Religious Terrorism: It's Time for Change

Religious terrorism is the worst aspect of the six millennia reign of patriarchy we’ve endured on this good earth.  A ferociously violent and anally righteous invisible patriarch sits atop an invisible throne in an invisible kingdom and dictates all that should happen here on earth.  His self appointed representatives command his docile minions and are justified in anything they do in His Name.  Religions are constantly fighting for more control of secular government; that was one of the prime motivators of Church and State separation for our “founding fathers.”  Theocracies are repressive and dangerous; recall the Christian Inquisition of the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance.

As last week's tragedy in Paris underscores, we live in a world where this energy has intensified, grown more dangerous and more prevalent than it has been for a while.  But there’s no difference between the atrocities committed in the name of one religion that claims absolute truth and power and another.  The worlds big three patriarchal religions, Islam, Judaism and Christianity are like a three-headed dog tearing global civilization to pieces.  There are also, as Eckhart Tolle has pointed out, secular religions like the Communist State; just as bloody, just as macho just as destructive of the spirit.

I'm tired of it.  Men running around screaming at each other about their gods and their demons and then resorting to the bloodiest means possible to prove their way is right, to carry out their Big Bad God’s will.  I say “men” because, despite the existence of women in the flock of each religion, they're to more or less degrees barred from decision-making power. The more radical and the more extremist the positions in any of the big three father run religions, the worst the position a woman is in if she’s born into the culture.  She’ll have fewer independent rights, many social and legal constrictions and increased danger of victimization, physical or psychological.  I don’t think I have to belabor the point that having to live a life determined for me by fathers, brothers and husbands would greatly suck.  There are wonderful men in these misogynist systems, of course;  in my life, I’ve been blessed in all three categories.  This, however, compares to the fact that there are wonderful white people in a racist society; the paradigm is still skewed in favor of being white, or in patriarchy, of being male.

In my estimation, spiritual transformation that leads to freedom from religious tyranny is a key avenue for bringing about the changes the world needs.  As outside, so within; if we’re captive to toxic psychic belief systems that fill us with self-loathing, anger and hate, then we can’t change how that psychic reality imprints the world around us.  Beliefs like: we’re born unworthy and full of “original” sin, we are perpetual sinners, god was so mad only the death of his one-of-a-kind son could make him relent his peeve, god hates women and gay people, god will get you if you don’t do what his appointed perps, er, priests and prophets, tell you to do, god hates pleasure…etc.,etc, etc.

While some haven’t noticed, there have been rich sea changes in the psychic paradigms of our time. They remain somewhat marginal, but the strength of revelations presented in the words of so many wonderful contemporary spiritual teachers today is fueling the energy of transformation to what I hope will be the tipping point in my lifetime.

For one, Feminism, often seen as a political movement, was critical to cracking the stained glass ceiling of patriarchal religions.  Thanks to Mary Daly's "Beyond God the Father", the return of feminine divinity, the return to earth centered, mother respecting spiritual practices that our ancestors created in the beginning, will go some way to defusing the time bomb that arrogant male theocracies are perpetuating for our planet with their self-fulfilling apocalyptic prophecies. Not long ago, while accepting a European award that was also bestowed simultaneously on two women, the Dali Lama quipped that Western women will save the world.  Why?  Because besides the usual gifts women have to offer, we have the freedom to develop and exercise our influence in our cultures, and hopefully, beyond them.  Despite ignorance and entrenched machismo in our religions, we have the freedom to exert a greater influence on changing those paradigms. I agree with the DL;  women, men and children who focus on our worlds' problems with their hearts; who know themselves to be spiritual beings having a temporary physical experience and thus keep in touch with their eternal spiritual lives by interacting with their dreaming, can heal this planet.

More challenges to our narrow and literal patriarchal paradigms about who we are and the nature of reality are coming from many of the “sciences” like Quantum Physics, Integrative Medicine and Psychiatry.  And, of course, there’s spiritual teachers like Eckhart Tolle putting our egoic insanity into straightforward, non-dogmatic perspective.  So the good news is that we’re living a transformation at this moment.  At the same time that we’re experiencing the urgent need created by outer collective insanities, we’re awakening to our individual organic spiritual existence in ways that exclude the need for religious structures that bind us to self-defeating paradigms.  Each person that throws off the yokes of religious psychic domination without tossing the baby out with the bath water, that is, without thinking dualistically, either you accept a religious paradigm or declare yourself a non-believer in “god”, is helping to envision the brave new world we can dream into being, if we want it.

