The Power of the Feminine

150 year Oak Tree, Galilee Center

My mind is being blown by a new book - The Wild Feminine by Tami Kent http://www.wildfeminine.com/. This is a ground-breaking book in so many ways. If you have ever felt your energy scattered, or wanted to complete a creative project - book, quilt, painting, drawing - and were unable to get back to it, if you ever have felt blocked or had stories to tell but no confidence to write them - you need to read this book.

Tami is a physical therapist, but she also works with energy exercises and visualizations to help women get in touch with and unlock the creative energy in their pelvic bowl. Yup, the container of our female parts, our invisible round as an orange uterus, our bulbous ovaries (she says they hold our creative sparks), our curving fallopian tubes, and all the apparatus inbetween. This center of the universe, this core of a woman, is where we hold our sadness and grief, our joy and our desire to create - not just babies, but books and art and goodness knows how many creative juicy projects.

I have read many books, been to many workshops, visited umpteen blogs about creativity and also about the power of the feminine cycle, but the exercises in this book made a difference in my body, and in how I feel energy circulating - this morning I was reading and doing some of the visualizations, and feeling rather scattered, drained, tired. She was suggesting my uterus needed completion after the end of a project, clearing out, and as I followed her suggestion to visualize energy like water flowing out of me into the ground,  releasing and breathing and letting go of what was still inside me, I began to feel calm, centered and at peace.

The power of ritual is a relatively new discovery for me. Coming from a heavily Catholic tradition with Church and incense every Sunday, I kind of didn't want to go there. But lighting a candle or taking a bath to clarify my thoughts and help me focus has become a ritual I love to do. Anything that honours the feminine qualities of rest and receiving feels very healing to me right now. Probably because I am so type A productivity minded that it's a challenge for me to slow down and rest up. Right now I'm exhausted - at the tail end of a cycle (and yes, women after menopause still have a cycle, and women who have had hysterectomies still have their energy center where the uterus was), and it felt good to let go, let down, and be at that end part. One must honour all the creative work, all the grunt work that comes with manifesting, labouring through a book publication, or a fundraising project, and just let one's field lie fallow for a while.

So that's what The Wild Feminine taught me today - I'm headed off on vacation and a fallow time of resting, music, wild grass and trees, the ocean's saltiness nearby and 'time off' of all my projects. (Well, I know I'll be reading and thinking and reflecting on my next retreat the Inner Garden, and some SoulCollage(r) cards, but that's not really work....)

Consider this, any of you who are women reading this blog, you have untold energy and creative potential inside of you - and you can contact it, stir it up, calm it down, renew it and find healing through it. Check out this book if I have made you curious.

Namaste,
Musemother
ps a new Relaxation CD will soon be available for sale through my website - link on upper right hand corner of this blog. or send me an email.