Seeds for a happy planet » feminine

Women on fire

Ria — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 16:29:37 +0000

Another manifestation of the feminine voice…

Millions of women around the world are generating inspired, exceptional, warm-hearted, generous and brilliant initiatives. Imagine the power, the consequence, if they were all joined up.

Women on Fire encourages women to live the power of gentleness, to bring tenderness to all walks of life, personal and professional, but most especially to themselves. It aims to promote and develop confidence in female intelligence, instinct and leadership. It offers a way of connecting up female wisdom worldwide. Its general purpose therefore is to power women as decision makers.

Women as decision makers constitute our one underused resource in addressing all the crises of our time: ecological, economic, social and spiritual. We want to encourage women to develop self-confidence without feeling challenged by patriarchal certainties. We want to offer instinctual wisdom as a partner to reason, wise women to accompany wise men.

Visit www.womenonfire.co.uk for more info.

Stitching the web of life together

Ria — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 20:31:47 +0000

Since the last day of our Women Moving the Edge gathering, which is more than three weeks ago, finishing my harvest has been at the back of my mind all the time. But working life is always rather full after a week away, and these last four days I had a low level energy – not really sick, but not able to work in a ‘normal’ way. It was the time and energy needed to tend to my subtle energy levels.

So I went back to my notes and started at the beginning – the preparation day – the day before the start of the gathering, when the hosting team came together. We were hosted by Lisette in her house in Amsterdam. I’m always delighted how these old city houses have so many windows and light is pouring in all over! So different than the rural Flemish houses of that age with small windows.

The day started with some synchronicities. Judy had lived in Amsterdam (she now lives near Boston), somewhere in the nineties, and it turned out that the place where she had lived had been only a few houses away from Lisette’s! So she strolled around the neighborhood in the morning, trying to find back a spot that she had loved and she succeeded. The spot was the ‘Begijnhof’ of Amsterdam. The begijnen, are a local and feminine story; very Flemish. These ladies lived together in the 13th and 14th centuries, under no religious order, making their own rules and having a certain influence on society. Aren’t we like them? The beguines of the new life?

The guiding question for our gathering was: If the need of the world/Earth is an invitation to become fully ourselves, then what is our role as the evolving collective feminine? This is a high level question with no easy or immediate answers. We have noticed over our different gatherings that these questions keep working in us, and pieces of the answers show up later also.

In our check in, the first major theme was: How domesticated are we? How deep is society ingrained in us? And where is the wild feminine, the natural under these layers of socialisation? This linked in with books we were reading – like Women who Run with the Wolves and Rewilding the World. Are we prepared to let the natural come back into our lives? Who knows what will happen then? The Wild is the archetypal, the instinctual, the natural. It is not new; but it seems to us that more and more women are hearing its call. And through internet we can find each other and relate with one another.

Another line in the conversation was about the movement, the transition from the Piscean age – where all sorts of parent-child relationships can be found in society – to the Aquarian age, where relationships are made out of true partnerships. We can understand true partnerships between humans, but how does this translate with the Earth, and with this archetypal level we talked about before? We were bringing in information from others’ books (Co-Creative Science from Machaelle Small Wright and Return of the Feminine and the World Soul by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee) and from our own experience to allow a new picture to form in our minds, hearts and bodies. We know that woman – or, rather, the feminine in every human being – has a natural tendency or capacity to be in direct communication with nature and the Earth. From that inner experience we have a deep sense of what is in balance with both inner and outer environment. True partnership with Earth, or with nature, then seems to be that we can use our human free will to choose for this overall balance, instead of the current ruling paradigm of separation and fragmentation. We have the free will to choose ever more balance, on all levels of our existence. We seem to get to a lived experience of the oneness of humanity and the Earth.

I have to tell you that this clarity wasn’t present our conversation then. It is now, by re-reading my notes and those of Helen, that I am able to give some coherence to what we were speaking on that day.

So, a deeper partnership with Earth seems somehow feasible and understandable, but how to understand a true partnership with this wild, natural, archetypal level of the feminine? And as we put it in our guiding question: a true partnership with the collective feminine?