We don’t need to follow a religion; we are immortal.  It’s built in, like a heart, brain and lungs; we have a soul, spirit, self, psyche. There are moments in life, ecstatic or extreme, when the borders between the physical and the non-physical are naturally transparent and we have a direct experience of the divine.  Each time we fall asleep and dream, or meditate or trance, we have access to personal experience of what lies beyond this physical lifetime. We can answer our most important questions for ourselves; we don’t need to let ourselves be manipulated into believing we have to join a religious cult to ensure our safe passage.  On the contrary, it would be unwise to adopt any attitude that has us vibrating in fear, hate, righteous judgment or reactionary violence because in the thought responsive realities of the astral planes, we might perpetuate that environment for ourselves.

In my view, it’s paramount that more and more people make a viable organic spiritual connection for themselves and throw off the religious yokes on our psyche.  I dream that freedom of religion will transform to freedom from religion, so religious terrorism no longer exists.  

As John Lennon says:  

Imagine there are no countries

It isn't hard to do

Nothing to kill or die for

And no religion too

Imagine all the people

Living life in peace...

You may say I'm a dreamer

But I'm not the only one

I hope someday you'll join us

                                 And the world will be as one

If we can imagine it and dream it consistently, we can make it so.  You may say I'm a dreamer; may I say you're one, too?

In Dreams We Learn To Fly

Videographer, James Cookman

As I mentioned earlier, I was confirmed this past weekend in my belief that dreams are fascinating and that many people find them so

I see dreams as the zip line of the soul, how we’re connected to where we came from and where we’ll go after we shuffle off the proverbial mortal coil.  Our culture as a whole ignores dreams, unless it’s in therapy or analysis, where dreams are usually surrendered meekly to the “experts” for interpretation.  Many people feel that dreams “mean” something psychological, many fear dreams in a vague way. Either through religious association or Hollywood distortion, lots of people shut the door on the dreaming experience. 

Since both dreaming and sex are a totally natural and ubiquitously human experience, I’m amazed at the number of people who remain inexperienced on purpose, like celibate dream virgins.  But all kidding aside, my fire pit waking dream of last weekend just confirmed for me that people love the possibility of connecting to their dreaming and I'm happy to offer that to them as a dream teacher, especially because AD is such a “juicy” avenue for dream exploration.

Active Dreaming (AD) developed by Robert Moss frees dreaming from the constraints of a purely psychoanalytic perspective.  Reaching back into the ancient past, blending indigenous wisdom with Western cultural ideas and weaving it all with the best of modern dreamwork, AD is a practice, not a theory.

Robert teaches how the ancient Egyptians viewed a dream as a place the spirit body visits, how the Egyptian word for dream actually means to awaken; in AD, a dream can be a place and the dream a memory of an experience in that place, like a postcard. Dream Re-entry, one of the main practices of AD, teaches the dreamer that a dream can be expanded and explored in a wide awake relaxed conscious state.  I often write my re-entry adventures along side the dream that inspired them in my journal, they’re that good.

So when my new young friend this weekend tells me that she often dreams about the same intriguing spot, sometimes it’s pleasant, sometimes not, I see this “place” in her dreams for myself as a launch pad for consciously re-entering the dreamworld in a state of relaxed attention and continuing whatever dream adventure I choose in my imagination.

William Buhlman is a contemporary leader in the field of “Out of Body” or OBE experience. Although he's a master of OBE experience, many others, myself included, have experienced a conscious OBE at least once.  For many like me, it creates an absolute certainty of the capacity of our consciousness to survive physical death and of the diversity and complexity of experience on other planes of existence that are "non-physical."

For me the practice of AD spans the entire spectrum of dreaming: sleep dreams of ordinary life minutia that might prove helpful in managing routine waking events; unexpected numinous dreams heralding life changing events or shining a beacon through the turmoil; lucid dreaming where I'm aware of my dream self dreaming and my ability to shape dream realities and OBEs, where I experience my consciousness outside of my body either in sleep or meditation and consciously explore the multiverse that I know to be as solid a reality as any other I live.  These experiences have taught me to be the authority of my own life, now and after death, to determine my priorities accordingly and to fear death way less, rather, to use it as my ally instead. 

