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. . .

Invisible Helpers: Empowering the Dreams and Spirit of Women

Lifelong Healing

Many of you read my book GROWING UP WITHOUT THE GODDESS and know that I spent the last thirty years trying to figure out what went wrong in my early childhood. I started out searching because the pain, first emotional and later physical, was too great to ignore.

Whatever happened in my early life had warped me, and as an adult, I fell into a pattern of setting up one life and support system after another, and destroying each one as soon as it was stable.

All through my search to understand why I acted out of such self-hatred, and how to heal my body, mind, emotions, and spirit, I sensed there was help available from what I learned to call the invisible world, the inner world, the Otherworld, and eventually the Sacred Feminine.

This help came to me through dreams, through chance meetings with others who had books to offer, through crossed paths at a daycare center that led to finding just the right therapist and dream analyst, through insights that came when I wrote or drew, and later through visions.

So I sensed that I might be a part of bigger story, but I didn’t always believe it. (And I didn’t have much time for other women’s stories since some early women’s consciousness raising groups, still acting out of degraded male consciousness, had skewered me in the late 60’s.)

Most of the time I felt like I was on a singular, solitary, isolated journey, stripped of human companioning. A modern mariner. Or the albatross itself, dead, but driven to repeat my story, to enact my brokenness again and again. Perhaps I didn’t deserve authentic companionship. I certainly turned it aside whenever it appeared.

Yet there were Voices that would speak from my notebook, my typewriter, and later my computer screen with far more wisdom that I had. I was somehow tapping into wisdom of the collective that I know now many other women were also finding and into which they were creating openings.

From some universal reservoir of wisdom, images of mythological characters, which I had no knowledge of but which I would come to see as archetypal/spirit guides, would arise in my dreams.

Once, Eurydice, the neglected wife of Orpheus, came to me in a dream. I awoke saying her name, a name I had never read nor heard. Because I could sound it out, I found her in the dictionary, and understood that I was like her – lost in the Underworld to find my own way because my “Orpheus” energy, the ego out-in-the-world energy could not keep its promise, do its duty, keep me safe, and bring me up to the surface without looking back, without making me into an object for the eyes to see, rather than allowing me to emerge as a human being ready to participate fully in Earth life.

The dream promised I was not entirely on my own to find my way out of the darkness, though. First of all, the wisdom from the inner world, had given me a picture of what was going on within me. That information showed me where to put my loving attention so I could heal.

Also, that same dream gave me another guide in addition to Eurydice, a guide who had an outer world existence, too – my therapist had visited me in a dream that night, had stood by my bed and told me that I would be okay – that I was strong enough to go within and find the light and bring it back to the surface. What the outer masculine had spoiled, through neglect and abuse, could be healed within.

But in the day-to-day world, in what I call the outer world, I was alone.

Solo. Single mom. Single woman. The one you see eating my herself and reading a book, trying to shrink herself into invisibility. The one who no longer goes to social gatherings because husbands make her feel uncomfortable. Separate, even through many short marriages. Separate, inauthentic, even – especially – in lovemaking.

Consciously, I held myself apart, and often I still do. But I see now that I was being swept along unremittingly by a wave of increasing consciousness about who I was as an individual and how I became that specific Sandra because of the collective cultural unconsciousness that held the hatred of women.

What was activating that ancient collective wisdom? Who was re-discovering the underground pools of divine healing and leading me to them?

Books I read held whispers that others were engaged in similar journeys inward. Whispers of the deeper lives of others reached me through poems and an occasional film. Decades passed.

I resisted.

Unfortunately, it took sickness to bring me understanding of my body as spirit, not just a vehicle for spirit, but divinity itself. That understanding allowed me to get out of the way and allow my body to heal. And as my body healed,* it guided my search and released to my consciousness the knowledge of my original wounding and separation from others.

As I grew to understand that I had been abused in early life, I understood even more why Eurydice came to me. Like her, I was neglected and unprotected and not just during those specific moments that I was physically and sexually abused. My whole being, my light body, my vibrational being, my chakra field – whatever I call my expanded being – held the pattern of abuse and the culture reinforced it daily. As Clarissa Pinkola-Estes says in one of her wonderful healing stories, [my] spirit went a way off and sat.

No wonder I began to participate in my own abuse, as we all do for as long as we must, by enacting the hateful pattern of self abuse and deprivation.

But, as I slowly came to know, there was a bigger story, a wondrous story, in which I was participating. As I allowed healing to flow through me, as I wrote my book to follow my healing guides and integrate their healing energies, there were other women who were also working in their own ways through their specific life problems and blocks and drives and dreams, so they could enter the sacred mystery of consciousness.

And somehow my individual healing was fed by pools of ancient collective healing wisdom and ways. It was from those pools that Eurydice, unknown to me until she appeared in my dream, arose.

Somehow what those other women, separate but contemporaneous with me, and I experienced, created, and unraveled through our individual Selves had fed the Source and helped the ancient wisdom find ways into all our daily lives. We had primed the pump, and now all our stories flowed together, little streams of consciousness seeking their Source while Source was seeking each of us and sending us invisible companions and guides.

Here now in a book I love, Women of Wisdom: Empowering the Dreams and Spirit of Women, are wisdom stories and healing stories of other women. Some of these women fed my healing through other books they have written. Some of them are women whose stories were unknown to my conscious self before I read this book. But all these, and many more, too, companioned me on my journey to healing through the invisible circle of Sacred Consciousness. For that I am deeply grateful.

Women of Wisdom: Empowering the Dreams and Spirit of Women

by Kris Steinnes

is available now through a special promotion.

I invite you to go to this page – www.wisewomanpublishing.com/womenofwisdom.html

to access the order page and then go back to this page and enter your order confirmation code and your email address. That will take you to the sign up page for the Women of Wisdom enewsletter, once you join the WOW book group you will be sent an email with a link to the bonus gifts that are available to people who buy the book today. You can later opt out of being on the Women of Wisdom newsletter list if you choose.

Blessings,

Sandra

Growing Up Without the Goddess

* I continue to engage in daily healing practices (Qigong, meditation, Healing Touch, reflexology, aromatherapy, and prayer with my Magdalene Rosary). Healing is lifelong, and as I engage in healing ways daily, I deepen into the ancient ways and wisdom and add what I have transformed to the Source.