“There’s a wonderful Bible verse that says ‘… well done, good and faithful servant.’ That about says it for me. I want to know that the people I care about most in the world can move on without me because I have done my job in a way that’s made a positive impact on them.”<\/i> — Gail Williamson, IN SWEET COMPANY: CONVERSATIONS WITH EXTRAORDINARY WOMEN ABOUT LIVING A SPIRITUAL LIFE<\/p>\n
No doubt about it, there’s a renaissance going on today, a grassroots spiritual revolution spearheaded by women of all ages, faiths, and backgrounds. Women are gathering en masse<\/i> to share our stories, to actively explore our options, to give and receive support. It’s time to rock and roll!
When I think about the expanding nature of women’s spirituality — this external flourishing as well as the depths women are reaching inside themselves — some words of the wonderful Jean Houston come to mind that, for me, nail what’s going on …<\/p>\n
\n“If for thousands of years you have been stirring the soup with one hand and holding the baby with the other, kicking off the woolly mastodon with one foot and rocking the cradle with the other, watching out for the return of the hunters with one eye and determining with the other on which cave you will paint a magical bison, you are going to develop a very complex consciousness … one that is well adapted to orchestrate the multiple variables of the modern world.” <\/i> <\/p>\n
It’s no surprise that many of the characteristic features of a woman’s spiritual practice were organic to the ancient matriarchal civilizations that set up housekeeping in the Indus River Valley 5,000 years ago. Riane Eisler called these cultures “partnership societies” because they were organized around nurturance and connection; they promoted community and mutual regard yet valued individual experience. They also fostered the development of intuition and creativity and operated in harmony with the natural world, with the cycles of the seasons and of life itself.<\/p>\n
Once these matriarchal societies were overrun, women’s spirituality went underground. The social and spiritual mine fields women tread were humiliating, disempowering, and rendered us invisible for thousands of years: Aristotle taught that women were defective, that we were “incomplete men.” In the Middle Ages, we could embroider tapestries and liturgical vestments, but we could not attend church with our fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons. We were burned, hung, shunned, and banned for our beliefs, told we were “less than” — and yet we survived. We made nurturance and connection the center of our lives; we trusted our intuition and expressed our spirituality through our creativity, our families and our communities. We honored the power of personal experience and operated in harmony with life itself. We found God in ourselves, in our families and friendships, in our activities. And we loved Her.<\/p>\n