In AD, the only authority of a person's dreams is that person, not me, regardless of how much I know about and love dreaming.  Being my own spiritual authority is incredibly freeing.  Someone who is trying to interpret another’s dreams is just projecting their own understanding, which is fine, as long as they own that projection by saying “if it were my dream” in preface and only using the personal pronoun when discussing thoughts on that other person's dream.  It seems a simple guideline but I’ve seen how very powerful it is in practice.

For instance, regarding the dream my new friend told me which I mention above, I’d say, "if this is my dream" I’d call on my imagination to take me there someday when I have the leisure to daydream or some night when I can't sleep.  I’d pay close attention to what I see, just as if I were looking around in a waking world wooded area.  But here’s an important difference, if I felt unsafe at any point, I’d call in one or more allies to have my back and fearlessly continue with my exploration.  Dream practice has taught me to use my imagination for my own good, which believe it or not, is a rare thing in our contemporary culture.

The negative scenarios and narratives that we entertain regularly in our inner dialogue are less than healthy for us.  I’ve adopted the habit of stopping myself and asking, “Really?  Is this the story I want to tell myself? How does it serve me?”  Thanks to the wonderful work of Eckhart Tolle, more people are aware of how the ego, the “I” we speak of and usually identify with, creates unnecessary drama, pain and stress for us.  Dreaming connects us with who we are beyond the ego, what Jung called the Self. Dreaming is organic spirituality for that very reason, there’s much more to us than meets the “I”.

A dream practice can be whatever an individual wants it to be, though keeping a journal and recording your dreams, frequently or infrequently, is key, as dreams are ephemeral.  Think how looking through a photo album recalls life experiences and people for us. It’s the same with your dream journals, only more important because we’re dealing with experiences in the Unconscious, as Jung puts it, or according to Robert Moss, in the Multiverse. Waking reality experienced in a “conscious” state gets forgotten; experiences in the “Unconscious” are harder to recall if we don’t record them asap.

So, I invite you to allow dreaming more space in your life and perhaps double your life experience. Open your awareness to who you are dreaming, to what you do and what you learn. Step into your dream world with curiosity, focus and not a little awe.  Begin with whatever dream comes to mind, old or new, write it down; dreams are timeless because time is only relevant in the physical. Give the dream a title as if were a story.  Notice your feelings and champion your own cause; you are the ultimate creator of this story, so take charge.  Nothing can harm you in the dreamworlds unless you let it harm you, and even then, you’ll bounce back if you try. 

I always add a note about PTSD dreams which often repeat psychic wounding from physical trauma. A person who suffers from PTSD nightmares may need a healer with dream skills to help them transform their negative dream experiences. Nightmares, which are common to human experience, can be a stepping stone to personal growth when approached through a practice like Active Dreaming and other wonderful experiential paths of dreaming.

As Robert likes to say: “We were born to fly, and in dreams we discover that the soul has wings.” 

A Waking Dream Or How I Spent Labor Day Weekend

I hope everyone who reads this post can recall at least one magical waking dream from this weekend.  I’m sharing one of mine I really enjoy.

It began with a wonderful tribute to a sister healer at her birthday party on Saturday.  It was beautiful in every way and by the sea, in my neighborhood. I enjoyed sharing the love that poured out to her for hours in our circle and meeting her amazing friends, some of which I friend as well.

When the party was breaking up, a friend says she’s headed down to the small fire pit that had been lit on the beach to burn her journals.  Intrigued, I follow.  Soon she realizes that fire pit won’t do and went to the neighbor’s fire pit.  A circle of friends invited she and I to join them and burn the journals, if she liked.

After much fun discussion among all six or seven, my neighbor in the circle and I began a conversation about dreams. She talked about a recurring dream, about a place that I felt might be a portal for frequent dream reentry. Exciting stuff which we discussed for quite a long time.  One by one I had the most wonderful conversations about dreaming with each member of that group. 

Two days later, on the beach, I spoke to one of the members of that group; when a neighbor introduced me he said; “You’re the Dreamweaver”.

I’ll take that, I smiled to myself; "Yes" I said.  A magical night and the essence of it so encapsulated in a casual remark.  The title of my waking dream is thus; “You’re the DreamWeaver.”

May your best dreams come true. 

  

A Midsummer Dream

photo by A. Kaiser

I recently officiated for the first time at a very dear friend's wedding and was honored with the opportunity to give a short talk on their behalf to introduce the grand event.  What a wedding it was.

