Dancing with the Gods:
Sex, Death, and A Reclamation of the Dark Feminine
I am not here just to tell my story. I am here to normalize a conversation that doesn’t have enough voice. I see my life as a following of a thread toward my wholeness and my purpose. It has felt like an invisible cord tugging at me, guiding my way, and sometimes even blinding me from seeing the world in any other way. The thread is finally weaving itself into tapestry. The following is the story of the tapestry. This is not for me. This is for the ones who came before me that were silenced or never found their voice. This is to pave the way for the ones that will come after me. This is my prayer for the cosmos.
Emerging Apocalypse: Who am I?
“Hello?! Can you hear me? Can you see me? Hello!? Is there a bubble around me? Why can’t you hear me!? I know you know that I’m here! I’m over here in the shadow! I have something important to say!”
Joseph Campbell has said “The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.” Well, my question is, if you believe you’re a mystic, how do you embody her in a society that will label you as psychotic? Great question. I’ve been living this excruciating paradox most of my life. For some reason, I have been blessed (and cursed) with the understanding of the cosmic riddle of our time. I was gifted glasses whose lenses show me the way through. There’s no way for me to remove the glasses. I spend a lot of time grieving and crying about the human condition and where we are and who we’ve become. Sometimes the experience of being a human in the modern industrialized society is so viscerally painful that all I can do is observe and cry tears that embody “I know there’s another way to live”. The other catch about the gift of the glasses is that I’ve literally had to create my own language to transmit the visions they show me. The transmissions have generally come in the form of intense somatic sensations and uncontrollable, colorful, raging and sometimes paralyzing emotions that download into my body and psyche as a cosmic gnosis. I’m pretty sure the transmission often comes from Pluto. Or maybe I am Pluto. The embodiment of Pluto. Spit out onto this planet during a time of collective upheaval, to bring our society one step closer to facing the death of its wounded, patho-adolescent condition.
Do I sound crazy yet?
No? Let me try to convince you further. I dream of apocalypse. I fantasize and long for impending chaos to shake and wake humanity to remember the truth of its innate wholeness and interconnectedness with the universe. I don’t just dream of it, I believe in it. Imagine that, someone who so deeply believes this truth embodying it openly in our current industrial consciousness based society. And not just embodying it, but claiming that it is the way and to go forward into the dark. Surely, they’d be locked up or medicated.
Christianity has defined apocalypse as “the complete final destruction of the world”, but what they failed to accept is that it is only the destruction of the world as they know it. As we know, death and birth are not separate. The word apocalypse is actually defined as “the uncovering” or “the shedding of the veil”. I feel like apocalypse runs through my blood. Just as I know the territory of the underworld. In fact, for me, the apocalypse is like the archetypal return from the underworld. Between my lifelong affair with Pluto and the events of my childhood and adolescence, I feel like I am wired for apocalypse and walking through the underworld and have a way of assisting others navigate through such treacherous landscapes, both internal and external. I can sense where tension sits and generally know just how to heighten it to make the space fertile enough for transformation. I crave chaos and it craves me. I feel like I was born to destroy existing structures, ideas, identities and be a midwife in the birthing of new ones. It’s a story that has followed me in my life, in my relationships, in my dreams, in my desires. I see myself as a walking, living, breathing whirlwind; an unfolding human cataclysm. I am a vast whirlwind of cosmic particles, continuously expanding and contracting, with the pulse of transformation oozing from every little speck of my being. It is like a wildfire that is just ALMOST about to spread massively, yet somehow remains contained, dancing in that place right before a full bodied orgasm.
Feeding the Gods
“From the beginning I had a sense of destiny, as though my life was assigned to me by fate and had to be fulfilled. This gave me an inner security, and, though I could never prove it to myself, it proved itself to me. I did not have this certainty, it had me. Nobody could rob me of the conviction that it was enjoined upon me to do what God wanted and not what I wanted. That gave me the strength to go my own way. Often I had the feeling that in all decisive matters I was no longer among men, but was alone with God. And when I was “there,” where I was no longer alone, I was outside time; I belonged to the centuries; and He who then gave answer was He who had always been, who had been before my birth. He who always is was there. These talks with the “Other” were my profoundest experiences: on the one hand a bloody struggle, on the other supreme ecstasy.”
— Carl Jung
Let me get to the point. At least one of them, for now. Like many brilliant thinkers, philosophers, and psychologists, I believe we are each put here with a mission. There are many lenses to view this mission, whether you call it your astrological natal chart or your soul purpose or your mythopoetic identity. There are archetypes that present themselves over and over, stalking you in your dreams, in your imagination, in your relationships, and in your traumas. They are begging for engagement from the psyche to become manifest on the physical, three dimensional plane. Embodiment of the archetypes feels like a sure doorway into truly living your soul purpose and claiming your unique place in the anima mundi and living with the more than human world in a mutually enhancing way.
