The Sacred Circle
By Chameli G Ardagh

You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round. The sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nest in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves.
Black Elk, Oglala Sioux holy man

When I find myself in a circle of women, I always have a strong sense of the presence of generations and generations of women. It is as if the circle has been there forever; only the shapes of the women in it have changed with time. We have gathered to support each other, to share our creative gifts, and to relax together. We have come together to encourage each other to express the voice of the feminine and to cherish a free flow of feelings since the beginning of time. A circle (which can simply mean a gathering of women) can include everything from two to hundreds of women, and beyond. It is the level of honesty and willingness to stay present that dictates how deep and nourishing the meeting will be. I find the gathering of women in circles one of the most powerful ways to restore a healthy and reverent relationship to the feminine. Maybe it is because the circle itself carries the wisdom of sisterhood, ready for us just to tap into. PEACE X PEACE is a global women’s network, and on their website you can read this about the wisdom of the circle: “A circle is more than the sum of its partners, and it is the structure that brings balance between “feminine” and “masculine” qualities. It supports the qualities needed to achieve and sustain peace— inclusiveness, compassion, questioning and listening, nurturing and protecting, healing, and restorative justice. Such qualities do not have equal influence in the world as the “masculine” qualities of linear thinking, structure, competition.”
The wisdom circle becomes something more than the sum of all the women in it—it becomes a teacher in itself. We come together to bring forth the best in each other, not to enable each other’s destructive habits. Together we can take a stand for deep love and clear communication with each other, to relieve the feelings of separation and mistrust that have grown between us.

The Power of Honesty
Beloved, you are my sister, you are my daughter, you are my face; you are me.
Toni Morrison

Every other week I have the honor to meet with a very special circle of girls. They are fourteen young women in sixth grade, and the story that follows is about a practice we did together. I have of course changed their names in order to respect our agreement of confidentiality.
One of the girls, Anna, had expressed to her parents and to her class that she often felt left out by the rest of the girls. She didn’t get invited to birthday parties, and she often felt that the girls were talking about her behind her back. Anna is a girl who speaks up if something is not right, so she expressed this in our afternoon session as well.

“I want to know why you stop talking when I come into the room and give each other looks. Do you think that I don’t notice? How would you feel if you never got invited for a play date?”
Some of the girls supported her by sharing that they wouldn’t feel good either about being treated like she was, but the girls that had been most active in excluding Anna were silent. At this point I felt that we all could benefit from the wisdom of the Spider Woman, a goddess of the Navajo Indians, so I decided to tell her story (this is my free interpretation of the legend):
In the beginning of time the Spider Woman was sitting in the center of the universe, which otherwise was completely empty. Out of nothing she created the planets, the suns, and the stars and the moons, she created heaven and earth, she created light and darkness, and each object she created was connected to her with the threads of life. She was a Spider Woman sitting in the center of her web, spinning out life from herself. She was creating human beings and birds and animals and trees, and she was blowing life into all these forms with her breath.

If you have seen a spiderweb you know that there are threads going out from the middle, but there are also threads crossing. In the same way, as human beings, animals, and everything else started their lives, threads were created that went between them all, and so everything in the world was connected. The threads of life permeated everything. If one part of the web was touched, the whole web was shaking.
“Can you see that each part of the web plays a very important role?” I asked the girls. “If you take away one part of the group it will be a different web.”
The girls nodded, and I noticed that they glanced around the circle. Maybe they were starting to see their little group as a web too.

“I love to travel around the world meeting with women,” I continued. “Women and girls have such immense powers and beautiful gifts that we can give to the world. But there are also other habits that are typical of girls and women that sabotage our gifts. They even disconnect us from the web, from our feeling of connectedness. I am talking about our habits of gossiping, talking behind each other’s backs, and of competition and saying, ‘She is more beautiful than me’ or thinking, ‘I want all the boys to like me, not her.’
We were all giggling at this point. The girls said they could recognize this in themselves. I opened the space for them to continue the conversation. Susan, a girl who often speaks what the other girls are afraid to voice, went first. “I really want you all to know that if you have anything to say about me, I want you to come directly to me, and not talk behind my back.”

