Woman's Work Day 1 "Do you know me? The woman who moves as the moon moves"

Using Dominique Christina's book This Is Woman's Work as a guide I will work my way through each of the 20 archetypes of woman that she sets out in her work - one per day. At the end of each chapter Dominique gives you a series of "seed lines" from which a poem or prose may stem…

Day 1… Shadow Woman…

The seed line that draws my eye is "Do you know me? The woman who moves as the moon moves"

Do you know me?
The woman
Who moves as the moon moves.

Drunken on the starlight
Lying still so no one will see her
Move.

The moon waxes and wanes within her
You would not see it
For the mask fits tight

Chewing on a scream
Full bodied yet veiled
God's bride.

Return after 3 months!

I haven't posted in my blog for 3 whole months! So much for every day!

My laptop broke and until I could afford to fix it I was using my iPad. Which didn't make blogging easy at all.

But I am back, Baby!

Touchstone Friendships

What would life be like if everyone agreed with me and we all got on great? It would, frankly, be unreal and also would any of us really ever grow?

I have a friend who called me this morning and asked me about how my weekend had been. I shared a deep insight that had helped me greatly and had brought me into an incredibly good place and space - it was quite a breakthrough. My friend's response was "that's bollocks!"…

Now, I would feel more shocked if it hadn't come from this particular friend who is a yang to my yin and I choose to keep in my life for his refreshing and honest views which are often contrary to mine. I was shocked mind you that anyone has the brass to suggest that something someone is sharing really helped them would so radically deny it's value.

We bantered about it for a while but we both dropped it and moved on. What was most remarkable to me (with a long history of being swayed by other people's opinions no matter how out of alignment with my truth they might be) I noticed that the truth and the validity of my experience was unaffected by his challenge.

After he and I spoke I then had supervision and described the triumph of retaining my centre and personal opinion in the face of such a challenge and my supervisor described him as a "touchstone"…

What was amazing about this is that my supervisor doesn't know that I recently looked up the true meaning of touchstone for other reasons so I know that it is a rough stone against which precious metals are tested…

… and the character of Touchstone in Shakespeare's As You Like It is a holy fool and narrator that weaves together the story (see image at top).

So my belligerent friend is indeed a touchstone - testing my mettle and metal. And I can think of other people in my life like this too. My beloved is oft prey to tell me when I am saying one thing and doing another - "you were vegan last week now you eat meat pie?" "you are driving at 85 mph!" "you bully that cat, reverend"(I don't, we just have a banter) "you never wash up…

I can only retort that I am indeed a meat pie eating, fast driving, cat berating, housework averse slob (which my friend Lisa says "makes you sound ace")…

What purpose these touchstones that irritate and punctuate and drive against the flow of life? They test my mettle! What is authentic, what is false? What is real, what is lies? What belongs to me, what doesn't? Where am I polished, where is there still work?

As my supervisor pointed out; I must trust these touchstone friends deeply to risk allowing them close. And I do, I trust them, I love them and I thank them… often long before I forgive them *winks*.

Communicating the dancing stillness

In the beginning was the Word. The roundly resonant primal OM that shook life from chaos into order. The Word needed an ear; a heart to hear; a listener. The Word became the media between the sender and the receiver; the first layer of duality; the first veil. 

Behind that veil there is the primordial silence; the Void; the infinite horizon; the wilderness.

Sacred is that Word; the movement of sound; the transmission of That which originally speaks (or sings). Sacred is that movement of tiny atoms vibrating against the ear that hears, the Heart.

I remember a time before I trained as an Interfaith Minister; I time when I knew what I knew and I spoke with certainty. The truth I spoke was mine and I owned it. I was right and I was confident; the words spilled forth spontaneously and passionately. I knew what I knew and I spoke as I saw it.

As if the great Word Itself boomed through me and shattered my illusions to dust the seminary training broke me open; I no longer knew what I knew to be true; the axiom of paradox and parallels; my language my gift and my barrier… shaken and healed of my certainty.

Ordination. The touch of oil upon my head, warm hands on my back, and my internal horizon blown wide open. The wind of the wilderness kissing my naked body, the cool sun shining in my newborn eyes. The Void touched me. The silence enveloped me.

3 years, nearly, onwards and I am finding my voice once more. Finding a language that conveys knowledge of That without certainty. Respectfully finding words that lay open to interpretation; that liberate the spirit of the receiver. 

Paradoxically I am no channel as I speak the Word; for its genesis is within me and is not me. I cannot be free of responsibility claiming to speak what the Spirit has told me. The Spirit is me. I am no channel as I allow It to speak through me.

