Seeds for a happy planet

This post was written on Oct. 13, but that doesn’t matter too much. For you, readers, this gathering can just start tommorow, instead of 13 days ago.

Autumn is really present here. Most trees have already lost a lot of leaves, or are showing the yellows, browns and reds that make autumn so beautiful. Yesterday was a day full of fog and later a lot of rain. We are here in Three Rivers, Michigan, for the 11th WMtE11 Women Moving the Edge gathering, on invitation of Ruth Eichler and it is in her house that we are gathering.

Yesterday Judy, Ruth and myself had a day of preparation; it went smooth and easy. I like when conversations and small actions flow easily from one into the other, without much checking or needing to seek agreement. We were in the flow together of what needed to happen: both deeper connection on the topic and the many small details to make all logistics work.

The theme or guiding question is articulated as follows:

After some silence we checked in with what was present, and the dialogue unfolded from there.

One of the themes was the understanding that there is reciprocity between humans and the subtle realms.
Reciprocal joy.
Reciprocal gratitude.
Mutual evolution.

As much as the mutual evolution of humans and the subtle realms is new to me -but makes a lot of sense – the concept of reciprocity is still a two-way relationship; back and forth and not too difficult to understand once you are open for it. I recently heard a woman-scientist explain the latest findings in science, which make a combination of relativity theory + quantum physics + consciousness and is linked with the notion of Planck scale (or more here). As far as I understood, on that ‘level’ all is information, and all is fractal. Everything has fractal dimensions; expressions on all levels. I am not at all stating that I can fully comprehend what she was trying to explain, but what I got is that reality, or the universe, is holographic in its nature. This is way beyond ‘back and forth’. This is ‘inter-dimensional’, where all dimensions are not just ‘connected’, but interweaving and interpenetrating each other.
Now that is something totally different!

It reminds of Brian Swimme explaining one power (out of ten) in the universe, called Expansion. He tried to convey the image that the universe is at all moments expanding in all directions. Not just from one point; not just in one direction. But expanding from every point you can imagine; in all directions; all the time.

My head was – and still is – crunching to take this really in.
Expanding from every point you can imagine;
in all directions;
all the time.

Living in a holographic universe: How can we language that with our linear built-up sentences?

And even more important: How do we embody that concept, in a way that it speaks in and through all our day-to-day actions; instead of just understanding it as a concept?

Here is more harvest from our latest mini Women Moving the Edge; made by the same participant as the previous one. You can sense the different energy of that afternoon…

Vibrations of Joy

Holding back,
Resisting,
Letting it soak in.
Not pouting in a corner

The freedom is always there.
It depends on us taking it.

Self-organization.
We are going to collage!

Sensing the subtle.
Jump over and get the brush!
Juicy.

What’s behind the veil?
An extended horizon.

Honor the mystery.
Be childlike, even in power.

Balance.
Impermanence.

Be open to every joy.

A few days ago we had a mini Women Moving the Edge gathering, starting with an outside circle on Midsummer – with lots and lots of musquitos! As these gatherings go, it is sometimes hard to share later what happened and what we actually talked about, or what emerged out of the collective inquiry. I was more than happy that one of the participants shared a collective harvest after each major part of the gathering! She learned – or maybe remembered? – this skill while attending an Art of Hosting training, and seeing others doing it.

To get a full sense of this, picture a circle of women, sitting outside in the evening, next to a beautiful pond…
or inside with some candles lit and beautiful flowers in the middle…
and take your time to read the sentences slowly…

Soapstone Balance

Balance, stepping back to savor, feeding the spirit.
Embodiment of the subtle
Experiencing sound, a coursing energy,
Feeling nourished, curious beyond the realm of present.

Can I hear it now?

Living a fulfilled life.
“Tell the people”, a recipe for replenishments.
The Power of Now.
Moving something on the surface, being open to the mystery.

In awe of how the universe works.
What will it take to remember the beauty on the other side?

Synesthesia, senses intertwining
Sharing a dream of being rushed, missing the bus to Finn.
Do you feel like breaking the temple?
What rhythm do I want in my life?
Moving into a cycle that I want to be in.

Why does singing bring joy?
Why does creating something bring joy?
Measuring a multi-vibrational harmony.
Joy and Beauty, a point to measure ourselves against.

Natural rhythm, new manifestations, a specific way to perceive the subtle.
Seeing, hearing, sensing, knowing.

What are we perceiving as right or almost right?

Sitting with excuses, not open in the morning.
Experiencing how the universe flows through me & the group.
Joyful or staying with whatever is in us.

Resilience, fatigued but not stressed.
A capacity to hold things when we have an alignment with our soul path,
Fully engaged in life.

A sacred circle to invoke and welcome the space.
Tuning in, however belatedly.
Things walk through our space, braiding things that happen willy nilly.

An ever fading and replenishing creation.
Being and seeing in different ways.
Vibrational essences, a mix of random patterns.
Different ways of experiencing life and joys and place.

The earth in larger cycles that we don’t understand.
Chaos as a natural rhythm, subtle sensing.
An ever evolving alignment.

The Future calling us to step up, be present.
Seeing or not seeing, we sense.

Part of the “Us”.

