Friday, December 9th, 2011

I was wearing my leopard-print jacket for the first time.  I had been lusting for one for over a year and had finally found the perfect one, and tonight, was its debut.  Its faux fur was so soft and comforting, and made me way too hot in a delicious way as I waited, in the packed theater, for the show to begin.

All along the front and second rows were our friends and acquaintances.  Of course we all, also the ones who dressed up in an especially fitting way for the occasion, would want to be front row at the world-famous burlesque performance that had come to town.  Mixed into the rest of the crowd were people of all ages and many backgrounds it seemed.  I was so excited to see how everyone would react.

As it turned out, I have never, ever, heard so much screaming from such a relatively small crowd, in…my…life…  Though the screaming was exquisite, (as was the woman who threw her bra up on the stage) it wasn’t my favorite part.  My favorite part was the enchantment.  The air was thick with it.  At any moment nymphs, satyrs, and unicorns could have skipped through the room and I think everyone would have found it perfectly fitting.

Though each performer that the fabulous and incomparable Miss Indigo Blue introduced (an incredible artist herself!) was a gem of self-loving exuberance and overflowing beauty, one really illustrates my premise today.  Her name is Lily Verlaine, and she entered the stage, a vision, nude but for her panties made of flowers and a huge bunch of multicolored roses held up to her chest with an arm whose hand reached around to cup her other, naked breast.  She wafted across the stage and then around the room like a fragrance, and indeed she left the strong and sweet aroma of flowers in her wake, trailing along behind her as she moved.

She approached an older couple, taking one of the roses from her bouquet and brushing it along his face, and then giving it to the woman beside him.  She offered a rose petal to my husband with her mouth, while I happily watched.  She sat in a friend’s lap for a moment and then, as she stood above another man, he rose toward her as if he were levitating in her direction without even meaning to…like a cartoon character lifted along by the scent of a nearby fresh-baked pie.  She was that magnetic.

I thought, as I watched her, back up on the stage pulling one rose at a time from her bunch and throwing them, littering their petals everywhere and then filling her mouth with them and blowing them out like a sprinkling, sparkling rain from heaven, that she looked just like the goddess.  Not because she had a beautiful body, but because she radiated abundance, fruitfulness, and gracious giving of her beauty.  She exuded it, she beamed it…she let it pour off of her in waves.  She didn’t hide her delicious secrets.  She gave them generously without reservation to all who were in her presence, just by being and allowing it.

We have been taught, through terrible methods and with traumatizing results, not to radiate this beauty.  All genders are taught this, but especially women and those who identify as women or have a strong feminine side.  We have, by every institution and individual who wished to gain power over us by supplanting our own, been taught not to get in touch with the most powerful force of creation…the pleasure of our bodies.

Nothing can ever truly win over that power, unless we never access it.  This is what those who wished for false power realized.  They picked a long-term plan to rob women, the greatest keepers and leaders of this bodily pleasure, of their self-esteem and self-confidence, and shame them out of feeling pleasure and joy.  They took actions that made women feel unsafe and caused them to equate pleasure with danger and pain.

I know very well that creating a feeling of safety again is what will allow women to blossom in the way that will cause the earth to rumble with the kind of change that will set everything right, the way that nothing else is powerful enough to fully do.  So my advice is not that every woman out there start running through dark alleys in their panties throwing roses (a little laugh is always good. : )

You see, we have a revolution to embody and to bring to the world.  And it is the revolution of the sexual woman.  She is coming back, and she will be better than ever before (even in the wild and wonderful goddess-worshiping days of old.)  She will access the answers…deep inside her.  And she will know just how to lead us into the new world with them.  She won’t doubt herself anymore, or hide her vibrant sunrise-beauty anymore.  She will glow, and beam, and heal and make whole.  She will be the return of the goddess.  The return of the divine feminine.  She will bring it back for all of us, and the world will be restored, and reborn.

So…here is the brave edge beautiful women…here are the raw beginnings.  Look for the cracks…we don’t hide from or fear them.  We lean in toward them and push them wider open and make things that are no longer of service crumble and fall apart.  We have always done this.  Then we can help better things grow.

Yes, we start by finding the cracks that are the little places where light comes through.  These cracks are the moments when we feel safe enough to radiate our beauty and let ourselves feel pleasure.  Even if they are only when we are alone for now.  We make these spaces grow and then we let ourselves be fully aware of them, enter into them, and get our glow back on.  Only you know what makes you glow, what opens up the cracks for you where the light comes in and you can see freedom…and it may have been a long time since you felt it…but do whatever it takes to seek and find it.  It will be more valuable than gold, and give you blessings and beauty for the rest of your life.

Once you have found what makes you glow, find more and more spaces where you are comfortable revealing it.  I know it is scary.  It has taken me so long to fully allow myself to do it, even though I have been pretty darned good at it my whole life, and I still find further ways to radiate and open even now, finding new safety and space to blossom more every day.

For as soon as you make the room, you will blossom into it.  That is how nature works.  And while an actual flower also wilts and drops its petals and eventually dies, we are ever-living and ever-blooming flowers.  We only get more beautiful as we grow.  That is also why there is a youth-crazed disassociation with the beauty of the older-aged in our world, to dissuade us from finding the unparalleled beauty and power there.  We only get better with age…if we know pleasure.

We may think pleasure is out of our reach…that there has been too much pain for too long.  But there is always room for pleasure when we invite it back in, even one little drop at a time at first.  Really it is a vast ocean and all we have to do is take our finger out of the dam.  We just need to find those cracks and help them crack open a bit more, and pleasure will flood the safe spaces we have made for it to fill.  It starts with attempting to open and relax into safety when we feel pleasure.  Later we begin to blossom at even the tiniest prompting, and every level of pleasure, so long as we feel truly right and good about it, feels completely safe and freeing, and wildly wonderful.

This is a whole new language we are talking about.  Even though it is ancient.  It may seem so foreign at first that we would rather run back to what we know.  But we have the goddess living inside of us.  All of us.  And we women have a special way to let her shine, to let ourselves shine, and to ignite the world.  With that light we illuminate every dark space that ever was, every hidden corner and forgotten knowing.

We have the return of magic right within our reach.  It’s in your hands right now, and deep in the pulsing tissues of your heart.  You access it when you trust your knowing and spend time finding out what that really is again.  You access it when you love yourself, and believe in yourself no matter what anything outside of you says or does in response.  You access it when you say yes to your body, and pleasure, and no to what denies your very being.

My name is Jennifer Posada, and I am a sexual woman.  I am a sexy, juicy creature and I am letting my light shine.  I am a beacon on a mountaintop calling out to you because I know you can hear me.  Stand with me, even if only when you are alone and you stand naked in front of your mirror and decide to love what you see.  Stand with me when you decide to take the afternoon off, just for you, and have your secret happiness all to yourself.  Stand with me when you take the risk of blooming, when you feel safe and it feels natural, and to let others see your beauty and your sass and your gorgeous, rippling, radiant light…

Find that armful of multicolored roses and play with them, touch them, feel them…love what you are.  And share that only when and if you want to, because it would increase your pleasure and your joy.  Go out on a limb.  Let yourself be more alive, perhaps, than anyone around you and apologize to no one for it.  Let go of the ropes and the ties that are holding you back, and soar.  We are the ones who will change this world by loving ourselves and modeling it.  We are the ones who will find bliss in a field full of flowers, giggling like a child, just when the rest of the world is falling apart.  And we’ll be okay with it when we need to fall apart ourselves.  We will be able to cry when we need to, and even feel desperate, because we won’t be afraid to feel.  And that is what will save us.  We are the only ones who know that great ocean, and deep within, are not afraid of it.

Make contact.  Make contact again with the part of you that feels.  Not the part of you that feels what everybody else feels.  That will just fragment you if you go there first.  Go to only what you feel, and indulge in it the way you would the most divine latte with the perfect foam.  Even if the feelings hurt, if you give yourself over to feeling them fully and completely that will change.  Just do it over and over again, until you become an artist of feeling.

If you can’t find what you feel anymore, turn off everything else.  Step away from your obligations, relationships and commitments for even an hour at a time.  Find the place where you can hear your own heart beat again.  Use that time to do something that feels good, whether it is taking a walk or watching a funny movie.  There is no right or wrong choice.  There is only what feels good to you.

I will say that again, because it applies to life:  There is no right or wrong choice.  There is only what feels good or right to you.

