The Holy Feminine
tldr: A note on "Reclaiming Goodness, Goddess, and Self" exploring themes of femininity, devotion, and transformation - regardless of gender. Including another invitation for women to join Tuesday Rivera’s “Luminosity Intensive.” And for those of you who need something more “heady” than spiritual, there is a good, long quote at the end.
Stay with me for this one. Even if you are not “spiritual.” Even if you have a reaction to the esoteric, to what is dismissed as the “woo woo.” And, especially, even if you come from a tradition in which it is a sin, a heresy, to consider that God might not only be masculine. (Which is what I was taught as I grew up).
Stay with me, especially and even if you are a man. And you are dismissing this note, and podcast, as only important for women.
What is the Holy Feminine? What is a Goddess? Who is the Goddess? What does devotion to the Goddess look like? What does it feel like?
Don’t worry.
I’m not going to pretend to be able to answer these questions. I mean… I do have thoughts, I have an experience of Her, a devotion to Her. And I know I have sinned against Her.
But this note is not about my experience.
Here, I am sharing a very powerful podcast episode of “Feed Your Wild with Vanessa Rodriguez.” It’s called Reclaiming Goodness, Goddess, and Self: Navigating Dark Nights, Crucial Crossroads, and Luminous Portals. Vanessa is an intuitive guide and holistic healer. She is also Puerto Rican (and most of you know how I feel about Puerto Ricans!) It is an interview of my beloved wife, Tuesday Rivera (and you most definitely know how I feel about HER!)
There is something so powerful. Something so feminine. About these two “hard core” women in conversation with each other.
Most of you listened to my recent interview of Tuesday on my podcast. It also centers her Luminosity Intensive, which is just about to launch. And part of what I find so powerful about her interview with Vanessa is how different it is. It is talking about the same thing. But something different happens when two women are talking together. There is a different potency. And I just had to share it with you.
You can find on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your preferred platform.
There is a lot here. Including references to very real suffering, about loss, betrayal and sexual trauma. And a lot of absolute gold about finding our way through.
Some other things I would highlight include:
The parts about having to change your work. Change from what you know, what is safe and secure. Towards something you are not sure the world will accept and reward
The ways in which we are surprised by the Divine
The grounded and the pragmatic
The ways in which life will demands change, often in big, dramatic and difficult ways
I’ll mention three other things that came to me as I sensed into how to share this with you:
First:
We all need elders, guides, mentors and teachers. Especially those of us who live within the binds of dominant culture. A culture devoid of ritual and initiation. Vanessa is both peer and mentor to Tuesday. Tuesday can be the perfect teacher for some of you. A guide towards what you are longing for and what you need.
Second:
Brothers! Listen and learn. It will help you get a better sense of how to understand and better interact with the women in your life. And, more importantly, how to connect to the feminine within you. Also, you are of course always welcomed to join the Better Men Project. Even if it’s just to receive the emails.
Third:
I just happened to read this quote this morning. It’s from the Homegrown Humans Newsletter, by Jamie Wheal. From a piece titled: Where does the Information Come From. It’s for those who need a more intellectual approach, and it includes a mention of the “Akashic Field.”
The first three explanations for where the information comes from have been, however hypothetical, still material. Umwelts and expanded data processing. Epigenetic signals passed down from parents. Our own DNA serving as a hard drive for the periodic table of the universe.
All still taking place within our physical bodies and brains.
This final explanation goes beyond that and considers the notion of a non-local source of all that inspiration.
For as long as philosophers have thought about it, they’ve supposed that there is a realm of reality beyond what our umwelt or five senses can perceive. That realm, they’d insist, is more true, more complete than anything we live in our day-to-day. Plato called it the Realm of Ideal Form. There, everything that we could ever experience exists first, in abstract, idealized perfection. An apple or a chair on this plane, according to Plato, is merely a partial representation of the original that lives in pristine suspended animation Out There.
Plato and later Western scholars also entertained the notion of the Aether—a kind of invisible background substance of the universe. The Aether was literally considered the substrate of all physical existence, serving as the carrier for everything from light to sound. But after centuries of consideration, Victorian physicists Michelson and Morley disproved this notion. Their refutation set the stage for Einstein’s theories of relativity and much of contemporary physics that came after.
But thinkers kept reaching for some metaphor to describe their glimpses of the Information Layer. Buckminster Fuller called it the Design Realm and credited his prodigious output in the fields of architecture, sustainability, and futurism to his access to that domain. He was merely transcribing what already was, he humbly maintained, not inventing new things from whole cloth.
In the twenty-first century, Hungarian physicist Ervin László called this hypothetical realm the A-field, or Akashic field, after the Sanskrit term for space. For him, the quantum vacuum stretches across time and space and carries information with it. If and when we access that field, we gain entry to a world of incredibly dense, non-local data. Think of accessing the A-field as closer to surfing the internet instead of picking the Encyclopedia Britannica off the shelf.
For most of the modern era, pondering the Information Layer—whether the aether, or the noosphere, or something with “quantum” in the front of its name—was a dodgy career prospect. Scientists risked almost certain ridicule and marginalization for even considering that there was a there there, beyond thin air. After Michelson and Morley, those kinds of musings were decidedly non grata.
But they’ve never entirely disappeared, either. Lately, we may be coming full circle on the whole “where does the information come from?” inquiry.
The notion that the information doesn’t come from anywhere, but that it is present everywhere, is one of the more intriguing hypotheses in contemporary physics. While most scientists hold that the universe is made up of combinations of energy and matter, or even timespace, others hold that at its simplest expression, the universe is information.
It is always a blessing to receive the gift of your attention. As you know, I am always wanting your feedback. So don’t hesitate to write me directly.