So what happens when we ignore the call? What happens when we don’t engage in active participation and conversation with the archetypes and gods and goddesses that are moving through us? Well, that question can be answered simply by looking at what humanity has done to itself in the present day. The father of archetypes, Carl Jung, said “The gods have become diseases”. Hillman has described this idea by stating: “Soul enters only via symptoms, via outcast phenomena like the imagination of artists or alchemy or “primitives,” or of course, disguised as psychopathology.” This can be explained simply as if we do not engage with the archetypes presenting themselves in our lives and do not follow the synchronicities that arise, they will instead show up as symptoms, diseases, pathologies. In other words, if you aren’t responding to the call of the gods, the embodiment of your soul, in turn, your life may end up as a battle with those gods instead of a dance with them. (I hate to use the word battle, but it feels relevant in describing the “typical” viewpoint of the industrialized psyche of being a victim to life, rather than participant. And the common outlook on illness being, “Why me?”, rather than “What’s the deeper conversation here? What is being asked of me?”) Hillman also says: ““when these Gods and daemons are not given their proper place and recognition, they become diseases.” I know how it feels to be isolated, misunderstood, and outcasted. I know how it feels to not want to exist because of feeling alone. My confusion about how I fit into the world and my understanding of it caused me to take drastic measures at a really young age, hurting my body and contemplating suicide. My heart breaks for youth and individuals of all ages that don’t feel safe to integrate their realities with that of mainstream society. My wish is to have this conversation to acknowledge the gods and provide them the space to be recognized.
A Dive into the Shadows: My Life as Pluto
Let me tell you a little bit about Pluto, the planet and lord of the Underworld. Often related to Hades (masculine) or Persephone (feminine), god and goddess of the realms of the dead and darkness. Pluto, a warrior spirit, embedded in the unconscious, exposes the repressed and seeks to reclaim power once taken away. To understand Pluto is to know that death is always near, whether metaphorical or physical. Often associated with the dark night of the soul, Pluto will not stop until everything he touches is stripped and transformed. His energy can feel like a black hole, forcing one to dangling in the depths of the unknown until they are ready to emerge. Without a doubt, Pluto is directly related to the shadow of the human psyche and the shadow of the collective. He seeks to make conscious that which is hidden.
The planet Pluto has had a pretty interesting journey in our dominant culture. Discovered in 1930, during the darkest time of the post-industrial era, in the middle of The Great Depression of the United States, the rise of Hitler in Germany, along with other dark armies in Europe. There was no shortage of fear and darkness in the world at the time. Interestingly enough, at this time, the exploration of the human unconscious was also coming into collective awareness as Freud, Adler and Jung brought psychology and psychoanalysis to light. In astrology, Pluto was deemed rulership over Scorpio, the sign related to the underworld, along with Mars, another warrior god. In 2006, Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet because of its’ relationship to other objects near its’ orbit, which opened up a slew of controversy. Funny (and unfortunate) enough that the Planet which represents death, sex, and the shadow would be dismissed as less relevant and unimportant.
I have been in this exploration of my deep connection with Pluto, as the ruler of my very Scorpio dominant astrological birth chart, and perhaps the most powerful driving force of my life. Pluto doesn’t just rule my life, I am his servant, here to feed him and nourish him. I see the world through his eyes, as though I see everything through the lens of the underworld. It often feels as if I can’t see or know anything or anyone without also being forced to see its shadow. It actually tends to be the thing that I feel first. It is as if I hold the shadow in my being, and everyone and everything that I contact, gets thrust straight into a deep, underworldly reflection. Pluto has chosen me to be one of his vessels in this physical plane and has been challenging me into initiation after initiation of my own, to really remind me of what my work in the world is and to test my capacity to meet it. I see my life as a serious courtship with Pluto, and it has become clear to me that he doesn’t mess around.
(My Chart)
Throughout the months of writing this, I have taken big and tangible steps into deepening this courtship. I have stepped into my commitment as a servant to the king of the underworld and have had continuous clarity on what that looks like in my life. During this time, my grandfather suddenly landed in the hospital across the country from me. It seemed as though after some procedures, he would be clear to go home and continue living. A (pretty bizarre) series of events unfolded, and he continued to spiral down, slowly losing touch with his existence in his physical body. During this time I had a dream about him, narrated by Pluto, telling me that if I am to step into my commitment as his servant, my grandfather must be sacrificed, and I must learn to really look death in the face. A month after he entered the hospital, which was the day after his 80th birthday, his organs failed, and he died in the hospital in the arms of my mother, aunt and grandmother. The next day, I flew back to Michigan to be with my family at my grandfather’s funeral, where I had no choice but to write and speak a eulogy in his honor and to feed Pluto. Beyond the intensity of this experience itself, I was forced to look at the shadows of the western medical system, the way our culture handles (or avoids handling) death, and the reality of our society’s approach to the ceremony of the funeral. It was as if Pluto was speaking, telling me “So you want to talk about death? You want to do this underworld work in the world? Well, you’re going to have to get to know it quite intimately first. Here is your initiation.” I struggled to be present with anything besides the shadow of the entire picture of my grandfather’s funeral.
