The other night in the Find a Womens Circle Facebook group, I wrote how blown away I was that something I had been working on for so long shifted … just like that, like Cornelia Jecklin said, a simple flick of the wrist. And everything changed.

And I had written a blog post on my experience last weekend at ALisa Starkweather’s ‘In the Roots’ gathering. I like to write these after I go to divine feminine events to help spread this concept of the ‘divine feminine’ and the app.

I spoke with ALisa yesterday who was giving me some feedback on my blog post, and she asked me what had shifted. I’m not sure I answered that well, so I’m going to try again.

It happened sitting on the bench in my front yard. Ironically, the very night before, the night of the eclipse and new moon, my husband and I had sat on that bench and an owl landed in the yard. Prior to that, I had never ever seen an owl outside of a zoo. How very amazing that the night of the eclipse, sitting there with my husband, one lands 50 yards from us.

He just sat there. Okay maybe ‘She’. She just sat there for a good few minutes, swiveling her head a few times, enough time for us to get my daughter and mother to come see, three generations of women: the maiden, the mother and the crone, and then she flew off with these long wings. Beautiful. Historically, owls are considered by a lot of cultures as a harbinger of death, transition and change.

Well, it changed for me.

owl

Back it up a bit before that. I decided, crazy as I am, to drive to ALisa Starkweather’s one day event in Massachusetts … from Chicago. It kept calling to me. So I answered.

And I did not want to do a 15 hour drive on my own, so I asked my mother to fly up from Texas to babysit our kids, and my husband agreed to drive with me.

I was a bit nervous about this, as my husband and I have been struggling to get along. But we had a wonderful time. I actually missed the guy when he dropped me off at Earthlands for the event. There’s a switch, as normally I am dreading when his car pulls up in the driveway.

But we have four kids: four kids in a blended family, economic and other stressors, and it’s pretty much just him and I doing the 24/7 care of all the kids. And we both lean towards being helicopter parents. This was actually the first time in our nine year relationship that him and I even went off without the kids. At one point, he said to me, ‘you’re much more calm and less annoying.’ Then he fearfully braced himself for a reaction and quickly said, ‘I’m just kidding.’

‘No, you’re right. I was thinking the exact same thing about you.’ We really need to make time for just each other away from all the other stressors of our life. Easier said than done, but I think this was one of the first times he really saw the importance of it.

So, to be perfectly clear, it was and it was not simply a ‘flick of the wrist’ as I had said. After an opening circle on Friday night, the next morning Cornelia Jecklin, co-founder of TaKeTiNa did a rhythmic session for us. It was so powerful as she started the session with a long jump rope, swinging it with another lady as she explained that the large majority of us focus on the ‘material’, what is seen and felt, the rope, in other words. But what is really important, is the space in between the rope.

And as she and the other lady swung the rope, through a simple flick of the wrist, the rope went from one large cycle to two. That is the simple flick of the wrist.

But don’t get me wrong, you have to prepare for that. And I think I have been doing that, through my Women’s Circles, through meditation, breathwork, through connections and nature.

I don’t want to go too much in to Cornelia’s work as if you are interested in it, I want you to check it out. She is wise. And kind and patient. And very talented.

But back to that ‘shift’ that I was speaking of … after Cornelia’s work, ALisa led a ceremony in ‘opening your heart’. Again, I’m not going in to the details. If you’re interested, check out her events. ALisa is fiery and grounded at the same time. She has been doing this work for 33 years and leading Priestess Path for almost twenty years. She is an amazing, intuitive and strong woman:  a trailblazer in this divine feminine movement that we are experiencing.

Through her events, you meet the Priestess Path graduates, and they are amazing women as well: powerful and confident in their skin but still kind and compassionate. That is the work of the divine feminine.

ALisa’s ceremony had to do with assessing the current state of your heart (a mess, broken and hurt and distrustful and scared and tired) and then thinking about what you have to let go of in order to move through that and open your heart.

It takes vulnerability. It takes courage and honesty.

