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.

Bless this Body as Goddess in Every Cell

HEART CHAKRA

Copyright by Elenaray

Lifelong Healing

When I began promoting GROWING UP WITHOUT THE GODDESS, everyone I asked to help, answered with an embracing and enthusiastic “Yes!” Other writers wrote reviews for me, and independent bookstore owners sponsored readings and signings and stocked my book. The UNC-W women studies program invited me to speak, a friend set up private home readings, and a radio talk show hostess and a newspaper writer interviewed me. Independent reviewers accepted review copies and wrote reviews filled with praise. Women studies programs at the major colleges and universities in NC advertised my readings. The NC Writers area coordinator invited me to open mics, and abuse survivors in Greensboro at the HIVE set up a reading and discussion with me, coincidentally just a block away from the house where I was abused nearly 60 years ago. This was just the beginning.

The events themselves were small, but the women were big-hearted and though almost all were wounded women, too, they embraced my story, my book, and me. Those who were present as I read, and those who read my book in private, talked and wrote about how it held them spellbound and shook them up with its personal and collective truth-telling. They were so grateful that I have been given the courage to tell my story and to help break the silence about how our culture collaborates in sexual abuse.

Months into my book promotion, GROWING UP WITHOUT THE GODDESS still holds the vibration of “yes” when I ask for doors to open for it, and it has begun to open doors for itself. It is a mysterious, sacred journey that has a life of its own.

And that’s a blessing because I need time to re-read my chapter on lifelong daily healing practices and begin to re-balance from the over-doing and over-thinking I engaged in for a few months. If you are a mother or have been around a new mother, you know the physical exhaustion of those first weeks, months, even years. I gave birth to twin daughters 29 years ago, and I was sleep deprived for the first three years of their lives! That’s how I felt after three months of being the “new mom” of my book.

I’m really much more of an introvert than a book like mine (that tells all from A to Z about being physically, mentally, emotionally, and sexually abused) might indicate. I loved the people I met, but every time it was hard for me to find the public persona that could stand up and read. If you heard me read in person or heard me speak on the radio, you just would not know that.

But I am shy, and being in public took its toll. While I was with the book in the world, the Divine Feminine was present in me and through me. I loved the feeling of expansion and my shyness seemed gone forever – until the next event approached.

I’d like to tell you that I heeded the dreams I had along the way that showed I was not protecting my beautiful self and that I needed to consciously return to my inner life after these expansions the way I might after giving a healing session. But I did not pay attention.

I barely took time to write down my dreams even though they have been a source of divine guidance for nearly 30 years now. Only later after I had to stop did I take time to read the few dreams I had recorded. It was so easy then to discern the wisdom that could have guided me to slow down and go inward to allow the Divine Feminine to nurture me and to allow the Divine Masculine to constellate and protect me.

I’d like to tell you also that I was wise enough to stop and re-orient myself without needing my body to nudge me. But that’s not true. I pushed until my body pushed back with migraines and a painful sinus infection, which eventually made me “see” I was too much in my head, too left-brained in my planning self and sick of it and sick from it.

From my Healing Touch work, I know that a migraine happens when the vibrational system shuts down and will not allow life force to travel through it freely. Too much life force tries to enter the body’s bio-field through too small an opening.

Migraines mean, “Stop. Re-balance. Allow the chi, qi, prana, barata, grace or life force to flow freely through.”

I didn’t stop. I hardly slowed down until a shocking blow came to the right side of my car and the right side of my body in an accident. Because I was tired, I had let someone drive with whom I really didn't feel safe. With deep gratitude, I can report that no one was badly injured. I eventually walked out of the emergency room, shoeless, adorned with a neck brace, without a car, and with only “soft tissue” injuries.

I don’t believe that the accident was created by dark forces or vengeful entities, which slapped me around because I failed to take care of myself. I do know that sometimes I want to be perfect at whatever I am doing. I get an idea of what that means, and, loyal to the idea, I try to enact it, no matter how hard it is. I turn off my feeling function. I forget that I am not alone. Then I get unbalanced and keep doing things without stopping to nurture myself.

