Women in the world will have been beaten or raped in their lifetime and everyday violence requires that women always be alert to this possibility. A crone is a woman who has found her voice. She knows that silence is consent. This is a quality that makes older women feared. It is not the innocent voice of a child who says, “the emperor has no clothes,” but the fierce truthfulness of the crone that is the voice of reality. Both the innocent child and the crone are seeing through the illusions, denials, or “spin” to the truth. But the crone knows about the deception and its consequences, and it angers her. Her fierceness springs from the heart, gives her courage, makes her a force to be reckoned with.
You have the need and the right to spend part of your life caring for your soul. It is not easy. You have to resist the demands of the work-oriented, often defensive, element in your psyche that measures life only in terms of output - how much you produce - not in terms of the quality of your life experiences. To be a soulful person means to go against all the pervasive, prove-yourself values of our culture and instead treasure what is unique and internal and valuable in yourself and your own personal evolution.
When we enter a forest phase in our lives we enter a period of wandering and a time of potential soul growth. Here it is possible to find what we have cut off from, to "remember" a once vital aspect of ourselves. We may uncover a wellspring of creativity that has been hidden for decades.
Before you can do something you've never done, you have to be able to imagine it is possible.
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I believe that the thought that women together can change the world is emerging into the minds and hearts of many of us, and that the vessel for personal and planetary evolution is the circle with a spiritual center.
A group of women can constellate a Mother morphic field when we gather together in a sacred circle. We create a 'temenos,' which means 'sanctuary' in Greek. In a women's circle, every woman in the circle is herself and an aspect of every other woman there as well. There is no vertical hierarchy in a circle, and when a circle is a temenos, it is a safe place to tell the truth of our own feelings, perceptions, and experiences.
For a women's circle to work as a spiritual and psychological cauldron for change and growth, we need to see every woman in the circle as a sister who mirrors back to us reflections of ourselves. This means that whatever happened to her could have happened to us, that whatever she has felt or done is a possibility for us, that she is someone toward whom we feel neither superior nor inferior nor indifferent. These are not just concepts but the emotional reality that comes from listening to women tell the truth about their lives.
Additional depth comes from the psychological awareness that strong reactions to another woman may occur because she represents something in ourselves that is psychologically charged; our reactions are not just about her but about us. Perhaps we can't stand her because she expresses experiences we have repressed; maybe we find her difficult because we react to her like we did to our personal mother or some other significant figure; maybe we are drawn to her because she embodies a potential in ourselves and the positive qualities we so admire in her are growing in us; maybe we avoid her because we fear our own addictions, dependency, or neediness. In this way, we are symbolic figures for each other that we need to understand as we would symbols in a personal dream.
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Until a feminist consciousness emerges, it is easy to be blind to misogyny and its far-reaching implications.
Just as places where the goddess was worshipped became sites for Christian churches, so too were her symbols taken over. Before becoming Mary's symbol, for instance, the open red rose was associated with Aphrodite and represented mature sexuality. At Chartres, which is dedicated to the Virgin Mary, roses abound. Light streams through three enormous and beautiful stained glass rose windows, and a symbolic rose is at the center of the labryinth. The path of the labyrinth is exactly 666 feet long. Six hundred sixty-six, according to Barbara Walker, was Aphrodite's sacred number. In Chrstian theology it became a demonic one.
In the theology of Protestant Christianity of my experience, the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost was male. In my own experience, because Holy Spirit or Holy Ghost was invisible, it became genderless. In the New Testament, the Holy Spirit descended in the form of a dove, which is a feminine symbol, and was called the Comforter. When we need comforting—when we have been hurt, or in pain or grief, or are sick and afraid—we feel small and want mother to put her arms around us, to kiss the hurt and make it go away. Even when our own experience of mother was not this, we yearn for what we know is archetypal; we miss Mother.
Long before Christianity, the dove was the goddess Aphrodite's symbol. Hidden in the symbology of the male Holy Spirit is the presence of the goddess of love and Beauty who was also a mother goddess.
There is no word in Hebrew for “goddess,” so the word cannot appear in the Old Testament.
But curiously, even if there is no word for goddess and monotheism denies the possibility, there appears to be a goddess in the Old Testament’s Book of Proverbs. She was Chokmah in Hebrew, became Sophia in Greek, and then the abstract and neuter word “wisdom” in English. Sophia as “wisdom” in the Revised Standard Version of the Bible speaks in the first person. Her description of herself and manner of speaking are that of a divine feminine being. Her attributes are those of a goddess of wisdom. She says: “I have counsel and sound wisdom, I have insight, I have strength.
