When I ask women where they swagger, not too many identify church!  I love hearing the stories of women who do swagger in their spiritual lives. Thanks to Erin Counihan for this great piece on following your heart, being yourself, and answering the call.

Guest post by Erin Counihan

I’ve got a bit of a church swagger and I’m not afraid to admit it. I think I’ve always had it. I was that kid wore the white rug duct taped to my back in the nativity play but acted like she had on a full on Academy Award winning designer made sheep costume. Today, I am the woman who wears red shoes to church and sings the hymns, in harmony, from memory, quite loudly… because I can. I’ve always felt at home in the sanctuary, in the choir loft, and in the fellowship call after services (um, hello, that’s where they keep the cookies). With the exception my few uber teen-angsty high school years, I just always loved church. I loved seeing people around me caring for each other and caring for their community. I loved our pastor, who each Sunday who both inspired and challenged us. I loved being a part of that big, messy, lovely church family. And I loved who I was when I was with them.

In college, I felt a call to ministry, to serve that great church family, but I resisted that feeling. I knew I church work would be a good fit for me and that God had put a tug in my heart, but I didn’t know any lady pastors. I saw a church run by men my grandfather’s age. They were smart and kind and caring, but they didn’t joke like I did. They didn’t play field hockey. They didn’t listen to Nirvana. They didn’t toilet paper people’s houses. They certainly didn’t date or dance or read US Weekly. Read more…

There are many who feel that we stand on the verge of massive global change and that women will be at the forefront of that change. Leaders are emerging in many disciplines, including the arts. Painter Kimberly Webber feels compelled by a burning desire to create as much art as she can that depicts the divine feminine. Her inspiration comes from “the voice of the earth herself,” and the hope is that the work personifies mother earth and empowers the viewer. Images and ideas appear to her in dreams or through nature where the feminine archetypes bubble up from the chthonic into consciousness. “They are asking to be heard now,” Kimberly says.

Kimberly started painting as a 3 year old and went on to train formally as a painter including studies in Florence, Italy of traditional Renaissance Masters. After leaving the university, she spent six weeks hiking in Northern California and Southern Oregon on the Pacific Crest trail, which runs from Canada to Mexico.  The redwood forests and ocean in California beckoned her to a different kind of learning.  “I wanted to unravel all of my formal academic training and programming,” she says.

Entering a time of earth-based training; she studied with a female shaman and lived deep in the redwoods.  Feeling gently supported and nourished by the forest, Kimberly hiked regularly in the dark, without a flashlight, exploring the night.  Moving out of her head and into her heart, she says it was a time of quantum growth for her and propelled her to a more sensitive, subtle level of painting.

After a year in the redwoods, a quiet but insistent call led Kimberly to Taos, New Mexico. She packed up her tipi in a pickup truck and moved, without ever having been to Taos.  Within 24 hours, she had a work-trade arrangement at the New Buffalo Bed and Breakfast – in exchange for studio space.  Living in her tipi, she bartered for most of her needs and continued journeying deeper into the heart and rhythms of nature.

Kimberly began painting goddesses – a bird goddess on a pile of skulls, a series of figures submerged in their backgrounds. Her paintings reflect sacred geometry and other underlying natural orders. She uses lapis, mica and gemstones to add an inner luminosity to her work. Her current work in progress features the Crete snake goddess manifested in huge eight feet tall images. Read more…

If the first swagger tool is intuition http://www.girlsguidetoswagger.com/?p=1772 , the second one is centering.  Intuition is developing the ability to listen to the small, still voice inside yourself for wisdom and direction. But how can you hear that voice if you are rushed, off balance, and anxious?

Many times during a day, you might feel off-center – it is bound to happen.  Driving in heavy traffic, deadlines, a crying baby, and complaining spouse can push us off our center and cause us to act from fear, rather than inner wisdom. When we are in fear – we don’t feel our swagger and can lose touch with our self-esteem.

If you find yourself disconnected from your center and your swagger, here are a couple of things you can do:

1.  Get grounded:

* feel the ground under your feet

*feel your connection to the solid and nurturing earth

*take a deep breath.

2. Get centered:

*take a few deep breaths

*you can close your eyes or keep them opened – whatever keeps you most connected to the world

*feel into your length, feel your spine stretching and expanding – notice what you feel inside yourself – strain, pain, worry?

*feel into your width – feel the edges of your body, allow your awareness to expand out beyond yourself – what do you notice? Sometime I feel a tug at my back – like my angel wings emerging.