Now, I am healing from overdoing. Writing is a part of that process for me. And so are dreams. I meditate. I pray with my Magdalene Rosary. I read healing books. I draw and paint. I cry sometimes. I watch the green grass grow while Grandma Rabbit eats the plants. I laugh occasionally. I do Healing Touch, use mudras, and do aromatherapy for myself.

Also, I've found it helpful to look at that shocking accident as though it were an inner world vision or a dream. . .

If the accident had occurred in a dream, I might ask myself why the right side of my body was injured. My answer to the “dream” question would include an understanding that in my daily waking life I was injuring my intuition, my feminine wisdom right brain, by over-ruling it, which is always life-threatening. My accident simply pictured this for me.

If the accident had occurred in a dream, I might also ask what it means that I let someone, with whom I did not feel safe, drive my car. I would remember that my natural self-protective instinct was impaired when I was abused. And when I stop doing the things regularly that rebuild my vibrational body and repair my instincts, I become the careless driver, driving myself too hard and endangering my life. That’s what over-doing and over-thinking do: they endanger and injure and sometimes destroy Life.

If the accident had occurred in a dream, I might ask myself why my car was totaled. I would say that my plan, my way of getting from here to there with what I am called to give the world, was not safe for me and so it could no longer be available. I would say I have to find another way, another container for holding and offering my gifts, that takes care of my whole being.

Oh, and did I say that in waking life, I was going to see a dear friend, who was at a social function at which I did not want to be? Only after I discussed this part with my therapist, did I understand. If this accident had occurred in a dream, I’d see that I needed to find a new way to be with that dear one and stay away from social events that I dreaded – at least, until my feelings healed and my energy returned so I didn’t dread them.

Now, I am at home. I wait and wonder what that very different mode for getting from here to there is and in what new way I will be in the world with my healing gifts and my book about healing, which, like my friend, are dear to me. Perhaps I just need more rest stops along the way.

Lately, I am using Frankincense to help overcome over-thinking and to create an opening for receptivity and to develop the intuition. Frankincense has begun to talk with me, and I have begun to listen. That’s what I thought I was going to write about today, but the inner guides took me elsewhere. I’ll share that really soon.

MEDITATING IN LOTUS POSITION
Copyrighted by Loveliestdreams

Bless my body, Goddess that it is in every cell – in every soft feminine tissue cell – for healing itself, for holding me in this dimension, and for nurturing me always with love.

Use organic, therapeutic grade essential oils. . .

"Empowering the Dreams and Spirit of Women" Guest Blog from Women of Wisdom's Kris Steinnes

LIFELONG HEALING

Here is a beautiful and empowering book for all who are engaged in healing themselves and the Earth by bringing in what author Kris Steinnes calls "the feminine mind." The feminine mind is what I call the Goddess within each of us, the One who holds us and heals us and moves through us -- each of us a part of nature -- to heal the Earth.

Women of Wisdom by Kris Steinnes, is being offered beginning on June 23rd, 2009 at 12:01 am. We invite you to go to this page - www.wisewomanpublishing.com/womenofwisdom.html - to access the order page and then go back to this page to access the bonus page. On the Exclusive Private Invite page, enter your order confirmation code. That will allow you to gain entry to the bonus gifts that are available to people who buy the book on June 23rd.


Here is Kris' description of the wisdom that WOMEN OF WISDOM: Empowering the Dreams and Spirit of Women makes available to all of us. I love this book. It holds the Divine Feminine.

Women of Wisdom is a journey through sixteen years of one of the largest women’s spirituality conferences in the world, a very unique conference that has impacted thousands of women’s lives. Authors Jean Houston and Margot Anand both exclaimed separately to me – “Kris there is nothing like this in the world” – and they have traveled around the world. The book will continue to impact women, as they experience the wisdom and gifts of the sixty contributors in the book.

