Thank You Very Sweet

I first learned of the concept of sacred rage while reading about of the myth of Pacha Karmaq, the Father of the World according to Peruvan Ichma Culture. The Ichma predated the Inca’s and they believe that God created Man and Woman but, in so doing, forgot to create food. When man died from malnourishment, woman got angry and demanded reparation from God. Pacha Karmaq responded by blessing woman with fertility and populating the earth with food. According to this myth, the sacred rage of woman led her to demand healing change.

In my view, this myth speaks to the need for sacred rage over neglect and how it can inspire creative resourcefulness within us.  It begs us to ask questions of ourselves about what is being neglected in our lives, communities, country, and world.  What is being neglected in education and in spiritual development? Can we speak our truth about these areas of neglect and even muddle in the uncomfortable waters of rage over them?

I am enraged by the marginalization of women in stories about God.  I am an ordained Christian minister with a Master of Divinity from an Ivy League institution.  I learned about God as man in my formal and informal training. Courses about God and women were specialized electives, not general track requirements. 

The year 2020 created time and space for me to explore the ways that world cultures throughout history have understood who God is.  I learned many stories about powerful women; Goddesses, Wisdom Keepers, Sages, Leaders, Healers. I learned stories of women so tall and majestic that ‘they have to bow their heads when the moon hangs low’ (Hafiz – “Dropping Keys).  I learned myths about women with super powers and the audacity to express rage toward God, I learned that the wombs of women were worshiped!

No more! My sacred rage over this neglect is inspiring creative change in my life and in my understanding of who I am. Perhaps the burn of sacred rage is what we all need to melt away that which does not serve our individual and collective highest good.

10 years after finding Kesner dead, I’m finally beginning to feel like myself again. I’m re-membering. The pieces are coming back together and I am grateful.

You can’t rush healing. Healing happens often in stillness. We do nothing.

Breathe into the uncomfortable places.

Now that I have your attention, I’ll share that I have been very intentional about calling this holiday Easter this year.  I always remember it being called Easter until I became an adult and my Christian friends started telling me that I had to call it Resurrection Sunday only.

“Easter” was a holiday before Christianity existed.  It was a time to celebrate the Spring Equinox, the end of a long winter and the beginning of Spring.  In some places this holiday was also associated with fertility.  This is how we would later get to the eggs (bunnies and eggs came later, admittedly I don’t really vibe with bunnies who lay eggs).

But a new beginning after a long winter? A new birth?  These themes don’t seem so far off from Resurrection to me.  It’s a celebration of life after death! I can understand why early Christians would associate the Resurrection of Christ with a holiday that celebrated new beginnings. Can’t you?

My heart wonders if the people who told us that we couldn’t call it Easter anymore were men.

I am reminded today that women were so very present with Jesus during these Holy three days- the last to be with him in death, the first to rise early to anoint his body with oil and spice , and the first to discover the empty tomb.

Lady this is not the time to hide your light or conform just because someone said so.

We are emerging from darkness to light.

This is a fertile time.

He is Risen.

Happy Easter!!

Yesterday I had a vision of having truffle mushrooms. It was a brief thought, an intention set, and then I went on with my day. By the end of the day I had attracted truffle butter, truffle honey, truffle cooking sauce, truffle goat cheese and actual truffle flakes. To be clear, I did not go out and buy these items, I attracted them. They were shared with me by a friend who recently returned from Italy and who had no prior knowledge of my truffle vision from earlier in the day.

I say this to say – set an intention and then let it go. So many of us suffocate our dreams. We have a vision but we don’t trust God to carry it out. Instead we hover, attempt to control and cling tightly to every detail of how our vision will be fulfilled.

And of course when things don’t go our way, we suffer.

Don’t try to micro-manage God. ‘God is able and God will bless you exceedingly abundantly above all you could ask or think.’ (Ephesians 3:20)

Trust that and let go.

I’m officiating a wedding tomorrow. I listened to Marianne Williamson a bit to prepare. She teaches about Love and she claims that every relationship is an assignment.

We are to love everyone, intimacy is already established because we’re all connected in Spirit. But our ego tries to protect us and keep us separated. We’ve all experienced traumas along the way that reinforce a felt need to self-protect.

So our relationships are assigned to us for our healing and re-membering. We learn in our interpersonal relationships where we have blockages to love.

And our Holy relationships- those are our life partners. When you experience chemistry with a person, that feeling of butterflies in the beginning, that is a moment of Divine enlightenment. Your soul recognizes that there is an opportunity for growth to be had in a relationship with that person. It’s not random.

Our Holy relationships are our partnerships; the containers for mutual healing. As our stuff comes up, our partnership holds the space. We grow together and remember – step by step- that we are Love.

I’ve been asking this question for years – Better to be right or be free?  Last week I asked:  ‘better to be right or be love?’ And my friend Kathleen asked:  ‘better to be right or be happy?’  It’s all the same to me – and yet even as I type, I’m convicted by my own actions.

