What is Sacred Feminine Initiation?

Even though I have been consciously engaged in Sacred Feminine Initiation, the short answer to this question is that it is the Mystery unfolding, i.e., I don’t really know.  I can’t know what the Mystery is.  I can only experience it.  Initiation is such an intimate encounter and conversation with the Mystery, the Divine Mother, the Kundalini Shakti, that it cannot really be put into words.  This is why there has always been so much secrecy about initiation rites.  We can say what we do but that does not even get near what actually happens.  While there are experiences and patterns that seem to be common to all of us on this path, the sights, sounds, colors and flavors of each woman’s experiences are unique.

I can more easily speak about what initiation does and how it unfolds.  I had the following dream in the early days of my investigation of the Feminine.  At the time of the dream, I was in graduate school, and at the beginning of my Jungian analysis.  I was aching for some connection to, or understanding of, the Feminine, even though I really did not know what it was, at least not experientially.  I was studying Jungian psychology and exploring my dreams, doing research papers on the Feminine in my graduate program, and giving women’s workshops about it.  My longing to know was a relentless burning, and at that time, the way I knew how to go about this was to go after it intellectually, through my dream analysis, and by teaching what I was learning.

Here is the dream:

My young son, Tim, then about five years old, led me to a cave.  We went in, but soon he disappeared and I was walking deep into the damp darkness alone.  I could see clearly,  despite the absence of any light.  As the cave wound around I came upon corpses, skeletons, decomposing bodies and half-dead people chained to the walls of the cave.  The horror of the sight and the stench made me run faster into the depths of the cave.  It never occurred to me turn back and leave the way I came in.

I ran and ran, finally got past the bones and corpses, and came upon a small shrine in a niche in the cave wall.  I was struck by the shift in the energy of the place, the apparent incongruity of what I was seeing.  There was a statue of the Madonna in the niche, and She seemed to be emanating a soft light from within.  There were a number of small, flickering, candles in the recesses of the earthen walls around Her.  When I saw Her, I re-membered and felt my long-forgotten childhood love of the Blessed Mother.  A wave of humility and gratitude swept through me, and I fell to my knees.

We are led by our innate innocence, our longing, and by love, Big Love, into the dark, damp, caves of our own mysterious being.  In my case, a little-boy attitude of curiosity and adventure was present.  I had no fear, initially, just an eagerness and excitement to explore the unknown.  A cave is such a perfect symbol for our Feminine being, and, as you will discover, the journey of initiation takes us into both the caves of the womb and the tomb—and we eventually realize them to be the same.

Again and again, we encounter our own shadow—the corpses, skeletons and half-dead ones who are the unhealed, unloved, unknown, parts of ourselves.  As we go, we become well-acquainted with our own fear in all of its flavors, learning how to meet it, moment to moment.  We develop the ability to see ourselves clearly, with compassion, mercy, and wisdom, as we meet and welcome our shadow.  We have to learn how to meet what comes, how to welcome it, open to experience it, no matter how ugly or frightening it appears, so it can be truly known and integrated.  It is all part of us, and we need to welcome it home.  This can be scary as well as extremely challenging, and it requires great willingness, courage, and commitment.
 
While we are guided and propelled by something mysterious within us that is luminous and sees through the darkness, initiation is a solo adventure, like birth and death are, though the journey is not necessarily taken in solitude.  Grace is always watching, ready with her stretcher when we need her help.  We learn to ask, and to pray like we never have before, and to feel our need, and what a challenge that is to our little egos.

Paradoxically, opening wide to our heartbreaking humanness is the portal into realms of spirit and beauty beyond imagining.  We discover the mythical dimensions of our lives, have all kinds of extra-ordinary experiences, and enter into a feminine, non-linear way of living in kairos, timeless feminine time, where an hour can feel like a minute and a minute can be a lifetime.  We make the paradigm shift from living in our heads and doing our lives, to living in our hearts and simply being.  We come to find out that there is no do-er, there never was.  It was all a case of mistaken identity!

At the same time, the unfolding of consciousness happens, regardless of how much fear and resistance we experience.  Our poor little egos dread this initiatory journey because it is going to be revealed for what it is and de-throned, disempowered as we dis-identify with it.  It gets very creative in its efforts to leave, shut down, disappear.  We learn to meet it all: the fear, the resistance, the numerous manifestations of our own shadow, as well as the ineffable, numinous Beauty.  One of my favorite lines is from the poet Rilke.  He wrote that beauty is but the start of terror men (and women) can hardly bear.  We learn to open to Big Love and more radiance than we ever imagined, and we expand to increase our tolerance for bliss, joy and ecstasy.  What a job!

Spiritual practices and healing processes are taught in this Temple so that we have many tools and skillful means to make this passage, and the perfect support always appears when it is needed.  Having a Ritual Elder to midwife our process and a loving spiritual community in which to be held add energetic support and love to strengthen and fortify us for the trip, and allows for some things that we could never do alone.  It all sometimes seems miraculous, yet it isn’t a miracle—it is how it really is and we come to see more of this as we awaken.  Wonder, awe, and amazement become regular companions on this initiatory journey.  Gratitude is an ongoing prayer.

Holy Longing

Our attraction to the numinous shrine is our longing, holy longing.  It is the energetic pull to keep going, to awaken, to get to whatever is calling us, to find Home.  It is so irresistible and relentless that sooner or later we realize that it has become devotion, receptive devotion.  This devotion carries us beyond our own perceived limitations.

