I walked through the initiatory gate of Empty Presence at my Priestess Retreat in California and on request, chose to let go of grief at the doorway. The next gate was a priestess honouring me with scent and stroking me gently with a beautiful white rose. I could not connect, I felt duped. The rose was plastic and I was horrified to be expected to surrender to something that wasn’t real especially now during this ‘Embraced by Love’ retreat. There was a fabulous pink altar with glorious statues, pink candles in elegant candlesticks and everything draped in glorious silks in different shades of pink and YET I was being offered a plastic rose to honour my awakening senses…..?
We sat in circle and I noticed how much I felt isolated with anger rising as each sister began to share about how blessed they felt to be in such a beautiful setting, how love was flowing. This only enhanced my sense of being separate and different, the all too familiar feeling of being ‘outside the family’. I decided I needed to be authentic and share what was arising but that it was more about wanting to express that having been duped as a child I was finally honouring the part of me that knew the difference between real and fake…..how for years I felt that I was a fraud and a fake. So speaking out was about shifting this, taking sovereignty, allowing myself not to be liked if I expressed out loud that I was frustrated to be stroked by a plastic rose when we were opening up to our senses. I realised I felt quite a strong sting of betrayal which I knew was about an old story but even with this, I still found myself projecting judgement that this was a bit of a cheap trick to pull on us at the start of the retreat! When it came to my turn to share, I took some ownership of what was happening. I was immediately honoured for being in alignment with my truth which felt such a relief as the workshop leaders did not take my comments personally. They asked me if I would like to have a new experience with the beauty and innocence of a real rose, which I took to mean that maybe I was right about the initial plastic offering. As I nodded with a shaky yes, I welled up with grief that was arising from old experiences of betrayal, the secrets and lies that had gone alongside the abuse and which was now being so perfectly mirrored in the story of the plastic rose. I was duped on so many occasions that to survive, I had to shut down my connection to my body and find some way to self medicate and cope with the shocks. In abandoning my body, I ended up ‘sensory deprived’ so that I rarely noticed anything and was more like an anaesthetised superwoman robotically going through life. Literally I had numbed out so much I wouldn’t notice if I needed to go to the toilet, I had so little connection to my body. I missed so much and yet - here – now – I could see that this WAS a plastic rose. I was impelled to say ‘no – now I want and I deserve more, this is not how it should be.’ It was a powerful Kali moment…… I was gently encouraged to choose a sister to support and offer me the rose for a second time. I chose my room mate Nicola who came over towards me, picking a white rose from the central vase and then suddenly I panicked again. A voice inside was saying ‘but no, this one is still plastic, what are you doing to me, I don’t want to play this game, it’s too painful?’ Time seemed to be suspended and a part of me so wanted to bail out and leave but as Nicola presented me with the rose….. I just about managed to utter that I didn’t understand what was happening…..to say that this rose was also plastic…………….and then ………a few seconds later………the truth hit me like a thunderbolt. It was a huge light bulb moment. I felt the stem with my own hands and knew it to be REAL…..I smelt the delicate scent and as such, I was shocked to recognise that the original rose had also been real……….that the multitude of glorious pink and white roses around the room were all exquisitely real. It was me that had not been able to see or receive the sensuous gift………. The cosmic wake up call did not go unnoticed. I was overcome with emotion, unable to speak. It was as if I needed to drop down on my knees and humbly ask for divine forgiveness, like being allowed finally into the Gates of Heaven. There was a palpable shift in the room as the energy dropped down and everyone realised what had happened for me, their own stories no doubt reaching home at the same time. All weekend the Goddess of Love perfectly played Her role to awaken us all from sleep, to help us hear the Rumi cry from his passionate poem ‘Don’t go back to sleep’. She was presenting me now with the love that had always been mine and that I had been forced to shut out because of trauma. This was the ‘bitter pill of the inner physician that cracked the shell of understanding’, another Rumi poem so perfectly encapsulating this shift of awareness. Now, it made sense why I clearly said ‘sorrow’ when I was asking what I needed to let go at the gate of Empty Presence. The years of feeling fake and not good enough, a lifetime of being disconnected like watching myself in a movie, endlessly seeking outside of myself in a desperate effort to be loved and find meaning. I had become a performing puppet and superwoman, totally focussed on perfectionism and stardom as a cover for the magnificent soft and tender petals that lay below. As I stared at the rose I was captivated by the two slightly mangled and limp leaves that were in the outer foliage reminding me of Leonard Cohen’s famous words ‘forget your perfect offering, there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in’. I could see this rose was magnificent in spite of these outside leaves, the centre was exquisite in it’s yoni formation, the ivory silk of the petals almost too beautiful to be true and the perfume subtly, yet profoundly impacting me. I didn’t realise I had my own distinct and unique perfume. Some things are hard to put in words and this experience was one of them. I felt like I had returned home to my own pure nature, witnessed in circle by beloved sisters who truly saw and understood the awakening that was taking place. I didn’t need to tell the wound story, I spoke for generations of women who with terror in their bellies, had suppressed and dampened down their feminine power and hidden their shame as a way to survive. In speaking out and questioning the plastic rose offering, in being allowed to check the situation, I could ‘know’ the answer for myself and allow the experience to be fully received in my body. And, in having this direct experience with the rose, I could reconnect with my naked innocence and finally come ‘home’ to the Temple of my body. The whole weekend was magical but the next night we were dressed up as a mythological character we wanted to embody more fully. Having travelled for some days in Vancouver I was unprepared for the request that we were to offer something in front of the group. And also, since I had spent my life as a performing puppet and trophy hunter for my mother, this time, I knew I had no song, dance or poem that related in anyway to the Avatar heart warrior character that I had chosen to embrace. Thankfully the lady before me decided not to dress in an outfit and to simply stand in her sovereign self, channelling something through for the group as a whole. As a result of her powerful offering which touched us all deeply, I had a strong remembrance of being stripped and shamed in a past life as a Priestess and since it resonated so deeply, I decided I would do my ‘performance’ next. As I stood in front, I shared that my edge was to not perform or try to do anything but instead to innocently strip in front of each of my sisters and to be in my naked truth with no guilt, shame or apology. And then just to be with it, transparent and open. Tender, powerful and fragile, surrendered like the rose. So this is what I did. I undressed with no drama and I walked reverently around each sister offering myself in prayer to each one. It was so powerful and whilst it was out of my comfort zone, I knew it was right to honour myself in this way. I felt the safety, love and total acceptance being offered by the circle. As I returned back to front stage, I did feel exposed and some shame tried to kick in but I wrapped myself up with love, put on my clothes and received the honouring feedback from my sisters, from the Great Mother who was so present in the ‘field. I knew it was deeply significant. The message was so clear as only ritual knows how. The potency of the archetype of love was burning away the old shame story that was never mine to carry in the first place. I was reclaiming sovereignty of my body, returning home to my truth. My whole system was literally being re-wired and this continued for some days after…..and I had a deep ‘knowing’ that the healing that was happening for me was also being offered to the collective. Bless you for listening to my story.
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