THE CRUMBLING
Returning to London after my pilgrimage through the sacred sites, I knew that life couldn’t continue, as it had before. I could feel the crumbling coming.
Having been in my spiritual closet for more than 15 years, I felt more trapped than ever. No matter how many teachers I trained with or qualifications I received, I still didn’t feel ready to step into the work that my soul was calling me to do because of an indescribable fear that I would be persecuted for my beliefs.
The tighter I clung to the life I’d consciously created, the harder it got to hold it together. Before long my life began falling around me. Kali, the compassionate, dark mother appeared with her sword, severing any part of my life that was not in alignment with who I came here to be. My decade-long relationship ended, one of my best friends died suddenly, followed by another, and when I moved to a new apartment, I discovered that that was falling apart also.
It brought me to my knees. My ego finally begged for mercy and asked my soul to lead. I committed to answering the call for real and began the serious business of aligning my life to my soul. Like a striptease, revealing my true self to those around me. I committed to my spiritual practice and sharing Her whispers like an ancient warrior in training. I felt more scared and alive than ever.
SHAKTI RISING II
‘Once the Shakti is unfolded, the inner yoga
begins to take place spontaneously. That yoga
happens by itself; you don’t have to do it.’
MUKTANANDA
After two years of non-negotiable spiritual practice consisting of Light Sourcing and body shaking, one morning I woke up feeling extremely joyous and noticed that my whole body was convulsing of its own accord. It was like I was having some sort of epileptic fit, only it actually felt good, ecstatic even. I went to the doctor and had a whole lot of tests. I was in perfect health.
Some nights I would wake up to my whole body shaking and my teeth chattering at a crazy speed that I could not even try to re-create. I shared my experiences with one of my teachers and she informed me that they were the side effects of your Kundalini Shakti beginning to rise.
At work, I’d be sitting at my desk and out of nowhere one of my legs or my body would jolt and jerk on its own accord. On a couple of occasions in meetings, I caught my neck jolting and tried to restrain it, so as not to look like a crazy lady or as if I’d nodded off mid-sentence. Sometimes I would be overwhelmed by a surge of a kind of ecstatic sexual energy and feel my whole body getting physically hot. All this was the result of my Shakti serpent uncoiling and beginning to rise.
The Shakti would sometimes shoot from my head to my toes, like being charged up like a battery and cleared out in some way. Sometimes it felt warmer and fluid, like sweet nectar intertwining each of my chakras and cracking open my heart. It felt like the heavens and earth were connecting through my body.
I began having visions and dreams of past lives. Of times I had been persecuted for speaking out and trusting my innate wisdom and power – my past lifetimes as the healer, Priestess, the mystic, the poet, and the witch. The burning times when so many of us were silenced and killed for speaking out, for sharing our wisdom, and standing in our feminine power. For worshiping the seasons, understanding our natural ability to heal, sharing our medicine, and honoring the Earth.
It was as if these ancient memories had been locked away and the rising of the Shakti had released the lid to a carefully sealed vault. It was uncomfortable and liberating. Finally I understood why I was so scared to share my voice and step into my role as a spiritual writer, healer and teacher. How even though I knew with certainty that this is what I came here to do, still I wavered.
During these few months of my Shakti rising, I would shift in and out of periods of normality, from the trauma of processing past lives to complete euphoria. I began seeing sacred geometry and how everything was connected, like seeing the blueprint to all of life. I felt like Dorothy stepping into a new land where everything was all of a sudden in Technicolor.
I would look at a flower petal and understand how it was connected to the larger whole. I would sit in the bath and go into the intricacies of a single bubble, almost like I was able to morph into it myself. Sometimes an hour would pass and it felt like a minute. Other times a minute would pass and it felt like an hour. Time got stretchy.
I would pass a tree and feel it whisper directly into my heart. Lying on the Earth, I could feel Her pulse and received the energy that surged beneath charging me up. I felt one with the entire planet – my energy connected to the Shakti of the entire Universe, like one big river or ocean of Life. I didn’t own the Shakti, rather I was simply allowing it to flow through me. I felt more alive than ever.
After a few months the teeth chattering and spontaneous jolting started to ease. But I was forever changed. A force within me had remembered and awakened, and now awakened it wasn’t going to sleep. It would be a while before I could find the words to describe this period of my life.
I vowed to answer the calls of my soul and the Universe, no matter how much sense it made or how scary it was. I began sharing my writing and teaching groups. On my morning walks I would hear whispers from Mother Earth, just as I did when I was a young girl. These whispers turned into my first book Light Is the New Black. I was in flow with She and She was in flow with me.
A year later when I met my now husband Craig, I experienced my third Shakti rising, spurred on in the coming together of the sacred masculine and feminine energies. But that’s a story for another time (and perhaps another book).
IMRAMMA: SANTA FE
The publishing date for my first book, Light Is the New Black, was rapidly approaching and my flight instincts were peaking. In three weeks I was to take the stage in front of 500-plus people at my first major speaking gig.
