My friend tells me she doesn’t like women’s circles, they aren’t for her. I am surprised by this, as she seems exactly like the type that you might find at one. “I don’t want to be doing this ‘the Goddess in me recognizes the Goddess in you’ shit when I know deep down that those other women are bitches. It just seems hypocritical.”
On one level, I can understand this because it reminds me of how I felt going to church as a teenager, looking around the room for holiness and only seeing hypocrisy. However, this is not how I view people having spiritual experiences now. Maybe it is grace, or maybe it is because I choose to see the good in people now, but when I am at a women’s circle, the Goddess in me DOES recognize the Goddess in the other women. Perhaps this is because the women in my circle are either close friends of mine, or are practically strangers that I don’t know well enough to say if they are a bitch or not.
The women I know in my circle, they are all beautiful to me.
Last night, a handful of these women and I dressed up in our fanciest clothes and adorned our heads with tiaras or crowns. We celebrated the birthday of one of our friends in royal style. I had spent a little extra time on glittery eye makeup that perfectly matched my sparkly purple dress, and wore a special jewelry set that I had gifted myself with when I had received a bonus at work. Against the background that we found, we glittered and shimmered and celebrated our sparkle with photos of our prettiest selves. I couldn’t stop admiring how beautiful we all were, and I contemplated how it felt to wear a crown.
The next morning, I spent some time working on another crown, this time my crown chakra. I have been doing this specific spiritual exercise in the deep end of the neighborhood swimming pool on Sunday mornings. I suppose you could say this is how I do church these days. What I have been doing is facing the sun and closing my eyes. I breathe deeply and imagine the sunlight illuminating my third eye chakra. This chakra, also referred to as ajna, is the area associated with intuition, insight, and spiritual awareness. I have been spending some time on this chakra because in my most recent oracle reading, the reader told me my third eye was blocked, and this had something to do with how I see myself. In this practice, I allow the sunlight to release this blockage, and I concentrate on feelings of positive self-love. I also focus on lengthening through my crown chakra, sahasrara. This chakraconnects us to the divine, and in this moment, I imagine this chakra opening up a channel between me and the heavens.
I look up at the sky and I invite the divine creator in. I thank the creator for the gifts that I have been given. I ask for the spirit guides to be with me and tell them I am opening myself up to their guidance. I clear my mind and allow my spirit to be still. I lay back in the water, embracing the way that the water over my ears drowns out the noise outside and allows me to do deeper inside my soul. I open my arms, leaving my palms facing the sky to receive the message the universe has for me.
This day, my heart chakra opened up, and I felt love pour out from me into the cosmos. I felt that my spirit was a small light in the universe that connected to other lights. I reflected this light on my beautiful friends from last night’s party, our bonded pentagram that soaked up the floating sound bath in the rooftop terrace pool in a fancy hotel downtown the night before this. I asked the creator to send them what it was that they needed at this time: to heal a broken heart on one; to help one be able to see and release people of bad energy in their life; for another to not feel that she has to make herself small for others; for one to feel that she can bring her authentic self to the table and be loved. These friends of mine, we put on crowns and tiaras for one night and felt worthy, and I want us to feel that way all the time. We are all amazing women who have talents and gifts to share with the world. We are all worthy of love.
I felt our connection, but more than that, in this moment, I felt that the spirit guides were telling me that this connection was aligned with my greater purpose. I felt strongly in this moment that my purpose is to build connections. I saw in my mind’s eye a beautiful purple flower, with several petals. This flower was in full bloom, and small birds, bees and butterflies were coming to the flower and getting nectar, then taking that nectar out to share with the world. I was the flower, and I was feeding them, and in turn, they were feeding others.
I reflected on how I built connection through creating these communities of common interests, how I had curated this friend group and forged this bonded pentagram of friendship that we currently have going on, my “main bitches”. I was building connections between my spirit, mind and body in this moment, and in the hiking I had been doing over the weekend. I considered connections in my writing between self and nature, self and others, self and the outside world. I was building connection in sharing writing experiences with a small set of friends, which was helping these friends and I navigate our emotions and our spaces in the world.