From the Spirit-Source model that I developed to understand how emergence can happen, we know there are many layers between the existing potential and the manifest. The archetypal level is one of these deep layers, way below the manifest form of our daily life. Because it is an energetic level – it can be translated into the multitude of forms that we know exist on our planet (and maybe beyond?) – I understand the archetypal as a blueprint level and most likely such a blueprint exists for the feminine and for the collective feminine. Now, because our consciousness evolves, and we can make different choices than our ancestors, the forms that can become manifest out of this archetype evolve too. And because everything is reciprocal you could say that we influence the archetypal blueprint too.

This was a shocking realization for me! If this is true – and I can’t see why it wouldn’t be – then it leaves me, and us, with a huge responsibility! What we choose now has a huge influence on what will come after us, because we will, in one way or the other, change the blueprint out of which the multitude of forms will be generated over time. Do we really dare to move this edge of consciousness? There is a lot of power – at least influence – in this. Are we sure our intentions are clear and without ego? Moving the edge of consciousness is not a small thing!

Looking back at it now, I realise even more deeply that this mutual influence is going on all the time, and has been going on for ages – whether we are conscious of it or not. So my and our power or influence doesn’t grow, it is just that our understanding of the consequences of our choices is growing. My power is not greater than before, but now I can choose to apply it in a more conscious way.

On the other hand, there is also so comfort in all this. If we understand the nature of these archetypal and other energetic levels that exist before something becomes ‘real’ on the manifest level of time and space, then we don’t have to worry about how things will emerge. All these energy levels – some call them deva’s and nature spirits – will do their job! We just need to set our clear intention and co-create with these subtle levels along the way! For me that is a big relief. I/we don’t have to do it alone! Of course – for a good understanding – we never did have to do it alone, but most of us didn’t realise that. We were so trapped in our power position as the ‘highest evolved being’ that we blanked out all these other layers. Probably what we need to do more is to listen more deeply to the information that these layers are sending us.

Being in conversation about this, listening ever more deeply to what was arising in the middle of our circle, I suddenly reached a level of these subtle layers that I hadn’t reached before. I saw in my mind’s eye a huge web, a kind of irregular woven fabric that was in many, many places completely torn and broken. It looked like a woolen fabric eaten by the moths, no pattern to discover, but broken in many places. I recognized this as the archetypal energy level of connectedness and of collectives. These holes where made by fragmented thoughts, over and over again. Thoughts about ‘me, me, me’ – about separation – all influence this energetic level, which then starts to die off, to decompose.

I realized why we need to come together in circles, over and over again: because it is only these kinds of collectives that can heal again this fabric of being a collective, of being in connection with all of humanity, all of earth and all of nature – probably all of existence. At that moment I understood the deep meaning of the web of life, I understood the many stories, myths and fairy tales about weaving, knitting, mending, stitching… all images about restoring the connective tissue in the greater web of life.

Coming together, as a collective, for the sake of darning the energetic fabric of the collective and keeping it strong; that is probably what women’s circles have done through the ages, consciously or not. This is what we need to do now too. Even as fully individuated individuals, we need to do that now. So these circles, these collectives are no longer about conformity. Rather, we are looking at a collective of fully conscious beings bringing their intention and attention together for the sake of the whole of life. We have a role to play in bringing forward that collective potential.

Mythical, Mystical, and Magical

Ria — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 18:27:58 +0000

(last blog post of WMtE8, which happened in Magnolia, Cape Ann – this happened on Nov 16, 2009)

The writer in our midst said: “This is about the mythic proportions of our time. It is not going to be an easy journey. Do you know the story of Metis, the first wife of Zeus? Metis was the wisest! And the wisest is no longer remembered. “ She told the whole story with lots of details and I was impressed because I never can remember these kind of stories, and because of the content of this myth itself.

The wisest is no longer remembered…
Men hold the love, women hold the wisdom, that is how it should be…
It raised the question in me: What then really is this wisdom?

It was said that our natural gifts – beauty, holding space, awareness of relationships etc. – have not been recognized; our natural wisdom has been devalued; but these gifts are still present and beautiful!

And as I said in a previous post, I didn’t fully grasp what the real meaning was of ‘women and need’. It was an important thread through our last morning conversation. Need, not from emptiness and deficiency; but from impetus.
Not: I need you, as I want you to be.
But: You asking me to be, is healing. The receiving draws out the being.

