Shakti

“Shakti is the primal energy of the Universe. She is the embodiment of power and strength coursing through creation, animating and enlivening all that is.

All forms are manifestations of Shakti. She is the Great Mother. She is the source from which all the other goddesses spring. She is also the fiery solvent that sometimes, either spontaneously or in response to certain spiritual practices, flows into the soul and dissolves the boundaries of the separate self, restoring our essential unity with the Supreme Being..”

~Mirabai Starr, Wild Mercy

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#RootEnergy
#PrimalForce
#SacredFeminine

Dancing Shakti Image by Tatiana Konstaninov

It’s Your Life. Own it.

“She never smoothed her wild edges.
She never stopped writing new chapters.
She fell.
She rose.
She danced.
She unraveled.
She let go.
She evolved.
She was a tangled mess.
She was strong.
She was fierce.
She was brave.
She was a badass.
The ocean was her therapy.
Grace was her religion.
She lived like there was a fire in her veins. e.
Forgiveness was her freedom.
She lived like there would never be enough time.
She lived like there was fire in her veins.
She lived.”

~Katie Yackley Moore

What’s Your Dark Art?

The arts of women have been called the dark arts for too long, and they are the keys to infinity.
Infinite form. Infinite being. Infinite life.
The art of far sight.
The art of inner knowing.
The art of sign-reading.
The art of deep feeling.
The art of song and circles.
The art of intuition.
The art of frequency translation.
The healing arts.
The art of kitchen witchery.
The art of communion.
The art of sacred story weaving.
The art of creation and manifestation.
And others too wild to name.

~Alison Nappi
The Wildness with Alison Nappi

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Image: Fire Dance by Julia C R Gray

Growing Yourself in Darkness

“The woman who takes the time to grow herself in darkness becomes familiar — perhaps for the first time — with the real source and containment of her psychic strength. No longer is her strength dissipated in obeying an idealized father figure, in pleasing a lover, in trying to satisfy a perpetually unsatisfied mother figure, in accommodating to a patriarchal organization or culture, in appeasing the inner witch who tells her she is worthless. No longer is her strength lost to obeying compulsions, drives, and obsessions that can slip in during the dark night of the soul and substitute for the real thing.

“And what is the real thing, the thing for which she longs? The love affair with her own spirit, the inner marriage that commits her to her destiny, the rituals of soul that feed her deepest hunger, and the sense of being pregnant with her Self, her creative essence.”

~Jill Mellick

The Power of Feminine Wrath

“I think the nature of what needs to be conveyed by women now is wrath rather than rage,’
she says firmly. ‘Wrath is different. To me, it means an incontrovertible statement,
put across fiercely, and also carrying an urgent instruction about what needs to happen.
Wrath carries no hate, but for sure –just like the utterances of
the women Oracles of old –it comes with dire warning.”

~Scilla Elworthy

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Call on Kali Maa. One meaning of Goddess Kali’s name is “force of time.” She stands outside the constraints of space-time. Kali existed before the Universe was created and she will continue to exist after the Universe ends. No physical limitations apply to Kali. She is pure primordial energy.

Both creative and destructive, Kali Maa is a symbol of Mother Nature herself. She is capable of both devouring and nurturing us. She is the strong mother archetype, the fiery mama who protects us and fights for us. Kali’s dual nature shows us both the beauty of life and the harsh reality of death. She leads us to understand that one cannot exist without the other.

Opening to the power of Kali is both exhilarating and frightening. She transforms whatever she touches. Every woman carries the seed of Kali’s primordial energy within her.

Kali is the fierce feminine warrior; the sacred Goddess who kicks butt and takes no prisoners. Her energy is needed when demons are running amuck in the world.

Kali Maa, we call to you.  We need you now.

A Love Story

She finds herself in a place that makes no sense. The people around her do things, mean things, thoughtless things all the time. Why did they act this way? Where is the Love? She knew in her heart that Love was key – the juice of the Universe. But she couldn’t find much love here. Just confusion and fear and pain.

