I spritz rose water above my head. I pause to feel, to sense, to experience. I stand in enlivened stillness as the delicate scent spirals down, earthbound, as the gentle droplets softly kiss my hair, my shoulders, my cheeks.
I thank the woman I am becoming. I acknowledge this gift of self-mothering. The woman I am becoming knows, with a bit more spunky conviction, what I like, and so, the rose water is kept in stock, readily available, and visibly placed on my white wicker side-table (next to a framed Mary Oliver poem).
I bless the fresh water before I drink. All day long and right before bed, I replenish this tall glass of water and respectfully, center it on a rose quartz coaster. I take grateful sips throughout the day, and long gulps right as I wake.
I thank the woman I am becoming. I stir a prayer, an affirmation, a beam of healing light into the water and the hydration streams life through the system of my internal earth. I thank the sacred springs beneath my feet.
I sprinkle a palmful of Epsom salt into the hot bath. I relax my gaze onto the lone flickering candle and acknowledge my emotions, my sensations, and the lingering energetic impact and echo of the day. The water clears, cleanses, clarifies and calls for me to receive what is mine to receive and to release what no longer serves me.
I thank the woman I am becoming. She prioritizes energetic hygiene, and is freeing herself from the “broom closet,” or the “spiritual closet.” The witch wound is healing, the invisible wound that has held lifetimes of persecutions and present-life fears for being called out, judged, condemned for being “woo-woo,” (aka: intuitive, non-linear, multi-sensory, energy-reader, , inwardly connected to God/Universe/Cosmos, trusting body-centered wisdom over external governance).
I am (we are) multi-dimensional beings with extrasensory capabilities. Long before we lived on land, we were creatures of the sea. We lived in water with our five senses and our extra-sensorial abilities as our embodied compasses of golden guidance and brilliant intelligence. Before our brains, before skin as we know it, in the waters of Mumma Earth (the waters of the womb) we had this … our senses, and our capacity to perceive beyond our senses.
If I lean far back enough, away from this computer screen, and into the ancient oceanic fluids of the nervous system that so quietly ebb and flow up-and-down my spine, I can catch a wave of embodied remembering.
Somewhere, once, a long time ago, and in a time that soon will be known again, there was an ancestor of mine, a woman, who knew how to exuberantly live in her body.
I have written of Her before.
I write of Her again.
This wise and well ancestor who lived in ease-filled, cyclical rhythm with her menstrual cycle (period blood was medicinal and women revered as spiritual counselors, those who could bleed and not die and bring in new life and mostly, birth their own lives); who was her own duala at her children’s births, who harnessed sexual energy as life-force creative energy, intimately knew her own fertility (no app, no pill necessary) and alchemized the power of orgasm to be self-actualized and self-enlightened. She is the Crone who wears a Crown.
I have longed for Her. I have cried for Her. I have searched for Her.
And my tears for Her are tears for me. A grieving of lost feminine wisdom … and this is wisdom that can be re-remembered, reclaimed, returned to and powerfully embodied.
This re-remembering has been my journey.
I ride the waves of those salty tears to a memory of me in October 2020. I answer a soul-call and fall home, inwardly and outwardly, and am resting on the carpeted floor of my childhood bedroom. A yoga mat holds my spine. My palms soothe my belly and my heart. With each rise and rinse of the breath, I send out a question into the humming network of intelligence that is my body …
What are my needs?
The answer is muffled. The response distant and blurred. The clarity foggy … but the body-knowing is there, I sense my instincts, my intuition like catching a quick and hopeful glimmer of a lighthouse gleaming in the tumultuous sea-storm of dark. This is all I need to begin.
And I begin by rearranging my question. Why is it so hard for me to trust my instincts? Why is it so difficult to access my inner knowing? Why is it difficult for me to remain in exuberant embodiment, vibrant aliveness, sensorial presence as I move throughout my day?
Slowly, the answers reveal themselves; the hidden and yet held in-my-body stories come to shore. A fragmented history, like a broken seashell, I piece together through reading, through sensing, through discernment and gut-guided feeling.
