Time to Change the Ending
Monday, May 21st, 2012
“It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day…and I’m feelin’ good.”
As sung by Nina Simone
It was a moment that chilled the blood in my veins. It took place in the movie Mirror, Mirror, a new version of the story of Snow White. She is leaning down to speak through a small door explaining why she has to go and fight the beast of her greatest fears alone. She says she has read a lot of books where the prince rescues the princess, and that she thinks is time we changed the ending of the story.
I couldn’t agree more. Not just that women facing their greatest fears will change the world most powerfully right now, but that, gender aside, it is time for a new story.
While we all know it is coming collectively, that collective new story can only be born of each of us finding our own individual new stories. I felt mine coming yesterday, as I stood by the ocean in the fresh twilight, seaweed in layers of colors encircling my feet. My new story and my ancient story are meeting, like my mermaid-self and the ocean in that moment…bathing in the soft, bright silence after the eclipse when I knew everything was forever changed, again. Yes, my new story and my ancient story are meeting…and so are yours.
For many years I have talked to Goddesses. Gosh, for too many years to count as they sift back through lifetimes. But for me talking to Goddesses is not a fancy and elite gift…it is like talking to girlfriends, and something I have taught thousands of people to do all over the world. It is something we are all able to do inherently.
One of the things I have noticed all of these Goddesses want to do, and want to model for we embodied Goddesses, (guys and other-than-female identified peoples that can include you too) is to re-tell their stories from a place of true power. In doing this, false myths are dispelled and healing is dispersed. Very, very potent medicine. That’s right…we can heal ourselves and the entire world by changing our stories.
Eve wants the world to know she loved that apple, and the serpent, and never left “the garden” because it is within. Pandora wants you to know that there was already evil in the world and she knew the box also had hope, and released it with intention. Persephone wants you to know that she became empowered in the underworld, and was never at the mercy of it again. Aphrodite wants you to know that she was the one who created herself from the sea foam, which is what made her truly beautiful. Hera wants you to know that her anger was an asset and freed her…like Durga, and Sekhmet, and Kali. And Isis, she wants you to know that she lived as both human woman and full incarnate of the divine…she was both fully enlightened, and knew grief and rage, and that those experiences enhanced her journey rather than being a distraction from her Goddesshood. These Goddesses know where the power is…in their lives, their experiences, their stories…and deep inside, so do we…
I am going to share the one magic key that will enable you to get down to re-writing and telling your story. Know it is yours. That’s it. Just don’t let anybody else tell you what it is, or that it doesn’t have value. It is love incarnate, written across the sky of your soul’s journey in stars. It is more valuable than its own length in diamonds, by a greater measure than can be made. We may think that making our own interpretation of our stories is akin to playing imaginary games at best, and outright falsifying truth at worst. But of course that begs the question of who decides what is true. It can only be you.
You see, as you look back over the long fabric of your life, even just this one life of many, you are going to find patches where you took someone else’s version of your story as true, and covered some of your beautiful self with it. You will be glad to find that if you remove them there are no holes underneath. Only the rest of the picture that allows you to finally make sense of the pattern of your life that didn’t seem clear before. It will all start to come together, and you will know why things happened the way they did.
You will see where you took someone else’s story, about you or what you experienced as true, because they were persuasive, or in a position of authority, or they sought to consciously or unconsciously usurp your power and keep themselves well hidden from the real. Your real. The real in you that upset them, so they sought to cover it up, and that is why they gave you a patch. They were holding their hands over their eyes because your sun was too bright and hard for them to understand…to scary and a threat to their perception of security. You even accepted some of the patches for the same reasons. Our own brilliance is a lot to accept.
Once you have decided you can re-tell the story of your past and self from an empowered place (because it is your work of art, after all) then you can begin to decide what story to tell yourself in each moment, and about your future. And you will find the courage to tell these stories to others, and they will be touched by them in ways you could never expect. There will be miracle healings because you decided your story was your own to write, to re-envision, and to share.
And, like Snow White, you may find that the beast of your darkest fear turns out to be the fulfillment of your deepest longing. Oh yeah, that’s what I said. We’ve heard this truth before, and we also feel it deep in our bones. The scary part of the story…the phantom that haunts your future, telling you bad things could happen there and to beware, throwing you off the scent of your own path like the patchy cover-ups of your former glories too…facing it is going to be the best part. You are going to reveal what is at the throbbing center of your soul’s lust.
