How The Divine Feminine Principle Has Changed
Yoga of the moon is about the realisation of the divine Goddess within. Self-empowerment and freedom to be ourselves in harmony with the cycles of the moon. The role in society of women has changed greatly down the centuries. Finally, women have been regaining their power after centuries of subjugation by patriarchal societies.
Unfortunately, this is not the same across the world in many countries where many women are still oppressed. However, the journey within our own soul is about uniting and balancing the divine male and female principles within us all.
The Journey Into Consciousness
The journey into consciousness is ours to undertake as soon as we become aware of its necessity. This can occur by internal or external pressures. The balance that the world is so acutely asking for mirrors our inner imbalance. It is, between the forces of the Divine Masculine and the Divine Feminine, inside each one of us. One mind at the time, it is our responsibility to bring our inner realm to an agreement.
Like the thousand-petalled lotus flower, once enough of us can nurture and create peace inside of ourselves, the world will know peace outside too. The archetypal forces of creativity and destruction are represented in ancient mythology by Eros and Thanatos, the impulse to create life and destroy it. Every cycle in our bodies is a constant reminder of these forces at work:
● The in-breath and the out-breath
● The beating of the heart
● The stream of thoughts and the gaps in between them
● These all hold the potential to bring this dichotomy into our awareness.
Our Place In The Cosmos
Slower cycles can be observed in the 28-day Moon cycle, the central focus of attention in Nature's Rhythm Yoga. This cycle becomes a vessel for the understanding and assimilation of the shorter and the longer cycles we are enmeshed in. Whether we are conscious of them or not.
It’s not in the scope of this blog post to go into depth about the historical details of how our current state came into being. It is our intention to bring awareness to the vastness of the cycle we are part of and the fact that our reality is but a point in the massive circle of time.
Knowledge protects, ignorance endangers. Armed with a fully open heart, delving into the realm of mythology and history can bring much-needed relief and a new understanding of the stories that get woven into our experiences.
Hopefully, your curiosity will be aroused by the possibilities that a more empowering vision of your actual place in the cosmos can bring to your life. Hence, turning it into a genuinely fulfilling and spiritual journey. A quest that will open you to the power of your own creativity!
The Divine Feminine In History and How it Changed
One of the best-kept secrets in our world is that the gifts that we have learnt to associate with the beginning of civilization and the first written Sumerian records had been implemented long before, during a time when Goddess worshipping was extended in Europe and the Middle East.
Agriculture dates back to the Neolithic (10,000 B.C.) as do the first stable communities. The Goddess was worshipped not just as the Queen of Heaven, but as the Mother Creator and the Goddess of sexual love and procreation. It was the life-giving properties that were highly valued and promoted in the first non-nomadic societies.
In our time, the false dichotomy of civilization vs. nature has become a traditional view in the dominating paradigm. We have been led to believe that war and conquest were necessary evils that allowed the flourishing of civilization in its current terms when this is not the case.
Education, administration, law, government and priesthood were already in place among the old Europeans and the societies of the Fertile Crescent long before written records appear on the stage.
Female Sexuality
Nowadays, it’s hard to even imagine that female sexuality was at a peak of expression back in 3,000 B.C. But this is what even the biased accounts of the invaders have imprinted on their records. Sex was the gift of the Goddess to her children, it was holy and sacred, as she was considered the Goddess of sexual love and procreation.
Sex was the means to connect with spirit and women were considered incarnations of the deity. Unmarried women of all social echelons lived in the temple as Goddess priestesses, receiving men who wanted to get in touch with the divine through the practice of ritual or hierogamic sex.
Matrilineal descent and the cultivation of the life-giving gifts over the power to conquer allowed the flourishing ancient societies to create a refined art that was going to be replaced by the coarser artistic expressions of the invaders’ world that valued the power of domination by conquest over the nourishment of life.
And then a long struggle began to shape the future of many generations to come. The Hebrew of the time established the patrilineal descent, imposing marital fidelity only on women to ascertain the paternity of children. Does this sound more familiar?
Let this be an example of how the nurturing values that were the basis of the Goddess rituals and resulting cultures later became despised, devalued, and suppressed in favour of a domination mentality. The power to conquest, submit and destroy was venerated by a society focused on a male, omniscient and omnipotent God.
Here and Now In the 21st Century
We are in the 21st century now, in a digital era, where a global mind is taking shape as we communicate across continents breaching the barriers of space and time.
Women still find issues regarding their bodies, their relationships, and their integration as equal members of society at every level. We may be faced with what are called first-world problems in the developed countries, while in many developing countries women are worse off than ever, reflecting again collectively the inner imbalance. As above, so below. Our inner harmony ripples out and that's the urgent call of our unique times.
The rhythm of life and nature is alive in each one of us. The forces in friction in the cosmos are a living reality inside every human being. How we resolve this inner conflict between our inner Divine Masculine and our Divine Feminine is our challenge.
Whether we choose to tame one of these impulses, or to bring both to expression or use them in a cooperative way to manifest a harmonious self. Whatever our choices they are decisive in the unravelling not only of our lives but of the cosmos itself.
When our inner house is in good order, when we develop healthy boundaries and feel whole within ourselves, only then can we relate to another whole human being in harmony. Devoted and conscious humans can bring up healthy children that will be the women and men of a better future. the future generations directed to increase their spiritual connection and their loving consciousness work for the greater good.
We are insignificant, yet we are endowed with the power of divine intelligence to create and destroy whole worlds. It’s in the inner silence of stillness where we can start to listen to our own voice, uncontaminated by the dogmas of the day.
Leaving aside all interferences, we create a space for our beings to blossom, for the Goddess to rise again. From then on, we begin to leave footprints in the world around us, instead of letting the world shape us in contaminated ways. What we are to do with our rediscovered power is privy to each one of us.
Freedom of expression belongs to the sovereign individual. Through the process of remembering what has been long forgotten, it appears evident that it’s a birthright and not a choice:
The right to bring the expression of that elusive Divine Feminine into balance in our own lives and in our own unique ways…
Free of the shackles of centuries of patriarchal domination, now we may reach deep within and reclaim the Divine Goddess within each and every one of us.
This is the journey of Yoga of the Moon…
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