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The Yoni Squeeze ( and other ways to love your Yoni)

The Yoni Squeeze

( and other ways to love your Yoni)

Hey beautiful sisters

I hope you enjoy this little video on HOW to activate your Yoni, your sacred space, your divine vulva...

And please bear with me as i take a moment to remind you WHY you would do that...and also give you some other quick tips on how to activate and nourish your sexual organs as a daily practice.

The WHY....

  • When you squeeze you bring more blood flow, you bring more LIFE FORCE and awareness into your sexual organs.
  • With regular Yoni Squeezes, you activate your creative life force. You feel more alive, juicy, inspired and creative
  • You get out of your head, you get into your body, you feel more centred in yourself. More strongly connected to the earth, your deep desire , your inner compass. 
  • When you are squeezing your yoni , you are WAKING HER UP to more sensitivity.
  • You are exercising your pelvic floor muscles for sexual health and also to enhance your capacity for pleasure ( both giving and receiving it).
  • You also increase your capacity to circulate orgasmic energy around your body.
  • You are reminding yourself that you are a sexual being. You are activating that aspect of yourself; you are sensually empowering yourself.

Other ways to love your yoni

  • Dance and Squeeze-When you dance, squeeze as you dance, imagine you are sucking up earth energy into your pelvis as you dance..go on..try it 🙂
  • Play with your Egg- A Yoni Egg is a crystal or jade egg you place in your yoni, it massages you on the inside, you can squeeze around your egg to increase the massage.Find out more here
  • Butterfly pulses and big exhales-In the video i show you a slow squeeze, after a few of these, you can do some quick ones, like pulsing of your vagina muscles, like butterfly wings flickering..followed by a long exhale. Go on, try it now...
  • Yoni clearing breath- Yep , you store stuff in there..deep conscious  cleansing breaths can rid you of energetic debris that can accumulate in your sexual organs. This can be super powerful!!! I lead this in all my women workshops and offer this as a meditation in my Sacred Sensual Meditations. You can also just make up your own version of it , and do it when ever you need 'a clearing'. 

Please share with any sister you feel could benefit from this practice!​

Enjoy sisters !!

If you have any questions go on and

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INTERESTED IN WOMENS EMPOWERMENT COACHING???

YES I CAN BE YOUR PERSONAL HANDHOLDER/COACH/PRIESTESS/CHEERLEADER/SISTER!

This is the service I provide because I am super aware of how much we need space holders to help us birth our graceful movements to 'the next level'

(also I am kind of addicted to witnessing women embracing their power..)

It sends a thrill all the way through me to midwife women into their potential in a way that is honoring to their deepest needs.

I know how to feel into what may be blocking you, and help you to move through that, so contact me if you are interested in a coaching program or one off session.

The post The Yoni Squeeze ( and other ways to love your Yoni) first appeared on Wild Sacred Feminine .

How to be in your power as a woman AND be open to LOVE

Insights for women on how to find that sweet balance between being strong, vulnerable and open.

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Do you know how it feels to be playful and open, and ALSO centered and connected?

This fusion of softness and inner strength is an important key to feeling fulfilled as a woman, and if we bring these qualities into our relationships they tend to be nourishing and empowering and fulfilling.

From working with SO many women I have noticed 2 kinds of patterns.

The first I would call ‘un- boundary-ed women’. These are basically women with undefined boundaries, women who find it difficult to say no and tend to ‘lose themselves’ in relationships. These women are ‘too open’ in a way that leaves them disconnected from their inner source of wisdom and strength.

This is one extreme. Where openness is not accompanied by firm inner roots connecting us to our self worth, our own needs and our unique voice.

Then there are the women with what I call ‘strong women syndrome’.

These women are disconnected from their feminine qualities in a way that hardens them and prevents them from being able to give and RECEIVE love freely and truly relax and let go of control in everyday life.

Both of these patterns can block us from living in our power and creating healthy empowering relationships.

Do you relate to this?

Like many women I suffered what I call ‘ strong woman syndrome’. Through necessity I learnt to look after myself and cope in many different challenging circumstances. The connection to my inner ‘warrioress’ helped me to create healthy boundaries and own my worth and speak my truth with confidence. But the journey has not stopped there…

Because I, like most women, yearn for intimacy….

I do not want to be so strong and self sufficient that I am guarded against receiving love….

I want to be acknowledged as a beautiful woman, to be seen and celebrated by the masculine and to receive appreciation, affirmation and love, not from neediness or disempowerment, but from a place of deep self love.

And i want to ‘get out of my head’ and feel deep pleasure, blissful union and surrender…daily….

Not only that, but I do not want to ‘lose myself’ and my connection to my own power in the process….

Are you with me?

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So how do we find this delicate balance between the strong and the open receptive parts of us?

And allow both aspects to support us in living as confident and connected women?

and to experience next level love?

The following points are playful suggestions and guidance for your own exploration of fusing softness and strength in your life and your relationships.

1.Explore how you feel, constantly!

No matter which side of the scale you veer towards, self knowledge is always your super power, to notice when you are feeling tense, and/or to notice when you are losing connection to your center…this clarity of awareness is the most important information you can have. Once you are aware of the patterns that tend to play out in you, this gives you the opportunity to redress the imbalances as they arise.

Have regular check in’s with yourself, especially when you are in situations where you tend to fall into old patterns of doing things. For instance, when with a friend who you always end up saying yes to when you really mean no. Or when you begin to get tense and defensive when you feel upset.

Notice your fallback behavior.

Notice how it feels to be shut down, tense or disconnected from your centre, noticing is the first step.

2. Sign .soften and surrender

When you notice yourself getting hardened, or notice that you are tuning out and becoming ungrounded, take a big breath into your belly, let out a juicy sigh, come back into a connection with the sensations in your body RIGHT NOW.

Your body never lies!!

It is your ultimate reference point, when in doubt, breathe into your belly, connect to your soft feminine power through a nice long deep effortless breath, then another, then another..

Allow yourself to relax into your own self.

3. Ask for what you need to go deeper

Get used to asking yourself the following question..

What do I really need right now???

Perhaps you want to feel more relaxed and supported, or maybe you need a sense of feeling centered and grounded. Perhaps you would like to be held, perhaps you need to let go of your ‘to do’ list and go for a walk.

Or..perhaps you need to RECEIVE.

Get good at asking others for what you REALLY need too ..you could ask someone in your life if they could stroke your face, or have a cup of tea with you, or make love to you.

You are a woman; one of your ‘jobs’ is to receive, either from yourself, or someone else.

ENJOY IT!!!!!

Be sure to balance the giving and receiving in your life so that you KNOW how it is to RECEIVE in a way that is empowering, nourishing and fulfilling. Be creative in designing the experience of woman hood you deeply desire.

4. Notice which patterns and beliefs you inherited.

Was your mother a push over or a control freak? It can be super helpful to reflect on how you have been influenced by the messages you received from your early life. I would suggest that perhaps if your mother had the habit of dominating, that it is part of your work in this life to learn to be soft and receptive, and if your mother was a push over that part of your work in this life is to own your worth, know your boundaries and claim relationships which honor both.

Rather than feeling helpless about your inherited patterns and the ways that you have been conditioned see what you were given as an opportunity to find a more balanced manifestation of woman.

I hope these words were helpful, I have found all these principles to be extremely helpful in taking me beyond my own patterns and into a more free flowing and enjoyable way of living and giving and receiving and BEING a woman.

This has helped me to experience a quality of intimacy in ALL of my relationship which nourishes me and reminds me how wonderful it is to be a open, integrated woman, connected to my OWN power.

And my wish is that all women are able to experience this!

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shaktiflows

The post How to be in your power as a woman AND be open to LOVE first appeared on Wild Sacred Feminine .

How womens workshops can connect you to your feminine power

 

I have been lucky enough to facilitate womens workshops all over the world. And have witnessed profound transformations.

I am witnessing women collectively waking up to their feminine power as well as the power of sisterhood.

So why are womens workshops so powerful? and why are more and more women finding themselves drawn to them?


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Mainstream education, and even much modern yoga training, has failed to offer us the all-important guidance that we need to tap into the mystery and power within our feminine bodies.

Without the support, guidance and the space to nurture this inner connection so many women report that they experience a profound disconnect from their feminine power.

How do you know if you have lost connection to your feminine power??

*If your attention is continually directed to the critical voice in your head

*If your time and energy is consumed in behaviours ,habits and relationships that are not nourishing, for example; over or under eating, comparing yourself to others constantly and worrying about what might happen.

*If you give your power away through looking to others for approval or to fulfill your needs

* if you apologise for who you are and shame your body

*if you feel numb , stuck and constantly tired.

What i am witnessing is that women are realising that there must be something more than this kind of reality, where we judge ourselves, we judge our bodies and we judge each other.

We are collectively waking up to our deep desire to be unashamedly sensual and feminine

We want to FEEL feminine AND we want to feel empowered,

We want to feel free AND we want to feel safe to be truly ourselves

We want to feel met, and expressed and sexually vibrant.

In other words , we want to be in our feminine power

And we are realise that to do this we need to be supported by our sisters…

So how do we reconnect to our feminine power?

Through working with hundreds of women,and through engaging passionately with my own life long study of feminine power. I would suggest that our feminine power is activated when we activate the feminine life force energy in our bodies- our ‘Shakti’.

Shakti is an ancient sanskrit word for the feminine principle, it is feminine energy, it is also translated as power.

As women we are embodiments of Shakti, our Shakti is our power. Due to a culture that has trained us to be stuck in our heads, most of us have lost connection to this primal feminine power within us.

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Obviously it is time to re embrace, redefine and remember.

Hence the surge of Sacred Feminine workshops, retreats and womens circles..

We are remembering !!!

And we are finding that we have to do it together.

I have held Shakti Activation workshops and rituals all over the world and i have been blown away by the transformations i have witnessed. 

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 So what do women get to experience in womens workshops? 

*Parts of us that have become deadened/blocked/ignored/wounded can be healed , with love. in this process the energy that has often become dormant inside of us wakes up.

 *We learn practices that awaken us to life force, to aliveness, to sensation, to feeling…to the power and passion and presence of woman.

*In the collective field of sisters our Shakti begins to flow, it nourishes us from the inside. it makes us shine, it connects us to our purpose, our passion, our natural sexual expression.

*We remember how it is to FLOW and TRUST and feel safe to feel sensual and sexual.

 This is often experienced as a ‘a-HA!’ in the entire being, it is a coming home, it is a wake up call, it is a blessing, it is a deep and sweet OH YES!

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 Women have ALWAYS gathered to sing, dance and pray together….

For good reason, together we are powerful. Sisterhood and our sensual feminine wisdom that we have been hungering for.

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Here are 3 reasons why womens workshops connect you to your feminine power..

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1. Together we reconnect to our power centres

The power centres within the female energetic anatomy are doorways to activation of the whole body and mind and spirit. The heart, the belly center, the third eye and the womb space can all be portals to awakening.

In my workshops we use the super simple tantric tools of breath, sound and movement to activate the power centers back to their natural free flowing state.

Then these power centers literally breathe us back into an experience of feeling juicy, connected, grounded and vibrant.

 This is a simple process that gets turbo boosted as part of a collective exercise, a group of women practicing this together creates an incredible activation to everyone in the circle.

 

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2.We free ourselves from our baggage from the past

I am going to have to have to highlight this next bit…

WE NEED SAFE SPACES FOR EMOTIONAL RELEASE!!!

Did you get that?

All wise cultures provide spaces for collective out pouring of emotions, simply because this makes for a healthy culture.

It is hard to ‘go it alone’ and it is potentially dangerous to simply ignore the pain that we hold deep inside from past experiences. Our deep pain does not go away by itself; instead it eats away at our vital energy and prevents us from living fully ( it de-activates us….).