Wordsmith. Sear not the silver and gold in the cold waters but leave the forms to bend and flex. Words are no longer flat on a page but dance! Conveying the essence of stillness through the shapeshifting forms. A process, a dialogue - no longer simply the receiver and perceiver of the Word but a companion in discussion.

Oh that the still movement and dancing stillness could find their expression in the hearts of a wider audience. This is my prayer. I pray to find expression, to experience communication, to speak and hear the Word aloud and in community and in the nation and across the globe… I pray to find expression that liberates truth rather than delineating it. I pray to find my humility proclaiming my love for this planet from the mountaintops.

I can be still. But the Word is within me, the Word is me, and it needs to be heard.

Amen

Marriage: conscious contract

I might be paraphrasing Eckhart Tolle when I say that when we think relationships are meant to make us happy we are heading for unhappiness; when we realise that relationships are meant to make us conscious… then we can work with relationship as a spiritual practice and, conversely, this brings us happiness.

I had a fascinating conversation this week with a dear friend who is about to embark on a conversion from civil partnership to marriage and we were exploring the difference between the two when my friend quite rightly points out… he gave himself 100% the first time around.

Initially the conversation rambled around civil rights and equality but we discerned them in the end to be red herrings. The institution of marriage has its roots in religion and politics and quite frankly boils down to a legal contract which is either blessed by God and your community… or not, as the case may be.

The image that comes to my mind is of the holy wells that are dotted all over Britain. I live in an area that is incredibly rich with them. Many of them now have churches next to them, walls around them, names of saints…

But those wells were there - and they were sacred - before the church came along.

This is how I feel about marriage and indeed about the contract too. That two souls should be destined to meet and to assist each other in coming to consciousness is a contract made outside of time and space. The contract is within and is either conscious or unconscious.

I believe the institution of marriage has been built on these sacred contracts like churches have been built on sacred wells - to such an extent that the well is often now completely forgotten and the edifice of the institution attempted to be replicated in secular law.

Strip it back, strip it back, strip it back!!! Before human laws governed love, before the church governed love… take down the FORM of what marriage has come to be seen as - allow it's dust to blow away…

There is the well. That contract between 2 souls - maybe to love, maybe to be happy… probably to push buttons, wind up and generally agitate too… a common destiny towards healing and wholeness.

When, in preparation for marriage, in spiritual counselling, we are able to strip it all back to the soul contract then we have the basis of the married life… a conscious journey together, the threshold for which is the wedding ceremony.

So the outer form of a contract is not an imposition but rather the inner contract being made conscious… to be blessed and celebrated.

A case study in ambivalence, absence, avoidance and inertia

I recently conducted a funeral for Enid; it was, for me, the most difficult funeral that I have yet to lead and it left me feeling dissatisfied; an itch was not scratched; it was incomplete. The family had been the most disturbed and disturbing that I had ever encountered. Nothing was manifestly untoward on the surface but the unspoken tidal currents of great pain and rage were whirling beneath us. Enid's son did not attend the meeting at the family home and I tried on successive days to contact the son for I had nothing for a eulogy. He was out, he couldn’t talk and then when I did speak to him he had nothing to give me; he was happy with the plans we had in place. His son in law wrote a short eulogy which contained nothing of the facts of her life just a couple of anecdotes. The first time I heard it was in the ceremony itself. The first time I met the next of kin was at the ceremony itself. 

There was genuine emotion in some of the gathered crowd; women wept openly; the men stone faced, red faced, unexpressive. The words I spoke were gentle, pacifying and deep. I could use the word God and did. I chose to lower the coffin at the committal despite not knowing what the son would have wanted; I had to mark the end of her life and I had to assist the transition somehow. The eulogy said nothing of her life; her ancestry, her roots, her parents, her upbringing, her marriage, her motherhood, her widowhood… just a couple of snapshot stories of funny times with her grandchildren. The service ended and the family shouted and cajoled themselves into cars to go on for a meal afterwards; a cursory thanks and handshake; a certain satisfaction that they felt it had gone well.

The funeral director gave me the cheque and I held it in my hands. It felt empty. I felt like I had showed up to a day job not a vocation; there was a futility in the act; nothing had changed, something was unspoken.

Enid had died at age 89 with Alzheimer’s disease. The ambivalence, distance, absence, repressed rage and unspoken resentments that riddled the family; the patchy eulogy of selected stories; the lack of engagement or closure in the token ceremony… this, it has become apparent to me, a case study of a dementia death. As I talked through in supervision how I had come away from the funeral ambivalent myself about the work, feeling heavy, pained and dulled by the experience… I became conscious of how this could help me write the book.