How can we respond to a need in a way that enlivens us, in a way that shows originality? If I am asked to spread the word about a book written, then a book party will show more of who I am than sending around email messages.

This brought us to this flipping insight:
The gift of need as invitation to others,
to be and to become more of who they are.
Two weeks and many conversations later the real meaning of it still is landing in me… it is a total flipping around, an upside down and inside out of need…
I need you, because of us.

Before the Ubuntu saying ‘I am, because we are.’ had been mentioned. (And I know now it was the title of a film about Ubuntu!) It does speak about the interrelationship between the individual and the collective; but I realized on a deeper level that ‘I need you, because of us’ is a more feminine way of saying the same. ‘I am’ puts the agency, the consciousness in the foreground; ‘I need you’ puts the interdependency, the matter-of-fact in front. It is a much deeper realization of interdependency for me… it is still trickling in…

One of us made a connection with our conversation around money and the sacred exchange system. The use of money is objectifying the people, because it reduces people to goods and services. There is no existential exchange going on; we don’t have a relation with the ones that produced the goods, or the way it was produced. It occurred to her that an exchange of true wealth happens from this existential soul level; it happens from subject to subject. Like we said a few days earlier, the new and sacred exchange system should put the soul’s callings in the middle!

The gift of need, Need as invitation to become our true self,
Our soul’s calling in the middle…

As I am writing this two weeks after the actual conversation, relying on my colorful notes on a big piece of paper, I come to understand why it is always the case that I finish my blog posts of a gathering some weeks later. Many times I have urged myself to do it right away, not to postpone it. I didn’t understand why I could do a lot of the harvesting on the spot and then there was this big time delay. Now I get it! Most of the gathering is more or less on known ground; there are new insights for the participants and also for me, but they flow naturally for me from previous conversations and insights. The more we go into deeper teritory, I am myself turned inside out and upside down. My way of looking at the world needs to shift, my perspective is challenged quite a lot. I realize now that I then need some time to digest more in order for me to be able to harvest it out, to be able to write something that – hopefully – makes sense to others too.

This said, in this last morning conversation we went into a more mystical thread.
Mythic and mystical…
I told my deep emotional experience of looking back on my life, at the time of Atlantis, in the last moments before death, because the world was collapsing due to humans actions. In these moments I had a deep realization that I had used my co-creating power with my partner and others for the sake of power; for the feeling of being god-like. And as I saw this, I promised myself I would never ever again explore these realms of magic, this co-creation with matter and energy. Now, 2009, in this circle of women we are talking about our natural gifts, our inner wisdom… our magic?
Then my memory gets triggered! Then I get scared.
I need all of you, because of us.
I need all of you, because I want to explore the real life-affirming co-creation; not an abuse of power. Our inner wisdom holds power. Can you please tell me when I am acting from personality or when from my soul level?
When is it memory? When is it true inspiration?
But not bringing our deep inner wisdom is holding back, and can do harm in another way. When we hold back, we devitalize the evolutionary impetus and potential of magic. From the integrity and alignment of soul we are needed to step into full partnership with magic, into real life-affirming co-creation. And in the ‘I need all of you’ there is the invitation to the collective (feminine) soul to fully step into right use of our wisdom in working magic.

The scientist in our midst chimed in with some of the current facts and integrated it with her spiritual understanding. There is a relationship between the manifest and the not-manifest. The not-manifest can be moved and shaped… it brings about an expanded sense of who we really are… If soul is from Source,
and Source is pure light,
what we know in light can be moved through density.
She ended with saying: Soul has a piece to play in how to understand the world.

That said, it was time to close the circle. It had been a full and inspiring morning, and there was no real need to do an elaborate checkout; another song was the best fit.

Her

Ria — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 16:58:05 +0000


"Then creation recognized its Creator in its own forms and appearances.

