The Land of Milk and Honey is Within
Messages from the Bee Priestesses
Monday, March 18th, 2013
Thank you life, for putting honey underneath every shameful shadow in my heart, so that I would know I was doing the right thing when I found its sweetness…
Jennifer Posada, from “Three Pomegranate Seeds”
It’s about to happen. A miracle right in front of me. Oh, I’ve known about it for months. I just went outside and saw for myself the readiness, the coming…I’m ready.
Maybe most people wouldn’t consider it a miracle, or even notice it at all. They wouldn’t see the brilliant flash of hot pink bliss that takes my breath away. They wouldn’t feel the exploding joy of life rushing through them as the fresh tenderness unfolded before them. But I do. I know the secrets of the ancients and the enlightened ones…I remember when they weren’t secrets, and I want them to be secrets no more…
So I am going to share with you the secret of life, and I am going to open this secret with the example of the miracle of my peach tree. The blazing streak of wild loveliness that marks and alarms the sky and surrounding trees with its beauty. It makes us, me and the sky and the woods, speechless, and runs hot sunshine through our blood. It cleans our hearts and lights our minds on fire, and I want to invite you into that world…that land of milk and honey within you.
Oh I am quite sure you have had glimpses, or maybe have even visited that land often…but like Alice or Dorothy, you may not know how to go back and visit your wonderland at will, or how to spend your life there…especially if it seems so very different, or even at odds, with this world. The world most people still share, and believe to be the only one, when really we are changing and reshaping the world into something entirely new with our desires, our dreams, and our bodies. Or, I should say, with coming to know once again the pleasure of our bodies. It was left behind long ago, this real knowing as the heart of living, but it is the one essential ingredient to really experiencing and understanding love while embodied, to feeling connected to the larger love of the universe, to communing with the deepest self and the earth, to knowing joy.
Before we go any further I want you to know that I am not just going to fill this writing with fluff about the joy of the body and leave those of you who feel totally alienated from the joy of your bodies floundering with no useful ideas for how to find it. I am going to give you the secrets I promised, right here from my staggering, deep-currented, ages-old heart. Remembering further back than time’s beginning has many benefits, and I am going to keep spending the rest of my life sharing them with everyone who will listen. It’s what I came here for. It’s why I held out and held on for so unbelievably long to the remembering, carrying it and protecting it like an unbroken thread…so I could reconnect it with the spark in your heart and spread the fire of knowing again…so that I could tug on it and pull the ancient beauty we once knew and lived right here into now. It’s made me damned good at remembering, despite what my eyes show me or how the world has changed, and therefore good at helping you to keep remembering too. As we remember, who and what we truly are (love) and our mighty and truly divine power, we will watch the world around us come to match it again. That is the effect of what I call in my book, The Oracle Within, “The Great Remembering.”
So, we begin with my peach tree. It’s very small and unimposing, and just at the back corner of my yard. You could almost miss it. But for just about a week every spring when it blossoms, and lights up the world. With it’s flaming hot pink blooms spilling from its small graceful branches, I am quite sure you can see it from space, glowing with a fierce beauty that defies gravity, that defies rationality, that defies reason. It is quite simply, magic. But it happens so fast, that if I didn’t know the secrets of the universe, I might just totally miss it. We have become so rushed, so hurried and our plates are so full…and even more powerfully than that, we have been so taught not to see the magic within or around us that we just don’t feel anymore, don’t make time to experience anymore, or to be embodied.
Embodiment became scary a long time ago, when it was sometimes-unofficially but very forcefully outlawed. It had to be. It was the only way to shut down the most powerful force in the universe here on earth and usurp control of the human race…to force out the pleasure of the body and its attendant inherent knowing of one’s own power and truth. It was the only way to topple the absolute self-love and self-reverence that come from it too, which was the essence of perpetual love remembered and everywhere. It was the only way for those who wished for false power to stand a chance. But that is old news. False power is crumbling all around us and the world is finally ready for the cracked-wide-open realness we dream of in our deepest, most buried soul’s longings.
