Friday 1 February 2008

We have been together for 24 hours, Judy, Ria and me. Soaking each other up. Allowing our energetic capillaries to flow into each other and mingle in the physical space as we have been doing in the ethers for the past however many months. These two women are beautiful souls and together I feel we can hold anything.



We always start in silence. Well… first off, when I arrived at Ria’s place on Thursday morning fresh from the school run, I babbled for about twenty minutes without even taking a breath, just to dump out all of the stuff I had carried with me into our circle. All the life, plans, projects, conundrums that had been occupying me, stressing me. THEN we could sit in silence. And empty ourselves some more. When I get into silence with these women, I could stay there forever.



We stayed most of the day in circle together, in comfort and transparency. Ria’s body acted as our dowsing rod. Are we getting there? Are we moving off into abstraction? We became aware of our dance between sensing through our felt experience and conceptualising what we were sensing. How sensing intertwines with abstraction, but how somehow, abstraction so often happens on its own, without the concomitant checking against our felt sense of life and our world. That’s how a section of the human race managed to invent and drop an atom bomb. If we had checked into our bodies more often, that would never have seen the light of day. How could it have?


Preparing our collective space today has been a joy. We decided to write up our core questions on flipcharts, and I couldn’t leave the words there alone without some kind of colour and adornment. So I got out Ria’s pastels and pens and started decorating. It was just so wonderful to have the time and space to do this stuff.

Here are some impressions from my journal, jotted during our gathering. It is an impressionistic and rather disjointed glimpse, snatched in breaks - in between managing multimedia down- and uploading. Our time together deserves rich and textured, multifaceted harvesting. There will be more structured offerings to follow.



Once everybody arrived on the first afternoon, we sat, ten women together, sharing our personal edges and exploring our collective one. A bundle of polarities and paradoxes came out. As if we were stuck in the middle. It was a good start. Aquarian energy coming in. A good, warm space, with a satisfying depth of circle conversation and plenty of insights. And with it, for me, a headache that stayed all night, insinuating into my dreams. I was fully prepared to lose the next day to one of my habitual migraines. Thank the goddess,  by morning it had dissipated.

The second morning, already over breakfast the ancestors came to call. The women in the forefront, of course. What our mothers did to us, all inadvertently. All these privileged women sitting around the table, the voice came in: it’s not just about being a woman. There are so many other factors. Is the feminine perspective really where we need to be putting our attention right now? And yet, what about the huge majority of that 50% of humanity – our sisters – who are in thrall to their womanhood. Breathing through the noise of the tragic, violent and unequal world created by our subjection, our missing perspective?

Back in our circle, Ria, on behalf of the ‘facilitators’, surrendered leadership to the collective. There would be no more facilitation. Only holding. The structure would come from the talking pieces, the centre and the bell. Looking back, I’m not sure anybody really took that on board. It certainly didn’t result in instant chaos, like it did the first time we pulled that trick. Instead, no sooner than we began, up came all the pain, individual and collective. Heavy and juicy. Why do we carry it? What happens if we drop it? Through what, if not through that, can we connect to ourselves, our bodies, our fluids and our feelings, our ebbings and our flowings?

Anne-Marie reminded us, like a bombshell in our beautiful introspection: Don Beck is opening the circle with five hundred Palestinians today. THAT brought me alive. A flood of ecstasy and urgency and power through my capillaries. My hair on end. The indomitability of life that can bring these forces together…

It’s interesting what a break can do. We always seem to know when the natural hiatus arrives. We drifted back after a spell around the coffee and biscuits of trying to lead or design what would come next. Nah! Couldn’t be done. We all felt it. When the last of us finally gave up, we were all back in our room together. We didn’t even get back into circle. Some music, some dancing. Some cuddling. Luxuriating in this spontaneous, honeyed silence, interspersed with the occasional chuckle or sigh. Drawing, writing.


It is becoming very apparent, as we gently sink our sensing toes into this third gathering of women on the edge, that we are building on the two that went before. The 'We' has been much quicker in the birthing, and the questions born out of the previous gatherings have flowed straight in to the centre, into the present from the past. A major inquiry in the first gathering had been “what is it that we are holding back, and why?” What is this holding back? Since the second gathering, another question has been mingling in with this: What if it’s not always holding back that we’re doing? What if it’s about timing? What if we must sense what the world is ready for, moment by moment by moment?