Spirit Bear 🐻 came to her and comforted her in this crazy place. Bear stayed with her for years, protecting and comforting her whenever things in this crazy place got too painful and confusing. But gradually, over time she got sucked into the confusion around her. She made the mistake of thinking that the adults around her knew what they were doing and she started trying to do what they did, act how they acted. Bear was still there close, but she simply lost touch somehow. 🐻 Bear slowly faded from view.

After years in this place, she acted like she belonged. She was still so confused but she pretended that she knew what to do. She forgot about Bear. And she forgot about the power of Love. She became caught up in vying for power and status and money.

But one day she looked around and saw how empty her life was. The power and the status and the money didn’t fix anything or make this place any less horrible, any less confusing. What was the point of all this?

She began searching for “the point”. First at church, then in meditation and spiritual books  and healing modalities. 🐻 Spirit Bear drew closer then, but she didn’t really notice. She was too busy searching for “the point.”

One day in the midst of meditation, a beautiful, ethereal light being 🌟 came to her and showered her with love, so much love. She was left shaken and wide awake. Oh yes! Love was the point! She remembered now. She connected with this beautiful star being many times and felt better. She began to write , filling journals with thoughts and feelings about  her life  and all her questions about this crazy world. But sadly over time, she got distracted and pulled back into the chaos and craziness of the world again. She stopped writing. She stopped connecting with her star being. She forgot.

This remembering and forgetting happened again and again to her through years of living in this crazy place.

Then the dreams came. She dreamt of another life as a Native American woman who lost her love and wandered grieving until she was healed by Mama Earth 🌎.  In this other life, Mama Earth taught her to open up and love again.

She dreamt of this other life again and again. She LIVED an entire other life in her dreams!

The dreams shook her to her core. And they loosened the grip the crazy world had over her. She wanted to know more about this dream woman and her life. She learned how to explore dreamspace so she could explore this other life, this other reality. And her Spirit Bear soon showed up there in dreamspace.

She wept when she saw 🐻 Bear again. She held on and melted into Bear’s fierce softness. She began consciously calling Bear to her every day. And she began taking her troubles and questions into dreamspace. There she found answers – specific answers that fit for her. She began to slowly unravel her confusion and get glimpses of “the point”, her point.

She began to 🖌 paint and dance 💃 just for the joy of it. And the more she did those things, the more she felt like herself – her real self. She began to sing 🎶, first humming then joyfully making up little melodies that she sang to herself. She remembered how much she had loved painting and dancing and singing when she first came to this place. She remembered. And she began to love again.

And one day while she was happily playing with paint, her star being returned showering her with love – Big Love that cleared away even more confusion. And she could remember who she was and what mattered when she first came to this crazy place. She remembered her point.

Image: Goldi Goddess by Nancy L

Judy Chicago – Just Create

The Dinner Party (detail). Ishtar place setting

THIS

What a great article about the creative process. And what a #BadassWoman!

When Judy Chicago’s piece, The Dinner Party, was first shown 40 years ago. It was maligned by most art critics. Revolutionary art usually is. But Judy simply kept following her vision, kept creating. And the rest of the world eventually caught up to her.

Now in her 70’s, Judy Chicago is still a take no prisoners kind of artist. I’m in awe.

I believe in art that is connected to real human feeling, that extends itself beyond the limits of the art world to embrace all people who are striving for alternatives in an increasingly dehumanized world. I am trying to make art that relates to the deepest and most mythic concerns of human kind and I believe that, at this moment of history, feminism is humanism.

~Judy Chicago, 1979

Read The NY Times article here.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/07/t-magazine/judy-chicago-dinner-party.html

“… She wants everyone to see her art and to understand it, so that it might change them and the world.

And it has. Once your eye is trained to see Chicago’s imprint, it is everywhere, and unmistakable. It’s in Petra Collins’s menstruation-positive T-shirts; in the forthcoming installation on Sunset Boulevard in L.A. by Zoe Buckman of a huge uterus drawn in neon tubing crowned with boxing gloves; in the pink “pussy hats” that are worn in opposition to Trump’s election. Images like these — symbolically overt, politically and anatomically in-your-face, forcing a public confrontation with sexism — are all descended from Chicago’s imagination…” ~Sasha Weiss, NY Times

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