I want to tell you now about the deeper reason my peach tree’s hot pink blossoms mean so much. Once upon a time magical beings lived on the earth, and some of those such creatures were the nymphs. They were all-knowing, all-seeing, and what we would consider to be enlightened masters of the highest order. But they didn’t sit in caves in the lotus position contemplating the universe and avoiding the “temptations” of the body, oh all to the contrary, they made an art of succumbing to them instead. You were more likely to see them rolling in the moss or reveling in the springs…quaking when the lightning struck and undulating with the ocean’s waves. They knew existence to be what we would consider to be various states of orgasm, and they experienced this ongoing enlightenment by being attuned to their own bodies, their needs and desires, one another, and nature. Most did have many lovers, but they weren’t indiscriminate. In fact, you couldn’t even enter the physical area of a nymph if your own energies and intentions were not aligned enough to resonate to a high enough degree. You literally couldn’t get near them without their energetic consent. One had to be able to rise to meet them in some way, and then they would open the wonders of the universe to you.
And that is the power of what even one being who can allow themselves to truly find and know the pleasure of embodiment does for everyone and everything around them, whether the change is observable and instant or not. And that also shows you just how powerfully being pleasurably embodied can change what you experience and draw into your life.
The trick, of course, is how to get to pleasurable embodiment when nothing much reflects or supports it in your life yet. (Or how to get to another level of it when you have plateaued or back-slid a bit…)
To tell you about how to get there I’d like to now introduce the Bee Priestesses. The original Bee Priestesses were nymphs, later followed by human women in their lineage (or bloodlines.) Like other nymphs, these Bee Nymphs knew the ecstasy of embodiment…and just happened to love experiencing it in two special ways…with buzzing, and honey. Like their bee friends, they too could feel the vibration of life pulsing through them, and actually create a physical buzz in their entire bodies, a buzz which manifested vast reservoirs of healing energy and sent them into galactic levels of oceanic bliss. The transcendence created was beyond our wildest dreams, but not beyond our wildest, deepest soul memories. We too have known this bliss. As if the buzzing weren’t enough, the Bee Nymphs and Priestesses to follow could also enter profound, revelatory, earth-shaking states of ecstasy by ingesting various highly-alchemical forms of honey. They lived in the true land of milk and honey. The true garden of eden. And they could eat whatever fruit they wanted. Nothing was forbidden to them, for they knew their own bodies and came from the place of true love. There was only endless creation, and beauty.
While I could go on, even fill books, with my thoughts and memories on this and their ever-unfolding meaningfulness, I’m going to come around to what you can take from this that will serve you right now, today, and for the rest of your life. It all has to do with the honey. The real honey is not about alchemical bees and long-lost healing flowers they fed from, and it wasn’t even about that then. It is about the sweetness. Something that has been relegated to candies and cheesy, saccharin greeting card sentiments. Something that has been dethroned, belittled and cheapened. Something that has had its power thwarted and hidden, a treasure only for the most steadfast and brave to find. A treasure that lives inside my peach tree, but not just there…
It’s in every flower that opens its fearless marvel and unconquerable light to the world. It’s in my cat rolling over to let me touch his belly right now next to me on the sofa, and purring completely uninhibitedly when I do. It’s in the shot of blue outside my window in an otherwise hazy sky. It’s in the promise of spring, the pulse of my heart, my sometimes stunted then suddenly flowing breath right now…it’s in whatever tiniest moments of joy we can find, or contentment, or comfort. And we can find those moments, even if they are just soft punctuations at first in a sea of pain, even if we have no money for extra niceties, even if we have almost no time. The truth is, if we can learn to recognize the sweetness in our lives, and let it in, and let our bodies really feel it too, our entire lives will ultimately change, and then the entire world around us. But we can’t just allow it once, or once in a while. We have to be diligent and courageous…we have to really ask ourselves where the sweetness is for us, open in new ways, and really allow ourselves to taste it in a world where we have usually been taught, even perhaps brutally, to do anything but.