*feel your past – at your back is everything that has come before and brought you to this place – what do you see?

*look ahead – what is coming, what are you excited about, what is inviting you to the future?

I like to think of this poem by Hafiz:

The God Who Only Knows Four Words

Every

Child

Has known God,

Not the God of names,

Not the God of don’ts,

Not the God who ever does

Anything weird,

But the God who only knows four words

And keeps repeating them, saying:

“Come dance with Me.”

Come

Dance.                                                     -Hafiz

With thanks to somatic coach and wise woman extraordinaire Renee Gregorio and Strozzi Somatics http://www.strozziinstitute.com/about/history+and+mission.

Guest blog by Aunt Erin

As a responsible, single woman of a certain age, part of my whole  quit-your-job-and-go-back-to-school plan included taking good care of the financial resources I’d accumulated over a decade of gainful employment. In other words, Erin’s too cheap to pay the Red Cross an annual custodian fee to keep my 401k.

I took an Econ class in undergrad, but admit that I retained about none of it. IRAs, CDs, Money Market Accounts- I know nothing. I needed help. So I went to see an expert. I made an appointment with the financial advisor at my bank. Little did I know that when I walked through those doors, I’d be walking back in time about 5 decades. I sat down to discuss my financial situation and saving options. The financial advisor asked me why I quit my job. I explained that I was studying at seminary. Blah, blah, I’m getting used to this conversation by now and have some stock answers ready to go for all inquiries and reactions. I know how to handle the shocked reaction, the curious reaction, the concerned reaction, the excited reaction and the why-are-you-becoming-a-nun reaction. But Mr. Finance threw a new reaction at me. Well, and old-new reaction. He asked me, in all seriousness, if I was in seminary studying to be a pastor’s wife. Read more…

Did you know that many ancient civilizations worshipped the Goddess as the giver of life and wisdom? The cycles of the seasons and of life were understood as the context for life and people lived in balance with the earth.  Male energy and female energy both were honored.

Myth and reality began to change more than 4,000 years ago, when famines in the northern part of Europe and Russia caused marauding warriors to move south and conquer the Goddess-worshipping, peace loving people of the Mediterranean.  On Crete, there was a civilization that lived peacefully – there is no sign of war for 1,500 years, until the invaders from the north arrived.

Before the invasion, the Goddess was most revered, along with her companion or lover, but soon the lover began to take on characteristics of a god.  The Goddess’ power was distributed among many more minor Goddesses in the mythology of Greece and Rome – becoming Hera, Athena, Aphrodite.  As the Jewish and Christian religions developed, the Goddess or Queen of Heaven and her consort Baal were considered to be evil and their worship was forbidden.  Although outlawed, little carvings of the divine feminine were found throughout the Holy Lands. Symbols of the Goddess such as the snake and the apple were made evil as part of the creation myth of the Garden of Eden.

Our knowledge of the ancient Goddess culture has been in the shadows for a long time. Now, there is a revival of interest in those cultures and in the honoring of the divine feminine.  Goddesses for Every Day: Exploring the Wisdom and Power of the Divine Feminine around the World by Julie Loar is part of that awakening.  Julie has identified 366 goddesses – from civilizations around the world – ancient and contemporary – and presented them in this book, along with a contemplation on what each goddess means in our daily life. Read more…

Surrender and consciousness

Surrender to the vagaries of wind and weather, water, weight, gravity, skill, ego and consciousness. In the wind, in a boat, I have to be fully conscious every second and able, ready and willing to change strategies, change tack, change direction, change sails and the amount of sail, at any moment. I might have a plan, but the wind will define what happens. You can be going along all nice and then be hit by a puff of wind and the boat wants to surge directly into it – you have to let go a bit, let it happen, readjust, then come off the wind, or, let the sails out really fast. In either case you have to balance, juggle, move fast, dance, think of and do a lot of things at once to bring the boat and the elements and the people back into balance with one another. Then you’re off, on a new tack, another direction until distance and wind and shore demand another change. It’s not up to you. You must surrender and be conscious every second.