The word ‘witches’ has come up, and doesn’t seem to want to go away. And the continual nagging intuition of timing has suddenly quickened in me. We are the generation of witches who will not be burned for our witching. So perhaps, after all, the time is now.

To be continued...

The sun rose redly this morning on ice in the moat and frost on the grass. Yesterday we sank through layers of archetypal woman – the fear, the pain, the anger, the joy and the power. We moved our bodies, we lay around in soft heaps of intimate communing comfort, daring to go that much further together moment by moment, driven on by our curiosity, by our determination not to be held back. Towards dinner we ended up in an excavation of our sexual power and mystery that had us screaming with laughter and weeping with fury and punching pillows in turns.

I have been impressed by all the shared patterns and archetypes that have come through, but I feel a tension between the immediacy of our bodies, with all the SUBJECTIVITY that brings, and the broader arena that women need to move out into if we are to contain and support our menfolk and work in partnership to set our world onto a sustainable path for all its children and species. There have been glimpses, but we keep sinking back into the womblike depths of the domestic perspectives. Individually, these are powerful and active women. Collectively, we are still retreating into our harem and wallowing in introspection rather than using our bodies as the collective sensing organ they have the potential to be. Ria is steering us purposefully in that direction, but the field keeps collapsing.


Sarah and Maria arrived half way through our morning and were absorbed effortlessly into our circle. There is a breathing in and out, an oscillation between seeing and sensing, between looking far outside and sinking deep inside to the enormity of knowing that is accessible to us through our bodies. Oh, how we have forgotten how to do this! Oh, how glad I am that Ria is here to remind us that we KNOW, if only we tune in to that place in us that knows. Ria is awesome. I hadn’t realised quite how thoroughly she has divested her body of the scarring and armouring that so many of us carry deep within us. She had us all sensing with our vaginas, in ways that had me cross-eyed with concentration – while for her it was now second nature. A walking advertisement for emotional body work!

Nina and Ursula evoked Kali in her many-armed form, and we also called in the thousand-armed Avalokiteshvara with the eyes in his hands to see the need in the world. There is a huge disconnect in our world, with so much action going on fed by disembodied concepts without ever any real, visceral checking into what meshes with reality, what is sustainable and what has true heart and meaning. We women have not been doing our job, insofar as we have withdrawn from the world of men into the domestic sphere.

Maria brought in Greek Delphi and the Pythian oracle. She told the story of her visit with Sarah to that place, to all the male structures and systems that had been built around… the rock where the oracle spoke (in metaphors which were more often than not misunderstood – oh how we need to learn to be explicit!) and the cave where she went to hear the answer to men’s questions.


Maria reminded us that we have not lost that which we cherish - we have hidden it! It is still there. We are waiting to bring it out again when it’s safe. And soon, soon it will be. So now is the time to relearn that which we have forgotten in these long years of retreat and withdrawal. And to incorporate and embrace the education, the models, the intellectual power that we women have also stepped into, the masculine realm of concepts and constructs. We can build bridges in a way our men can’t, because we have something they don't: that bodily knowing, that power to grow and manifest the seeds they plant in us. It is not clear to me whether this capacity is genetic or can be cultivated. All brothers reading this - please feel free to share your perspective on this!

We keep moving from the deep past out into the far future. We revisit our grandmothers, our mothers, the passing of the generations. That is part of the woman. In telling our stories, we are weaving a story in this gathering of where we as women need to go from here, back into the world. We returned to Delphi to hear the story of how Apollo killed the python that protected the stone from which the Oracle spoke. And the python had been male - that part of masculinity that protects and holds space for the feminine. Gradually, a clarity is emerging around the need to send the call out into the world to that masculine, that so many of us – both men and women – are hungry to hear and answer. Before the gathering even convened, we had been talking about the split that had occurred in women – between the domestic and interior and the ‘emancipated’ agentic woman. And here there came, all unexpected, into our circle, the split in the masculine. Always we see the isomorphy of this living system that we are. If the feminine is split, then so will the masculine be. It didn’t occur to us to look, but it was given to us to see.

After dinner, Maria and Sara read the tarot for our question. (That will be a separate blog entry). It was uncanny, of course, as all true magic is. It reminded me strongly that in this world of men-in-suits and machinery, magic is still real.

