The Divine Feminine

I didn't go to Yemaya Festival this weekend to reconnect with my feminine side, I went to a bush doof, as usual, to dance. But the universe had other plans for me.

Adorned with feminine colours, designs, shapes and symbols, Yemaya was representative of the mother goddess of the ocean, the divine feminine. I like to look at the divine feminine at its core aspect - Yin.

Yin is feminine, water, earth, soft, night, dark, shadow, passive, receiving, yielding, gentle, slow, consuming, cold.

In contrast, I am a rather yang person. I am very upbeat, extroverted, bright, bubbly and energetic. I like to control, and I am stubborn and unmoving, unlike the soft, accepting and allowing qualities of the feminine.

But this weekend at Yemaya has changed how I use feminine energy in my life, and it all happened in an extraordinary didgeridoo healing session.

At 7pm on the Saturday night, our group was pretty high and we were in the process of figuring out what we all wanted to do (A mighty task while on LSD). I tried to dance at my usual favourite place at a bush doof, the main stage, with high energy psychedelic trance booming from the speakers. But after a few minutes by myself, I wanted to go back to my friends. 

My best friend declared that she would be attending a didge healing session at 8pm. I'd never participated in the healing spaces at a bush doof before, and was keen to try it out.

We entered the space a bit early to settle in before the healing. It was a large dome-like space, with pink silk sheets drooped from the middle of a ceiling, where a crystal chandelier hung like the crown jewel. I had seen a vagina sculpture in crystal healing space a bit earlier, and noted again the vagina-reminiscent decor.

To tell you the truth, this vagina stuff was quite confronting for me, even as a female (I wonder how my male friends took all of this in). It wasn't until later that I realized that our culture shames female genitalia, and this is why it was so confronting to see a vagina sculpture blatantly staring me in the face.

Despite this, the warm pink sheets and the mood-lit space were highly inviting. There were people snuggled amongst blankets and pillow, with my friend smack bang in the middle. Feeling like a deer caught in headlights, thanks to the overemphasizing effects of lysergic acid, I went straight over and sat with her.

There was a kind of open-mic thing going on, and a young dreadlocked woman named Megan came to sit up at the mic to share her poetry. I immediately thought that this was an amazingly brave thing to do, to open yourself up to a bunch of strangers and trust they would pay you respect. (And that they did, which is a wonderful thing about bush doofs.) Megan, with a strong spoken word and conviction, proceeded to read us multiple poems that are all beautifully blended in my memory, exposing her life with themes of womanhood, children, love, heartbreak, and the body. One that touched me in particular was about fat on the body. I have always hated my stomach fat, wishing it wasn't there, and at the end of the poem she encouraged us, with her soft, kind voice, to touch that problem part of our bodies, and tell it we love it. Light giggles echoed as the room filled with love for our bodies. And when I gently held my stomach and told it I loved it, unlike the other times I have tried, this time I actually meant it.

Megan had set the scene for the healing with her poetry, uniting the room with laughter and love. There was a sense of solidarity within the space as the didgeridoo healing man began to set up. We lay down with our heads on pillows, and a beautiful stranger covered my friend and I with a blanket. The healing ceremony started with a light drumming beat to ground the energies. And as I closed my eyes, the the man said "Let yourself fall into the earth"...

My breath flowing out let me fall deeper and deeper. I was restless at first, trying to relax to the abrasive sounds of the healing didge, which were unlike the more melodic sounds we usually hear from Aboriginal educators who come to schools and cultural centres. I kept opening my eyes to make sure I was still in the room, and my friends were still there. My closed eye visuals were confusing and full of colour. But after a while, I was deep within myself. Deeper than I had ever been before. My breathing was so slow, and with every breath, I felt my body let go of tension. And after the bodily tension was gone, my breathing was penetrating my very inner layer. My whole being was opened by my breath, my inner self expanding and expanding. I was seeing and feeling places so deep within my self that I was sure would take YEARS to access without the help of the LSD (which I like to think of as a spiritual lubricant). My breath finally reached a tiny red tent like structure right at the middle of my being. I was sure this was me, hiding away in there. By now, I had forgotten I was even on LSD, or that I was at yemaya festival, or that there was time. I was now in the deepest meditative state I had ever experienced.

It was about now that the didgeridoo sounds "clicked" into my body. I had started letting go of control and trusting, and my deep breathing had allowed the sound to enter my being and start healing me. But to heal, you first need to get the dirt out. I started seeing all this dark stuff being scraped out of the particles that I consisted of. I was far more than a 3-dimensional matrix, a vast rainbow pixellated like structure that was woven into the space around me and beyond. The didge sounds were like rakes on my being. It kept raking and raking the soul crap into a pile, until a climax was reached and the sounds gently brought us back down, releasing it all, and bringing us back for another round. I surrendered to the sounds which were now making my body arch and twitch, and my breathing got faster as the energy rushed through me and whirlpooled out, taking all the stagnant stuff with it. My gut even churned as if the didge was cleaning out my physical body! I had never experienced healing like this before. When doing more gentle, subtle healing in my old psychic development class, we were told that stuff would come up for us as it was released, but this was like everything was released through me at once. It was super intensive, and there was no denying that it was real.