The other girls joined her in this demand; they all wanted to have clear communication. By this point all the girls had a lot to say. I encouraged them to share things they had withheld from each other to clear the air, and especially to express what needed to be said to Anna. I was deeply touched by the girls’ honesty, as one by one they shared how they sometimes had been hurt by each other, shared their apologies, and shared their appreciation of one other. Whether Anna was invited to the next birthday party or not I don’t know, but it was clear that what happened in this meeting laid the groundwork for a healthier relationship among the girls.
Powerful healing is made possible when we come together, committed to speak face-to-face and abandon our habits of gossiping behind each other’s backs. The trust between women is deeply interconnected with our trust of the feminine itself. As we move closer to the divine feminine we are ruthlessly challenged to face all our judgments and criticisms of the feminine in ourselves and in others.

If we are here to live in honor of our deepest longing, we must ask ourselves if we really are willing to face all that does not serve that intention. Because now is the time, now is the place. Love is here pressing itself into this moment, yearning for our hearts to open for real, waiting at the door for the moment when we lose interest in all our empty games. Love is ready to bring us all back into what’s real. We don’t have to wait until we are perfect or until we never again fall into unconscious habits. Love is right here embracing it all. Totally, with nothing left out. All that is needed is a yes.
Yes, that is important.
Yes, that is why I am here.

Feeling All the Way to God
I have been in sorrow’s kitchen and licked all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows, with a harp and sword in my hand.
Zora Neale Hurston

Most people are surprised when I talk about being with feelings as a spiritual practice. How can our feelings, which so often seduce us into heart-wrenching dramas, be a way to connect with the sacred?
To allow the natural flow of feelings does not mean that we become lost in a never-ending roller coaster of emotional drama. Drama takes over when we experience strong feelings without connection to presence and awareness. When we have no container for our feelings, they are accompanied by a compulsive urge to react.
Repressing and/or acting out our feelings often progresses in this way: 1)You have the feeling. (I feel so powerless.) 2) You energetically shut down and resist the feeling. (I really deserve some chocolate. Oh, look, here is some ice cream too. I am going to do the best job of anybody in the office this month. I am going to be the best. I am good. Oh, my head, I need an aspirin. I take five.) 3) Out of the contraction comes an automatic impulse of frenetic mental movement. (I wonder why my boss gave Anna that new assignment and not me? She likes her better than me. It’s always like that. No one ever sees me, no one ever did. My mother was the same. I work so hard, and no one really appreciates it. I don’t care, I can get another job, and then they will regret how they are treating me. Then they will realize how good I really am. That I am the best.) 4) Out of a lack of inner acceptance, we project on the outside what needs to be changed. (If only I had another boss. She really needs some therapy to look at her issues. She is making me feel so bad. And Anna gets all the attention at every meeting. She should give other people some space sometimes.) 5) And off we go. (Have you heard the latest news? Anna was super late with the assignment. I have nothing against Anna, but I must say that one can’t really trust her. And her hair looks . . . well, do I have to say more? Oh, God, look how that idiot is driving. Hey, you. Yes, you! Can you get out of my way?)

Lost in the destructive chain reaction of resisted feelings, our attention is turned away from the essence of the feeling itself, we become alienated from our bodies, and we are disconnected from presence and love.
Don’t we all, in one way or another, long to live in love? To connect deeply with each moment, to connect deeply with our children, our friends, and our lover? And again and again we find ourselves being occupied by one emotional state after another. We close down when a feeling arises, or we become lost in those feelings. We become rigidly occupied with the story attached to the feeling, and we enforce separation. I would even go so far as to say that emotional drama is the main root of suffering and distraction for the feminine, and this is why it brings such freedom and expansiveness to us when we learn how to be with feelings in a natural and conscious way. Then we can stay open and connected to loving presence in the midst of any emotional state.

