Elixir from My Recent Teaching Trip
If you could distill your most fervent prayer down to one word, what would it be? I like my teacher Christina Donnell’s: Union. When I think about it, anything I want comes down to that. Union – with the infinitely holy intelligence interpenetrating all things, with the bejeweled quantum net of love, with the personified Divine. Union seemed to be at the core of my offerings in Milan, Rome, London & Canterbury these past few weeks.
Whether I was teaching about the timeless call of the Pleiades for unity consciousness, or what it means to have a sexual encounter with a god like Dionysus, or how to receive the healing touch of Asclepius & his helping family, or the mind-shattering shamanic descent of Eleusinian mystery initiates in ancient Greece, or the Delphic priestess’s impregnation by Apollo so as to deliver guidance from the stars, I spiraled again and again on the theme of connection. For are we not waves longing to remember the cosmic ocean, bits of pinched clay feeling the pull back into the mound?
The Agony of Dis-Connection
In navigating my own inner challenges & observing those faced by my sweet audiences & beautifully open private clients abroad, I had an acute look at just how much work humanity is doing to heal right now. On my own end, amidst preparing to hold a high vibration for my trip ahead, my angry inner child burst forth in a string of expletives directed at my malfunctioning curling cream pump as I rushed about the morning of my flight out. My beau Lewis burst into laughter in spite of the tension: “I’ve never heard a priestess use such language!” I watched my trauma responses surface regarding production challenges associated with my workshops. I felt my insecurities arise when things didn’t seem to be going just the way I wanted. I had to constantly call upon the Graces.
With my students & clients I saw the wounds that have been streaming down for generations – lack of proper nurturing, sexual abuse, loneliness. Illnesses emerging – and always for good reasons, sickness so often being the body’s metaphorical cry for healing of the soul’s true wound. I saw women’s need to heal with men; men’s need to heal their hearts. In the more scholarly climes, even among the spiritually inclined, I witnessed a distrust of the prophetic, of individuals’ gnostic/intuitive authority due to a (still) over-reliance on the rational & a demoting of the Feminine.
The Ecstasy of Re-Connection
My role in all of my workshops & presentations was to weave the intellectual & the intuitive, and, ultimately, to take participants on journeys to realms where they encountered their own higher consciousness in connection with the larger pool of guidance. For is not the answer to all these ailments… Union? One evening my academic lecture concluded of its own accord with a good half-hour left to the event. I took a risk & shifted the room out of mental gear, leading the audience into a living, breathing experience of unity consciousness. It seemed to me that this was the real reason they had come to my talk, perhaps without knowing it.
In releasing the tedious labors of the mind we got down to the important matters that really run our lives: those within the emotional body. A row of older gentlemen had bothered to come to the talk, did not run out of the room when “experiential exercise” was announced – despite being given the out – and participated to the best of their ability. Although they could not fully engage by meeting others’ gaze as required at different points in the exercise, I could see through their bowed heads and closed eyes that they were making the effort to confront their own inner life. I was deeply touched. One man later confessed to me: “This showed me how much constriction there still is around my heart.”
Sex & Love
Union is erotic. It’s “entheogenic,” meaning it engulfs you in the Divine and it engulfs the Divine inside you. Those who communed with Dionysus’s willing phallus knew that most obviously – a taste of which my female students got at my Rome workshop in which they learned about and met the god. “Oh, come to me with the foot of the bull!” the women of ancient Elis would cry out to the Lord of Entheos amdist their orgasmic utterances of “Euoi, euoi!”
Dionysus is the Perfect Masculine, I told my students. We can heal the traumas from the fathers through his loving, protective, yin-balanced intelligence – and his healing wand. I took these Italian women, who are living in a land where this god was once venerated, on a journey to his realm, where each one was touched by his infinite Masculine wisdom. More subtle are the erotics of agape. At the end of my trip, I once again sat in the hushed crypt of Canterbury Cathedral where the dark form of the Madonna exudes silent wisdom. Here, I always receive guidance – be it personal or transpersonal.
While last year I was gripped by grief under Her tender embrace, this year I realized as I sat: I am at peace. I hoped for some advice on my path, but She redirected me to another task. “We wish you to embody the energy of unconditional love,” I heard. This did & did not surprise me, given my work with the Sacred Heart these many months. What surprised me, as always, was the nearly sexual ecstasy of the state. But this time, something more uncanny was at work: the memory – “This is how it was in the pre-Reformation holy orders when I was here as a Catholic nun.” I suddenly understood (remembered) what the holy orders were for, at their best: to serve humanity not just through outer works, but through work on the inner planes.
Union for the sake of helping others.
I poured before Her a list of names, asking for their healing. Friends, colleagues, family. Those who have sent me harm & toward whom I have had ill feelings. “How do I stay in this state when I know I will get up from this chair & already be jarred out of it?” I asked. “Practice,” was the answer. My travels coincided with a solar eclipse, the last pass of the Uranus-Pluto square & the Spring Equinox. All of these events signaled the sloughing off of the old, the powerful rebirth of the new in an evolutionary new key. I return home indeed feeling renewed & richly rewarded by having shared my bits with other tender souls on the healing & awakening path. I was ever more aware that in this work, in my imperfection, I am but a pilgrim meeting other pilgrims, and that together we are offering one another a hand in making the Great Connection.
With love,
Marguerite
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