That is the mantra of the sexual woman.  For there is no right or wrong way for you to be sexual either.  You can be sexual for only the rarest moment, alone on the sofa once in a while, or sexual with the wind and the trees, or very actively sexual with partners.  Sex doesn’t make you a sexual woman.  The goddess made you a sexual woman, and you are the goddess, so you did that.  You could be celibate for the rest of your life and still be a sexual woman.  You are not just sexual when you are doing or thinking about something you think is sexual…you are sexual when you look at the moon, when you do the dishes, when you cry, when you drive your car or read a book.  You are sexual because you are alive and the creative divine.  The entire universe was born of this creative “sexual” energy and it is what fuels everything in your life, whether you know it or not.

Being turned on is being truly alive.  How can we function properly if our power switch is turned “off”?  We need to be turned on!

So just imagine, now that you really know it, what can happen next.  You could become unleashed.  You could get your energy back and become empowered as never before.  You could have everything you wish for, and more.  You could leap tall buildings in a single bound (so to speak…or maybe literally…who knows!)  You could overcome whatever is holding you back.  And then you could do it again and again.

When we all spilled back out into the lobby for intermission that night at the performance, everyone looked flushed and full of life.  Movements expanded and voices and gestures were wider and louder.  You could feel the life force pulsing through the room.  There was more laughter.  In the long line for the ladies room, woman of all ages chatted like happy birds, full of life and eagerness.  You could feel the buzz moving through everyone.  A few women danced their way out of the bathroom stalls in front of the big mirror playfully, while others in the line cheered them on.  This is how the life was brought out in people…the life, and the play, and the joy.

This is how the sexual woman heals.  This is how the sexual woman brings light, and vibrancy, and ecstasy back to the world.  And just like Lily Verlaine didn’t do it alone, we won’t either.  We will be surrounded by a supportive cast of other luminaries, each of us like a rose in that multi-colored bouquet…unique, and celebrated, and collaborative.  There will be other sexual women alongside us, as well as the beautiful and awakened men who are ready and cannot wait to stand by the sexual woman, and those of other gender identities who have come to bless the world with gifts we have yet to even fully imagine.  If you are looking around and wondering where your beautiful cast of fellow radiant revelers is, just wait…they are coming.  We are rejoining more and more every day.

I can’t tell you everything here.  It is too much.  But I have told you everything that I can right now that matters most, and I will spend the rest of my life telling you more.  I stand as a sexual woman.  I will not fear my light.  I will love myself radically and unconditionally and take care of myself like a fiercely protective and loving mother, and make sure I feel safe so I can glow.  I feel you now.  I feel the light growing ever-stronger as we speak…for you and I are speaking right now.  I know you stand with me.  I know, together, we will light up the world again.

Love,

Jennifer

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Sunday, November 27th, 2011

I change shapes just to hide in this place,

But I’m still, I’m still an animal…

Nobody knows it but me when I slip, yeah I slip,

I’m still an animal…

Miike Snow

It was one of those mornings when I woke up in pain.  They still come, those mornings, just left often now and less extremely.  But I know what to do now.  I get in the shower and I follow my animal body for the rest of the day.  In fact, I always follow it now.  I was pretty good at it before.  It was my life.  But I am excellent at it now.

It was a day I planned to work, but instead I put a coat on over my pajamas and went to a beach that I love, and hadn’t visited in a while.  It’s near the road I lived down when I was ten years old.  It’s where I went with friends when I was a teenager, and still go with friends sometimes now.  It is old and new.  Living on the island where I grew up, everything has layers of memories like the layers of paint in an old house.  If you scratch the surface, you’ll find all these other colors underneath.  All these old feelings there and so much richness.  They both sting and revive me, I rise and fall with them like waves.  I live among my history and write it at the same time.  I feel this way so completely because, remembering so much of my entire soul journey and past lives, everything in the universe is like this for me.  I live in these layers, and I fear them not.  They are only intense feeling.  Most people flee from feelings, but I have learned to sit in the white-hot center of them and have watched them bless my life beyond all description.

I would not trade my life as an animal for anything.

Many of you have heard me say that I am not interested in enlightenment.  I have been there before and go there often.  I am interested in becoming better at being human.  Since humans are animals, I am saying that I am interested in becoming better at being an animal.

I’ll admit when the sun had already gone down at my beach, I chased it across the island at rather high speeds, just to drive fast.  And I did find its last rays turning clouds the colors of golden peaches and lining them with fire.  I listened to music loud.  I do that a lot.  I also write until my hand hurts, often…for hours sometimes.  I sing, hard sometimes too, songs that would make me want to cry if I weren’t so deep in the singing that I felt too whole to do so.  I dance.  Sometimes I dance all night long.  I have lots of orgasms, and lots of kisses.  These are the kinds of things it can take to let yourself be an animal, to bear the immense and immeasurable waves of really feeling your own being…of really feeling.

Of course, what it takes for each person will be different.  You have to find out your own way, if you choose, to follow Mary Oliver’s advice, “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”  To be what Eve Ensler calls an “Emotional Creature.”  Because it isn’t easy, but it is better and more wonderful than anything else I have ever known.

Immediately, when the vision began, I was on the edge of the ocean with Magdalen.  (Yes, Mary Magdalen, she is a good girlfriend of mine.  We have a lot in common, and share many of the same views.)  I was teaching my annual advanced course in vision (Persephone’s Pomegranate: The Visionary Oracles Course) and we were all on a journey together to view a past life.

Magdalen and I both stood on a rocky shoreline, right at the point where the water met the land.  My feet were bare and my toes wrapped around a rock that was lined in seaweed.  We were looking out over the sea and the islands.  It was just before sunset, with the crisp light of autumn.  She was holding my hand.

She told me that it was time for me to finally bring the whole of myself into this world.  That I could finally, truly have it all.  Many would say that I have it all now, and even I feel that I do.  But when she told me that I could feel what she meant in my bones.  It was time to let my even fuller glory be known and felt and shared, as I haven’t been able to completely do on this earth for a long time, and when this happens I will be even more gifted, and gift-ed.

Then she took me into a past life.  One I have visited before in Egypt.  I was an Oracle, and many came to the temple to speak with me, or experience my energy in some way.  It was beautiful, and sometimes taxing in those times, because the demands on me and the expectations were immense.  But I had all of that to give and more.  So I did.

But the memory was of a specific day.  One in which a surgery was performed (the ancient Egyptians were far more advanced medically than we realize now) on me to remove a small part of my heart.  It was going to be used to add to salves and medicines, and to create relics with bits of the powder that could be taken to other locations for people far away to receive its healing.  Silly idea really.  There are so many other ways to do it.  But for some reason I agreed.

What I knew, returning back to Magdalen at the shore, was that I would never have to give up a piece of my heart that way again.  My animal, emotional heart.  It is the great secret, for all of us.  It is far more powerful than any outside deity, any incantation, spell or ritual.  It is all we have ever sought and more, and it is right inside of us.  And while we may also find it in a book, or mantra, if it speaks to us somehow, we are more likely, I believe, to find it in a howl.  In a laugh, a tear, a hunger.  In our bodies.  That is where all the mysteries await most profoundly.

On halloween this year I was experiencing some heartache.  There had been some recent let downs, but it was more than that.  I was in one of those realms you sometimes enter when you are open to the worlds of deep feeling within your vast, ancient soul.  I had gone with my sweetheart and friend to the big dance in town and had great fun and laughs, and then afterward some of us piled into my friend’s big, modified school bus and went to his place.  He and my husband drummed while a friend and I danced, and I went into one of my deep trance states.

I went into a vision, a specific memory of being in a special kind of temple of women.  I remembered the fabrics, and the vibrant yet soft colors.  The way the warm air smelled.  But most of all I remembered the women.  I remembered the exquisite softness of their skin and their eyes.  I remembered their deep knowing, and the way they could walk through the world with the full oceans within them.  I remembered the way we all touched, almost all the time.  Arms intertwined with arms, heads resting on chests.  I remembered the way we felt in and about our bodies and their pure sensual power.  I remembered how at ease we were, with that, and with each other.

I remembered how it felt to be enfolded this way when one was grieving.  How there was no feeling too intense to be acceptable.  It was the full embrace.  For I have remembered so many temples before, but these were the ones where the women gathered to be together and to heal.  And somewhere, deep in our bodies, I know we all, of all genders, know how to do this.  We are just remembering.  And nothing will remind us more than the animal of our bodies.

I was Alice in Wonderland that night for halloween.  At some point my friend asked me, “So…you’ve been down the rabbit hole?”

