Spiritual awakening for the feminine heart
By Chameli G. Ardagh

What is your deepest longing?
What is that calling in the heart that makes you gaze towards the horizon in cold winter nights, that makes you involuntarily skip a little when the wind changes in the spring? That longing that burns out all other longings, the flame in your heart that keeps you moving. If you were to wash your life clean of distractions; what is it that makes you get up in the morning?
I have asked this question to women all over the world, and in my own heart I ask it over and over again. One of the things I have discovered is that a remarkable number of women are compromising what they, in their deepest hearts, find most important. The ways we do that are many, but the one main reason we compromise our deepest longing is that we haven’t really investigated what it is.
For me the word desire has a different flavor to it than longing. I distinguish between the two words in this way. Desire is the wanting to fulfill something that is missing; it is the impulse that makes us look for external fulfillment. When I use the word “longing” I mean an intuitive knowing, an original remembrance of life in its most immediate form. We are longing to rest more deeply in what is already here.
We have a desire for the perfect relationship, whereas our longing is to melt as love.
We have a desire for approval, whereas we are longing to rest in the perfection of all.

But rarely do we stop and investigate what this pull is about.
When we look closer at the goals we in the western societies are collectively running after, we could assume that the answer to this question would be:
-To get Money
-To get a promotion
-To have a bigger house
-To have relationships like they have in the movies
-To be smarter than everybody else.
-To have the slimmest body possible
We live our lives on this merry-go-round of “more stuff” and “ better me” when we don’t give our self the time to stop and investigated the undertow that drives us. What is it really about?
At certain times in our lives, life itself is forcing us to stop and look deeper. It can be at times of loss of a loved one or sickness or financial breakdown that we are forced to wake up and question the way we are living. For others, as it was for me, we never really manage to get away from the inevitable emptiness echoing in the way we are living our lives and we embark on a vigorous search for an alternative.
I had from an early age a nagging feeling that “this cannot be it”, and I was intensively seeking alternative ways of living. This led me at last, as for many others, to turn to spirituality . Spiritual teachings and teachers speak to that place in us that knows “there must be something more to this”, and it presents to us different values and goals we can strive for.
Although this alternative seemed far deeper and more satisfying to my heart than the purely materialistic way, by adopting these teachings as ultimate truth I was skipping over the process of truly investigating the essence of my longing. When we look closer at the “goals” of the different spiritual teachings that many of us have adopted in the hope of fulfilling our longing , it is natural to assume that our longing would be:
-To disappear.
-That life will one day be completely still
-That I will be saved
-That I will transcend out of here
-That I will stop having bodily sensations and feelings; especially negative ones

I was for years involved in spiritual teachings that emphasize many of these values. In the lack of any alternative role models, I simply adopted these values as spiritual maturity and in the process didn’t honor the wisdom intrinsic to that original flame in my own heart.
In my passionate longing for the divine, I adapted my self with fierce totality into spiritual dogmas created by the male psyche. My practice was goal oriented, it was reclusive. I felt I needed to reject life to achieve my spiritual goals. I ended up believing that the divine is realized away from ordinary life. I never for a minute considered the fact that all these spiritual concepts were written down and practiced by men and that it perhaps was these very men who seek away from life. I believed in their models as if they were models that are intrinsic to the Divine Truth, instead of merely intrinsic to the way the masculine psyche may affirm itself in certain cultural circumstances.
I was in India when I was by grace kicked out of the hamster wheel of seeking a future state of enlightenment, and for me it took the presence of a female spiritual teacher to finally let go. This winter morning the miraculous simplicity of life, of this moment gently kissed my forehead.
I was sitting with my teacher ShantiMayi and about twenty others in a small temple, big windows to the vista of big nature. The air was filled with the smell of incense and with the sound of the Gayatri mantra, a prayer for everybody to wake up their nature beyond the personal self.
Dissolving completely into this song, this chanting, this prayer for all of us, for the first time I truly had no sense of a separate me. It was absolutely completely gone; I became the prayer, a total prayer for everybody. There was nothing missing.
I had been traveling to India and to other places around the world for many years, I was seeking enlightenment. I had numerous spiritual experiences and openings, but seduced by the concepts of what enlightenment should look like, I would soon again resume the vigorous climb for something more. I was determent to reach the ultimate void, a place where all human expression should stop. This search had led me to be occupied full time with my own process, with my personal growth with my own enlightenment.
Simply sitting here, singing for the awakening of all, at the foothills of the Himalayas, was freedom. There was no more concern to get rid of anything or to reach some kind of end. It was a pure expression of love, which made me disappear completely.
From then on it was clear as the mountain air, that this love was and is who I am, who we all are, at all times, and that there was nothing more important in the whole of existence than to let life be an expression of this love.
For that to happen for real there is the need for gentle practice. To practice in a way that makes me recognize the automatic habits that sabotage love, the places where I get identified and contracted. Practices that support me to explore life lived from spontaneity and creativity, to allow the body to reflect and radiate more and more of this presence, of this deeper love.
The feminine quality in all of us is fully in the moment, relishing the full spectrum of life with all its colors and all its smells and feelings, in birthing and dying. The feminine laughs at a future state of enlightenment and sees it as nothing but a concept of the mind, and she asks; do we really have the time to postpone living the love in our hearts?
In retreats and seminars, in individual meetings and in wisdom circles, I have had the honor to get to know so many remarkable women from all over the world, exploring together what life lived in honoring of the deepest longing can be like. What is life like, outside the concepts and comparisons of the mind. We have explored how we can be with each other and life, when relaxing into the body, opening and surrendering to fully feeling this moment. We have been willing to nakedly face habits that have contaminated the feminine. Habits like; Competition, judgments, gossiping, compromise, blame, indulging in emotional dramas. And we have been forced again and again to break free of the stereotypes of gender that limits our culture.
It is time now to bring the masculine and the feminine into balance in our life. This has to happen within both men and women, but the journey into the depht of the feminine realms has to first be done by women who feel most at home there.
When women come together and we recognize the intrinsic wisdom of the MotherGod, the divine feminine in each other’s eyes, we can again trust the wisdom of our deepest longing. Staying true to the simplicity of heart, we watch and learn from the carefully designed balance of nature where the masculine and the feminine are inseparable. It is only in the distortion of the human mind we manage to put one above the other.

