Spirituality is commonly presented in opposition (and superior to) the mundane world. That is, spirituality is viewed as something intangible, transcendent and perhaps only accessible through an approved recipe of invocation, a legitimized authority via church or temple, achieved through undergoing deprivation of the sensual world, or perhaps as the result of a tyranny of self-improvements. Above all, you are meant to develop faith in its existence when no tangible proof is easily accessible, and no experiments can be replicated successfully.
This is what we have inherited from thousands of years of culture that has negated and lost touch with the feminine aspects of the divine. This approach can feel unbearably remote, and the distance between “me” and “the divine” appears vast, cold and impersonal. What really is the point of engaging in spiritual life? To appease a judgmental creator? To insure our seat in heaven? To help others and sacrifice self? To pay our karmic debts? To be able to stop our own suffering? To awaken? The answer depends, of course, on what you have been taught, what you have practiced, and what you have experienced. These things probably don’t align as well as they could, and the discord may be quite pronounced. If you have been taught that spirituality is a rarified, special state that only includes positivity and light, then its likely your experience has been skewed toward seeing the divine as mostly transcendent, and have disregarded (or never heard of?) the divine in its immanent expression. Transcendence and Immanence are equal expressions and I would argue that immanence, the divine as manifested in the material world, is actually easier to connect with, since our own bodies are naturally included. But if you are using mostly your mind to try and create a connection – either through meditation, prayer, or intellectual information, you might completely overlook your own body as the most obvious place to connect and experience the divine - not unlike trying to eat the menu, and not the meal. Speaking of bodies, if you have grown up female, you likely experience some form of the collective trauma women carry because the velocity of misogyny has not ceased in spite of a handful of “rights” allowed for some on the planet at this time. But lets be clear: these are rights that allow women to enter into areas previously restricted to males – this has absolutely nothing to do with recognizing and respecting the feminine dimension of life, and that all of us – men, women, and every liminality that is claimed –need this in order to heal. This is not a call to return to some Patriarchal formula that encourages “separate spheres” of behavior. It is not a call to return to a pre-historical Matriarchy, where women are in charge and sacrifice men to do their bidding (or, modern twist: simply “elect more women”). It is a call to elevate the feminine as a true and equal expression in all aspects of culture, but primarily, to recognize and restore the value of the divine feminine so that we can stop the poisoning and plundering of the natural world, preserve and protect the minds and bodies of girls (especially during puberty) and start to recognize and correct the myriad other ways we dismiss, ignore, deride and destroy our own emotional lives because we keep pretending that logic is superior and that an intellectual understanding is all we need in order to “change our thinking/reality.” This is a call to step away from the theoretical and plunge into real life. Because there is such an extreme imbalance, it is a call to restore what has been lost – because this is our chance to bring balance and healing to the world. The manifested world is the literal soul of the divine feminine. How many girls and women actually feel this in their body as a living truth? Of course it isn’t only the bodies of females that are connected to the divine feminine, but all bodies - any body of any label – including animals, plants, minerals, and of course, the earth itself. Count me in as one who left behind her bodily sovereignty at puberty! Its been a strange journey ever since, with one very marked experience of spiritual emergence and direct, embodied transmission of the divine feminine in my mid-twenties. That process restored so much of what I had been cut off from while also deepening contact with the subtle energy field that is the blueprint of the physical. This took about a month before it “peaked” and during that time put me through a lot of strange physical sensations as the years of built up conceptualization and energetic armoring unraveled. However, like many who go through extreme spiritual emergence experiences I was not able to maintain this (the reason is a story in itself!) Instead, I dropped into the underworld. By underworld, I don’t mean the kind of depression that I had managed to live with for years, but a collapse of identity and an astonishing new level of terror that I tried my best to hide because at the time, I thought I had done something really wrong to lose this connection. I thought I had made a terrible mistake and the more I practiced this self-recrimination, the harder things were to manage. I lived like that for a long time – lost in the parallel mythic woods where grief and fear close in and the only fire you can make has neither warmth or light – the strange flames just eat and eat. My body/mind had just been through a fairy-tale transformation of dirty rags to a sparkling starlit blue gown, but was now boggy sediment slowly turning into coal. Ever feel like an unlit lump of coal? Bloated with black, I roamed my life just like a new ghost – confused, ineffective, lonely. I lived secretly in this this inner landscape for years. While “everyone else” (so it seems when you are plunged into darkness ) was busy building up wholesome strategies for living, I was only able to manage daily survival. Hoping “someday” I would emerge again, contained, and whole, feeling my soul looking through my own eyes, - not scattered and hidden in what felt like a body where the electricity was knocked out and there was no one coming to fix it. What I am intending to share going forward is some of what I have learned about how spirituality and physicality are not “opposites” – the time for either/or is no longer sustainable. It is both/and more. The “more” is what happens when these seeming opposites are united – exponential growth - not of a virus, but of peace and healing for ourselves and for the Earth.