“Oh,” I laughed. “So many times…”

So many people are afraid of letting the animal within guide them.  They are afraid it will take over.  Being “animalistic” isn’t exactly considered to be a good thing.  Funny thing is, animals usually do a lot better than humans at living well, sustainably, and healthily.  What I can’t figure out is how people can suffer through repressing their animal selves.  It’s the repression that causes the terrible things we associate with getting animalistic, not the full embrace of one’s instinct, feeling and animal self.  I wonder how people haven’t fully seen the cost yet of that holding back.

After all, most of the time we walk through the world by “changing shapes just to hide in this place,” as Miike Snow sings.  We keep a poker face, or the presentable face, no matter what we feel.  We cram ourselves into all kinds of awkward positions to get through interactions, work, and environments that often don’t fit us.  And so rarely does someone actually cry out at the wildness that is being constantly held at bay.

The animal within isn’t insatiable.  In fact satiating it over and over again is one of the most rewarding ways to live life.  And it doesn’t just want food and sex and sleep and survival.  It wants soft touches, warm breezes, wild oceans, bare feet in the grass, laughter so hard it makes your stomach hurt in the best way, it wants to cry and sing and run free.  It wants long talks, long looks, bright blazing mornings and dark, sparkling nights.  It might want a shiny red pair of shoes, or to give away everything and move to Bali.  It wants to ache with joy.  It wants to love until there is nothing else, and then love some more.  It might want parties, or deep forests.  It might want movies, or bubble gum, or to run through crisp autumn leaves.  It wants to be hot, and held, and free.

Being the animal that you are doesn’t mean that you have to find out all of this at once and run off to Bali.  It just starts with listening to your body, and the yearnings of your heart, and then answering them…as often as possible.  It could be as simple as what I did the last time I woke up feeling like I did this morning.  Too much an animal to go about my human business in life.  I just decided my work would get done later, climbed into the car and went to a place where I could cheat on my currently-strict diet and drink coffee and eat bread, and wrote in my journal, finding all of my redemption in ink.  You’ve got to reach deep into your well to feed the thirst of your animal.  You’ve got to get the water from your inner earth.  And when you’ve found it, you will know.  It will be like a warm rain, washing everything away but the very deepest truth of you.

To that deepest truth I write tonight.  To that deepest truth of you I drink tonight, a toast of imaginary pomegranate wine.  I drink a toast to knowing that we will all survive the flood…the one we face every day.  The flooding that rises up inside of us.  And I toast to the animal I know we will set free, that will swim in it, that will drink it, that will shake itself off, and get ready to wander the earth again…

Love You,

Jennifer

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Sunday, October 23rd, 2011

If I had my life to live over, I would start barefoot earlier in the spring and stay that way later in the fall.  I would go to more dances.  I would ride more merry-go-rounds.  I would pick more daisies.

Nadine Stair

I fantasized about it for a few nights before it happened…when I couldn’t sleep I thought about it.  And then, last Saturday, the time had come and I finally did it.  I got into my closet and began pulling clothing off the shelves and hangers.  I emptied every bathroom drawer and sorted through everything.  I got the last two piles of things sorted in my studio.  I know that might not sound like the glamorous or exciting stuff you thought I might be fantasizing all those nights about before bed…but let me tell you why it was so much more thrilling than it may seem…

You see, it was all part of a systematic plan.  I had spent the days before going diligently through my to do list, and catching up on countless emails.  So going through my “stuff” that needed a clearing was the final piece.  When I was done, I glowed.  I was radiant.  All of my energy flowed freely, and I got down on the floor of my creative room, on the cotton pad and furry blankets and pillows and…just let go.  I played my guitar…I wrote…I dreamed…

You see, I knew that was coming.  I’ve done it enough that I know that as soon as I make the space, no matter how absolutely and relentlessly diligent I have to be to get there, what fills that space is creativity.  Not because I have to force myself or plan that part at all.  It is just what happens.  Like a magnet finally able to move in the way its nature has been begging it to.  Like a butterfly when it is ready to be born.  In fact, it is only when I can absolutely set aside anything and everything that would require something of me that I too find my own nature and how it moves again.  It is only when I stop cultivating my growth long enough that I find out how I grow wild again.

The other night I saw a dance performance with five or six little girls in it between the ages of maybe six and twelve.  What I loved most was how freely they moved.  How they each did the same moves very differently, but they didn’t care…in fact it made it all the more unique.  They didn’t care because they were laughing…they didn’t care because they were having fun.

Later in life, dance performances, like other performances and productions, become serious and are often judged harshly.  We are supposed to look just like everyone else in the group.  We are supposed to blend.  As we do in choreographed dances, we learn the moves expected of us in life.  We learn the moves we think we need to learn in order to please others, in order to do what we think we must to survive in the world.  We forget.  We forget the old movements we once made that have no steps, no plan, no pressure, no expectation.  We forget the movements that flow from a happy and free spirit.  We even forget what a happy and free spirit is.

When I was a little girl I loved that poem about picking more daisies.  I had a little framed version of part of it that I kept near me in a special place.  Throughout my life I have stayed barefoot as long as I can, and am almost never found to miss a dance party.  I even used to go to school sometimes still wet from an afternoon dive in the ocean, or to forget to wear my shoes afterward.

Sometimes when I hang out with my little girlfriends in my neighborhood who I love so much, I want to tell them…I want to tell them that childhood doesn’t have to be the only free time in your life.  I want to tell them that being an “adult” doesn’t have to mean giving up play, and fun…that you can actually have all that fun and the autonomy that is missing as a child too, making it even better…that you just have to be really diligent about never really growing up, never getting so stuck that you can’t find your way back…

Gabrielle Roth said, “It takes tremendous discipline to be a free spirit.”  I couldn’t agree more.  In fact it is the discipline of my lifetime.  It is the discipline that sets me free.  After all, I also agree with David Campbell who says, “Discipline is remembering what you want.”  And I want to be free.

There are a million ways to be tied up in this life, and held back, and entrenched.  There are bills, emails, obligations, family needs, expectations, details to manage…it is almost endless.  But it isn’t quite.  You can still get free.  You just have to step out of it all long enough to hear the voice of your own being again.  It knows just what to do.  You just have to steal the moments you can, and let everything drop away sometimes.  You just have to think in ways some people would find absurd, and which are actually genius, and which will give you the moments that make life worth living.

The other day I had to spend two hours on the phone with four different customer service departments to right an error made by one of them…it was the most terribly tedious kind of thing you can imagine.  But it needed to be done.  When it was through I felt squished inside.  It had been meant as an afternoon off, and instead I felt I used my life force in one of the least important ways I felt I could have.

Sometimes these kinds of things almost drive me crazy…I am the first to admit it.  I feel that it would be hard for me to dig out of the hole of unfinished business I find myself in.  But that is when I find my best brilliance.  That is when I call for the magical golden rope that pulls me out and sets me on sunlit grass again…and I walk into the horizon.  Because everything gets done eventually, but none of it is worth losing my spark.  That spark is my forever guiding light.

So I become a radical strategist, in the name of my own freedom.  In every step I take I attempt to make more room, in the most efficient way, to walk barefooted and pick more daisies.  And what do I get?  Miracles.  All that miracles require is taking risks…and so I do it daily.  I already know what I have to lose, and that I would lose it by settling.

I have space for two things in my life…highly scheduled time where I get stuff done…and totally unscheduled time where I am totally free to feel, and to create.  That’s the way I’ve found my secret doorway that keeps me able to visit my own secret garden.

And it is okay if you haven’t visited yours in so long that it is overgrown, and feels like somebody else’s.  If you can make your way there, just pull the vines away from a bench and spend some time there.  Soon you will notice the old wild roses peeking out from under the brush.  You will see that everything is still there, everything that is yours…everything that is fertile and abundant…the food of your life and soul.  And suddenly you won’t be hungry anymore, in that way that makes your heart ache constantly.  Before you know it you will have picked up your tools and you will be pulling the overgrown weeds away from your beautiful flowers, and they will grow wild and free again.

It might take something drastic…a trip somewhere maybe.  Disconnecting from electronica (email, cell phone…) for a short time.  A couple of days, or longer, spent in nature.  Nature will always return you to your own nature, if you give it time.  In fact, if you give yourself the time and space, without any expectation of immediately working on something creative, you will find that creative spark comes of its own accord.

