My great aunt Titatina was the spiritual/medicine woman of my community, a very small place in the countryside of the Dominican Republic. She was the spiritual guide who crossed the boundary between life and death to assist the living and to fulfill the desires left behind by those who died. She became my first encounter with the nature of the Goddess and initiated me in a spiritual path rooted in nature and in the enjoyment of life.
In Titatina’s house, prayers were offered three times per day and those times were to be respected and honored by everyone especially us children. Everyone had to be quiet, and those not participating in the prayer time would keep a contemplative attitude wherever they were. It seemed perfectly natural for us to see a woman as the spiritual authority of the family and entire community. Her unique role wasn’t given to her by an institution but was earned by her practice and commitment to a life devoted to the spiritual path. She was her own authority and didn’t need to obey or submit to anyone, she was free to be herself and behave as such.
Her practices included humerios (smudging) her house periodically and the house of family members with aromatic and energy-cleansing herbs. The flame of her devotion was an ever-present oil lamp on her altar that she kept lit day and night transforming her hearth and house into a temple–our temple. It was a sacred place for us as her family members and also the place where the whole community would gather periodically for special prayer celebrations or searching for resolution to some of their life challenges.
My great aunt lived her entire live devoted to the spiritual path, embracing every one of us as her own child. She brought harmony and a sense of wellbeing to every place that she visited. Wherever chaos and discomforts existed, after some time in her presence all conflicts would begin to fall away, and a sense of peace and joy would naturally arise. Though everyone wanted a visit from Titatina, this happened rarely because her sanctuary was her home, from which she preformed her life-impacting work in our community.
She wasn’t perfect and never pretended to be a saint; her faults could be seen and she could laugh at them. Her teachings were not puritanical or moralistic they were liberal and joyful, the opposite of so many church prescriptions. We didn’t have a church building in our community and when the Catholic priest came to the village maybe once a month the mass was given under a tree outside Tititina’s house. The visiting priests knew of her presence and spiritual power within the community that it couldn’t be denied or challenged, because it was interwoven in the psychic well-being of the people.
She was a virgin priestess and the foundation upon which I learned that the feminine was sacred and needed to be respected and honored. My whole childhood was spent under her care and Titatina, until her death in 2005, continued to be a source of great harmony, peace and support throughout my life, from whom I leaned to become, myself, a woman dedicated to seek spiritual awareness.
As my life unfolded I kept being drawn to cultures and places where there were vestiges of the living Goddess. I traveled to Greece to participate in a reenactment initiation of the Eleusinian Mysteries (the sacred rituals of the goddesses Persephone and Demeter) guided by facilitators who had worked with Marija Gimbutas. Trips to Bali and India brought me in contact with sacred art offerings and to the Goddess Kali. In Mexico I was exposed to Coatlique the Mother Goddess and encountered the indigenous cultures of the Huichols, the Tarascos and the Tepehunanes. Each of these ventures along the spiritual path took me deeper within myself as the presence of the Goddess kept calling me back to herself as the giver and taker of life. Not only did she lead me to places where I could reconnect archetypically with her, she appeared in my artwork wanting to be embodied in many ways, forms and shapes; while in my dreams she taught and transformed me into her priestess in ways I don’t yet have words for.
Even today I am realizing a continued deepening and expanding in the awareness of the great mother Goddess because I cannot do otherwise. She has been the foundation of my childhood’s spirituality and the source of many gifts my entire life, the one consistent thread everywhere that I go. Her presence is the guidance that lights my path.
The Age of the Sacred Feminine
The goddess, feminism, activism and spirituality are for me what can support individuals to restore their sense of wholeness and lead humanity into the next evolutionary stage, the embodiment of our true nature.
I sense that this is the age of the feminine, the age of the Goddess. And the most important healing work that is necessary to do during this time is about restoring the sacred feminine in women and in men. Everyone that I work with is dealing with the detrimental problem of being subjugated by their conditioning patterns of patriarchal values and the devaluation of the feminine nature both here in the U.S. and elsewhere.
Sociologically speaking we can see in many fields that everything is pointing to the need for restoring the feminine, and though not yet much in evidence in the main stream, the feminine can be seen in many spiritual circles. There is an awakening taking place where it is becoming obvious that the restoration of wholeness is possible for all individuals. It is I think a revolution and we are fully in the midst of it! We can see the ripple effect everywhere if we are open to see. For example, the collective arising of women exposing publicly the countless and consistent years of abuse and denigration toward women is one of the ripples; women are saying enough is enough! The women’s marches in 2017 and 2018 shows very clearly that women are rising united and are unstoppable.
In my psycho-spiritual work with women in their thirties and forties I have come to see that they inherited a field of information and accessibility to a more open view of spirituality and women, with opportunities to express themselves particularly in this digital era. At the same time, I see that some of them are not necessarily in tune with the feminine nature of the goddess wisdom. As this work progressed it became clear to me that the unhealed conflict with their mothers did not allow them the ability to discover the goddess nature. The negative complex with the mother becomes an obstacle, the barrier that keeps them separate and alienated from the great mother and feminine nature.
This healing transformative process with the mother is maybe one of the most challenging we face. Since our bodies are made from her flesh and blood, how far can we go disowning this inherent connection and remain in conflict with the nature from which our physical container was born? So, this healing process can be supported and assisted when we are able to reconnect with the Goddess that is always waiting for us to turn toward her.
The most amazing revelation that one discovers is that she is always available, she is alive in every part of existence, present in every aspect of life. We recognize this when we finally resolve the psychic split that devalues our own feminine receptive nature. We need to begin to observe how we are still bound and enslaved by the internalized misogynist culture that keeps us in a state of self-devaluation, self-hatred, fear and insecurity.
To be able to embrace and reclaim the sacred feminine within ourselves we have to question our conditioned patterns of beliefs: that what is important and valuable in life is the one-sided ideal of linear accomplishments, for example the practice of doing more than being, that financial success is more important than doing what we love, that fame is better than an ordinary life. We believe that the narratives running from the conditioned thoughts patterns of the mind are real instead of actually being in the present moment in real life.
Waking up from the conditioned patterns that we have lived by all our life is essential to becoming free and being able to see life as it is and not through the filter of belief systems. A radical shift needs to happen wherein we can realize that our identification with an image and with our egoic drives is not who we ultimately are. A shift in our identity needs to be explored so that the infinite, unbounded, limitless loving awareness can be revealed as our ground of being and our very selves.
(To be continued)
[This was first published in She Rises: What… Goddess Feminism, Actvism and Spirituality? Volume 3]
(Meet Mago Contributor) Noris Binet.
Thanks so much Noris for sharing memories of your great aunt, who’s spiritual life nurtured yours. Your writing is such a fine reminder that The goddess is present; we just need to listen.