Sacred Space offers us the opportunity to express and release unprocessed emotional material in a safely held supportive space where this energy can be transformed.

Through releasing the stuck emotions we hold within we quite literally let go of the past, this in itself liberates so much energy., it awakens our Shakti .

Through emptying out we get a fresh start!

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3.We create a personal relationship to the divine

I have found that for many women a personal relationship with the divine is most easily accessed through a intentional connection to the mother of everything( aka MA or the goddess or mother nature) rather than an impersonal god who judges us.

Why is it important to have a personal connection to the divine?

It comes down to the power of attention, when we direct our attention to that which is so much greater than our logical minds we become open to receive guidance and inspiration from that which is so much bigger and greater than our small selves.

Through activating our relationship to the Divine we become receptive and available to experience this life as sacred, to experience ourselves as sacred and our bodies as sacred temples.

Rather than worshiping an image of god that feels foreign to us, we can find a way of relating to the divine that is personal, real and meaningful and rich to us. Our relationship can be devotional , sexy, whatever opens us, whatever sings to us, whatever brings us back into deeper connection,

Womens workshops give you the time and space to explore this for yourself . To create inner foundations that sustain you in your everyday life and nourish all your relationships.

A personal connection to the sacred offers us  physical remembrance of deep support and belonging. It allows us to let go and flow and receive. An experience that every woman truly yearns for, whether she realizes it or not.

You are not here to ‘cope’ you are here to live fully; you are here to shine your light and experience profound love and a life infused with deep meaning.

This involves connecting to your Shakti, your feminine power.

 20-2If you have not experienced a transformative womens workshop I really encourage you to come to one of my workshops or to one of the other teachers holding Sacred Feminine workshops with authenticity and integrity.

Find out about Upcoming workshops and retreats HERE

Find out more about the Wild Sacred Feminine workshop or retreats

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shakti

 

Learning SURRENDER-4 Ways to learn to LET GO of control and re learn your feminine ability to surrend

The more I work with women, the more I witness the frustration that women feel when they are unable to relax, let go and TRUST, in other words SURRENDER

Learning surrender

On some level we know that part of being placed here in a feminine body is to be open and receptive to love, to not harden ourselves against the world and live with suspicion and fear.

Unfortunately the reality is that most of us women were conditioned to fear rather than trust, hold on rather than let go, dim our light rather than happily, confidently unashamedly beam it out into the world.

We hold this conditioning in our bodies, as rigidity, stiffness. The fearful voice, both conscious and unconscious, whispering to us messages like ‘ you are not good enough’ and ‘what will people think’ which causes us to shut down and close off.

Often there is an underlying (and usually unexplored) belief that it is not a safe world, it is not safe to shine our light, be sexy and confident and claim the love, the fullness, the depth, the magic.

Or perhaps we are disillusioned by life, by the pain we have felt, the pain we have witnessed, the pain we can feel deep down inside and are afraid to visit because we fear it will be too over whelming if we ‘go there’.

How do we break free of this need to control everything and the total exhaustion that comes with that?

I truly believe that surrender is an ability we can cultivate.

We learnt the patterns of fear and control, we can also un- learn and re-learn the capacity to surrender.

Here are some pointers to help you on your path of learning surrender.

1.Make a choice

What do you really want?

To go through life shut down?

Sure it might feel ‘safer’ but it also sucks. When you are shut down, you are not open to love, either from yourself or anyone else.It comes to a point where you have to decide that you would rather face your fears, rather than go through life hard and closed.

Are you willing to let go and meet the fears you have around that? Are you willing to trust yourself, and trust life?

Making this conscious choice to ALLOW life to touch you deeply, this is the first step.

2. Clear the basement

We all have emotional baggage, we are not alone in that one, and yet if we keep that locked up, then we will never break through to the other side. It can be scary to be vulnerable, so you probably will need some loving help along the way.

Seek out the support that can hold you as you officially ‘go there’ and meet your fears of rejection, abandonment etc. For example tantra workshops, coaches, healers etc Be discerning of course, very discerning, and also be OPEN to attracting the exact people, practices and experiences that you need to heal enough to develop a deeper trust of life.

Unless you ‘go there’ you will be carrying around that baggage on some level, preventing you from realizing your potential as a woman.

3. Develop your base level of surrender-re train your body

This is where feminine practices come in…these practices take your awareness out of your mind and back into your Wild Sacred Femininebody, the only place where surrender can be re-learned.

These practices help you to feel the more subtle layers of your experience, so instead of feeling fear and getting shut down by it, you can begin to experience fear as a kind of energy, an energy you can work with.

Feminine practices help you to remember your natural feminine ability to relax deeply.

They help you to develop a base level of relaxation that you can always return to, what I call your ‘ base level of surrender’. The more you cultivate that state of deep relaxation the more you will be able to trust the magic that happens when you feel relaxed and open.

Feminine practices also help you to tap into the wisdom and power in your vagina, your ovaries and breasts, and be nourished by this energy. Rather than going through life in a state of ‘coping’ you can tap into the potential you have as a woman to be radiant, fully alive and connected to the energy and the wisdom both within you and all around you.

4. Take it one loving moment at a time

Surrender is going to look different for everyone, honor your unique expression of surrender.

A surrendered you is a happy, loving and open you. Every breath is an opportunity for another small surrender, so just take it breath by breath, and enjoy the ride, the contractions and the expansions. It is all a part of your journey into a deeper relationship to you, and to life. And this leads to a deeper relationship with everyone in your life, especially your intimate partners.

If you do not know yet how it is to surrender to a man in a way that feels nourishing and empowering, you have something to look forward to. This is another beautiful aspect of the journey which usually only comes in a healthy way after doing the preliminary work with yourself.

In conclusion I would like to talk about surrender FEELS like; it might not be that same for you but hopefully this serves to inspire…

Surrender feels like a deep acceptance of who you are and your limitations, it feels like a warm soft belly that can breathe long and full of all the good things that life and love has to offer.

It feels like overflowing love, open, innocent, delighted, ecstatic.

And deeply Ok

It creates the kind of relaxation that reflects a sense of TRUST, in ourselves, in life.

It also feels like ‘fuck it’ I do not have to try and be anything, I am good as I am, I am worthy, I am strong enough to soften fully into this experience in the moment, this moment that life has designed for me. I trust the perfection of this and know that I am wise enough to choose to be in environments that nourish me, therefore I have nothing to fear, I trust myself and I know when to say NO and I am able to say YES too. I am open and permeable and I feel SAFE, and I check in moment by moment to see where I am at, I notice when I have tensed up and I take a nice long deep breath, I remember that I am safe, loved, held, supported and i come back to surrender.

I hope these words have served to inspire your own journey to experiencing the beauty of surrender.

shaktiflows

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The Sacred Feminine… (I mean who the hell is she anyway?)

There is a lot of talk these days about the Sacred Feminine.

And it is my opinion this is a damn good thing, yes indeed, she does need to be brought to the table in our conversations, in our thoughts and actions, to dance floors and to bedrooms and community gatherings and, yes please!!! the halls of parliament….

But who, and what, exactly is she?

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Well, where to start? Most of us have been raised in a world that values logic and reason and results that can be measured, ideally in a laboratory by men in white coats…
Well guess what! The Sacred Feminine cannot be accessed through any of these means.

She is a mystery, a mystery that lives though our bodies, a mystery that cannot be measured, verified or validated. She is so obvious that we could forget to honour her; we could get so stuck in our heads that we forget to feel her in us, as us, dancing into existence through us.

She is the most natural thing in the world.
Indeed She is nature itself.

She speaks to us in our natural urges to nourish, to be nourished, to feel, to connect, to love, to be loved. She shows her face sometimes as a ferocious love that will do anything required to protect what is most important to us, or as a wildness that lives to express itself through our feelings, yearnings, movements and emotions.

And sometimes she is felt as a knowing that defies logic but is undeniable, a knowing that churns in our bellies and rumbles in our wombs and informs us when we are doing something that is just oh so wrong for us; or a glow that shines from within when we are walking the path of our deepest truth.

Yet none of this can be put under a microscope, or bottled, or sold or scientifically validated or categorized…..

But does that mean that SHE does not exist?

What many women are finding, in the playgrounds of their own bodies, in the deep intimacy of solo and shared lovemaking, in the wildness and intensity of their authentic emotional experience and in the increasingly popular Sacred Feminine circles where women come together to explore, embody and celebrate the Sacred Feminine within them…

What they are finding is that the Sacred Feminine is very much alive and well, in fact it kind of feels like she is waking up, stirring from a deep slumber, stretching her limbs, shaking us up and beckoning us to hurry up and get out of our heads and listen!

She is asking us to hurry up and do less and feel more and trust ourselves and trust her.

And so despite the completely illogical lunacy of it all (luna-moon-take note) getting a sense of the Sacred Feminine is surprisingly simple.

Our quest to know HER is all about listening.

To find her we need only to sink deeply into the wisdom of our own bodies, we get to know her intimately when we allow and embody our natural feminine qualities of receptivity, authenticity and compassion.

Quite simply our ability to know what the hell the sacred feminine is rests purely in our ability to feel her and become a vessel for her expression.

And this comes with a warning label; for when you let her in, nothing will ever be the same again….

Amongst other mysterious phenomena, life will never again be boring, sex will never be 2 dimensional, emotions will flow majestically and you will forget to apologize for who you are…. your emotional energy will be become a strong power that activates and clarifies, you will not dance in a conventionally sanctioned manner; it will be wild it will be delicious and the dance will come from deep within, people will notice that you have ‘something about you’. In your daily life you will know what to do from somewhere very much other than your head, you will feel unexplainably intimate with life, you will be filled with a love and wonder that rips you apart at the seams, and you will have signed up, better or for worse, for the adventure of your life….

And what do we do to receive this bounty? The following are points of guidance, they are signposts pointing the way to the living breathing undulating experience of the Sacred Feminine, to knowing her, feeling her, loving her, being her…. When you follow these guidelines all confusion drops away, she becomes closer and more real to you than anything else.

Feel free to interpret them as you wish, explore them in the living laboratory of your everyday life, add to them as you feel, and live them as you dare……

Be open and available to what you feel in your body right now.

Explore yourself, relentlessly and enthusiastically,

Allow the energy of life to flow through you in unexpected ways,

Receive love and let it touch every single part of you, deeply,

Give love, let it spill out uncensored and feed everything, including you, 

Be yourself, even when you would rather present a more ‘pleasing’ picture,

Shine that incredible light that comes from very deep within, even when it feels hard to own,

Own your shadows too; those icky bits of you of which you are deeply ashamed; (bring them to the table too….)

Honour and express your needs, keep on determining what they are,

Connect to your wild nature,

Follow your heart out of the comfort zone and beyond,

Make the most of your capacity for pleasure, own it, explore it, grow it and honour it as a gift from HER,

Inquire into what leaks your energy, and find another way,

Nurture yourself and the life around you, meeting both as sacred and precious,

Embody tenderness,

Trust the intelligence of the body, and as the beautiful American poetess Mary Oliver suggests in her exquisite poem”Allow the soft animal of your body to love what it loves…,”

Be both patient and persistent,

Allow life to teach you in both painful and pleasurable ways,

Invoke your authentic voice and give your greatest gifts, whatever that might look like for you,

Remain connected to both your inner world and present to the external reality,

Manifest beauty and harmony,

Invite in ease and flow,

Dance and sing your heart out, often

Honour divinity as a felt experience, unfolding moment by moment and steer clear of concepts about what spirituality ‘should’ look like,

Find the courage to be your totally imperfect self without shame,

Call up the devotion to ‘stay with it’ and keep opening,

Have the willingness to explore the rich terrain of the body and to surf the waves of the emotional tides,
Say yes to feeling lost and yes to the invitation to come back home.