In fact, since anyone can claim five minutes to themselves in a day, I’d wager that the amount of joy we could experience in that amount of time, once we are practiced in the lost arts and true power of sweetness…once we have found the secret honey in our lives that is the long-sought holy grail of the path to pure truth and full awareness, five full minutes of the bliss we can experience might be almost too much to bear, and the resulting golden glow it would cast on the rest of our day each day of our life would be enough to cast our life with the kind of resplendence the nymphs knew, and carry us gently through the rougher passages of all the more challenging experiences and feelings in our life that are so honorably and crucially beautiful a part of our ever-burgeoning wholeness.
I know well that so much of what others would consider to be profound intuitive abilities has simply to do with being perceptive, and willing to open ourselves to feel when we perceive beauty, magic, or pleasure. It is the power of my noticing the one week of hot pink beauty in my peach tree, and not missing it. It’s in my willingness to, no matter what else is going on in my life, slip outside in my bare feet for the first time on the still-cold, slick earth and be there with it…to reach my fingertips up to meet the impossibly-soft blossoms’ petals and feel life flow through me like a river on fire. We can all feel this way…it’s just a lost language. The lost true language of the body…and the soul. Oh yes, we once knew them as one, and we will again.
This spring, be fearless. (Or if you are in the other hemisphere please do rock the autumn instead.) Even if you think all the honey in your heart and life dried up so long ago that all you would find is the grey dust of sad losses and lost chances. Even if you worry that you never had any to begin with, or that it will cheat you or hurt you in the end to hope, or open or try. Even if you secretly obsess that you are the one person who will never know how to feel good in your body, or feel this good. Somewhere inside you, muted as it has been for most of us, the buzz still rumbles the deepest chambers of your heart. The place where you still want. The place where you still burn. The place where you would still give up all your constructed safeties for love, and where you still believe in your wildest dreams. The place that never dies.
Oh yes, be fearless…find the smallest taste of honey somewhere in the scatter of your hours and days. Find a pure moment all your own to just listen…to the wind, to the rain, to the rustle of leaves and the songs of birds. To the empty places and the fullness, to what your heart says when it isn’t being pressed upon by the demands of living the way we live now. Cherish those first signs of the inner spring, and welcome the milk and honey inside that follows. And then, despite all the voices that try to remind you what happened last time you ate the apple, drink it all in anyway. Because what comes after the blossoms, what they really promise, are the even sweeter fruits to come. They remind me that if I wait, I will be in that same place months later, beneath my peach tree with juice running over my lips and fingers, filling me with bliss. And if you find the blossoms of sweetness wherever you can in your days, you too will be guided toward the most exquisite rewards of your soul and life, and reminded that they will, indeed, come…
Love you, friend…see you under the peach tree…
Love, Jennifer
Learn more about the Nymphs in Jennifer’s writings and courses about them (including the special nymph course packages,) here…
Love this writing? Hop on my email list to receive each new post!
Also, if you love this writing you will adore all my online courses…click here to see them!
Would you like to hear me read this piece? Just click here…
Letter to a Self-Lover
Tuesday, February 12th, 2013
Dear Self-Lover,
I don’t know if you have begun yet. Perhaps you may not even know what beginning in this way means. You have just found this letter, as if tucked into an ancient book you just came upon, and though you know the letter could be for anyone, it feels somehow as if it is meant for only you…
It feels that way because, though I am writing it on the date above, I am also writing it from long ago, and from a deep place within you. I am just putting words to something your soul wants to say…wants you to know…to remember…
There is only one thing that makes a lasting, profound, positive change in one’s life, and that is love. And there is only one way to get better at feeling love and allowing it, and that is from the inside. The warm fire you long for at the hearth that is your deepest home is burning inside you right now, and if you have grown cold from its absence it is only because you have forgotten how to truly rest in its glow…and how to let that glow shine forth from you to illuminate every moment of, and every thing within, your life…
I want to tell you how to get back to that flame within of love. I want to tell you how to wake there every morning, and rest there every night. I want to tell you how to draw from that place to sustain you through every experience in life…the rapturous to the torturous, and how to transform all of it to gold by burning from all that you are.
