Tag Archives: Women-Only

Becoming a priestess

Is this your time? Now?
Only you can answer that question.

We are holding space for the right group of women to come together at just the right time.

When it was my time, I serendipitously stumbled across a flyer for a Shamanic Trance Dance. I was intrigued. I had never heard of trance dance before and I had no idea what to expect, but I decided to check it out. When I arrived three amazingly beautiful creatures, the facilitators, were dancing across the room, smiling broadly, enjoying the movement of their bodies, completely in their element and definitely in their power.

Who were these incredible women? They carried themselves differently from most, with an air of confidence, self-satisfaction, intention, and exquisite beauty. I was entranced, alright, not by the dancing (well, that came later), but by the priestesses setting sacred space. It was kinda like the famous line from the movie “When Harry Met Sally” in that I didn’t know what they were having, but I wanted some of THAT energy! I wanted to be like THEM!

One of them handed me a flier about Priestess Training and the rest is history. I didn’t know what a priestess was, or what the training would entail, but it didn’t matter. An elusive ‘something’ had called me.

Listen to that small quiet voice, calling you home.

Is the Temple Priestess program right for you?

What is a Priestess, Really?

The First Grandmothers Summit

When women come together: The rise of feminine energy

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.

Interesting study on the science of female friendships

Came across this recently and I wanted to share this…

The following article is posted on UCLA’s Study on Friendship Among Women

A landmark UCLA study suggests friendships between women are special. They shape who we are and who we are yet to be. They soothe our tumultuous inner world, fill the emotional gaps in our marriage and help us remember who we really are. By the way, they may do even more. Scientists now suspect that hanging out with our friends can actually counteract the kind of stomach quivering stress most of us experience on daily basis.

A landmark UCLA study suggests that women respond to stress with a cascade of brain chemicals that cause us to make and maintain friendships with other women. It’s a stunning find that has turned five decades of stress research (most of it on men) upside down.

Until this study was published, scientists generally believed that when people experience stress, they trigger a hormonal cascade that revs the body to either stand and fight or flee as fast as possible explains Laura Cousin Klein, Ph.D., now an Assistant Professor of Biobehavioral Health at Penn State University and one of the study’s authors. It’s an ancient survival mechanism left over from the time we were chased across the planet by saber-toothed tigers.

Now the researchers suspect that women have a larger behavioral repertoire than just fight or flight. In fact, says Dr.Klein, it seems that when the hormone oxytocin is released, as part of the stress responses in a woman, it buffers the fight or flight response and encourages her to tend to children and gather with other women instead. When she actually engages in this tending or befriending, studies suggest that more oxytocin is released, which further counters stress and produces a calming effect.

This calming response does not occur in men, says Dr. Klein, because testosterone (which men produce in high levels when they’re under stress) seems to reduce the effects of oxytocin. Estrogen, she adds, seems to enhance it.

The discovery that women respond to stress differently than men was made in a classic “aha” moment shared by two women scientists who were talking one day in a lab at UCLA. There was this joke that when the women who worked in the lab were stressed, they came in, cleaned the lab, had coffee, and bonded, says Dr. Klein.

When the men were stressed, they holed up somewhere on their own. I commented one day to fellow researcher Shelley Taylor that nearly ninety percent of the stress research is on males. I showed her the data from my lab, and the two of us knew instantly that we were onto something. The women cleared their schedules and started meeting with one scientist after another from various research specialties. Very quickly, Drs. Klein and Taylor discovered that by not including women in stress research, scientists had made a huge mistake: The fact that women respond to stress differently than men has significant implications for our health. It may take some time for new studies to reveal all the ways that oxytocin encourages us to care for children and hang out with other women, but the “tend and befriend” notion developed by Drs. Klein and Taylor may explain why women consistently outlive men.

