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.

Meditations on Love, Abundance, Metaphors: Embodying the Goddess, Moment to Moment

Love: I am in love with Michelle Obama. Pure love. She is a walking springtime garden of Goddess dresses and rainbow smiles, each one meant especially to lift me up, and you, too, I'd guess. . .

Archetypal, she evokes an inner hidden springtime Goddess of blooming womanhood, and I want to decorate myself, too, until my inner beauty is turned inside out, and I am safely visible -- a burst of color, a brilliant ray of light.

Then, I cry like a school girl, asking "Why is She here?" And weep again to know: She is here because I am here, and though it all feels so personal, because you, too, are here, I'd guess.


Abundance: Images of an Abundant Goddess in Becoming visit me in my dreams. Large and beautiful and loving, she doesn't know how to do all she is drawn to do, but she is learning. I love her, too, like I love Michelle, like I love Mary Magdalene, like I finally love myself.


Metaphors: Those comparisons that say a thing is something else and so expand our knowing -- I have loved them for decades, these powerful figures of speech that can import the beauty and majesty and sacred creative mystery of the stars to my woman's eyes:

Her eyes are stars in the dark night-time sky, lighting the way.

I have hunted them down, these metaphors from Milton to Donne to Shakespeare to Jesus to Mary Magdalene to Dorothy Parker, Sylvia Plath, Maya Angelou, and hundreds in between. For decades they expanded my mind; they pried it open wide and beyond the scope of conditioned response. I constantly sought the sudden surprise of Wordsworth's daffodils on the other side of the hill or violets populating the hillside of a Tennessee pond from childhood, for I have loved the experience of being suddenly seized and lifted to a different way of being.

Now I know.
They are one way, one love,
these metaphors are,
to broaden consciousness.

Their playground is the mind, but their gift, finally, is insight, as they tutor us to find our other mind, our intuition, till a new time of life, of knowing, comes (and it goes, too, to where I do not know, but it also returns), so that:

My ancient mind is unfettering itself, and there are moments now when I no longer need metaphors to prop me up till I reach the sky or deepen me until I feel the Earth inside my flesh.

I used to pray every day into conscious experience -- 365 prayers a year -- and devour each day with my hungry mind as it entered my always greedy-for-beauty eyes. But I am more than observer now, more than speaker now, more than meaning-maker now.

So when I say, if for an instant only sometimes, that my eyes are the stars or that I am the Goddess, or that the days pray me, I don't mean it. I don't believe it. I don't even simply experience it.

Embodied -- I am it!



Sandra

P.S. Readings of GROWING UP WITHOUT THE GODDESS:
Here's my schedule of events, some past, some nearly present:



March 2009

March 19: Read at North Raleigh at Fall River Books Open Mic
7:00 pm 1141 Fall River Ave.

March 29: Private Reading in Magnolia, NC
2:00 pm
and
4:00 pm

April 2009

April 9: Reading and Book Signing at Pomegranate Books, Wilmington, NC
7:00 pm

April 23: Tentative: Faculty Colloquium at UNC-Wilmington (re-scheduled for the Fall of 2009)

April 25: Display book at NC Writers’ Conference in Greensboro, NC


May 2009

May 2: Reading, Dancing Moon Books & Gifts, 12 noon to 3 p.m. Raleigh, NC
12:00 - 1840 Wake Forest Rd. Raleigh, North Carolina 27608 Phone: (919) 833-8081, 3:00 p.m. http://www.dancingmoononline.com/


May 6: Voices of the Sacred Feminine Radio Interview with Karen Tate
9:00 EST http://www.karentate.com/Tate/radio_show.html

May 9: Reading at the HIVE in Greensboro, NC
2:00 – Greensboro Hive www.gsohive.org, 1214 Grove St. Greensboro, NC
4:00 p.m. 27403 (336) 617-5328


May 21 Seminar on Abuse and Vibrational Healing with readings from my book,
6:30 p.m. – Visions & Dreams, 4403 Park Avenue, Wilmington, NC.
8:30 p.m. http://www.visionsanddreamsinc.com/

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

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