I am going to give you that alchemical formula…the one that has been held as secret for ages, the one that has been sought in vain with endless campaigns…the secret to life. But many people will still turn from it for one simple reason…it seems too unglamorous, too obvious, too easy. It takes the bravest kind of soul to really see the path, for disguised by simplicity it may be but easy it is not. However it is the very path to all that your heart yearns for, and all that one needs to take it is enough of a taste of the spark within to be drawn forward…to have that small light through every dark night until nothing can distinguish it…and you are free.
One could say that we are always on this path, and that the journey to self-love is constant and ever-unfolding…and that is true. But the path I am speaking of is the direct path that we step onto the moment we start moving ourselves toward self-love consciously. That’s when everything changes…so long as you stay on that path by remaining conscious with every step on it…by continuing even when you stop being able to see your way in the darkness, even when you forget who you are and where you are going and must come from a deeper knowing, even when you’ve given up everything you know…that is the moment right before you are going to break through to a bright new meadow of magic and truth, and beauty. There may be more dark passages after that, but each one will leave you both more stripped bare and more fortified, and each will shape your life in new ways that support the radiant truth of your inner flame to burn freely. And trust me, there is no better feeling…this is the return to true nature…the return to love. There is a lot it has to burn away, and it hurts incredibly sometimes as that happens. Sometimes we don’t feel the breakthrough or relief for an incredibly long time, but when it comes you are forever redeemed, forever liberated, and truly reborn.
To really accomplish this, you must do the unthinkable…and while you may think that means something like leaping buildings in a single bound, breaking some major law, or swimming from one continent to another, I am talking about that thing I mentioned that sounds simple but isn’t. I am talking about making feeling good a priority in your life no matter what. I am talking about making time, be it five minutes or five hours, every day, to do something you actually want to do. I am talking about carving out time, even if you have three jobs or three kids, to do something that brings you back to yourself once each day as if your life depends on it. I am talking about being willing to say no to some things, let some people down, rearrange your priorities, work through your resistance, remove the “shoulds” and expectations around how you spend your precious few free moments every day, dig beneath the ancestral shame and burdens, consider grand faith in yourself, and take a breathless leap into finding out what your heart feels and wants…every single day. I promise you that while it seems almost trite, this isn’t for the faint of heart.
For in a way it is breaking a law to do this. It is breaking the unspoken law we adopted a long time ago when pleasure was ruled out. When we were forced, with our lives at stake, to leave behind our inner knowing and the answers and joys in our bodies. It is that fear that keeps us still hesitant to put ourselves first, and that spell that we must break to enter into our new lives and the new world.
It is actually hard work and requires near-infinite diligence, like any great work of art or love, to find out what you feel like doing with a free moment, make sure you have a few every day, find out what you actually want to do with them, what would feel good, and then really allow yourself to actually feel good. Just going through the motions isn’t enough. You have to let it in. You have to let in the love you have made room for in yourself. It’s waiting there, like your own beating heart, to be felt. But you won’t feel it or hear it over the din of a million constraints and requests, a million emails and chores, a million obligations and promises. You have to carve out the moments of your own as if you were chiseling a tunnel out of rock, and show up every day for it even if at first it only leaves you with a horribly restless and hollow feeling that you want to run away from…or a deep grief about the realization of how long it has been since you really returned to yourself, or the pain of the recognition that you don’t even know what you truly enjoy doing anymore.
That is where you begin. In the darkness of an unfinished tunnel. But where you end is meeting up with the inner sanctum of your temple. That’s where the tunnel leads. And don’t worry that you may reach your inner sanctum with a feeling of terror rather than relief. It is terrifying to see ourselves truly…even if only because we are terrifyingly beautiful. It is terrifying because we will have nowhere left to hide from our radiance then, and suddenly we will know how to make the changes in our lives, day by day and step by step, to set ourselves free. It is terrifying because we will no longer need outside sources of authority, since it will forever after that time come from within. We will trust ourselves. We will know we deserve joy, and to be able to feel whatever else we need to. We will know there is nothing wrong with us, and when we really know that, there just isn’t anything we can’t do. We trust everything that happens in our lives then, and everything that ever has. We are no longer afraid of our power, and we are no longer afraid of love.