The Sacred Feminine is there for you, in you, here are the questions she is asking you;

Are you accepting the invitation to feel?
Are you saying ‘fuck it’ and diving in anyway?
Are you getting drenched in the beauty of your being?
Are you doing what you want to do or what you think you should do?
Is your life a divine dance with the beloved?

With this recent surge in Sacred Feminine hype comes the potential for a vast array of bullshit, projections and misconceptions.
If you have developed a concept about what the Sacred Feminine is that makes you feel like you are somehow separate from ‘it’. If you think that you need to do something, or be something, to experience or earn ‘it’.
Then please throw that out and go back to square one.

Square one is-How do you feel, in your body, right now?

This is radical, this is beautiful, this is surprisingly challenging…yet it gets easier and yummier the more we give it a go.

We need to give it a go. Life on earth depends on it, and it would be a bleak place to be without the juiciness of the feminine. As woman ( and men!) we have a job to do, a joyful job, a labour of love, a path to dance on, a mystery to embody and unravel.

Act now and heed HER whispers,

One moment of felt truth at a time….

shakti

 

7 ways to help your feminine body to blossom

This is an article for every woman who yearns to live as her most radiant and deeply connected self.


As a teacher of Wild Sacred Feminine Arts and the proud resident of a womans body that yearns deeply for physical, tangible, embodied fulfilment… life has taken me on a little tour of the kinds of practices which facilitate the process of a woman’s body to blossom.

And before I hand you some little parcels of wisdom from my journey I would like to mention that as women we truly are like flowers, and we are designed to bloom as such, not just for a limited time, but in ever changing manifestations of our essential essence….Yes we grow and change constantly. But like the flowers that we are, if our roots are well tended and the conditions are good, then we will be all set for maximum bloom. I have found the following practices to be invaluable in nurturing the conditions that nurture our unique and radical blossoming as women.

1.Goddess temple time

Every juicy woman I know is dedicated to her goddess temple time and the self-honouring practices that she dives into at this time !!!

Feminine practices are practices which work with our feminine energy( our ‘Shakti’), activating it, building it, honouring it and channeling it.

Goddess Temple time is the time we create sacred space dedicated to US, to doing whatever we need to do to meet our own needs.

It is the time when we give our rich inner world the attention that it needs and allow the flow of energy within us to run free, replenishing us and cleansing us and preparing us to meet the world from a place of fullness.

2. Invite in your sexual self

One major difference between a standard yoga practice and this kind of juicy goddess temple time is that within Goddess Temple Space our sexuality and our emotional energy are welcomed and celebrated and explored and channelled .

To be a blossoming flower we need to spend some time in the mud; we need a time of the day where we can totally dive into and express our ‘negative’ emotions and allow space for the expression and healing of our sexuality. This time serves as rich fertilizer for the soil from which we can expand and blossom.

3. Full body prayer

Women’s bodies are incredible vehicles for prayer

-In other words, the feminine body has the potential to be a portal for radiance and aliveness that goes way beyond our personal selves.

When our body remembers that it is a part of the universe, connected to all the elements of the earth and the great love that pulses through all, then we blossom, pure and simple. It is not something we can understand.

This kind of prayer is not about making requests to a higher power it is about embodying the goddess within us.

It is about letting the breath take us out of our mind and into the deeper layers of our awareness.

Whatever ‘practice’ that you do, the big game changer comes when you let it take you out of your worries and fears and into your greatness. And then the radiance reflected in your body will reflect the expansive state you have opened yourself to.

3. Back bends

I do not mean back bends that you push yourself into; I am talking about the kinds of movements in which your whole body opens up to the sky, whilst staying strongly connected to the ground. When we physically open the space of our heart then something in us remembers to open wider, our breath deepens and we begin to feel hope and joy and desire to LOVE and be loved in our fullness, we connect to our open heart super power.

Heart opening movements accompanied by deep flowing breath as well as other techniques like the Taoist technique ‘The inner smile’, have the power to effect out physiology and, in turn, change our mood completely.

4.Breast massage

Our soft feminine bodies, what a wonder they are, so full of life and yummy tenderness, this is very much personified in our breasts. I highly recommend to give your breasts some touch every single day, whether you just place our hands there and rotate, or your take some time listening to the kind of touch your breasts are asking for…

The more activated your breasts are, the more your body will blossom, there are good hormonal reasons for this, but why not do some breast rotations now and notice how you feel afterwards.

5.Grounding


The earth is the ultimate source of yummy nourishing feminine energy.

If you go a day without contact with her, your blossom will be less blossom-y for sure…you are a flower, make sure you touch the earth everyday and bathe in her waters as regularly as you can. Consciously ‘fill up’ from HER incredible spring of aliveness, the Tao Tantric Arts are full of practices that allow us to connect to and refill form the natural elements. As someone who has the pleasure to share these practices I find that most women find them feel deeply wonderful and so natural.

6.Jade egg Practices


Your vagina is connected to your brain, it is also connected to your over-all sense of well-being

Whether you are sexually active with a partner or not, the jade egg helps you to awaken the different areas inside of your vagina this awakening dormant energy and charging up your essential energy in the process.

You can insert your jade egg during your goddess temple time to uplevel the whole process and bring more awareness into your sexual organs, as you will see, this brings more energy into everything that you do.

7.Honouring touch

Just like a flower, the feminine body is also here to be adored and what better way to do this than though soft caresses! Touch yourself with honour and invite others to do so also, this does not have to be sexual.

Touch can be a kind of prayer, a deep appreciation.

The body responds to loving touch by softening and opening and in turn our radiance shines forth from this deeply surrendered state.

So..dear beautiful flower you..i hope that you hope this article has helped you to become more excited about the incredible potential of your feminine body and empowered you to explore this yourself.

There is so much beauty to experience both within our pain and our joy and to become a open channel for life force is not only a service to ourselves but also to the world…

So BE the flower that you are , and be DEDICATED to creating the conditions to nurture this, to nurture YOU and the blossoming of your OWN UNIQUE FRAGRANCE.

The world needs YOU to be your most shiny self loving self !!!!​

shakti

 

How to move out of your comfort Zone….the feminine way..

We were not designed to settle with a life that is ‘just ok’, we are here to experience our own version of YES!

If we are really honest with ourselves we can see that we are at our happiest when we are stretching beyond who we thought we were and into a larger, more expansive, creative, confident and juicy version of ourselves..

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But does that mean we need to drag ourselves, kicking and screaming in the direction of growth?? Does that mean we should be bullying ourselves out of our comfort zone and beyond?

Or is there another way to do it? a kinder way to do it?

I feel quite privileged to be a professional hand holder ( aka a coach) for women who want to step out of the comfort zone (which they have begun to notice is actually quite uncomfortable indeed.) And I have found that NO we do NOT need to bully ourselves out of our comfort zones, but that often the best approach to making profound shifts and life changes is to get out of our comfort zone in what I call ‘ the feminine way’.

What do I mean by feminine? i mean the more YIN way…

‘Feminine’ as in flowing, receptive, not pushing, not striving, not should-ing…

It is a way of engaging with our fears with sensitivity.

It is a way to move out of our comfort zones whilst feeling safe, connected and grounded.

(Basically, It is a way to grow and expand that honors the little one inside of us who is totally shit- scared.)

A small note about the masculine approach (which often fails to address the little ones needs)

First of all..there is nothing ‘wrong’ with a a more masculine ‘yang’ approach. With this approach you PUSH your way out of your comfort zone, at certain times this may be the ‘kick up the arse’ you need. But…

If you bulldoze your way through your fear, you may well have to, at some point, backtrack and deal with the fallout (which sometimes shows up as actual trauma) that often comes as a result of not listening to those tender parts of us that need patience and love.

Here is my approach to getting out of the comfort zone WITH patience and love.

1. Get to know the scared little person

I notice that every time I am about to move out of my comfort zone, I freak out. I am sure I am not the only one..we all have our own version of the little scared person who lives inside of us.

I encourage you NOT to try and push ‘her’ out of the way. Instead, take the time to get to know her, intimately.

These are the kinds of questions you can ask your scared little self to get transformative insights.

  • What are you really afraid of?
  • What do you need right now?
  • What do you need to feel safe?

2. Make a deal with your little friend

Once you have made friends with the little scared one inside of you, you can begin to explore how you can best work together and make the journey out of the comfort zone ‘ok’ for every part of you.

Once you have formed this dialogue you will begin to see what her fears are, and most importantly, what her needs are, and you can make a deal…for example..

Maybe your little one will feel safe about letting go of your full time job if you let her know that you will line up some other kind of income first.

Perhaps she will feel ok about moving into relationship if you make the deal with her to keep connecting in with yourself, so as not to lose your self in the relationship.

Do you get the picture?

Parameters, boundaries and action plans all help the little one to feel safe..as do kind words of reassurance and a compassionate approach.

3. Giant leaps and baby steps.

Life will always move through periods of expansion and contraction. It is so natural whilst in a period of expansion out of your comfortable old shapes and patterns , for there to be a period of ‘OH FUCK!!!’ (ie:the freak out).

And you might as well accept that and work with that.

Sometimes its time for a great leap, sometimes it is more kind to take a baby step, sometimes you need to curl up and whimper for a while…and that should be totally allowed as long as you notice when it is the time to get up, brush yourself off and walk on, perhaps in baby steps..

4. Don’t try and do it all alone

I am someone who feels compelled to constantly move out of my comfort zone, just cause I know that that ultimately serves me. But I don’t try and do that without support. I KNOW that need hand holders and midwives to assist my great leaps, and baby steps out of the comfort zone.

Women need support, from other women

and if we don’t get it, we suffer, it truly is as simple as that. Don’t try and expand without support systems firmly in place, find your sisters, your midwives, your priestesses, without support you will become hardened.

Get Good at asking for help!!

(You want to stay soft and receptive as you grow, this only comes when you feel supported by your sisterhood)

Do this for your self, do this for your sisters, and if you do not have someone who you can cry on along the way, get one!

So… if you have been one of those women who bully themselves for not bring ‘good enough’ or tough enough or whatever enough then I am happy to say

YES !! You can work on your self with LOVE!!!!

Yes you CAN let go of the ‘should’.

You can be a brave warrioress, an empowered woman doing her thing in the world AND a crumbling wreck at moments. It really is ALL ok!!!!

I find that for most women, we thrive in a tender and yet uncompromising environment. And that when change evolves in fluid, responsive way, in alignment with our deep needs as women to feel safe, nurtured and connected to our natural feminine flow, then the transformation we experience is deep and long lasting.

And I will leave you with this reminder..

..the real reason we leave our comfort zones, is to enjoy a life which is more expansive and fulfilling…so remember to be EXCITED about the space beyond your comfort zone, and know every little baby step is a bold and wonderful movement to embodying your greatest truth.

shakti

 

The shame game and how to stop play playing

Recently I have become super fascinated with SHAME!


And I want to speak about it, in fact I feel I MUST speak about it, for my healing, for the healing of all woman.

Why? Cause it needs to be spoken about. When we don’t speak about what we feel ashamed about then we keep the shame well and truly alive.

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And why am I excited about blogging about shame?

It is because I want women to be free, and I can see with absolute clarity that shame is a weapon that our small self, in cahoots with the negative forces in this world, use to keep us down.  In other words…that part of us that self sabotages our growth and freedom and happiness, and which is mirrored in the world we create around us, keeps our ‘stuff’ locked in, and inaccessible, by covering them with shame.

But there is a way out of the game of believing our shame…

When we feel ashamed we feel small and worthless, and it is incredibly debilitating. When we feel shame about our bodies, and who we are, then shame holds a strong power over us, sucking our life force into its shadowy grip.

