Sacred Union and Necessary Falls

I practice mercy toward my former selves,
and so see my life – not fractured –
though full of starts and finishes.
Reincarnations then these starts –
leaps of Sandra-faith into the new.
Those finishes – necessary falls, times
out of daily world and rhythms when
emotion and intellect collide, constructs collapse.

Yet this body has not died and
spirit, though clothed in foreign garments,
remains wedded to this earth.

I spiral up and then I spiral down.
Sometimes I spiral in.
Sometimes out.

But there is a center.
And it does hold. And some revelation
Always is at hand.*



*William Yeats begins the second stanza of "The Second Coming" with these lines:
" Surely some revelation is at hand;/ Surely the Second Coming is at hand."  As I wrote this reflection, felt the energy of the "gyre" of which he writes, but I felt the vibrations as Sacred Union and living reincarnations.



Note:  Yeats’ Vision speaks of two conical helixes that are joined so that the widest part of one helix meets in the same plane of the point or smallest part of the other helix.  Certainly, this the hexagram formed by the chalice and the blade is a cross-section of this union.  And two helixes joined this way from the side would also form this pattern of the Sacred Union.

How the Loss of the Sacred Union Leads to Abuse

The urge of the masculine for union with the Sacred Feminine is a powerful, universal drive, and when no Sacred Feminine is acknowledged by the culture, the angry part of the masculine energies cannot be cooled down.

This anger and hatred is visited upon the "merely human woman" through whom the Sacred Feminine archetype cannot be seen by the masculine separated from its own sacredness.

All women experience the energetic pattern of this hatred in their lives. Abused women experience it in its most awful form.

Even the popular culture, acknowledges this pattern. For example, in THE COLOR PURPLE, when Shug Avery asks Celie why her husband beats her, Celie answers: He beats me because I am not you.

In my own journey toward recovering the Sacred Feminine in myself, I was guided to understand this ugly truth: The divine will seek out the divine and when the human culture or personality does not acknowledge that divine spark in another, when the cultural blinders do their job, the desire for union is degraded and becomes simply the desire "to have."

Then in a frenzy for the Sacred Union which has been denied them, men beat and rape women because "they are not" Her.

Surely, if they could see the Sacred Feminine archetype shining through every female, then they would be unable to reach out in hate and harm.

And, no, I am not saying that it is the role of women to save men. I am saying that our only protection comes through re-connecting with the goddess energies within ourselves.

And that is what may allow the energies of resurrection to constellate and bring forth the Sacred Masculine.

Isn’t this the pattern the Bible teaches us when Jesus came late to the bedside of Lazarus?

Jesus did not resurrect Lazarus alone.

Mary Magdalene re-ignited the Sacred Masculine in Jesus when she allowed herself to feel with her human heart the loss of one she and Jesus loved, and only then did Jesus weep.

The resurrection energy, the Christos energy, that raised Lazarus resulted from the Sacred Union between Mary Magdalene and Jesus when he allowed himself to feel her loss and reconnect to his own wholeness through her. Her Sacred presence allowed the Sacred Masculine to constellate.

New life is always the outcome of the Sacred Union, and Lazarus embodies this new life. This new life is the reward for us when we acknowledge and hold our own Divine Feminine energies – whether we are female or male.

http://bit.ly/bfm6mn

Meditating on Images of the Divine Feminine and Sacred Union Is Healing

Revision

copyrighted by RUTH THOMPSON

Lifelong Healing

In my healing room, I surround myself with beautiful images of the Divine Feminine. These images shift my consciousness and remind me that I, too, am divine. And when that shift occurs I feel whole and my body does what it knows how to do and heals me.

I have a dove and a chalice; paintings and statuettes of Mary Magdalene, Kuan Yin, Mary Magdalene's daughter Sarah (who comes to me as Tamara), the Virgin of Guadalupe and Mother Mary; Mother Earth paintings of deserts and rivers and rainbows and flowers -- and now this one called Revision by Ruth Thompson.