All of this was uncomfortable at first, I had never experienced anything like this before, nor trusted anything to come so far into my being. I hadn't even seen this much of me before! My body is so much more than anything I could have ever dreamed of. On the very inside, it is as big as the sky, and all of this is contained deep deep deep inside the very center of me. But I never looked! We're always too scared to look, afraid of who we are and afraid of what we might discover. But by letting go and relaxing everything, I was able to peek in, and eventually, let the healing right into me at a deep soul level. I could feel the transformation happening. The didgeridoo reached right into my soul and pulled out chunks of darkness like they were thorns embedded deep into the skin. Now that I had gotten used to it, and I could literally see how beneficial this was for me, I could have stayed there for hours. But eventually I had to get up.

I got up way too fast, like when your alarm wrenches you out of a super deep sleep. I pulled myself out of the deepest parts of me, stood up, literally stumbled out of the healing space, disoriented, and was gasping from the intensity of the healing. It took me a while to be able to think clearly again but the most amazing thing I was feeling that I was VERY grounded. I was right into my body, I could feel every part of it and could feel my feet on the ground. This is a huge deal for me, as a double Aquarius who spends most of her time in her head and the sky. I was stomping my feet on the ground like it was the best feeling ever! And it was - I have NEVER felt to connected to my body, and the earth beneath it. Just, wow.

I was pretty spent and we all wanted to chill away from the intense energies of the party, so we all went back to our campsite. To my surprise, it was only 10pm. My estimate at this point was 3am or 4am. Long story short, I stayed up all night chatting with my dearest friends. I had a sleep, and in the morning, as I walked into the bush, the sun greeted me. I felt it all over my skin, bathing me in warmth. I walked, feeling all the movement in my legs and feeling the solid earth beneath my boots. I took my sweet time, gently stretching in the morning sunlight. So much peace filled me in all the places I had discovered the night before, in all the places that darkness had been removed from. I felt bigger, expansive, and deeply relaxed.

Later that day, I tried to sleep again. It didn't work, so I spent a good couple of hours just lying on my back in my tent, breathing deeply and stretching. I took my time that I never had before, and I stretched my body like I never had before, feeling every stretch as deep as it went, and observing how my body thanked me for it, for taking my time.

That's what I learnt at Yemaya. To take my time, like Yin, like the feminine, which is slow, and gentle, and soft. I learnt how to fully embrace myself, like a loving mother; embracing my body, my whole being, and embracing the chance to heal.
I learnt to yield, to be vulnerable, to let go, accept and receive. Like the vagina yields to the male, yield to the present moment; accept it, embrace it. Let yourself breathe, let yourself relax, and slow down.
Breathing IS acceptance! The deeper the breath, the deeper the acceptance. Slow down, breathe, and accept every part of yourself. Accepting is connecting... Slow down, breathe, and connect to your body and to the Earth. Allow yourself to feel, and be vulnerable, even though it is scary... Allow yourself to receive love and healing with grace, even though it is scary... Allow yourself to let go of control, even though it is scary!

When you let go, when you become soft, when you embrace all that is Yin, the feminine, you literally open yourself up to possibilities, knowledge, love and peace.

You open yourself up to YOU.

Word vomit of illusion and love

I have been doing some thinking over the past week, after a bit of a stint in struggle street, and today the spark has come back in a big way.

Something terrible and unexpected happened to someone close to me, and it snapped me straight out of the illusion I'd gotten stuck in. That illusion is the material world. Yes it's here, and we have to live in it and survive in it, but its not the very essence of our being.

The fact that we are in this amazing universe for a fleeting amount of time makes us insignificant in the scheme of things, and that insignificance brings with it great freedom. We all live in a world where no one can tell us what to do or give us instructions on how to live life. We just somehow evolved here and no one can ever tell us why. So why do we let anyone else on earth control what we do? They don't know any better than we do how life should be. When eventually our whole earth ceases to exist no one is going to remember us. So why do we strive to make such an impression? Who do we do it for? Ourselves? Why do we feel we need to impress ourselves? Is it because we are our own inner judge? The only judge, the only 'god', that rules your life is you. Your intuition is that god part of you speaking to you in a language which isn't tangible and therefore not valued or not deemed 'real' by a materialist culture. In this culture (Alan Watts describes culture as an operating system- a great analogy), we use the 5 senses, mostly the eyes, to determine what is real. A physical, tangible reality. How do you define feeling in those terms? We can describe what feeling is like but there's no way to show another person exactly what you're feeling because it comes from within, not from an external source. So Materialist cultures value those external, easy to see and easy to believe things over internal things. They base our reality on the material realm, thinking that because its real, it must be the source of happiness. And of course god must be some tangible entity external and separate to your own self.