Shame robs us of our feeling of self worth. There are many kinds of shame, some we inherit, some we create over and over again through our inner self critic’s unkind dialogue. And sometimes shame is subtle and sneaky.. there are so many ways that we can come under the power of shame and consciously or unconsciously play the shame game.

I feel that we need to speak about shame, so that we can disempower what we feel ashamed about and empower ourselves in the process.

Have you had something that you felt really really awful about and you kept it to yourself and then when you finally did speak about it, sure you felt exposed for a bit, and it hurt, but then after that died down, you felt totally liberated?

Yep that is how it seems to work.

What we own and meet with love is drained of shame

Here are a few more pointers to how to stop playing the ‘ shame game’.

Be there for yourself uncompromisingly.

Shame is all about telling ourselves that who we are/what we have done/ what we feel, is unlovable, unacceptable and wrong.

Yet when we dedicate ourselves to the knowing that every single part of ourselves is inherently OK, judgment transforms into compassion.

As the midwives of transformation that we are as conscious evolving women, loving self acceptance is pretty much the most potent alchemical tool we can use. Unconditional love melts shame, it might take time, but it will, and we can cultivate this for ourselves. But it helps to ‘get to know’ our shame first.

Notice when you are ashamed

When your voice goes all funny, when your shoulders droop, when you have trouble keeping the gaze of another. These are all good telltale signs that the shadow of shame is present.

Feel it in your body

When we feel a feeling that we absolutely do not want to feel (it could be numbness in your sexual organs, it could be your desire, it could be your longings and achings and fear of exposure….) whatever it is, if we turn away from it, shame has done its job of leading us away from meeting and loving a part of ourselves…

So here is a trick, instead of turning away, explore it, become fascinated. How exactly does it feel? Is there a story line it is attached to? Hold a loving space for yourself to feel the shame and feel beyond the shame,

Be there for yourself, without compromise, invite the shameful feelings in for tea, feed it sweetness, unbridled compassion, take it into your embrace as the lost outlawed shunted traveller that it is. Give it a home in your heart.

 What is the shame telling you?

 Once shame is accepted you can investigate what the shame is telling you…is it an indicator that you are doing something out of integrity OR, as is often the case, it is showing you where you do not accept yourself the way that you are..

Share it in a space of love

Sometimes it is too hard to ‘go there’ and feel and investigate the shame so we can call in back up. My backups are nearly always sisters on the path who have a capacity to hold me and love me as I am.  If you do not have one of these yet then call them in or hire one (she/he could be a healer/teacher/ psychologist/friendly maternal toilet cleaner). (Or join the Nakedly Unashamed community of women now!)

One amazing sister who I have had the privilege of spilling my heart and guts to on occasion, shared with me the following story.

At a moment when she had received a hurtful careless comment, she had gone to the mirror and looked at herself and watched herself cry.  She opened her heart to herself as she did it, she did not shame that broken piece of herself, that hurt aching part; she met it and she loved it,  she asked what it needed.  It needed love!  She gave that love through her simple willingness to see it and meet it with compassion.

Learn from this amazing woman, we are all teachers and healers to each other on this crazy path of life.  We have an awesome capacity to love, we need to direct this at ourselves.

In the words of the Buddha; (I have paraphrased but you get the gist….).

‘You will not find anyone in the whole universe more worthy of love than yourself’

Did you get that? In other words…

Our hearts are big enough for every single damn bit of us, and we can extend the space to hold the wounded parts of our sisters too

This is the revolution we are living.

When chunks of shame become lightened and freed through our clear seeing and radical love, we become more whole, more alive, more real.

There is more space, more depth, more love.

And isn’t that what we hunger for?

Mine the depth of your being and you will find yourself free of the shame game and shining in the light of your own hard won truth.

Join your sisters in the Nakedly Unashamed Shame- Free challenge beginning on Jan 4, its FREE, it will be a container for you to explore shame and how to live shame free! Join here

Or if you need some one one one support then i would love to help you…

 

IMG_0039My deepest wish is for all women to live without guilt, fear and shame.

Contact me now for a free 20 min Skype consultation if you are interested in one of my coaching programs
 
 
 
shakti

 

The gift of vulnerability……..Do you reveal your true face?

Feeling and revealing our vulnerability, and being TRULY SEEN…we are so scared of it yet we want it so much as well..


What is going on with that? In this article i explore this curious conundrum experienced by so many women and i give some simple tips on how to be seen and met in your true essence.

vulnerable me

I have certainly been one of those women who have ‘held it all together’ and put on a brave face to hide deep feelings within myself.

Yet the more I have journeyed deep into my feminine power, the more I have found the courage to NOT hold it all together and to reveal my tender parts, my vulnerable self, to the world.

And yes! What a relief! I have discovered that I love admitting that I am not perfect! It is soooo liberating!!!

 

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I love it when I let go of pretending to be strong, wise, attractive or just plain ‘enough’.

I love putting all my cards out on the table. I love it when habitual masks I have used to hide behind CRACK, and tender vulnerable realness seeps out.

Masks are tiring…

The effort it takes to put on a brave face and intricately design a front to put on that looks acceptable and appealing is friggin exhausting! Masks are a form of armour, and the thing about armour is that you have to carry it around with you, you need to uphold it and worst of all, it puts a barrier between the true you and others, and the true you, and your own intimate experience.

So why do we bother?

First of all I would point out that most of us are often not even aware that we are putting on a front, our armour has become such a part of our lives and the way that we interact with the world, that we forget that it does not serve us, and is entirely optional…

Please note- armour is indeed optional..

I would suggest that the reason why we consciously and unconsciously choose to guard our true face has probably got something to do with a deep fear or being rejected.

And why do we equate rejection with ‘the end of the world’?

I imagine it is because the experience of being ‘rejected’ by another person rubs up against where we are rejecting ourselves on a deep fundamental level.

We show our best face to the world so at least others will believe we are worthy….so that we can believe that ourselves.

I know, because I have studied this mechanism in myself.

And I observe that this wound of not feeling ‘enough’ is huge in women. It might show up in different disguises, and yet, if we peel back the layers and different disguises then whoop! There it is!

A sad vulnerable girl who is scared that she is not enough and that if she reveals her true vulnerable self she will be rejected and exposed as not enough…

Bless us! ~Bless HER!

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The thing is that hiding your vulnerability just keeps that hurt and misguided little girl from the light of day. But if we accept her enough to let her be seen… then deep healing usually occurs.

A suggestion…

Instead of hiding her, what about taking her out for a dance? What about putting her right there on the table with the rest of your cards? Your masks, fears and pretences, what if you just said ‘fuck it’ I hurt, this is how much I hurt, this is my truth right now, and do what you like with it, I am still going to stand by myself whatever your reactions and perceptions are….

The truth will indeed set you free…

The truth is that we are, you are, full of deep hurt from deep woundings and the fears that these old wounds trigger. The truth is that you are also just so much deeper and wider than your wounds and your negative self-beliefs.

And If you deny them you deny your true essence and the opportunity to go beyond your past and be completely alive and naked and real and exposed to life in its fullness.

Somewhere within the true expression of your vulnerability is a precious spark of aliveness, whereas masks and armour are static, vulnerability is a living thing, it moves and evolves and transforms. True vulnerability is healing in action, it is life energy seeking recognition, once given and received with unconditional love, it dissolves into something else….back to pure life force.

Your vulnerable self is desperately asking for you to be present with her  so you can be free to be completely, unashamedly…YOU!.

She is asking you to accept every single part of you.

So that you may drop the masks and be truly available to the mystery of life unfolding within you, no holds barred….

Yet because so many of us have been raised to hide our true feelings, it can feel a bit intense and on some level actually dangerous to reveal our vulnerable self to the world….therefore to reclaim your true vulnerability you need to find a way to feel open and yet incredible strong and safe and contained, at the same time.

How to do that? Here is what works for me;

1.Get grounded.

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Yep, this is key, cultivate your relationship to the ground, feel your feet on the earth. Allow your body to feel supported by the earth and your vulnerability will feel like it stands on firm ground.

2.Be discerning.

Your vulnerability is precious; reveal it to people who are able to receive that as a gift. Seek out safe containers (workshops, rituals, loving relationships) that can hold you and support you as you explore what it is like to let your true face be seen.

-Do not throw pearls before swine…

3.Give it space and time

At the end of the day, all your vulnerability and the wounds beneath it, want, is the space and time to actually feel what it feels. Resist the tendency to distract, brush over, and/or put your attention on others rather than your self.

4.Receive with respect and gratitude10276437_10152265629454830_1003072028_n

The ability to feel is a blessing, it shows you are truly alive rather than guarded and numb, so even if it feels sticky and yukky, be grateful for the opportunity to engage with your emotional landscape.

5,Compassion.

Compassion, compassion, compassion, it is KEY. Have compassion for humanity, as it is expressed in you and others. Welcome and rejoice displays of true vulnerability, open your heart to receive and accept, without any need to hide or ‘fix’.

And remember…

Noone is really judging you but your self….

If someone else is judging you, then that is really his or her problem not yours…

Every single time I have witnessed a woman as she has let go and allowed her mask to crumple, and her tears to flow, I have been shocked by the level of beauty she has embodied in that softness.

Women are beautiful when they are vulnerable because they become truly alive, soft and real.

DSC02941Anyone who would still prefer you as a masked Barbie doll you are better off without in your life. You deserve people in your life who say YES to every part of the vast and wondrous living terrain which is you.

And if all this feels like a bit much and you do not know how or where to start…I really encourage you to seek out workshops where you can ‘practice being seen’ in a really safe and supportive space. Most Tantra workshops and women’s circles ( if held in a space of authenticity and integrity) are ideal, check out my own workshops and retreats or work with me one on one.

And in the meantime, practice by being real with yourself, you can begin by making this pledge to your self.

I……herby declare that I am dedicated to living life naked and real, rather than perfect and armoured. I am MORE than enough just as i am!

floating surrender shakti

 

Do you need some extra support as you explore who you really are? Let me be the one who holds the space for you to dive deep and find a nourishing and empowering way to live. My Womens Coaching programs offer you the time and space for deep transformation.

Contact me to sign up for a FREE 20 minute Skype call now.

 
shakti

 

Survival guide for the present time……….Tips on how to keep your sights on the bigger picture when life is poking you in your tender bits..

Is it just me, or has it been super intense of late…


Actually I know it is not just me…I witness in the many people that I encounter, that this is a time of challenge for many, whether you are feeling it physically, emotionally, financially or mentally…you are probably feeling it.

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Feels to me like spirit is asking us all to pull our socks up and live to a higher level of integrity. The patterns we have been playing out in the past do not have a place in the future that we are collectively creating. In the process of becoming collectively more conscious these patterns are being illuminated for us to see clearly, to heal the issues under these patterns. And create a new story. 

It can feel all a bit scary…for me anyway..but some part of me knows that good things are being birthed, we are not being punished; we are being refined, we are being upgraded, we CAN pull our socks up, it is time…

And in the process of this upgrade I feel anyone who has any degree of awareness and sensitivity is experiencing some pretty dramatic phenomena playing out… Our own perfectly designed dramas eliciting the releases and realisations that are needed to facilitate this shift.

Oh how tempting it would be to ignore rather than explore the nature of our experience as we are being challenged…(anaesthetics in many forms being the preferred survival tactic for many…)

Yet a fully engaged relationship with our experience is likely to be the only way out of the particular patterns that we play out…

If there was ever a time when we need to learn healthy and loving ways to meet ourselves and our experience it is now…IMG_1337

The parts of us which are being poked…. are the parts of us looking for our attention, the circumstances which arrive and the emotions which are erupting are unlocking aspects of ourselves that previously lay beyond our conscious awareness.

