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Patterns of Living

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I was thinking that I would like to represent the essence of this time of year with a symbol. The next thing I knew, was an open book on my lap and The Goddess Lilith looking at me. She made it pretty clear that she was up for the job. She is a Sumero-Babylonian Goddess. The divine lady, often represented with the lower half of her body encompassed in flames. She is a wild, winged seer, full of hutzpah. She governs the birth, death and re-birth cycles, the transformation of energy. An owl is her attendant, she brings us the message… cast off the parts of the self that suppress and stand up to reclaim your power. Men, Women and all who occupy the gender spectrum, can relate to her strength and forceful nature.

Try this exercise: say this “I am precious and you are precious. I am precious, you are precious. We are all precious”. This is based off, Chogyam Trungpa’s concept of Basic Goodness, we were all born whole, with no marks to defect us. As we grow up here in this Western culture, they tell us we are defective, mostly because someone wants us to be weak, so that we are easier to control. They told us we were not precious because they want to make money off us. They wanted to abuse us and let us flatter their shallow egos. If we knew we were precious and could rely on our internal power and guiding principles, then we cannot be swayed easily. We would not be nearly as gullible. I know this as truth and yet I still can not totally surmount the hurdle of precious enough. I am a…

The lovely wise and fierce Hag. The one we are all afraid of finding in the woods, because she will eat our hearts or the one that we shudder to become ourselves. The Hag is not limited by romantic love, she is not bound to her children for an identity. She is not even successful in the world of business and money. She is not intelligent or a good girl, she is not a nurturer. She will not mimic the power dynamic of any externalized source. She is embodied and empowered from within and that is not dependent on her actions. She is precious from the beginning until the end of her spark here on the planet

“Authentic and lasting healing does not come prepackaged as sweet and syrupy wisdom to spoon-fed to lost souls, nor does it aim to fix what we perceive as broken. True healing is born of both awareness and integration- nothing more and nothing less. True healing is an eternal, often cyclical process through which we discover the roots of our unique passions and wounds, framing them not as, respectively positive and negative but, rather as interconnected gifts that, when brought out of the cavernous depths where we buried them during childhood, cast a clear gleam on precisely whey we are here.” Danielle Dulsky There is something about the tone, the lull, of this style of writing that reminds me of Tom Robbins’ literature. A window deep within my cranium is opening slowly and connecting the dots. I think the sound is that of the primal feminine, dancing with the linear language.…

A client helped me formulate this one, (you know who you are)… thank you very much. A musing on general established patterns that swirl around us, some people are taught to take whatever they want and some are taught to yield to the former. Neither approach works well and this pattern has been the instigator of most of the violence and greed that we witness. The inherent problem is that both approaches are flawed and so the imbalances balloon. It seems that we need to abstain from taking whatever we want and we also need to stop yielding because both tendencies put us in disempowered position. We just need to stay put inside ourselves and act according to the situation at hand. Because this stance is so different then what we have been exposed to, it will take a lot of exploration and re-patterning, many self reminders. I had this…

Females are indoctrinated into Western culture at a very young age and told by every novel, pop song and movie that we must fall in love. That may be one of the first historically marketed drug, the feeling of love. We are not only told that we must fall in love but that we need that person to define us and shape our identity in the greater world. Be it a wife, a mother, or a business partner. Males are also sold the song of love but they are never told that they need a female counterpart to be successful. I read somewhere that the ideology of love was actually formulated around the mid- eighteenth century to control the population and before that time no one spoke about such matters. Let us be honest, it was designed to control the female population. Since the male population was never restricted by…

On a Goddess kick. We are going to talk about the pre-patriarchal story of Persephone and Demeter. In this tale Persephone goes by the name of Cora, which means maiden. Demeter is another way of saying Earth-Mother. In the most well known version of this myth. Cora is dragged down into the underworld against her will by Hades. Demeter practically dies of grief looking for her and that is why there are the Winter months. In the lesser known story, Cora willingly descends into the underworld to anoint and receive the newly deceased souls. “I am Cora, I have come to be your light. You have shed your earthly bodies and now live in the world of the dead. Come forth and I will issue you into the new land.” She squeezed a few pomegranate seeds and lets the red juice mark their foreheads. Cora stood on the rock in…

“From the Great Above she opened her ear to the Great Below. From the Great Above the goddess opened her ear to the Great Below. From the Great Above Inanna opened her ear to the Great Below. My Lady abandoned heaven and earth to descend to the underworld. Inanna abandoned heaven and earth to descend to the underworld. She abandoned her office of holy priestess to descend into the underworld.” Translation by Wolkstein and Noah-Kramer. The powerful Sumerian myth of Inanna. The goddess that willing submits herself to seven gates of the underworld, to be reborn as queen of both heaven and earth. I think about this often, she went through seven difficult gates, each subjected her to more fear and humiliation. She did not think she was going to survive. But she did! She was helped by those that she did not think would help her and forgotten about…