For in the beginning, when God said, "Let it be!" and it came to pass, the means and the Matrix of creation was Love,

because all creation was formed through Her as in the twinkling of an eye."
The Holy Spirit as Sapientia

St. Hildegard von Bingen



More facets on the gem
Ria — Fri, 15 May 2009 18:20:26 +0000
The constellation of the previous day had worked on us and we came to see, became more aware, that we had to integrate the wild, the lush, the earthy, Kali… with our mental capacities and the esoteric-mystical piece. The last one alone is like ‘eating sand’, not tasty and not effective. We need to move the edge of the Divine Feminine, to include all these facets, and then we can worship that.

In chakra language it means that we connect Earth and grounding (1st chakra) with the sensuality and sexuality (2nd chakra) and the power (3rd chakra)! And not excluding the second, as we many times do! There is a lot of power if we really connect these energies, and when we integrate the body element with the head and the heart. Of course there is the mystery in the sacred, but the feminine archetype is much more and the seductrice, the mother, the Earth are all facets of this gem. And in a certain way we hold the bigness of the Earth in us, and with it the future potential.Another facet of the divine feminine is the collective. One of us saw what ‘together’ really means: to-get-Her. I was really surprised I had never seen that! To get Her we have to do it together. And we don’t mean here ‘all women together’, but a true mutual relationship with the masculine in a real co-creation.
Of course, next to our insights there were questions too: Can I trust the collective takes care? Can I live the sensual, the sexual? And maybe more important: Can we be aware of the influence and power we have while living and expressing it? As one of us did – spontaneous, unconscious – as preparation for the constellation.
One of us was leaving half way through the morning and we started to name the projects and dreams we hold, asking the others to hold them with us. A few words:

A Yes! Place,

Understanding that give and receive is from the same gesture,

A culture of celebration…

The joy of free giving and receiving…
Then back to the money issue:

How to let life flow happen?

Nature doesn’t need a currency.

What is a love currency?

The universe has more for me than a job , there is a call. The call is seductive, but we have the power of make the choice: Yes or No. But the feminine, the call is seduced by the illusion of security, of money and stuff.
A possibility opened for us:

Maybe change can happen

without the system going into crisis,

by the flow of love,

and through us?!

The real edge is to explore it collectively.
Living from the creative spark, to-get-Her.

Living as play, to-get-Her.

The art of Living, to-get-Her.



Sex and Money
Ria — Thu, 07 May 2009 10:14:54 +0000
As happened in different other iterations of Women Moving the Edge a systemic constellation emerged in the afternoon. It came out of a merging of the two lines of conversations that had been going on since we started. One the one hand the conversation on what a new economic system could look like, and all that is related to that. Many of us live and work on the edge of the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ system, with the implication of having some real money for some of the work we do and creating a lot of value and meaning in other projects, but with no reward or payment in the common currency. On the other hand we have been talking a lot of being in the fullness of who we are as women, our passion, our sensitivity, our wildness. How is this all related? Is there a relation?
When we started sensing into it something happened in my body, some kind of anxiety related with the question at hand, realizing how much war, murder etc was related with money and the bigger economic system. The energy became dense in the room while I shared it… but others stayed clear and called me/us out of our belief in the shadow!!! Recalling ‘the koan of the shadow’ I soon got out of it and could focus on ‘restoration of the sacred’, be it in a money system or in relationship with the feminine. It teached us that neither fear nor shadow are real, but that this topic has a lot of depth and we have to realize that fully!
The question we came up with that would drive the constellation was something like: If the Collective She comes alive what is the new economic system? We didn’t capture the constellation real time, but here is – more or less – the conversation we had afterwards. The ‘names’ are the elements in the constellation that people represented in the constellation. This is kind of long, but I don’t want to leave something out…

Holding Space (HS): On a personal level, I could have been the Sacred Feminine (SF), but Judy took it. I felt powerful at the end, sitting in the chair. (The chair represented the new project of restoring the Earth that seemed somehow needed in the whole constellation to align the energies of the different players. At the end HS plopped herself in the chair, representing the wild, sensual feminine energy, which brought a lot of aliveness for all elements in the constellation!) HS and SF need each other; we could have done it together: Sisters in the Sacred Feminine.
Sacred Feminine (SF): As you sat in the chair, as the seductrice, I came aware that there was no one in the constellation that I wanted to seduce! Really hard… I don’t want to be in intimacy, only when Current Value System looked at me… I felt pretty powerless in the constellation. When I was asked to say: “I will hold that project (of restoring the Earth).” I first was holding back, but yet, it drew me. When later HS sat there in the chair, I was ready.
HS: The seductrice and the HS, this partnership is the powerful force that can move the system. I embraced Greed and the whole thing. I wanted to say: Come on! Let’s co-create! That’s fun.
Current Value System (CVS): When you sat there – like the Royal Pose of the Buddha – personal I loved it.

