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Subscribe to this list via RSS Blog posts tagged in weekly goddess inspiration

Posted by on in SageWoman Blogs
Weekly Goddess Inspiration: Tara

Tara, Goddess of Inspiration, sometimes known as The Liberator, brings her message that we are not alone. She encourages us to remember that we can always ask for help, and it is through asking for help that our wishes can be granted and our troubles surmounted. Tara's message is especially powerful for women -- our culture encourages us to see ourselves as weak if we need to ask for help or if we are unable to handle all of our various tasks, obligations, and burdens alone. I know I have certainly fallen prey to the Superwoman syndrome throughout my own life, and have been struggling with feeling like my life was unmanageable on a practical level of late. And yet I have been afraid to ask for help -- even as I find myself resentful of the fact that no one's helping!. Tara comes dancing into my life right now to remind me that I have help available, human as well as Divine, if only I will ask for it. 

Tara appears in many forms in Buddhist cosmology -- White Tara is the sacred star, the liberator and wish granter; Green Tara, the Buddha of enlightened activity; Blue Tara, the transmuter of anger; Red Tara, whose power magnetizes all good things; Black Tara, who helps us access our power; and Yellow Tara, who brings prosperity and wealth. While the card depicts White Tara -- and my sense is that I myself will be walking with White Tara this week -- you may find that another one of these Taras calls to you. In the Goddess Tarot by Kris Waldherr, Tara takes the place of The Fool in the Major Arcana and is called Beginnings. I love this idea, that when Tara comes dancing into our lives, she is inviting us on a journey towards enlightenment, towards joy, towards our power -- and also reminding us that we do not walk alone. She is always with us.

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Weekly Goddess Inspiration: Ajysit

Among the Yakut people of Siberia, Ajysit is known as the Comforting Mother Goddess of Childbirth and Fate. It is she who guides children into the world through the process of birth, who comforts and assists with labor and birth, and who writes down the name of each newly born child in her Golden Book of Fate. It is said that calling out to Ajysit helps to ease the pain of labor contractions. She is also said to bless breastmilk so that it will be nourishing to the newly born.

While I have never had children of my own body and do not plan to, I spend a good deal of my time surrounded by midwives, doulas, and other birth professionals. (I joke that I spend a lot of time with a lot of people who spend a lot of time looking at other people's vaginas in a professional context, but I digress.) In working with, worshiping with, and simply knowing and loving people whose primary job it is to support labor and birth, I've come to believe that there are many times in our lives when we need a midwife -- not just when we are birthing a human child. In fact, one of my dear midwife friends calls me a "storycatcher" -- as she said once, "You know how I catch babies? You catch stories. You stay with people while they labor to get their stories out, and make it safe for them to birth them into the world." And so I do my own type of midwifery as a priestess, helping people, especially women, birth themselves into being. 

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Weekly Goddess Inspiration: Kali Ma

Sex and Death! Sex and Death! 

That's the running joke whenever anyone in my circle pulls Kali Ma from one of my Goddess Oracle decks. Kali evokes a sense of simultaneous awe and revulsion, devotion and recoiling, from many people. The Hindu Dark Mother embodies so much that seems paradoxical -- endings and beginnings, creation and destruction, nurturing and punishment, love and hate, and -- yes -- Sex and Death. Her fearsome visage, her girdle of severed arms, her necklace of skulls all draw on our darkest fears. And yet the ultimate lesson of Kali Ma, it so often seems, is for us to be willing to find beauty in the horrific, to find the love in the dark nights of the soul, to find the new beginning in the fiery ending. 

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Posted by on in SageWoman Blogs
Weekly Goddess Inspiration: Haltia

One of the things I love most about the Goddess Inspiration Oracle by Kris Waldherr is that it includes many lesser-known and even obscure Goddess alongside those that are familiar to me. I appreciate the chance to learn about Goddesses who may have been overlooked in my mythological education, and to find connections with Goddesses from pantheons or cultures I may know little about. 

This week brings the Baltic Goddess Haltia, Goddess of the Hearth and Home. She has much in common with the Estonia Goddess Holdja, and with Hearth Goddesses more generally. Honored among the Baltic Finns as the guardian of the hearth and hearthfire, Haltia lives on today as a general name for the house faeries or spirits who guard homes, water, graveyards and other places where humans dwell and carry out our daily activities.

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This week, the Hindu goddess of knowledge, wisdom, music, arts, and learning comes into our lives to serve as guide. Beautiful Sarasvati appears when we are on the cusp of enlightenment, of new learning, of finding new ways to express ourselves. If you have set creative, spiritual, or intellectual goals for the coming Spring (in the Northern Hemisphere), Sarasvati has come to tell you that you are on the right path. 

b2ap3_thumbnail_sarasvati.jpg

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And now for something completely different! 

Well, not completely different. But this week brings a reading from a new deck, Doreen Virtue's Goddess Guidance Oracle. I love working with Kris Waldherr's Goddess Inspiration Oracle, and will continue to do readings from that deck here on the blog. But I've been working with a couple other Goddess decks as part of my new monthly Women's Full Moon Circle here in DFW, and I thought it'd be fun to bring them to you.

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Posted by on in SageWoman Blogs

It's been a busy month for the Third Wave Witch. I've been adjusting to having more structure in my life than I've had in more than a decade. With the (exciting, wonderful) new job has come the need to adapt to an actual schedule -- with a wake up time, a "get to work" time, and a "quitting" time -- as well as to make the internal adjustments that go along with not being quite as much of a free agent as I've been for the last few years. I've been very used to having near-total control over my own time, to following my whims throughout the day, to doing what I feel like doing at any given moment. (Essentially, I've lived much like a large housecat, but with opposable thumbs and a bank account.) In some ways it's been a process of taming myself. It's a strange feeling. I enjoy my job (and the financial freedom and career advancement it will provide). I am doing work I believe in, on a campus that is incredibly supportive and diverse. I even get to read more, now that I have a train commute each day. And I've also chafed at times, trying to find the sweet spot between structure and freedom.

Freedom has always been one of my core desired feelings, to borrow a phrase from the wonderful Danielle LaPorte. This desire for freedom is what kept me self-employed (and under-employed) for much of the last decade, caught on the adjunct treadmill. My only real experience with full time corporate work had been so negative and scarring that I wasn't willing to go back there. But over the last year it became clear that while I had much control over my time, the poverty wages I was earning as an adjunct actively hindered my freedom. A long and heartfelt conversation with my partner encouraged me to rethink what it mean for me to have freedom, to be free. 

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