I’m still buzzing from our Summer Solstice ceremony this past week! The Temple Priestesses, new priestess initiates, and women from the community came together to celebrate this time of fullness, prosperity, and abundance. Many of these women are going through rough times right now, and through their courage to share, we all saw how challenging times have the power to reveal the amazing abundance of love and support we have in our lives. As the talking circle continued, we were reminded that success and abundance are not about how much money we have. 
Story after story showed us how rich we all are in different ways, rich in friends, opportunities to come together, support, family (whether blood or chosen), and Love, among other qualities and treasured possessions.
Why only women? In a society where we have long been our own enemy, when women come together and connect, we find healing on a whole new level. When we heal our relationship with other women, we transcend competition, secrets, and distrust. We keep each other grounded by sharing our stories with one another, because we come to realize we are not alone in whatever it is we are going through. This grounding, being fully present in our bodies in connection to Mother Earth, raises our Shakti energy, our feminine energy. Activated and nourished, we will stay grounded longer and become more centered, focused, soft, and fluid, better able to go with the flow and meet life’s challenges head-on. This is not to say we’re better off without the men, our relationships with them are just different—magic happens when we come together with men too, it’s just different! We women need our girlfriend/priestess-time. I think this healing is something men want for us, a cause they can certainly support, yes?
So here’s an interesting question, what is feminine energy? Do you know what it is to be feminine? Seriously, think about it for a minute.
Feminine energy is magnetism, manifestation, present-moment, creativity, vulnerability, space-holding, embodiment. Masculine energy is singular-focus, future-focus, action-oriented, transcendent, analytical, electric. Masculine is status quo, feminine is evolution and change. To be masculine is to be projective, to be feminine is to be receptive. I didn’t say passive! I said receptive. There is nothing sexist about this, for the giver to exist there must be a receiver. Yin and yang, receiving and giving, magnetic and electric—
both exist in partnership and both are equally valuable and important to the equation. Just as when a woman and man come together biological creation happens, when these energies come together symbolic creation happens!
Women are not taught how to be feminine and so our concept of what this is gets distorted. We are taught to be mothers, givers, to put ourselves last, and so often our self does not come into the equation at all. We sacrifice, we believe it is better to give than to receive. We don’t understand how meeting our own needs first, allows us to more easily meet the needs of others—the wisdom in the safety speech during flight take-off procedures: if we should experience a loss of air pressure in the cabin, put your own oxygen mask on first, then help your child. As mothers, as a living example in action, what lessons are we passing on to our children? Our daughters learn from us to sacrifice, and our sons learn to receive from us (hence, the men are out of balance too).
In case you’re already wondering, this is all distinguished from sexual orientation. “Masculine” is not equivalent to man and “feminine” is not equivalent to woman, because each of us contains both masculine (giving) and feminine (receiving) energies, to varying degrees of balance (or imbalance, as the case may be). For most women you could think of it as us having an outer female and an inner male, whereas most men have an outer male and inner female.
When I was first introduced to all this information by my teachers, something in me clicked and it all made perfect sense, but at the same time I have to admit I actually felt a little defiant. With a background in Women’s Studies I knew the definition of Feminism is the belief that men and women should be treated as equals, period. (How this definition has come to be distorted is a whole other discussion!) It took a bit of exploration to understand that this all fits, there are differences that have nothing to do with women, feminine qualities, or feminine energy being seen as lesser-than. It’s not that women and men should be identical, it’s that we are equally valuable, equally important.
Over time I have come to understand these concepts on a deeper level, through repeated exposure and personal experience, and have been better for it. I think everyone should know this stuff! My goal is to challenge status quo, to encourage people to think beyond their ingrained habits and beliefs. And as I re-read my words I’ve written here, I want to keep it as short and to-the-point as I can, but I feel like there might be ways I could explain things more clearly or round this out better. So I value your questions and feedback, it helps me learn too!
I think it goes without saying our world has been very out of balance for the last few thousand years. So as we women align with our feminine energy (what we’ve largely been missing or under-valuing in our world), our masculine energy will naturally balance, bringing us integration. When we balance our magnetic/feminine energy polarity with our electric/masculine energy polarity, we become electromagnetic (healing energy). From this place of balance and wholeness we can begin to heal our outer relationships with both women and men, we can begin to transcend the polarization.
While we still love and value the priestess work and training programs, we have both, respectively, needed to take a step back and work on our own lives for a bit. And well, what do you know, a few years have gone by! Currently we don’t have any plans for future workshops or trainings. If and when we do pick it back up, it will probably look different, so we’re okay with letting go of the old right now, and freeing up the space for whatever new is coming.
May abunDance, joy, friendship and happiness be yours!
Temple Priestess Training 