We have so many problems trusting that god self within because our cultures have us so focused on the external that we don't even think that inner self is real, in a sense. I know if I had a physical entity in front of me telling me 'yeah you can do it!' I would be way more inclined to believe it than the invisible inner self that I sometimes forget is even there because I can't see it, I can only feel it in a way that I can't be taught about. You're sposed to get to know it and trust it from the beginning but culture distracts us and we begin to distrust it because it has become unknown, a stranger. A lonely wail at the bottom of your being crying out for you to listen and be friends with it.

Your inner self, is kind to you. Be kind to your self and it can blossom like a friendship. It will be the kindest and most honest friend you can get, and you will find that you will never be alone. You will learn to love your self.

So right now I am hearing loud and clear instructions to go out and make a difference in the world. To unplug myself from this material world and open up to the reality that we are free and nothing lasts forever. There's no need to feel so attached to the physical world, because the end of you is the end of the illusion. There is no need to fear. We are all scared and that is more reason for us to connect with each other. We are so scared of people, but taking chances and risks with people can lead to some beautiful and magical life moments which would never be possible if we didn't trust that foreign stranger who offered to fix our bag at the airport, if we didn't take a chance to do something nice for someone that you don't even know, or if we didn't talk to each other about our feelings. But that part of us is ignored, and we are too scared to connect with others, we were never taught how. Its because no one knows!! Except for ourselves...we already know how to connect. Trust that inner want, the want that seems to terrifying to do but the most rewarding! And helps other people access that deep forgotten part of themselves too. Two awoken souls recognise each other immediately, its that feeling described as 'connection', which is really a re-connection. True reality is that we are all one and even though we are physically separated by our bodies, our soul connection is stitched together like a patchwork blanket in an invisible realm layered right over our environment. Don't ignore that fundamental part of reality. You can't ignore the physical part too, but don't take it so seriously, because it will not be the thing that brings you true happiness.

That's it for Stoned Saturdays.
I'm the rainbow lady, signing out for a good nights sleep.

Peace and love
<3

Faith

Had a great chat at uni the other day with a vibrant girl from the Christian Union who approached me to talk about faith. After viewing a short cartoon, she asked me how it related to my own faith. The whole conversation that stemmed from there was surprisingly awesome, and I found that I connected well with this Christian girl, that in fact we shared very similar ideas about the world and the same values. It reminded me that we see the world from all different perspectives but what really unites us is love and understanding! 

I want to share with you a few things that I shared with her, as through this conversation I realized how very little I get to talk about something that I am so deeply passionate about. I also never thought of myself as a person with a faith, maybe because I don't name it. I just think of it as my set of beliefs.

God, or the Source, is for me, like in other religions, where we all came from. I like to think of the God concept as the Big Bang. At the moment, the widely accepted theory is that the Big Bang originated from a singularity- a single point of mass in a void where space and time did not exist. Considering that everything in our universe supposedly came from this singularity, it's rational to say that, since we were all 'one' when this happened, that we are still 'one' with everything around us. Everything we are made, the stars are made of, even what space is made of, originated from this point. This is why I love to say that we are all pieces of the puzzle; The puzzle of the universe! 

Another thing about my faith that aligns with others is that I have a similar set of values. When talking with this girl, we both believed that we should have love and compassion for one another, and that we are too selfish now and scared of connecting with people in this 'dog eat dog' world. For me, this stems from the belief that we are all one... If you are me, and I am you, what am I afraid of? Why would I want to hurt you? For me it's really sad that we compete and are jealous and hateful of one another because this reflects on and creates how we treat ourselves... We did an exercise at Reach once where we had to make a criticism of another person, and then ask ourselves whether we had said the same thing about ourselves too... Every time. Another one of my favourite sayings is 'you must love yourself before you can love others'.

She also spoke to me about her underlying feeling that there's something wrong with the world, that its not working in the way it was meant to... I get this a lot. I got it from a young age. I always questioned why we work all our lives and then rest when we're too old to enjoy life properly. Now I question it in a deeper way, and try to remember that while I can't change how it works, I can work around it. I can do things to avoid having to rely on money and greed, such as remembering that my worth isn't dependent on my looks or possessions. Everything is impermanent, so it makes no sense to attach myself to anything. I can go natural, buy organic or grow my own food, which is like growing your own money, but allows my body to absorb pure, rich nutrients rather than the chemically altered crap that they sell in supermarkets. I can center myself in a more natural environment. All these things make me more at ease and closer to nature on this dying planet. 

The last thing she asked me is where my beliefs came from. I thought about it for a minute, and realized that my beliefs materialized one day out of nowhere. I was always drawn to spiritual and space talk when I was young. I think when I watched zeitgeist I really awoke. Everything sort of clicked into place and I thought, this is right. My morals stem from my empathy as well, which allows me (or forces me) to feel others' pain, to really absorb it in my mind and heart.

I really believe that we can only find the answers within. I always want to know things, and I keep reminding myself that all I have to do is look within to find what I'm looking for. The trouble is trying to find the time and also the discipline to let the material world go and meditate without the interruption of my mind or anything else. I always plan to. But what if I am planning until I am old, and one day I realize I never did it? I was always waiting for the time when really, time doesn't exist, it is an illusion of the material world. I have to let go of time as well in order to properly explore consciousness....

I have a lot of self work to do.