Wholeness, Mother, Goddess: All Synonymous
Being in alignment with the Goddess, in a simple and direct way, is to be attuned with nature, with its rhythms and its manifestations. The moon’s energy, for instance, can be a vital resource for our own deepening since its touches an aspect of the psyche that is deeply connected with our unconscious and our capacity to enter into the world of the archetypes, from where life is renewed periodically. Working with the monthly lunation is an alchemic process that supports our restoration through a process of renewal so essential for human beings and our wellbeing. To develop a sensitive connection with rainfall, lightening, thunder, the sun rising and setting, rivers, ocean currents, etc., can support us in reconnecting with the Goddess nature. Eventually we will discover that wild life in every sense is the same as the wilderness of our own psyche.
Serving the goddess is the most progressive and self-sustaining kind of work that we can do for humanity. Introducing young boys and girls to Mother nature as the giver of life is how we preserve our heritage. Whether the children in our family or wherever we find ourselves in connection with youth, sharing this lesson is vital to our survival.
I introduced my niece Carla to the Goddess when she was quite young and then more so when she had her first menstruation as it was a simple but intentional recognition of her own blood as a celebration of life and this beautiful event, one that she will always remember.
Since then she has developed a connection with the Goddess nature and has been rewarded with powerfully guiding dreams where the Goddess has been clearly revealed. In one of her latest dream she was shown a stone, colored orange and blue and was told that this was the stone of the Goddess of the Fish, La Diosa de Los Pescados. After awakening from the dream, she was able to find that the stone in her dream was known as sodalite,but she wasn’t immediately able to find reference to the Goddess of the fish. Then, after further research she found in Egyptian ancient mythology reference to the fish goddess Hatmehit.
At a gem store in Sedona, Arizona, I found the specific sodalite and purchased a sample for each of us being so very touched by her dream as I felt it was a very important revelation not just for Carla but for me as well. It also reconnected me to a dream that I had wherein the ocean waves would bring to the shore a few fish for me to pick-up from the sand, so that I wouldn’t have to go into the water to find food for nourishment. I carried the stone with me wondering what kind of energy this stone possessed. And would she reveal who La Diosa de Los Pescados is?
Lately, after living in the United States for 28 years, twenty years in Nashville and the last eight years in Sonoma, California, I began to sense that something was shifting both internally and externally, something was ending but I was not sure what it was. Building bridges in Nashville between African-American and Anglo women in Nashville had been important and fulfilling work for me. Then after moving to Sonoma, I began working with the immigrant women’s population in the Sonoma Valley, mostly from Mexico, doing educational, counseling and healing work. I was able to use a series of alternative modalities to help them in the challenging transmigrations process that had embarked upon them. These pioneering women contribute to a more diverse society bilingually and biculturally, in addition to the contributions from the daily work they perform. They also brought with them, as many are aware, the Virgin of Guadalupe, who is not only the patron saint of Mexico but also the most holy mother of all.
In the last few years my health began to be impacted in ways that I couldn’t understand. I had no idea where to go, or how life would unfold since my husband had a good job and was content in Sonoma. Then in 2013, I was invited to lead a silent retreat in Ajijic, Mexico, where I had once lived. The first morning that I rose to meditate I suddenly felt a powerful energy arising from the land and the nearby lake through my entire body. I was very surprised because this energy reconnected me to the same feelings that I discovered when I lived there over thirty-five years ago. I came back to Sonoma with an awareness that there might be a possibility for me to go back to this place that I loved but I had no idea how.
Then unexpectedly, last year my husband lost his job which allowed us to go to Ajijic during January and February of this year for him to see if he liked the town. During those two months we were granted with many gifts of welcoming from new friends and from those who I had known before. When we came back to Sonoma, our landlord decided to sell the house that we had rented for nearly nine years and we were forced to leave that home that I treasured. It was an unsettling time.
But then, I was invited to go back to Mexico to teach this past July (2017) and I welcomed that invitation as an omen since I had not been invited to present at this congress for over five years. It was an opportunity to explore further the nurturing energy that I felt was calling me back to Mexico, whose culture had always embraced me with open arms since I first moved there forty-one years ago when I was twenty to attend the University of Guadalajara.
I left Sonoma in July to Mexico after having spent a couple of months since moving from our home, into the NEST, a wonderful guest house in the woods offered to us by a dear friend of my husband’s until we could find a more permanent place to live, and while my husband searched for a new for job as a minister perhaps even going abroad. I had the intention to stay only for a month in Mexico.
