For a long time, I wasn't much for the word. Goddess. Not at all. I was allergic to the word, to be honest. It caught in the throat. It didn't seem to weigh anything on the tongue. Too awkward. Too airy-fairy. Too light. If you'd told me six years ago that I'd be co-facilitating a writing circle inspired by sacred goddess stories, I'd have spit out my drink. Too intimidating. Too assumptive. Too removed. So I want to tell you about how I shed my little goddess aversion. But first, let's talk about the matter of women. We can move countries. And mountains. We can change our minds. Our hearts. Our seasons. And our retreat dates, too. So we did:
The Women's Sacred Stories Retreat in Tennessee is now on
Melanie and I moved the retreat to a long weekend in the heart of fall. Because I want to see rich, dripping velvet colors in the leaves of the Smoky Mountains. Because I want my whole being to be deliciously steeped from head to toe in thick autumn air. Because I want to see you in our circle around warm fire and burning candles and fuzzy blankets and old stories and warm women. Because laying claim to the whole of our divine feminine is so raw and revealing that it's bringing up the unchartered wilderness in me. This is the thing about women, my women. We come here Real. Breathing, pulsing, fragile, fierce, perfect, flawed, strong, stirred, skin and flesh women. That's my tribe, it is. Give me real. We tell our truths and we loosen our constraints and we turn up our voices and we shake down our stories and we call ourselves out and we call ourselves in. And we find a hundred thousand ways to feel and know that our life is ours for the taking. We show up real. And together, we expand our expression.
Showing up real and expanding our embodied expression as women is what the goddess stories are ALL ABOUT, too. Retrieving. Remembering. Recollecting. Reclaiming. Reigniting. Revering who we are as women. The goddess stories are mirrors to the raw and real and messy and vulnerable and sexual and sacred and cosmic and powerful and creative and compulsive and mysterious within. Myths don't live in the distant cosmos. And they don't live in the ancient past. They live inside of each of us and through the gentle breath of you. They guide you on how to unlock your vibrant aliveness. How to not apologize for wanting it. How to own it or receive it and not push it away. How to awaken the dormant parts of your nature. They validate your deepest impulses. Reveal the imprints of your spirit. Call you to expand. They ask for more of you to show up. To you. To here. To now. They beckon you to get more naked. To be in this skin and to allow it to be transparent. To stop the trivialization of your own being.
These goddess energies - along with the moon - are calling me to beat my sacred drum, all over again.
The goddesses are about getting radically real and allowing the whole of our vast femininity. Digging into their sacred stories is a matter of initiation into our skin. So yes, I am down with the goddess and the goddesses. Besides, let's get real, painfully real, for a moment.
Women need to recover the words that were lost and hidden from us, that were torn from our lips and forgotten, until they sounded so foreign we could no longer recognize ourselves within them. Goddess. We once gathered to whisper her name and their names, in honor of all that is sacred inside of each of us. Let's remember, together. Come gather with us in the Smoky Mountains on October 12th-17th, 2017. Meditation. Yoga. Women's self-exploratory writing circle. Sacred storytelling.