womanspirit

2013 Moon Calamandala

Posted on November 23, 2012 by Molly

This post is part of an assignment for my Birth-Death-Regeneration: Triple Goddess class at Ocean Seminary College.

First, I considered the relevance of the triple goddess concept and maiden, mother, crone archetypes/stages in my own life. I appreciate the expanded concept of the Women’s Wheel of Life elucidated by Elizabeth Davis and Carol Leonard and find there is more room within their construct for women to identify with the Wheel. The expanded wheel includes:

The Women’s Wheel of Life
(Amazon affiliate link included)

The Daughter
The Maiden
The Blood Sister
The Lover
The Mother
The Midwife
The Amazon
The Matriarch
The Priestess
The Sorceress
The Crone
The Dark Mother
The Transformer

Women’s Rites of Passage: Reconnecting to the Source of Feminine Power
(Amazon affiliate link included)

However, I also find the original Triple Goddess concept is still useful. Why? Simply because in very, very broad ways, they encompass the three blood mysteries of womanhood and serve as clearly recognizable transition points in my own life. My life IS in fact divided into three distinct stages. Before menarche and after menarche are distinctly recognizable in my memory. A couple of months ago I finished working through a Women’s Rites of Passage workbook and in it we were asked to explore our relationship with menstruation. I was surprised to discover and write the following:

I was shocked to discover during the first menstruation meditation that there is a clear division in my bodymind between before menstruation and after and that after involves less happiness and more confusion and angst and altered relationship to my body. In the meditation I saw/experienced myself as carefree and happy prior to menstruation and also eagerly awaiting her arrival. Post-menstruation I recalled the intensely painful cycles I experienced, the feeling as if I was “sick” when I had my period, and no longer feeling in blissful harmony with my body. Giving birth in power and joy helped me reclaim my body joy, but it is only in the last year that I’ve begun to consider that moontime itself might hold sacred wisdom and opportunity for connection…

As referenced, giving birth is also a distinct, transformative and intiatory rite in my own life. As with menstruation, I also observe a definite distinction between before motherhood and after motherhood. And, in many ways, I am not the same person I was before going through this rite of transformation.

Finally, while I’m not to the Crone stage yet, I can sense that this will be similar only it will likely represent the division between life as a mother with children at home and life as a mother with adult children.

I wish to acknowledge that I know that many women do not become mothers for a variety of reasons, so they may in fact feel excluded from the very transitions and distinctions I describe above. That is why I prefer Davis and Leonard’s exploration of 13 archetypes. And, it is not my intention to make any reader feel excluded or overlooked by the Triple Goddess image, just to explain how I am able to see her represented in my own life’s trajectory.

As I have described previously, within my circle of friends, we have been wonderful for some time at celebrating the Blood/Women’s Mysteries. We have Mother Blessing ceremonies for each pregnant woman as well as maiden ceremonies for our girls who are coming of age. My mother and her friends had a coming of age ceremony for all of their daughters when I was 13 (and my sister 11) and it was very meaningful for us. Two years ago, I facilitated a blessingway ceremony for all of my friends’ 10-12 year old daughters follow a series of Meetings at the Moon classes. We also had a new SageWoman ceremony just this month to honor the wise women among us. One of my goals is to have a regular monthly Moon Circle–to bring some of that sense of celebration and power from our Mother Blessing ceremonies more fully into our lives and to celebrate the fullness and completeness of women-in-themselves, not just of value while pregnant. (In January 2011 some friends and I did begin holding quarterly women’s retreats loosely based on the seasonal cycles, with the intention of perhaps having this become a monthly circle, and with the intention of celebrating our lives, whatever the stage or experience.)

As I read the material for this lesson, I was thinking about the wheel of the year and about the woman’s wheel of life and I decided it was time to make my 2013 Moon Calamandala drawing! It seemed like the perfect time! The Moon Calamandala (TM* 😉 ) includes the dates of each full moon in 2013. It also includes a variety of “womanrune” symbols to pictorially explore what our family would like to bring into our lives during each quarter. In the classes I teach, sometimes I encourage my students to think in circles rather than in lines. To me, this is what the Moon Calamandala represents as well. Here, we see the year as a cycle, a circle, another turn around the sun, rather than as a series of linear boxes as a graph, implying a distinct beginning and ending. The four goddess images represent the seasons and the four quarters of the year. Within each quarter are that quarter’s moons and the womanrunes symbols I chose to indicate family hopes, dreams, or plans for that part of the year. The waxing and waning moons are also indicated symbolically.