You are a vast being, you have aspects of yourself in which you are very developed, exceptional and wise. And you probably also have parts of you that are deeply entrenched in a sense of fear and separation. Your deep unresolved issues keep you playing out stories from the past, rather than living in the way that you truly want to be living. It is a time when all this can come to the surface to be seen and accepted.

The wise parts as well as the confused and scared and stuck parts….You are all of it , and none of it, accept it all as it appears. Then from a place free of shame you can be in a position to survey the bigger picture.

SHE does not mistakes

Whatever shape your challenges have come in, no matter the mental stories that they create, know that ALL of it has a part to play …whatever higher power you resonate with, understand that it does not make mistakes, this whole drama is not random…your pain is not for nothing…( I promise!)

The next step after acceptance of the different aspects of you is to extend the field of your acceptance into every aspect of your story and understand that truly ALL this is a part of the plan…there is a bigger picture, we are all walking ourselves out of a intricate and magnificent maze of illusion.

Through engaging consciously with the process that life has designed for US (in the form of the challenges that life is bringing to our attention) sooner or later we walk out of the maze into a new realm. In the process we become an instrument of the divine, birthing new ways of being, new levels of seeing.

 Staying on track

 As I navigate my life, as a deep diver, brave enough to explore my reality (and if you are reading this you probably are either doing this or you are ready to). I for one am looking for ways to ‘stay on track’ when my mind takes control and I fall into overwhelm.

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I notice that when I am ‘ in the thick of it’ and feel like curling up and escaping from it all…that I am looking for an escape from the intensity from my feelings, and I am also looking for a way to escape evolving. Curling up and whimpering is totally fine for a while(in fact I recommend it especially if you can curl up somewhere out in the nature) but ultimately I find my way through by remembering the bigger truth. That I am an expression of spirit, in human form, this pickle that I find myself in, in terms of being a vulnerable human running around in particular circles, is superimposed upon a bigger truth.

 The truth that I am free already… completely superbly whole… ultimately I know exactly what I am doing, nothing is wrong, and despite this fear/ anger/ misery/ apathy and frustration.. I am in fact a superconductor for the divine, I am balanced between heaven and earth, I am connected to everything, and I am an instrument for healing as I traverse this path of self healing.

 What else to do in the midst of what can feel like a complete mess but try and find that thread that connects us out of the head fuck and into an experience of the bigger truth?

just trust

The way that my body and mind can truly comprehend the bigger reality is through embodying it; through experiencing myself as energy and intelligence; so much more vast than the limited mind and its fixations.This not a mind trip, it is a reality; I AM actually made up of energy. And when I get out of my head and into an awareness of this then my story does not feel so hopeless, it is seen to be what it is..a story…a story created with a purpose, to bring healing and awareness.

Constant reminders to self…

 How I would love to offer you, and myself, the magic potion to make all our pains go away. Instead I offer you what I offer myself… constant reminders to self!

That you are ok as as you, you haven’t irreversibly fucked up, you are not really stuck in a ditch never to find the way out of the maze… you are plodding along in the direction of exactly where you need to go and you deserve oodles of compassion and self care along the way.

Hand on belly and heart

These reminders are best accompanied by a physical gesture. Go on and do it now!

Sonja Shradha Devi

Place one hand on your belly and one hand on your heart. Once you have fully ‘arrived’ in your body whisper to yourself the higher wisdom you need to remember right now.

Sweetly coax yourself back into a space of loving compassion for where you are and what is going on. From that loving place open yourself to receive the higher truth that life is asking you to come back to right now. Or just breathe…that’s enough too…

 

A channel between heaven and earth

 In lieu of that magic balm, I leave you with one more practice that helps me stay on track…

 No matter how tender I am, I make a point of finding a bit of nature and do Chi Gung. Chi Gung is so simple that you can have a go even if you are feeling phenomenally resistant and is therefore perfect for when you feel disconnected and heady. Through Chi Gung present moment awareness and inner integrity become places of focus for the wayward mind and simple gestures of connection offer reference points for the physical body to align with.

Heaven and earth alignment is a simple practice to bring us back into alignment, back into ‘super conductor mode’ rather than’ crumpled and lost mode’. Here is how you do it;

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Go out into the nature, bend your knees a little and tuck your pelvis in so you feel grounded. Spread your hands above your head as If you are embracing the sky, connect to the quality of the sky, spacious and infinite, open up the crown of your head to be filled with this open sky quality. Then bring your hands together and imagine you are bringing the vastness of the sky down through your body, bring you hands all the way down to the earth and connect to the quality of the earth, solid and supportive and nourishing…let your mind connect to the vibration of mother earth, and once you feel this connection imagine that you are drawing this energy up with your hands up into your lower belly. Then rest there, feeling your body in perfect alignment between earth and sky.

To feel aligned with the part of you who is infinitely wise is to connect to the quality of the sky (the heavens). To feel in touch with the earth is to connect with that part of you who feels supported by life and is ready to face the challenges that come with gifts of growth…

It is so important for us to have a cosmic bat belt full of practices that show us back to a view of the bigger picture, enough so that we can breathe a bit and allow the next step to evolve out of a healthy space.

May you keep on reminding yourself of the higher truth whenever you ‘forget’. May you honour your unique path and may your journey be gentle and kind and supported, with an eye on the bigger truth as you. Life is asking you to pay attention.Stay with it!

 ….Go back and take care of yourself. Your body needs you, your feelings need you, your perceptions need you. Your suffering needs you to acknowledge it. Go home and be there for all these things…

– Thich Nhat Hanh

Sonja Shradha DeviDo you need some extra support ?

I would love to hold space for you to get a better view of the bigger picture and to access the gifts wrapped up in your challenges..I offer individual Skype sessions and coaching programs-feel free to contact me now about either.

 
shakti

 

Sisterhood (and bitchiness)

Everywhere I go I am blessed, loved and supported by incredible women.


I realise that I have created the most valuable resource for myself,

I have tapped into the awe-inspiring wellspring of support and love that is THE SISTERHOOD, and I benefit each and every day from this.

sister love saves
Sometimes sister support comes in the form of a big hug, a supportive smile across the room a place to sleep, a lend of something I really need, a healing, a pep talk or a kick up the arse……

What I am finding is that I have a global tribe of women to support me and to midwife me through the dips and dives of of my life. Just when I need some support then invariably BOOM another gracious sister emerges to ground me, bless me and remind me of the greater truth in the situation.

What did I do to receive this incredible bounty?

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I committed to sisterhood, pure and simple.

What I had to do….

I had to learn to ‘show up’ more fully in myself in order to receive this incredible gift. There were things I had to look at in myself; there have been many moments where I have had to make conscious choices. In a way claiming the sisterhood paradigm has been a process of committing to love.

So what did I have to look at?

I had to have a good look at the mechanism of bitchiness in me, I had to learn how and why I could begin to separate myself from the sisterhood and fall into the trap of the bitchiness mind set.

What I noticed…

I am only a bitch when I feel threatened or insecure.

I noticed that certain women would trigger my insecurities and they were usually quite similar to me ( a mirror in the form of a sister!).

In the event of being intimidated by another woman I noticed that i would try and convince myself that the woman in question was inferior to me in some way.

I noticed that if I was emotionally triggered by another woman that there was usually something to be learned from our glitchy connection; that we were ‘sent’ to each other to learn and grow in some way. (Once I ended up sharing a seat on a 40 hour train ride from south to north India with a woman who I had a challenging connection with! By the end of the journey we LOVED each other- true story).

I noticed that women were only bitchy to me when they felt threatened and insecure…

I noticed that the mask of superiority what I could put on would only come as a an effort for me to make myself feel better about myself.

I also noticed that I could choose NOT to be a bitch and embrace her as a sister instead (even if she was acting as a ‘mirror sister’ showing me things I did not want to see.)

I noticed all this and I decided to commit to sisterhood because it feels SO much better.

I choose every single day to recognize every woman that I meet as my sister

I want my sisters to be happy so I offer them my loving presence in any way I can. I want my sisters to recognise their own beauty so I recognise their beauty and let them know what I see. I take every opportunity I have to say ‘Woah sister! – You rock!’. I have learnt from the example of other amazing sisters committed to sisterhood and i offer whatever support I can to a sister, whether I have known her for 10 years or 2 minutes.

I am not faking any of it, I really mean it. My sisters are truly awesome.

And the more I celebrate my sisters the more I celebrate myself, and the more they celebrate me. It is a win-win

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At a Sacred Succulence Retreat with Rachel Love

What I did (and continually do) to commit to the sisterhood…

I recognized that my sisters and I all want the same thing, to be loved and appreciated.

I understood that we each have a different part of the pie and we do not have to fight for it.

If a sister is super amazing (even if it triggers my insecurities) I choose to TRUST that her amazingness is a gift to the world and no threat to me.

I choose to see us as a vast tribe working for the same big mama.

When I have fallen into the trap of judging and comparing I have asked forgiveness of the sister involved (usually just in my mind unless the right moment comes to share) for projecting my crap at her. (I use the process of ho’pono’pono constantly with this sort of thing- cant recommend it enough…)

Also…I forgave my sisters for collectively buying into this false notion of separation and competition. The fact is that we were trained into the separation paradigm that creates bitchiness…

Bitchiness is fabulous fuel for the patriarchy

 It keeps us in competition so it keep us alone, so it keeps us disempowered…to claim sisterhood is to change your reality and claim your birth right as a woman to feel loved and supported.

The sisterhood will heal you (and the rest of the world too).

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At a Tao Tantric Arts Retreat

In many traditional cultures it was understood that the women (when united!) were holding the fabric of the community together, they were bonding together, birthing together, dreaming together, praying together and working through their crap together. It was understood that to destroy the culture and health of a tribe you went and dismantled the women’s space first. Without the supportive web of the women, without the spiritual, emotional and energetic holding of the collective feminine it was easy to bring down the village.

I truly believe that what we are doing now is bringing healing to the world through reclaiming sisterhood.

The more we let down our defences, show our vulnerability and open up our hearts to each other, the more love is going to be pumping around this planet healing us all and creating the harmony that we all need.

It is every woman’s inherent birth right but it takes a commitment to rise above the conditioning that tells us that a sexy/successful/beautiful woman is our competition and not our support.

Yes- you have to surrender your judgements and question where they are coming from. And yes you might have to learn a completely new way of relating…

Instead of contracting when you see a woman who you are judging/being emotionally triggered by, you will have to be willing to look at her with the eyes of love, and see your sister, who hurts like you, and dreams like you, and yearns like you.

And in return for your efforts you receive the ultimate prize!

You will have a tribe of deeply loving women supporting you, loving you and blessing you, every step of the way.

What could be more valuable than that?

Truly, the only reason I am able to do what I do is due to the back up of my super strong sisterhood. Through our sisters we learn to love ourselves, from this place of wholeness we can be in relationship with the men in our lives in a healthy way.

To create a fulfilling experience of woman hood, the sisterhood comes first !

Do you have difficulty connecting to other women? If so perhaps you could benefit from working through these issues with a loving sister coach ( like me!).

I am available for one on one sessions and coaching programs Contact me now !

sister love saves

 
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What does it take to be a radiant woman?

To be radiant is to literally ‘radiate’ and to be a radiant woman is to be available to the full expression of our feeling life and to not hold back from the expression of our living truth. It is to be a conduit for ‘Shakti’ allowing this unbridled creative life force to truly touch us, open us and express itself through us.


My experience is that radiance is a lived experience, it is a visceral reality that is birthed and fed by a series of choices….