After finishing my work in Mazatlan, Mexico, where I presented at the International Congress of Hypnotherapy and Alternative Therapies, I took an eight-hour bus ride to Ajijic, Jalisco on the eastern shore of Lake Chapala. This journey through the Mexican landscape afforded me a great reconnection with the land and to many of the places where I had received transformative initiations during my twenties, like at the Mesa del Nayar in the Sierra Madres, where the Huichol Indians live.
Many memories came back inspiring me to write like having my first profound direct initiation with the living Goddess of the water. We called La Diosa del Lago, the goddess of the lake, because her presence was very obvious and the energy that emanates could be felt if one was receptive and attuned with the inner and outer rhythm of life. I received many healing gifts from the goddess. (Even prehispanic offerings of small sculptures).
As I began to integrate myself back into the Mexican culture and re-experience the way that life moves for me there slowly I began to feel enlivened, inspired, and life felt easier going, gentler and kinder, as I was touched by the warm, freshness of each new day and the luminous night-time sky along with the evening’s cooling breeze. I soon realized that I required more time to undergo the healing process, and that I needed restoration not just for my body but also for my whole being. I realized that I have been gasping for air without knowing it.
The moon, the rain, the thunder and lightning that I witnessed in Ajijic helped to restore me and the energy of the goddess simply took me in as the daughter that had never been forgotten. Very soon I found that the goddess Teomichicihualli, which an artist friend had been researching and painting all over in Ajijic, was the pre-Columbian, goddess-fish princess of the lake. The Goddess first appeared to the Nahuatl and then to the Aztecs at Lake Chapala. About her the natives professed, “To see her is to believe in her. To believe in her is to honor her. To honor her is to hold her sacred. For now, and forever more”. (Aurora Terranus, Published in El Ojo de Chapala Newspaper, 2007).
How exited I was to read about Teomichicihualli because I found her while carrying her sodalite stone with me. Then as I was immersed in this unique energy of realizations and revelations I received an email from my dear friend Margaret Meggs, with an invitation to submit a piece about What keeps me continuing in Goddess Feminism, Activism, and Spirituality? It was obvious to me that I had no choice but to fulfill the invitation.
I just surrendered even deeper under life’s unfolding current, and everything that I needed while in Ajijic came to be effortlessly and I was guided to find the healers and the support that I needed. For the next three months I was offered places to live and slowly it became clear that life was carrying me back to where I feel at home. As such I was hoping to find a house to rent beginning in January 2018, and, even better, a wonderfully-located house found me while I was still in town, which was available to be rented in November, and I soon moved in. It was the perfect place for me to recommit myself to the spiritual journey that sustains this life. It was magical how everything unfolded. The house even has a name painted on a ceramic tile at the entrance, Hogar de Madre, Home of the Mother and for me this means The Mother of all life!
A couple months earlier I had been invited to conduct a weekend retreat in Dream Alchemy for a group of women in Ajijic. It was a wonderful way to investigate what is going on in the unconscious world of the women there and at the same time it occurred to me that what I have to offer is very relevant at this moment for the community. Without their even knowing it on a conscious level they (appear to be) searching to be initiated into Goddess Mother spirituality. Later I offered a Satsang at my newly rented home to baptize it as a place for spiritual self-realization, where the sacred feminine can be restored for women, and for men.
The Embodiment of the Goddess
Serving the Goddess is serving the mother of all of life, by seeking to bring forward the awareness that every aspect of this life is sacred. Realizing the deepest recognition that we are life, and have never been separated from life and never will be. We are the Goddess Mother living life, unfolding, beautifully awake.
In the life of everyone who has been called to Goddess initiation there is a time for a deeper realization that this life must only be dedicated to the embodiment to what has been realized. One can no longer stay in the corner hiding, keeping secret our deeper connection with the realm of the spiritual life that nurtures us–a spiritual life which is neither male nor female but all inclusive. There is a deeper call to the embodiment of what is whole, unfragmented and non-dual.
This possibility of embodiment is available in this life time for anyone who honestly is willing to offer themselves to the silence that is alive within each one of us. It is available to those who are willing to be present and aware in this present moment, every moment, being awake to what is happening in the body, the mind and the heart, shifting from thinking that the world of beliefs created by thoughts is real, and instead just being here living life free from the conditioned thoughts of the past and the imaginations of the future.
Embodiment is aliveness, spontaneously free, listening deeply to what life is saying in its many forms and many ways. It isn’t perfection but completeness. It is living life from the awareness that everything is impermanent, nothing here lasts forever. And, in this realization, one can live life fully devoted to that which is never born and never dies, that which is eternally alive and exists at the core of all Beings!
(End of the sequels)
[This was first published in She Rises: What… Goddess Feminism, Actvism and Spirituality? Volume 3]
(Meet Mago Contributor) Noris Binet.