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What we know through a connection with the Self is divine wisdom.
Feeling
authentic means being free to develop traits and potentials that are
innate predispositions. When we are accepted and allowed to be
authentic, it is possible to have self-esteem and authenticity at the
same time.
Syncronistic meetings are like mirrors that reflect something of ourselves. If we want to grow spiritually, all we have to do is take a good look. Synchronicity holds the promise that if we want to change inside, the patterns of our external life will change as well.
Synchronicity has been defined, tongue-in-cheek, as “God acting anonymously,” which nonetheless alludes to an awe that can accompany an especially uncanny and significant synchronicity. Maybe we should think of it as “Sophia acting anonymously,” when we know through the synchronicity that there is no adequate explanation for how this could happen other than that we are part of an interconnected spiritual universe that has just shown us that we matter.
Moisture and greeness have to do with innocence, love, heart, feelings and tears. All of the [fluids] in our body become moist when we are moved — we cry, we lubricate, we bleed, all of the numinous experiences of our bodies have to do with moisture. And it's moisture that brings life to this planet, that is the cure for the desert experience and the cure for aridness.
To be a green and juicy crone comes from having lived long enough to be deeply rooted in wholehearted involvements, of living a personally meaningful life, however unique, feminist, or traditional it may appear to others. It has to do with knowing who we are inside and believing that what we are doing is a true reflection or expression of our genuine self. It is having what Margaret Mead called PMZ, or postmenopausal zest for the life you have.
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Over the years I have come to believe that life is full of unchosen circumstances, that being human has to do with the evolution of our individual consciousness and with it, responsibilities for choice. Pain and joy both come with life. I believe that how we respond to what happens to us and around us shapes who we become and has to do with the psyche or the soul's growth.
The true cost of anything is what we give up in order to have it. It is the path not taken. To take the responsibility of making the choice is crucial and not always easy.
When we have rigid theories about what makes people the way they are and we project our theories onto patients and clients, insisting that our reality is their reality, we do the same thing their parents did. This is the wounding shadow of authority that says, 'I know what your story is and I know its meaning,' and it robs the person of the opportunity to discover this. This is a risk for anyone in a leadership role.
When you recover or discover something that nourishes your soul and brings joy, care enough about yourself to make room for it in your life.
Life presents us with repeated opportunities to face what we fear, what we need to become conscious of, or what we need to master.
To know how to choose a path with heart is to learn how to follow intuitive feeling. Logic can tell you superficially where a path might lead to, but it cannot judge whether your heart will be in it.
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A person (or ego) with a connection to the Self has a sense that what she is doing with her life is meaningful. This can only be known subjectively, it is soul knowledge.
While everyone has a different experience of what is soulful, these experiences do share similar beginnings. We start by giving ourselves permission to be soulful, to take seriously this aspect of ourselves, our soul and our soul needs.
As I experience it, appreciation of beauty is access to the soul. With beauty in our lives, we walk and carry ourselves more lightly and with a different look in our eyes. To look into the eyes of someone beholding beauty is to look through the windows of the soul. Anytime we catch a glimpse of soul, beauty is there; anytime we catch our breath and feel "How beautiful!," the soul is present.
Bliss and joy come in moments of living our highest truth — moments when what we do is consistent with our archetypal depths. It's when we are most authentic and trusting, and feel that whatever we are doing, which can be quite ordinary, is nonetheless sacred.
Whenever I experience something beautiful, I am with Soul. That moment of inward breath, that pause and awareness of "how beautiful this is" is a prayer of appreciation, a moment of gratitude in which I behold beauty and am one with it.
Love is the only thing that the more you give away, the more you have.
The individuation journey — the psychological quest for wholeness — ends in the union of opposites; in the inner marriage of “masculine” and “feminine” aspects of the personality that can be symbolized by the image of yin and yang contained within a circle. Said more abstractly and without assigning gender, the journey toward wholeness results in having the ability to be both active and receptive, autonomous and intimate, to work and to love. These are parts of ourselves that we come to know through life experiences, parts that are inherent in all of us. This is the human potential.
— Jean Shinoda Bolen
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