The choice to listen rather than distract, the choice to feel rather than numb out, the choice to trust rather than fear, the choice to explore and express rather than stay in familiar patterns,the choice to go beyond the known, the choice to feel our anger, sadness and despair, as well as our joy and beauty. The choice to take the time to feel into what feels true RIGHT NOW, the choice ‘do the work’ and explore and accept all our different fragments…. the choice to keep on responding to life rather than controlling it.

Our ultimate choice is to take our focus from the outside and feed it back in, to notice the texture of our emotions, the depths of subtle sensation, the wisdom of deep feeling. This inner focus awakens the power of ‘Shakti’

Shakti- She is the power of creation. She is feminine life force assessable to both men and women, and she is a particularly potent radiance booster for women…

She is pure energy without a story, she is fresh and wild and she loves to move and MOVE SHE WILL when we give her the time and space to be. She is the energy that births life in ever fresh forms and she is continually birthing US into ever fresh expressions.

She is the wisdom within us that knows how to let go of what keeps us small, she is showing us all the time… our only job is to listen and surrender our defences, moment by moment.

When Shakti is moving we are radiant and powerful, in the deepest truest most life affirming sense.

Remove the doubt and distraction and we shine naturally, when we become intimate with the flow of life force we tap into our inherent radiance and potency…

DSC02976My prayer is that all the sisters support each other to know this experience, to discern the living truth and shine our radiance without shame, do something radical now, check in with what you are really feeling and BREATHE into whatever you are feeling,and/ or support a sister to do the same.

I bow down to the Shakti in you!

 

Would you like to experience the practices that help me to fully embody Shakti and be a radiant woman????

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Then check out the Wild Sacred Feminine Meditation recordings

for Sacred Sensual and Deep Nourishment practices

for Living Radiance.

 
 
 
 
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Living Love- Reclaiming our Wild Sacred Knowing

Our wild sacred feminine knowing is our connection to the depths of who we are. To live in relationship with, and receive guidance from, our inner wisdom is to honour and serve the divine feminine principal at a time when its very resurgence has the potential to transform consciousness and bring the world into a state of harmony for the next generations to enjoy.

So how do we do this, how do we live in connection to love, being love, giving love, embodying love? and how do we reclaim our wild sacred knowing, our living connection to the Sacred Feminine? 


The mainstream view of modern society is that we need to do something, be something, get something to have a life of meaning. It has us believe that  we need to control life rather than be a channel for aliveness .We only validate knowledge from ‘what is scientifically proven’ and fight against our bodies, we have forgotten to listen  It is obvious that the world suffers in the face of such an imbalance.

The feminine wisdom that comes from our living experience offers us a completely different paradigm. The feminine  values and practices honour the qualities of receptivity and compassion, it values simplicity and  beauty and the sensual art of being.

When we befriend and learn from embodied wisdom we transform ourselves and our lives follow suit. We literally embody the Sacred Feminine, bringing healing and balance to the world.

The change that comes from within

Before the change can come in the external world, before we can end the struggle ‘out there’ in the world around us we have to end the fight with self.

And it all begins with the way that we relate to ourselves, it has everything to do with the way that we allow ourselves to be who we naturally are-or not.

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It usually requires a lot less effort and a lot more effortlessness, a lot less doing and trying and a lot more being and allowing.

When we initially contemplate such a shift in direction and perspective we might feel fear or disbelief, if I stop ‘trying’ to be good and ‘trying’ to do good, wont I just get lazy, what will I do, how will I contribute? It can feel scary to let go of the reigns of control, but we must do this in order to feel that ‘something deeper’ that wellspring of love flowing beyond the fear,

The most radical thing that we can do is learn to love ourselves because exactly what the world needs is more love, through learning to love ourselves we quite literally transform the world.

The good news is that this is simple, it may not be simple to rewire the ways that we have been doing things for as long as we can remember, yes that does take perseverance and tenacity(and yes this is the path of the warrioress), but the methods of cultivating self love  are simple and completely within our means to utilize and live.

More than that… it is a path of profound discovery, effortless unfolding and incredible joy.

Knowing who we are

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In order to know and feel our inherent worth we need to cultivate a relationship with ourselves and our bodies that is self-affirming and supportive. We have to know ourselves- really well. We need to know what makes us feel good, we need to know what does not make us feel good, we need to know how to ask for what we need and most of all we need to be able to give ourselves what we need.

Our spiritual path as woman is a process of feeling into our experience and learning to trust and be guided by our natural wisdom.

(Not by emotion-this is a very important distinction to make for a woman as although the emotional life needs to be fully met and experienced and accepted, and the energy within the emotions skilfully channelled, if we navigated life purely from our emotional perspective then we can easily fall into confusion and overwhelm.)

Yoga and Tantra and the Tao all offer us tools to explore ourselves and our relationship with the natural flow of things. But whatever our spiritual and life practice looks like what counts is our capacity to listen, to learn the language of our inner world and find out our unique way to navigate our internal terrain with skill and respect.

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And it is not a part time job, our Wild Sacred Wisdom is ever changing. It continually invites us to meet ourselves with fresh eyes, to fold our entire experience into our exploration and understanding of divinity. Our everyday life, listening and loving, becomes our spiritual practice. With the very way we move and breathe and live becoming a pure expression of ‘Shakti’ (feminine life force) flowing freely.

This quest requires dedication, curiosity, tenderness and devotion.

It requires gathering up everything that we are and everything we have experienced and everything in our present experience whatever that may be, in our tender embrace.

This is love in action, this is radical, sometimes it is incredibly painful to love our selves through our dark times, in our contracted shapes, our fear and our vulnerability. But we can no longer run and hide from life if we want to receive the fruits of our knowing. This is part of the deal. To BE HERE FULLY and not shut off, not shrink away from the intensity of who we are and what we experience.

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Guided by deep feeling

On this journey we have the power of reasoning that we can draw upon and something much deeper still, a wisdom that is in a dynamic relationship with life and which has a greater view of the picture than our reasoning mind ever has.

On the path of self-discovery

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Our power lies in our willingness to show up and enquire and to be there for ourselves whatever happens. The connection to our inner divine feminine is, in a very real way, the quality of the divine mother with her capacity to gather us up and love us up whatever we do. She shows us that when we fuck up we can learn from it and that when we begin to pay attention and listen deep it is amazing how much we begin to notice and learn.

We can learn to be guided by deep feeling……..

IMG_5985Deep feeling being our inner wisdom, a sense that is deeper than the emotional whirlwinds of experience, you could call it intuitive knowing, our gut feeling- call it whatever makes sense to you, personally I call it wild sacred feminine knowing. Whatever you call it, it cannot be understood or logically explained, no scientist is going to be able to prove it, it has to be experienced first hand. It has a life of its own, and in all indigenous cultures the women were shown how to connect to it, these days we have to find it ourselves, you could say, we have to reclaim it.

Fortunately it never went anywhere and many of us have accessed it very naturally. Because it is natural, simply the most natural thing ever, but if we are stuck in our heads, like most of us were trained to be, then we miss it.

And if we miss out…..

When we miss it, we miss out on our inner guidance, the compass that always shows the way and we will probably miss out on the capacity to accept and embrace all that we are. We might find ourselves living a life that does not truly satisfy and fulfil us, we may find ourselves walking around in shrunken versions of ourselves or in relationships that do not allow us to blossom, we will probably not be the living breathing glowing radiant self that we were born to be, unable to taste our feminine essence and express the juiciness of who we are.

And what a shame that would be.

The good news is ….

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The good news is that although our connection can be forgotten, or even just overlooked a bit too regularly, it is always there ready to light us back up, ignite us back to life, illuminate what we need to know.

We can find it together ( our capacity ‘to listen’ magnifies in the company of women sharing the intention) and we can find it through our own relationship with life. All we need to do is learn to listen, listen deep. That’s it. To come out of our heads and into our hearts and into our bodies and listen.

Life is continually providing you the opportunity to listen deeply within and meet all that you feel with unconditional loving acceptance

When we feel comfortable with ourselves, we find that from this basic space of allowing, we can meet and explore ourselves and the life that is constantly expressing itself within us, through us and around us. Our whole life becomes the stage on which we dance the unfolding of our unique Wild Sacred life.

Knowing ourselves is an endless quest and learning to access our inner knowing is an endless journey with no definite destination. It is the journey of our lives, the unveiling of  the wild sacred woman within.

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A love story….

And it is a love story, an adventure thriller, a murder mystery (where we die again and again and live to tell the tale) there is action and stillness, romance and heartache.

The story is both deeply personal and completely collective and entirely impersonal, a shared drama where there is a place for every aspect of our inner and outer life, and we have to be there through THE WHOLE THING and participate with every level of our being! Because by showing up and being present to being here fully we contribute our essence to the mix this is our sacred offering, when we all show up then this story can be a great one,

It is our part of the story that we have power over,

Our actions and reactions, whether we listen to our needs or ignore them, whether we listen to what our bodies tell us or push on through regardless. Whether we allow ourselves to dance with life or just keep on walking in a strait line, not looking, not feeling, not listening. Whether we follow the call of our hearts or the reasoning voice of fear in our heads.

The great letting go

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This is a path that requires letting go of what does not serve us and also walking gently on the earth.  Of allowing our selves to be held as we grow and learn and to hold others in the same way, this is the feminine resurgence and this is the medicine that the world is hungry for.  Through this capacity to STAY WITH and BE WITH and BREATHE THROUGH and FEEL INTO we learn to sense that something is holding us all the way through, this is divinity, the greatness that is both beyond us and within us.

This quest is the quest for truth, and what is truth but love?

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And what is the point of love if we do not feel it and be it and dance with it and be danced by it? This is the feminine way and all women are cordially invited to take part and by doing so we call in the wild sacred masculine and let it know that we are ready to meet and create together. We do what we do in service of love, the greatest love that is, a love that is lived and alive and expressed within us, and through us.

I love nothing more than to provide spaces for women to experience this for themselves, to plug into the wisdom and power from within. Please Join me at workshop or retreat or book in for a private session.

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Tantra 101 – 4 tips for daily life

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We think that the way out of our old patterns will be complicated.

Secretly we want the release, we want to feel free, we want to feel alive, comfortable in our own skins and confident in our place on the earth. We crave this, yet we also fear this, we fear ourselves, we fear being exposed. We are conditioned to be afraid of life and our patterns keep those fears in place.

We fear that perhaps we will never move past these patterns that hold us in fear and separation…we can begin to think that it will take a super powerful highly advanced technique to get us out of our old patterns and into an experience of freedom.

As it turns out, the way beyond our patterns does not involve a complex magic trick, it does not come in the form of a special drug or a high salary or a mastery of a sexual technique or a fancy meditation technique or any technique for that matter…

The cosmic joke is that we just need to REMEMBER HOW IT IS TO BE NATURAL!

Is that all?

That might seem overly simple, but the truth is that in our essence we are wild and sacred and naturally ‘plugged in’ beings governed by an incredible in-built intelligence. Most of us were not educated to listen and respond to this natural wild intelligence but there is a way of coming back to it.

Basically. Tantra in my practice and understanding, is essentially a way of living and relating in which we embrace life and reclaim our natural spiritual wisdom and innocence.

In innocence there is TRUST, there is playfulness, there is the ability to be vulnerable and open and SURRENDER to what feels alive in the moment. There is the willingness to go past ideas of right and wrong and our conditioned patterns to embrace life as it is and experience life in its fullness.

Through Tantra we learn to BE with ourselves rather than run from ourselves. We shine a loving light of acceptance within so that our shadows can exist without being cut off from our deep heart. We learn to be transparent about what is really going on for us and in the process we learn to accept who we are, open more to more of what we are, and move beyond the fear that keeps us wrapped up in our old patterns.