Right now you may be standing in front of a huge slab of rock, feeling like you have no tools and no energy to take on this diligent course, but if you lean against that slab of rock and place your ear up to it, you will hear your own heart beating deep inside it. And every time you make even a little time for yourself and inquire what you could do that would feel good during it…even just for a few minutes a day that are all your own, you are moving closer to freeing your heart, beating as one with its voice and its wisdom, living your life in pulse with its pure joy. We have protected our hearts for so long, and certainly with good reason, but the war on love is ending, and we are the brave souls who will step forward first unguarded. Not as a strategy of battle, but because we’ve remembered what it is like to feel good, to have that infuse our lives, and that there is nothing left to fight.
I know even as you are picking up your first nearby stone and striking that big slab it won’t feel good right away. As the first dust scrapes away you may not feel anything much at all, and as you labor on you may have times when you wonder whether you are making any progress at all. Those are the moments to put your ear to the wall again and see if your heart sounds even just a little bit louder. Because once you know what you are moving toward there is simply no other endeavor worth attempting. This becomes the project you begin to turn to the moment you can every day, and soon feeling good begins to realign you with yourself, recalibrate you with your true nature, and inform every choice about your life. At first the waves may crash against and crush other things you have built, and the destruction may give you pause, but you must let whatever needs to crumble, fall. The energy you have spent holding those things up needs to come back to you. You have better things to do with it.
And then one day you are going to get your first real feeling of it…of moving at the pulse of your own heart. You are going to realize that you are realigning with its rhythm… You are going to remember what it feels like to move with the animal of your body, and to speak with the knowing of your deep soul. And once you have tasted that, like the purest nectar of heaven, you will know it unmistakably, and you will fall in love…finally and forever, with your self. When that happens you will have a compass from that moment forward that will always lead you back to love. You will stumble again, but you will know always how to find your way again.
I am writing you today, dear self-lover, from an ancient time and place within you. I am writing because you knew you would need encouragement at this point in the path, and you placed this letter here for you to find now, long ago. Your wisdom is sprouting like sweet madness all over your garden, and I can only dream of the blossoms to come. All that the sprouts need is your loving attention…the time you make just to feel yourself and do what feels good, over and over again, day after day, until you return to the inner sanctum of your self-love…and then, your whole world blooms…
Love, Jennifer
Love this writing? Hop on my email list to receive all of my best free writings, videos and resources to support you on your path!
Or work with me directly for the best possible way to deepen into this path with my upcoming course: The Thriai Nymphs: Lessons from the Bee Priestesses, available around the world!
find more of jennifer here! 🙂
Ambiguity’s Gift
Sunday, July 22nd, 2007 I know as an Oracle you would think I don't experience ambiguity. In fact, it is true that I can go to my beings, or innermost heart, at any time of the day or night and receive loving and nurturing guidance. But knowing everything in your...
I Still Remember
An Oracle's Retrospective (you can scroll to the bottom to listen to Jennifer read this piece...) Monday, July 16th, 2007 During a massage today I drifted back into a memory I had as a child of a past life. High desert, and a city built into the summit of a mountain,...
Taking in the Sun
Sunday, July 8th, 2007 I can't say I have entirely mastered the art, but I have found that taking care of oneself, that loving oneself, is revolutionary. It seems like a little thing...an afterthought or a rebellion against a family in which one did not do such...
A Friend in Me
Wednesday, June 27th, 2007 When I was little I would sometimes take one hand in the other and imagine it was someone else's reaching out for me. I felt the unbelievable solace of self-comfort and it has been a refuge for me, in one form or another, all my days. I am...
The Heart of the World Still Beats
Saturday, June 23rd, 2007 San Miguel de Allende, Mexico I am sitting in a room with two glass walls and a beautiful, lush garden with all the colors of the rainbow in front of me. It is cool and the soft air that blows in through the door is as sweet as the sound of...
Translucence and the Ease of Being
Tuesday, June 5th, 2007 The ancient Sibyls, prophetesses of the Mediterranean lands, wrote their prophecies on leaves and laid them at the mouths of caves. If no one came to retrieve them they would be scattered by the winds and the questioner would have to do great...