In the embrace of the feminine divine
To honor the wisdom of the feminine divine, and to let her be lived in our lives, does not require us to join any particular cult or religion. We don’t need to dress or move in a certain way, or to follow strict rules or dogmas. She does not abide in any book or in any particular temple.
She is right in the core of our own hearts. In her total embrace, we all become one; not one speck of dust is left out.
You may perform your daily dance on high heels, on Wall Street, barefoot in the desert, alone in your artist studio, or among five children in the kitchen, wherever you are the radiance of the divine feminine is in every moment available to you. Even in this.
To join hands with her is to open a gate to the wisdom of our deeper nature, you are returning to the wisdom of your own feminine roots. Once again you are listening to what you know, in your bones and in the very depth of your soul, to be true. You can again feel your feet on the ground, and know yourself to be everything.
When we listen carefully within we hear the calling for a spirituality that embraces both the masculine and the feminine. For this marriage to emerge fully from the shadows, women will have to hold sacred the wisdom that would otherwise invariably be crushed.
Luckily the sacred web of life has connected and supported the feminine through times of deep starvation of the soul; The flame of truth has kept on burning, despite heavy oppression and fear-based propaganda. Some of us were told that our natural wisdom, our connection with the earth, our bodies themselves were the making of the devil. Some of us were even told that spiritual freedom was only for men, that all we had held sacred was merely a distraction.
Some of us were told that we had to choose between having a family and spiritual life: that the formless source was more valuable than its manifestations. “Be aware,” they said, “the flesh will lead you astray.”
Others were just stretched to wide, trying to be there for every body, running like lemmings between the homemade muffins and the boardmeetings. Feeling our heart lying in bed at night, tight like a fist, dreaming of waves of nourishing water. And just a little bit of time to listen within…
Through all this, the feminine soul was giggling behind her veils, preserving her diamond for a time where it could be truly seen.
Here we are; both following well- trodden paths engraved in our beings, and at the same time fumbling our way, to bring to manifestation the union and wholeness of our spirituality in a way we have never seen before. We are being called upon to deeply question our familiar spiritual maps, do they fit the new landscape emerging before and within us? Women everywhere are making sure that the new maps will be drenched in the unmistakable fragrance of the goddess.
Some of us are taking our first baby steps in embodying Her; many of us meet in wisdom circles mirroring each other, encouraging each other. Everywhere she is, ripe and ready to be recognized for what she is; the divine in form.
We see the divine feminine in the sparkle in a woman’s eye, in the caring for those we love, in the rage against injustice, and in the unconditional love for it all. She is found in swaying hips, in belly laughter, as well as in the bottomless grief for innocent children being abused and hurt. She is found in the tender kiss of a lover’s neck, and in the throbbing heart that has just enough trust to expose itself. She is found in wild storms and in crisp autumn mornings, she is the one tickling your belly in the spring.
She is there in the depth of your longing, in nursing breasts, in rotting leaves, and in the voice that whispers the truth. She is the one who shakes you when you live your life in compromise, and the one who dances with you in your ecstasy, She is the steaming hot kiss of the sunrays, and she is the cool embrace of the moon. She is the voice that chooses love above all, while excluding nothing.
The goddess is all forms, wild and colorful, deep and constantly changing shape. She is unpredictable and utterly free. She is the high priestess of deeper love.
She is the feminine principle of life, the feminine face of god.

Women all over the world are waking up and we are stepping out of the dusty dogmas to really investigate what is true. What is this longing inside? Is what you’ve been taught to seek really what your heart’s deepest longing is for? The heart is very innocent and its wisdom gives us hope for a sane life on our beloved planet. Look inside and maybe you will find as I and the hundreds of women I have investigated together with have that your longings are something similar to these:
-To welcome life
-To fully be present and open with life in its totality
-To live a natural life
-To live undefended
-To feel all
-To surrender to the oneness of all
-To have every corner of our being to be fully loved and accepted
-To love
-To be love

When we fully realize and commit ourselves to a simplicity of heart , our spirituality fundamentally changes. We no longer seek to transcend “out of here”, but to open our self to a multidimensional life, right here in the midst of it all. We recognize that the ideas of a future state of perfection keeps us from surrendering openly to the perfection already present in this moment. We feel the suffering intrinsic to any sense of duality, and we start to breathe down into our bodies, into our wombs, welcoming human life as an opportunity to explore love in tangible ways. This shift gives birth to the spirituality of totality.

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