As CVS I was yearning all the time: Where is she?!!! There was intense relief when I had an alley (SF came along). Then Greed came along, and I had a hard time not to get angry. I want to be, I want to learn from the SF! That was very nice to me. CVS and the People need more to do together.
Terra (as both the Earth and one of the new complementary currencies called Terra): Interesting; there was something missing. The People were not representing the question; SF didn’t look like to be involved with it… but we didn’t have the lush, wild woman!! I had the idea: the answer is missing! There was total relief when you sat down in the chair! Now she has shown up. When are women going to show up and say: We can play a new game! The spark, the alchemy will come from women totally showing up!
Greed: Personally I had a question in high school: What made it go wrong? The answer was greed! I wanted now to try to feel what it took to release that. It happened when CVS had put her arm around me. Someone would need to guide that greed energy to go to a healthier place. Like you would speak to a 5-year old. The SF felt like in a foreign country to me.

Something shifted when I got directions from the facilitator. I am not sure I wanted to grow up, I would like to have attention for the little 5-year old that is wanting and wanting and wanting… but there is relief in having limits…

How can I apply this to my world? Seeing the 5-year old in the bankers??

At the end (HS in the chair), that was a very grown up experience, meeting you as a full woman, but I was still a child. I needed a lot of holding to grow up. If I felt nourished I wouldn’t need all this stuff, replacing what is missing. That feels true.

SF: My inclination from the beginning was to give love to Greed, a human need that was unfulfilled. All my colleagues were not fully trusting you… I didn’t do it, I wasn’t listening to myself at all! The shadow is not real, until we say it is bad and we can’t trust it!
Money: I didn’t go with all my impulses, thinking: I can’t do that as money! I wanted to go with the Sacred feminine to Greed. I wanted to say: There is nothing wrong with her (=Greed); it is a Sacred Longing!!!! When you said: “If you could hold me and nourish, it brought me to … (explanation of the development of the limbic system and how it is related to the development of empathy)… it is just that critical part in development, that hungry place for nourishment! It shows up in adults, but it are young children. I think of the differences when my son has an emotion I can hold it, he can just have these expressions and he doesn’t need to hold it in his body, as we had to do.
People: I resonate with this. I choose to represent People because I feel like the people should protest, and they don’t! I went with that impulse and tried to integrate it with the feminine etc; I wanted to push that, but it didn’t work. At the end I wanted more connection with the Sacred Feminine, but it felt right that they where the bigger system. Being with Greed felt right, we can hold them. Maybe I could have played a more nurturing role…
CVS: ‘living as child in an adult body’… the holding space we have been talking about, is holding space with love. We don’t name it like that. Unconditional love… bottom line is the love and the space!
Terra: I was never fully activated. It was not needed?!? There was nothing in the constellation that was activating Terra; a potential untapped. Interesting, even when I was standing on a chair trying to get attention. The constellation was dealing with relations etc, but not paying attention to me. I stayed floating, not meaningful. I was like a piece of furniture.

Sometimes I was the currency, sometimes I was Earth. It was a dual consciousness, possible of healing the split. Neither of it was activated in the constellation.

The wild woman, not the Sacred Feminine, but the practical, seductive, juicy! If we connect juice to the Terra everybody would love it!

When wild, lush women doing real cool stuff, evoke this community, who wouldn’t want to be part of this tribe? Sexuality and sensuality are deeply connected with this; like a lover’s invitation to the Soul. The integration of wild and lush and spiritual and… spiritual ecstasy, existential ecstasy.

It reminds me of a quote: What will you do with this one wild life? Like someone is saying: Peace is sexy; make it alluring.