My 2012 Moon Calamandala (above) and the 2013 drawing ready to go into the frame. You can see a larger image and description of my 2012 calendar in this post, which was part of an assignment for a different class at OSC.

On the wall!

Seemingly appropriate for the Mother turn of the wheel, I received much assistance from my littlest one as I was completing the calamandala:

Womanrunes

*I think I may have just invented this new word 😉

Categories: art, family, Goddess, OSC, spirituality, womanspirit, writing | 2 Comments

Stand, Sisters…

Posted on October 12, 2012 by Molly

Stand together, dear sisters,

arm in arm, thigh to thigh, heart to heart–

Great CD for women’s circles! Circle of Women
(Amazon affiliate link)

stand strong, sturdy, flexible.

Stand on the seesaw

and know–

it’s always moving, never still,

forever moving up and down

always rises up again.

Stand flexibly, dear sisters.

stand together, arm in arm,

and whether you’re up or down–

Rejoice!

–Barbara Ardinger in SageWoman Magazine #78

Categories: friends, poems, readings, womanspirit, women, women's circle | Leave a comment

Her Name by Janine Canan

Posted on October 1, 2012 by Molly

She is dancing her Dance
and everything changes.
This is what is meant by Impermanence,
buddhist for God.

She is dancing her Dance
and nothing remains.
This is what is meant by Nothingness,
atheist for God.

She is dancing her Dance
and everything is beautiful.
This is what is meant by Changing Woman,
navajo for God.

She is dancing her Dance
and planets whirl around the sun.
This is what is meant by Allah,
sufi for God.

She is dancing her Dance
and her forms are never-ending.
This is what is meant by Shakti, Energy,
hindu for God.

She is dancing her Dance
and the Dance is She.
This is what is meant by God,
human for Mystery.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

poem from Ardor: Poems of Life

via Her Name by Janine Canan « Feminism and Religion.

Categories: Goddess, poems, quotes, spirituality, theapoetics, womanspirit | Leave a comment

Blessingways and the role of ritual

Posted on September 18, 2012 by Molly

I saw this gorgeous blessingway image pinned on Pinterest a while ago. Love it!

In this circle No Fear
In this circle Deep Peace
In this circle Great Happiness
In this circle Rich Connection

I’ve recently been on a reading streak with books on ritual. I’ve always been interested in ritual, especially women’s rituals, and I’ve planned and facilitated a lot of different rituals. I also have a huge variety of books that include information on planning rituals, women’s spirituality books, books about blessingways, and more. I’m branching out even more with my recent kick though, starting with buying books on officiating/planning wedding ceremonies (I have two weddings coming up in October). Then, I was talking to some mothers of newly teenage boys about planning some kind of coming of age rite/ritual for them and bought some more books on creating sacred ceremonies for teenagers. (I’m good with books for women/girls, but sadly lacking in resources for ceremonies and celebrations for boys/men.) One of the books I purchased was Rituals for Our Times, a book about “celebrating, healing, and changing our lives and relationships.” I left a mini-review on goodreads already:

There were some good things about this book about the meaning, value, purpose, and role of ritual in family life. I lost interest about halfway through and ended up skimming the second half. While it does contain some planning lists/worksheets for considering your own family rituals, the overall emphasis is on short vignettes of how other families have coped with challenges or occasions in their own lives. Also, the focus is on very conventional, mainstream “ritual” occasions–birthdays, anniversaries, holidays–rather than on life cycle rites of passage and other more spiritual transitions in one’s life.

However, one section I marked was about the elements that make ritual work for us and I thought about blessingways and how they neatly fulfill all of the necessary ritual elements (which I would note are not about symbols, actions, and physical objects, but are instead about the emotional elements of connection, affection, and relationship):

Relating–”the shaping, expressing, and maintaining of important relationships…established relationships were reaffirmed and new relationship possibilities opened.” Many women choose to invite those from their inner circle to their blessingways. This means of deeply engaging with and connecting with those closest to you, reaffirms and strengthens important relationships. In my own life, I’ve always chosen to invite more women than just those in my “inner circle” (thinking of it as the next circle out from inner circle) and in so doing have found that it is true that new relationship possibilities emerge from the reaching out and inclusion of those who were originally less close, but who after the connection of shared ritual, then became closer friends.