When I give a talk, my first care is for those whom I'm addressing; how do I speak so as to give something that might be of value to the good folks in front of me?  In this case, it's also, how do I honor my friend and her wonderful guy; I want them to be happy they asked me.

I produced several drafts of my speech, searching for meaning and brevity combined so I have some bits left over I can use here.  What I left out was mostly about projections in romantic relationships, realizing, though I find this topic fascinating, my audience might appreciate getting on with the ceremony and perhaps to the cocktail hour.  At least reading is voluntary, so here are those thoughts:

Carl Jung, the famous psychiatrist of a hundred years ago said that for many people, romantic love and sometimes even marriage is really a fantasy based on the perfect picture of the other that each person is projecting.  “My prince, my princess”, but as the shine wears off over time and they gradually fail to live up to each other’s projected expectations, the fireworks begin.

It takes time to find out who another person is at the soul level; many people are too caught up in building a fairy tale life to take the time to know each other.

The naked truth of marriage is not that “the two shall become one” but that the two shall become three, whether they have children or not, the two becomes three.  I have my soul journey to walk, my husband or wife has his or hers.  Neither of us has a right to impose projections on the other.  But there is a third in a good relationship, it’s the spirit of who we become together, the partnership itself is a life force, if we walk our soul paths together with love and understanding, it only gets better through the years.

What I love about following a dream practice is that it's easier to recognize and own my projections, thereby sparing myself and others much grief.  Here's a real life example:

Last September I had the absolute good fortune of attending a Michael Franti concert at a very small venue where I was in the front of a crowd of just a few hundred adoring Franti fans, myself included.

In my opinon, Michael Franti has it together and is an emissary of Love. Most Franti fans are pretty cool, they're on the same vibe.

But there was this one woman right behind me who had obviously been to a long cocktail hour before the show and who had a passionate, therefore drunkenly unleashed, projection on to Michael's drummer.  She was screaming for the drummer, lost in the fantasy that he would complete her if only he would return her singular devotion.   As she was screaming the poor guy's name through Michael's songs I finally gave her a look that said, "please be more respectful of all of us"  and she did quiet down some, thankfully.  She was lost inside her own projection that night and she wasn't really present with the crowd, the music and the artists.  

Perhaps this woman, lost inside this pigment of her own infatuation, really wants to be African and play the drums like that?  She's plainly not aware that she doesn't know this man who may have a perfectly good family/love partner to go home to and may not appreciate silly, screaming, inappropriate fans.  This is an example of a relationship projection that's pretty common in pop-idolatry culture, but it can also serve to illustrate the dynamic of personal relationships, up close, in the family model

.  

As a therapist and counselor and as a friend, the issues I've heard related again and again are about relationships, especially, romantic ones, happy or ones gone bad.  The counsel of dreams, in my experience and that of countless dreamers I've heard say the same, is that you must, as Jung would put it, mind your own Shadow first, the dark and the light. I've written an intro to the Shadow archetype here.

What made me truly happy as I officiated my friend's wedding is that she and her partner have been together for nine years and have stripped away much of those early mutual projections.  I don't know how else it can be done.  It takes time to know another and to know oneself.  The good news about relationships is that loving is a lot lighter and more fun when the personal projections are cleared.  

I had such a wonderful time at this wedding and so did everyone else there, that I thought you'd enjoy seeing a picture of my young friend with her beloved.

Wish you all a very blessed Summer Solstice season. 

You Have A Dream

by Tom Feelings

I love people who inspire me to hope and dream.  Maya Angelou, one of the great dream prophets of our age, crossed over last week.  People's hearts are singing her praises all over social media.  I say she was a dream prophet because with her poetry, art and oratory, she called on all of us to dream from every cell of our existence and to sing our hearts out to the tune of that dream.

Martin Luther King, Jr. is another dream prophet I honor.  When I was in my late 20s and fresh out of seminary, (here's that story) I taught at an all girl's high school run by the then wonderfully progressive Sisters of St. Joseph.  I had the grand honor of helping to produce, with a caucus of African-American students, a kick-ass assembly program in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King's birthday.

The opening of our assembly was a spectacular dance performance to Stevie Wonder's tribute to MLK, Happy Birthday.  The dancers were among Garth Fagan's best students in his Rochester based dance school, (yes, the Garth Fagan of Lion King fame, and you can imagine how fortunate I feel that I got to learn from him and his A-list dancers, just for a few years, while I was teaching high school in Rochester).