Run free, beautiful soul.  It’s not too late.  The daisies are waiting…

Love, Jennifer

Wednesday, September 14th, 2011

Even when I was a little girl I couldn’t fall asleep for a long time after I went to bed.  I could hear the heavy sleep breathing of my family members in their rooms, but I lay wide awake in the night and thought about things, and stared into the darkness and at the dim outlines of objects around me.  Most nights I would go and sit in my little wicker rocking chair, tucked inside the curtains of my large windows, and watch the world outside.  There wasn’t much to see but some trees, and the lit streets, and other townhouses across the way.  I sat there so many times, and thought about how I would tell the world what I knew…

About 27 or so years later I have been able to do just that.  It is my life’s work and joy.  When I took a group of people to Delphi, in Greece, and we remembered together as Oracles there, I felt the shift deep inside me…I felt that a mission that I started as a soul so many ages ago had completed.  I had helped bring back the remembering enough that I could let go.  I had done what my soul promised to itself that it would.  It was wildly liberating and the joy and celebration of it is so vast that I will have to engage it for a very long time to come, but really it was only the beginning…

I recently spoke for about 250 people at a training workshop for sound healers and it was such a rewarding experience. While I was at the event, I went out to dinner with several women who had taken my courses and we all had the most wonderful time…finding a place to eat, ordering lots of new things to try, laughing, and even welling up with tears sometimes talking about the Nymphs, Self-Love, Sexuality and so much more.  One woman left earlier than the others, and then, when we realized it was time to get back for the evening program, two others scooted ahead and disappeared into the parking lot.  It was just Samantha, Deborah and I left and we walked slowly, savoring each moment.

We talked about the joy of the Nymph Course which we had all been a part of, and as we did you could feel the bliss filling our bodies, and our faces lit up and the next thing you knew we were hugging, the three of us, long and deeply in middle of the vast parking lot of the mall.  “If we can be nymphs together here like this,” I said, “We can be nymphs anywhere!”  And we all agreed, and laughed.

As we walked Samantha talked about how special it was that she could connect with me in person and feel me like a friend after all that my teachings had meant to her.  She talked about how she was constantly becoming more and more aware of being gentle with herself, but how it was still hard to feel so much.  We each understood, and as she described what it had been like we could relate to how hard it was, and yet in sharing it we all seemed to be at the same time brimming with joy, and even giggling with shared knowing of what it was like at some moments.  And then Samantha said, “All I know is that 2012 better be good!” and we all burst out with laughter.  Through laughter she added, “But my astrologer friend told me that it is just going to get more intense!”  And somehow this struck us all as hilarious and every word that came next out of each of our mouths made everything only funnier and funnier, and by the time the little blue person showed at the crosswalk on the sign letting us know we could walk again, it seemed like an eternity had passed and all my abdominal muscles were deliciously sore from laughing.

We kept walking toward the hotel and Samantha said, “I always want to share about you and your work with all of my friends, but then some of them are like, ‘Well, so are you channeling and having visions all the time then?’ and I can’t decide…”  I finished for her, knowing how much more there was to it, “Whether to tell them everything?”

“Yes,” she replied.

“I don’t know how to tell them that it isn’t just about intuition or visions, that I have learned to love myself exactly as I am.  That I have learned how to have a wonderful hot bath at the end of the day…That I have learned to feel bliss in my body…”

“Any one of those things is life changing in itself!” Deborah replied.

And we all agreed that that was really what it was all about.  That so few people, still, knew that true power of loving who you are…being not only okay with who you are but really loving yourself…being gentle with and true to yourself.  Our words began to overlap, chiming along on the same wavelength like a song as we strolled into the hotel, not missing a beat.

As we neared the crowd of people getting ready to enter the evening event we drew in even closer to one another as we walked, and our voices naturally got lower so we could be heard just by one another, and as we did we became more and more interwoven in our speaking, finishing one another’s sentences and replying with delighted sounds of knowing, and yet never missing a single, perfect, juicy, soul-quenching word another said.

“It’s like this forever gift,” Deborah said as we drew near to the doorway into the ballroom where the event was held and came to a stop, standing close, and her eyes became moist and then all of our eyes were moist, “And nothing is ever the same after you love yourself this way.  After you have known this pure love.  And it’s like for the rest of my life I will always know because of the courses we’ve shared, deep inside of me, that there are others out there, other women who know…who know this joy…”

And it was almost as if when she said the word joy we were each saying it…we had each arrived at that moment and that encompassing, culminating word together and all the layers of meaning it held.  For we all would always know, whatever else happened in life, that joy, and that out there there were these other Oracles…these other Nymphs and Sibyls and Priestesses…who knew it too…who had it awakened in their hearts too.

Our arms were intertwined as we stood there, without ever having consciously intended the movement, and we looked into each other’s tear-filled, joyous eyes for just another moment of pure knowing…of pure understanding.  And then, as if synchronized in a perfect choreography that never needed to be practiced, we stepped away and I could hear the whoosh of our priestess robes spinning around our ankles as we turned and parted ways like streams separating from the ocean, and entered into the throng of people around us and into the room to find our seats.

And as I sat down my heart was so full I felt that it would soon burst and the energy flowed off of me in waves that surely rocked the entire cosmos, and I remembered, with a tremble deep in my soul, all the times we had done that before.  All the times we who remembered had met during the Great Forgetting, and shared our tears and words of joy and knowing, and then deftly pulled our hoods over our heads and moved back into the night, moved back into the world and the different places where we would do our work, perhaps without that shared understanding or sisterhood for some time again.  We knew just how to connect for that nourishment, and just how to step away and go back to doing what we needed to among the rest in the world that still did not remember or share that knowing.  And though the Great Remembering has begun, and we are coming together more and more as we once did, it is not in full swing yet, and we still part ways in the night to take our remembering to others.  It’s just that now, more and more, we now know and remember that we are not alone.

The sign of that one sweet shared moment, in person, in bodies, with other sisters who remember, shuddered through me and rubbed a sweet balm deep into my soul.  The sign did not go unnoticed.

During the sound meditation that night I went deep into a vision where I met with a very ancient Sibyl.  The Sibyls were Prophetesses who sang their prophecies, the daughters of Nymphs and human men, they were part human and part magical creature and lived for hundreds of years.  They were powerful women who were born unable to speak anything but their truth, and often lived, for that reason, in communities of their own kind near the springs and caves their Nymph mothers had, where they could most feel the ecstatic energy of the Earth Mother Gaia, and sing her…their own…song.

In my vision the Sibyl reached out her hand in the darkness in which I could just barely make out her form.  Her hand was more bone than flesh, but I was not afraid and took it in mine.  She carried me deep into a memory of being far down a tunnel into the earth as a Sibyl myself, in a chamber that was so dark and silent that it simulated death.  I remembered how, as Sibyls, we would seek these dark places at the edge of life and the threshold of death.  It was not only because that made one fearless about death itself, and even oblivion, but because we knew that some of the most potent possible power and potential existed in this state…in being able to walk right up to the place where you might be breathing or not, your heart might be pounding still, or not, and where the line between being in a body or not blurred.  To be in this place with no fear opened up all the heavens and all of the true powers of being.  I felt myself move in and out of the place of death as I had the vision, and as I had so many times before, and just as before I was not afraid.  It was home.  It was truth.  It was real power, and love.

Next I saw myself, in my Sibyl form, more ancient than the oceans, perched in a tower above the sea, cupping my hands around the small flickering flame of remembering in the windy storms of the forgetting.  I knew it was time for this part of me too to let go.  Another layer of releasing my primordial soul mission could occur, and with it I could finally rest at a deeper level.  I knew then that it was part of the place that I still held on in my body, the way we strive to keep our eyes wide when we are sleepy while driving.  I knew that this was yet another part of the incredible stiffness I had to experience in my body during my recent process with extreme adrenal fatigue.  It was brought on by a lifetime of food sensitivities, but I always knew that the deeper reason for my process with it was that I could finally let myself experience the exhaustion of the long mission I had been on without stopping to rest.

Now, in this life, I can rest.  It is done.  There is only the unfolding now.  Now I can feel the ache of having cupped my fingers around that flame and arched my back awkwardly while leaning for eons over a whisper of hope that contained all the truth of the universe, and all of its love.  I was not the only one who did this.  And it is not a whisper anymore.  It is loud.  It is your voice, and mine.  It is a song you can hear, even if still softly playing, everywhere in the world again, and its volume will only grow until every soul can hear the song of their own heart, strong and soft and potent beyond all measure, all the time once more.

