Following the impulse… and uncoiling the snake…
In 2008 my world imploded. An unexpected downsizing of the company I worked for resulting in the loss of my job, coupled with the heart breaking-open meltdown of the relationship that I was in at the time, were the catalysts for the shattering of ‘the glass jar that was my ego’. The simultaneous loss of these two key pieces in my life was like having the rug pulled out from beneath my feet. The structure of my personal reality collapsed. I had plucked the narcissus flower and been swallowed into the underworld, rudely plunged into the unconscious…
Of course, my masculine oriented personality structure had a linear & logical solution!
I remember telling the psychologist I was seeing at the time, “I’m going to take a month out of circulation to rest and do absolutely nothing and then I’ll start networking again and in no time, I’ll be back on my feet” (I had thought this was an incredibly generous time-out gift to myself!) Well, existence had other ideas…The unconscious sucked me in deeper. There was almost no energy available for participating in life in the ways in which I had previously done. The impulse to dissolve, to unravel, to die was unrelentingly insistent. The feminine was ready to birth herself, whether I liked it or not.
Previously, I was a mind-over-matter kind of a person and of course this served me (fairly) well during the first half of my life. But now matter was knocking loud and hard, demanding that I pay attention. She was calling me to slow down, to listen very finely with sensation, with intuition and with feeling. Embodiment was Queen and she insisted on turning everything inside, outside, upside down, so that the King might die (In Alchemy this is the Nigredo or Blackness)
And so the proposed month ‘out of circulation’ turned into almost three years without work in the world, without an income, without any idea of what I was doing or where I was going or how it would work out. I used up all the resources I had saved up. I spent my compensation package from my previous employer, cashed in my pension, sold my shares and eventually rented out my house. It was a very scary time! There was a loud voice in my head screaming at me that I was a fool, that what I was doing was illogical, irrational & irresponsible (I had two beautiful boys both still in school and with some several years yet to go…) AND, there was also another part of me that absolutely knew that something wild & wonderful was happening, and as uncomfortable as it was, that this alchemical transmutation was the thing that I most deeply longed for. I was willing to lose everything.
One day I spotted a tiny little advert in a wellness publication. It said,
“Uncoiling the snake: A women’s retreat with Shakti Malan” Sexual energy is a tremendous source of vitality and life force. When we own and live our sexual energy, we incarnate – we come to embody the goddess within. We wake up to the moment. Through our sexual flow as women, the worlds are birthed. And yet this potential lies dormant in so many of us. The snake, the kundalini, the origin of our embodied vitality, is there, at the base of the spine, but it slumbers, and it rarely gets touched. Until the wild woman in us wakes up to who she really is.
I had never heard the word kundalini, I didn’t even know what a chakra was, but instinctively, I knew that this was what was happening in my body and I just knew that I had to go. And so it was that along with a small group of women, I arrived at N’auma! in the ‘Klein Karoo’ for this retreat with Shakti – her very first offering as a full-time Tantrika…
If you had asked me then to write a creative piece on ‘What my life would look like in 10 years time,’ I could not in my wildest imagination have come up with the life that I live now. (Actually, it’s not really my life, it feels more like life living itself as me) Following your Bliss is never easy, but as Joseph Campbell said, “It’s true that If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.” What I have embodied doing this ‘work’ is that if we consciously follow our attraction and our desire, then the keys required for the next leap in our evolution will reveal themselves…
In a previous email, ‘Claiming our freedom and living fully embodied lives’ I posted these three questions that Shakti repeatedly asked:
- What is it that you really, really, really, really want?
- How much bliss can you stand?
- How can you keep falling more deeply in love with yourself?
If all you ever contemplate for the rest of your human incarnation are the above three questions, I do believe that you will wake up to the power & purpose of your being here on the planet at this time.
Coming up on Sunday 14th July, we are offering a free interactive mini-workshop for women in which we will dialogue and explore the four cornerstones of waking up to our true potential: Power * Purpose * Being * Woman
You are invited to join Claire Rumore and myself as we unpack some important questions like:
- What does it mean to be a woman right here, right now on the planet at this precise moment in our evolution?
- Why is it that so very few of us incarnated here in Female Form recognise that ‘we’ are the ones who hold the power?
- Why are we so unwilling to claim and step into our power? And why are we so reluctant to take our Freedom?