Women's
Bodies: Women's Wisdom
Now that we find ourselves at a
crossroads of consciousness, we need to turn to our mother the Earth again to
re-discover her wisdom so we can find the answers to our problems. Women can do this by donning our mantle of
furs and living in our bodies, and by understanding the proper ways to
reverence and live on the Earth. Living
in our body means being mindful about what our bodies are feeling, listening to
its instinctual responses to what we do each day.
As Father’s Daughters, women are cut
off from our instincts because we have been told to restrain our feelings,
intuitions, passions, fantasies, romantic ideals and sexuality for a morality
and logic which overtly discriminates against women’s ways of knowing and
being. How can a woman be happy living
like this? When a woman’s instincts
kick in, if she is a Father’s Daughter, she will go into her head and find all
the reasons she shouldn’t follow her instincts.
The rules and morality of the Father’s House often cause her to turn
away from something that she longs for.
While a good Father’s Daughter will be proud of herself for standing up
for her values, she probably missed an opportunity for growth and relationship
by ignoring those instincts instead of exploring them. If we used our
intelligence to understand which instincts to trust and which ones we need to
ignore, we would be happier and healthier.
So often, we ignore our body until it
gets sick, or we abuse it with food, drink and drugs because we don't know how
to deal with its pain. As we work in our
fur mantle, we learn to listen to and understand what our bodies ask of us and
perhaps we remember that our bodies are the temples of our souls. Working with the imagination can help us
speak with our bodies through images that arise spontaneously from the
unconscious, the interface between body and soul.
Instead
of ignoring or drugging your body, take the time to get to know what your body
is trying to tell you. Meditate on where
the pain is and ask it for an image to work with.
This is the way to begin to reclaim
our feminine standpoint, which is grounded in the body and on the Earth. We each have to balance the four-fold aspects
of consciousness within ourselves: the physical, the psychological, the
imaginal and the spiritual. When all
four layers are open and aware, we become wise in our choices and in our
creativity.
We need to distinguish between instincts,
intelligence and intuition. 4 Instinct goes straight to the heart of life,
through an instantaneous sure feeling.
Intelligence is the faculty that creates ideas, words and theories that
can be used in science, government and culture - the structures we operate
in. When Allerleirauh wears her dress of
the sun, she has learned to balance both instinct and intellect as a first step
in wearing the mantle of furs. A Woman clothed with the Sun understands what
her instincts are telling her to do.
Taking our stand on the moon allows us
to fully experience life because we combine instinct with understanding. When
Allerleirauh wears her dress of moonlight, we find meaning in our experiences
when we act on our instincts and intelligence.
The moonlit dress gives us the capacity to reflect on our experiences
through images, memories, dreams and feelings and connects us to the creative
imagination, which opens us to the magic of the moment.
Then we have our intuition: instinct
which has become objective, self-reflective and transformative through shining
the light of consciousness upon it. When we become conscious of the spiritual
purpose of our experience, we, like Allerleirauh, wear the dress of starlight.
Since a woman’s experience of owning
her body is so important to re-discovering her unique Self, this will be
explored further when we discuss the Sun Dress.
Being a Father’s Daughter has taken us out of our bodies and into our
heads, away from the feelings and intuitions that ground us in Feminine
Wisdom. So when we leave the Father’s
house and find our freedom, we will encounter our Sacred Initiator, Aphrodite,
the goddess of the body, Love, sexuality and wholeness. It is Aphrodite who initiates women and the
soul through the power of Love. But first
we have to find our lost Mother.
Mother
Earth Is Our Home
Whether we acknowledge it or not, we
are held and sustained within the arms of Mother Earth. Just
as surely, the life of planet Earth is now in our hands. Earth is the only home we have. How could we have gotten so separated from
our home that we would come close to destroying it with our poisons and our
waste, our wars and our unsustainable economy and population? We are faced with the stark truth of global
warming, which is disrupting our weather, melting the glaciers at alarming
rates and heating up the gulf stream, which could bring on another Ice
Age. By allowing our governments to
ignore the signs of global warming we are taking away our children’s
future. If women can remember our
relationship with our mother Earth, we can become spokeswomen for her
Sovereignty. We have a choice, and we
are responsible to our children’s children for seven generations. Through each woman, the Woman Clothed with the Sun can become the consciousness and the
conscience of the Earth. When we
incarnate feminine wisdom, we give the Earth back Her essential power and
mystery, which is based in the spirit of life and the testing of death.
Most ancient cultures that lived close
to the Earth - the Celts, the Aborigines, the Native Americans, and Western
culture itself until the sixteenth century - revered Earth as the Mother. They knew they were made from the dust of
this Earth, that they shared this Earth with the other animals, the trees, the
rivers and seas. They knew that they
were part of the Great Round of Nature, one with all the other works of the
Mother. They knew that just as the
animals gave up their lives to feed and nourish human beings, so too, human
beings gave back their lives to the Great Mother when death took us. They understood the wisdom and necessity of
the cyclic processes of Her mysteries, and they lived within that cycle of
gestation, birth, death and regeneration as in the protective circle of a
mother's arms. For them, the Earth was
animate and divine; She set the rhythms of life for all Her children. She was the Divine Nourisher and Sustainer,
giving humans beautiful children and plentiful harvests; She was also the
Divine Destroyer, taking back Her own.