I find myself in Santa Fe, standing in front of my speaking coach, Gail Larsen, and four peers. I am there to face my fears around sharing my voice. While I had become comfortable sharing my writing, the thought of standing on a stage in front of so many people was making me nervous.
I had been teaching workshops for three years, but still after all this time, there was part of me that could not shake the irrational feeling that I was going to be killed for what I had to say. There was no rational reason for this fear, but still it was there.
From the moment I landed in Santa Fe I could feel a grapefruit-sized lump lodged in the center of my throat. No matter what I did, I could not swallow, soothe, or force it down. Encouraged by the black obsidian beneath my feet, I could feel that age-old pattern of holding back my voice about to erupt all over the place. Fighting to hold down the tears and entrap the citrus bulge, which now seemed to have developed razor-blade-like edges, I did my best to get through the morning by not speaking at all.
Just before we break for lunch I am instructed to stand in front of the group to do a 15-minute speech. Off the cuff. Without even 30 seconds to prep. Video camera on record. Eyes locked on me. Had I really chosen to be there of my own freewill?
I decide that if I had a superpower, teleportation would be it.
I am encouraged just to share what emotions are going through me at that moment. Through a shaking defensive voice, I state… that is what I am scared of.
I take a deep breath and soon discover that this feeling that I had been holding back was a surprising concoction of grief and rage. Through staccato sobs, I confess:
‘I am so furious with God/dess right now, I cannot even begin… I mean seriously, why does the work I am here to do have to involve doing the very thing that scares me most?
‘How can I possibly encourage other people to share their soul’s voice, when I am so petrified to do it myself? Why is this my message? It’s so unfair. I mean, why can’t my message be about style or health or creativity or quite frankly anything but this?’
After what felt like an eternity, the sobbing made way for something else – a sound current foreign to my ears, yet famil
iar to my soul. She spoke with cadence, clarity, wisdom, and conviction.
And She had a lot to say.
FREEING MY VOICE
The moment I discovered chanting it felt like coming home. For the first few months of practicing regularly, I cried pretty much every day. Not tears of sadness, but the joyful tears of being reunited with myself (Self), of coming home. I was finally allowing the voice of my soul to sing. The chanting filled me up like sweet nectar, and, each time I sang, it was as if I was not doing the singing, rather, it was I who was being sung.
I bought myself a harmonium (a very clunky, unsexy Indian musical instrument that makes the most heart-bellowing sounds) and started playing it each day as part of my spiritual practice. One by one, women who were connected to chanting started entering my life. As they did, a little light went off inside me, as if to say, ‘Bing, bing, bing, yes this, follow this.’
Following the golden thread being woven before me, I began working with my teacher and friend Nikki Slade in truly freeing my voice from the lifetimes of soul trauma that I’d discovered through my Shakti Awakening. Using the power of the vibration of my voice I was able to remember, embody, voice, and release it all. Lifetimes of unexpressed rage, grief, agony, sadness, loss, betrayal, guilt, and despair were finally set free through the power of my voice.
One by one, clients began coming to me with similar soul traumas from times of persecution – witches, healers, High Priestesses, midwives, teachers, medicine women, seers, Knights Templar, and diviners from times past. All with a knowing of the work they had returned here to do, with an unshakable fear of rising to it. Together we would journey and call those pieces back home. Renouncing vows of silence made in times where it was the only way to survive. Witnessing the pain and suffering that living in these times entailed. Being persecuted for sharing their truth, medicine, and gifts with the world. For working with the seasons and seeing all people as holy.
As more and more clients arrived at my door with the same symptoms, I started seeing a pattern. Many of us experienced a sense of urgency to rise up, come out of our spiritual closets, realign our lives, and do this work in around 2012 – the year that the Mayan calendar ended and a new age was called in, which I’ll discuss in more detail later.
It was as if during this time something shifted. In the ending of one age and the beginning of another the feminine vow of silence was lifted. Right on cue each of us beginning to come out of hiding, intuiting that it was finally safe to be fully seen and once again rise.
NO LONGER SUSTAINABLE
Light Is the New Black was finally out on the shelves and having been in a spiritual closet for so long, I felt like I had to give it my all in an effort to make up for lost time.
While I had written the book and created a whole new life for myself by surrendering to the mysterious flow of She, I had no idea how to integrate this new way of being into running my business. A career girl who learned to make it in a man’s world, I reverted to the old patriarchal ways of enduring, pushing, and striving. Of being the hard worker, the dutiful soldier, the good girl. Using pressure not pleasure as my driving force. Putting my service to others above service to myself.
My client sessions were booking out three, four, five, six months in advance. I kept promising myself that I would tend to filling my inner well when things quieted down. But days turned into weeks, and weeks into months.
My time in nature was rationed to trips to the closest park, which didn’t touch the edges of what my soul was truly yearning for. I even began approaching my daily devotional spiritual practice with a sense of duty. It was ever so subtle, but every decision I made took me further away from the rhythm of Me and thus She and Life.
Each time I took a step in the direction of my old ways of being I was resisting being held by the mysterious force that not only nourished me most but also was responsible for the effortless flow of all of Life. Acting from a place of pressure and endurance, I was resisting being held by the Mother and Life.