Throughout the last 3,000 to 5,000 years, the holy humans who turned their gaze inward for guidance, for a connection to the divine, for the joy and empowerment of self-knowledge were persecuted, tortured, killed.
In the depths of our nervous systems, there are dark waters that hold these brutal memories … we live in the bones of the survivors who witnessed these atrocities … of medicine women, of Gnostics and mystics, of healers and radical free-thinkers, publicly tortured, banished to the edge of the village, murdered.
To look within and act on what is heard from the inner depths, is the ultimate power-play, because the “forces” that be (and I theorize that these forces have been on this planet for thousands of years, they just take on different masks, different shapes, hide and parade about with agendas that may look different but at the end of the day it’s all about control, the diminishment of the human spirit and the human experience) know that a person who is awake, conscious, fully embodied, is a threat.
The ones who look within, who take their cues from the internal intelligence that reflects nature and the cosmos, are immune to outer manipulations, outer programming, outer societal conditioning … they don’t follow the trends on their social media feed.
All the answers are within.
The body is on our side.
But we’ve been constantly bombarded with fear-inducing messaging that keeps our gaze (that inner sight!) distracted and scanning the external landscape, and the external landscape of today is extremely (and purposefully) noisy.
So when I asked my body, when I implored, and stewed in a frustration that bubbled up tears, I was meeting something deeply old within me, a tenseness that like dam, that was restricting my inner energy-flow, my water-flow, my vitality. I was meeting, for the first conscious time, an internalized loudness that was my people-pleasing, my fawning, the survival strategies that I had adopted to establish a sense of safety.
(And yes, it’s brilliant that our bodies do this too … that I devised a survival system when I was so young, and there was a time when this did serve me, and now, I am Mother, I am a grown woman, and I don’t need to sacrifice my realness, dim my authenticity and self-expression, or really share my light and attempt to likeable to bullies to be safe anymore. Real safety comes in me being me.)
What are my needs?
This question sparked the beginning of my ongoing liberated, embodied homecoming.
I’ve descended down into the depths of womb that was a tomb and now is vivacious inner well of infinitely abundant life-force, creative energy.
I’ve returned to the waters that are my womb and flow throughout the month in reverent and joyous tune with my cycle. I live in rhythm with my female body, I eat intuitively and move intuitively, I befriend my hormones, and let each specific phase magic-make through my embodied spaciousness, my allowing, my affectionate attentiveness. I practice the feminine art of receiving, of discerning, of open-hearted surrender to rebirth myself anew.
I’ve floated along the currents of my nervous system and detoxed the hurriedness, the rushed sense of urgency, and practice connecting with my inner child when I feel overwhelmed, abandoned, or the fretful edge of burn-out.
I turn to her, the little girl who is still me and my adult-mothering self asks very kindly, “What do you need?”
Water.
To be water.
To go home to my own currents, my own rhythms, my own tides.
To release back to a body befriended that is wildly wise.
To cultivate enjoyment in my senses … the rose water, the Epsom salt baths, the top-offed fresh glass of water that I drink as a love letter to me from me. To stay hydrated as we do this conscious work of liberated, embodied homecoming. To not be afraid of our depths, to dive within, and even be brave enough to just float in the uncertainty until we’ve re-arrived on the sun-lit shores of our inner knowing.
Meet me here. On this walk done by so many … footprints from our ancestors still reside in the sand, footprints of what the next generation will be, when we soften into the tides of our inner knowing and become those (perhaps rose kissed) embodied (r)evolutionaries.
My next Body Writes session, Watering The Wisdom Of The Nervous System focuses on utilizing the healing power of water to return us to our bodies, our instincts, our inner luminous knowing.
When: Saturday, January 28th 10am-11:15pm EST
Where: The Gathering Ground of Zoom
What: A meditation, movement, and writing workshop centered on nourishing the nervous system.
Price: $33
I’ll also be recording the session, so if you’re all heartbeats of YES and can’t attend live, register at the link, and then kindly send me an email and I’ll make sure you get a recording!