Changing–”the making and marking of transitions for self and others.” Birth and the entry into motherhood—an intense and permanent life change–is one of life’s most significant transitions. A blessingway marks the significance of this huge change.

Healing–”recovery from loss,” special tributes, recovering from fears or scars from previous births or cultural socialization about birth. My mom and some close friends had a meaningful ceremony for me following the miscarriage-birth of my third baby. I’ve also planned several blessingways in which releasing fears was a potent element of the ritual.

Believing–”the voicing of beliefs and the making of meaning.” By honoring a pregnant woman through ceremony, we are affirming that pregnancy, birth, and motherhood are valuable and meaningful rites of passage deserving of celebration and acknowledgement.

Celebrating–”the expressing of deep joy and the honoring of life with festivity.” Celebrating accomplishments of…one’s very being.

Notice that what is NOT included is any mention of a specific religion, deity, or “should do” list of what color of candle to include! I’ve observed that many people are starved for ritual, but they may so too be deeply scarred from rituals of their pasts. I come from a family history of “non-religious” people and I feel like I seem to have less baggage about ritual and ceremony than other people do. An example from the recent planning for a mother blessing ceremony: we were talking about one of the blessingway songs that we customarily sing–Call Down Blessing–we weren’t sure if we should include it for fear that it would seem too “spiritual” or metaphysical for the honoree (i.e. blessings from where?!) and I remembered another friend asking during a body blessing ritual we did at a women’s retreat, “but WHO’s doing the blessing?” As someone who does not come a religious framework in which blessings are traditionally bestowed from outside sources–i.e. a priest/priestess or an Abrahamic God–the answer felt simple, well, WE are. We’re blessing each other. When we “call down a blessing” we’re invoking the connection of the women around us, the women of all past times and places, and of the beautiful world that surrounds us. We might each personally add something more to that calling down, but at the root, to me, it is an affirmation of connection to the rhythms and cycles of relationship, time, and place. Blessings come from within and around us all the time, there’s nothing supernatural about it.

I also think, though I could be wrong, that it is possible to plan and facilitate women’s rituals that speak to the “womanspirit” in all of us and do not require a specifically shared spiritual framework or belief system in order to gain something special from the connection with other women.

In another book I finished recently, The Power of Ritual, the author explains:

“Ritual opens a doorway in the invisible wall that seems to separate the spiritual and the physical. The formal quality of ritual allows us to move into the space between the worlds, experience what we need, and then step back and once more close the doorway so we can return to our lives enriched.”

She goes on to say:

You do not actually have to accept the ideas of any single tradition, or even believe in divine forces at all, to take part in ritual. Ritual is a direct experience, not a doctrine. Though it will certainly help to suspend your disbelief for the time of the ritual, you could attend a group ritual, take part in the chanting and drumming, and find yourself transported to a sense of wonder at the simple beauty of it all without ever actually believing in any of the claims made or the Spirits invoked. You can also adapt rituals to your own beliefs. If evolution means more to you than a Creator, you could see ritual as a way to connect yourself to the life force…

As I continued to think about these ideas, I finished reading another book on ritual called The Goddess Celebrates. An anthology of women’s rituals, this book included two essays by wisewoman birthkeeper, Jeannine Pavarti Baker. She says:

The entire Blessingway Ceremony is a template for childbirth. The beginning rituals are like nesting and early labor. The grooming and washing like active labor. The gift giving like giving birth and the closing songs/prayers, delivery of the placenta and postpartum. A shamanic midwife learns how to read a Blessingway diagnostically and mythically, sharing what she saw with the pregnant woman in order to clear the road better for birth.

[emphasis mine, because isn’t that just a cool idea?! I feel another blog post coming on in which I “read” my own blessingway experiences and how they cleared the way for my births]

Baker goes on to describe the potent meaning of birth and its affirmation through and by ritual acknowledgement:

Birth is a woman’s spiritual vision quest. When this idea is ritualized beforehand, the deeper meanings of childbirth can more readily be accessed. Birth is also beyond any one woman’s personal desires and will, binding her in the community of all women. Like the birthing beads, her experiences is one more bead on a very long strand connecting all mothers. Rituals for birth hone these birthing beads, bringing to light each facet of the journey of birth…

“I wish for you a life full of ritual and community.” —Flaming Rainbow Woman, Spiritual Warrior

(in The Thundering Years: Rituals and Sacred Wisdom for Teens)

“Genuine, heartfelt ritual helps us reconnect with power and vision as well as with the sadness and pain of the human condition. When the power and vision come together, there’s some sense of doing things properly for their own sake.” —Pema Chodron

(in The Thundering Years: Rituals and Sacred Wisdom for Teens)

Other posts about mother blessings can be found here.