My decision to open the school assembly with this dance was inspired by a dream.  In my dream I saw dancers silhouetted on a dark stage with the most amazing light show of streaming colors flowing out of their every move.  The waking dream performance had that magical, luminous energy.

Dreams inspire creative action in waking life.  Shaping your own dream according to your heart and soul's desire keeps life extremely interesting.  As Maya Angelou said with her succinct power:

" A person is the product of their dreams.  So make sure to dream great dreams. And then try to live your dream."

from "Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now."

The World Day of Active Dreaming, 1.

I'd like to share with you what I posted on my Lita Dreaming FB page today; a miniscule moment of bliss from the great experience of bliss that was our World Day of Active Dreaming celebration in Monroe, CT, hosted at the wonderful ARC Sacred Center on May 10th, "El Diez de Mayo".

I had asked my very musically talented co-facilitator Lynette Turner (holding my right hand in the picture) to sing her incredibly beautiful song, "Believe" as a meditation at the beginning of our dream cirlcle.

http://www.broadjam.com/artists/songs.php?artistID=71737&mediaID=543393

What a wonderful experience it is to call on spiritual guides through dreams in a circle of open, heart- fueled women.  This was an all women's circle by chance, I have had the same experience with men and children in dream groups.  It's all about the dreaming, the doors and gates and paths that open when we dream together.

Also:
I give thanks on this day for the life and work of Maya Angelou; may we dream her dreams of hope forward together.

Mother's Day Homily at MUUS

I'd like to share with you the homily I gave this Mother's Day at the Mattatuck Unitarian Univer-
salist Society in Woodbury, CT, titled: "The Feminine Divine on Mother's Day." 

Today is Mother’s Day, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to share my thoughts with you about Mother. Actually, today in particular is the centennial of Mother’s Day in the US, first declared officially as the second Sunday in May by Pres. Woodrow Wilson in 1914.  This holiday, which probably has its roots in ancient Mother Goddess Spring festivals of Greece and Rome, was championed in the US by Anna Jarvis, who beginning in 1905, campaigned vigorously to establish a day where each family would honor their personal mothers in a special way at home and with church services.  Unfortunately, it took no time at all for the holiday to become so commercialized that she actually spent the rest of her life fighting to have the holiday removed from the official national roster.  Thanks, Hallmark.

What Anna Jarvis wanted was that on Mother’s Day we be reminded to celebrate the unconditional love, sacrifice, untiring care and selfless devotion of our personal mothers.    To give thanks to our mothers for having the courage to give birth to us, and thanks to every woman who after taking on that heroic biological task, in the majority of cases, did her very best to take on the moral/spiritual task of nurturing her children, as well. 

Moving from the personal to the collective, on this centennial of our national celebration of Mother’s Day, I’d like to invite you to remember with me not the personal mother of our own experience, but the archetypal mother of our collective experience as a human race, the Great Mother, the Feminine Divine. 

At the very core of our collective psyche as a human race on this beautiful, bountiful planet is the Great Mother, known throughout antiquity and across indigenous cultures as the Creator of all that is. Thanks to the work of exceptional scholars like archeologist Marija Gimbutas, we know that: “The Goddess is the most potent and persistent feature in the archeological records of the ancient world, a symbol of the unity of life in nature and the personification of all that was sacred and mysterious on earth.”

I was completely delighted to learn that Unitarian Universalists have for many years offered a very sophisticated curriculum about the ancient and indigenous Goddesses from history and diverse cultures, “Cakes for the Queen of Heaven”. I was going to spend some time with you sharing slides of many of these pre-historic and multi-cultural images of the goddess, until I realized I’d be preaching to the choir, many of you already know about HER.

Whether God as Mother is a familiar concept or a new one to you today, I’d like to invite all of us to reflect on the status of the Divine Feminine in our psyches, both personally and collectively.  Because for the last five thousand years or so, She has been persecuted, obscured, neglected and finally banished. This has had dire consequences for humanity.  The elevation of the masculine to exclusive divine status and the denigration of the feminine to subservient and inferior status has grave implications for our personal psychic health, whether we are male or female, for our cultures and for the well being of our endangered planet.