I happen to know that if we adopt the belief that the soul leaves the body at death; the spiritual essence of that individual returns to the collective for either reincarnation or ascension. If we do look through that lens then from personal experience I can testify that souls that enter into the “dementia contract” are destined to die while they are still alive; to experience a death so gentle that few notice they have even died and the soul lacks the momentum to leave the astral plane at all and sinks heavily into the family field if not consciously released.

I wonder if the heaviness of the family field is both a cause and effect of the "dementia contract". Maybe those with heaviness in their ancestry find that they reach a point where they refuse to carry the burdens further and begin to regress to a childlike state where they have no responsibility and cannot be blamed for anything; where their needs are met by others and they are cradled into death without fear or too much pain or torment.

That is not to say that dementia is without pain and torment but it seems that the extent to which the person and the family are identified and attached to their personality roles is directly proportional to the pain experienced by all involved as the personality and identity associated with those roles is erased. 

That is to say that someone is very firmly “man, father, provider” or “matriarch, boss, mother” finds it deeply distressing as their ability to play those roles becomes diminished especially as those that love him or her try to continue to enact those roles for which they no longer have the scripts.

This phase of dementia passes, of course, as all things do. And there comes a time when the memories of the roles are held entirely by the family and have been lost to the individual. At this point they settle into a routine of reliving the core feelings that have been woven into their muscle memory; for some this might be fear but for most there is a contendedness in simplicity… a gentle word, touch, flower, bird song, sunlight… brings about peace.

Enid’s story has reconnected me to why I would write the book. For fear of being judged as wacky I wanted to steer clear of the spirit clearance side of things to focus on whether we can work towards a deeper understanding of the meaning and message of dementia; largely for those that care for people with dementia; how can we find peace with the process? I still intend on doing that but I also realize that with the increasing levels of dementia in our ageing population if we don’t become conscious of the psychic and energetic load in our collective field of spirits not making a clean exit from this plane then we are sinking fast into a morbid energetic quicksand. A collective inertia, forgetting, ambivalence and resentment borne of, I believe, the shadow of the personality identified age that we live in. As the generations born into war and rationing now age and die the unspoken terrors of a war-torn childhood, loss of fathers, mothers who had to father, unprocessed trauma, denial of comfort and rapid developments in industry, food production and the pace of life... the development of psychology and medicine, the decline of church and community… all compounding into a cohort of souls incarnating for longer but living much more isolated lives.

So, I am in service of these souls and of humanity. The book contains case studies and testimonials… also meditations on 12 aspects of dementia such as communication, identity, memory, compassion… and it will contain a narrative and insights that the spirit clearance aspect of my work has given me. It continues to grow and change and evolve. Every thing is inspiration and every thing is information.

Menarche Ceremony (a retrospective healing of the maiden for all ages)

Having smudged everyone we shared in the circle and we sat in silence. We placed our right hand over our naval and the left hand on our neighbour and as we did we called to consciousness the unbroken line of women between us and the first women.

Then we lit the central red candle invoking the Mother and all our maternal ancestors, we called in the elements, the directions and those that gather to witness the work.

We held our tokens of childhood to our chests, the teddies, photos and drawings. The youngest of our group read the blessing of the maiden…

"Child, daughter of Gaia, you are not gone but spring eternal in our dancing hearts, we give thanks for what innocence you have retained and draw deep on this well of healing for any innocence lost. Change is here. Like the turning seasons; we are at once both powerless to prevent it and all the more powerful for it. At this point of transition may we celebrate all that childhood held and continues to give us…"

And we took our time to lay our childhood tokens in the care of the central altar. Beautiful song accompanied us.

I took the wine and held it, blessed it with spontaneous words I now can't recall but naming it Blood. And we passed it about the circle - with beautiful song once more - each of us holding the chalice of blood to our hearts and blessing it.

Once the cup had made the circle we stopped. The eldest of our group read the mother's blessing…

"Maiden, like the spring buds opening, your blossoming is to be held in time - take time - may the changes you observe in your body and emotions bring charge to your passions. A million, million women before you have spilled their sacred blood and as the cycles of the moon draw the great tides… know that within you is an ocean of infinite love. May you never fear your fierceness nor allow your sensibilities to be dulled. Always find your true north within you, the compass of your heart"

The silence we held for some time. The metaphor of the silence is the chrysalis of adolescence - to be upheld. And in that silence we called in the healing for any loss of youth that we experienced ourselves.

The silence ended with a chiming bell and we passed the wine to the left giving a gentle and whispered blessing to the next who then drank. When the wine had passed around the circle it was laid upon the altar (and later drunk).

We stood. Taking each others hands we sang together… There is So Much Magnificence in the Ocean and drummed and clapped to close the circle.

Then we ate.