To give a little context, I grew up witnessing my grandfather develop schizophrenia. He mostly struggled with crippling paranoia, causing him to take drastic measures to make his life and home feel safe. He was always talking about what “they” were doing to him, what “they” were saying, or most commonly, that “they” were listening/watching. I watched and listened to my family invalidate him and his experience, telling him to keep his mouth shut and directly addressing him as crazy and out of his mind. Even as a small child, I knew something was wrong with this story. I demanded that my family let him speak and to stop telling him to keep quiet. I knew my grandfather to be an extremely intelligent, strong, humourous and caring man and I felt heartbroken at the way he was treated. Somehow, I always understood that there was something present beyond what we could see. As he got older and his ‘condition’ got worse, he was medicated with antipsychotics and hospitalized more than once. I watched these medications completely drain his life force and turn him into a living zombie, losing his personality, sense of humor and physical energy. In a lot of ways, my grandfather was my doorway into my fascination and interest in psychology, altered states of consciousness, and conversation with spirit. He was a tangible entry point into my magnetization toward the shadow. Nobody ever wanted to talk about his “condition”. Even after his death, nobody wants to talk about the role of his mental health (and lack of acknowledgement of) being a catalyst for his death. I, however, want to go there. I want to talk about it. I want to scream about it. I am committed to giving understanding this split in the human psyche and to create spaces for the voices of those who feel the agonizing tension. My grandfather did not get a chance to have a voice and my commitment to this is in his honor.
Pluto has been with me since I was a child. I was a strange child. Paranoid. Afraid of simple things. I kept to myself. Growing up, one of the most common things I was told was that I am too sensitive. In fact still, one of the most common and sure things that my mom and I will still bicker about is her telling me to “stop crying”. I grew up believing something was wrong with me because I cried easily. I thought I had to apologize for my emotions, for sensitivity, for taking up space with my tears. I always felt infuriated when my family would make fun of me and tell me to stop crying. Otherwise, they won’t talk to me or refuse to take me seriously. I never felt like my tears were getting in the way and I was angry that they could not see me. Is this another example of the tension of living as a spiritual being in a material world? Of being in touch with and willing to look at shadows? As I got older, I started speaking out and speaking up for myself, refusing to control my tears. My sensitivity was increasing and tears would show up in more experiences. The only common denominator for the experiences were: truth, beauty, union, and the raw complexity of the human condition. My tears are a doorway to truth. My tears are my conversation with the cosmos. My tears are the self-regulating system of my soul, seeking integration in a soulless culture. My tears remind me of my longing. If I suppress my emotions, I forget who I am. Very often, my tears aren’t my own, they are of the Earth. I feel like I am a vessel for a collective well of grief. When it flows through me, I remember my aliveness. I remember my interconnectedness. I remember what a gift it is to be able to feel. I also love to see other people cry or to cry with others. For me, this is one of the most intimate soul-bonding experiences.
Pluto has also been the third party in all of my relationships. I have been struck by the reality of what happens to people when they become intimate with me. It’s like clockwork. They are thrust into deep shadow work and an underworld process. I have found myself needing to warn men, telling them “you don’t know what you’re getting yourself into”, when they are allured and persistent. They may be allured by something that they aren’t even conscious of. I will tell you more about this later. It’s not just sexual or romantic connections, even platonic relationships, friendships, or simple encounters with passers-by. I initiate some kind of shadowy soul purge for others that I engage with. I hold a space of safety for exploration of the deep contents of the psyche.
It’s common for me to hear “I don’t know why but I just feel like I can release this all to you”. It’s almost comical how surely I can get caught anywhere I go by someone, anyone, strangers, telling me their struggles, sharing their stories, or even breaking down and crying in my presence. I regularly have the experience of getting stuck in the grocery store longer than expected because the cashier or the person picking out broccoli beside me begin to share with me their troubles. It doesn’t feel like a burden, it nourishes me. People often apologize for taking up space with their emotions, tears, and words. My response is always the same, “Don’t apologize. This is why I am alive.”
Pluto has shown up recently relationally in another context recently. In the last six months I have initiated two different circles, a women’s circle at my home and a peer group for community building for students in the Philosophy, Cosmology and Consciousness program. Though very different contexts, both groups were based off of my longing to create more community and merge with other individuals in learning how to be human together, and supporting one another on that journey. Both groups had powerful, energetic and really beautiful first meetings with overwhelming feedback from participants around their longing for these spaces. Shortly after each of those meetings, an emergence of shadow unfolded. Pluto came knocking again. “So you want to see what it takes to create community? You want to know what it means to be a human? You want to create a world of love and compassion? Well here is everything that must first be purged…” It was literally as if someone had opened the basement door and let in the darkness. It felt like someone had elected particular individuals from the groups to represent the trickster or the entire archetypal shadow side of the collective and how humans treat one another. There were issues around breach of confidentiality, false accusations with violent language based off of misunderstanding, and passive aggressive venting/accusing on social media rather than mature confrontation. All of these issues we see on a regular basis as a norm for the current state of humanity. Because of the radically bizarre and serious situations that presented themselves, both groups had to take a pause to reassess one of my original questions: “how do we come together in our humanness to create a more beautiful world?” The shadowy purge has certainly created the space for true community/relationship building and deep truth telling! I can feel Pluto with me in all my endeavors, in all my projects, in all my relationships. Sometimes it feels like torture. Sometimes the intensity is too much. Sometimes I scream “CAN’T ANYTHING JUST BE LIGHT IN MY LIFE?! WHERE IS VENUS?” In truth, it excites me. The intensity is where I thrive. If I fight Pluto, he will destroy me too. I have chosen to feed him. I have chosen to offer myself to him.
