Consider for a moment that there are two versions of the everyday: the status quo where you live mostly on autopilot, following your regular routines and the outer dictates of family, work and culture; and the sacred feminine where you live from your deep, beautiful Self outward, connected to your soul-based needs and desires, the rhythms of the natural world and your body, and the self-chosen demands of your outer life.

The sacred feminine speaks to a life-centered practicality: your physical well-being, capacity for joy, the richness of your personal relationships, and the beauty of your connection to Nature.

Artist: Amanda Sage

If you’re like most people, the status quo version best reflects your everyday reality. You may get tastes of the sacred feminine through your spiritual beliefs and practice, and in special circumstances like a weekend retreat. But to live your day to day from this ethos may seem impossible given the hectic demands of the modern world where practicality, not soul, reigns supreme.

The sacred feminine is the feminine face of divinity. She is the Goddess, the love- and life-centered ethos that infuses all of creation, and the sacred matter of your human body and of the living Earth. How does this more esoteric understanding of the sacred feminine translate into your everyday life? And how can you access Her presence on a daily basis?

Though there are infinite answers to these questions, here are four concrete ways you can begin to weave the sacred feminine into your daily life.

1. Listen to and care for your body.

Your body is sacred. It’s the living expression of the sacred feminine and the home of your shining spirit. There is deep intelligence in your flesh and bones that can guide you in what you need to be healthy, present, joyful and connected to the patterns and energies of your inner landscape and the outer world.

Eat tasty, healthy food. Exercise. Get enough sleep. Make time for play, pleasure, quiet and repose.

Pay attention and respond when your body speaks. Discomfort, illness, pleasure and ease, these are the ways your body lets you know its needs. Love and welcome your body’s messages, no matter their form, and let them guide your healing and self-care.

2. Open to the beauty and rhythms of Nature.

Whether you live in a city or the country, every day and each season Nature gifts you with its beauty and bounty. Fresh air, sunshine, moonlight, rainstorms, snow-brushed landscapes, blossoms, green-growing things, birdsong — these things are food for your body and soul, anchoring your material connection to this Earth, your home.

Turn your awareness to what’s happening outside your doorstep in the natural realm. Spend time in your favorite green space. Breathe in the earthy scents. Feel the kiss of the elements on your skin. Look up at the sky. Bear witness to the wild things around you. Heed your responses. What ignites your wonder and joy? What nourishes you? What gives you delight and discomfort?

Practice gratitude. Honor the gifts and miracles of Nature by expressing your thanks in words and deeds. The best gift you can give back is to walk lightly on this Earth by bringing more consciousness to your environmental footprint and reducing what you consume.

3. Believe in yourself and the gifts you have to offer.

The sacred feminine is immanent. She is everywhere and in everything. You’re a part of Her living form and manifest beauty, a miraculous spark of creation, just as you are. With your struggles and faults, this may feel like a stretch to you. But even the hard, messy parts of your life are reflections of your beauty and true potential. Where you find your wounding, you also find your beauty; both are part of your journey of healing and personal growth.

Seek out your beauty and gifts. Turn your gaze inward to your soul-based desires and dreams. Heed the parts of your outer life that give you joy, satisfaction and a sense of achievement. Ask those closest to you what are you best qualities and skills. These are the markers of your beauty and gifts. Name and own them.

Commit yourself to self-love, self-acceptance and compassion. Your life, with its challenges and imperfections, is the vehicle of your evolution in this lifetime. Embrace your beauty and wounding, and let these things guide your pathwork of self-empowerment and wholeness.

4. Bring the very best of your love and goodness to your encounters with others.

Love, from a sacred feminine perspective, is an energetic, magnetic imperative rather than an emotional state; it is the primal desire of life to seek out, create and nurture life. In the face of the widespread negativity in our human society, both in the greater world and our personal lives, we hunger for goodness, compassion and kindness. These very things reflect the best of your human nature and the primal love at the core of your being.

Realize that love and goodness are always options in your encounters with others. When faced with a negative or challenging situation, or when your judgments and worst instincts arise, stop, breathe deep, and ask yourself: what else is true in this situation? Where are the places that draw out your compassion for the other person? How can you tap into your love and goodness to navigate these tricky interpersonal waters?

Practice simple acts of goodness. Goodness can be a smile, a word of acknowledgement, a gift, a dinner, a helping hand, or any kind act that fits the individual and the moment. Drink in your acts of goodness. Feel their impact on yourself and the other person. Let these encounters mend and expand your heart and your capacity for love.

