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Women's Wheel of Life

8/10/2015

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Serendipity is a strange and wonderful thing; life asking us to “be alert” and pay attention. 10 years ago now I was living in the bush of the NSW far south coast and life was pretty simple and sleepy. My Saturday morning habit was to drive to our local one horse town for the weekend papers, a quiet ritual of a few locals chatting over coffee, utes pulling up for gas bottles and straw bales, a “dogs in the dust” kind of scene.

One Saturday a few trestle tables meandered down the street out of the local hall, manned by old timers selling jams and old tools and hand knits and piles of unwanted books. I wandered along trailing my hands over the wares, not looking for anything in particular. As an enthusiastic collector of literature around the divine feminine it was the last place I expected to find a book on Women’s Business but lo and behold I was to find in my hand a book that has now become a template for my work on Women with Spirit, the title “The Women’s Wheel of Life”.

First published in 1996 the book is still available and really is timeless for the information and stories it holds. Authors Elizabeth Davis and Carol Lombard offer a simple mandala image of life – one that is cyclical in nature, creating a space of transformation and void at the centre. I devoured the book quickly, resonating with both the concepts and the personal stories shared by many women.  The familiar phases of life as maiden, mother, maga and crone are divided further into 3 sub-archetypes and the central space completes the archetypes to 13. It is this expansion of the model to 13 that mirrors the richness of the experience of being a woman.

What I love most about the model is the reflective value – each phase sitting in a harmonic opposite that mirrors and informs the qualities and experiences of each phase. I continue to revisit the wheel to make associations with yogic principles of evolution; match archetypes to myths and goddesses that hold ancient wisdom for the universal experience of being human; reflect on my own life and share with other women a way of seeing themselves as they move through different times of life. The 13 archetypes have also provided fertile material for artistic exploration.

It’s been curious over time to come back to the wheel and remember where I thought I was at 10, 7, 5 years ago and place myself now.  Life isn’t linear and it’s always informative to stop for a moment as I allow myself to really embrace the challenges and opportunities that are both before me and arising from within me and I love sharing this model with women, seeing the “aha” moments as they see themselves a little more clearly. 

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Kali - the dark Goddess.

8/5/2015

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It feels like the world is spinning ever faster and whilst this might be a moot point from a factual point of view, the rate of change has never been greater. According to yogic timelines we are close to the end of the Kali Yuga – the age of Darkness. For a really good breakdown of the complexities of the Yuga’s and how they are astrologically mapped you can read this article: End of the Kali Yuga. 

Just like Medusa, Kali is a dark goddess misunderstood by many due to her ferocious appearance. She is the first of the 10 Wisdom Goddesses, the ruler of time, driving us ever forward through the cycles of birth, death and reincarnation representing the ultimate transformative potential within everything. She is an archetype of seeming opposites: creatrix and destroyer at the once; divine and demon. Understanding and loving Kali is said to be the most difficult path for a sadhaka and her presence is certainly becoming more universal with the resurgence of interest in Goddess culture.

I had an “aha” moment hearing Innovation strategist Monica Bradley challenge all of us to think into the future. Like Kali she invoked “the past is dead”. A truism if ever there was one but suddenly I felt it, a visceral understanding of what that means. The arrow of time on a one-way trajectory and we can never go back.

But so often we are held by our beliefs, our need for security and assurance of the known, the inherent values of many traditions still relevant and needed for social cohesion. Ideally, ethically and morally, there is always need to reflect and consider how changes are going to affect us all. But change is a coming – oh yeh!

Everything is possible and all we need to do is imagine it, see it and open our minds. That is Tantra: expansion and liberation. In recent times many people have focused on manifesting only self-focused possibilities, ones that maximise profit and personal gain – all aspects of the power paradigm of our current era: the energy of Manipur chakra uncontrolled. Now is the shift for collective awareness into new ways of being that are sustainable, humanistic and radical. US philosopher and activist Cornel West recently lamented the dearth of new ideas in the public discourse. As a passionate orator and progressive thinker he practically begs us to come up with something new, to stop rehashing the old way of looking at the world.

Just after thinking about the possibilities in life I came across an article on the Na people in China. This small tribe from the hills of Yunnan province is a matrilineal society that doesn’t even have a word for husband. Relationships are contained within what is called a “walking marriage” where men stay living in their own family home and simply visit their women folk each evening. Nowadays this tradition is under threat but I was struck by the realisation that of course there are so many ways that societies adapt and organise themselves. Whilst it is an old tradition it is a new way of thinking about family structure to many of us in the west.

Over the course of my own experience of motherhood I have seen enormous social changes that have largely de-stigmatised divorce and single parenthood. New family models are evolving all the time and I wonder if we are not closer to the idea of a walking marriage than we think. I would say that what is wonderful is the potential for many approaches, no fixed model. Nuclear, extended, shared parenting between several single women, same sex parenting, blended families, the possibilities are endless and it is seems only social mores limit our possibilities. There are a million ways to make a family and children need the love of lot of people. We can re-model the old idea: “It takes a village to raise a child” into something new and unexpected. That's what Kali consciousness can create - letting go of the past; stepping into the new.

I want to believe that consciousness is evolving. According to the Vedic model of time the Kali Yuga is passing and this is a time of chaos and dissolution. The shift is now, the discomfort increasing as we approach the tip of the fulcrum. Collectively the energy is moving through the chakras and as the remnant shadows of war, abuse and power have the light shone upon them integration is possible. Through integration new paradigms become possible.

 


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    Gauri Ma's little insights, shares and sometime rants.

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