The next night I went to see the new Harry Potter movie, the last one (no spoilers here, don’t worry) with my sweetheart and parents, and I knew I was in for it already, but more so when even an advertisement for the movie theater chain we were in made me cry because in it an enchanted forest magically grew up around the movie seats and I thought, “Yes, that’s my world…I know that world so well…”

But this is my world too.  This is our world.  We are the ancient Nymphs who now blissfully hug in mall parking lots, order lots of appetizers and new kinds of drinks to try at restaurants where we are loud and stand out with our brave light, laugh until we can hardly breathe about the intensity of the current energies on the earth and feeling everything so deeply all the time, and speak in hushed tones with eyes full of tears over the shared knowing of pure love and joy.

And perhaps we can most know that the ancient world and this one are united by understanding the myths that show us the path between.  Because I have a secret for you.  You are Harry Potter.  I know because I am the chosen one, and so are you.  It doesn’t have to make sense because it is just true, and so many true things don’t make sense at all when we try to see them through the eyes we have been trained to look through.  We need new eyes…our old eyes.  Eyes that see everything in a much broader light.

And the fact that you are Harry Potter doesn’t mean that you need to have your physical wand and go out to fight evil with spells and rays of powerful light.  It means that you can save the world by believing in yourself, by being brave beyond all measure and by being willing to die to all that you thought that you were in order to really live.  And you won’t likely be fighting it at Hogwort’s or in dark forests…you will be fighting it in grocery stores and where you work and at parties and with your family and friends.  For Voldemort is, quite simply, anyone or anything that tries to put you down, make you feel less than the brilliant star that you are.  And every time you don’t believe those negative messages, whether from around or within you, you win over darkness.  Your light and power increase, and therefore so do your joy and your ability to touch the world with that joy.

No matter where the negative messages, the ones that make you feel less-than, put down, wrong, unworthy, or guilty come from, even from people who think they are well-meaning or doing you a goodness, you mustn’t let it dim your glow.  You must believe in yourself above all else.  And when someone has something to say that is truly constructive and important for you to hear, you will know.  Elsewise these people or groups are simply harkening to an old way of being that is limiting and fear-based and self-deprecating and therefore deprecating of others.  And you…you are the bird that flies free despite all odds or words cast at you of failure.  You are Harry Potter and you are blessed and protected because you have been loved by the mother, like he was, and because you love yourself.  And you are, at the level of your soul, invincible, as he was.

Don’t forget, brilliant star, that you are the blazing light that illuminates the world and all the heavens.  Don’t let anybody try to put that light out, and don’t you believe the words or ideas that would put you down.  You can do anything, soaring bird, chosen one.  You are that pure love, and that joy, and we who know are gathering again, and we will triumph.  It is already done.  So be a priestess, or a priest, in your pajamas while you eat breakfast, in your car in the middle of traffic, in your relationships, at your children’s school, at dinner parties, at the movies, at work, at the post office when you are getting your mail, while you do housework or paint masterpieces…everywhere.  Know that you are Harry Potter, empowered by love, with your wand of self-belief that grows stronger as you do…and soon we will have back our Hogworts…our schools and our sisterhoods and brotherhoods of knowing and remembering.  And magic, first in our hearts and then more so and more so in the world around us, will reign again.

Love, Jennifer

The Second Secret of the Nymphs: How to Magnetize Anything You Want…

Tuesday, July 26th, 2011

I was deep in a memory of being an ancient Nymph when it came back to me, the feeling of embodying the magnetics of bliss, moving deep in the core of my being like a tide pulling me back to what I have known forever…

Once upon a time magical beings named Nymphs lived in the most luscious nooks and corners of the world…near springs, caves, rivers and the sea…in forests and in rich meadows filled with flowers that blossomed in every color of the rainbow.  They were embodiments of the magic of nature, that same thing which we all still embody now, but they knew it fully.  They lived in the bliss of full knowing and union with the magnificent and beauteous heart of the universe…

The other day I was feeling a bit heavy-hearted and was working hard on the computer when someone sent me a dance video someone made…you know, like a personal flash-mob video…and I watched it once, smiling, and then watched it again and danced along.

Suddenly, my world changed.  I was no longer in a rut in even the slightest way, no longer feeling slumpy and frumpy, no longer sitting in a workspace…I was electrified and I was at my own personal (and quite fabulous) dance party…shaking everything I’ve got.  I was a radiant star, a moonbeam, a firefly blazing through the night.

I tell this story not to point out that I suddenly discovered that dancing could change my mood (I am an avid dancer, relishing the chance to do it as often as possible and loving every minute of it…in fact I may take a dance break before I even finish writing this post…) but because I want to illustrate, with a modern-day example, how we can learn and take advantage of one of the most powerful secrets of the Nymphs…how to magnetize anything you want.

You see, when I was sitting down, feeling crunched and awkward, I was resonant (even if only partially, for our own great souls hold many different vibrations simultaneously) with whatever vibrations matched that.  I had to do something to break the flow of the wavelength I was hanging out in, and once I did, I was suddenly ready for everything good to come my way.  I was a one-woman party again (my default mode, even if it is a rather quiet party of one, sipping my favorite beverage, looking at the moon, and dreaming…)  And the rest of that day was different as a result.  I was not only open to the good and the fun, I was drawing it to me.  I had magnetized myself with joy, stolen from the jaws of a low day like the most sweet and erotic of stolen kisses, and infused my space with the energetic scent of playfulness and freedom.  I then defined what I would bring forward next.

We have this power, always.  This power that the Nymphs had.  When they woke up in the morning they were already and instantly in bliss.  Starting out that way, they simply carried on through their days in unencumbered, full-on, outright bliss…the bliss of fragrant flowers in their hair and feeling heights of ecstasy from the softest breeze or the feeling of water against their skin.  This is because bliss is self-sustaining (as well as world-rockingly healing, nourishing, and pleasureful)…we just have to get there in the first place and keep returning whenever we can.  It will self-perpetuate if we nourish our ability to reach it.  We just find a place where we can access the spring that wants to bubble up through the earth of our consciousness, and then it will continue to cascade, as long as it is unobstructed, in splendorous waterfalls all through our lives.

What I am suggesting is that if you want to bring something into your life, try to imagine and embody what it would feel like to have it.  Become what you want.  If you want to be rich, decide that you are rich and figure out how to truly feel as if you are.  What is it like to wake up feeling rich in the morning?  Try it and find out…even if you feel as though you are just faking it at first.  Fake it then.  The real feeling and circumstances will more easily come to you as a result.

If you want to have close friends and loved ones, imagine what it is like to be seen and loved that way.  See if you can hold and embody that feeling.  Put yourself around whatever inspires that feeling, even if it is only a favorite image or movie or book.  Steep yourself in it and become saturated.  By the time you are done you will feel so full of the feeling you crave that you won’t even crave it the same way anymore, (because you will be too busy enjoying it) and when what you wanted falls into your path, you won’t even be surprised.  You will integrate it and welcome it into your life easily because it will feel like a natural consequence or result of the energy you were embodying.

If you want to feel beautiful, decide that you are…again even if it doesn’t feel real but instead like a trick of the mind at first.  Believe me, if you are diligent, you will be authentically awfully darn sure that you are a gorgeous being.  And you can also believe me, if you’d like, that you are.

If you desire a lover, partner, soul mate, imagine what it is like to be met that way.  How would that make you feel?…As you walk through the market, the park, down the street, do so feeling that you are loved that way.  It will fill the air around you with luminous gold, and all that you wish for will not be able to help but to respond and match that energy.

In essence, you don’t even have to know which exact energy to focus on.  Just find the activities that bring you back to feeling like your most alive, juicy, energized self.  Bring yourself back to these activities over and over again with the greatest of disciplines and it will reward you endlessly.  I know it can be scary to say yes to yourself this way, this profoundly, but whether it is today or another day, one day it will seem less scary than the alternative.

It is true that regardless of how much you make space to feel your own energy and bliss, and to be in alignment and resonance with the energies you desire in order to magnetize them, you will still also draw to you whatever your soul needs in order to grow, (and therefore find even more ultimate freedom and bliss…in other words, to remove any obstructions to your deepest openness to bliss.)  Even the Nymphs discovered struggles before the worlds split, and had to draw more intensely on their bliss to navigate through those times.  But that is just exactly how we too can use bliss…to help us navigate through difficult times, as well as to fully enjoy the good ones.  (For more information on how to access bliss in the first place see my previous writing: click here.)

The Nymph in the painting with this writing is not afraid of the power of who she is.  She is bold, alive, simmering with the juiciness of her own being.  She is not worried about whether she will be judged or what anyone else thinks of her.  She is full of knowing, and wildfire, and calm ocean waves.  She beckons all of us…simply with her being.  She isn’t in the place where she is for anyone else.  She is where she is only for herself in the pursuit of her own special bliss, and in that way, without even trying, she benefits all.

