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Cross-posted at Goddessing From the Heart.
For today's post, I wanted to consider the lighthearted aspects of our journey in Goddess Spirituality. I use Womenrunes on a daily basis, and today I pulled the Sun card, which represents healing and play. We’ve entered the cold and dark season in the Northern Hemisphere, where little sunlight filters through to grace each day. How, then, during the gloomy winter months, do we find our moments of rainbow reflection? What in our busy and over-scheduled lives can provide opportunities to laugh, dance and act silly? And what do we do when it seems no comfort will arrive?
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Cross-posted at Goddessing From the Heart.
This is the first installment in a series of blogs about the four elements. My spiritual walk is that of an Earth-based practitioner of Goddess Spirituality, so the element of earth was a natural beginning point. I will be describing physical features of earth and connecting them to our human and spiritual experience.
Picture a girl or woman coming across an insect unexpectedly. Perhaps you just heard her shriek. Women have been trained to let men stand in and defend them from this fearsome beasts. It’s kind of strange if you think about it, given that any physical strength advantage is relatively meaningless in response to something about an inch or smaller in length. I think I’ve fallen into this squeamish behavior myself for long enough; it’s time to put on my hiking boots and get to know some of Gaia’s smaller beings. As a practitioner of Earth-based Goddess Spirituality, I wanted to take some time to explore ways in which we might learn spiritual lessons from insects as they reflect the presence of Goddess.
Many insects, including bees, function as a collective. The queen bee is responsible for laying eggs and releasing a pheromone to give the bee colony a unique chemical perfume. The female worker bees feed her, tend to the hive and take care of the offspring. The drones have it pretty rough; they exist to mate with the queen. They are killed in the mating process or kicked out of the hive to starve during winter.
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Greetings PaganSquare readers! I am honored to be starting a blog here and sharing my perspective on sacred Goddess practice. I’ve been blogging at Goddessing From the Heart. My writing centers on affirming trauma survivors on their journey through Goddess Spirituality. I received my Ph.D. in Psychology from a university in the Midwest and work as a full-time college professor. You can connect with me at my page on Facebook (Goddessing From the Heart) and follow me @goddessingheart on Instagram and Twitter.
I was in my mid-20’s when the accumulated stress of my experiences of childhood trauma finally broke through and nearly broke me. Along with the classic PTSD symptoms like flashbacks, emotional avoidance and heightened vigilance, I started to have a host of physical issues like migraines, digestive problems, and muscle pain. As you’ll discover in this post, the connection between traumatic experiences and our bodies helps to explain not only the outcomes of trauma but also the potential treatments for it.
Entering the archaeological site of Kato Zakros, which includes a Sacred Center and part of a town on a small hill above it, I felt too tired to continue with the others. As we passed a stone bench to the north and west of the open court, I lay down and closed my eyes. I don’t know if I actually slept, but when I opened my eyes, I was in a trance.
I could see the air vibrating, and as I looked up the hill, I could almost see women walking up and down the stepped paths. My eyes were fixed on the path where women I could not quite see with my eyes went about their daily tasks. After a while Cathleen joined me. “I don’t want to talk,” I said, “but if you sit quietly beside me, you will see women walking in the village. She sat down and said nothing, but smiled broadly and nodded when I asked her if she could see what I saw.
After a while, I moved and sat facing the Central Court. I could still see the vibrations of the air, and as I looked across the court, I felt a sense of anticipation. “The dance is about to begin,” I told Cathleen when she joined me a few minutes later. She nodded. It was an hour before sunset, and the ancient stones were bathed in the last light of day. Jana and Patricia were talking in the central shrine room, while the others leaned over the ancient cistern watching turtles and turtle babies dive into the water and emerge again. “The dance is about to begin,” I said again.
Over in Ariadne's Tribe we have a list of recommended books about Minoan spirituality and related topics. One of the books from that list that I find myself pointing out frequently to anyone who is interested in Modern Minoan Paganism and/or goddess spirituality (besides my own books, of course) is Charlene Spretnak's classic work Lost Goddesses of Early Greece: A Collection of Pre-Hellenic Myths. Originally published in 1978, this amazing little volume is still in print, and with good reason.
Ms. Spretnak addresses herself to nine goddesses, eleven if you count the Moon Triad as three separate ones: Gaia, Pandora, Themis, Aphrodite, the Moon Triad (Artemis, Selene, Hecate), Hera, Athena, Demeter, and Persephone. She offers some fascinating information about each one, detailing where they originated, what their early worship was probably like, and how the Hellenes and other later cultures "demoted" them from their original places of honor and power. It's both enlightening and a little sad to discover how these goddesses were purposely tarnished over time. But this book helps to polish them back to their original glow.
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