I put the bin in the constellation for the Cosmic Garbage. There was a heaviness in the constellation, and it was my invitation to just let it go! Throw the trash out! Then let’s get back to what we are doing.
People: (What would activate you more?) More of me. I was doing more people on my own. I was not sure how to do it, torn between fighting the old and going with the new.

(Did you feel lost? Confused?) Yeah, it was hard to keep a clear idea of things… lots of confusion… I wanted to get to a new way – not just the small concept – I didn’t see how to get there.
Money: Terra brought me the chair to rest. Terra being there was important. It allowed me to be what I was. I didn’t realize you (Terra) wanted attention, it looked like you were holding space.
Terra: For some time I was doing that. But at a certain point someone needed to notice me and activate me.
Money: At some point there was an impulse, not very strong. I wanted to reach out to Terra, but so much was going on… There is something about ‘the moment’…

(Why was it hard to look at Terra?) Part of it was ‘she was cool’, looked like ‘don’t you like me?’. I had the impulse to say: I am here for some time!
Participant: This whole movement of complementary currency can piss people of. We have to flag something about language, tone etc. ‘Old money meets new money’. A way to come in is at the side door and start a conversation.
Money: The credibility of complementary money has been studied. Unless the orange (Spiral Dynamics) can shift, credibility is not being granted. My first impulse was attraction!(Could it be an invitation to dialogue?) There was an openness, I didn’t need an invitation. But it moved too fast, I missed the opportunity. (How did it move too fast?)Terra was jumping of the chair, there was lots of fixing and making nice. There was no attention for Money and Terra.

CVS: It was not so much fixing for me, but looking for allies. Greed came along – I hoped to change it, to get Greed of my back.

There was some healing going on. Maybe Greed could be held in that, in the unconditional way. Maybe it is part of reality that there are a lot of emotions. I wanted People to make a lot of noice ‘We can’t take it any more!’… But there is responsibility everywhere.  Money: We didn’t inquire into Greed, we jumped into blaming Greed.
Facilitator: There was not much adult consciousness in the constellation.  Greed was obvious and I tried to bring her to the emotional position of a grown up – Let her say: sorry.  The other elements still didn’t trust her and I was puzzled – why couldn’t they take the bowing for what it was (maybe too soon?!)

What I hear now in this conversation afterwards are a lot of impulses not acted upon and ideas that were not spoken.  Why is that?  What does it tell us about the system?  As facilitator I see a system that is blocked and I try to see which stone to move so it can flow again.  Try to move positions or let people say something to see if it brings flow.

My big question was: Who is taking initiative?  Who is taking this on?


Greed: The instructions, to me it felt as: “Mam is upset!”, and I wanted love for the child greed.
Participant: A lot of things didn’t go ‘right’ and the learning is huge!

Participant: I honor the constellation – who didn’t show up, who doesn’t speak up… I deeply believe that – having worked with teenagers – we live in a teenage-at-risk-society! They have to be initiated; and can we love them? Saying: Let me help initiate you. That is all they are longing for.
Participant: Who do we think we are that ‘they’ need initiation?! It is what it is, and there is a longing in some of us to change something. I think it is simple.

Silence
Participant: How do we hold consciousness? It seems like Life has a new toy, Consciousness, and it doesn’t know what to do with it yet.

I’m present to the life stages from birth to… getting to an adult stage.. I am not sure that I can go there, responsibly. But I can hold the possibility and the potential. I (Money) did feel a real love. Just put some love in the system! Somewhere! There is also the urgency; when the love holds the call then it goes somewhere. It is very easy to see the call going without the love.

Participant: How to have that Call – in Love and grounded… Love says finally: No more!!! Kali energy rooted in unconditional love. We have yet to see the Feminine Principle to show up! It is not an a map yet, and all metaphors brake down.
It is quite clear that this constellation impacted us a lot. There was confusion, no one taking responsibility, everyone waiting for the others… just as we can see happening in real life in our world. The ‘jump’ from Holding Space to the active, seducing and attractive part of the feminine would work further in our time together, and even beyond.