–
Amazon affiliate links included in book titles.

This post was originally published on Talk Birth

Categories: blessings, resources, ritual, womanspirit, women, women's circle | 4 Comments

Knocking…

Posted on August 28, 2012 by Molly

Last night I dreamed I was in

the living room with my friend

There was a knock on the door

Listen, I said

That’s the Goddess

We looked at each other for a long moment

and then I said,

It is time to open the door

and let Her in…

8/27/2012

Edited to add–when I hit publish on this, the random WordPress quote I got was suitably this one: “Dreams are illustrations from the book your soul is writing about you.” –Marsha Norman 🙂

Categories: Goddess, spirituality, womanspirit, women, writing | Leave a comment

Embodied Prayer

Posted on August 22, 2012 by Molly

Sister, before you get all busy and serious about your new year resolutions,
take a moment to tune into that force which beats your heart,
which grows the leaves on the trees, which creates and tears down,
everything.
Tune into the captivating rhythm of evolution,
and dance your way into your holy calling.
The whole universe is dancing with you.

–Awakening Women Institute

I’ve felt a pull to return to this quote above and to something I wrote about embodied prayer at the dawning of 2012. I have had a tense, taut, and tight couple of days in which I’ve been irritable and impatient with those closest to me (for whatever reason, the people I know less well, usually get the “better” side of me, which just doesn’t seem like the way things should be!). It is strange because on one hand I feel like wonderful things are unfolding in my life in ways that feel meaningful, on purpose, and right, while at the same time I continue to struggle with finding the balance between what I need in my life for myself and what my children need/expect/deserve from me–the two often, frankly, feel incompatible. I continue to believe that there is a way for our family to live in harmony together, companionably meeting each member’s needs for self-expression, self-development, love, and authenticity, but then with weeks like this, I feel as if perhaps that IS an unreasonable hope!

When I became ordained as a priestess, one of the things that I vowed to myself was that I would remember to be a priestess of my own hearth first, rather than to become so pulled by the expectations of others outside my family that they get my best and my family gets the scraps. I’m amazed by how opportunities have been opening up to me since accepting the priestess call—I’m planning multiple rituals and ceremonies, I’m going to a Goddess festival next month, I continue to make steady progress on my doctoral degree and finished another one of my classes this week, my brain buzzes with ideas for my dissertation, I’m absolutely stoked to have two articles accepted for publication at the Feminism and Religion blog (one of which seems to actually be an original/fresh idea in the field of thealogy!), I have a guest post accepted for publication on The Divine Feminine blog, and I had an essay published in The Oracle (the online zine for Global Goddess) called The Central Value of Relationship. I also have other ideas for classes/circles I’d like to facilitate and participate in. These things feel great. They feel right. They feel like where I belong. They also feel risky and brave and big and complex. I love the life of the mind and ideas that I’m experiencing in my classes. I love spending time in my own brain. I love thinking and writing and teaching and learning—“priestessing” my community in all of these ways. And, yet, then I feel bad and guilty about having snapped at my kids while trying to finish these–how ironic–essays on spiritual growth and development and then I feel like a fraud. And, every day I find myself with a “time deficit” and feeling taut and on the edge of freaking out because there is just SO. MUCH. TO. DO. All the time. And, I don’t feel like I ever get a break to just be still and rest. It is almost like I don’t know how to rest.

So, here’s what I wrote at the beginning of the year:

This year, I’d like to let go of shoulding myself. If I don’t truly have to do something, I’m only going to do it if I want to do it. If the word “should” enters the picture about anything, I’m going to use that as my cue to NOT do whatever it is I’m letting should me. Sound like a plan?

I enjoyed reading this post from Dreaming Aloud recently and the writer observes that she is only going to be able to be her for the new year: “I might even let myself mother to my own standards too! Wouldn’t that be nice, rather than failing every day because I don’t do everything the way the books say.” She also included this interesting idea about 3/4 baked: “Another influential book in my life…Zugunruhe… talks about the 3/4 baked philosophy, where the author urges us to do our work the best we can, but rather than spending all our energy in refining it ad infinitum, put it out to the world 3/4 baked and let the feedback and the inspiration it creates, and your own distance, do the final honing, because really there is no such thing as perfect.”

