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Spring Journey: Living Your Spiritual Evolution
Posted on: Feb 26, 2023 @ 10:01 Posted in: Featured, Sabbats
In Spring, it’s easy to think that the season is all about the powers of light and life. With Nature putting on such a glorious display with warm, sun-bright days, a burgeoning, green landscape, the swell of birdsong, and the enticing scents of chartreuse buds and pastel blossoms, it’s hard to detect the presence of the primal energies of darkness and death.
Yet if you widen your awareness, you can see that the natural realm is sustained and nourished by a complex, interwoven wholeness of all these primal powers.
In the Goddess tale of Demeter and Persephone, the springtime reunion of Persephone and Her Mother Demeter can be understood as a mythic explanation of the spring season as the return of the Goddess’s life-giving powers to the world.
Persephone evolves into Her full maturity and powers by bridging and balancing the immense, opposing energies of the death-centered Underworld and the life-centered sunlit realm of Her Mother Demeter. It’s this wholeness and bigness of being, honed through Persephone’s trials and travels in the Underworld, that transform Persephone from a maiden to a Queen, Goddess and equal to Her Mother Demeter.
To live your spiritual evolution is to step into a new way of understanding and engaging your Self and life story, in alignment with Spring’s spiritual, evolutionary mysteries. With this new understanding, your whole life — everything you are and everything you’ve experienced — is part of a greater journey that drives your personal growth and spiritual evolution.
When you live your spiritual evolution in these ways, the miraculous happens: you grow and evolve in powerful, new directions that can only arise out of the messy, potent, divergent wholeness that is your life. Your spiritual evolution is the journey itself, made up of these miraculous, transformative moments which both change and evolve you and your outer life.
The Spring Journey: Your Spiritual Evolution provides you with the knowledge, inspiration and skills you need to explore and embrace these powerful teachings and make them your own. Through integrated writings, pathwork, journaling tasks and a guided meditation, the Spring Journey takes you into the depths of the season’s mysteries of spiritual evolution, and helps you discover the new beginning and personal growth that are emerging for you at this time.
The Spring Journey includes:
Spring Journey Guidebook (pdf ebook): Seven lessons, each with an integrated wisdom teaching, awareness practice and journaling task to help you explore and experience the teaching, and apply it to your spiritual pathwork and everyday life.
Spring Journey Journal (pdf ebook): For each lesson, there are journaling prompts and questions to deepen your self-awareness and exploration of the Spring Journey teachings.
Spring Journey Guided Meditation (audio mp3): A 26 minute meditation that connects you with the potent energies of the spring season as you travel to the sunlit realm of the Mother Goddess in search of the parts of your Self and life story that are the makings of your springtime new beginnings and personal growth.
The cost of this integrated Spring Journey package is $16.99.
Spring Journey: Your Spiritual Evolution Embrace the Goddess’s mysteries that guide your spiritual evolution. Give yourself the springtime gift of new beginnings. Your Spring Journey awaits you!
Artwork by Catrin Weltz-Stein
Your Spiritual Evolution: Four Transformative Teachings for the Spring Season
Posted on: Feb 26, 2023 @ 10:01 Posted in: Sabbats
Spring is a time of rebirth and new beginnings. Nature buds and blossoms as the seasons of light and life return, and the Goddess offers up Her mysteries of spiritual evolution to guide your journey of soul.
With a Goddess-based conception of spiritual evolution, your whole life — everything you are and everything you’ve experienced — is part of a greater journey that drives your personal growth and spiritual evolution. Your intention on this journey is to become a more whole, mature, powerful version of your Self.
This season’s offering in the Path of She Guided Journey Series, Spring Journey: Your Spiritual Evolution, is grounded in the Mother-Daughter tale of Persephone and Demeter that speaks to this Goddess-based conception of spiritual evolution.
In the Fall, Persephone begins Her journey as a maiden who leaves behind the sunlit realm of Her Mother Demeter. She descends into the Underworld, and spends the Winter months traveling its mysteries of darkness and death, and suffering its trials.