The Glory of the Feminine
Ria — Sun, 03 May 2009 02:09:30 +0000

Another of these amazing days with amazing women in an amazing program! The point of Women Moving the Edge is that we don’t have a design for the process. What we do have is a long process of preparation of holding the space for the potential to manifest and an intense co-sensing of what would be the right guiding question. These two, the holding space and the guiding question form the container in which the gathering can unfold. This question is in nice colors on the wall and besides the practice of the circle nothing is set beforehand.
For me it feels very natural to trust that something really meaningful will come out of this – even that we will move the edge of where we were before -; but I realized that it is not for many people. This trust makes that there is no pressure whatsoever of getting somewhere and it welcomes every contribution in the circle. So besides the conversations we had a song, a walk to the beach, belly dancing; we had tears and lots of laughter, and a hot tub to end the day.
It is impossible to remember or describe all the conversations… maybe I can put it together in The Glory of the Feminine.

What if following our bliss, our passion, our joy, our pleasure would be the way to go, and creating the new world would be a byproduct of that?!?
Coming from the idea that the masculine and the feminine needs to melt before new birth can occur, we had different lines of conversation on this dance between the genders, between these two energies. Who has to move first? Or do we all dance to the cosmic music and there is no one moving first but only listening to the resonance?

Is there value in seducing? Isn’t seducing the very act of being the pleasure and embodying the future?
The first part of our question is: “If we collectively hold space for the Future that is being birthed, …” That might be a very big idea, but it is important to see lots of our work – paid or not – in that light. We can’t move faster than how it goes, and it is important that projects and ideas can unfold in resonance with the pace of the Earth. But very important in this process is that we need each other to support one another in this holding space. It is a conscious act, although not very visible, but so needed!
Being pregnant… together…



What is the feminine?
Ria — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 17:38:39 +0000
Different than what I planned, but one week after we finished the fifth iteration of Women Moving the Edge I still find value in writing down the words that struck me, the new wise insights I got in the process.

The following words – pieces of sentences – should be read like a poem, with attention for the deeper meaning they carry. These are the words I noted down on Saturday morning (Jan 31), our first session after the welcome and check-in of the night before.

our emptiness

our silence

is not ‘absence of’

it is huge

it has meaning

it touches me

My whole solar plexus is expanding.

There is incredible strength

it can move mountains

it comes from within.
We make something to hold something else.
When I sense into the center, it feels as if we are pregnant.

What are the conditions that enable a fruitful pregnancy?

Being pregnant is about being. You can’t rush it.

Lying in bed was ‘doing something’.
Do I make sense when I am ‘useless’?

It is OK when it is related to others.
Being pregnant, my body knew exactly what to do! It taught me! It was making some magic. How subtle it is to let your body teach you!
We can be pregnant of so many things!
It was the process of what was to come.

The body knows.

Now – Here – This.
The emptiness has meaning.

The house and the walls are there to share with each other.
I am curious…

The way of our body…

My body wants to be touched.
The nothing is full of something.

I love to be in the silence with you.

I love when we slow down.

A golden silence.
When we slow down, we go down. And what becomes possible is joy!

“And she gave him her joy at what he had created.”
The feminine has been on a long journey. What is the feminine?
When Shekinah comes back the 23rd letter will appear.

The holding has value.

I named it and claimed it.

Shekinah is back.

The feminine is bonding together… weaving under and over… to create a beautiful piece.

Perchta, the Goddess of Weaving and Knitting…
If we can’t name it, how can they know? I can’t be pregnant without his seed.

“… she lived with him and gave Form to his creative Word”

We can’t blame them for not seeing it.

Men are happy to take care of women being pregnant.

Holding space for our own femininity.
You are pregnant or not; you can’t be a little bit pregnant! We can’t be a little bit feminine.
So positive.

So much potential.
Either you give us the stage, or we take it! Dancing, singing, joy, little stories, jokes…

We are in separate cars on the same road.

Nobody is to blame, not myself, not the men, nobody. Honoring instead of blaming.
IMAGINE   CREATE   INNOVATE
Our attempts for innovation are welcome!



Start of Women Moving the Edge 5
Ria — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 21:11:40 +0000
Inspiration
Thirty spokes are joined together in a wheel,

but it is the center hole

that allows the wheel to function.
We mold clay into a pot,

but it is the emptiness inside

that makes the vessel useful.
We fashion wood for a house,

but it is the emptiness inside

that makes it livable.
We work with the substantial,

but the emptiness is what we use.