The Women of Wisdom book gives women access to powerful, inspiring women leaders and their message for women to step into their power, own their feminine gifts, and learn to speak their truths. WOW provides role models who will inspire women to discover their dreams and their purpose.

Additionally the book shares stories from women whose lives have been changed by experiencing these women’s messages. Evocative art, poetry and experiential exercises enhance the book’s message, providing diverse ways to experience the spirit of the feminine.

Included in the book is my own story of how I started Women of Wisdom, which has been an empowering story for women to hear. My story began with reading The Feminine Face of God, by Patricia Hopkins and Sherry Anderson. Shortly afterwards I had a vision of bringing these spiritual women leaders to Seattle. And I immediately set that in motion at Seattle Unity Church, where I was a board member.

I realized this was something more than just a conference when I welcomed people at the first night of the conference, February 11, 1993, and I stated “Welcome to the First Annual Women of Wisdom Conference.” It has become a movement for women to come together in community and explore their potential, and to honor and support one another. This conference has continued to grow and be strong for seventeen years now and that is a testimony to the power of the vision, and the importance of women realizing the value of their unique gifts to share with the world.

In 1998 I realized I had a wealth of material in the tapes of the talks from these nationally known best selling authors and that they would make a great book. I had a dream to share this with other women. I would get phone calls and emails from women asking me if there was an organization like WOW in their city. Not everyone has the luxury to travel to conferences and experience life changing conferences and this book will provide that opportunity to many women.

In addition, the powerful women who participated at the conference in different ways – artists, musicians, writers, local presenters and WOW leaders – would contribute to make this book a holistic experience of exploring the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual aspects of being a woman, giving the reader the full conference experience.

The women’s movement has led women to evolve to such heights as running for the presidency of the United States. However in workshops I have given women have shared how isolated they feel. They don’t feel honored in society for their feminine gifts and how they don’t feel comfortable or safe speaking what they feel, what’s inside their hearts, whether it be in the workplace, home or other. In sharing women’s stories in the book, women will relate to their experiences and gain strength and support through the validation of the feminine that is expressed in the book.

Many of the authors in the book share how there is a lack of balance of the feminine in our world, and how we’re at a critical time where women need to become equal partners towards creating the solutions to the many crisis facing our globe. Jean Houston shares her experience of Women of Wisdom in the foreword of the book:

“Women of Wisdom is in the forefront of the biggest change in human history – the only change that will assure our continuity as a species. Those who organize and participate in the Women of Wisdom experience, know that for a new world to be born we have to bring a new mind to bear. Critical to this is the rich mind style of women that has been gestating in the womb of preparatory time, lo, these many millennia. In their ebullient and evocative conferences WOW demonstrates a tremendous change in who we are and how we do things.”

”Playing their part to usher in feminine mind, WOW emphasizes process rather than just product, and making things cohere, relate, and grow. Cultures in which the feminine archetype is powerful are almost always non-heroic, they tend to make things work together, each piece has its part to play.”

“Men and women will be released from the old polarities of gender that force them into limited and limiting roles, and qualities of intelligence will be added to the human mind-pool that will render most previous problem solving obsolete. Linear, sequential solutions will yield to the knowing that comes from seeing things in whole gestalts, in constellations, rather than in discrete fact…. And it will ring an ecological ethic, along with a new partnership between men and women, in which the human acts in concert and in partnership with Nature to bring about more symbiotic ecological relationships.”


As a bonus, those who buy Kris, book on June 23 from her link (see above) and are in the first ten to select my book as a bonus from her bonus page, will receive a free copy of GROWING UP WITHOUT THE GODDESS: A Journey through Sexual Abuse to the Sacred Embrace of Mary Magdalene. You may request a pdf. file or a signed paperback.

