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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
Spring Journey: Your Spiritual Evolution
Posted on: Mar 19, 2018 @ 16:32 Posted in: Sabbats
In Spring, Nature and the Goddess share their mysteries of spiritual evolution where new beginnings emerge from a complex, potent wholeness woven of the opposing energies of light, life, darkness and death.
The Spring Journey: Your Spiritual Evolution guides you in these mysteries where soulful, new beginnings emerge when you welcome your whole Self to the light of your spring pathwork, engaging the light and shadow of your life story that are the makings of your personal growth at this time.
On your Spring Journey, you will:
- Align your spiritual path with the seasonal powers of Nature and the Goddess.
- Explore the spring season teachings of balance, wholeness, equanimity and spiritual evolution.
- Reunite with the Goddess’s ways of love, light and new beginnings.
- Step past your old stories into a deeper level of spiritual maturity, power and self-love.
- Discover the seeds of transformative change and personal growth that are emerging for you.
- Design an action plan to plant and tend this new growth in your life.
- Cultivate the essential qualities and skills of living your spiritual evolution.
Your 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!
Photo Credit: Matthew Henry on Unsplash
Spring Journey: The Goddess, Nature and Your Spiritual Evolution
Posted on: Mar 18, 2018 @ 22:39 Posted in: Sabbats
Spring heralds the return of the seasons of light, a threshold time when Nature reaches its green arms upward from the dark, death-like places in the belly of the Earth to embrace the strengthening sun. The Spring Equinox marks a moment of equal night and day, before the resurgence of the powers of light.
The natural realm delights us with the miracle of tender, new beginnings as life returns to the sleepy, barren landscape. From the tight buds that unfurl into purple crocuses, pink blossoms and the chartreuse canopy of trees — to the nighttime croaking of mating frogs, the quick flash of hummingbirds and the noisy honks of returning geese — it’s as if Mother Nature has turned back on the fresh, bright colors, sounds and smells of the living world outside our doorstep.
Less apparent in this wondrous springtime display are the death from which this new life arises, and the continuing presence of darkness alongside the resurgence of light. Green-growing things bridge and balance these elemental forces, extending both downward into the dark, composting soil, made rich by decay and death, and upward to the enervating potency of daylight, and the restful influence of the dark of night.
You’re part of the living world. The quickening pulse of Spring tugs on your body and soul, inciting you to cultivate new growth that takes your life in a fresh, positive direction. This new growth emerges from your inner darkness — made rich by the lost and forgotten parts of your life story and dormant potential that reach upward to take their place in the sunlit world of your conscious engagement and everyday existence.
Like Nature, something deep inside of you seeks a new balance and wholeness —woven of the light and shadow, beauty and wounding, and other vital, opposing parts of your inner darkness and life experiences — that give rise to your springtime rebirth and new growth. And like Nature, you need to cultivate equanimity to achieve this potent state of balance and wholeness in the face of these challenging, divergent aspects of your Self and life story.
This kind of soul-sourced, transformative change doesn’t come easy. It calls you to step past the death-like stagnation and stuckness of your old story and patterns, and step into the soulful, new beginning and personal growth that are ready to root and blossom in your life at this time.
In this profound spiritual pathwork, you’re following the hera’s path that illuminates the Goddess’s mysteries of spiritual evolution as a journey of descent and return from the Underworld. The hera’s path comes to us through ancient Goddess myths, the best known being the Greek, Mother-Daughter tale of Demeter and Persephone. It’s Demeter’s and Persephone’s evolutionary teachings that guide your Spring Journey pathwork.
In Spring, Persephone returns from Her Underworld travels in the realm of darkness and death. Demeter waits for Persephone at the threshold place where the Underworld opens into the sunlit realm, welcoming Her beloved daughter back to Her powers of light and life. Persephone has been transformed by Her travels and trials in the Underworld. She emerges as a Goddess reborn into a more mature, evolved version of Her Self: 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 realm of Her Mother Demeter.
Persephone shows you what spiritual evolution looks like from a Goddess perspective. You’re not trying to achieve some rarified, perfected state of being, or to emulate someone or something outside of your Self. Instead, like Persephone, your journey of soul can help you become a more evolved, mature version of your Self, with a wholeness and bigness of being that can bridge and balance the potent, opposing energies of darkness, death and wounding, and light, life and beauty within you and your life story.
With Demeter, Persephone and Nature as your inspirations and guides, here begins a new season of light on your journey of soul that can embrace your life story, in all its complexities and polarities, as you seek the equanimity, wholeness and bigness of being that are the markers of your personal growth and spiritual evolution.