Speaking of the shadow, I should also tell you about how much I love seducing men. And I have since I was quite young. Even if not for sex. Anyone — my teachers, my bosses, the guy at the grocery store, or the one stopped in the car besides me at the red light. Just the realization that I have that power has been gratifying enough to make it a practice. Or a habit. Actually, it’s not just men. I’m obsessed with seduction in general. Everything and everyone. I like to get what I want. Better yet, I like to find my way to get what I want, and sometimes I don’t even want it. I just want to see if I can get it. And sometimes I just want to stir something up and create some chaos. I learned to relate to this desire for chaos as self-sabotage, but what if as humans, we know innately that in order to get something we desire or create or manifest, there generally is a period of unknown, chaos and ambiguity. I have spent most of my life psychoanalyzing myself and this particular “habit”. You know, daddy abandoned me so I’m just trying to prove to myself I can overpower men and prove to myself my own self-worth. That’s a great story. I know because I’ve been attached to it for most of my life. At what point do we realize when psychoanalysis actually keeps us stuck and chained to disempowering stories?
So what kind of stories can we write and live in that actually empower us? Or better yet, what are the stories being written and embodied through us?
Who is Lilith?
So what if I tell you that I’m not only Pluto, but I am also Lilith. You probably haven’t heard much about Lilith. Not surprising, if you were born into industrial consciousness which is utterly terrified of everything she represents as the embodiment of the dark feminine. Her name literally means “the night” and she has historically symbolized terror, sexuality, chaos, untamed freedom You may know of a similar archetypal goddess from the Hindu tradition, Kali, the ancient Sumerian goddess, Inanna, or in Greek mythology, Persephone, the queen of the underworld. Lilith first appeared in the Babylonian Talmud from the mythical Jewish tradition as Adam’s first wife, and the first woman. She was banished from the Garden of Eden for refusing to make herself subservient to Adam, specifically in refusal to be beneath him during sex, demanding a turn in the dominant position. As myth has it, Lilith enjoyed sexual pleasures, took any man she wanted, killed babies and did not submit to any expectations.
So, rather than pathologizing my natural desires and instincts, I’ve chosen to engage in a conversation with Lilith and let her live through me. Through this, I’ve been changing my relationship to this obsession with seduction, sensuality and chaos from an unhealthy one to a more liberating one that lets me say “Fuck YES this is who I am! I know I am powerful and I know how to use it with integrity, from my wholeness.” This is the more empowering story I’m speaking of. Archetypes show up in our lives over and over asking to be voiced. And when we stifle them, they make us sick. So I’m choosing to create something out of my thrill for the erotic, my obsession with the art of seduction and art of the female body, claiming my power, and pushing all types of boundaries around what’s acceptable.
Reclaiming Lilith
The more I understand Lilith as an archetype, the more I understand that reclaiming my own relationship to Lilith is actually the work of reclaiming Lilith in the collective. It is the work of giving voice and space for the feminine to take her authentic place in our world, as it realigns and transitions into a place of integrity and wholeness.
Lilith was known by patriarchal cultures as a winged and wild-haired, she-demon who flew through the night. As a Goddess of the Dark Moon, Lilith carries the patriarchy’s shadow projection of the defiant woman as seductress and child-killer. She has come to embody men’s fears of the feminine as dark and evil. In ancient traditions she has been seen in the image of woman as “femme fatale”: alluring, irresistible, and deadly. Now, at the close of the twentieth century, Lilith reasserts herself as the liberated feminine, exalting ecstatic sexuality, upholding integrity, and refusing submission. — Demetra George
She especially catalyzed men’s worst fears concerning the sexual power of the feminine. The abandonment and exile of Lilith from our collective is in fact the exile of the healthy, erotic, dark feminine from our society due to patriarchal consciousness. In everything that Lilith represents, she is exactly that which patriarchy fears and denies.
For as long as I can remember, my grandmother has told me to brush my hair, and that I look untamed and unlady-like if I don’t. I quite love my wild hair, in all it’s big messiness. My mom always tells stories that I really learned to assert my “no” quite early on. Even if I didn’t mean it when I said it, I really liked to say it. I guess this was my early, intuitive commitment to say “no” to those things that go against my values and integrity, as a woman, as a human animal, as a being within a collective Earth community. Last year, in ceremony on my vision quest, I was given the mythopoetic name of Wings of Darkness; a combination of my connection to the Dragonfly, a symbol of transformation, and my relationship to the underworld.
There’s something else I gained a deep understanding of about my mythopoetic identity through nature-connected soul work that requires a bit of context. Bill Plotkin has created models of mature human development as based off of nature’s cycles and rhythms. One of his models is that of the different personalities we are made up of, and he distinguishes between healthy and unhealthy manifestations of both.
We are all made up of all four of these “facets of wholeness”, as he refers to them, but some of us are more dominant in some than others. For me, I am most comfortable and settled in the South and the West. The west is the night, the underworld, the soul, and the muse. The south is the wild indigenous, erotic, primal human animal. Some of my deepest soul work on the path to mature adulthood is to cultivate more wholeness around the East and North facets. I recently heard Plotkin say that the current culture we live in is terrified of the the West and the South. It is virtually disconnected from these facets. It has rejected and forgotten them. In understanding this, I have understood more intricately the importance of the gift I have been given in my relationship to the South and the West.