Blessings, Sandra

National Campaign for Health Care Reform

Here I am signing Growing Up Without the Goddess:
A Journey through Sexual Abuse to the Sacred Embrace
of Mary Magdalene at Dancing Moon Books

and Gifts in Raleigh, NC. Photo by Alice Osborn.

While I practice holistic healing for myself and others -- Healing Touch, Reflexology, and Aromatherapy -- I understand that sometimes we all need to go to a doctor to speed healing. Many of us needed a doctor (and someone willing to take us to a doctor) when we were abused. I also know that those of us recovering from abuse need the support of psychotherapists as we continue on our healing path. For these reasons, I support the National Campaign for Health Care. Here's my story, which I submitted to the campaign for posting on their blog, if they choose to do so. You can post your story, too, by going to the site above.

I am fortunate because I am healthy, but if that were to change, I would be among those who are most unfortunate because I have no health care insurance. I worked for 20 years as a high school teacher, but a technicality left me without health insurance when I retired early and received partial retirement pay. I continue to work part-time as a community college instructor, but I receive no benefits from that employment. I can no longer afford catastrophic health care insurance ($250 a month), so I eat right, exercise, meditate and pray and try to stay out of harm's way.

I could pay $125 at most monthly for a health care plan that would do more than pay 80% of hospital charges after a $5,000 deductible. I could afford low co-pays for office visits and routine care. Paying more than $125 a month for health care means that I can't afford to visit a doctor for everyday care and checkups. It means I can't afford to visit a dentist for teeth cleanings and ordinary checkups. So I pay for that preventive care now instead of paying for a catastrophic health care insurance plan.

I'm five years away from being eligible for Medicare, and from what I read, Medicare is underfunded and at its current funding rate, may not be able to continue paying for care within a couple of years.

Fortunately, my husband is a veteran who qualifies for his care through the Veterans Administration. Otherwise, his diabetic care would be far more than we could afford. He is 65, and receives Social Security and Medicare, and he, too, continues to work part-time. Our cars and our house are paid for, and fortunately, we are almost out of debt.

We are able and willing to pay for ordinary medical care, but not at the rates insurance companies charge today. I've worked for 40 years, and only in the last three years have I been without health insurance.

I'm not afraid of death -- of dying maybe -- but not of death. I'm not seeking care that will give me new joints and new body parts or even exceptional intervention if I am faced with injuries or diseases for which the chance of recovery is slim. I believe the body is an amazing healer, and I just want simple interventions to help it on its way. A flu shot, a bone set, a blood panel now and again, and hospitalization to help with minor interventions that will sped recovery.

I watch as people in my community have barbecue dinners to help people younger than me, who have not yet raised their children, pay for necessary life-saving hospital care. I know there are others who need this help far more than I do.

I hear that the medical lobby and the drug lobbies have just about killed the possibility of a "public Medicare" plan. I do hope what is being reported is wrong and that our legislators will have the foresight to make basic health care available to everyone.

Guest Blog: I, too, found the Mother I so badly needed in the Goddess

What follows is a commentary by Merry Stetson Hall about how she entered the story I tell in my spiritual memoir GROWING UP WITHOUT THE GODDESS and discovered that we shared similar hidden abusive experiences growing up in a culture that does not honor the feminine as divine. Her story touched me deeply and affirmed that this is our collective story and that as each one of us heals by finding the Goddess within, that healing spreads out to all others, too. Thank you, Merry!

Dear Sandra,

I commandeered GROWING UP WITHOUT THE GODDESS right out from under Burl's nose for two days! I intended to look at the format and presentation because I'm almost committed to using BookSurge to publish BRINGING FOOD HOME. I found your story too compelling to put down, however, and read every word greedily.

A review follows, but first I wanted to share with you more personally.