In Spring, Persephone returns to Her Mother Demeter’s realm of light and life as a Goddess reborn into a more mature, evolved version of Her Self. She is the Queen of the Underworld and Goddess of Spring Growth, with a wholeness and bigness of being that is wise, loving and powerful enough to bridge and balance the immense, opposing energies of the death-centered Underworld and the life-centered sunlit realm. Where Persephone walks the Earth, She leaves a trail of spring flowers in Her wake.
Through this mythic Goddess tale, you can embrace a new understanding of your Self, your life story, and your journey of spiritual evolution. Here are four transformative teachings offered by these Mother-Daughter Goddesses, Demeter and Persephone, in the spring season.
1. New growth and beginnings arise from darkness, death, suffering and wounding.
In many spiritual traditions, spiritual evolution is associated with a rarefied, higher state of consciousness: one becomes enlightened, ascends to a higher frequency, and transcends the human, material condition.
The problem with this conception of spiritual evolution is that it’s elitist, granting spiritual superiority to the very few who can achieve this state of purity. It favors the path of the monk or ascetic who chooses to separate themselves from the complexities and messiness of everyday life. It negates the very substance of our human existence, that we are flesh and blood creatures, living in a material world. And, most importantly, it leaves out the vast majority of us traveling a sincere spiritual path of personal healing and growth in accordance with the dictates of our own soul and life story.
Nature and the Goddess illuminate a very different conception of spiritual evolution.
You don’t need to think of spiritual evolution as a rarefied state of enlightenment. Instead, you can understand and engage your spiritual evolution as a journey of new beginnings and growth that arise out of the darkness, trials, suffering and wounding of your life story. Rather than transcending these inescapable parts of your human experience, you can honor and embrace them as the very things that inform and nourish your journey of evolving into your full maturity and power.
2. Your life story is the vehicle of your spiritual evolution.
Persephone sets out on a journey of discovery and self-determination outside of the circle of Her Mother Demeter’s love and guiding presence. She has Her own, unique, personal experiences in the Underworld, separate from the ways of Her Mother and the sunlit realm She left behind.
This is Persephone’s story, not Her Mother’s, nor the story of any of the other Goddesses in the Greek pantheon. And it’s the full range of Her life story — with its beginning in the sunlit realm of Her maidenhood and innocence, travels into the depths of the mysteries and trials of the Underworld, and return to the sunlit realm, stepping into a new level of maturity, power and wholeness — that drives Persephone’s personal growth and spiritual evolution.
Like Persephone, you must consciously choose to set off on a journey of discovery and self-determination by stepping beyond the people and parts of your life that define and limit you, and descending into the mysteries and trials of your inner darkness. Here you’ll find everything you need — amongst the lost and repressed parts of your Self and life story that hold your beauty, wounding and dormant potential — to guide your new, spring-like beginnings of personal growth and transformation.
This isn’t the work of one season, but of a lifetime of descent into your inner darkness and personal trials, and return to the sunlit world of new beginnings and personal growth. The journey itself, drawing on the wellspring of your life story, is your spiritual evolution.
3. Equanimity is an essential skill on your journey of spiritual evolution.
Your spiritual evolution is driven by a special kind of transformative magic. Whenever diverse, opposing energies come together, and are held in a state of equanimity, something miraculous happens. Life is reborn in new, fresh ways that are only possible through the potent meeting and mixing of opposites.
Nature and the Goddess Persephone illustrate this transformative magic, and the essential role played by equanimity in the miracle of springtime rebirth.
In Spring, Nature reveals a living equanimity where the wild world is reborn through the balanced, harmonious interweaving of the primal, opposing forces of life and light, and darkness and death. When Persephone returns to Her Mother Demeter in Spring, She is reborn into a mature, evolved version of Her Self, whole and holy as the Queen of the Underworld and Goddess of Spring Growth. Persephone demonstrates Her equanimity through a bigness of being that is wise, powerful and loving enough to bridge and balance the divergent worlds of the death-centered Underworld and the life-centered sunlit realm.