Open to Nature’s living equanimity of balance and wholeness. Embrace the evolutionary teachings of the Mother-Daughter Goddesses, Demeter and Persephone. Become big, wise, loving and powerful enough to bridge and balance the complexities and polarities of your Self and life story. Be ready to step past your old story and cultivate a soulful, new beginning as you start your Spring Journey.
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!
A Beltane Mystery: The Green Man and the Dance of Life
Posted on: Apr 27, 2017 @ 10:00 Posted in: Sabbats
At Beltane, at the edge of the forest, haloed in the chartreuse brilliance of backlit foliage, the Green Man awaits you. He is a lean, powerfully built man, dressed in Lincoln green, with penetrating chestnut brown eyes and a captivating smile. With a crook of His finger, He beckons for you to join Him.
Without a word, the Green Man leads you deeper into the forest. As He walks, an aura of light and heat radiates outward from His body, firing up everything within His circle of magnetism. Unseen creatures scent the air with the feral musk of mating, trees release yellow dustings of pollen, wildflowers burst into bloom and baby chicks break through their thin-shelled eggs.
Something delicious stirs within you, a mirror heat that fires up your core and loosens the fibers of your being. Your inhibitions melt away, overrun by a primal, steamy desire to take the untamed, fertile life force of this mysterious Green Man inside of you.
The Green Man turns to you, His face suffused with passion and love. He places His hand on your mid-body and an intense, thrumming current runs between you. Within your core, something pushes past the stagnant, blocked places inside of you as tendrils of new growth unfurl and reach hungrily toward the Green Man’s magnetic touch.
“Your hunger and my hunger are one,” He says, His voice rich and husky, “your deepest beauty longs for expression in the outer world, and the outer world longs for your deepest beauty. My quickening magic can ignite your sacred hunger and make fertile your flourishing in the sunlit realm. Is this what you desire?”
With your yes, the Green Man transforms into a being woven of shimmering luminescence. His living-light body pushes up against your outer form, insistent and irresistible, and you open yourself wide to His luscious, energetic embrace. Together you tumble deeper into His wild-world dream of rutting and nesting and the pushing forth of life. One heart, one breath, one ecstatic force unites you, the Green Man, the forest plants and creatures, and every living being of the Earth, in the irrepressible drive of life to create new life.
In this glorious embrace, all traces of the waking dream of the human world melt away: your suppressive, domesticated ways that block your primal, wild instincts; your self-judgments and limitations; the outer voices that tell you who you are and how to live your life; and the destructive, life-fearing ways that plague human society. They are but distant memories, constructed by a shadow dream that has no sway in this other, more compelling and nourishing, wild-world dream.
For what could be just one shining moment or a season of bliss, you revel in your life-making dance with the Green Man and the forest. Then your energies separate; He stands before you, returned to His physical form, and you find yourself, once more, on the edge of the forest.
“This wild-world dream we have shared is real, as is your hunger for your deepest beauty to have form and expression in the outer world. The life you are longing for has taken root in your inner landscape. Even now, its tendrils, infused with my quickening powers, are reaching for their place in the sunlit realm.
“Be warned and be wise. As you step back into the everyday that is your life, this dream will fade and the human dream will impose its order upon you, an order that denies my wild ways and debases the primal, creation impulses that run hot in your human blood. Forces, within and without, will resist this tender new growth within you.
“My magic serves you even in the face of this resistance. Remember your wild encounter with me and my forest realm. Remember the irrepressible drive of life to create new life that infuses every living thing. Be courageous, step away from the old stories that wish to bind these powerful impulses within you. Give yourself over to the hard, dedicated, wondrous work of tending and nurturing the new and beautiful that is yours and yours alone to gift to the outer world. As the new takes root and flourishes, so the old atrophies and dies away.
One last time He kisses you, a soft brush of lips on your brow, and leans close to whisper in your ear, “at the edge of the wild, between the dreaming and the waking, you will find me, always, waiting to love you ever deeper in this dance of life-making.”
Then the Green Man smiles His radiant smile and steps back between the trees as the forest vision dims and disappears. Though He is gone, His igniting touch has done its work, leaving you forever changed. The new, beautiful life you hunger for is budding within you, and it is time to give yourself over to tending its continued growth in your everyday existence. What the Green Man has kissed awake can never go back to sleep. For you, and all your human kin, are beholden to His mysterious dance of light, life and creation.
Excerpt Path of She. Available on Amazon.
Make your own journey with the Green Man into the wild, delicious, life-making powers of Beltane with the Path of She’s Beltane Guided Meditation. Available at the Path Store for $9.99.