When I began this post I wasn’t sure I could write it today.  I’ve been especially sleepy-feeling and foggy today and writing, in short, about the magnetics of bliss felt large as I sat down to type.  But as always, it flowed like the spring of the Nymphs once I was willing to let it.  And now, because it simply is time and I have a party to get ready for next, I think I will turn up the music, have a little dance break, and get ready for the next, whole honey-bucket of bliss that awaits me when I do…Join me?…

Love, Jennifer

Want to know more of the secrets of the Nymphs?  Click here to read about the upcoming course this August, available anywhere in the world, The Spring of the Nymphs: The Secrets of Embodying Bliss

And Click Here to read my most recent writing on the first secret of the Nymphs

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The First Secret of the Nymphs for Embodying Bliss…

Friday, July 1st, 2011

The whir of the fan across the room is pulling me along, asking me to tell you what I know…acting like a wind that is beckoning me into the deepest places of what I remember…

Like you, many days I am simply in the great rush from one thing to the next.  I am hustling into the car and back out of it, and walking briskly or half-running because I am late (punctuality is not exactly my strong point…)

But there is one central key in why, even with a hectic life, I am able to know and feel the power of bliss.  It is what fuels me as I half-jog where I am going, and what puts the skip in my step as I hustle along.  It is what makes me enter wherever I am going with a beaming smile and why no one ever seems mad at my lateness when I arrive.  It is why I often melt people, and my own hard places when they begin to stiffen and ache…I do a lot of things (maybe too much) but I also do nothing…

But wait…perhaps I should tell you a story first.  You see, I remember being a nymph.  Yes, long, long ago in one of my more ancient memories I remember being a magical creature that was more of nature than human, more subtle than other form.  I remember, most of all, how the earth felt against my body…there was the warmth of stone, wide and long under my body in the sun.  There was the soft, moistness of moss and sweet grasses and little spring flowers.  (For spring followed us wherever we went.)  There was the delicious rolling of water over my skin, and the tender light of flames glowing around me at night.  There was bliss.  In fact, there was, in these particular times, nothing but bliss.  Being among nature was all that it took to roll in waves of ecstasy…endlessly…  But the nature I am speaking of wasn’t just the flowers or the voluptuous, swaying trees…It was our nature.  It was simply being able to be with our own nature that generated the bliss.

I know that that magical land may feel the many ages away that it is, but in fact what made that magic in nature and within our own nature is still well at hand.  We have just become as pulled away from it as if it were in another dimension that we can view but cannot feel.  It is the feeling that the nymphs knew how to do, and I am going to tell you just how to open that gateway again…how to feel, like that, again.

It is, on the one hand, going to sound much too simple, and yet, when we try it, it may feel much too hard.  I know that doesn’t make it sound like something to sign up for, but just keep in mind that the reward is bliss.  And bliss?…Bliss changes your life.  Bliss brings you everything your heart ever dreamed on a silver platter.  Bliss lifts you up and shows you things you could never have imagined, and gives you new dreams, new hopes, new joys, new wants and desires.  Bliss heals your body and gives you energy and inspiration.  Bliss gives you wings.  And, perhaps best of all and most compelling of all, bliss feels good.  Is there anyone who wouldn’t like to feel good more often…or all the time?  And really, ultimately it isn’t just that bliss feels good…it starts out feeling good, and then it feels great, and then it feels wonderful, and then it feels juicy, delicious, pleasureful, divine…and then it feels ecstatic, elated, blissful.  It only gets better and better.

We may not think there is room for bliss in our lives.  We may think that knowing bliss means we can’t acknowledge any other feelings or pain.  We may think we are too exhausted, too far gone.  But I am here to compel you to know that this is not the case.  Bliss assists us in becoming all that we are, affirming all that is true to us, being calmed and comforted through any kind of pain, and feeling connected and supported in every step we take on this earth, and through this life.

So…how do I recommend finding this bliss?  In little tiny tastes at first…in little drops of nectar like licking a bit of honey from your finger.  I am going to tell you the first secret of the Nymphs for embodying bliss.  It is all summed up in the Italian phrase “dolce far niente”…sweetly do nothing.  I know…it immediately may sound boring or tiresome.  If we are going to have free time we certainly don’t want to do nothing with it!  And we don’t need one more meditative practice in which we have to be disciplined to find peace.  That would surely not be very nymph-like anyway.  No, I am not recommending you actually do nothing.  I am recommending that you find out what happens when you make space for nothing.

The woman in the painting above is simply lying down on a soft fabric, with a comfortable pillow, a beautiful sunflower to look at, and a fan to cool herself.  Some feathers from the fan are floating above her and she is simply playing with them, capturing and then letting them go…tossing them up again and letting them float again.  She is idle and yet not truly, for she is also playful and absorbed, even creative.  It is exactly these states that nourish us and bring us then into blissful states.  Don’t you just want to be her right now?  Warm and free?

Each item the woman has with her is important, and representative of what we must do in order to create the space to move more deeply into bliss.  If she were too hot because she didn’t have her fan it would be distracting.  If she didn’t have her lovely rug or pillow she might be uncomfortable, and if she had somewhere to be in five minutes, or even fifteen, she wouldn’t be able to relax.  If she didn’t have the beautiful sunflower to rest her eyes on when she wanted to, or the playful feathers than came purely from the spontaneity of the moment, the experience wouldn’t have been the same.  Indeed had she been in conversation or too busy doing a project she might not even have noticed the feathers.  I want you to be able to notice the feathers.  Just that.  Because those feathers represent all the little happinesses and playfulness that you might otherwise miss, and that lead to bliss.

So, back to what makes me different as I bustle through the busy times in my life.  What is different for me is that I have made a practice of bliss in my life.  And it isn’t hard, or structured, or a chore.  I am so used to giving myself even little moments of bliss that it happens very naturally for me now, even when I only have a tiny window of time.  That is the benefit of learning to make that space, wherever you can.  Because now I just fall into bliss whenever an open moment arrives.  For instance, in the middle of a heavy work day when I have been on the computer for hours, I stumble outside in my bare feet and crouch down in the grass and pick strawberries in my yard…and I really taste them, and I get my fingers juicy and dirty.  And I am certainly a nymph once more.  I catch any space of even five minutes that is open, but I also make whole afternoons that are all my own.  If we start with the five minute spaces, the afternoons will come.

Try starting with just an hour.  Then an hour a week, then increase it whenever you can.  You can even simply re-create what you see in this painting, but if there are no feathers just watch the clouds, or the way the light plays on the leaves of the nearby plants, or bring a flower and simply gaze into it.  Get lost and let your thoughts get hazy, and, because heaven forbid, don’t do anything constructive on purpose.  You will find, soon enough, that the most constructive, creative, enlightening states come from this…but not because you tried…because you didn’t.  Not because you did something, but because you made space for nothing, and eventually, bliss filled it.

Love, Jennifer

Want to know more of the secrets of the Nymphs?  Click here to read about the upcoming course this August, available anywhere in the world, The Spring of the Nymphs: The Secrets of Embodying Bliss

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Saturday, May 14th, 2011

I’m going to let you in on a little secret…(okay maybe more than one.)  It’s a secret that I have committed my life to making a secret no more…and that I am just about to get a whole lot more serious about.  Well…serious in a truly playful and epically fun way.  After all, isn’t that the only way to get serious about pleasure?

Oh yes, I’m not just about to jump off the high diving board that there is no turning back from into pleasure…I have already done it.  And let me tell you while sailing through it…the air feels mighty fine…and the water below…I have felt it before…and it is the very juice that makes life worth living, and an act of pure beauty and bliss…ups, downs, and all the rest included…

Many of you know that I have loved myself from my earliest memories, that it is what propelled me to teach what I do, and that it is what guides me in all of the ways I lead my life and make my choices.  It has enriched and informed my every experience in this life, and many others, and there is no way that I could ever recommend self-love highly enough…and yet I still try.  Since the act of self-love (I teach self-love through the gateway of action versus trying to change thoughts first) is always pleasureful, I am also a pleasure beacon, a pleasure ambassador, a little golden, glowing ball of pleasure really…it is my life and the throb of my heart to direct myself to pleasure, because it is the surest healer, reminder of who we truly are, and guide.

“Oh boy…”  You might be thinking…”That is not at all how I live but that sounds good!”  I have great news.  Living a life of pleasure is not about negating all of your other experiences and emotions.  In fact the only way to pleasure is to invite and embrace and envelope all the parts of yourself into one whole…and welcome it all.  Self-love is radical self-acceptance, and, as I always say, to love oneself utterly is in fact the most radical and revolutionary act there has ever been.  This is the way we will change, and effectively rock in the best possible way, this world more than any other.