And soul lust is exactly what we need to find and reclaim in this world…it will change everything.
We have numbed and dumbed down our feelings and made little reduced, animated, caricatures of the one role model we could have for finding them again…the girl. The girl who feels, and who, as Eve Ensler so beautifully shares, lives within all of us. Yes, we all have a girl within, and she is more powerful than we have any idea of. She knows just how to save this world. She has all the answers, and she is not afraid to feel her way to them.
And now the myths that have held the “girl” captive as a powerless, foolish, or evil creation are crumbling. Even our fairytales are being re-written to replace our docile sleeping beauties with empowered, fearless truth-seekers and knowers. Alice in Wonderland can still have a kitten, but she could also have a sword. She can be pretty and slight perhaps, but sharp as a tack and deep as the ocean. It isn’t about girls becoming more war-like or violent…it is a metaphor for accessing her power, fearlessness, and courageous heart. We are getting heroines back. It’s about freaking time.
So what kind of stories do you have about yourself and who you are? Because you know what I am going to suggest, right? Oh yeah, it’s time to get out your big teal feather-pen and all the ink your heart desires, and start writing your own story. Though this may happen on paper too, I am talking about deciding for yourself who you are, who you have been, and who you will be. This is about becoming, quite truly, a living legend. You are a fascinating creature of the most gorgeous and exquisite order, and if no one else has noticed that by now you can certainly notice it for yourself.
It takes the greatest courage of all to fall in love with yourself, but once you do, everything changes. You begin to want to give yourself everything you would give someone you were in love with. You value yourself so highly and think of yourself so well that nothing is impossible. And anyone can attain this kind of self-love. You just have to be your own heroine. You have to face your darkest fears and once you have walked that dark forest you own yourself, fully. Persephone did it. Innana before her. You can do it too. That’s why their stories are so important…because it lets you know for sure that it can be done. And that is why your story matters so much too. You are the Creatress…you are the one writing this story, so why not make it juicy? You will spend your life reading it, so you want it to be good…
Larger than life. Your own heroine. A living legend. This will be you. I can see you now, looking so hot in your armor, and also without it because you don’t need it anymore…knowing when you want to eat the apple, and don’t…with nothing left forbidden…claiming your throne. Because we are each royal. We are meant to be Queens, Kings, and titles that mean something in-between or beyond. Oh yes, you do have a throne, and a kingdom all your own that is waiting for your mighty rule. And the world needs to be ruled by girls…the wise, all-knowing, all-feeling girl within us all. The world needs heroines. The world needs you to write your own story, and to be the super-star who plays you in it…as fabulously and freely as you can. Look around and find out what script you’re in now, and ask yourself if you like it, and who wrote it, and what parts are waiting for you to release the beast and free yourself…and that is the moment, like a new star born in the still night, that your new story will begin…
Love you, Superstar.
Love, Jennifer
Bare Feet, Warm Temple Floor
Sunday, April 15th, 2012
I know the temples have fallen. I have seen their stones toppled, bones, remains. I have stood in the sun and felt the heat still retained in them, for the stones live still, and the temples are alive too, inside my body…
After all that is what the temples were always meant to signify, to recreate, and then finally to house and hold…the body.
Maybe this is why my bare feet slipping across and resting against the warm temple floor is one of my favorite memories of being a Priestess, and why so many people have told me that my writing about that particular memory so moved them. They remembered too. Long after the clear light of lucid past life memories has fallen into the subconscious cracks between lifetimes, between blinks, though retrievable, the sensual impressions remain. In fact, when I teach and speak of these sensual memories the women in my Priestess Courses often cry, and ask for more. We all want to go back, back to that feeling we had when we knew those warm stone floors against bare skin. Back to when we felt our skin. Back to the time when we could feel everything. There was nothing taboo, or constrained. There was nothing overwhelming but bliss, and joy, and the throb of the ancient universe pulsing with love, in our bodies. Always, in our bodies.
We want to go back to the time when we were Sacredly Sexual Priestesses, or really part of any unfettered, unadulterated, uninhibited days as a Priestess. For before the days of what I call in my book, The Oracle Within, “The Great Forgetting,” all Priestesshoods were sacredly sexual. For the sexual had not been strained from the sacred, or the spiritual, or even falsely thought to be so. In fact, it was one unutterable truth. One did not exist without the other…and still does not.