Sometimes you wonder if it’s working as your mind falls back in to its old traps of ‘what do I look like’, ‘am I making a fool of myself’, and ‘they don’t really care’, etc. etc. etc.

But keep going.

ALisa also had all of us sing one of Eleanor Brown’s songs ‘Over and Over’. You can see that in this post here. ALisa incorporates social issues in her events. That was actually what my original post was about, and although ALisa did not ask me not to post it, we did discuss it and she asked me to think about a few things I had written.

You see I don’t ‘do politics’. I don’t ‘do politics’ because they seem so divisive, and I tend to like things that ‘unite us’ rather than things that ‘divide us’. Especially right now, it is such an explosive, emotional subject, that I tend to put my head down and take the ‘why can’t we just all get along’ approach.

But here’s the thing, until we can understand other’s perspectives, until you have friends of color and have listened to their stories and heard their pain, no, we can’t really all come together. We have to do the work first.

Well, I am listening and I am making more friends of color and listening to their stories. And just because you say ‘this banana is yellow’ does not take away from saying ‘that apple is red.’ Somehow we have to move away from all the pain and walls to a place where we begin to truly listen and communicate with each other. All of us.

You see, I really feel like one of the most important questions of current times is ‘who are you?’. Who are you, when you are tired and suffering? When you are alone and misunderstood? In pain and afraid and angry?

As many of us are right now.

And when you work through those questions, you come to the realization that many of us have been living with those questions their entire life. Their entire life.

So … I was sitting on my bench in front of my house, after my husband and my drive, after ALisa’s event, after my women’s circle and the owl, and I was thinking.

I was thinking of everything that I had learned and thinking about how I take it into my ordinary daily life: the one where, after pleasant conversations and an incredible event, my husband and I started arguing, no kidding, ten minutes from getting back to our home.

I was thinking about how could I take that little seed of love and an open heart and transfer it to the often frustrating, exhausting daily minutia of my real everyday life where children and husbands and bosses and mothers and others whine and complain, and argue and scream, and burp and belch and do all those other real, everyday minute to minute often irritating things amidst the cares and concerns of keeping my family safe and healthy and fed and sheltered and prospering … how, HOW do I take that with me when I often see how ‘right’ I am and how ‘wrong’ they are and the fact they don’t see it and don’t agree with me and it’s oh so frustrating and putting up these boundaries, and yes, I felt affection and love for my husband on the road but now, I was feeling the same ol’ urge to bop him on the side of the head (figuratively not literally of course), because somehow, somehow the wrongness of what he says and sometimes does, doesn’t it take away from the rightness of what I say and do and ‘loving that’, ‘opening my heart’ to that, doesn’t that diminish me somehow??? Right??? Right?

And then, that, THAT was when I realized. ‘no, it does not.’ It happened so subtly that I did not even realize it at first.  I realized that I was thinking of all these things in my life that seem ‘so wrong’ and are so frustrating and irritating, but that I was also still keeping my heart open.   It sounds so trite and cliche, and the written word is not going to do it justice, but it really was a huge moment for me.

I realized that I can be me and be triggered by everyday life and realize those triggers and set my boundaries, but also, kindly, gently remind myself to keep my heart open. That who other people are is not a reflection on who I choose to be.

And how I choose to keep my heart: open.

Look, I’m not going to say that I have forever learned this lesson. I am sure I will at times fall in to my old ways. Life and progress are not linear. They are circular or spiral, a great big helix where we are circling and returning and going parallel … back and forth, up and down, and we ultimately end up somewhere different but yet also the same.

But, and what a big butt this is, I opened up to the possibility of living this way, with my heart open: truly, a completely different way to approach life.

A simple flick of the wrist. A whole lot of work to get there. The work of Our Mother.

Amen.

A-women.

All of us.

Check out ALisa Starkweather here.

(And especially her Priestess Path which starts the end of September and still has room in it.)

Check out Cornelia Jecklin here.

Check out Eleanor Brown’s song ‘Over and Over’ here.

Check out the divine feminine app here.

We’ve got work to do.

-- 
Karen Moon
www.FindaWomensCircle.com
www.thedFApp.com