This transformative magic equally applies to your spiritual pathwork. Whenever you consciously embrace and engage diverse, opposing parts of your Self and life story with equanimity, the miraculous happens. You heal, grow and evolve in powerful, new directions that can only arise out of the complexities and polarities of the wholeness that is your life.
4. Spiritual evolution is a journey toward wholeness.
In Her Underworld travels, Persephone reclaims the missing half of Her nature. Her maiden side lived in the realm of light and life, but She was incomplete without the part of Her that held the mysteries of the Underworld and Her experiences of death and suffering. Persephone isn’t one thing or another, but a wholeness that contains it all. In Spring, it’s Persephone’s wholeness, as the Queen of the Underworld and Goddess of Spring Growth, that reveal Her as a Goddess evolved into Her full maturity and powers.
Nature is this wholeness. It’s an ever-shifting balance and harmony of darkness and death with light and life. With the change of season, one state naturally steps into the foreground as the other recedes, but neither ever totally replaces the other, and both are absolutely essential and interdependent. It’s Nature’s wholeness that gives rise to springtime’s new, green growth.
This spiritual pathwork of seeking and reclaiming will naturally change and evolve you, deepening your spiritual maturity and power, and granting you a sense of peace and rightness as you live in accordance with the rich, complex wholeness that is your innate, true, beautiful nature.
Further explore these transformative teachings through the Spring Journey: Your Spiritual Evolution. The Spring Journey guides you through seven, integrated lessons that take you into the depths of your springtime personal growth and spiritual evolution. Each lesson is complimented with an awareness practice and journaling task to help you experience the teaching for yourself, and apply it to your journey of soul and everyday life.
Your Spring Journey includes: two pdf ebooks: the Spring Journey Guidebook and Spring Journey Journal, and the Spring Journey Guided Meditation (mp3 audio). The cost of this integrated Spring Journey package is $16.99.
Spring Journey – Your Spiritual Evolution: Embracing Your Life Story
Seek Out New Beginnings ~ Embrace Your Wholeness
~ Evolve Into Your Deep, Beautiful Self
Your Spring Journey awaits you!
Photo by Matthew Henry on Unsplash
The Lost Daughter: A Story For Our Times
Posted on: Feb 21, 2023 @ 10:00 Posted in: Featured, Goddess
Long, long ago, in our personal story, family history and the unfolding of humanity, She was lost to us — Goddess, Great Mother — priestess, healer, wise one — the sacred feminine within.
One half of the Universe, one half of our humanity, one half of our true Self — She who is wild and untamable — She who is liquid sensuality and earthly pleasure — She who wields the powers of magic and mystery — She whose laws are love and the nurturance of all life — were despoiled and repressed, until we learned to fear and forget Her very existence, and essential place in our inner landscape and shared society.
We became the lost daughters and lost sons, cutoff from the true power and presence of She as Goddess, woman and the feminine side of human nature. And we have been profoundly wounded, individually and collectively, ever since.
Yet things are shifting. Deep hungers are stirring within, arising from a sense that something essential, precious is missing from our life and world. We are waking and finding our way home to the Goddess, our true womanhood and sacred feminine nature.
Dreaming of the Lost Daughter
When I began to write Tale of the Lost Daughter, I started from a place of emptiness, of opening to the Goddess to direct my writing and focus. I would sink into an altered state of awareness, place my fingertips on the keyboard and let the words flow onto the blank page of their own accord.
Early in this process, a dream story came to me. I was given a specific day — a very snowy, Saturday, December 21st. With this information I could pinpoint the year. At this time, I was still fast asleep in my corporate career and completely unaware of the depth of my discontent and unhappiness.