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Tantra means ‘ to weave’ and it also means ‘to expand’ . Through loving self acceptance and the willingness to honour all aspects of life as intrinsically sacred we weave all aspects of ourselves into one conscious tapestry of life. When we invite the possibility of expanding beyond ‘the known’ we invite great shifts and leaps in our behaviour and our lives.

The subject of Tantra is huge, yet it is only working for us if it is guiding us back to an experience of simplicity, of freedom, of love.

Gathering in a space dedicated to this living exploration (like a Tantra workshop) is amazing, but we can also explore the basic principals of Tantra in our daily lives by simply being DEVOTED TO THAT WHICH FEELS NATURAL. Through consciously reclaiming and inhabiting that natural wild, open, loving nature that we had as small children.

Here are a few tips for bringing this exploration  into your daily life.

1. Follow the natural flow

When we are stuck in our old patterns we are usually trying to manipulate our reality in order to avoid pain and
rejection. This is kind of like the polar opposite of trust. This is the opposite of sensing into the flow and following that flow.

Following the flow involves sensing into what is moving in you right now, and following that.trust the flow

Because most of us were trained to live from our heads and not our bodies then this usually involves a process of reorientation.

And it really is a process, it involves checking in with ourselves again and again and again.

You can stop at any moment of the day and ask yourself.

‘How do I feel right now?’

‘What do I need?’

Or if you come to a situation where you would like to learn to do things in a more responsive and natural way you can ask:

‘What would life want here?’

We can literally invite in more openness into our experience and consciously choose to trust in our natural responses as well as the universal plan.

Take the time to tune into your own energy, welcome whatever it is that you feel, express it, cultivate it, there are so many wonderful ways to do this, explore them, weave them into the tapestry of your life.

2. Connect, intimately, constantly.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAOften we tend to think of intimacy as something that we experience only with our lover, and although the kind of intimacy we share in sexual experiences is indeed a potent form of intimacy.

We can experience intimacy anytime and anywhere when we let go of our sense of being a separate person.

My research experiment in recent years has been to see how it is to simply reveal the way that I am feeling and to lay myself bare under the gaze of others, even if they are bringing up my stuff.

Yes I actually ‘practice being seen’ and I really recommend this amazing but super simple practice.

Fortunately you can do it anywhere…

Great places to do it are dance floors, sexual encounters and anytime that you notice that you feel fear. In those moments you can notice what your instinct says to do. Is it to look cool? Is it to numb out? Instead of acting out of habit, take a pause, check in within, keep on breathing and focus on being in your body as you are witnessed by another being.

When you allow yourself to be real, you become a walking permission slip allowing everyone else to be real….

Try it for yourself…. amazing experiences of everyday intimacy could happen!

3. Create spaces for intimacy

Instead of waiting and hoping for profound exchanges of intimacy to happen, you can create those opportunities 11018322_10206263537655495_7998889645517665917_nyourself by asking for what you need.

First of all decide who there is in your life who you trust and then decide on a clear way to ask them to join you in your exploration.

This could be a space where you will simply gaze into your each others eyes  for 10 minutes then share a hug.

It could be a space where you meditate together and then exchange some intuitive healing.

Be clear about your needs and intentions and creative about the kind of container and experience you will create. If you are both clear about the guidelines and boundaries then both of you can relax into the space and great healing can occur.

I REPEAT! It is important to be super clear about the boundaries. You can ask the person if  they are willing to hold a loving non- sexual space for you. This could be with the intention to help release some emotions, to ground you into your body through loving non-goal-orientated touch, or simply to share a space of presence together.

You could just say ‘Are you willing to hold space for me?’

Creating these kinds of spaces for intimacy is incredibly liberating and empowering, you can do this if you are in a relationship or not. Start small and experiment.

4. LET GO OF CONTROL!

It doesn’t have to be hard, it can just be a simple question to self:

‘How would it be to let go of this thought and allow myself to be free in this moment?’

‘How would it be if everything was perfect and this fear/anger/sadness/insecurity that I feel is ok?’

And then breathe and stay grounded, allow your feelings, and be open to the energy shifting – and see what happens.

All these are simple ways to invite in a completely different way of living and relating. A way of living where we are not living from fear, a way of living where we are open to the fullness of life moving through us. It takes vigilance and courage and humility to notice when we are acting from fear, and to choose another way. But once you get a feel for how that feels in your life, you will begin to LOVE it.

I encourage you to take your natural self into the world, explore, share and have fun!

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Would you like to explore these principles in a safe and supportive space with other women?

Join us for the Sacred Succulence- Feminine Yoga and Tantra Retreat in 2016 in Bali

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Do you need me to hold space for you?

Thats what I do! I offer personal sessions and coaching programs (to both women and men)  to help you identify and move through your old patterns in a loving supportive way.

And other workshops and retreats for women.

Get in touch! I would love to hear from you !

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Take me deeper or do not take me at all

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Last night I symbolically threw my shame in the river, I threw in the subtle shame I realised I hold on some level about being single. As if maybe that makes me somehow inadequate or undesirable or just not good enough at manifesting!

I released this unhelpful thought form, because it is not based on truth.

If I really wanted a man, I could ‘get’ one, I could manipulate reality somehow and find a body to share my bed with, but the truth is that I do not just want any body. I want a man who can truly open me and open TO me. A man who can really see me, a man who is dedicated to growth and truth in the same way that I am. A man who takes me deeper than I can go myself.

I am determined not to purchase the idea that men are ‘behind’ the women in terms of growing up and showing up (although I could easily rustle up a hell of a lot of evidence to prove this) and my intention in writing about this subject is not to point out that men are not capable of really meeting me. It is about me getting super clear about where I am investing my energy, where I am losing energy, where I am barking up the wrong tree, where I am forgetting to trust, where I am selling out for the hope of fulfilling a romantic vision, and losing touch with reality in the process.

Forgive me for making pronouncements for all women, because many might disagree, but from my own experience I would say that the romantic illusion is FUCKING STRONG for us women.

I am generally a very grounded woman (and pretty wise actually, ask my friends!) and yet in the field of relating I have observed an unbelievable tendency to create intricate webs of delusion centred around whoever it is I am attracted to. FUCK. It is SO frustrating, I experience first hand how I can go into a complete story as soon as I fancy a guy.

So this article is about ME, and this tendency of women to give our power away, in the hope of receiving love and validation and fulfilling a romantic fantasy.

Let me take you back 48 hours, to a scene by a river, here in magnificent beautiful tropical Bali. At a restaurant with a dear soul sister, I was freshly out of a period of fasting and meditation, with a fresh perspective on THE TRUTH about what had been REALLY going on with the last guy I had been relating to.

First of all, the guy is lovely, was as honest with me as he could be, this is not really about him.

What I could observe clearly, after a couple of weeks of being completely friggin confused and blind, was that I was moving towards this guy, basically because I was following a romantic impulse, and just really wanted to be seen, met and loved, by a man.

Yes I admit it.

I am dying to be loved, seen and met, by a man.

The problem is that this man was so obviously not in a position to meet me and fulfil these needs, yet something in me kept on moving towards him, I was moved from a place of lack rather than a place of fullness, I created a story which fed my unconscious insecurities, and my precious energy was wasted in the process.

On this night, in a fit of clarity on the whole issue, I made a stand for myself, I have no idea if I will uphold it but still it feels really important to at least try.

(And my friend told me I had to write about it, I really didn’t want to because this subject makes me feel really vulnerable, but when she said it I got a funny feeling in my tummy that indicated to me that I had no choice, I had to write about it. And I trust that if you are reading this then this might be meaningful to you in some way.)

So what did I make a stand for?

To not give my power and energy away to relationships that do not take me deeper into an experience of truth, intimacy and aliveness.

To not settle for unconscious relating or unsatisfying sex.

(Am I the only girl who gets emotionally attached as soon as she has sex with someone? This is not my pledge to be celibate until marriage but this is a kick up the arse to myself to honour the fact that my heart and yoni are inextricably linked, and to only create ties to men who are UP FOR THE JOURNEY and ready and willing to meet me in the depths and stay present for the whole process.)

My intention is to HAVE MY EYES OPEN and notice when I have moved from reality into fantasy, to communicate, to be authentic, to be CLEAR ABOUT MY OWN NEEDS, and find empowering ways to fulfil them.

And a note to the men:

I want you, I need you, and if you are relating to me intimately I need you to open to me, if you hold back your presence and love, we both lose out.

If you cannot open to me, please explain to the best of your ability what is going on for you, let me know where you are at, so at least I can try and work from it on my side.

Please help me, lovingly, to stay in my centre and have compassion for the fact that I have this massive urge to love and be loved, and if I am attracted to you, there is a good chance I will project some of my yearning on to you.

Please be aware of how sensitive I am to your touch and presence, I have learnt to be vulnerable and soft so that I can surrender to you as the feminine principal, and that means I come to you un-armoured by choice, so please take care. Please understand that my yearning for love feels bigger than me. I can get blinded by my pull to merge with you!

And thank you for every time you have been honest with me, and loving at the same time, this is incredible medicine for my heart. Thank you for every moment you have come to me with respect and love and received the preciousness of my gifts. Thank you for every time you have entered me with presence and devotion. Thank you for every time you have stayed with me until our process is complete and left me with a feeling of being respected and honoured.

And to myself….and all women

Thank you for being open to love, thank you for being human too, and vulnerable and real, thank you for choosing to focus your energy on what Is expansive and supportive, and making wise choices that serve your greatest needs rather than your need to be validated.

And also.

Life is amazing you are amazing! Please do not sell out for that small part of you who is afraid that she is not loveable!

If there is not a man on the scene that is capable of offering you something of worth, and who is able to recognize and receive the gift of you, don’t waste you time. Be single and proud, make love to life, nurture your energy, feed your power and cultivate discernment. Respect the preciousness of your own energy and the temple of your own body and share it with the people who expand you beyond your small self’s fears…If they are not here now, they will come, until then, rest into being and TRUST!

 

How I un-numbed my yoni

UnknownYes it was numb, I knew that and that was a disturbing and confusing fact. It is not that my yoni (aka my vagina) had no feeling at all, yet it was certainly numb, and I knew there must be SO much more sensation and pleasure available to me as a woman.

I had no idea why it was desensitized or how to heal this, in fact I had no idea that what I needed was healing. No one ever spoke about this! I assumed everyone else was a naturally vibrant sexual diva and I was the freak. I felt resigned to my fate at some level, as I quite simply did not know what to do and felt too ashamed to ask anyone,

I felt like something must be wrong with me…

Does any of this sound familiar?

A journey of reclamation

Fortunately life took me on an interesting journey to ‘un-numb’ my yoni. And I would love to share this with you, as I am sure I wasn’t the first, nor will I be the last to experience this phenomenon.

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I want every woman to know the delicious pleasure of having a yoni that feels utterly available to the flow of vital life energy coursing through it.

I want every woman to understand how powerful she is as a sexually activated woman and how she can engage with a process of healing and reawakening of her sexuality both on her own and with the help of others.

Why do we need healing?

I want to highlight some possible reasons for desensitization of our sexual organs. Indeed for so many women this comes a result of sexual abuse of some description. But this can also be a result of any sexual experiences that did not feel completely safe and sacred and honouring.

And really, how many women have had those sorts of experiences?

Yes that’s right. Pretty much all of them as far as I can tell…

In a culture where conscious sex is not exactly the mainstay and real sexual education is wanting….is it any wonder that many of us find that our sexuality has not had the right soil in which to blossom ?? And consequently our sexual organs have lost their capacity to feel the full breadth of pleasure that is available to us.

Your yoni is a sensitive flower

We as women are sooo sensitive, that is our gift, the oh so tender tissues of our intimate area are like the petals of flowers, soft and tender and designed to open fully in the presence of love.