Going back to men, I’ve had a few stories most of my life, in terms of my relationships with with them and how I feel I’ve been recieved. One, is that men are magnetized and allured by me, and yet absolutely terrified of me. The other story is that connection with me sends men directly into existential breakdown and that has translated into “I am too much and too intense”. Intense? Absolutely. Too much? Maybe true, but only if you’ve been conditioned to fear and reject truth, intimacy, and the raw depths of human existence, which most of us have been.
(A relevant and elusive poem on Lilith that I happened upon while writing this; It felt only appropriate to add):
A Hell of a
gotta give it to Lilith,
she was a hell of a woman.
Said she’d
demons on the
lie under the
that whiner
flew from paradise.
Told God’s angels
they came to get her back,
to me now, while you still can.
The original sin was
God has chosen Adam.
From here we begin. This
between man and
out the world.
I am the first woman. And the last.
My children may be sterile as
raisins,
die each evening with the sun,
but I continue.
You will see me soon, looking
with the eyes of sweet-faced Eve
when Adam breaks another covenant
as easily as teeth break the fruit’s skin.
I am always here.
Justice owed
and justice withheld.
I see my place in history:
the forgotten metaphor
living with the beasts in the desert.
You’ll try to erase the sound of my
name,
call me Witch.
Queen of Ghosts, Mother
of Terror.
Then you come here, wanting
assurance
that I will not harm Adam’s seed,
will not steal from another
woman’s cradle.
Go ahead. Write your names over
doorways
if you think it will keep them safe.
Sanvi. Sansanvi, Semangelaf.
The syllables curl and fade,
grow old as children.
And what do you ask of me
after the eight days have set?
I am the Night Hag.
Patient as memory, I wait at the
crossroads,
visit your men in the dark,
they have reason to fear.
I bring them a sleep restful as my
own.
Go back now. I’m through talking.
Tell God for me,
this fight goes on as long as it must.
Let him make Eve, thinking to
undo
this treachery. Let him make laws
declaring the mud’s mistake.
In every generation
there is a woman
who belongs to me.
I belong to Lilith. I commit to letting her speak through me.
I feel like I want to claw someone’s eyes out. This feeling of deep, dark feminine rage as a result of being silenced, forgotten and taken advantage of. I want to scream so loud that the entire world wakes up from its delusion. I am ANGRY because women have let themselves believe that their power and strength only lies in finding the man. I am ANGRY because women have turned to self-sabotage rather than self empowerment and liberation. I am ANGRY because I have been kept in the quiet for too long. Do you want to know how to see the true strength of someone or something? Repress it. See what happens. I am waking up from my slumber. My voice WILL speak through the women of this emerging new world.
***
I walked into the room and saw you immediately. You looked at me, turned away, and looked back. Our eyes locked with gentle smiles. It was more than physical attraction; a meeting of souls, remembering one another. I knew in that moment that I had caught you. And so the chase ensued. A very familiar pattern quickly revealing itself. Passion, depth, intimacy, raw and wild primal sex, and the revealing of our deepest shadow material. All within 48 hours. I watched you open, soften and break down; exposing your deepest fears and longings. You told me you haven’t felt this way before and this type of intimacy has never happened so quickly. You said there was something special, unique and seductive here and yet, the words that followed were “But I don’t want to go there. I don’t want this relationship.” And still, you persisted, you kept merging with me, melting into me, and going into the shadows with me, while simultaneously pushing me away. I lingered. I let myself stay in your push and pull, hot and cold treatment. “He’s afraid. Maybe if I just keep working him, he’ll realize he actually does want to be with me.” But I’ll tell you, it’s easy to fall in love with potential.
Can I tell you that every single romantic dynamic I have been in the last four years has been an exact replay of this? I have given my power away for too long.
I am putting an end to this pattern. I have been enraged so deeply that I have forgotten who I am. I am taking my seat in my voice and commitment to truth. I am gripping the sword of Kali, preparing to sever the heads of those in the way. And so, in a dance exploration of my explosive rage this piece came through:
The Longing Beneath the Rage
I am angry
I am angry about my silence. I am angry about my confusion. I am angry that I don’t know what it feels like to be supported. I am angry because I so badly crave the taste of true intimacy. I am angry because I have been hurt and abandoned. I am angry because I’ve been shown love and had it sliced out of my life, as if to play a cruel joke on me, saying “Oh you want to know this? Well, here’s a glimpse but you don’t deserve it.” I am angry because I have learned to believe this. My longing has turned into RAGE. Rage, fear, and a tangled mess of knots that I have tied to protect myself from not being seen and held. I have forgotten that beneath my anger is actually the most innate, sweet desire for union. My rage has blinded me, and I’ve only been able to see men as either perpetrators, heroes, or someone to claim and destroy. How absurd it is to see that I’ve created the same story that I’ve been so terrified of.