Beyond Blame
We all have places where we contract and close in fierce resistance. One of my strongest challenges is the pornography industry, its abuse of innocent children and selling of women. For many years I worked as a therapist for teenagers who had been involved with prostitution from a very young age. I got to know how precious and fragile these girls were in their early womanhood. Their hopes for the future where often covered over by a hard shell of cynicism. They had prematurely lost their childhood, their vulnerability turned to shame. But deep in their hearts, their innocence was still undeniably beautiful. When I feel into how this innocence had been brutally crushed and abused, my whole being screams in pain and murderous rage. In my incapacity to accept this part of existence my immediate impulse is to close down. My body gets hard, my jaw tense. I feel a desperate resistance in my whole body, and thoughts of hatred toward “the abusers” run in turbo loops.
As my practice has deepened I have started to become aware of this contraction, the isolation and insanity of it. I recognize that this state I freeze into is the very state that creates abuse. It is this contraction and the incapacity to empathize with others and ourselves that turns us into abusers.

Feelings keep rolling in as I deepen this practice, but now I can bring awareness to them. I can’t help feeling the rage and pain, but I can feel it in open presence, connected with the love infusing everything. I can recognize that the man (I am using a man as an example here because the majority of people who have sex with children are men, but I do not by any means want to implicate that men in general are abusers) who has his way with a twelve-year-old girl or boy is moving in, and is made of, the same love. In his way he is longing for the same connection we all are, but he has isolated himself from his source, which is our common source. He has not learned how he can feel his sexuality and his inferiority, his loneliness and his anger in a conscious way. Thus being hostage to the unbearable he fails to keep faith with his dignity.

Should he be held responsible for his actions? Yes, absolutely, but can I feel something beyond the brutal gratification of pointing my finger? Can I feel in him the unstained land where he and I meet in wide-eyed recognition, the place where our differences become transparent? I practice feeling my rage and pain, feeling my unwillingness to accept, and feeling the open presence in which all this is happening. With practice, the cycle of reactivity is broken, and we become part of the awakened solution instead of enabling the very trance that makes us so bitterly betray each other—the trance of separation.
Where do you contract and close down?
Where do you divide life? Where do you say, “This, and not that”?
You can make it your meditation to remain open and connected to your own presence and love while feeling deeply, even while feeling things we normally would not call loving. Don’t confuse this deeper connection to a love that embraces opposites with “feeling” love. The love I am speaking of is not a feeling state. It is the ungraspable web that connects us all. It is where all your desires come to a rest, where you are home, no longer a frightened person hiding behind a hostile protective wall of hostility.

Help, I Am Drowning!
It cannot be said too many times: the process of exploring, restoring, and enjoying our natural relationship to feelings rests on our capacity to be present in our bodies. In the initiation phase, as we take the rusty brakes off, many women experience an overwhelming tidal wave of grief, frustration, anger, and love. So many of us have felt that if we really let go of controlling our feelings, we would go crazy, be “too much,” be judged as weak, drown in tears that would never stop, get lost in the feelings, or scare men away. Feelings that have been suppressed or controlled for so long are now “going berserk,” and we need to create a safe space where the newly released prisoners can have plenty of space to breathe.

Although this phase will pass, life itself never passes; it will keep on unfolding, sometimes comfortably, sometimes harshly. Beloved ones die, Mother Nature moves in unpredictable ways, flooding one family, drying out another. We get rejected, we lose money, and our bodies are afflicted by diseases small or large. In order to meet all of life living in this body without collapsing but also without suppressing feelings, we need to create pockets in life where we can safely meet our feelings. Conducting a ritual every morning where you can totally mourn the loss of your marriage will allow you to go about with your day in a more relaxed way, dealing with what needs to be done. Doing a daily fear meditation in which you allow yourself to shiver in terror for five minutes, imagining the worst scenarios, will bring the underlying current of worry out from hiding.
The most powerful way I know of is to create, along with other women, an oasis where feelings can flow unrestricted. We can do that in women’s retreats or in ongoing circles. In Nevada City where I live, we meet for “Temple Night” every Monday. Here we often play with the expression of feeling, not to get rid of it as a cathartic event, but to allow the alchemy of willingness. In our “Temple of Feminine Flow” we discover that any feeling has the potential to be as much a dense, contracted expression of the divine, as a fully surrendered, open expression of the divine. We don’t have to modify our feelings or make them more “positive”; we simply have to remember and relax into the loving presence in which the emotions are happening, to soften our resistance.
Having a sanctuary of feminine flow in our life allows us to approach and welcome feelings that arise in our daily lives and interactions with other people in a more sober and contained way. With practice women can feel deep feelings without anybody even noticing. What we notice is that we radiate more presence and love, that we emanate a soothing softness and receptivity.