I have known this feeling of longing since I was two years old, and recognize now that it is our longing that brings us into seeking and finding.  Women come to the Temple because they are longing.  We must welcome and allow our longing, feel it fully, and follow it to its Source, not its object.

I love the word entelechy—it fits here.  It is from the Greek entelecheia, meaning to have a goal.  Entelechy refers to an actuality rather than a potentiality.  Just as it is the entelechy of the acorn to become an oak, it is the entelechy of a human being to become conscious, awake to our own essence, awake to our own True Divine Nature.

We must, and will, be what we are, whether we are awake to it or not, and it’s a lot more fun awake.  The good news is that we don’t have to figure out how to do it.  It is already encoded within us and happening, just as each seed is encoded to be a rose or an apple tree.  The bud that we are is opening into what it already is, beyond our ego’s control.
The shrine…what can I say about the shrine?  It is so beyond words… as I feel it now, I bow to Her with such gratitude.  All longing leads us here.  It is the place within us where the meeting we have been longing for happens.  We can go to this shrine within our own hearts.  She is there, whether we are aware of Her, or not.

For this Temple of the Sacred Feminine, I was given the Samyama practice about twelve years ago in meditation to use as the central practice for initiation.  We do many practices and learn many skills here, and Samyama is at the heart of everything we do.  Samyama answers the question of how to meet what is, how to meet our fear and shadow, how to meet the horrible, and how to meet unbearable beauty.  It has taken me through the most difficult initiations of my life.

In the dream I felt an energy shift at the shrine and was somehow puzzled at the apparent incongruity of finding the shrine and the Madonna in this dark, damp, stinky cave of skeletons and death.  There is no incongruity, I have discovered.  It is our egos, our limited thinking minds that see the place of stench and the holy shrine as separate.

In the alchemical fire of our hearts, both the horrible and the holy can have a place, a niche in which to be held.  When the Kundalini Shakti, the fire of initiation, snakes her way into our hearts, she brings about this marriage of heaven and earth, and we directly experience the 

Collage by Sheila Foster

Path of Direct Experience

Sacred Feminine Initiation is a path of direct experience, a path of meeting and opening to all that is human, messy, imperfect, fragile, and not wanted, as well as what we do want and love.  When we learn to meet what is as it is, we realize that no matter how things appear, their essential nature is revealed to be the Mystery.

As much as we can share with each other, or we can read of someone else’s journey, there is some knowledge that can only be gained through our own direct experience.  I can tell you about giving birth, having an orgasm, or a kundalini experience, but you can only truly know what extraordinary, orgasmic chocolate is when you have tasted its sublime nectar yourself.

When I had this dream, I had not been in touch with my love for the Virgin Mary since I was a child.  She returned to me awareness in response to my longing for the Feminine.  If we call to Her, even if we have no idea who She is, She comes, every time.  I have seen this a zillion times over the years with the women in this community.  I gave up Mary in my teens, along with my membership in the Catholic Church.  Often, we have to give up our attachment to organized religion and its doctrines in order to find our true religion.  The word religion comes from the Latin religio, to bind back, to go back to our roots.

Where are we truly rooted??  Carl Jung wrote that our primary human instinct is religious, spiritual; it is not sex or power.  Jung wasn’t referring to organized religion, but to the unrelenting longing we carry within us to go back to our Source, our root, to know who we are.  This is our entelechy.

I, like many others, was called to inquire, to seek, to live into the question of my spirituality, my original connection with Source, before and beneath any Catholic dogma took hold, before and beneath any patriarchal definitions of God and how I should be in relation to God came into my consciousness.  According to Carl Jung, this inquiry is an essential part of our individuation, the process of becoming a whole human being.  Like many women and men, I had many layers of misogynistic, patriarchal crap to get through, beliefs and stories about all of this that I had ingested, breathed, and been poisoned by.  This is part of the collective shadow that we encounter and have to address, along with our personal shadow.
 
Re-membering Mary in this dream presaged re-membering my religious (in the true sense) root before Catholicism.  That root goes directly to the Divine Mother, to Mary and to Eve.  After the dream, I began to pray and tune into Mary, and she began to come to me in meditations.  She was no longer the Mary of my childhood.  Her image as the Madonna, the Mother, became for me a portal to the energy and presence of the Divine Mother, She who has many forms and manifestations.  Other goddesses from many cultures and traditions began to appear in my life as She made Her presence known in different forms, and in formlessness.  Here, again, it becomes unspeakable for me, as the Mystery of this meeting cannot be put into words, but perhaps you can tune into the energy field.  I can say that I live in Her lap, I am nourished by the divine nectar from Her breast, and I am in service to Her will.

I encourage you to feel your longing, invoke Her, whether you know Her or not, and ask to see Her face.  It is important to let go of any and all ideas about Her and how She may appear.  Just see what happens…She will come, perhaps in a form that may blow your mind in its ordinariness.  Maybe you will re-member Her.  She is longing for you.
                                                           -  © Sheila Foster 2005
 
You can see and hear women from the Temple of the Sacred Feminine community speak about their own initiatory experiences, and learn more about the stages of the journey, in our evocumentary film, Eve’s Fire.  Also on the Dangerous Old Women  site, you can read excerpts from inner-views with some women from this community.  You can also read about my awakening experiences throughout this site.