She was, and is, the bedrock and foundation of all that draw their life
from Her. The Greeks saw her this way:
The Mother of us all
the oldest of all
hard,
splendid as rock
Whatever there is that is of
the land
it is she
who nourishes it,
It is the Earth
that I sing.5
We have come a long way from our
origins, and today, our consumer-driven consciousness is such that we have
forgotten this generous and dangerous Mother.
While our Western religions have strengthened our individual sense of
morals and values, for the most part they separated us from a positive
relationship with the Earth.
Christianity saw the ancient Goddess as evil, and later condemned all
things of the Earth as illusionary and sinful.
Since the Industrial Revolution, our scientific rational world view taught
us that Earth was only inanimate matter.
Rejecting her divinity, and even her aliveness, we felt safe defiling,
raping and poisoning the Earth. Leaving
science to investigate the complexities of life, people no longer honored
Earth's mysteries of life, and so we forget that we are also a part of the
Great Round of Life.
As we learned to control and use the
Earth, we found that we could also control our instinctual nature, and the mind
and the ideal of pure spirit became more important than the body and its
experience of soul. We removed ourselves from living contact with our Mother
Earth: by covering the land over with our cities and roads; by explaining Her
mysteries as scientific facts and nothing more; by living in our heads rather
than in our bodies. We substituted a
one-dimensional observing of life for the wisdom of the experience of life.
The Native Americans treasured the
wisdom of the Earth. Luther Standing
Bear, a Lakota (Sioux) medicine man, wrote:
"The
Lakota was a true Naturist - a Lover of Nature.
He loved the earth and all things of the earth, the attachment growing
with age. The old people came literally
to love the soil and they sat or reclined on the ground with a feeling of being
close to a mothering power. It was good
for the skin to touch the earth and the old people liked to remove their
moccasins and walk with bare feet on the sacred earth. Their tipis were built upon the earth and
their altars were made of earth. The
birds that flew in the air came to rest upon the earth and it was the final
abiding place of all things that lived and grew. The soil was soothing, strengthening,
cleansing and healing.
That is why the old Indian still
sits upon the earth instead of propping himself up and away from its
life-giving forces. For him, to sit or
lie upon the ground is to be able to think more deeply and to feel more keenly;
he can see more clearly into the mysteries of life and come closer in kinship
to other lives about him. . . .
Kinship with all creatures of the
earth, sky and water was a real and active principle. For the animal and bird world there existed a
brotherly feeling that kept the Lakota safe among them and so close did some of
the Lakotas come to their feathered and furred friends that in true brotherhood
they spoke a common tongue.
The old Lakota was wise. He knew that man's heart away from nature
becomes hard; he knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led
to lack of respect for humans too. So he
kept his youth close to its softening influence."6
We have indeed become hard-hearted
to each other, to the Earth and to ourselves, and I believe it is because of
this separation from the Earth, from the feminine realms and from our own
souls. This created a split in our
psyches, plaguing us with all the neuroses of modern society. We no longer understand the beauty of the
laws of Nature – or of our nature - and so we live constantly with the fear of
the unknown, just as the early settlers must have feared the vast and wild
lands of the American continent.
When those settlers came to this new
land, they brought with them the memories and shapes of their old land, the
land their ancestors were formed by.
Cultures and personalities are shaped by the land: mountain dwellers are
different from sea peoples. Just look at the United States, with our
hard-driving, intellectual East coast, our salt-of-the-earth plains people and
our laid-back West coasters. We know
about the hardships that accompanied the settlement of America, but it
must have been a great psychological hardship as well, for the land was
re-forming the people who came to settle it.
Perhaps it was that great psychological wrenching which caused the
terror and fear and which contributed to the American determination to dominate
and control the vastness, strangeness and wildness of the 'new' continent. And so the ‘enlightened’ Christian belief
that it is man’s place to dominate nature won out over the Native American
reverence for and care-taking of the land.
And the Native Americans, who were
formed by this land, also became the victims of this fear of the white
peoples. Luther Standing Bear ventured
into the white man's world, and came to understand this about his conquerors.
"The
white man does not understand the Indian for the reason that he does not
understand America. He is too far removed from its formative
processes. The roots of the tree of his
life have not yet grasped the rock and soil.
The white man is still troubled with primitive fears; he still has in
his consciousness the perils of this frontier continent, some of its vastness
not yet having yielded to his questing footsteps and inquiring eyes. He shudders still with the memory of the loss
of his forefathers upon its scorching deserts and forbidding
mountain-tops. The man from Europe is still a foreigner and an alien. And he still hates the man who questioned his
path across the continent. But in the
Indian the spirit of the land is still vested; it will be until other men are
able to divine and meet its rhythm. Men
must be born and reborn to belong. Their
bodies must be formed of the dust of their forefathers' bones."7
Today, many of us feel that
connection to the land and are beginning to understand and meet her
rhythms. We understand the need for
parks in our cities and open spaces saved from developers. The ecology movement and groups fighting to
protect the oceans and waters, the wilderness, animals, ancient forests and
rainforests are signs of this connection.
People working to develop safe and renewable energy and to reduce waste
are another sign of this return. We go
on vacations back to the land for refreshment for we recognize the
irreplaceable importance of this connection to the land for our psychic
well-being. We fight to save our wilderness areas, knowing that if we lose the
last of our wild places, our psychic equilibrium will be destroyed. Our children, through Earth Day activities
and school courses, are learning to honor and respect the Earth as our home.
These are steps away from fear and into integration. We are beginning to listen to Earth's song
once again.
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