Liberation is the way to evolution. As I align with my Higher Self, brilliance awakens within me. I release with ease that which depletes my vitality so I soar toward my special destiny. ~ Christina Caudill, Radiant Astrology
She was sick. Her body ached and the pain took her breath away. At night she tossed and turned, trying to relax, to get comfortable. The fear came then. She could imagine the tumors growing inside her body, all down her left side, breast, belly, leg.
She spoke to no one about this. Having no trust in the ways of the medical doctors, with their endless tests and poison pills, she knew the only way was to heal herself. She knew she must slow down and listen deeply, allowing her body’s wisdom to be heard.
She went to her healer. Waiting outside the door, she felt a powerful wave begin to rise and gain power. She felt nauseous, like she needed to throw up. The emotions beginning to hit her were completely overwhelming. Something was surfacing from the deep.
On the table, she prayed for answers, asking the healer to tell her about the energy and the pictures she saw. As hands moved over her body and energy began to move and shift, she suddenly became aware of the ancient seed of self-hatred she had reached again and again over the years, every time she went deep in healing or ritual. That energy would make her shake and gag on its intensity and cause her to be reduced to wailing anguish. Each time in the past that she had reached this place and released some of this energy, she came out of the trance feeling lighter and more free. But always the seed was there, waiting.
This time was different. This time it hit her all at once, fully formed and revealing its secrets. The Dark Egg, deep inside her, so deep it was hidden from sight. All those other healings just tapped its energies, cleared some of them away. But this time, it began to dislodge from its hiding place. It was incredibly heavy, like dark matter itself, a different kind of substance. Still energetic in nature, it was in the process of becoming material. Although it was made of the formless power of creation, it was gaining more and more the physical attributes of form. It was the source of her sickness.
As she saw the Dark Egg, she felt the self-hatred that fed it and saw its source revealed for the first time. She named it misogyny, the hatred of women. In a flash of insight, she saw the source of its creative power as all the ways in which women are oppressed, violated, demeaned, shunned, and annihilated within humanity. But, still deeper, she saw the defilement of the Divine Feminine, that pure, undifferentiated Oneness at the heart of all that is. She felt that everywhere you found men, women, children, organizations, institutions, communities, cultures, or religions embodying the Divine Feminine energies, you found them oppressed, debased, and vilified.
She saw that the Divine Feminine energy is what brings together lovers, families, and communities in unity and harmonious cooperation. It is the power that dissolves walls, boundaries, and borders in the spirit of oneness, compassion, cooperation, and celebration of life. Her culture had decided it was evil because it was so powerful, because all of life came forth from it and was absorbed back into it over and over again, in an infinite dance of birth and death and rebirth.
The Divine Masculine Principle, the energy of activation and individuation, the power that gave us separation and form and allowed All Creation to be born from the formless, this enlightening energy began to be worshipped and seen as the only power worthy of life.
From this denial of the dance of balance between the formless and form, all the illness of the world was born. The desire to acquire wealth and power in the physical form, to hunger after immortality of the flesh, to deny the inevitability of dissolving back into formlessness, this desire brought forth all the sicknesses of the soul: greed, competition, exploitation of Mother Earth, war, famine, slavery, oppression, and genocide. It brought the denial of the sacred nature of the flesh, the knowledge that all that takes form is born directly out of the formless web of infinity.
She saw how deeply this sickness was embedded in the fabric of our reality as a people. But in that moment, though the macrocosmic view was revealed in a flash as she sat on that table, she felt the Dark Egg living inside of her. It was hers. It was her collection of this poisonous power that she had absorbed through her ancestors, her family, her culture, and her experiences. She could see that it was not “out there” in the world. It lived in her. Just as it was the source of the soul sickness of her culture, it was also the source of her own soul sickness. She had given it lodging within her being and fed it with her own terror, her greed, hatred, anger, and self-denial. She fed it with her own internalized fear and loathing of the Divine Feminine Principle of life, the formless void of infinite potential from which we came and to which we will return.
And yet, as all things are born from the formless, as there is nothing that does not arise from it, she saw how this Dark Egg was formlessness itself, made manifest by the thoughts and emotions, the creative energies, within her. This Dark Egg was also, in essence, part of the dance. Her desire to heal herself, to love herself was itself the movement of the formless and the form, dancing within, creating union, harmony, and balance. And she was Divine Awareness, watching the dance of creation within her own being. The birth of this egg, as she released it, would be the birth of her own potential, her own access to the formless power of creation. It was her very own personal, direct experience of this dance between the Divine Creative Powers. And she saw how, deeper still, she was always at One with the source of life itself.
And so, as she sat up on that table, her healer asking her if she was ready, she looked within to find the answer. She saw how the Dark Egg was deeply embedded and entwined with her own being. She saw the death it would bring, and the return to formlessness, the dissolution into raw energy that it symbolized. She began to feel like a giant ovary, with the Dark Egg emerging into the world, preparing to pop out and be fertilized with her own Divine Masculine Power.
She knew she needed help to access and draw on Divine creative power for this energetic ovulation. Her healer called in all the powers of the universe, seen and unseen, all the guides and angels and guardians, all the Gods and Goddesses, Mother Earth and the four directions, the rain, the sun, the wind, and the trees. She closed her eyes and let the power flow into her.
The ocean rose up to meet her. Taking three deep breaths, she opened her throat and brought forth the birthing sound, loud and forceful and deep and enormously powerful. She felt it emerge from her, the great release of it.
Then she began to laugh. It was a laugh that felt so good, so free. As the energy released and dissolved and expanded, she saw so much more. She saw her own creative potential and how it was linked to all that is, how she would speak this understanding so others could feel it and birth it in their own way, as they, too, saw that the dance is within, always within.