You never know it all

What caused our lapse when we bumped the side of the hill? It doesn’t matter who’s in charge when we are all in the same boat. This is metaphorical. I could have said, Why didn’t you see it? But I didn’t see it either. People may think they know it all, all about sailing. (I actually think my brother does know almost all there is to know.) But we went out with Bob the expert, he races in the harbor and knows the depths of the lake, the Narrows and still he biffs. What happened? We will talk about this for a long time. Was it the winch issue? The sail out too much? The main was reefed but we could have pulled in more of the jib. Certainly we didn’t tack soon enough and there it was, the muddy bank of the hill and I said “We can’t be doing this.” So much for control. It was too late to prevent what was happening. At what point was it already too late? When we were talking about strategy of the cockpit and who would bring in the sheet and how to let it off the other winch? Careening across the Narrows trying to conduct sailing school. The real school was the muddy bank of the hill. And we didn’t know how close it was because we were busy thinking. The Lesson is much closer than you think. And it’s not the one you are talking about, it’s the one right in front of you, coming up before you have a chance to do anything about it. It was a slow scrunch and dead on the bow (am I right that if the Titanic had hit the iceberg straight on it wouldn’t have been so bad?). Why are we humans so schizophrenic? So confused about the thing itself and our words and ideas about the things.  We were lucky the lesson wasn’t hard as a rock or – indeed –the rock itself. Read more…

Grief and dating

Why are you online looking for friends? Probably because you lost someone, one way or another. Have you dealt with your grief? Have you faced it and let it unravel within your body? Did you sit with your feelings long enough to give the chemistry/adrenaline the time to exit the body? This is a spiritual activity: you check in with your body, feel what it is feeling and how it is related to what you’re thinking. Am I looking to be saved? Do I want to have another in my life so I am distracted from my more painful, uncomfortable or shadowy feelings? Am I looking for an escape from my grief?

Detachment

When I feel the energy and spirit in my body, I am not lonely. But when I am thinking, I cannot tell what my body is feeling anymore and I can’t feel Spirit energy within. So the practice is to keep coming back, keep coming back to the body sensations, the breath, and move out of thinking, move away from expectation, from analyzing or judging or rejecting or accepting. None of these activities is real or productive. It is usually the ego holding on to a fantasy/thought. In general any holding on activity is ego-related. What is real is detaching, staying open and in the moment and not knowing, not knowing why we are alone, or fantasizing about not being alone but staying in the balance of the present. Letting all thoughts come and go. It is just like regular life no matter how many pictures or profiles of people keep coming at you. Maybe online dating requires more practice than everyday life, to stay balanced and aware of spirit within. Just keep letting thoughts (or photos or profiles) come in, and go out. Come back to the body. Breathe. Read more…

Do you ever wonder why we are here?  I taught a class at the University of Colorado’s College of Architecture and Planning, called Real World Planning. The purpose of the course was to help the students, most of whom were getting ready to graduate, to figure out want they wanted from their professional careers and their lives.  One book I loved to use for the class was Life Mapping by Bill Cohen.  The book outlines a complete approach to figuring out what you want and making sure you get there.  One of the first exercises was to answer two questions:  why do you think we are here as humans?  why do you think you are here?

As you are thinking about your life, I believe it is useful to return to these core questions.  You may find that your answers evolve over time, but pondering these two questions is a great way to remind yourself of what is important.  When I did this exercise recently, here is what I said:

Why are we here?  I believe that we are part of a great cosmic battle and balance, a spiraling, returning, learning, advancing, understanding, seeking enlightenment, followed by rest and return.  To be part of a growing vibrations toward good, fulfillment and manifestation of light.

Why am I here? To serve some purpose in the movement toward good, a role in the wave, a point in the wall of light, a star in the sky – unique, not more or less than any other point of light; a weight on the scale that eventually brings balance to the world.

Why do you think we are here? Why do you think you are here? Do you have the confidence to fulfill your purpose?

The God Who Only Knows Four Words

Every

Child

Has known God,

Not the God of names,

Not the God of don’ts,

Not the God who ever does

Anything weird,

But the God who only knows four words

And keeps repeating them, saying:                

                                                          “Come dance with Me.”                 

                                                           Come

                                                           Dance.                                                     -Hafiz

Does your spiritual life invite you in to dance?  If not, maybe you are still searching.

A couple of years ago, on my birthday I have the good fortune to be in the Caribbean.  After an ideal day for me – hiking and snorkeling – I got a massage.  As I lay there, I thought about the new life I wanted – to leave my current job and pursue my creative projects; to live where emotion ran deep for me – both the highs and lows.  I thought about all the problems with that plan – lack of money, my many committments to my current work, and the very real fear of failure.  As I worried, I remembered the mountain we had stood on that day and imagined myself tossing my old life – my worries and anxieties off the top.  But still I worried about the risk and pain that a new unknown life might bring.  Then I heard a voice say: “Come anyway.”  I said “what?” And again it said “Come anyway.”  Read more…