Initiation is a very right brain, non-linear experience that can never be
adequately named or described by a thousand left brain linear sentences. It
came to me to simply share a dream that conveys what Sacred Feminine initiation
is via images and metaphor. I had this dream about 1982 in the very early days
of my exploration of the Feminine while I was in Jungian analysis around the
time of my first volcanic Kundalini awakening. I was longing to experience what
I named then as my creativity, and I see now I was desperate to experience and
express my authentic Self. I did not know then that this almost unbearable
longing was actually an experience of the Kundalini Shakti, the Sacred Feminine
spiritual power that purifies, heals, and awakens us.
I wanted to know the deep Feminine even though I really had no idea what
that was until I began to experience directly the power of the archetypal
feminine energies in my self. I read the books and pamphlets of the early women
writers who were students and colleagues of Jung, and I understood the feminine
archetypes at an informational level. When I began to work with the archetypes of
the Mother, the Amazon, the Lover, the Medial, and the Queen with myself and
with other women in groups and individually, I was initiated into the mysteries
of these archetypal energies. Initiation is a profound process of direct
experience that teaches and transforms us, awakens us to the truth of who we
are and what we are here for. These archetypal fires of initiation bring us en
face with our identifications, conditioning, old stories, and unhealed wounds
so that they can be healed, and we can live as the awakened beings that we are.
Initiation transforms us and life as we know it. That’s the challenge and the
gift.
We cannot begin to imagine that we know what we are asking for when we
follow our longing for the Sacred Feminine. This is a journey of not knowing… I
asked and was given this dream:
My five-year-old son is leading me
to a mysterious cave in the side of a mountain. I have a sense we are in the
southwest, maybe Utah. I follow him in, and soon I am walking into the cool,
moist darkness alone. I can see clearly despite the absence of any light. Is it
my own light that pierces this darkness? I walk the well-work path through this
cave that twists and curves like a snake and spirals deeper into the luminous
darkness. I walk slowly and carefully and come upon disintegrating corpses,
skeletons, decomposing bodies, and emaciated, nearly-dead people chained to the
walls. I am terrified, I cannot help them, and I don’t want to touch them or
even get near any of them. They are repulsive to me. I hear them moaning and
groaning, and the sounds of their chains and manacles clinking pierces my
nervous system like electricity. The stench of decay, waste, and death is so revolting
that I run as fast as I can, deeper into the cave. It never occurs to me to turn
and run back out the way I came in.
Past
the charnel ground, I immediately notice a significant shift in the energy and
I become curious. I walk on a bit and I discover a number of small, flickering,
candles in the recesses of the cold, gray stone walls. Obviously others had
travelled this way before me and lit the devotional candles. There is a niche
carved into the cave wall at eye-level, a small shrine with a statue of Mother
Mary. She is about a foot tall and looks like so many statues of the Blessed
Mother, standing there in a sky blue gown with her arms and hands extended,
palms open and up in a gesture of giving, receiving, and welcoming. Her face is
young and pretty and she exudes a kind of sweetness in her expression. What is
unusual is that she wears a hand made white brocade cape around her shoulders. As
I became ever more present to Mother Mary of this charnel ground, a great sense
of peace fills me.
I re-member and feel in my body and
heart my long-forgotten childhood love of the Blessed Mother. I had forgotten
about her as I moved from teens into my twenties and thirties. Waves of remembrance,
humility, shame for abandoning Her, and gratitude sweep through me, and I fall
to my knees before her in tears of love and the deep recognition and joy of
reunion. I wake up.
This dream holds significance on both collective and personal levels. The
collective significance is that the Divine Mother, Kundalini Shakti, can be
found in all things and beings, anywhere and everywhere, including the charnel
grounds and the darkest places on earth and within us. She hidden deep in a
cave in the charnel grounds to symbolize
the exile of the Feminine—divine and human—by patriarchy, made explicit in our
creation myth in Genesis where our Mother Goddess Eve is blamed, shamed, and
exiled as the cause of original sin and the fall of man. In my dream, the
Divine Mother is self-illuminating, her light emanates from within Her, as does
ours, and as did mine when I entered the darkness of the cave. Sacred Feminine
initiation leads us into the unknown shadows of our own being and brings us
face to face with the luminous Divine Mother within. Once we feel the longing
we go seeking, and it may take awhile before we realize that what we seek is
what we are.
Mother Mary was the form in which I first experienced the Divine Feminine
when I was six. I fell totally in love with her, probably because I didn’t live
with my own mother and my grief and need for my mother were unmet. I turned to
the Blessed Mother and had many conversations with her, wept in her lap many
nights as a child while in bed. She was my consolation and refuge. I created
shrines to Mother Mary in my room and outdoors, and at eight I started the
Blessed Virgin Mary Club—a child-like foreshadowing of the Temple of the Sacred
Feminine.