In that moment, as the Dark Egg was fertilized by her own Love, a gestation was set in motion. She knew that the birth, when it came, would be her own freedom.
***
This story is dedicated to the re-emergence of the Divine Feminine within all of humanity, and to my Grandmothers, Evelyn Torrey and Lynn Henderson, who were the first to show me the Divine Powers, and my Grandfather, Clifford Torrey, who told me to remember the dance.
What an incredible time to be alive. We are witnessing the re-birth of the Divine Feminine within the consciousness of our species. We can see evidence of this all around us and in so many ways. As the largely Masculine Principle dominated hierarchy begins to crack and crumble, the Divine Feminine is being revealed as the missing link, the Divine Life Principle that has been oppressed and shunned, only to break through the cracking facade with shining newborn beauty.
There is a very important distinction in this infant language we are learning to speak that must be made clear. The Divine Feminine and the Divine Masculine are principles underlying all of life. They do not reference physical gender. The Feminine Principle is not more inherent in women and the Masculine Principle is not more inherent in men. This may seem obvious but often the literature about this topic seems to bring some confusion to these concepts. All of life is made up of these two energies in some blending, and the most beautiful and harmonious life systems are composed of a balance between these principles. As the yin and yang, The Divine Masculine and Divine Feminine are forever locked in a dance which fuels the creative principle of life. All that is born from this dance is in a never ending flow of being.
The Divine Feminine Principle is the formless void. It is undifferentiated potential at its core. It is Oneness. It is receptivity, fertile and infinite, welcoming without resistance the activating energy of the Divine Male Principle. The Divine Male Principle is the Big Bang, space and time, individuation. It is the activating principle that sets into motion the creation of life, the energy which differentiates in order to create existence. From these core Principles, the myriad of life is born. Within all of life we can see these principles manifest. Our Mother planet shows us this dance in all forms of life. The vast oceans mirror the feminine, while the volcanic energies exploding forth and thrusting into space create the boundaries and potential for life to thrive. The seed contains the infinite potential of life, and must seek the dark earth to wait for the sun and moisture to penetrate and create movement, growth, and a thrusting action as it emerges through the soil and out into the light. The dance is inherent to being, with both principles equally necessary.
At some point in our ancestral human journey, many of us began to worship the Male Principle and hold it in higher regard than the Female Principle. We are now witnessing the results of that movement away from the balanced dance of the Masculine and Feminine principles, the condition which creates abundant, harmonious, balanced life. We have become a species that for the most part oppresses and fears the Feminine Principle. Anywhere in our culture in which the Feminine principle expresses, whether it be in an individual, organization, or living system, you can find violence toward and oppression of this primary energy. This oppression is so completely embedded in our culture and society that we can only see the most obvious forms of it. Much of it is hidden and needs to be dissected to be seen clearly. This deeply embedded fear and oppression of the Divine Feminine and the worship and corruption of the Divine Masculine have become the human soul illness that currently threatens all of life on this planet.
So, as we witness this most extraordinary time in human history, it is clear that a great shift is taking place. The power of Divine Feminine energy is being reborn in a big way in the consciousness of humanity. If life is made possible by the individuation of the Divine Masculine energy, then death is the dissolution and reabsorption back into the formless. We are facing our own extinction, which is awakening a very direct understanding of the Awesome reality of Divine Feminine energy. Is being driven to the brink what awakens us? Have we been here before? It is an incredibly intimate experience to contemplate that we could be the last of our species. It opens the heart. We see, in this way, that we are One. So yes, it is a very exciting and activating time to be alive.
In the story, the woman is facing her own death. As she lies on her healer’s table and surrenders, she understands it is time to listen deeply to her body (Earth Mother), and she opens herself to her own depths, her own unconsciousness, the void within. This is the realm of the Divine Feminine. Here she finds the Dark Egg. This egg represents that which is denied, repressed, feared, rejected. It represents her own death, the dissolution of her ego. It represents her own avoidance of her being, her denial of this reality. It represents her culture and how she has completely identified with it and internalized it on a deep level. It represents the misogynist monster cleverly hidden within her own psyche. But being hidden, in the shadows, it represents the Divine Feminine energy, gestating. This contradiction is mind bending but is also the source of the unraveling of all the programming, all the misunderstanding. We see how it is one fabric all connected. We come close to understanding the Tao which is the Way, Yin and Yang. The dance is always within. What we see and how we see is always a direct reflection of our relationship with our own Dark Egg.
Nothing is really “out there.” We see it all playing out, but we have each created it, and we create it together. How do the Divine Energies of Creation express within our own beings? As the unseen, the unmet, the shadow, the void, come into the light of consciousness and thought, they move into the creative realm of form. This is the dance. The movement is always ongoing as more is revealed. We are birthing ourselves in every moment. Whether we are focusing on the big stage of life or looking inward at our own inner play, when we can see the dance behind it all, and when we can recognize that we are the dance, that we are creating reality right now and in every moment, and when we can let go and laugh and know that we can create our dreams out of this dance of form and formless, then we can be free.
Devon Love, owner of OneHeart Intuitive Healing, is a spiritual mentor, intuitive healer and nurturing bodyworker, practicing at Arcata Healing Arts Center, arcatahealingartscenter.com. She is currently focusing her work primarily on supporting women who are ready to learn to love their authentic and amazing selves and who want to expand their self-care skills. Though this is her main focus, everyone who is diving deep into their own healing journey is welcome! You can reach Devon at 707-825-1153, or on FB at oneheartintuitive/facebook.com.