Embodied Prayer

My other intention for 2012 was a very personal one that I felt extremely hesitant to write about. As soon as I read the quote I shared above from The Awakening Women Institute, I knew I wanted to share it. When I applied to graduate school in thealogy, I wrote in my application that I wanted my life to be a living prayer for social justice and women’s empowerment. Then, based on my work in my graduate classes, I started to be asked to write for publications focused on women and religion. I have always felt very cautious and wary of sharing any of my ideas about spirituality or religion publicly and so this makes me nervous for a variety of reasons. So did starting this blog and I’ve sort of tried to avoid connecting it to my “other life.” However, if I’m actually going to be writing these articles and having original ideas in the field, it is time to shed discomfort and speak my truth! I think my primary concept of living prayer is really about mindfulness. Being here and being aware.

In September, the Awakening Women Institute offered via Twitter to give people “temple names”—you were asked to respond to the question about “your edge right now in your life. What is calling you, what is challenging, what is opening?” I was instantly intrigued and responded to the offer with the following: “I have multiple edges–I feel at the edge of being able to truly live my faith, having my life be a living prayer. I also constantly teeter on the edge between meeting my children’s needs and meeting my own needs–and trying to find the harmony in that; trying to find the place in which our family works in harmony to meet each member’s needs (not requiring ‘sacrifice,’ because we have a seamless integration!).” The temple name I received was: Embodied Prayer. At first I felt slightly disappointed, like, yeah, I said that already. But, as I “rested” with the name and stated it aloud—i.e. “I am Embodied Prayer”—it became a powerful daily practice for me (that I seem to have lost hold of recently).

I have long sought strategies to integrate a sense of the sacred in daily life and have also known that at the root, what I’m really wanting is daily mindfulness. My “temple name” came to serve in some ways as mindfulness touchstone for me—as I go about my life, I ask myself what kind of “prayer” I’m offering in this moment. And, is this the kind of prayer I want to embody right now? (i.e. this week as I feel cranky and overextended and tense and annoyed, I’ve been stepping back slightly and looking at my “prayer” and realizing that I wanted to embody a much different sort of offering to the divine, to the web of life, than a stressed out cranky prayer.) This step back and self-reminder, sometimes calms my mood and allows me to breathe more deeply and kindly, but recently I’ve solely been using it in a self-flagellating way: what kind of prayer is THAT, you loser! You think you’re a priestess?! What a JOKE, you SUCK. What about this priestess of your own hearth bit, failure woman?! I also become angry at myself when I forget to use it, forget to be mindful. I’ve also described this practice as reaching out to touch my thread in the fabric of the tapestry of the world. When I get caught up in my own busyness, I lose sight of my “weaving” within the overall tapestry of life, that holding web of incarnation that I call Goddess, and I’d like to always remain mindful of that connectedness—or, at least to notice when I’ve lost it and reach out my hand to that which is always there, surrounding me.

Then, as I was thinking these thoughts and berating myself, and always continuously trying to be better and dang it failing every single day at being better (and, yet, trying again the next day!), I read this blog post today from Jen Louden called I’m Not Liking Myself and I’m Not Doing Anything About It. Say what? Do you mean I DON’T always have to “be better” and to have my life be one long, relentless, ever-failing self-improvement project?! Maybe this is possible: “So if you ever find yourself not liking yourself, put down the self-improvement and take a nap. But no mean thoughts allowed!”

Oh, and by the way…to what/why is this prayer of which you speak offered anyway?

This is actually part of the main subject of my upcoming guest posts on those other blog, but I’ll touch on it now anyway. Something that made me feel as if I belonged to our tiny little Unitarian Universalist church and like there was indeed a spiritual niche I fit into, was a hymn we sang during one of my first visits with a line of, “some call it evolution, and others call it God.” That notion that there is something widely felt by many, but called by different names and within vastly different systems of belief and understanding, is why I continue to identify as a UU, even though I’m not closely involved with the local church any longer. This force, this connecting “glue” that holds the universe together might be named by others “God” or “the Universe” or “Nature” or “Life Force” or “the Sacred” or “Divinity” or “the Tao”—I feel most satisfied when I personalize it as Goddess. I do also feel Her presence directly in my life—call it an energy, call it the sacred feminine, call it the divine, call it source, call it soul, call it spirit, call it the great mystery…I perceive a web of relatedness and love within the world and I choose to put a feminine form to that energy—to name it and know Her as “Goddess.” When I am embodied prayer, it is mindfulness of this connection and relatedness of which I speak.