Tao Te Ching: (part of) Chapter 11

More Inspiration

“When God created the World, he was not alone. Sophia – Wisdom – the feminine Principle – was with him, lived with him and gave Form to his creative Word. And she gave him her joy at what he had created.”

Gerard Bodifée
Our Guiding Question

When we fully name, claim and live as the feminine,

Individually and collectively

In service of the whole

What becomes possible in our world?
We started yesterday with the fifth Women Moving the Edge. We had one day and a half preparation with our hosting team before. One of my big realizations – when being in a collective presence and sourcing energy – was that science and knowledge has evolved over time (as we all know), but that inner wisdom has been evolving too. The inner wisdom that we can access now isn’t the same anymore than during the times of the priestesses of Avalon. It has evolved, we evolved it, it evolved us. We are evolving the Earth – the whole of its system – as much with science as with wisdom.



The Deva of Flow
Ria — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 15:13:16 +0000
As it goes, through some connections by email I received this report. I found it interesting as it links with constellations I have facilitated, or maybe better to say: that have emerged in gatherings that I was hosting. It is about a constellation with its focus on the New Economy.
Especially the role of the Joyful Women – see the end – speaks to me as we are looking in the program Women Moving the Edge what is the kind of feminine action and consciousness that is needed in the world right now. Enjoy this story!
“On Sunday Nov. 16, at a Women’s Circle in Malibu, California, a new Deva* came through to help us manifest the New Economy of the New Earth: The Deva of Flow.
This occurred during a Constellation** inquiring into what needs to happen to bring the Economy into alignment with the Divine Plan.

It was a “Chaos Constellation” in which people do not know what they are representing. Each person simply follows her own movements until she finds her place. Representatives were chosen for the Economy, the Deva of the Economy, and different aspects of the Solution. By the end, all the 20+ people in the room were in the Constellation, including a 7-year-old girl and 5-month-old boy.

In sharing after the Constellation, representatives reported feeling as though they were water, part of the waves or wave action, sources of power, etc. Science, Education, New Energy Forms, the Common Man and Women all entered to find their places as part of the Solution.

The representative for the Deva of Flow (a name that came to me later) constantly wove in and out of the group, making a whooshing sound like the wind, easily bending, arching and moving among all the different people and energies.

When New Forms of Business came into the Constellation, all the other representatives ignored her. She wanted to go to the Economy, but could not stand on her own and sank down on the floor. It took the Deva of Flow to reach out to New Business, raise her up and show her how to dance, how to move, how to effortlessly flow.

Dancing, New Business connected to Conscious Humanity, and they danced and flowed together. Many other representatives in the room already were holding hands, starting to make a circle. Conscious Humanity and New Business – their hands linked – moved to join the others.

Conscious Humanity took the hand of the 7-year-old girl and there was an expectation that New Business would complete the circle. But, with her right hand joined to Conscious Humanity, New Business continued to move into the center, placing her left hand on the back of the representative for the Economy who was holding the baby boy in her arms.

Conscious Humanity and New Business continued their dancing movement, swaying their hips and moving together. Everyone else in the room linked hands and the line moved and swayed in harmony, slowly spiraling toward the center in a living expression of Sacred Geometry, the Golden Mean, the spiral at the center of a Nautilus shell.
In sharing afterwards, one representative emphasized that what the Economy needs is the energy of Joyful Woman: The woman who has no agenda. Who does not push but gently pulls, saying, “Follow me!” This is NOT the energy of trying to fix or make something happen. This is the energy of pure knowing, powerfully and gently expressed. This is the wise, intuitive woman who leads simply by Being who she is.
* A deva is an overlighting Spirit – emanation of the Divine – overseeing physical manifestations on Earth. (There are Devas for all the elements, trees, plants, animals, etc.)
** In a Constellation (a process pioneered by German psychotherapist Bert Hellinger), an issue or question is raised and individuals enter a circle of sacred space, following the feelings, information and movements they sense through their bodies. Through this group process, a new picture may emerge, which can help shift the energy in an individual, relationship or situation.”
Joy Steltzner