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Our Sexual anatomy is remarkably responsive, it is designed to feel and respond to loving touch.

 

 

But the flip side of this is that when these incredibly responsive tissues do receive sensitive touch then they can close off and contract.

Also, when we are not able to process feelings that arise in sexual experiences, then the unexpressed and unprocessed emotions can get stored in these tissues – and numbness develops as a result.

Many women have become habitually contracted and numb in this area. The numbness is essentially a defence against feeling pain, there is sadness, anger, frustration and grief locked up beneath the numbness, therefore often what is needed to restore full feeling, is healing, the process of coming back to wholeness, our natural sexual innocence and vitality.

Sexual healing for women

When we are able to access, express and release these stored emotions, in a safe and supportive space, we are set free. The numbness dissolves and fresh life-force is invited back in, to flow freely, nourishing us with pleasure and vitality.

Sexual healing is available in different forms, here are the ways that I have found to un-numb my yoni and transform my sexuality in the process.

1. Sacred Self pleasure

At some point I realised that to reclaim sensitivity and a positive relationship to my sexuality then I had to make sexuality sacred for myself. So the first step of my healing journey began with what I like to call ‘Sacred self pleasure.’

Despite the fact that I had not been raised with strong religious influences, a sense of sexual pleasure being ‘dirty’ had somehow slipped into my subconscious. Sexual pleasure was accompanied by a subtle sense of shame and self-pleasuring was NOT recognized as a spiritual practice.

But I needed to make it one.

So how did I do that?

I would touch myself and receive the sensation as a gift from the goddess. Self-pleasuring became sacred because I made it sacred, I used this time to re-educate my approach to my sexual life and combine this with my spiritual life.

I kept on opening my heart to the feelings that arose in me as I touched myself, I loved myself through shame, through disgust, through fear… and found that all this ultimately dropped away in the face of my loving attention.

This ‘work’ I did with myself was an all-important first step towards reclaiming a nourishing connection with my sexual energy.

2. Tantric Yoni massage

I did not know exactly what it would involve, yet somehow I knew that Tantric yoni massage was part of what I needed for my healing, and I felt a deep sense of trust in the therapist healers that came my way.

You have to trust your healer!

More than anyone else perhaps, sexual healers need to be in the highest integrity, Fortunately I had enough self respect to attract healers who embodied this, and with this sense of trust, I was able to receive the profound gifts of yoni massage.

The true medicine of Yoni massage is imparted through the yoni being met with loving skilful touch by a deeply present and loving person in a sacred space. This kind of healing has the power to initiate huge emotional releases and powerful healing. This was my experience. It was profound, opening me in ways that I could not have imagined.

 3. Yoni meditations

When we focus our devoted presence back into the subtle sensations of our yonis then we can reawaken the sense of aliveness and subsequent sensitivity.

Have you ever been guided to meditate on the sensations in your sexual organs?

Probably not…

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Funnily enough most of us have not been encouraged to become truly intimate with our intimate areas…

 

Our sexual organs can become ‘down there’…. a long lost forgotten land outside the field of our awareness. Or perhaps we do not feel able to ‘be with‘ our sexual feelings in a safe and nourishing way, with deep presence and love.

Through the Tap Tantric Arts I have discovered, and have gone on to create for myself, meditations which activate ‘ the sexual palace’ (I LOVE this Taoist term!) using attention, sound, intention and movement to deepen my experience of my own sexuality.

Sacred Sensual meditations provide an assessable way to invite presence into your sexual organs and initiate healing and pathways to pleasure.

4. The jade egg-goddess technology

The jade egg (yes it is actually an egg made out of jade..) was used by mystical courtesans in the royal palaces of ancient China at a time when the power and preciousness of sexual energy was recognized and actively cultivated as an art form.

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In a modern context, the jade egg practices are included in the super yummy nourishing practices of Tao Tantra.

 

 

The vibration of the jade gives a crystal healing from the inside and the internal massage from the jade egg exercises increase sensitivity inside the vaginal canal, opening up pleasure spots that may have become desensitized.

The jade egg offers us a way to heal ourselves with awareness, love and consciousness and create an ‘awakened yoni’.

It is best to begin your Jade egg journey with an experienced practitioner who can best guide you to make the most of your practice. All women can benefit from regular jade egg practice! Find out more about the jade egg here

5. Conscious tantric love making

When the time is right, the partner is right, the environment is right..then BOOM! This is wild sacred feminineprobably the most effective and transformative healing you can get.

When a man can fully embody the unwavering presence and infinite love of Shiva, and he holds you in that, touches you from that, and does not falter in his devoted loving. Then the pure force of that loving presence can undo layers and layers of numbness in just a slight touch.

You do not find a Shiva of this calibre loitering on every street corner but they are out there. If we value ourselves enough, and stand in our truth as Shakti (Shiva’s divine consort) and inhabit our own body as a sacred temple then we radiate a frequency that will, sooner or later, draw in the kind of man who can meet us as the goddess that we are.

Hallelujah!

Every woman deserves to be seen, loved, held and celebrated in this way, and our yonis truly blossom in the ecstasy of this meeting.  

We deserve it ! You deserve it!

It is an exciting time! We are remembering that sexual energy is powerful and precious.

Do not forget that there is support out there, and we are all in this together. Women’s workshops and circles provide the safe and supportive spaces to explore who you are as a sexual being, with curiosity and awareness, and with the support of other women.

Whatever works for you, be open, be soft, be loving and also be courageous as you facilitate your relationship to your own sacred sexual experience and reclaim your pleasure potential.

There is so much beauty and power resting in you. Enjoy the journey of unearthing your internal treasures as a Sacred Sensual woman!

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If you would like some guidance and support on your path of un-numbing your yoni

I would LOVE to help you!

I recommend beginning your journey with the

Sacred Sensual Meditation Recordings

these offer guided practices that you can experience in your own home !

Click here for more information or work with me for personal support.

WSF-Sacred Sensual Meditation

  

How to move past fear and embody your inner goddess

 

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One of the women who has attended our ‘Sacred Succulence’ women’s workshops and retreats, and who is, in her words, exploring what succulence is to her, and how she can embody that more, was telling me on day 2 of a 3 day workshop about the voices in her head that tell her why everyone else is sexier and more empowered than she is and tell her that maybe she should just give up and go home and get back into her comfort zone…

We spoke about how damn normal that is, how we all have our own versions of those stories. It was a beautiful sharing in which we could both reveal the ways that our fear works in us and closes us down.

Then the next time we spoke was the last morning of the 3 day workshop and something big had obviously shifted, she was standing taller, she was swinging her hips and smiling brightly and had obviously stepped into her goddess self. She looked at me and saw that I was seeing her, really seeing her and recognising her dramatic shift into her goddess self, and she said ‘yes-why not?’

Indeed..why not?

2000 years of repression of the feminine is no longer a good enough excuse as to why we would make ourselves small.

Those voices inside our heads that have nothing but negative criticism also need not be a reason for not saying YES to embodying our own power, beauty and sensuality.

The fear that our own power and sensuality is scary, selfish, inaccessible or lacking, need also not be a stumbling block that prevents us from connecting to our feminine essence and power.

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 What I love the most about my work in holding spaces for women to activate and explore their feminine energy is that women can feel safe enough to go beyond those voices and begin to discover for themselves what succulence, sensuality and feminine power looks like and feels like for them.

 

In these workshops and retreats we provide the space for women to explore what living as a goddess looks like and feels like for them, we are all a different flavour of goddess energy and we need to know, respect and claim our unique qualities.

Women might come in with the idea that they want to fit an image of what ‘sexy’ and ‘powerful’ and ‘succulent’ looks like and that they need to change who they are to fit this image. But they soon discover that the journey to embodying these qualities is really about creating the conditions for their own deep feminine qualities to emerge naturally.

In these workshops and retreats we provide the much needed space for women to awaken and celebrate their unique qualities ,and we provide the space for them to release what prevents them from feeling and living in alignment with their feminine essence.

I can honestly say that no woman has ever left one my workshops with anything less than a big smile and a twinkle in her eye and a spring in her step. And of course this has so much to do with the Shakti awakening practices offered, but the real medicine, the real jewel that makes it so potent and life changing is the nourishing space of sisterhood.

DSC02976Whilst many women in the generations before us lived without communities of supportive women, that paradigm of isolation is no longer workable because it keeps us separated from the empowerment and activation that we receive from gathering in sacred space with other women.

 

Sacred space is a space we create together with the intention to go beyond the superficial, all indigenous cultures have gathered in this way and these spaces were the backbone for a healthy society. In that space we do not chat, we do not interact on a superficial level, we do not judge. We join together in a space of unconditional love and acceptance so that we may explore, release and connect to that which we have been over looking in our busy lives. This supportive space, like the womb, is the nourishing foundation on which we can grow and thrive as a woman.

The truth is that we can not do it alone, those voices can take over us, we can so easily get pulled into giving too much, we can get so stuck in our heads, up tight, closed off, and feel helpless, not knowing what we need or who we are.

In sisterhood we remember who we are, we remember how it feels to be supported and connected. From the ground we find within beautiful things can begin to grow effortlessly; we tap into the wellspring of Shakti, of feminine life force, rather than continually drawing from, and depleting, our reserves.

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Together we are strong, together we are empowered and reborn, together we shine and are able to offer our gifts to the world, to our men and to our children with a sense of joy rather than obligation.

 

 

It is my prayer that more and more women offer themselves this experience of sisterhood and regular time spent in sacred space with other women, mining the gold that rests inside every woman’s body; that exquisite feminine essence of sweet succulence, so that we may navigate life in a more feminine way, honoring ourselves and life in the process.

Come and join us in sacred space! Click here for information about our upcoming Bali Retreats! 

Come on Over!


I'm now blogging at http://www.hecatedemeter.wordpress.com. Come on over! Sunday Ballet Blogging is up, with an amazing use of slow motion and an interesting discussion of the daily practice of ballet. This past week, we heard Charles de Lint sing a country song (really!), discussed The Last Unicorn and what Witches and artists know, smelled some potpourri, and had a great exchange in comments about the tellurgic intelligence of cities. You can still catch up and join in the discussions!

If you've been kind enough to follow my blog or to list it in your blogroll (for which, thanks!) I hope that you'll update the information. Come on over to http://hecatedemeter.wordrpress.com and let me know what you think!

Hecate Demetersdatter

Picture found here.

Come on Over!


I'm now blogging at http://www.hecatedemeter.wordpress.com. Come on over! Sunday Ballet Blogging is up, with an amazing use of slow motion and an interesting discussion of the daily practice of ballet. This past week, we heard Charles de Lint sing a country song (really!), discussed The Last Unicorn and what Witches and artists know, smelled some potpourri, and had a great exchange in comments about the tellurgic intelligence of cities. You can still catch up and join in the discussions!

If you've been kind enough to follow my blog or to list it in your blogroll (for which, thanks!) I hope that you'll update the information. Come on over to http://hecatedemeter.wordrpress.com and let me know what you think!

Hecate Demetersdatter

Picture found here.

Come on Over!


I'm now blogging at http://www.hecatedemeter.wordpress.com. Come on over! Sunday Ballet Blogging is up, with an amazing use of slow motion and an interesting discussion of the daily practice of ballet. This past week, we heard Charles de Lint sing a country song (really!), discussed The Last Unicorn and what Witches and artists know, smelled some potpourri, and had a great exchange in comments about the tellurgic intelligence of cities. You can still catch up and join in the discussions!

If you've been kind enough to follow my blog or to list it in your blogroll (for which, thanks!) I hope that you'll update the information. Come on over to http://hecatedemeter.wordrpress.com and let me know what you think!

Hecate Demetersdatter

Picture found here.