace.  That supreme Self is our true identity, universal and divine.  Before you realize this truth, say the Yogis, you will always be in despair, a notion nicely expressed in this exasperated line from the Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus:  "You bear God within you, poor wretch, and know it not."

"Yoga is the effort to experience one's divinity personally and then to hold on to that experience forever.  Yoga is about self-mastery and the dedicated effort to haul your attention away from your endless brooding over the past and your nonstop worrying about the future so that you can seek, instead, a place of eternal presence from which you may regard yourself and your surroundings with poise.  Only from that point of even-mindedness will the true nature of the world (and yourself) be revealed to you.  True Yogis, from their search of equipoise, see all this world as an equal manifestation of God's creative energy - men, women, children, turnips, bedbugs, coral: its all God in disguise.  But the Yogis believe a human life is a very special opportunity, because only in a human form and only with a human mind can God realization ever occur.  The turnips, the bedbugs, the coral - they never get a chance to find out who they really are.  But we do have that chance."

God dwells within you as you. AS you. 

If there is one holy truth of this Yoga, that line encapsulates it.  God dwells within you as you Yourself, exactly the way you are.  God isn't interested in watching you enact some performance of personality in order to comply with some crackpot notion you have about how a spiritual person looks or behaves.  We all seem to get this idea that, in order to be sacred, we have to make some massive, dramatic change of character, that we have to renounce our individuality.  This is a classic example of what they call in the East "wrong - thinking".  Swamiji used to say that every day renunciants find something new to renounce, but it is usually depression, not peace, that they attain.  Constantly he was teaching that austerity and renunciation, - just for their own sake - are not what you need.  To know God, you need only to renounce one thing - your sense of division from God.  Otherwise, just stay as you were made, within your natural character."

"I keep remembering one of my Guru's teachings about happiness.  She says that people universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fine weather if you're fortunate enough.  But that's not how happiness works.  Happiness is the consequence of personal effort.  You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it.  You have to participates relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings.  And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.  If you don't, you will leak away your innate contentment.  It's easy enough to pray when you're in distress but continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to its good attainments.

I loved this book!  The authors journey back to herSelf was so relatable, and juicy to read!  I highly recommend it, and have a link to it on my right side bar.  Happy reading!