Categories: family, Goddess, spirituality, thealogy, womanspirit | 4 Comments

May I…

Posted on August 22, 2012 by Molly

May my feet rest firmly on the ground
May my head touch the sky
May I see clearly
May I have the capacity to listen
May I be free to touch
May my words be true
May my heart and mind be open
May my hands be empty to fill the need
May my arms be open to others
May my gifts be revealed to me
So I may return that which has been given
Completing the great circle.

–The Terma Collective in Life Prayers

Categories: nature, prayers, quotes, spirituality, womanspirit | Leave a comment

As Women Have Always Woven

Posted on August 17, 2012 by Molly

As women have always woven
so we weave this yarn into the circle of our lives.

As women have always woven time and the fates,
so let us weave this yarn into the circle of our lives.

As woman have always woven the seeds with the earth,
so let us weave this yarn into the circle of our lives.

As women have always woven baskets and tools.
so let us weave this yarn into the circle of our lives.

As women have always woven threads into clothing and shelter,
so let us weave this yarn into the circle of our lives.

As woman have always woven words into poetry,
so let us weave this yarn into the circle of our lives.

As women have always woven, so we weave this yarn
with the Goddess who is here with us.
The Goddess is always with us.

As each woman weaves the yarn around the woman next to her,
let her call on the Goddess to be with her in daily life.
Let us all answer, ‘Goddess be with us.'”

–Anne Kent Rush, Moon, Moon quoted in Blessingways by Shari Maser.

I’m in the middle of planning two blessingway ceremonies for friends. I’ve hosted enough of them, that I rarely look through my books anymore, but another friend borrowed the books recently and when she returned them, I skimmed through and settled on this beautiful reading. While it isn’t a match for the belief systems of the friends for whom we’re having the ceremonies, it is a match for me! At the close of a mother blessing, we often wind yarn or ribbon around our ankles or wrists as a symbol of our connection to each other and as a reminder to think of the pregnant woman as she approaches her birthing day. In our own tradition, as we pass the ribbon or yarn, rather than the reading above, we usually sing:

We Are the Weavers

We are the flow

We are the ebb

We are the weavers

We are the web.

At a mother blessing ceremony last summer.

Categories: blessings, poems, prayers, readings, ritual, theapoetics, womanspirit, women's circle | 2 Comments

Woodsprayer

Posted on July 16, 2012 by Molly

Deep breath…aaaaahhhhh….

I quietly gaze into the depths of a forest
and see nothing save beauty and peace.
Birdsong fills my ears.
A gentle breeze brushes against my cheek.

Seeing from inside the seeing,
I drink the dark riches of the woods.Would it be that every day
I could see my own face so clearly in these still waters,
And meet the emptiness–which is also my very own heart–
that is carried in the boughs of pines and in the gentle
music of crickets.
–Cass Adams in Life Prayers

I’ve had one of those bad days. A day in which I let myself down repeatedly, was snappy with those I love, was crabby and distracted and sometimes mean (to myself and to others). In short, I was not who I want to be, wish to be, or how I would like to see myself. I feel disappointed with my lack of accomplishments on my to-do list (that really needs to get done) and then also frustrated by my own unrealistic standards of what I “should” be able to do on any one day. I settled at my altar space for a few minutes and read the above in the book Life Prayers that I read a little of each day. I also have a nearly daily ritual of going down to the priestess rocks in the woods—though, on days like today, I don’t have “enough time” to do that, even though it is on those days that I really, really, need to go. So, I went. In truth, this time in the woods restoreth my soul, there is no other way to describe it.

I go down to the woods to pray. Thinking about the sacred way. And, we need this way to survive.

Categories: nature, poems, prayers, spirituality, theapoetics, womanspirit | Leave a comment

Women’s Retreat Ritual Recipe

Posted on July 12, 2012 by Molly

Quarterly, I get together with some of my friends and we have a women’s retreat. We had our summer retreat this past Sunday and I thought I’d share the outline and our activities as a “retreat recipe” that others may use if they wish to do so. Since my friends do not necessarily share specific religious beliefs, the retreats are spiritual in a somewhat generic “womanspirit” sort of way and you can obviously customize your own retreat to best suit the spiritual beliefs/backgrounds of your own friendship group.