The sacred feminine teaches us that all aspects of existence are interdependent and interwoven. On a practical level, this means change in one area of your life will naturally infuse and affect other areas. So start small and simple, and see where it leads you.

Name the daily practice you’re ready to follow. Make a commitment to this change, knowing that developing a new mindset and habit can be challenging. Pay attention to what works and what doesn’t, and what arises from within and outside of you to support or resist your new behaviors. Do your best and be patient and compassionate with yourself.

In these ways, you’re doing the extraordinary work of walking with the Goddess and finding that sweet spot where the sacred feminine naturally informs and guides your everyday existence.

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Long ago, we worshipped the Great Goddess, the Creatrix and the Dark One, the giver and the taker of the breath and sustenance of our mortal existence. Her ever-present love and life-giving ways, like shining silver threads, wove the tapestry of our human society, threads that were passed down from the Great Mother, to the priestesses and women leaders, and to the daughters who were to inherit the red cloak of feminine power.

So it was, for generation after generation, the silver threads of the Mother’s ways continued, shining and undiminished.

We must begin again, collecting and weaving the silver threads of the Great Mother into a tapestry of Her life-giving ways, knowing that new times require a new weaving.

Yet nothing lasts forever and the seasons of humanity turn. As the sun overtakes the moon in the shifting of night into day, so the rule of men and their patriarchal Gods eclipsed the leadership of woman and the Great Goddess. Dominion and death overruled creation and the nurturance of life, and the silver threads of the Mother became tarnished and frayed.

Still, within this newer, distorted weaving, the silver threads remained visible for those with eyes to see and a heart to receive.

With each successive generation and in patriarchy’s quest for absolute rule and absolute suppression of the Mother’s ways, Her silver threads faded farther and farther from our human awareness. Fear and disdain replaced love and reverence.

There were no priestesses, no women leaders, and no daughters to pass on our sacred feminine lineage. Only the bravest of our ancestors, the witches and the healers and the wise women, dared to remember and speak of the remnants of the Mother’s silver threads, woven into the Old Religion of the Great Goddess. Then they too became a part of our disappearing herstory, tortured and murdered during the horrors of the Burning Times for the taint of association with She who must be purged from Her stubborn roots in the human psyche.

Yet nothing lasts forever and the seasons of humanity turn. The sun shares the sky with the moon, just as God shares this world with the Goddess, and a male ethos with that of the sacred feminine. One may eclipse the other for a time, but what was lost will be refound and balance will return.

We, the waking daughters and sons of the Great She, stir after lifetimes of a deadening sleep. Piece by broken piece, we remember Her in the shards of pottery, crumbled sanctuaries and fragments of sacred text that have weathered the ravages of time and persecution. Somehow these silver threads, though torn, tangled and disconnected from their original holy weaving, reach through the ages and whisper their secrets to our hungry hearts.

And all around us, Her silver threads shimmy and shine in the outpouring of life and splendor of this planet Earth, and in the mysteries that underlie our waking reality. While we banish Her to the shadowy recesses of our minds, still She walks among us, gifting us always with the abundance and beauty of the green-growing world. Still, we journey by Her side in our dreams and between-the-worlds magic, receiving Her teachings and guidance on our journey of soul.

In these turning times, we must begin again, collecting and weaving Her silver threads into a new tapestry of sacred texts and secular practices that return balance and Her goodness and love to our human psyche and society. While we mourn the destruction and desecration of the ancient weavings that were once the bedrock of our humanity, we must also remember that new times require a new weaving.

Each of us, individually and together, in our personal lives, families and communities, must collect and weave, collect and weave, the silver threads that are everywhere and in everything — in the laughter of children, the heat of our lover’s touch, the smile of a stranger, and the best impulses of our warm beating heart — in the crisp bite of an apple, the comforts of home and hearth in the dead of winter, the glorious scent of a summer rose, and the silver brush of moonlight on a sleeping landscape — in our dreams, intuitions, creative expression and spiritual gatherings, where the Mysteries congregate at our doorstep — and in our big and small choices and actions to right the injustices, environmental damage and human abuses of our troubled world.

In this essential work, we’re going to stir up the brittle, crusted-over places and twisted, tangled threads that hold our personal wounding, and the fears and nay-saying old stories that dig their heels into the status quo in resistance to our forward movement. We’ll come face to face with the worst of our collective, destructive impulses and the tumultuous, terrifying upheaval that mark the ending of one season of our humanity and the birth of the next. Yet we mustn’t waiver nor let these old stories and fears stand in the way of our sacred task of co-creating the new.