There’s a veil that is lifting and I am feeling like a newborn. Who am I without the rage? My rage is seeking integration. The fire within me wants to burn not to destroy, but to create. I have forgotten that the rage is driven by longing. Longing so deep that it comes from the core of the earth, the womb of life itself seeking to return to its source. This is not just my rage. This is not just my longing. This is thousands of years and generations of confusion, slaughter, silence and abuse. The earth will once again speak and be heard. She will be supported, nurtured and given life. The longing will come out from hiding behind the rage.
Voice, Desire and Starvation
When I was 18, I began starving myself. It actually began much earlier but around then, it got serious. You see, I grew up believing that struggling with weight and body image was innate to being a woman. I watched all the women in my family continually diet, hate their bodies, and struggle with their self-worth and happiness. Thus, I inherited the fucked up notion that I too was destined for this fate. My obsessive thought about eating less and wanting to lose weight set in at some point during high school. As I transitioned into a more (hypothetically) independent adulthood, the manipulation of my body became real and quite detrimental. Beyond a helpless attempt to find some sense of control over my own life, a manifestation of all my mommy and daddy wounding, my eating disorder was a radical shut down of my femininity. I lost over 30 pounds (that I really didn’t have excess of), I did not bleed consecutively for two years, and developed a serious thyroid condition. I stopped creating, and I stopped dancing. I isolated and lost connection to my erotic self and my desire. Instead, I developed a very rigid, militant, and masculine mindset and relationship to my body. It took another four years to develop a regular moon cycle again. Eight years later, my body and psyche is still finding it’s right alignment in relation to my physical health and the sacred feminine. Thyroid issues are directly linked to throat chakra blockages and energetic imbalances in voice and self expression.
***As I write this, I’m feeling sick to my stomach with the question of “How long do I have to keep writing about this? How long will I keep regurgitating these past traumas and stories about myself?” Perhaps this is the blessing/curse of the commitment to shadow work and an archetypal life. My story isn’t going anywhere. It will only continue to stalk me. I know that this time, the retelling of story is different. This is the process of alchemizing the personal into the cosmological. I am blurring the boundary that says that this is about ME.***
Over the years during my recovery and beyond, I’ve become really fascinated by the fact that so many women struggle with food and body issues [I absolutely know that this is not exclusive to women but this is where my interest lies]. I’ve started studying the parallels between patriarchy, industrial consciousness, and women voluntarily shrinking themselves. In a world where women have been stripped of their power and equality to men, it is no wonder this has manifested as our own internalized oppression. We’ve found a way to suppress our own voice, take up less space and disconnect ourselves from our healthy erotic nature. We have sought to find a way to control our reality in a world that doesn’t support the freedom of true, wild, raw expression. We live in a world terrified of the power of the feminine, and we carry that grief and pain within us. Through food and exercise, our bodies have become vessels of the control and manipulation, which we don’t know how else to create.
Because of the trauma and recovery of disordered eating in combination with with my reckless and premature entry into sexuality, I’ve transitioned into adulthood entirely confused about roles and expectations between the masculine and feminine. The current systems in place have no graceful way to initiate a young girl into becoming a woman, so we are left on our own to find our way. Lack of guidance lends itself to exploration and self-destruction. As a result, I, like many other women, have entered the world of adult relating with a habit of suppressing my voice and my desire, for fear of taking up too much space. Only now am I realizing that I have actually never truly given myself the space to find out what my desire really is. Upon reflecting, I have recognized an extremely self-destructive tendency that has become habit for me. It is a result of the subliminal cultural brainwashing through the traditional story of a helpless girl giving herself up and waiting around for Prince Charming. I have abandoned that ability to say “no” that came so naturally to me as a little girl. I have abandoned my “no” in the name of seeking love, in believing that if I take on more, if I make myself available, then I will find that love and I will attract who and what I want in my life. Instead, what has become reality is the complete opposite. I have become so exhausted by overcommitment because of what I “think” I should be doing rather than actually listening for what’s calling me. Abandoning my “no” has made me forget who I am, what I value, what my boundaries are, and how to take care of myself so that I have the energy to truly show up for what I value and want to embody. Abandoning “no” has been a rejection of the fertile power of the feminine and her desire.
***
“What do you want?”, I’m asked. It wasn’t until I started consciously reclaiming Lilith that I realized how paralyzing this question has been for me my whole life. Well, let me clarify; I have actually generally always known what I want. I can say it. I can take action on it, and am generally not afraid of disagreement or confrontation. I have always had a strong intuition, gut response and a way to somatically gauge what I want. However, within the context of the erotic or a potential romantic dynamic with a man, I freeze. I’m stuck. I have learned to respond to that question based off of what I think the man wants, expects or desires. I have let myself believe I am confused, emotional, irrational, and obsessive. I have trained myself to act as if I believe the cultural script that the liberated sexual feminine is wrong, and my desire does not have a place and should be tamed. How painful it is to realize this about myself.
In a recent encounter, I’ve been challenged to really speak about my desires, to give them voice, even if they don’t make sense, even if they contradict one another, and even if it feels scary to not know how I will be received. There is not adequate language to describe the agonizing sensation that accompanied the space to not just answer this question, but to feel what actually is in that space. When I actually drop in, there is a whole world of desire, of longing ready to jump out and be heard. I am committed to giving her voice and to bringing her to life.