At first, I began to bring home images of Kuan Qin because I loved to look at her. As I read Joan Norton's and Margaret Starbird's books about The Mary Magdalene, and later as Joan added such beautiful pictures of Her to her blog, I consciously began to find pictures of Her to add to my walls and altars because I felt an inner peace and sweetness when I looked at Her.

After surrounding myself daily for years with beautiful images of the Divine Feminine just because I loved them, I saw Ruth Thompson's Revision a year ago. I felt like the inside of the top of my head was the Sistene Chapel ceiling, that it had suddenly been blown away, and that I had been given a new crown chakra!

It was a culminating moment of healing in which I felt completely new and changed forever into who I already really was.

As I reflect on it now, this culminating moment was the result of a simple, almost unconscious process that is both miraculous and obvious: My consciousness had been re-patterned by introducing images of the Divine Feminine and meditating on them. It's a process that I now consciously engage in.

Recently I learned from neuroscientists Andrew Newberg, M.D., and Mark Robert Waldman in HOW GOD CHANGES YOUR BRAIN that meditating for as little as 12 minutes daily permanently changes the structure of our brains by activating the "God spot" and feminine traits like compassion and acceptance.

I had been activating the Divine Feminine permanently by meditating upon her images. How powerful is that! And simple. Easy. Available. The way Divine Love should be.

In their research, Newberg and Waldman also trace how the God concept progresses in human consciousness. They report that young children in all cultures draw anthropomorphic pictures of God -- for them God is a person.

In our culture that person is male. In my Southern sub-culture, it was God-the-angry-father. The wrong image for me, making God unreachable because my other father, my personal father, was my abuser.

Consequently, until two weeks ago I only had one image of the Sacred Masculine in my healing room. It is of the son, of Christ as envisioned by Alex Grey. A dear friend, David Ray, who worked with me doing Healing Touch in the chapel at Hollywood United Methodist Church years ago, had given it to me. I love Alex Grey's work, and I think this image is gorgeous, but because of my wounding, I could not have put it in my healing room, if it had not reminded me more of my friend David than Jesus. Though I admit that over the years, as I meditated on Mary Magdalene, framed and on a separate wall from Christ, I felt her love and longing for him flow through me.

Now I have placed an image of the Sacred Union of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, called Kundalini Christ by Sofia Christine on one of my altars, the one I see across the room when I sit in my chair and meditate. I had the reproduction for over a year before I framed it and placed it there.

Copper Icon of Kundalini Christ

copyrighted by Sofia Christine

I feel like a spiritual version of Barbara Kingsolver's POISONWOOD BIBLE character Adah, the victim of hemiplegia at birth, who limped along and kept her silence until she was an adult and away from her family. Then by learning to crawl again, she taught herself to walk normally and to speak brilliantly.

Like her, I have abandoned my larger family -- my Southern religious subculture -- and crawled back to the foundation of the Divine in myself and rearranged it. I began as an adult, as all children intuitively begin – with anthropomorphic images of the divine – this time the Divine Feminine as a real woman, a really beautiful woman who loved.

Newberg and Waldman also report that the natural progress of the concept of the divine is to move from the anthropomorphic to the abstract. By age 16, 80% of religious children draw abstract images of the divine.

For now, I am consciously going in the opposite direction.

A sacred geometry image of the yoni

I had meditated on the abstract image of the yoni or vesica piscis () since I dreamed someone drew one on my palm about ten years ago. I had thought of the yoni as the image of the Divine Feminine, and it is that, but it is also the image of the sacred union. It is formed by the intersection of two circles, representative of two complete beings.

Now at 60, instead of abstract images of the sacred union, I am meditating on Sofia Christine's gorgeous human image of a loving Mary Magdalene with a loving Christ, so I can experience the traits of both the Divine Feminine and the Sacred Masculine and a balance of the two, as represented in the Divine Union, at the core of my being.

I want to start over, to grow up again with these two beautiful people-gods locked in their lover’s embrace at the foundation of my consciousness, so when I can walk upright without limping, I can continue to explore, experience, and refine my relationship to the divine within and bring this balance, this divinity, from inside myself each day into the world.