So…having said all of this…why am I so fired up at this particular moment?  Well, it all started with the Sacred Sexuality Oracle Course I teach every winter.  In that course I teach, central to everything, that…and here is the “secret” mentioned at the start…”loving pleasure heals all.”  And since the fastest way to enter into pleasure and experience it more often is to increase your self-love, and since self-love is the foundation for every single course at the Oracle School…that means pleasure is at the very heart of my teachings.  Pleasure and Love (self-love is love…in fact it is the most direct path to becoming a pure vessel of love in all ways…one’s truest being, that I know.)  Quite the combination…and one always, at the most essential and authentic level, generates the other.  Really they are one.

So…each year after I teach the Sacred Sexuality Course, and women who have ranged from their late-twenties to their early-seventies have radical experiences of opening that make them bloom, and grow and feel their “juiciest, yummiest, best ever”…and I do too…I feel so profoundly how needed this focus on pleasure really is.  So I decided to crank it up a notch…

I wanted to keep pleasure…real-deal, super-strong, pleasure, as my clear focus even more than ever.  I decided to do two things…find a way to teach about it even more often and more potently infused with the pure power of the pleasure-loving universe, (which simply requires me being even more juiced up inside…naturally) and to find and read books on the subject of pleasure to add to my Sacred Sexuality booklist.  And oh friends…when you know what you desire and you allow yourself to desire it (another key component to bringing about pleasure)…then when it rains, it pours.  Because just making pleasure my even bigger number one priority than ever before, changed everything again.  That’s what happens for all of us as we deepen into these new layers of self-love.

I have been overflowing with opportunities, falling at my feet, to experience new pleasure and own my desires even more deeply.  I have been bombarded with the most pleasure-positive messages I could ever hope for.  I have been falling all over myself with the new lightness of what I feel entering in and coming next.  I came primed, and I am simply ready to pump.  I know…edgy right?  Full of potential innuendo?  Yup.  Because everything seems to begin to insinuate creativity and bliss when you know how to welcome them in, and then life changes right in front of your eyes…  And because yes, the lines between spirituality and sexuality are finally more fully blurring away…the lines between transcendent and human…and the blur is oh-so stunningly beautiful…

And you can still cry…and get lost…and suffer.  You are just able to love yourself even in your desperation.  The lighthouse can still be made out in the distance amid the stormy waters.  You are connected…terribly and beautifully alive…and free.  You are whole and there is nothing discarded, rejected, or thrown out about you.  You are both strong and so flexible that no wind can tear up your roots, or be too powerful for you to fly on either.  You are true.  And when the wild pain has passed, buffered even ever so-slightly but so, by your reservoir of self-love, you are ready for pleasure again.  You are open like you were as a child, or baby, before you knew anything much but love.  And yet you are not exposed and unprotected.  You are quite literally invincible because you are not afraid of anything dark within you…and you know, no matter what, that you have love on your side.  You even know it, deep inside, when you doubt it or believe it at some time to be unreal.

It is time for the summer’s sweetest cherry…on the palm of your hand in the sun…no matter what time of year it is.  It is time for the warm sun of your heart to light everything within you.  I hope you will join me in this year and ever beyond…on the path of pleasure.  Pleasure and love are the heart of all my teachings, and if you cannot be in the Courses, continue to check out my writings here, the Oracle Prophecies, Oracle Messages, and other resources I send out via my email newsletter.  I am overflowing, planning to do a lot more of it (stay on the lookout for great new changes!), and would love to do it with all of you, my beautiful Oracle companions around the world…

It is, so very truly, my pleasure…

Love, Jennifer

Sunday, March 27th, 2011

I was getting ready for a party…the way I usually do.  I drag my behind up the stairs when I am down to the wire on having time to do something between sprucing up and completely glamming out (depending on the event.)  It doesn’t matter how potentially tired or anti-social I am beforehand.  I don’t miss chances to party…not only because they don’t come every night in the small but very special place I live, but because the parties here are usually so unique and fabulous it makes them unmissable.)  I lug our big boombox into the upstairs bathroom with me and the rougher I feel beforehand, the louder I play the music while I glitter myself up.  I come out not just with the right clothes on, but with my heart pounding and my mind totally made over.  I am ready to go out into the night and find out what it holds for me.  I am ready to dance.

A month or two ago it was one of those nights.  It was a 70s party and I had on the psychedelic turquoise and red dress on, a sequin hat I had a fun hell of a time trying to get my curls to stay inside, and huge glitter sunglasses on.  I even got to buy the screaming red lipstick I had just bought (for a “towel-dry my hair, put on tinted lipstick and fly out of the house” kind of girl this is a lot of dressing up and quite exciting…)  And suddenly in the midst of my mix of new music, a new Adele song started playing, and before too long I was singing along…and then the lines of life were blurring.  I was looking into my own eyes in the mirror, as I sang with my full heart and whole soul, and I was seeing myself.  I saw all of my passion and beauty, and it was a landslide…an avalanche…it was dams breaking open.  It was knowing that even the smallest doubts that had cropped up in my garden, in the places I’d not been looking, had no sway in this wildfire.  They were all consumed.  And all in a moment…

Because I sang a song, a song I had to put on repeat to learn as I went because I’d never heard it before.  A song about heartache that I didn’t even have, but that we all have known.  We all knew it before we were born, we remembered it even in the land of pure love, because we knew it wasn’t over…not just yet.  All because I sang a song, to myself, with all that I had, in my 7os costume on an otherwise-slow Sunday night, trying to rally myself to go out and shake everything I’ve got.

I knew that if anyone had a problem with me…looked down on me in any way…they just didn’t know me.  Their loss, too.  Because I was so damn beautiful…all the way through.  There just wasn’t any other way to see it.  And I know…you’d think I didn’t even need this.  I was, after all, as I often speak and write of, born loving myself…it is my greatest gift.  But I also say that knowing yourself, and loving yourself, is a moment to moment practice and friends…this is how I do it.  This is what I am always talking about…bringing yourself back to yourself by doing things that remind you of who you really are.  Over and over again until you are just so good at it that it happens on its own, like it did to me that night.

That’s why I go outside every with chance I can steal…why I stare at the blue sky, and the ocean, and the moon.  It’s why I rally to go to every party.  It’s why I love hard no matter how much I have been hurt.  It’s why I open again and again to try to make friends.  It’s why I dance…why I sing…why I teach…why I write…why I went up into my art room the other day, closed the door, played my guitar, took photos, painted, drew, and banged out soft poems on my old typewriter.  It’s why I wore overalls all weekend.  It’s why I am going to the sauna tonight to sweat until I can’t remember what it felt like to be sort-of sick all week, and to find out what it feels like when I am hot enough to melt and my skin is wet and soft like the seal I am somewhere inside.  Selkie, I return to the sea…to the wild tempest inside of me, and the wildfire that burns me, again and again, but which shows me the stars.  Living as a lover is hard, but there is no finer gold, no sweeter honey…no more beautiful thing than that life.  I won’t ever give it up.  Some might think I will eventually get broken, but they just don’t know how broken I have already been…and how it opened me up to the sunburst waiting underneath.

If only we all knew that falling apart is okay…if you can just endure it, in any way that gets you through, it will always take you somewhere better.  And if you are not there yet it is because you aren’t done falling apart.  Just find something…anything that brings you back to yourself…and then keep visiting it.  Don’t leave it alone.  Make it your temple.  But not the temple of should…never the temple of should.  Only the temple of what your soul and soft body longs for in any moment.  Find that, and you will never be empty.  Your mirror will never be too clouded to let you see yourself.  Remember what I always say…”It isn’t that I never forget.  It’s that I never forget how to remember.”