You are, indeed, right that your story bespeaks the gender abuse all women suffer in one form or another in our patriarchal culture, whether or not the abuse manifests in sexual rape. It pervades our sexuality, our relationships, our self-esteem, our spirituality, our employment, our status, and every conceivable aspect of our being on earth. It perverts our fathers, brothers, sons, and lovers too in a different way. You are right on target, too, when you suggest that the sexual manifestation of this abuse is inevitably rampant throughout our homes and families, because it is based on misogyny. You offer the painful details of your personal experience with eloquence and courage. Because you also trace your recovery in ongoing detail, your story stands as a guidepost for the acknowledging and healing journey we all must take. Your understanding that we can never be fully healed in a culture that continues its patriarchal abuse and asks us to turn to an all-male Father/Son God for guidance out of sin is invaluable. We heal ourselves by resurrecting the Goddess; we resurrect the Goddess by healing ourselves. This is our ongoing mission.

I, too, found the Mother I so badly needed in the Goddess as she variously manifests within me, within nature, within human history, within the universal energy that flows through us all, within my therapists, and eventually even within the female abusers who became my personal teachers. I am especially gifted to see and hear Her present in my husband Burl's experience, relationship, and voice--a rare blessing.

I cannot yet fathom whether the story I have woven from my own experience with my father is shrouded memory or personal mythology. I have decided that it really doesn't matter, because it requires a story of that scope to account for who I am and how I am wounded. My story goes that he used me and my vagina as a "mule" for black market goods when I was 3-4 years old and we were in Japan right after World War II. He then abandoned me in mind and spirit while still a part of the family in body as he sank into psychosis and frequent sexual liaisons that took him from home.

My mother's coping mechanism of putting a "normal" face on all this, moving the family whenever the truth started to catch up with us, mothering/nursing/forgiving her husband, and encouraging me to love/respect him as a father, only deepened the abuse and delayed my recovery. As a young mother, I ended up stepping into the role of my mother's mother, comforting her and getting her legal representation when my father finally threatened to leave her/us for his newest lover.

I did not have a brother (unless the half-Japanese half-brother I fantasize we left in Japan is real and not imaginary), but I have a now-deceased, abusive older sister, more deeply wounded than I, who spent her time on earth hating herself, life, our father, and most especially me for stealing from her the scant amount of love, attention, and affirmation my mother had left after mothering our father and nursing the wounds he inflicted on her. By the time mother had coped with my father, my sister, and her own pain, there was little energy left to mother me though she meant well. To gain at least her approval I identified with her and took on the role of "the healthy one who would succeed and uphold the family honor."

Only through my willingness to fail, to hurt, to do the incredibly painful work of acknowledging and healing have I grown now as a 65-year-old into a true though shaky manifestation of that role. Like the velveteen rabbit, I have become real. Only Sophia could have placed and nurtured the wisdom, willingness, courage, patience, and forgiveness in me that this transformation required.

Here's my book review. I hope you find it helpful.

GROWING UP WITHOUT THE GODDESS gives story and form to the abuse all women suffer in one form or another in our patriarchal culture. Sandra Pope offers the painful details of her personal experience with eloquence and courage. She shows how the denial of the Goddess has blighted both men and women from generation to generation in her family and the human family. She reveals how rape and incest team up with denial, neglect, and the perversion of victims to maim us. She shows how both the egregious and the subtle forms of sexual abuse pervade our families, our sexuality, our relationships, our self-esteem, our spirituality, our status, and every conceivable aspect of our being on earth. Her message that we heal ourselves by resurrecting the Goddess and resurrect the Goddess by healing ourselves is much needed in today's world.

Merry Stetson Hall
Author of BRINGING FOOD HOME: The Maine Example. Her book profiles local farmers, gardeners, homesteaders, processors, distributors, merchants, restauranteurs, consumers, and advocates. Through these profiles, it explores how a healthier community, economy, ecology, and ethic are growing up around local food in Maine.

Why Don't You Just Get Over It?

Chapter 69

Why Don’t You Just Get Over It?

Often I am asked, even by close friends or family members why I don't just get over having been sexually abused. To them I say: I do. I have. I will. I may. Every single day.