I said it before here, I’m way behind in blogging what I want to blog about… one big chunck that is on a pile right next to me is writing about the experience in our last Women Moving the Edge gathering. I know that one of the reasons that it hasn’t been done yet, is that our experience is getting more and more subtle, and in that way it is more and more difficult to write about it, at least when you don’t have a lot of time.
But my dear friend Helen comes to the rescue, as she has done incredible artful blogposts – using some of her fabulous pictures – on different topics or themes that are present for us. So instead of stressing myself to write I’m going to point you to her blog and my writings can still come in later.
Exploring radiance
The power of our daughters
Power of Place
Poetic response from the world
Widening the circle
Invisible beings and other dimensions
The presence of Ria’s book (Yes, mine)

A piece of art by Elena Leibbrand, made during the gathering

I’m way behind in blogging and in making notes and sit down to capture learnings…
but here is a great post by Helen on our latest Women Moving the Edge gathering here in Belgium. The slideshow with all the drawings we made is just stunning! (this was not a drawing workshop or art class!)

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.

Sunday morning we invited every voice in the circle to check in, as we have come to realize, again and again, how important that is for the energy in the circle. It took us almost till noon, but it was surely worthwhile!

Following upon the affirmation we had named the day before – The need of the world/Earth is an invitation to become fully ourselves; that is our role as the evolving collective feminine. – of course that turned into new questions:
What does it mean to become fully ourselves?
How is it to be the new collective?
It seems like a sacred meditation in itself…

Living as the web of life is living from a meditative space…
the flow is enticing but is not always there…
the flow becomes a stream of evolution, completely natural.

I feel the need to report how it has started snowing here again. Snowing with these thick drops of snow that make the perfect layer to use the snow to sculpture. It is an amasing view because there are windows on almost three sides of this room and it feels as if I am right in the middle of it, but still warm and protected.

I also notice that the further it gets into a gathering it becomes more difficult to sculpt out the meaning it has – for me at least. More really new things are coming in, new insights and new information, and I need more time to digest all of it before I am able to write something coherent about it. So I will stop here for now, and go to have breakfast instead of forcing myself…

As always in our Women Moving the Edge gatherings, I’m getting behind in blogging all that happened because it is such an intense time. It is Monday morning now and I have slept almost 10 hours, as my energy collapsed to almost zero yesterday late afternoon. So I wasn’t part of the second evening in the hot tub… I will hear the stories later today.

What if the new is here now? that is how Judy invited us into the afternoon on Saturday. A few themes that I wrote down in the moment:

Healing
The circle is a safe birthing place for the broken off bits of ourselves. I’m becoming more of myself, in this collective feminine that we are…

Birthing the new woman
The new woman is soft, has a clear focus; she knows; she brings the pain into relation; she is all of this and doesn’t need a definition. She receives in the womb, gives it some form and brings it into relation with the outside.


Trusting the intangible
Trusting the color to pick; trusting the image to follow; trusting the impulse to speak…

Yesterday morning, which was Sunday, we started the circle with reading my two blog posts; as a way to mirror back what had happened so far. Of course, and that’s the point I want to make here, this is only my experience, the things that I have picked and found meaningful, out of the vast amount of what was spoken; not able to mention all that happened inside the other participants in the process.

In the late afternoon energy got low in the group and also in myself. I was wondering what this was about. I was not normal tiredness, at least not for me. Some were laying down… coming in and out of the dream state… resting to allow to open up to new ways of sensing… cherishing the silence… resting to open up the vagina… resting to let the broken off bits heal…

It was noticed that after connecting with ourselves – to reconnect the lost bits - and connect with each other the next step is to relate with the Earth; ‘allow myself to grow into the soil’.

Relaxing – as if nothing needs to happen – to improve my confidence in myself and the confidence to use my wisdom in the outside world. This gathering is the place to receive and then ‘giving’ my view into the world. I’m tired of being this or that, I want to be the way I am!

So, it dawned on us that we needed to change our question into affirmative mode: The need of the world/Earth is an invitation to become fully ourselves; that is our role as the evolving collective feminine!

It is Sunday morning now, more snow has come during the evening and the night; so postcards are everywhere you turn your head. Meditation has just ended and a few people are doing their morning exercises.

Yesterday evening we treated ourselves with a special gift: a hot tub in the open air, with the full moon right in front of us! It was a fabulous experience, with the moon coming in and out of the clouds, getting hot in the water and then rolling in the snow to get cold and back in the hot tub again. Time to just be and enjoy the experience and nothing more...

It wasn’t an easy morning yesterday. We were in the proces that Arnold Mendell calls becoming a True Community. First there is the happiness of finding like-minded people and then – all of a sudden? - the diversity shows up! Weren’t we friends; and now I am angry at you! In the language of Theory U this is the point of opening the heart, realising that all emotions that we project on each other are ours and we have to take responsibility for them ourselves. Going beyond the right and wrong, or any polarity that is present, and opening to the diversity and how other people are different than us. It was a big reminder for all of us, me included, never to violate the rule of the talking stone and an invitation again to speak to and from the middle and not addressing someone in specific. Reclaiming our projections is needed to re-weave the strands of the collective.

It was nice to see how throughout the day more and more people started drawing or playing with colors on paper. Amasing pieces of art emerged before our eyes by just taking one color after the other, not having a plan upfront what it would need to look like. This is exactly what we invite people to do here – to be here – to live in the moment, sensing where impulses are coming from and express them when they are authentic. We were releasing the tension of having to reach something. And we were, step-by-step, coming to this point of not-knowing. The mental not-knowing that hasn’t a clue how to draw energyfields, but if we try it turns out we can! It is possible to sense into that and observe and notice it in some way. There is something below the visible and the tangible...