Yesterday I was angry with my studio manager. For three weeks there has been nobody present at the front desk to check in my Saturday morning yoga class. My student who works for the studio has stepped in but that wasn’t fair to her; she’d come to take class, not to work.  When I saw my studio manager, my own manager persona kicked.  I am a director in another part of my life and I manage a team.

“Do you have a strategy for making sure that this doesn’t happen again?”  I asked her.

I sat firmly in my rightness.

But I didn’t think about the way that my energy made others feel –  those who were sitting in the lobby with no context and who are used to interacting with me differently.

In hindsight, I wished I’d communicated differently.

Where does being right ever really get us? Everything that ever will happen will happen whether we try to control it or not.  And other people always show us where we are stuck. In this way, they are our teachers.  If we open our eyes and allow our hearts to soften, we realize that all of these experiences are here to teach us.  Everyone is our teacher and our most difficult situations show us where we have blockages to love.

I am learning that I’d rather be love because it feels better.  I am learning how to communicate my needs without being unloving ~ because I want to contribute to what is good in the world.  There is enough aggression.

Join me on this return to Love?

Don’t mind me if I preach for a minute..

I was in a yoga class once when a teacher said this:

Comparison is the thief of joy.

I have repeated this many times since then and I believe it to be true.  We really should not look among the branches for what should be in the root.  And the root is always LOVE. You are so unique and wonderfully different from everyone who was ever created.  God has blessed YOU with certain special gifts and a vision that, if you have the courage to pursue it, might satisfy your longing to be different.  Don’t spend time comparing your journey / process / experiences / progress to others.  This steals your joy and might even make you a downright miserable person to be around.

Don’t blame others for your misery. The journey goes down.  Root down in who you are and deepen in that. Learn to love everything about you and what you have to offer to the world. The more that you love you, the more that your capacity to love others grows. You are pure LOVE. That is the truth.

Abide in that.

You are pure Love. That is your essential nature and it cannot be changed. Anything that you put out that is unlike love – maybe a fear based manipulation or an attack – is the ego. The ego is trying to protect you and it thinks you need to do these things in order to survive in the world. You don’t. This is learned behavior. Anything that you put out that is unlike Love makes the truth of who you are something that you need to learn to remember.

Last night as I was preparing for my Spirit Flow Yoga class, I decided to check the Revised Common Lectionary to consider the selected texts for this week.  The Gospel text was John 2:1-11, the story of Jesus turning water into wine:

Jesus was at a wedding with his mom.  His mom alerted him that the wine had run out.  He instructed servants to get six barrels and fill them to the brim with water.  By the time the servants returned to the wedding with the barrels, the water had become wine.

This story is interesting because most people know of it; even people who really don’t know much about Jesus seem to know that at some point her turned water into wine.  It’s also interesting because it doesn’t seem to have any noble purpose – no sick person is being healed.  Jesus is seemingly just keeping the party going.

I felt compelled, last night, to research this Scripture to better understand the point of it. What struck me as I was reading is that those barrels were said to have been able to hold between 30-40 gallons of water.  I never considered the size of the barrels.  I’d always envisioned a few carafes, to be honest.  But this was A LOT of water (six 30-40 gallon barrels) turned into A LOT of wine.  And the barrels were said to be filled to the brim.

What I said about it to my class this morning is that maybe this story has something to tell us about abundance.  God wants us to live abundantly.  And the thing about abundance is that its not always good.  Abundance doesn’t mean good, it means full.  We are supposed to have full lives; to learn and grow from every experience.

If things are wonderful for you right now, abide in that.  Don’t feel guilty about your happiness or do things to sabotage it because you’re used to something different.  If life is challenging in this season, let it all happen. Let yourself be done. Ask – what is this experience requiring from me?  What can I learn here? How can I grow?  If life is boring – find 100 things to be grateful for right now.  Take out a notebook and write them down.

We’re not meant to hide from any aspect of our lives.  We’re meant to live abundantly – God wants our barrels to be full.

Merry Christmas!

All month long and through the season of Advent, I’d been teaching about hope in my yoga classes. I talked about hope being powerful and fragile, how we need to model hope for future generations, and about finding joy in hoping.

On December 23rd I taught from the Gospel of Luke. I read a story about Mary going to visit her friend while she was in the early stages of her pregnancy with Jesus. Her friend, Elizabeth, was also pregnant and the child in Elizabeth’s womb lept inside of her when she encountered pregnant Mary. It was a joyous moment and in the exchange Elizabeth said:

“Blessed is she who believed in the fulfillment of what the Lord had spoken to her” (Luke 1:45)

In this season and always, believe that what the Lord has spoken to you will be fulfilled. And trust God’s timing, it’s perfect.

“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.” (Romans 15:13)