I was in my early thirties when I began my Jungian studies when I learned
that there were goddesses in other cultures and traditions, and that there had
been matriarchal cultures who worshipped a Mother Goddess long before patriarchy
came on the scene. I didn’t understand that goddesses were archetypal energies
that we can embody until I began studying Jung. I also did not know that the
feminine archetypes were portals of spiritual initiation and awakening until I
was actually invoking them with other women. Nothing in those early writings by
the Jungian women suggested that archetypes were portals of psychological and
spiritual initiation. It was a stunning discovery that changed my life and the
lives of many other women in the Temple community.
My dream suggests that it is our innate, child-like innocence and
curiosity that leads us to awaken to our essential nature. In my dream this is
represented by the sweet inner masculine of my five-year-old son joyfully
leading me into the mysterious maw of the cave. Jung believed that the primal
urge of all humans is a religious instinct. The word religion is derived from
the Latin word, religare, ‘to bind
back’, to go back to our roots, our source. I cannot tell you how many times I
have heard people passionately say, “I want to go Home,” and they don’t mean to
Kansas. It is natural for humans to want to know and seek their source and we
have been doing so since the beginning of humanity on the planet. Home is at
the other end of the yearning. When we direct our attention into the longing in
our own heart, rather than ‘out there’ where we may attach it to some person or
thing, we arrive Home, at the source of our longing, the source of our existence.
All we have to do is turn toward our hearts.
The image of entering a dark cave is so feminine—it is like going back to
the womb, to the source of our human life. The cave is also symbolic of the
tomb, as it was for Jesus and those poor dying and dead souls in my dream, and
it is the alchemical vessel of transformation. While in the underworld phase of
initiation, we may feel as if we are dying—and we are in certain ways. Much is
being released and much recovered and healed all at once. We are dying and
being reborn with every breath. When alchemy is happening, unhealed wounds
appear in order to be met and healed, old identities dissolve, and we find out that
we are not who we thought we were. Our familiar reference points may disappear
and our karma with certain people in our lives may be complete and those
relationships over. We emerge into a new life and the way to that new life can
be very arduous, with sacrifices to be made, old wounds to face, losses to
grieve. This is the price of birthing a more authentic self. At a certain point
in this creative process there is a paradigm shift from head to heart and we
begin to see through the darkness, see that there are infinite possibilities
held within this initiation and our lives, and we may start to feel excited
about this. Eventually we come to know in our flesh and bones that the womb and
the tomb are the same.
Embracing of this paradox of womb and tomb, or any other polarities that
arise, brings us to the transcendent, the shrine of the Holy Mother within our
own center. The presence of my boy child also shows the importance and the
preciousness of the young, innocent, unconditioned masculine energy within us. The
bright inner masculine, the animus, is an essential guide and helper on a woman’s
initiatory journey. His function is to point the way, shine the light so that
we can see where to step next, and enter with innocence, not knowing anything. I
have noticed that the masculine has played a significant role in every major
initiation I have been through. This is Divine Arrangement, not coincidence. The
masculine and feminine energies within us come into right alignment. Initiation
is not a journey that the egoic mind can grasp or enjoy. In fact, the egoic,
thinking mind will be de-throned on this adventure of the soul, like the Wizard
of Oz that it is. Jung wrote that a coup for the Self (aka the Divine) is
always a defeat for the ego.
Women need to make friends with this inner masculine energy along the
way, restore it to health and innocence if conditioning has corrupted it, and
cultivate it to its maturity. Eventually we partner with him in an inner sacred
marriage, the hieros gamos, which we experience as another shift of
consciousness. Many shifts and expansions of consciousness happen as we follow
the path of the Sacred Feminine.
Again and again, we encounter our
own shadow via the feminine archetypal invocations—the corpses, skeletons, and
half-dead beings that are the unhealed, unloved, unknown, parts of ourselves. As
we go, we become well-acquainted with our own fear and primal terror in all of
its appearances and embodied sensations. We also encounter joy, bliss, ecstasy
we have never known before. Our guides, angels, wise beings, ancestors, and
totem animals accompany us and give us support, advice, wisdom and comfort that
we can ask for. Under the protective, experienced wings of an initiatory elder,
we can learn the tools and skillful means needed for every step of the journey.
There are countless practices and ways to meet what is as it is, and even
embrace it, no matter what it is. As we discover and welcome our shadow—what
has long been hidden, not only in us, but also in our ancestral lineage—we
become more of who we are meant to be and abide in who and what we truly are. Healing
happens, soul retrievals and ancestral
healings occur, we discover our deepest gifts, and our boundlessly creative potential
is free to fly. We are empowered to step into the world to Be that which we are
here to Be and all that that implies.
© Sheila Foster 2015
No comments:
Post a Comment