On our last morning, Judy, Nina and I meditated as we had done every morning and it seemed that all of history’s witches and priestesses were with us, holding our circle. As I review our time together, seeing the weaving patterns and recurring cycles, I see how we have been adding all our stories to the cauldron. All the stories from the past, that were invoked in us by the centre, and by each other’s stories. And all our longings, called forth by our own and each other’s stories. All ingredients into the potent potion brewing in the middle. At moments of collective resonance, when the circle being came into focus for a spell, one of us would dive into the cauldron and bring back an insight, a call from the future. What we have been weaving here during these days is of inestimable, unfathomable importance for mankind and our beloved Gaia.




There is so much still to be said about all that emerged during this gathering. One thing that became clear for us - that Ria has been exploring already for some time - Source and Spirit are not one. And Source is where the feminine connection lies. The question kept coming back again and again - How do we allow source to manifest through us?




Something came through Lisette on the last day which blew me away. I captured her words exactly:

On the evening of the third day of our women moving the edge retreat, Maria and Sarah did a tarot reading on the collective question that had emerged from the centre of our circle during the previous days.

The pattern they chose for the spread was the Celtic Cross, where the central card, represenging what is at the heart of the matter, is crossed by what stands in our way. The horizontal line represents time; the vertical line represents consciousness.

The question: What is the next level of women’s leadership connected to source?


Central card: What is at the heart of the matter

The tower




The next level of women's leadership connected to source is breaking out of every structure, every paradigm, every thought form that we’ve known. This is going to be like a divine intervention - the lightning rod that comes through.

This is fundamental change, and it’s shocking. It’s painful, it’s frightening. You don’t have a choice of staying in the tower. You’re evicted.

The old concepts of masculine and feminine as we have known them are shrugged off. From the top to the bottom, from the left to the right, from the in to the out, change. It’s absolutely radical.












Transversal card: what is the barrier to that happening?

Seven of swords reversed

The right way up, we call this card the nightmare of perfection. You take care of every little detail, and you have to make sure that everything is perfectly right.

The fact that it’s reversed in this spread means that what’s blocking us is that we’re always looking at the bigger picture! We want to get it all perfectly in the big picture, it’s all very conceptual, it’s all up here in the head: we’ve got to figure it all out, and then it’s going to be OK.

That’s blocking us. Because we’re too ‘up there’ in the conceptual realm. We’ve got to ground it. We don’t know how it’s going to be, but let’s just do it.

Actually, we don’t have the choice, given that the central card is the tower. So the more we are sitting with our heads up somebody’s plough… It’s falling to bits, you guys! Let’s be real, we’re in disintegration.







Upper card: What is visible

Eight of pentacles


This is the apprentice card.

One way of seeing this is that we are making a new contract. We are starting to learn practices and we are apprenticing to learning a new way.

What the apprentice does is the same thing, over and over and over. It looks really mundane, but that’s how you slip through into the mystery.

It’s the archer who becomes the arrow. It’s not about getting the bulls eye, it’s the act that lets the mystery come through. It’s practice, practice, practice… prototyping - and NOT waiting!













Lower card: What is coming to our consciousness

The Emperor

This is the masculine. This is the king.

So what’s coming into our consciousness is, perhaps, how the masculine worldview is so deeply ingrained in us – that’s one way of reading the card.

But the other interpretation is about creating order. So it’s not about throwing out the masculine, but  about creating a new order. Because that’s what the Emperor does.

We do need form. But we have to create from source. It’s not going to look like the tower. It’s going to be completely different. We're not going to sit down and design it: it’s just going to come through.

We’re realising – It’s not just about us feeling and loving and being nice to one another. It’s like: “What the fuck are we going to do now?” It’s creating more form. The form and structure are there, but it's what it serves that makes the difference… It’s going to be new, it’s not like the hierarchy.

This new level  of women’s leadership connected to source is going to have form. It actually does something. There’s a masculine energy. It’s very clear and manifest. It’s out of the fundamental shift represented by the Tower that the form will come through.

Card to the left: what we need to leave behind

Judgement



We are stepping into a new life. We’re already in a new life!

We’ve been waiting for the judgement call. We’ve been waiting to be awoken to our new lives. There are still a lot of people in this world that feel that they are waiting to step into a new life that somebody else will have made for them. There are a lot of people talking about how bad things are. "It’s really bad, and we need the new life… Someone has to do something about it… "

And that new life is already here! We’re in this time! This time has arrived and we need to let go of waiting for someone to call us into it.