The Wisdom of the Feminine, personified in the many forms of the goddess, is essentially the understanding that Divine Light is not separate from creation, but inherent in creation, embodied and birthed over and over again by women.  For ancient peoples, woman was the matrix of creation, both literally and metaphysically. Moreover, to ancient and indigenous peoples even today, the Earth is our Mother, alive, sentient and interactive with our every thought, word and deed.  We are part of a physical and mystical web of life that is inter-dependent and inter-connected.  

History is the story as told by the conqueror and the stories we have learned are about the triumph of the masculine sky gods, giving birth without women, from Adam’s rib, the head of Zeus or even the spoken word.  Patriarchal mythologies have divorced divinity from nature, exhorting conquering, dominating and exploitive ideologies that have brought us to the very brink of our own annihilation.  It has placed divinity outside of matter and reduced matter to a mechanical science, devoid of soul. All ancient and indigenous peoples even today know this is a grave error.

But today, we are in the midst of a spiritual revolution. Enlightenedl teachers from all over the world, across cultures and disciplines are pointing to a new/old paradigm for understanding our world and our purpose in it.   From subatomic physics to new metaphysics we are hearing that we are essentially energy; we are spiritual beings participating in a physical manifestation and each of us has chosen this manifestation with a purpose in mind.  Today’s spiritual teachers point to the need to bring balance back into our psyches by once again honoring the Feminine aspects of Divinity and recognizing the sacredness of the Earth as the embodiment of the Feminine Divine.

They’re telling us that our world is in serious trouble and at the root of what ails us is the terrible psychic imbalance caused by the inflation of masculine principles and the devaluation of the feminine.  In Chinese Taoist philosophy, these principles are known as the Yin, the Feminine and the Yang, the Masculine.  Taoism teaches that these opposites are in a continual dance, an ebb and flow that results in balance; neither is superior or inferior, each has its time and its purpose.  When one becomes too pronounced, the entire system is thrown out of balance to the detriment of the whole.

Mother’s Day is a fine time to consider what the consequences of shutting the Feminine out of divinity are.  I recently wrote here about the new, celebrated Pope Francis who has firmly stated that he won’t consider finally ordaining women as priests, although he is very concerned about their level of poverty and exploitation in the world.

But it’s a Catch22; the majority of the world's poor are women because women have no status in patriarchal government, patriarchal religion nor as the Divine Archetype.  In patriarchy men rule, make all the decisions concerning women and children and God looks like one of them. In patriarchal paradigms, woman's power is stripped from her and to the degree that it’s justified by “the image of god” her situation can’t and won’t change.  You’ve only to look at the status and experience of women in the most orthodox patriarchal cultures.  As Jimmy Carter recently put it:

“The truth is that male religious leaders have had – and still have – an option to interpret holy teachings either to exalt or subjugate women.  They have, for their own selfish ends, overwhelmingly chosen the latter.  Their continuing choice provides the foundation or justification for much of the pervasive persecution and abuse of women throughout the world.”

To change the status of women, we have to change the paradigm that devalues women by excluding the Feminine from divinity. This work begins at the level of the individual psyche, as psychiatrist Carl Jung taught.  The fate of humanity, he said, hangs by a thread, and that thread is the psyche.  As the mystical poet, William Blake, wrote, “mind forged manacles” imprison us.  What we believe at our deepest unconscious level is what really drives our behavior.

Like most of you, I grew up with the psychic imprint of God as male, God as Father.  Jesus, though his teachings espoused rather feminine values, was also a male representation of the divine and all his earthly ministers, up until the mid 1980s, were male, as well. As an on again, off again Catholic, Mother Mary did factor in, but definitely as an obedient helpmate, not a divine equal to His Holiness, Father God, and always a Virgin, despite marriage and motherhood, because another artificial separation of this paradigm is sexuality from the sacred.

I first met the Great Mother in a dream when I was 21, way before I knew anything about Her in waking reality. She came to me as “Howling Mary”; I talk about this dream here.

I woke from seeing Mary howling in anger and pain, heart pounding and completely baffled.  I didn’t know then the value of recording my dreams, but I’ve never forgotten this one. It was a Big Dream with a Big Message for my life that proved prophetic. In a manner I’ve come to recognize from following my dreams, my waking life unfolded in a series of one meaningful coincidence after another, until the Great Mother embodied in my Psyche, out of the shadows and into the Divine Light.