Dancing Myself Home
Since I’ve become a conscious participant in my affair with Pluto, I’ve described him as my guide in dancing between worlds. I’m starting to understand that this statement actually has more than one meaning. I’ve always felt a bit like I live tuned into the channel that industrial consciousness doesn’t want you to have access to. But it’s felt more like the channel was tuning into me rather than me tuning into it. The switch would randomly flip, giving me short downloads of information, sensation, and knowing beyond logical explanation, and then going right back to originally scheduled programming. Through the other powerful force I’m in deep relationship with, dance, I have understood that I actually have access to choosing when to change the channel. In other words, when I dance, I talk with god. It’s how I actively engage in conversation with cosmological consciousness. Who could guess that this is what’s happening when they see me on the dance floor? Or at the hip hop studio?
Dance is the disguise; the doorway into my cosmological self and an activation of my primal human nature. Since I have deepend into relationship with dance, I have become aware of the visions and transpersonal experiences that have been arising in that space. The most common experience I have while dancing is a vision of women dancing naked around a fire, toes stomping through the sand, drums banging, beneath a full moon. I still can’t distinguish if this is a vision, a remembrance of a personal past life or the remembrance of the collective past life of the wild feminine. I don’t need to distinguish it. I understand it in every cell of my being. I am there. This is my resource. This is where the wisdom of the Earth moves through me and aligns me to my very center, at her center.
Dance has been an even deeper opening into my rage. This intensity that I carry, which I’ve spoken about, can sometimes be translated into anger or aggression. For me, it’s passion, fire, and rage. Holy, sacred rage. Sometimes I feel like I have a direct cord connected to the core of the Earth, where I feel her grief and rage. Dance has become a safe space for me to feel, express, and move through it. I think maybe it was Joanna Macy that I have heard say “Follow your outrage. It’s where your passion lies.” And so I do.
Everything about the dance floor excites me, allures me, fascinates me and holds me in a space of homeostasis surrounded by other souls that share that same deep allurement. In my deepening connection to the art of dance, I’ve begun to understand how it’s been strengthening my relationship to the healthy, erotic, Divine feminine and how she lives in me and through me. Whether dancing alone, with another, or in a group, the dance itself has been participation in a bigger conversation and experience. It is an opening for the cosmos, myth and archetypes to move into and through the space. I watch others engage and interact, or simply go into their own dance, and all I see is joy, ecstacy, and raw, soulful truth.
I’ve been sharing energy with a male friend on the dancefloor in an exploration of “dancing with the gods”. This is where the idea of ‘dance as a disguise’ first came through for me. Our dance has become an embodiment of the masculine and feminine archetypes reconciling old stories, old relationships, old patterns and attempting to their new way of being in right relationship. There is anger. There is fire. There is gentle longing and supportive holding. There is lust. There are fierce boundaries. There is true devotion, support, and seeing one another. There is play. There is softness. There is pain. There is grief. There is magic. Above all, there is a mutual commitment to truth, respect, and compassion. In this dance, we are rewriting our own stories as we understand how this fits into the collective emerging new story. In a world where there is so much confusion of roles between masculine and feminine as we rewrite scripts, this is perhaps some of the most important work I feel like I can be doing.
Reclaiming The Erotic Feminine on the Dancefloor
I need to speak about another experience I am having on the dancefloor, the shedding of skins and layers that have been built up by patriarchy, industrial consciousness and capitalism. I am learning to be with souls, not just bodies that I want something from or am jealous of. I am healing my relationship to my fellow humans, particularly women. For the first time in my life I am genuinely enjoying dancing with women more than men. I am becoming aware of a beautiful sisterhood, a celebration of women moving their bodies together in ecstatic bliss. It is a co-inspiration and appreciation of intimate connection between bodies and sound and a shared love for the dance. It’s as if dance peels away all the layers that don’t serve. I have grown up in a society where women don’t smile at one another, aren’t welcoming, display jealousy and competitiveness and show little interest in friendship. I’ve been lucky to surround myself in bubbles and communities where this is NOT the dominant trend, but have still often found it challenging to connect with women in a non-threatening, non-intimidating way where we honor one another’s beauty and sensuality.
I have had another understanding arise on the dance floor which feels really charged. With everything going on in the world in regards to women’s rights, everyone is trying to be heard and validated. Sometimes I feel radical but also recognize that my opinions don’t necessarily differ from the mainstream message, they just have a different perspective. And sometimes I am afraid to be thrown under the bus with all the other “bad guys” and “traitors” because I see things in their more primal nature. But this is the Voice of Lilith coming through. Of course I support women’s rights. Of course I want women all over the world to feel safe in their bodies and their sexuality. Of course I am sick of the media distorting and demeaning women and polluting the minds of young girls. And of course, I want to do away with patriarchy and everything it has done to create our current planetary crisis. But I do not see matriarchy as the answer. We will never find a new way if we continue to jump to extremes. This is not the way to create balance. This, however, is a bigger conversation because I am not here to tell you the answers. I don’t know them. I don’t know yet what the way through looks like for us. But what I do know, in terms of women reclaiming their place on this Earth, is that we must reclaim our place in our bodies as sexual, erotic beings.
