Abigail Carter, Author, Artist, Website Producer

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Discovering Our Inner Divine Feminine, The Sex and the City Method. Cosmo not Included.

There is much we don’t know, yet sense. Another universe perhaps, an alternate existence. “You are a healer,” she tells me, “Your ultimate goal in life is to embrace your divine feminine, and help others to do the same.” Today was my first reading with Joann, a psychic/medium/astrologer based in Tuscon, AZ. It is not my first reading with a psychic, but my first with her and from the outset, I sensed that this reading is going to be different somehow. We spoke for two hours and there is so much to process, but here is a small taste.I have heard this term before, “Divine Feminine,” but think of it in a Sex and the City way – drinking Cosmos on a beach with a bunch of girlfriends or in a Hot Yoga Class surrounded by those paintings of Indian women with elephant trunks. Its one of those terms I blow off, roll my eyes at, snicker about. There is an inherent sexual element to this term that my Google search on the term confirms:The mission of Divine Feminine-Awakened Masculine Institute is to awaken the erotic soul, to realize the integration of masculine and feminine wisdom in our lives through experiential education, sexual healing, and energy practice.Um. OK. That just screams “Open Marriage” to me. But I judge. I found this quote from Elizabeth Debold in her essay, the Devine Feminine Unveiled in EnlightenNext Magazine (http://www.enlightennext.org/magazine/j39/divine-feminine.asp?page=1) where she writes about Carl Jung and his theory with regards to repressed feminine sexuality. She reminds us that he wrote in the Victorian Age, a time when women were at the height of suppression in almost every facet of their lives, but most dramatically in a sexual way:Jung said woman “is faced with a tremendous cultural task [that] perhaps . . . will be the dawn of a new era,” because women long “for greater consciousness . . . [to] escape the blind dynamism of nature” in which he saw her caught.“Dawn of a new era.” “Greater consciousness.” OK, I’m listening.Over the last twenty years, however, something deeper has started stirring in women, a motivation to change culture at its roots. The goal is to create a new spiritual and ethical context that would balance and heal our hypermasculine world through honoring the feminine as sacred. This means a variety of things, and different women (or groups of women) have identified the feminine in different ways. There are some who see the Divine Feminine in the unique life-sustaining roles that have emerged from our biological role as mothers. Others speak of a feminine principle that is a force in the human psyche and a fundamental aspect of the manifest world. And still others are engaged in reclaiming or re-creating rituals to celebrate ancient goddesses, to make this feminine divinity more visible and conscious. Common to all (or most) is the sense that the sacred is not to be found in a transcendent realm out there somewhere but that the sacred is immanent to life. Thus these forms of spirituality celebrate the very human endeavor of trying to realize unity with nature and with one another—often celebrating the body, sexuality, and relationship.On another site I found:Our planet has a need to reinstate a sense of the "Goddess" within its understanding of the divine; the nurturing principle of the female is needed to help guide our way through the maze of accelerated change which surrounds us.I know. I sort of glazed over too. What is it about the language around this stuff that is so off-putting? My logical mind screams – “Hoky! New age. Too touchy feely!” But there is a tiny part of me too that hears something familiar in these convoluted words, perhaps because they are repeated often: Unity, Understanding, Nature, Sexuality, Celebration, Change.“You will be a leader,” Joann said, “teaching people to discover their own divine feminism, their own Deity within.”I can’t believe I am typing those words. I feel slightly breathless. No small task there. I get it enough to be interested in finding out more and making sense of what the heck all these words really mean in the context of real life.Another thing Joann told me was that I have a new book in me. She even gave me a title, which I won't share now. Too much to live up to, too soon, but oh so inspiring. I am on fire now. At the end of the reading, I asked her, "so should I write it as fiction or memoir?""Memoir of course! Its time for you to crawl out of your bat cave and expose yourself again to the world. You will be like Moses," she said. "People will trust your words."Yeah, so no pressure. Cosmo anyone?