You have to find what makes you real again.  What makes you come to life again.  It is you loving yourself that will make you real like the Velveteen Rabbit.  It is you kissing yourself that will make you wake from the thousand years sleep…and don’t worry.  There will still be princes.  (Princesses too of course for those who would prefer one. : )

Here is the thing.  I was watching the most beautiful animated movie about magical Owls and, of course, there was the dark and the light…there were the good guys and the bad.  And the old warrior-priestess rose up in my blood and I felt myself ready for battle as I once did.  I know that story, I thought.  I know that story so well.  Don’t you just remember it in your bones?  The battle between the light and the dark?  Only it isn’t a question of spears and swords, no.  It isn’t a battle of a lost ancientness or of the future.  It is the hidden battle that rages on right now.  Not between disembodied dark forces soaring through hyperspace in Harry Potter’s nightmares (well…maybe a little like that…)  It is the battle inside of you over whether you will decide that you are okay…that you are good…that you are worthy and beautiful and exquisite and brilliant…or whether you will succumb to what others around you have told you, in words or silently, about who you are that is in any way negative or less than the sparkling stunning-ness that you are.  And the battle is won when you decide that nobody has the right to make you feel bad about yourself.  And that you still have the right to feel bad if you need to…you can bless all of your feelings and embrace them all and trust that they have a purpose and a meaning and a value.  But you can just decide that you are damn-well worth every beauty in this life.  That you are not what anyone who has thought less of you has said you are, or insinuated you are, or tried to show you that you are.

You can grab the psychic glass-cleaner (self-love and self-empowerment) and wipe clean the mirror inside of you…so you can finally see yourself, for yourself.  If you aren’t sure go to the ocean and ask her how you are looking today.  Ask the stars if they think you have anything beautiful to say.  Ask your loving pet or that one friend who is always your cheerleader and celebrator (through the good and the bad…with honesty and integrity.)  Ask your freckles, ask the flowers in your garden.  Ask your paintbrush, your pen, your hands.  Then shut out the leaky places where the drafts are getting in, and bask in your warmth.  And then, sweet firefly friend of mine, you will light the world up, even more and ever more, with your glow…

Love, Jennifer

Friday, February 25th, 2011

I often feel like I am the woman in this painting, looking out at the ocean.  Only I feel that I have been standing there not for moments or hours, but for eons…looking out over the waves of the cosmic ocean, watching the worlds rise and fall, and rise again…

I have always adored the ocean, and kept it close to me.  I believe I have loved it most because it is the only thing that I feel mirrors the depth and intensity of my heart.  Yes, the universe is more vast…but the ocean is both vast and contained.  Both contained and uncontainable.  It is both wild and fierce, and soft and gentle.  It both adapts to its environments and changes them.  It is pulled by great gravitational forces, and can pull almost anything into it.  It surrenders, and it rocks.  But most of all, in passionate waves, it rolls…

It had been twelve years since I’d been to Hawai’i when I went last month.  That previous time had been my first, after a long, hard winter.  I remember waking the first morning to the sun, stumbling out my door and down the hill and plucking a ripe papaya.  I opened it with my pocket knife and had my breakfast there, in the clothes I slept in.  And I knew then that everything was finally going to be okay.

This time in Hawai’i I swam every day that the surf would let me in the water (it was a time of wildly high surf).  I would swim out to the place just where the waves crested…and wait for them.  I’d get so exited when a big one came, and I would swim rapidly toward it, until I was face to face with the wall of it, and then turn quickly to ride it blissfully in.  Then I’d turn right around quickly in hopes of another big one.  I did this endlessly.  It was all I wanted to do and it brought me the most amazing joy.

There were only a couple of times when I knew, instinctually, that I had missed the moment and the crest was going to pull me under and smash me into the beach as I’d watched it do to so many others.  So I dove into and through it, in those moments, just in time.

And I thought a lot about all of us, and how bravely we try to face the waves that come every day, and every night.  They have always come, these waves of life, and feeling, for all humans.  But now we live in a time where there are more of these waves of transformational energy than ever, and they are more potent than ever.  I know we find ourselves being crashed into rocky shores and it may feel that it is too often.  I know we may sometimes feel beaten.

I know, among other reasons, because when I arrived in Hawai’i I felt broken myself.  Not unfixable by any means, but it would be a lie to say that I didn’t feel broken.  For the last three years I have been remedying a serious adrenal depletion, brought on by a series of stressors to my body including reactions to food, and exposure to toxins (mostly in my travels.)  My levels of the crucial hormones and substances the adrenals make were so low that it would have taken down the mightiest creature.  They needed to be…for I am a might creature indeed, and I needed, to finally…go down.

Not because I was too mighty, no.  Because I had been too strong for too long.  I had been on my mission as an Oracle, carrying the memory and being brave and bold and passionate enough for every battle.  I had put everything I had on the line, including my life, over and over.  And I was always strong enough for more, if it meant completing what I had sworn to in my deepest soul, out of pure commitment and coming from deepest love.

And it has been, my friends, so very many lifetimes.  Now, in this time when the Great Remembering is finally underway, I can let go and let all the pain and exhaustion of my lifetimes as a “spiritual warrior” be felt.  So when friends asked why I didn’t just “tune in” and get the answers about why things were happening the way they were with my health and what I should do, I told them…

I know why this is happening.  I am finally letting go now and all of this suffering needs to be felt, because it wasn’t before.  If I had the answer about the perfect “fix” right now I wouldn’t allow myself to complete this release.  There is also much I am meant to learn in the meantime, by putting one foot in front of the other and learning as I go.  By not having answers.  My beings had talked to me about the central issue being one of the nervous system, so I knew which way to look.  But it was clear within me I neither wanted nor needed any further information.  I knew all along I could heal myself whenever I was ready to, but I was determined, finally in this lifetime, to not cut the experience short so I could move onto whatever was next.  I was determined, this time, to get every last bit of the poison out, no matter what it took.

After all, I told them, being an Oracle is not just about getting answers, even when you can.  It is about not having answers too, when that is right.  It is about trusting in the known and the unknown.  It is about following that voice within, of the deep heart, whether it gives you answers or just one feeling at a time to go on.

And so, though no one I didn’t tell ever knew about it or could tell, I went through a really hard time in my body.  Chronically inflamed, so stiff it was hard to turn over in bed in the night, waking up as if I’d just been in a train wreck, reacting to so many foods it was hard to find something to eat, losing mental focus and stamina, terrible muscle weakness and pain, reactions to toxins…all of it.  It was textbook adrenal insufficiency, (though these symptoms can come with other conditions as well, my test results corroborated this) which I discovered on my own.  In fact, though eventually I found practitioners who could help, a great deal of my healing and discovery has come by way of my reading and study.  And oh, how much I have learned…

I have learned things that are going to make me healthy for the rest of my life.  I feel incredibly grateful and gifted by all of this.  And though it brought me to tears (and to my knees) so many times, it has given me so much courage and wisdom.  Now, as I finally turn things around, every little gaining of strength feels like the most amazing miracle.  I go to the gym and every time the exercise energizes instead of drains me…every time I can do a little tiny bit more without pushing myself, I am so proud.  I press one foot after the other on the elliptical machine, listening to the pounding, juicy beats in my ears from my ipod, and move with my own rhythm exactly.  This experience has made me better than ever at finding it.  And that is a golden gift indeed.  And when it comes into my mind that, “I am a strong and beautiful woman,” I know it is true.  I can feel it pumping in my blood and moving through my muscles…the beauty and the strength that radiates from my pure heart.  And now I will move forward not just more beautiful and more strong, but more healed and whole than ever.

I don’t take a moment of it for granted.

So when I swam into the waves it was a special moment.  It was happening at the time when I had just crested and I knew I was finally rolling in.  It happened at the time when, however broken I was, I knew I was starting to regain my strength.  In order to reduce stress at every level to support the healing of my adrenals, I had made an even deeper commitment to fearlessness, and it has freed me at even more profound levels.  (To me fearlessness is not the absence of fear, but the refusal to let it lead us.)  So when I was facing the wall of the wave and swimming toward, rather than away from it, I felt not afraid but absolutely thrilled and alive.  It doesn’t mean I didn’t trust myself when I knew the right moment had passed and I needed to dive through it instead, in fact it meant that I was entirely in sync and aligned with my instincts and intuition.  I was completely one with their motion, and from that came my bliss.

This is indeed how we can walk through the world…even as we embrace the painful crashings as well, we can find that we are more often, rather than trying to avoid the waves…the waves of what we fear will consume us…we are heading right into them, and therefore we are in the best position to be fearless, to make an empowered choice about riding or diving through them, to be situated to do either, and to hear and trust the deepest voice within us.  The voice of our vast, oceanic hearts…rolling in on the shore of who we are becoming next…

And when we do get rocked too hard, and we’ve swallowed water and sand and we can’t even breathe at first, we can take ourselves gently to a place on the beach where the surf sounds soft, and the sun is electric and gentle at the same time, and let ourselves be nurtured…and rest deeply…until the time comes again that we are called by the waves and we are ready to have them free us, and to ride them as the waves of bliss they truly are.  To let them carry us home, again and again.

Love, Jennifer