As we develop our capacity to welcome feelings, we discover that they do not always need to take on such dramatic expression. We can again have the flow of feelings as we had as small children, but we are adults now who can bring a container of presence to our feelings. We don’t have to throw ourselves on the floor banging our fists and legs in tantrums every time we feel upset, nor do we have to control or suppress our feelings. We can simply feel. We move closer to the essence of feeling, which doesn’t necessarily require any outer expression at all. It is an exuberant edge to balance, lingering in this essence of feelings without going anywhere with it, without doing anything with it, just feeling. And just as the welcoming is total, grace and gravity pull you right through and out on the other side, with one more piece integrated into wholeness.
It is good to remember that although expression of feelings is welcome and can be your deepest gift to your surroundings, that deeply feeling doesn’t automatically mean a melodramatic aria. As a self-confessed drama queen I know all about how easily we can use dramatic expression as a means to prevent this deep melting into wholeness from happening.

Help, I Feel Numb!
As one woman is gasping for air in a pool of tears, another has the opposite concern. “I can’t really feel myself. I am spacing out.” Maybe she spends most of her days in a very mentally oriented business environment and her feeling world has been efficiently stored in a filing cabinet. Or maybe her boundaries were violated and she has learned to retreat into a pinkish dreamworld where she can pretend she is safe. Or maybe she is simply a woman who, like those deep velvety lakes in the forest, only moves in gentle ripples. We cannot force ourselves or anyone else to open up and feel more. If we want to get a kitten out from under a sofa, it doesn’t help much to yell and push. Gentle patience and relaxation into what is will probably serve us better. We are feeling our feelings exactly as much as we are feeling our feelings. We don’t know for sure that it is supposed to be different right now. Maybe it always will be just like this; who knows? The question is, Can we be present with this, just as it is?
In any moment you can relax into the openness in which all this fluctuation of feeling is occurring. Your self-doubt can be here, your numbness can be here, your spacing out can be here, but remember also to turn your attention to the presence and love that is here as well, always.

The Body as a Container for Feelings
Start by doing a scan of your body, resting your awareness for ten in- and out-breaths in your belly, in your chest, in your shoulders, and in your jaw. Feel how this simple awareness makes you softer, how awareness creates space. Now, rest your awareness on your breath. Imagine that you open to this moment with your breath. Now rest even deeper inside yourself, being aware of the awareness itself. You have found the golden key to feminine practice when you recognize that no matter what is happening now, open space is also always present.
Allow yourself to be surprised and to surrender to what comes through you moment by moment, to ride the wave of impermanence, as you are relaxing and opening. Practice this as often as you can, so it becomes habitual to meet life like this. When strong feelings arise, you will stand a better chance if you meet them with open awareness.
To show just how practical this practice is, I will review the steps:
1. Notice what happens in your body when feelings arise.
2. Use your breath to relax around the feelings.
3. Relax into the awareness in which all this arises, into your own presence.
4. Allow what needs to arise to be there without the need to attach a story to it.
5. Feel the feeling and let it pass.

An Oasis for Feelings
You can do this practice by yourself or with other women. It invites you to enjoy the freedom to experience a completely free and irrational flow of feelings.
On a tape or a CD put together a mix of music that includes soft music, sensual music, energetic, longing-evoking music, oriental music, and so on. Try to create a mix that reflects a full spectrum of energies but that ends with soft music. You need a space to move freely and preferably to make sounds. Put on the music, and give yourself at least thirty minutes to connect with your body, to breath and to shake, and to fully feel and express whatever feelings arise. To use sounds freely is one of the most powerful ways of connecting with your body and with your feelings. If you feel sensations in your arms, let them express these sensations in movements, and if any sounds come, let them be expressed.
When you reach the soft ending music, use some minutes to just notice how it feels to let all this flow through you. Feel your body, feet on the ground.