In all these things and so much more, She is with us, gathering up our smaller weavings into the greater tapestry that is the template of a better, kinder, more sustainable and loving world. And in this tapestry, we’ll find Her shining ancient threads, the tarnished silver strands when we lost our connection to Her sacred ways, and the new golden threads of our remembering and reclaiming the love and goodness that are Her most precious gifts to us.

I reach out my hand to Her. I reach out my hand to you. We have work to do. Let us begin.

Related Post: Our Collecting and Weaving Task: A Tapestry of Love

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I was born into a world that didn’t teach me what it means to be a woman in accordance with my true, sacred feminine nature and power. Instead, it made me see my womanhood as weak, small and inferior, meant to serve and please others. It taught me that power was an outside force, defined and imposed by others, that belonged to the realm of men.

Though I started my adult life on the wrong track, seeking my place and power in a masculine-defined world as an educated, career-focused business woman, my deeper Self had another plan that set me on the path of reclaiming the lost fragments of my whole, holy womanhood.

Our whole, holy womanhood is powerful, with the ability to hold the light, dark, life, death, beauty and wounding of our personal story and shared humanity.

I did feminist graduate studies, ran my own gender-equity consulting business, read countless books on women’s ways and Goddess theology, spent countless hours in therapy and personal development, moved away from the city to a small, rugged island to reconnect with Nature, practiced magic, went to witchcamp, and became a priestess, dreamer and daughter of the Goddess.

Still something essential was missing, connected to the dark, death powers of my sacred feminine nature. This is the story of when this precious fragment returned to me.

It’s the early hours on the day of the Winter Solstice. I jolt awake with the word “miscarriage” screaming in my brain. I dash to the bathroom to find blood coming from me that isn’t supposed to be there at week eleven in my pregnancy. My partner soothes me, and calms me down enough to take me to the hospital. Later that morning, an ultrasound confirms that our baby has died — a child we had consciously conceived and desperately wanted.

Our midwife gives us a choice: to stay in the hospital for a procedure or to let things run their course at home. I’ve been down this road before, having miscarried five years earlier. No one had told me then that thirty percent of first-time pregnancies end in miscarriage, nor prepared and coached me for this eventuality. We had gone the hospital route, and the experience had been disorienting and disempowering. This time would be differently; I would tend my own miscarriage.   

In the darkest hours of the night, in the turning before the new dawn, my womb begins to convulse, releasing the dead life within. For hours, with each release, I collect the tissues of our child in a one-quart mason jar, not knowing which would have been his perfect face, his beating heart, his tiny body, his reaching hands, and his sweet toes. There are no eyes for me to close, or lips for me to kiss goodbye. This indistinguishable flesh, mixed with my life-giving blood, is all my partner and I have to mourn and bury.

In the midst of my keening grief, I remember myself — witch, priestess, wise woman — Holy Whore, Holy Reaper — midwife to both life and death moments with the powers of creation and destruction within my living womb.

Like all transformative moments, I have a choice: I can collapse into my grief and loss, bleeding myself into oblivion, and following the wisp of my child’s departed soul, or I can become something new, something that I’ve been traveling toward in my many years of collecting and mourning the death bits of my life, and gathering back the shattered fragments of my womanhood.

Naked and aching raw, I lift my blood-stained hands to the returning light, trusting that to be fully present — to feel all and resist nothing — to claim myself and my life as whole and holy — that a new dawn, a new beginning will come.

And I change. I become big enough, wild enough, wise enough, powerful enough to contain my bottomless grief and my unbounded love, not only for this child I’ll never hold in my arms, but for my own wounding and my own beauty, and all the death bits I’ve suffered to arrive awake and present for this death moment.

This story isn’t just about my whole, holy womanhood, but about yours as well.  Our world has deceived us. We aren’t weak or small.  We aren’t inferior and beholden to men and their ways of power. Our purpose isn’t to serve and please others, although nurturance, care and compassion are part of our sacred feminine nature. Instead, we’re big and powerful in our own right, with the presence and capacity to encompass the light and shadow, life and death, and beauty and wounding of our personal stories and collective humanity.

These greater capabilities of our womanhood aren’t feminist fantasies. Our ancient feminine ancestors lived in accordance with their whole, holy nature. They were the red-cloaked ones, priestesses, leaders, healers and counselors that guided their communities through the natural cycles of birth, life, decay and death. Our very bodies have the powers to give and to take life. While our culture amplifies women’s ability to give birth, it completely ignores our innate capacity to terminate a pregnancy that isn’t viable. Miscarriage is natural; though it breaks our hearts, the babies our bodies reject were never meant to be.