On this fateful night, surrounded by the magic of the Winter Solstice, I dreamed of finding a silvery, shining path between the worlds that led me to Hecate’s realm, the Dark Goddess who is the Mistress of the crossroads, and guardian of our human destiny. She bid me to look into Her magic cauldron where She revealed my life story, the beauty and the horror, and everything that I had forgotten and denied. From this place of greater awareness, She asked me to choose how I would live the rest of my life. And I made a vow to remember Her in my waking life and find my way home to Her sacred ways
Although I have no memory of this dream, shortly afterwards, in early February of the following year, I had a serious ski accident that changed my life forever. My skull was fractured, my face temporarily disfigured from a facial palsy, and my world so shook up that, once I recovered, I began to make dramatic changes. From that moment onward, my life was set on a new course of self-discovery and spirituality that I later came to know as the Path of She.
I was the lost daughter seeking my way home to the Goddess, my true womanhood and my own sacred feminine nature.
A Story For These Times
In the natural course of writing Tale of the Lost Daughter, this very dream found its way into the text and became the inspiration for the book’s title. This wasn’t planning or artifice on my part, but more that this was the story that was mine to write and share, from one lost daughter to others.
Sarah, the main character, is a lost daughter who has the appearance of a perfect life, with a fantastic career and affluent lifestyle, yet, in the secret recesses of her inner world, she’s not happy or well. One evening, she has an emotional breakdown that wakes her up and sets her on a journey of discovering her feminine spirituality, magic, ritual and the Goddess.
Though it was my hands and mind that crafted Tale of the Lost Daughter, it was the Goddess Hecate who spoke through me, telling a story for these times. Her message is simple: listen to your soul’s longings that tell you that something essential is missing from your life; commit to follow where these longings lead you and you will find the precious things you have lost.
Like Sarah, if you have the courage to make these choices, change will come. The Goddess and your own soul and life story will guide your way home to the things you’ve lost and hunger for: your wild, untamed nature; sensuality and connection to the living Earth; the powers of magic and mystery; the love and nurturance that are the essence of the Goddess and your own sacred feminine nature; and your own beauty and sacred purpose.
The Goddess is calling you home. Open your heart and your senses to Her presence. Hear Her whispers on the wind: come, I am waiting for you. It is time. You are ready. You are ripe.
You don’t need to be skilled in these matters, or even understand what these things mean to answer the call of the Goddess. It’s enough to trust your soul’s longings and begin, and the skills, knowledge and experiences you need will come to you, in the right way and at the right time. My personal journey started with a vow to reclaim the Goddess and my true feminine nature. I made this vow in a dream I didn’t even remember at the time, and wouldn’t have understood anyways, and yet my life was set on a new course.
Now, many years later, I’m lost no more. The Goddess and Her sacred feminine ways are as natural to me as breathing. I’ve become a woman — doing the work of my soul and living nestled in the forest with my beloved family — I could never have imagined all those years ago. And the best is yet to come; after we’ve found what we’ve lost, the real adventure begins, taking us ever deeper into the mysteries and wonders of the Goddess, our wild, powerful feminine nature, and this amazing journey called life.
I reach out to you, waking person to waking person; come, it is time. We are ready. We are ripe.
Reclaim the Goddess with Tale of the Lost Daughter.
Artist: Heather McLean
The Love Revolution: Mending Our Souls, Transforming Our World
Posted on: Feb 13, 2023 @ 10:00 Posted in: Goddess
Carl Jung was teaching us about the love revolution when he said that the opposite of love is not hatred, but will to power.
Will to power pretty well sums up the ethos that underlies our mainstream society where those at the top of the pile claim the right to dominate those below them. Self-interest and greed go hand in hand with will to power, and this toxic combination is what drives our political, economic and social systems.
The Goddess has been teaching me about this love revolution for years. Our humanity is at a pivotal turning point where the world as we know it, arising from this ethos of will to power, has set us on a collision course with ecological disaster and societal meltdown. When I ask the Goddess how we can change this destructive trajectory, She always tells me one thing over and over: love is what can mend our human soul, and transform our shared society.