Circle up—we stand in a circle, place our hands on eachother’s backs and hum together three times to raise the energy of the circle.

Invocation to directions. This time we used an invocation by Judith Laura:

We honor the East
Home of air
March wind
Morning’s song
Eagle’s flight
Aurora’s breath
Welcome East

We honor the South
Home of fire
Noon sun
Flame of change
Heat of passion
Pele’s power
Welcome South

We honor the West
Home of water
River’s flow
Font of feelings
World’s womb
Kwan Yin’s love
Welcome West

We honor the North
Home of Earth
Root of life
Shaded mystery
Ground of being
Gaia’s growth
Welcome North.

Light candle/opening quote

“I see the wise woman. And she sees me. She smiles

from shrines in thousands of places. She is buried

in the ground of every country. She flows in every

river and pulses in the oceans. The wise woman’s

robe flows down your back, centering you in the

ever-changing, ever-spiraling mystery.

Everywhere I look, the wise woman looks back.

And she smiles.”

–Susun Weed quoted in Birthing Ourselves Into Being

Check-in–we take turns “passing the rattle” and each woman has about two minutes to share what’s been on her mind.

Since we are close to summer solstice, I then chose to do this solstice prayer of healing from the United Nations as a responsive reading as a group:

A Prayer of Healing
From the United Nations Environmental Sabbath

We join with the earth and with each other.
To celebrate the seas.
To rejoice the sunlight.
To sing the song of the stars.

We join with the earth and with each other.
To recall our destiny.
To renew our spirits.
To reinvigorate our bodies.

We join with the earth and with each other.
To create the human community.
To promote justice and peace.
To remember our children.

We join together as many and diverse expressions of one loving mystery: for the healing of the earth and the renewal of all life. We join with the earth and with each other.
To bring new life to the land.
To restore the waters.
To refresh the air.

We join with the earth and with each other.
To renew the forests.
To care for the plants.
To protect the creatures.

Guided visualization/meditation/relaxation (for this particular retreat, I used a nice full body relaxation from the book Birthing Ourselves into Being. This one isn’t available online that I can find, but you can find others online, like this one for example.)

We followed the relaxation with a muse questions and journaling using one of the questions from Shiloh Sophia’s Museletter:

Your Muse would like to show you something you haven’t been able to see.

She wants to invite you to have a thought you haven’t had yet…isn’t that an enticing thought in and of itself?

A thought that has lingered on the edge of your consciousness for maybe even a few years, or months….tell her…

I want to know what it is I am not seeing.

Then automatic write whatever comes up until you have to put the pen down.

Immediately following this question, it began to rain. Blissful, blessed, healing, glorious rain for which we were in so much need.

Discuss responses/experiences to relaxation/journaling.

Listen to songs/perhaps drum (this time, went outside together and stood in the rain)

Closing circle: Sing Woman Am I (recording of my friends singing it together is here).

Closing quote and extinguish candle

“A circle! No sharp edges, no hierarchy, just a circle of women…We are mothers. We are the portals. The next generation comes through our bodies.” –Annie Lennox

and one of my all-time favorites:

“I believe that these circles of women around us weave invisible nets of love that carry us when we’re weak and sing with us when we’re strong.” –SARK, Succulent Wild Woman

When reading a 1988 back issue of SageWoman magazine, I fell in love with Womanrunes by Shekhinah Mountainwater (originally in her book Ariadne’s Thread, which I then purchased) and so I made copies of the images to share with my friends. We are going to make some sets of runes at our next retreat. (And, after much scouring of the interwebz, I found a pronunciation guide for the runes here).

I also made a handout packet for them of various moon wheels/circular calendars for tracking your cycles, or simply for planning and thinking in circles rather than in lines. In the packets were:

a variety of “spiritual woman” journal templates
Moonwheel calendar
Articles and printouts from Miranda Gray (scroll down the page to see available pdf files, including how to make your own “moon dial”)

And, then it was time for a craft, so as we snacked and chatted, I showed everyone how to make a small, hardbound pocket journal. You can find instructions for a simple book here, or, to make it even more simple, use this kit from Blick Art Supplies.

It was a delightful afternoon of connection and celebration—my original vision for holding these retreats was to bring some blessingway spirit into our regular lives, rather than only centered on being pregnant and I think that purpose was achieved.

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This post is crossposted at Talk Birth.