The less we resist the chaotic world of feeling, the less threatening it will be. By welcoming it, most women will find it highly enjoyable and juicy. Connected with our own presence, we have infinite space for whatever feelings need to pass through.

The Mother God
The Divine Mother is one embodiment of compassion in feminine form, and we find her in just about every culture. Tibetan Buddhism has Tara, Mother of all the Buddhas. From ancient Rome we inherited Mother Gaia, the earth goddess. In Hinduism we see Maha Devi in many different incarnations. The Navajos have Spider Woman, weaving her threads of life. In China and Japan we have the Mother of mercy, Kwan Yin, who hears the cries and prayers of the world. In Romania, we find the gypsy goddess, Amari De, who is the Mother of all things, and in Christian-influenced cultures the Madonna represents the great nurturer who has endless compassion for all her children.

The Mother is not separate from her children and never can be; she teaches us to embrace everything. Through hard times She has been a source of comfort and protection for generations of human beings of various spiritual traditions. What is often overlooked is the sacredness in the way feminine compassion emanates through us as flesh-and-blood women. Luckily, we are blessed to have women walking on this earth in our time who mirror to us the energy of the Divine Mother, to remind us that she is right here in our own hearts. Mother Teresa, who died in 1997, has become a symbol of selfless compassion, and Ammachi, an East Indian wise woman, brings thousands of people together, wherever she travels in the world, just to soak in her inexhaustible hugs. And all over the world mothers are inexhaustibly cleaning the wounds, feeding the bellies, and shedding their tears for the lost ones.

Since the role of the housewife and nurturer was often (and in many cultures still is) the only choice available to women, it limited and repressed them, and it was natural for this issue to become an important part of the women’s liberation movement that exploded in the late 1960s. Women were throwing away their mops and aprons and longing to play a larger part in society. Their message was clear: “We are so much more than nurturing breasts and homemade pie.” This was one of the most important revolutions we have seen in Western society. In hindsight what we have discovered is that we more or less threw the baby out with the bathwater. In the process of breaking free from oppression, women cut out many of our feminine roots as well. We thought that the alternative to the repressed feminine was to adopt as many masculine traits as possible. Being just as good as men became a way to assert ourselves within the patriarchal paradigm.
In the feminine spiritual practice we see blossoming today, another alternative is being revealed to us. Now it is obvious to us that the antidote to the imbalance between the sexes and the resultant discrimination is not that we all become like men, but that we usher in a new paradigm, in which the feminine and the masculine in all of us are equally respected. As we become more aligned with the masculine in ourselves, it is equally important that we cultivate and fully own a mature and free femininity. Envision a world where we as women enjoy both our sensuality and our power. Where our nurturing qualities are not restricted to the home but are just as validated in leadership and politics, and where we are connected to the wisdom of the moment, as well as to our purpose. In Greek mythology the goddess Bellona embodies the merging of two aspects of the feminine, as both the nurturing mother and the fierce warrior. In their vision statement PEACE X PEACE, the contemporary women’s network, says:

Women’s ways of perceiving, organizing, communicating, interacting, and building the components of peace hold a power to create peace, on all levels, that cannot be achieved without their equal participation. Yet, women’s work is discounted, and women continue to be excluded from peace processes from the poorest nations to the most industrialized, leaving peace negotiation and implementation an unbalanced, and usually unsuccessful, discussion among men. Sustainable peace requires women to come into their full and equal power.

Beyond Division: Spiritual Activism
For me feminism is about sisterhood. I believe I am not free if there is one woman who’s not free in the world. I have been a warrior woman, and I want my granddaughters to be warriors and mothers. I say, have the nurturing part, have the loving part, have the sensuous part, be passionate, but be warriors.
Isabel Allende

This is a taste from her book about feminine spirituality "Come Closer-Spiritual Awakening for The Feminine Heart"
chameli@wildlove.org

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