My story has a happy ending. On this Winter Solstice, despite my heartbreak and the death and despair that threatened to overtake me, I reached for life and my whole, holy womanhood, and life reached back. I changed profoundly, becoming a woman and priestess of the light and the dark, and of life and of death. This deepened my healing journey, physically and spiritually, making me strong and present in new, empowering ways. I consciously prepared my womb and my heart for new life, and a couple of years later, as the seasons turned to Spring, I gave birth to a beautiful baby boy.

Artist: Unknown

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Outside my windows, a wild wind is blowing. The trees bend and swirl in its fierce, unrelenting force. Somewhere on my island home, trees will be falling over with root systems exposed to the bright light of day, power lines shutting down, and homes returning to a simpler, natural ethos of candlelight and going to bed in synch with the descending darkness.

A wild wind is blowing in our world, unleashing a power born of the intensifying weather patterns of climate change along with a growing discontent with unpalatable political choices, increasing social and economic imbalances, and the stresses of our personal lives.

There are mysteries afoot, strong, beautiful counter-forces that whisper in our ears: the season of humanity is shifting. The Goddess is awakening within and without.

I feel it in my bones, in my soul and everywhere around me — it comes to me in my dreams, waking me at 4 am with visions of what is and what can be — a fierce and unrelenting force, eroding the pillars of our social order and exposing its root systems to the scrutiny of the sunlit world.

There’s rot in the roots of our human society, born of greed, corruption, manipulation, lies, ignorance, apathy and fear. So much of what was hidden in our cultural fabric has come to our collective awareness. We have lost our naivety and trust in our social and political institutions. How we live our lives, individually and collectively, no longer works for most of us or for our planet home.

And there are mysteries afoot, strong, powerful, beautiful counter-forces that whisper in our ears: “the season of your humanity is shifting. The Goddess is awakening within and without. It’s time to live in accordance with the powers of life, and your best, most beautiful instincts. Do not despair. Turn your face back to Her living light and nurturing ways. It’s time; you are ready, you are ripe.”

When a tree falls down, the forest is opened up for the small seedlings to have their time in the sunlight. In death, there is a quickening where new life is called to the empty space left behind. Let us open to this wild wind of change. Let it strip away what no longer serves our lives and the life of our Earth home. Let us trust that a new season of the sacred feminine is upon us, and, though some pillars of our human-made world will fall, others, more caring and life-serving, will rise up in the empty space left behind.

Discover the Path of She for yourself.

Reclaim what you have lost, your true, beautiful Self and the life-giving mysteries of the Goddess.

The Goddess is awakening, and calling you home. Are you ready to heed Her call?

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Photographer: brookeshaden

A fire burns at the center of our large, ritual circle, its saffron flames and feral sparks spiraling into the night sky. One of the teaching priestesses at Reclaiming witchcamp stands in the center, speaking of our ancestor witches, the powerful ones who practiced the Craft in the distant past. She tells us that their magical words and practices were lost from us; our lineages were destroyed through centuries of repression, persecution and the atrocities of the Burning Times. But the world has changed, and we are awakening and once more practicing the Craft of our ancestors, renewing what  was lost and creating new traditions that can be passed on to future generations.

We’re the waking witches. The powers of the ancients still sleep in our cells and our souls. It’s time to return to our sacred heritage of the Craft of magic.

Then she spoke the words we use to cast our circle, “By the Earth that is Her body. By the Air that is Her sweet breath. By the Fire of Her bright spirit. By the Waters of Her living womb. By all that is Above, and All that is Below, our circle is cast. We are between the worlds. What changes our world, changes all worlds.”     

Her words cut through me, with a mixture of pain and pride, for what has been lost and what we were collective rebirthing. We were now the voices of the ancestors, renewing the Craft and reweaving its mysteries for these times. I felt the power of our casting in the rippling outwards of the resonant power of the spoken words. There was a reverence in the air, as if the Universe itself, and all those that had practiced witchcraft before us, were sacred witnesses to our stepping into the empty space left behind by the ancient ones.

We are the waking witches. The magic of the ancients still sleeps in our cells and in our souls. Mother Earth is hungry for those who know how to dance Her mysteries. Our ancestor witches cannot go to their rest until we, their descendents, return to our sacred heritage. We are saplings once more reaching for the sunlit world, stretching our limbs, anchoring our roots and flexing our powers.

May we trust ourselves to renew and rebirth the Craft for the dire needs of the precarious edge our humanity and Earth home rides. May we hone our mastery in service of our souls and the world soul. May we serve the powers of life with presence, grace and humility. And may we grow strong and cast our circles wide and deep so what was lost can flourish once more in waking world.

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Artist: Melanie Delon (www.melaniedelon.com)