She/the Universe began sending me messages. Each time I sat down for a client session or an interview, the builders, working two doors down, would start drilling. Tuning in to the subtle energy of the soul is quite challenging with high-pitched machinery shrieking around you.
I knew that I was here to create a life’s work, not a season. But at this rate it wouldn’t be possible. There had to be a different way…
One Friday morning I woke up sobbing after having one those dreams that are just so real. In the dream I had a baby girl. Everyone was in awe because she never ever cried. But because she didn’t cry, a whole week passed without her receiving any nourishment. Guilt-stricken for failing to look after her, I scooped her up and brought her to my breast, feeding and rocking her, mothering her and doing all I could to get her to receive. I looked down at this beautiful baby girl and as she looked so lovingly up at me I recognized her soul as my own. She then morphed into my mum’s.
Feeling the deep sadness of this dream I didn’t move for about an hour, doing all that I could to hold on to the importance of the message and also sending love to my mum.
When I got up I checked my phone and discovered a text from my dad to call home. Feeling the energy behind the text, I knew it was not good news.
Mum had breast cancer. Dad wasn’t meant to be calling me because Mum didn’t want anyone to know (her younger sister also had cancer and was scheduled for surgery to have her bladder removed), and didn’t want anyone to worry. Dad suggested that I call Mum and say that I had a dream about her and wanted to check that she was OK. I told him about the dream and that I wouldn’t have to lie.
Looking up the metaphysical meaning of breast cancer, I discover it is to do with a refusal to nourish yourself and the ability to receive – the meaning of my dream. Like the majority of women I know, my mum is a total giver, putting every other person’s needs ahead of her own. I saw how I was doing the same thing with my work once again. Like the baby in my dream, and like so many other women, my mum and I had been denying ourselves the nourishment that we needed.
One Monday morning, just as the drilling started up for the week, I fell to my knees and prayed to the Mother to show me the way. And immediately got a response, ‘Halve your work hours, double your devotion, and go to the Chalice Well Gardens in Glastonbury.’
Knowing guidance when I hear it, 15 minutes later my overflowing diary had been cleared, bus ticket booked, and the blue angel room reserved at my favorite guesthouse on Wellhouse Lane, on the outskirts of Glastonbury.*
The day before I left for Glastonbury, my friend Jayne introduced me to Madeline Giles who was visiting from the USA. The moment our eyes meet I know I’ve found a Magdalene sister.
Unable to find the words, Madeline and I end up just looking at each other while awkwardly smiling and laughing. When I tell her how disappointed I am that my upcoming trip to Glastonbury means we can’t spend more time together in London, she reveals her purpose for being in the UK: To tour the sacred sites of Glastonbury with Kundalini teacher Guru Jagat.
We make plans to meet for afternoon tea.
I already feel like I am in another world.
* * *
* Glastonbury is a small town in Somerset in the UK. It is a sacred place where the veil between the worlds is extra thin. It is also where the Michael and Mary ley lines of the Earth meet. Likened to meridian points of the planet, many ancient sacred sites, stone circles, temples and churches around the world were built on these ley lines, in order to harness the powerful feminine energy of the Earth (Shakti) that runs beneath. Avalon is an ancient land between the worlds and Glastonbury is thought to be the location of one of its main communities.
RETURNING TO AVALON
Three days later I found myself lying, star-shaped, in a patch of daffodils in the Chalice Well Gardens. My inner well being replenished to the sound of the red springs bubbling eternal.
I allowed the full weight of my body to be held by the Earth, as it nouri
shed me in ways that I hadn’t been able to do for myself. My heart began to balance to the beat of She.
Surrendered in Her arms, my soul drank it all in. Supported by the Shakti running through the sacred ley lines beneath me. I could feel the feminine energy of the Earth beginning to spiral through me, like nectar replenishing the most undernourished of places, connecting each of my chakras.
Hour by hour my parched soul was quenched, my hardness softened, my brittleness made fertile, as pressure gave way to pleasure.
The next day, I began to hear Her whisper again, as I had before on my first visit to Glastonbury. I surrendered to the plan greater than me, picked up a pen and began writing the name and outline for this book. All the time, in awe at how much easier life is when I surrender to Her embrace.
In the margins I wrote down several sacred places in the UK that I felt called to visit for the book (and my own pleasure), including Merlin’s Cave, Nectan’s Glen, Avebury, and the crop circles in Wiltshire (which I had discovered was the home of some of my ancestors).
Lying there in the Chalice Well Gardens, I thought of Madeline and couldn’t shake the feeling that perhaps I was meant to be on the same sacred trip that she had journeyed here for. I delegated the decision to the Universe by declaring, ‘Alright, Universe, if I am meant to be on this trip, organize it for me and organize it quick.’
Back at the guesthouse, as I put on my favorite chanting music and got ready to take a bath, there was a knock. I opened the door to find a white-clad yogi called Ra Ma Kaur standing there, asking me if I was there for the sacred tour with Guru Jagat starting the next day.
Rise Sister Rise Page 3