For when I see the bright blossom flash, the unspeakable hot-pink lick of petals on my peach tree every year, I know I have to stop everything else, and let it in. I know in the midst of a life without temples, without the kind of sisterhood I knew, without the support of being able to live that life without any other concern, I still have the secrets within. Not only because I am an Oracle with full awareness of my gifts, and not only because I remember those lifetimes as a Sacredly Sexual Priestess as if they happened for me yesterday…but because I know where the temple still remains…in my body, and in nature.
Okay so yes, it is so incredibly special that I can live my life now doing the work I love with my whole heart, living as a modern Priestess. I adore and relish it with utter gratitude. However that doesn’t mean I don’t find myself suddenly sitting on the porch of my house, head in my hands, reeling sometimes with the intensity of the current transformational energies, and the difficulties of living in the world as it is now. It doesn’t mean I don’t ache with it. It just means I know how to take that essential time to feel it all, to hold my head gently, and when I am finally ready, to lift my head and notice that spring is lighting up the very edges of existence…that the plants in my yard are literally glowing with life force and beauty…that the breeze has started to smell like warm earth and new sprouts and the first, fresh, courageous flowers. It means I know how to feel my skin.
It sounds like a little thing, I know, feeling one’s skin, and feeling one’s own heart, but it is the path home. Home not far off, or later down the road. Home here, now, in your body. It is how we find the Priestess within (regardless of gender) and the temple again.
Do you remember the way mornings felt so fresh that every day seemed immediately filled with possibilities? Do you remember how you didn’t wake to think of what you had to do, but all that you could do, and, most importantly, what you most wanted to do? Remember when you didn’t live for anyone else, even if you had an intimate relationship, and you were loved and cherished by many? When your life was about you. And not just about you, but your heart’s desire. Do you remember the way food tasted when you weren’t starving for nutrients and it didn’t taste like emptiness because of a dulled lack of feeling and robbed sense of taste? Perhaps it seems strange to describe that sense as robbed, but really we have lost the real depth and potential of all of our senses. At this point I am not sure how much it matters how they were lost. It only matters whether we can find them again.
I can tell you where they are…but I will also tell you right away that it takes the greatest courage I know to go there. They are down that corridor…you know, the one in the temple that got shut off and became forbidden. There are few lights down there, so you will likely have to feel your way along in the dark, wondering if you are crazy, and feeling as if you are risking your life. After all, you have been punished before, in a myriad of ways, for wanting to feel, and wanting to know your own body, and wanting to embody the ecstatic, electric rush of love and life force that you are. Of course it is scary.
And yes, this means having to become Lilith who knew her serpent power. It means being willing to upset “god” because you know better…because there is no more true divinity than that which lies inside of you. It means being willing to say no to the garden of eden and perhaps your current company, if it doesn’t feel right, because you know it means there is something better. A better paradise born of your own beauty and truth. It means being willing to realize that the power is yours.
It means pissing some people off and not being liked by everyone. It means upsetting the “flow” sometimes and not paying attention to those who would tie rocks to your glorious wings. It means being willing to fly. But to be light enough to fly you have to be willing to cast off your burdens, at absolutely any risk your heart truly compels you to take. You can discover and loose these burdens one at a time, or one day you might find yourself standing at the edge of a cliff, finally feeling as if there is nothing to lose, and taking the leap. That day might be today. For in truth, the more we allow ourselves to feel, the more each step is a leap of faith, and perfect release.
I want to lay down, like we did before, under the trees by the temple lake, with the universe singing in my body, and say nothing, but see the shared knowing in one another’s eyes. I want to see the women rise up and speak, and bring back the era of beauty and peace on the planet, because it is time, and we know the secrets, and we know the way. We know the way back to that corridor we stopped visiting long ago, where we sealed off the forbidden fruit. For all the answers are there, and all the missing pieces, and the nourishment, and the seeds. First we have to nourish ourselves, and in the splendor of giving ourselves what we have always wanted, the seeds will fall and cover the earth with orchards of trees of knowing, and the sweetest, ripest fruits that come from it, forbidden no more…
Love, Jennifer
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For the lover:
The Sexual Priestess and the Seven Serpent Powers of Regeneration
October 21st – December 2nd, 2014
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p.s. While I listed them this way as a most clear focus, each of these courses is truly for the lover, the mystic and the healer…every single one…so you can view them all in one place here and see which one(s) speak to your heart most!
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