As I was floating in the pool, eyes closed, reflecting peacefully on the idea of building connection, I didn’t realize that the water was moving me out of the deep end and into the main pool area. There was an older couple swimming laps, and I ended up floating right into her way. She angrily fussed at me, and I apologized profusely and moved way, way back into the deep end. On one hand, I felt like her anger was overly amplified for the situation, but I also had noticed that there were two little girls swimming in the pool who had also gotten in the couple’s way, and perhaps they were just extremely annoyed at the interruptions at this point. It is not a private pool, and basically it is mostly open at this hour for lap swim, but there are no lane ropes up to keep areas restricted. I also chided myself, “oh, you think building connection is one of your spiritual gifts, but you just created division instead, way to go!” This was a lighthearted joke with myself, though, and I didn’t spend any time being negative towards myself for this mistake. It was an opportunity, really, to see how I could maintain my positive reflection and belief in purpose even when there are setbacks.
I continued to remain open to messages from the spirit guides, but this time I kept my eyes open so I wouldn’t wander out of my area again. I looked at the clouds in the sky, wondering if there were any messages there. There was a big fluffy cloud that looked like a swan. There was a breeze blowing, and I watched how it lit up the leaves of the trees around me, how it made the needles dance in the pines. I felt this wind like a hug from the heavens, and it brought me comfort and helped me feel loved. I searched my body and realized that every part of me felt good and healthy, even the parts of me that usually hurt. I felt filled with that warm sunlight and infused with love for self and others.
At this point, the older couple had gotten out, and I felt the woman’s eyes on me like little daggers. It occurred to me that she was probably judging me, but I didn’t care. That was her journey, and I didn’t have to let it affect mine. I could keep having a moment of peace and light and living with intention.
I eventually realized I had spent enough time in this spiritual swimming exercise, and left the pool to head home. As I drove, I was listening to a podcast about a man who acts as a psychic channel. He was talking about spirit guides, and he said that many people want to ask spirit guides about their relationships and the work that they do, their every day decisions. He said the spirit guides don’t care about your relationships. Their only concern is for your development and aligning your purpose with your actions to bring you to a higher spiritual plane. This helped me strip down the message that I believed that I was receiving today, to focus on aligning my actions with my purpose and not to focus on what this meant for the day-to-day decisions.
When I got home from this exercise, I created a virtual time and space to intentionally build connection with my spiritual friends. I posted the information about this reoccurring Zoom call in our chat, and spent most of the day resting and reading. I was being nudged internally to create a physical area for online interaction. I have been toying with the idea of developing virtual content and spaces for creativity and connection. I enlisted my husband’s help to dismantle technical equipment on my desk that had been sitting idle for months, possibly years. We had originally set up this desk space in our bedroom as a place for me to work during graduate school. This desk area had been accumulating paperwork, odds and ends of my life. Behind the computer monitors that we were taking down today, though, was a beautiful tapestry representing the tree of life, and now I wanted to feature this area and the tapestry as a background for digital sacred spaces.
Now, in preparation for this virtual meeting space that I had created, I cleared my desk off of all the junk. I purged an entire trash bag full of things I did not need anymore. I organized the clutter into a box and wiped the dust off the desk. We got it ready just in time for me to log in.
Well, I was the only one who logged into this space I created. A digital party of one. I thought back to being in that swim lane this morning, and decided I did not feel any sort of way about this situation. I lived aligned with my purpose, I created time and space for a connection, and that effort was a win for me. If others could not make it, then it was just something that was not a priority to them today, or the timing just didn’t work out. Perhaps it will work out in the future, perhaps it won’t and if so, I will stop setting aside time in this way.
I didn’t just sit around looking at an empty Zoom meeting. What I did with the time was work on creating a visually and emotionally appealing creative space for me. I moved some of the terrariums I have created over time into strategic spaces. I added a sparkly gold star to remind me of the heavens. I brought in little glass bottles filled with moss and flowers and set them on top of round slices of oak. I gathered some of my pretty stones and arranged them around a tea stand. One of the finishing touches was to take the sparkly crown I was wearing last night and place it on display above a wide sealed glass jar full of pine cones, wine corks and sparkly beads. This is to remind myself to hold my head high, to value myself, to feel pride on what I have and will continue to accomplish in this life.
I am worthy. I am loved.
I am sitting in that space now, writing, and it feels so good.
I’ll keep the light on for you.