The love revolution isn’t a new idea. It was gifted to us by the sixties counterculture, where love, compassion and awareness were seen as the basis of a revolution in our human consciousness and society. Then it seemed as if the love revolution fizzled out, and we continued on the same collective, destructive trajectory of self-interest, greed and will to power. But here we are, sixty years later, returning to this tenacious idea of love as a counterforce that can mend what ails our lives and shared society.
What is this transformative love that Carl Jung, the Goddess and the sixties counterculture are talking about? This question has been central to my own spiritual journey, and quest for personal and collective transformation, and this is what I’ve discovered.
Love is a base human need.
We are wired to give and receive love both within our intimate circles of family, lovers, partners, children and friends, and the broader circles of our fellow humans and creature companions who share our Earth home. We can love ourselves, other people, things, ideas and activities. We typically think of this personal kind of love as emotional, but it’s also about service that honors and nurtures the well-being and happiness of others.
Love is a state of being.
I’ve opened to this state of love through meditation. What I experienced wasn’t an idea or an emotion, but more a place or part of my being where I was love. My whole being was infused with an absolute peace and acceptance of everything and everyone. There was no separation between me and this love; it was in me and outside of me at the same time, everywhere and in all things.
Love is the primal power of the living world.
We live in a material Universe, of matter, of Mother, of love as life’s unquenchable desire to create and nurture new life. From our flesh and bone bodies to our shining souls, we are woven of this primal love, as is everything around us. Love is our essence, and the energetic matrix that connects every living thing. We are part of this love, and we are this love. There is no separation, and never was.
Love is a choice and sacred responsibility.
Humanity has been blessed and cursed with a dual nature. We hold within us the powers of creation and destruction, and their mirror forces of love and will to power. For millennia, we have collectively chosen will to power over love, and self-interest and greed over concern and care for others. To heal our souls and transform our world, we must consciously choose love over will to power, and then begin to live in accordance with this choice.
Love is unconditional and inclusive.
No one and no part of ourselves are unworthy of this love. Beauty and wounding, light and shadow, creation and destruction, those who love, and those who cling to will to power — all of these complex, opposing aspects of our inner landscape and collective humanity have brought us to this turning moment, and all are in need of acceptance, healing and transformation. Love is deep and wide enough to hold everyone and everything, and in this meeting and mixing of the full range of our humanity, we can become whole, holy, and something new, kinder, wiser and more powerful.
Love is a revolutionary force that can mend our souls and transform our world.
Beneath the thin veneer of a world constructed on will to power, beyond our personal burdens and scars of broken hearts and wounded life stories, this vast, infinite love calls us home to its welcoming embrace. We need only reach back to reclaim the love that we are, and the love that is ours to share. This love will heal and transform us, and then we, in turn, will heal and transform our world.
We, every single one of us, are the catalysts of the love revolution. The outer world can only change when we ourselves change, and choose love over will to power as the guiding force in our lives. This isn’t an easy journey. It calls us to claim and heal our wounded love, and to extend compassion and care to the great circle of our humanity, with all its mess, complexity and diversity. It requires that we become something new, a deeper, wider vessel for the love that is Goddess, life, and our true essence and best nature.
With each healed heart and mended soul, person by person, step by step, change by change, love is the counterforce to will to power that can guide our way forward into a kinder, caring and sustainable future.
Check out Path of She book offerings in the Path Store
Artwork by Vladimir Kush
The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful: Reinveinting Your Worldly Toolkit
Posted on: Feb 5, 2023 @ 10:00 Posted in: Path Basics, Pathwork
Everything we are, everything we’ve experienced, learned, and suffered can be used in service of the healing and transformation of ourselves and our world. What matters is not so much who we are, or what has happened to us, but what we do with what we’ve been given. We can choose to reinvent our worldly toolkit, and make beauty with the good and the bad of our life.
Whether we are conscious of it or not, we have been socialized to see the world through the black and white lens of good and bad. Good things come about through the best sides of our humanity and personal nature; bad things through our worst instincts and the shadowy, nasty places in our collective humanity.
We apply this dichotomous lens not only to the world around us, but also to our personal history and characteristics. There are parts of ourselves that we embrace as good and positive, and other parts that we reject as bad and negative.