For mine is a story about sexual abuse that is so ordinary that one in four young women will be abused before they are eighteen years old. Mine is a story about an ordinary wounding so profound that the fourth one who is abused, who is me, who is my sister, who is my mother, will feel the repercussions all her life. And for some of us, who were abused before consciousness had dawned fully enough to allow memory to record the act, the consequences will exist without a known cause and without proof, like the world demands, that the abuse ever occurred.

The repercussions of abuse vary from one woman to another in their particulars, but a destructive pattern emerges and ensnares and drives each abused one as it did me. For decades, I let the following pattern govern me:

• I fell into my wounded consciousness.

• Though I thought myself a feminist, I acted as though I were fit only for service to a man.

• I projected all of my goodness onto another.

• I fell in love with the other.

• I mistook him for the god/goddess energies.

• Sex bound me to him for a season.

• I did not recognize the abusing or using energies of the other.

• I blamed myself for the problems I encountered in the relationship.

• To compensate and because I felt the pain so deeply, I went into a helping profession, thinking it was the pain of others I felt.

• The projection of my goodness onto the other started to slip.

• He was certainly no god.

• I began to feel his abuse or misuse of me – sometimes it was physical abuse, sometimes sexual, sometimes intellectual or emotional.

• I felt my own wound again, but I mistook its source.

• I always thought it was the particular partner I had chosen who had caused me the pain.

• I left. Him. Home. Jobs. Friends. Family.

• I repeated the cycle, leaving this man for that man and that one for still another. And none of them was the Goddess I was looking for, and surely, that is what I was doing even when I didn’t know it. This was an imprint I picked up from my father’s search for Her that ended in his abuse of me, and that caused me to seek Her in relationships, which abused me as he had.

• I would start a new life. I would discover it was the old life, maybe a little better in some ways, maybe a little worse. But it was the same pattern, and I would have to make life work all over again. New home. Sometimes an apartment. Sometimes a house. Sometimes a pauper. Sometimes a millionaire.

After many repetitions of this pattern, finally, I brought it into the light. Then I let the wound itself preoccupy me, and I sought to find out and prove that I had been wounded. Those were stages I could not by-pass. I wonder if anyone can.

Still, the woman that I have become turns away from being consumed and goes inward, goes inward daily, because she knows that is where the Source is, where growth and safety lie, and where all that has been lost will be regained.

My healing has been life-long and my pattern of my healing is this:

Through dream guidance and psychotherapy, through visions, meditation, prayer, reflective reading, channeled guidance from Tamara and Mary Magdalene, Chi Gong, and through healing others, I attend to my holiness and remake my wholeness each day. When I abandon my daily rituals of healing, I become sick. I become ensnared in the dis-eased pattern again, and even my old second chakra bladder pain returns.

Though I long for it and may yet create it through my longing, so far for me, there has been no one moment of complete healing. Perhaps while I remain in the outer world that created my woundedness and more importantly, continues to wound me energetically through thought and deed with it patriarchal men’s-locker-room consciousness, my healing must remain a continuous process, a continual “getting over it,” full of falls and full of recoveries and full of openings to the Goddess within me, who it turns out, has traveled through the goddess-less years with me and endured the accumulated misogyny of the last four thousand years because I have, and you have, held her in our collective memories.

Now as she rises in me, as she comes because I call her name, and as she rises in others, she will come back to the world and heal it the way she heals me daily. Eventually, the pattern of energy, the matrix, will shift so that the wounding of the Goddess within each of us is no longer possible. And each day I “get over it,” without denying or repressing the original wound, I am helping to call her healing forth.

-Excerpted from Growing Up Without the Goddess: A Journey through Sexual Abuse to the Sacred Embrace of Mary Magdalene by Sandra Pope

Buy GROWING UP WITHOUT THE GODDESS.

Hear an excerpt from GROWING UP WITHOUT THE GODDESS.

Read excerpts from GROWING UP WITHOUT THE GODDESS.