Study after study has found that social ties reduce our risk of disease by lowering blood pressure, heart rate and cholesterol. There’s no doubt, says Dr. Klein, that friends are helping us live longer. In one study, for example, researchers found that people who had no friends increased their risk of death over a six-month period. In another study, those who had the most friends over a nine-year period cut their risk of death by more than sixty percent. Friends are also helping us live better. The famed Nurses’ Health Study from Harvard Medical School found that the more friends women had, the less likely they were to develop physical impairments as they aged, and the more likely they were to be leading a joyful life. In fact, the results were so significant, the researchers concluded, that not having close friends or confidantes was as detrimental to your health as smoking or carrying extra weight!

And that’s not all! When the researchers looked at how well the women functioned after the death of their spouse, they found that even in the face of this biggest stressor of all, those women who had a close friend and confidante were more likely to survive the experience without any new physical impairments or permanent loss of vitality. Those without friends were not always so fortunate.

Yet if friends counter the stress that seems to swallow up so much of our life these days, if they keep us healthy and even add years to our life, why is it so hard to find time to be with them? That’s a question that also troubles researcher Ruthellen Josselson, Ph.D., co-author of Best Friends: The Pleasures and Perils of Girls’ and Women’s Friendships (Three Rivers Press, 1998). Every time we get overly busy with work and family, the first thing we do is let go of friendships with other women, explains Dr. Josselson. We push them right to the back burner. That’s really a mistake, because women are such a source of strength to each other. We nurture one another. And we need to have unpressured space in which we can do the special kind of talk that women do when they’re with other women. It’s a very healing experience.

The new temple priestess

By Jennifer Masters

Throughout history as we know it, we’ve been taught to feel ashamed of our bodies, or ignore it when in pain—which is how our body tries to tell us something is wrong. We don’t meet our own standards of beauty. Nudity is taboo. Sex is taboo. Deriving pleasure from sex is even more taboo—to the point where the whole of humanity has forgotten how to allow themselves, to give themselves permission to experience these pleasures.

The Temple Priestess recognizes that her body is sacred. It is a temple which houses her spirit. It is a perfect representation of the Goddess incarnate on earth. She knows it is a gift to explore, conduit through which the world is experienced, and the vehicle through which she expresses herself and the will of Spirit.

She acknowledges the connection between body, mind, and spirit. She is able to be present in her body, to be in the moment. She knows how to listen to her body and take care of herself. She recognizes that her body is a conduit for healing others, through touch, movement, dance, telling herstory—even her mere presence. She knows her humanity is not perfect in the common sense—but nature in its most perfect state is imperfect. She leads by living her life in example, and strives to do her best in all things.

She knows that she holds the power to be herself, to be free from judgment, from self and from others. Everything she needs to be a whole human being, she contains within herself. And she recognizes that she is part of a greater whole, that all of life is connected, we are not separate and alone.

She is the feminine counterpart to the equation, working in partnership, in balance with the masculine, the priest. One cannot function without the other. Yin and yang, receiving and giving, magnetic and electric. She recognizes that we all have both masculine and feminine energies, and our outer relationships can be just as diverse as our inner selves. A priestess is not just about one religion or spirituality, she is the element of the sacred feminine in any religion or spirituality—something that has been largely ignored, left out or forgotten in mainstream religion. She celebrates her femininity not despite or in contrast to masculinity, but in connection to it.

Every woman is a priestess in her own spiritual journey, but in a more formal sense, what defines a priestess is the willingness to step into the leadership role. A priestess is a position of leadership when she holds feminine strength and power while acting in service to others, holding sacred space within which anyone may come into connection with their divine source. A leader is a person who guides or inspires others (inspire = in spirit) to pursue that which is in their highest good. A true leader is someone who isn’t afraid to be different—she can stand by her principles, stand in her truth, regardless of what others do or think.

The path of the priestess is to lead the way into a life more abundant, more joyful. It is about how to be a woman in balance, and about living one’s life fully, being more in tune with her self, her body, her relationships, and her world. This is a state of being that each woman—all shapes, ages, cultures, and creeds—already has within her nature, whether she is conscious of it or has yet to explore. The priestess illuminates the path of self re-discovery.

Click here for information on Temple Priestess Training with Jennifer and Kaliani»