Instead I offer a different perspective: within each of us is the power to do beautiful things with what life has given us. From both the good and the bad, we can create beauty and positive change.
Our life story brings us the things we need to heal, grow and change, and whatever we have gathered in our worldly toolkit in the form of knowledge, skills, abilities, and personal characteristics can be used to bring about positive, beautiful change in ourselves and our greater environment. It all comes down to personal choice: what we do with what we’ve been given.
A Personal Story: A Witch with an MBA
This insight came to me in the midst of a crisis on my island home. A small corporation had bought a huge tract of land in the southern portion of our island and began to clearcut the forests, leaving a swath of devastation in its wake that threatened the environmental and economic fabric of our community.
In this story, the corporate world was the bad guy: the business men who owned the land, the multinational corporation that funded their activities, the government legislation that enshrined corporate rights over community and environmental considerations, and a cultural ethos that worshiped money above all things.
Our community rose up in resistance and I found myself, for the first time in my life, deeply involved in a collective activism that fought, with every bit of skill, knowledge, and inspiration at our disposal, to protect this stunning, natural landscape we called home.
Yet I faced a strange dilemma. I was also the bad guy in this story. I had a corporate, consulting background and an MBA. Whatever we were fighting out there was also part of my personal makeup and worldly toolkit.
This split within me wasn’t new. I had long struggled to reconcile the two divergent, powerful sides of me: the MBA with a corporate career, and the wild witch connected to earth and magic. Our community crisis and activism brought this struggle to the forefront.
But, as is the case in any crisis, there was no time for indulging my inner angst; I just jumped in with all that I had. With my witch skills, I did magic and ritual to protect the land, and with my corporate skills, I led a small group that organized public, consciousness-raising events like street theater. As the group’s business manager: I made agendas, ran the meetings, delegated tasks, made sure the financial resources were in place, and followed up on logistical details. Our group did amazing things, with a handful of people, little money, and quick, efficient meetings, due to the massive, diverse talents within our group and my well-honed business skills.
This story has a beautiful ending. Our community activism stopped the clearcutting and turned big tracts of the forest into magnificent parkland. A middle ground was found between the interests of our community and the corporation that owned the land. And I reclaimed and reinvented my worldly business side in service of the beauty of my island home and community.
Reinventing Your Worldly Toolkit
1. Take an inventory of your worldly toolkit.
List the key knowledge, skills, abilities, and personal characteristics that you draw upon to navigate the demands of the everyday world. Be sure to include the parts of your toolkit you see as good and bad.
2. Choose one thing on this list, or a bundle of related things, that you view in a negative light.
This can be a “bad” side of your personal characteristics, a skill that you aren’t proud, or anything in your toolkit that you believe negatively impacts your life.
3. Explore this part of yourself with clear eyes and an open heart.
Where did this part of you come from? What is its story? How does it bring about negative situations or outcomes?
What is your attitude toward this part of yourself? Do you want to: a) hide it, get rid of it, pretend it doesn’t exist, or transcend it; or b) embrace it, learn from it, and find a way to make it a positive part of your life?
4. Now imagine, no matter what you current attitude is, that you can do good, beautiful things with this part of you see as “bad”.
Open your heart wide, with love, compassion, and acceptance of all that you are and all that life has brought to you. Know that you have the power to do good, to choose something new, beautiful, and life-affirming, with these parts of you that you see in a negative light.
This new, beautiful choice may be committing to heal an inner hurt or old story, or to reframe this part of you as a strength and ability that you can use in more positive ways.
Don’t overthink this, instead let go of your current way of thinking, and explore what else is true and possible. See how you can take this part of your worldly toolkit in a new, beautiful direction.
Positive change doesn’t require that you reject or cut away your “bad” parts, but that you open yourself to love, self-acceptance, and new possibilities for these parts you see as negative. You can choose to do beautiful things with what you’ve been given.
Check out Path of She book offerings in the Path Store.
Artwork by: Cameron Gray