I have always been charged up by the phrase women are commonly told, or at least I’ve been told; “you’re asking for it”. Whether it’s the way I dress, dance or act, somehow I’m continually told that I’m asking for it. When I complain about being objectified or cat-called on the street, patriarchal society wants me to believe that it’s my fault. If a woman is raped, there is a foundational belief that she must have done something to provoke that type of attention. How is this type of deeply entrenched thinking creating fear in our women, simply for being a woman? I’ve found myself screaming back at men on the streets that the fact that I have a vagina is not an invitation to insert themselves inside me. But this is a HUGE topic and conversation and not where I am attempting to take this, for now at least.
For me, the potency of this conversation is around a personal tension I’ve been faced with a lot of my life; being shamed for being myself, dressing in what makes me feel good and sexy, loving my body and the way it moves and loving sex just as much as any man. How do I claim my erotic, sexually empowered feminine in a society that fears it and doesn’t want to believe it exists? I’ve found a doorway to this freedom through dance and allowing my body to move how it wants, in primal ecstatic states. I’ve created a relationship with my hips and pelvis, shoulders, legs and neck and entire body that’s unlocked freedom in who I am as a woman; a creative, sensual being that loves her body and isn’t afraid to be seen in it. And guess what? Sometimes it probably looks like “I’m asking for it” and I’m okay with that. Because I know that my dance is for me and because I refuse to live in a world that cannot accept a woman’s sexuality. I refuse to mold myself to the norms of what’s “appropriate” for a woman and what isn’t. I want to see a world where women aren’t hypersexualized, instead I want their bodies to be seen as art.
In general, the dancefloor has become my temple and place of worship. The dance floor is my place of reclaiming Lilith, reclaiming my body, reclaiming the feminine and her place and voice on this Earth. I watch the faces of others as they transcend into ecstacy and joy. The dance floor is a like couples therapy for the sacred masculine and divine feminine, restoring their right relationship. It is a space where body meets soul in devotion to rhythm, movement, and connection.
Conclusion
In the few months of writing this, I have hit several breaking points. Old stories, old patterns, old ways of being presenting themselves yet again. Stories and patterns I have been working to purge and sever from for years, but they have continued to show up in different forms and I have been grasping to a younger, less mature, patriarchally conditioned version of myself. I have been attempting to hold onto an identity that I have outgrown and has become entirely too small for me. Even more importantly, I know that the Earth cannot afford waiting around for me to stop playing small and that the old, exhausted patterns have served their purpose but are now dead and decaying. I have been in the midst of a deep soul initiation for the last two years. I have spent the last eight months painstakingly forcing my return from the underworld and emergence into integration and instead I have only launched myself deeper into the shadows. I can humbly see both the humor and the wisdom in my sense of urgency and that paradoxically, it has throttled me into a whole new understanding of what this initiation really is for me. I cannot plan it with with my mind, it requires participation. As poet David Whyte says, “What you can plan is too small for you to live.” My soul is claiming me, and I am finally ready to listen. I have been claimed by the dark feminine. I have been claimed as a guide through the underworld. And I intend to show up for the mission.
This is my commitment to dancing with the gods and giving them their recognition. This is my commitment to creating more spaces for individuals to feel safe in this exploration. This is my commitment to building bridges between the seen and unseen.
I want to create a world where we teach young girls to love their bodies, dance with their hips, and honor their voice. I want to create a world where emotions are not only welcome, but encouraged; raw, loud, colorful, terrifying and beautiful emotions. I want to create a world that isn’t afraid of it’s shadow. I want to create a world where screaming, crying, hysterical laughter, a walk in the woods, ecstatic dance and wild sex are our go-to therapies. I want to create a world where connection and conversation with spirit and other-than human dimensions isn’t pathologized. I want to see a world where those that feel alone, isolated, and voiceless are acknowledged for their wisdom and gifts. I want to see a world where the erotic, wild, divine feminine has her true seat in companionship to the sacred masculine. I want to see the Earth restore her balance and thriving with life.
I may not know yet what the new world looks like (for me personally and collectively), but there are a few things I do know. I am going to keep conversing with the demons. I am going to keep dreaming of apocalypse. I am going to teach young girls to claim their “no” and to love their bodies. I am going urge younger generations to question everything. I am going to keep pushing boundaries and challenging structures. I am going to continue in my commitment to give voice to the shadow. I am going to continue to be a vessel for the voice of dark feminine. I am going to keep claiming my sexuality and my erotic nature. I am going to keep holding onto Kali’s sword and wearing my own necklace of skulls. I am going to continue to attempt to blur the line between what is or is not appropriate for a woman to say or do. I am going to continue to challenge the male gaze. I am going to keep working to reclaim what was voluntarily taken away from me as a young girl because I grew up in a world not conscious of its own sickness. I am going to give voice to what the dominant narrative has continued to rape, slaughter, strip of its strength and beauty. I am going to keep dancing with my brothers and sisters through the flames of the sacred fire of transmutation. I am going to continue to dance through my rage and shake and wake the world back to wholeness. I dare to keep speaking about the things that most humans shy away from. I dare to look the shadow in the face. I dare to challenge and to destroy. Most importantly, I dare to live up to my most inherent task as a woman; to channel creation through my womb within the womb of the great Mother.
