A Crone’s Embodied Life with Goddess by Deanne Quarrie

Awakening to Goddess made me aware that as a human being, I was designed to utilize all of my senses. I realized that I had drifted away from my natural state through which, at one time, I engaged with all of life through all my senses, including the intuitive. This change came about through an active, stress filled life in which I seldom slowed down to even appreciate what was around me. I had ignored much of my sensory ability due to a change-over from right brain functioning, which is more imaginative, creative and intuitive, to left brain functioning, which is linear and analytical. Once I had entered the educational system, two of my senses were developed out of proportion to the others. I had left my childhood behind and entered an environment lacking in exposure to the natural world. I had become a resident of an indoor and often sedentary world.

With this sudden awareness I realized that in early civilization, humans and all other animals depended on finely tuned sensory awareness for survival. We walked the Earth, using those senses for protection, to find food and to move around. We did not just see and hear our way around but we felt, touched, tasted and smelled in order to survive.

We were at one time a right-brain functioning species but over time, with the development of written alphabets, rather than those based on pictures, and a fast paced, artificially constructed environment, we have gradually become mostly left brained in our approach to life. This keeps us in our heads and out of touch with our bodies. This in turn, can leave us disconnected and out of touch with the sacred. We are meant to be sensuous creatures and were not designed to live out our lives with only our mental bodies.

With Goddess in my life, I wanted to return to that sensuous human being, living through her senses. I realized that I needed to implement a conscious practice learning to more aware of the subtle ways in which I experience life. I knew that, as a left-brained, thinking, analytical being, I had to return to being a woman with full body appreciation of the oneness that I share with all of life. I could no longer live in my head! Through diligent practice I developed an appreciation for nature, in fact, a return to nature. This opened my awareness of my inclusion within the web of life and I became more attuned to my own sacredness. It became clear that an open and developed sensory awareness brought me a greater appreciation for the value of peaceful co-existence. I started dancing again, another thing left behind. I started painting what I see, writing what I feel and even more important, I learned how to better express my feelings, so long bottled up inside. By engaging in full-body awareness with all of life, I broadened my appreciation of the “whole” and my inter-connectedness to the web of life.
I have learned that as human beings we are capable of having fully “sensing” bodies. We come into this world as infants, somatic in nature – all sensory awareness – without cognitive process – all feeling. Our parents, in their care for us, served as the cognitive part of our worlds until we reached a certain stage of development, able to move from our full body awareness into our cerebral functioning and thinking processes.

Some of us, out of pure need for survival, developed very quickly into thinking beings, leaving behind completely, our somatic selves, because it was not safe to be in the body. We were in situations where our cerebral functioning was necessary to survive.

Because so many of us grew up in troubled homes, we have few memories of being children. Many of us have very little awareness of being fully alive, expressive, and in our bodies. Many of us left our child self behind and our task now is to retrieve her, to find that child of feeling, the one who experiences pleasurable sensation all throughout her body.

When I was a child and I needed to remove myself from what was to me threatening, I found solace in nature. I grew up near the Pacific Ocean and was, from an early age, like Child to Mother, fully attached to the Sea. Even today, just standing with my feet in Her blessed waters, I am relieved of my sorrow and stress. Swimming in Her, my body finds total freedom.

When I was no longer near the Ocean, I discovered trees. I climbed them to the highest places to rest my body on their branches and be comforted as no human ever comforted me.

And finally, when no escape was possible other than my room, I had my music. I have always used music to comfort, to heighten, or to fully experience any emotion that I might be having. As a child, I lay on my bed, the music playing next to me. I felt it course through my body much as I sense energy today, feeling it move, dancing it with my hands, all over my body.

It has now been thirty years since I became aware how I had lost that sensing, feeling child. I have been doing the work to find, heal, and restore her. Once, so linear in my thought processes, so cut off from my ability to express emotion, feeling and yet unable to express those feelings so long stifled within that needed to be opened and embraced, I can now say that there is a lovely balance between both worlds.

I have learned that if we are to fully embrace living, it is important to remember how to live in our bodies comfortably and safely. If we re-awaken all of our senses, our awareness is expanded and our perceptions clarify and heighten. Without this, our lives will not develop as they could. Our enjoyment of all that is Sacred will be impeded, as if walled in and separated from all that is possible.

To clarify my own personal meaning of Sacred, I see the Sacred as All of Life. This includes everything I can see, hear, taste, smell and feel. It also includes all that is known and unknown to me, quantifiable and intuited. The All is Sacred. I choose to call this All, Goddess, as my own personal preference because I see the necessity for a feminine presence in the All. I am a part of this sacredness, a part of Goddess, for I am a part of the Whole. My experience of this sacredness, of Goddess, is through my senses. Of course, we have a lot more senses than the five Aristotle described.

Through many years of learning sensory awareness, as well as placing more of my focus on what my body experiences, rather than what it “thinks” all the time, what I have discovered is that life truly has become an embodied experience. This comes from the sense that I call “knowing.”

Early on in my practice, I became acutely aware of suddenly knowing something that I did not know before. This increased for me as I developed my ability to “journey” or travel via trance to other realms or dimensions of our reality. This “gnosis” seems to have increased with age. It has helped me define my spiritual practice as well as guide me deeper into the Mysteries. At one time I needed drumming or singing, some outside source to help me trance, but now, I just go. When necessary, I ask, and just know.

It has also affected my sense of time and space as well as the cycles of sun and moon as I move throughout the seasons. I no longer have to look at a calendar to know that it is a new moon. Or that the moon is at its peak in the light it reflects.

My body feels the changing seasons and responds to them accordingly, and not always when the calendar informs me. For example, I had this incredible burst of energy around the first of February. I was creative, active and productive in my online work and writing endeavors. I got seeds for my garden and had my garden planted before the first of March instead of in April. All of this activity typically hits me mid-March to mid-April in a normal year but this year it came early. Puzzled by that, I had to reflect for a moment and I realized that of course, here in South Central Texas, we really had no winter and our spring began in early February. Small green leaves, early flowering; it all began then and not now. Now, we are fully green except for a few really late budding trees. Our bluebonnets are blooming all along the highways. My activity was simply my body’s awareness of the changing season and responding to it. I was responding to the surge of beginning growth, the need to fuel what is blooming in me.

Because I am basically retired (I don’t have a job that I go to every day), the need to watch the clock has vanished. I eat when I am hungry and I eat what I am hungry for. I stay up until I am sleepy and I sleep until I wake up. Occasionally I do have to use an alarm but when I do, it feels like an imposition.

It is a comfortable way to be, to live life through embodied experience while at the same time have an active mind, digging and learning, all while sharing that knowledge with others. It is a nice give and take with the Universe just as it is a nice give and take with those in my life.
I am excited because I am beginning to feel the energy rising around me again as my summer rapidly approaches. I look forward to completion, nurturing my early spring projects to fruition, ready to embrace their fullness. I am dancing in Her rhythms, in tune with her song. This is how I know Goddess.

Meet Mago contributor, Deanne Quarrie