Greetings, dancing ones,
Another year is approaching its conclusion, and the breath of winter is drawing us inward, into our cave. The body, so attuned to its earth, makes a clear request for rest, slowness, and inner looking. For us, gardeners of the inner landscape, this is the season of preparing the soil for next year’s garden, and choosing what we want to weed out and what we’d like to seed and grow in our soul garden for 2016.
We are invited to a dance with INTENTIONALITY. Will we say yes?
The kind of intentionality I speak of is not the kind that comes in ballooned words that pop empty in the lack of meaningful action. It is not the setting-intentions-then-waiting-and-trusting kind.
It is instead the blazing intentionality that aligns heart, mind, and action towards a sacred goal, and becomes deeply embodied in our tissue, movements, gestures and voice. It is the kind that calls our mystic nature to body and charges our deepest longing with the power that makes it tangible, physical, and alive.
As I’ve been preparing to write about intentionality, I've been reminded of an experience I had earlier this yea. In the summer, I joined 140 women for a four-day women’s embodiment retreat called Honeyroot, in the mountains outside Nevada City. Traveling from near and far, these were women of all walks of life, skin colors, and ages, from girls 6-months old to grandmothers in their late seventies, and all of us in-between, maidens, mothers, women of our day, the earthly lineage of the Goddess.
We had come with a strong intention: to honor womanhood in all shades and forms, to explore it through our bodies, to move in our truth, and offer dances to the undying feminine essence. On our first afternoon, all 140 of us gathered in a circle in a large dome on the land for the opening ceremony. Each woman had been walked into the space by hand and seated in the circle by one of us ritual artists in service. Singers' gorgeous voices were singing our hearts open, and the opening speech began. Suddenly, a lightening blazed the windows and the sky that had been clear and sunny all day sent down a powerful thunder that shook the room! Our bodies grew alert and excited, and amidst giggles and whispers, the opening ritual was soon interrupted by more ground-shaking thunders and lightnings that illuminated the forest on all sides.
It was July 4th weekend, not the time for rain in California. We had been in deep draught for the better part of four years, and rain was certainly not on the forecast. What was happening?
Thrilled, the women could not longer be contained inside and ran through the doors, reaching to the thundering sky, throwing their tops off, meeting the break of rain with naked, exhilarated skin, singing, howling, dancing with the storm! And the storm danced back at us, splitting the sky open with light and sound, the whole forest was trembling, flashing, moving fiercely…
In this exuberant union of Wild Women and their Earth, in a place outside space and time, we entered a direct and epic communion with the Goddess, making her sky thunder, sending lightnings back up into the sky with our electrified fingers, shaking the earth with our pulsing hips, each cell and bone of our bodies awake with Her power.
This is the intentionality I speak of, the magic of our intention meeting the power that sustains it. The power inside us met by the elements and their sensory knowing. The power that brings new forms into being.
What I have come to witness again and again is that when we women come together with intention and ritualize our intention, this power is not only palpable. It’s transformative. It is our very own creative force mirrored back by our earth so that we can suddenly touch it and see it. Women reflect it to each other and thus amplify it.
It’s the power for birthing new forms that comes to earth with women.
This is my inspiration riht now to invite you to a most special edition of the SHE MOVES, HER BODY KNOWS circle, a heart-felt offering that will bring us dancing on the edge between worlds, and on the on the very crossing between 2015 and 2016, together birthing the new.
What are we ready to give form to? JOIN us beginnning Dec 14.
And, if you’re not able to be with us in the room, I am offering you this simple practice below that can bring you into the heart of your creative power. Try it anytime!
Spiritual and Creative G-Spot:
An In-Body Power practice in Women's Creative Power to Brinig Visions into Form
Take fifteen minutes to be alone and undisturbed. Get cozy, bring a vessel of water, light candles, breathe deeper, slower breaths.
Lying on your back or sitting straight, bring a breath and your full awareness into your heart, the home of your deep, silent longing. Ask yourself to feel your longing. Feel under the surface of your usual feelings associated with the heart, deeper than the initial emotions. Drop further and further into the embodied life of your deepest longing that no words can touch. Let yourself long silently, sensing your longing with the heart and with the rest of your body for several minutes.
Then, bring another breath into your belly and womb. Connect with the sensations of the place where you feel your greatest desire. How and where do you know your desire? For some long moments, simply breathe into your desire and ignite it, feel it, sense it, watch it rise and take over. Amplify it. Get to know it well through the felt sense. Don’t give it names. Just sense and feel desire. It will likely make you move, sensually and otherwise. Let it.
Now, see what happens if you intend to bring your longing and your desire together, connecting heart and womb through breathing and awareness. Direct these two most elemental feminine forces to meet and sway you in their wavy movements, allowing your breath to move with freedom and sound. The meeting of longing and desire is our spiritual and anatomical G-spot. Locate it by connecting these two powers with lots of breath and awareness. See what wants to arise from the movement of longing and desire in the G-Spot. Images and words may come as you move and breathe with it. Ride the wave until you feel complete.
What are you ready to create and birth from this place?