Though my original plan was to go to graduate school to study literature, I went to seminary instead, campaigned to be ordained a priest in the catholic church and when I realized that wouldn’t happen, despite the many other denominations opening the ministry to women, I abandoned Catholicism for psychotherapy and Women’s Spirituality and came full circle to marry my love of HER to my love of dreaming, where I first met Her. From my perspective today, I see what Mary was howling about.

On this day of Honoring the Mother, I invite all of us to examine our paradigms, our deeply held, knee jerk beliefs inherited from our parents, family systems, cultures and belief systems.  Knowing about the Queen of Heaven is an intellectual exercise; healing the Wounded Archetypal Feminine, the Anima and the Feminine relegated to Shadow is the soul-searching challenge of our time that each of us has to accomplish individually. Recovering a reverence for the earth and all life based on a deep, intuitive understanding of our Oneness with Gaia is the test we face.

But we can’t create the new order we need using the old logic that got us into the mess we’re in.  We need to use the principles we’ve been told are inferior, heart, intuition and instinct.

Here’s an example of what I mean; close your eyes and imagine a prehistoric time, cave people, cave man, cave woman.  How do they relate to one another? Is it hard to dispel the caricature of the caveman with the club, dragging the cave woman by the hair, dominating her way back then?  At an intellectual level, we know it’s not politically correct, but is it a knee-jerk visual?  Can we imagine a pre-historic culture where women were revered for their personal magic?  A culture that deduced the Creator of humanity from observing the creator of the personal world, a culture that finds no problem in revering a Divine Mother as ultimate Creator?  In this culture, people exercise their talents for the good of the group; knowing that sticking together and loving one another is the way to survive?  Oh, and a people who are constantly in and out of psychic experience, one to whom dreaming and dream adventures meld seamlessly with waking and waking adventures?  A culture far more advanced in spiritual practices than we are today.

We are plagued by the tunnel vision of interpreting all of history, at least 40 thousand years back, through the lens of the last six thousand years.  We have a patriarchal, war obsessed mindset that tells us it always had to be this way; human nature is naturally contentious, greedy and selfish, anything else is wishful thinking.

Amazonian and Mayan shamans teach that “the world is as you dream it.”  We create the realities we live through our communal expectations. We created this paradigm when we banished the Sacred Feminine, and in order to break free of its unconscious hold on our psyche, we need to re-instate the Great Mother as she is embodied in the earth and in all feminine characteristics we have devalued.

Here’s another example of how knee jerk our denial of the Feminine Divine can be.  I taught theology in an all girls’ RC high school, back when there were enough progressive religious communities, especially among nuns, to allow me to teach a course I called, “Christian Feminism.”  On the first day of class, I asked the students; “Is God male or female?”  They were prepared, and gave me the bonafide answer from the catechism.  "God is neither, God is Spirit."  "Fine", I said, "In this classroom, for this semester, when we pray, we’re going to say, Our Mother, and when we refer to God, we’ll use the feminine pronoun, She."  They were horrified; "We can’t do that!"  "Why?" I asked; "Because God is Father," they replied. The masculine divine has been imprinted in our psyches, both personally and collectively; it’s hard to reshape that image.

Until we heal our personal psyche, we can’t heal the collective.  Until we heal the collective, we remain alienated from the resources we need to create balance.  Here’s the good news as taught by Llewellyn Vaughan Lee, a contemporary Sufi master who wrote “The Return of the Feminine and the World Soul.”

“The mystery of the divine feminine speaks to us from within her creation.  She is not a distant god in heaven, but a presence that is here with us, needing our response.  She is the divine returning to claim her creation, the real wonder of what it means to be alive.  We have forgotten her, just as we have forgotten so much of what is sacred, and yet she is always part of us.  But now she needs to be known again, not just as a myth, as a spiritual image, but as something that belongs to the blood and the breath.  She can awaken us to an expectancy in the air, to an ancient memory coming alive in a new way.  She can help us to give birth to the divine that is within us, to the oneness that is all around us.  She can help us to remember our real nature.”

How do we reconnect with the Feminine Divine?  Turn off the TV and step out into Nature. Listen deeply to what you hear within you.  Be still and know that She is Divine, alive in the beauty of the simplest flower.  Follow the counsel of your heart over your head.  Listen to your dreams, your own organic spirituality, your connection to revelation and trust that you are part of the One, you are not separate and you are not Alone. 

I wish you all a very blessed Divine Mother’s Day.