We have to call ourselves into the new life. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for!








Card to the right: what is the near future we are stepping into

Wheel of Fortune

The wheel is turning. Get out of the way, it’s happening anyway.

We are the right people in the right place at the right time. Things are lining up. This is like the slot machine, about to hit the jackpot.

The next level, in terms of our breaking out of that tower into collective feminine leadership, is that all of us have got to be awake to the alignment. So if you’re not aligned, get the hell out of it! And go find the alignment.

Because that’s what we do: when we find that collective space together, we align with source. That’s what’s going to happen. And we will also know our alignment. It will be more visible. We won’t have to think “Am I? Aren’t I?” It’ll just be there.

This is the culmination of the practice we see in the eight of pentacles. This, we know we must do.






Adding the numerical values of all the cards in the spread, we get the hidden message, the river below the river: Forty-one

We start with the One: is the Magician. The new beginning. Pooling all the tools that we have to create magic. It’s a masculine energy, it initiates, it moves forward to the Four: the Emperor, which is giving form; creating the container in which things can happen. And then you add 4+1 to get 5, which is the Heirophant – or perhaps, in this case, the High Priestesses – it’s the new level of wisdom. In Greek, it means ‘to make the sacred visible’. He is the wisdom holder. He brings through and sheds light on the sacred.

It’s interesting to see all these masculine archetypes here. Part of what we have talked about in this women’s circle is the fact that we have mastered the models (thinking here, in particular, of cutting edge models like Integral Theory, Spiral Dynamics, U Theory, systemic constellations, the adult development models of Kegan, Cook-Greuter, etc). We understand how to do that, just the way the men do. And now we are remembering what so many of us have forgotten, during these long years in a world steeped in the masculine perspectives, that other bit, about connecting through our bodies to source. We do come through a masculine lens, no matter how much we’d like to think that we don’t. But the feminine is not some sit-around, wishy-washy do-nothing. She is a sassy chick - there is oomph to this! You get out there, talk through the bullshit and get it done! That’s part of what’s being shown to us.

In Greek mythology, you’ve got Heracles. Everybody thinks of Hercules as the big strong guy. In the feminine goddess history, ‘Heracles’ means ‘the one that does what Hera tells him’. Hera, in the masculine mythology, is the nagging wife of Zeus. But Hera is the feminine. So the masculine that does the bidding of the feminine is very powerful. We are talking about source. It’s for us to come through in a very clear way. It’s not about becoming something that we are not. It is time for us to come forward with this presence that we are holding.

We can see how we have been initiating (Magician) and bringing together the skills that we have in order to hold space – create the container (Emperor) in which all of these things can happen in order to shed light on the sacred.

Piece of advice - To help us step into this new level of leadership.

Three of Wands, reversed

Wands are creative energy. Three is a number that brings things together to really move forward and manifest in one direction. This is reversed, so we read this card as: “Let’s not put all our eggs in one basket”. There’s going to be many creative forms of the feminine coming from source that can be manifested in the coming time. The tailor-made, off-the-shelf version is not going to work here. It’s going to be different, and that’s fine. There are going to be many different levels and layers to how it needs to be offered. So let’s not try to centralise it, trademark it! Open Source! Because this is a reversed card, it means that sometimes the creativity can get diminished, because it’s not pulled together.

When we get a piece of advice that is reversed, we pick another one until we get one that’s not reversed. Sometimes this tells us the journey we may have to go on.  So we picked another card, to see how we can heal the reversal.

Ten of Pentacles, reversed

In order to reverse that Three of Wands and get that creativity lined up, we are going to have to be extremely untraditional. We’re going to have to not do what the family has always done before, we’re going to have to be extremely different. However, it’s still reversed. Because it’s reversed, it means we’re not going to manifest the level of karma/potential that we can.

King of Pentacles

This guy is the personal level of the Emperor. He’s the manager. The one that creates order again, but on the personal level. There is a very strong message that’s coming through here, that the masculine really has to do its work. But doing its work gives form to the feminine. This is what we’ve been sensing during these days. We need to have form for the feminine to emerge in our world. For the source to be spoken – to be made explicit. Giving it language, having a model, inviting a gathering…