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BoAnne. Hera. Yemaya. Sheila Na Gig. Hathor. Isis. Artemis. Quan Yin. Skemet. Ashun. Aphrodite. Ah, yes, always Aphrodite….
Can you hear it in Her names—the gentle ocean wave, the tumultuous tsunami? The balmy breeze, the brittle wind? The Goddess is everywhere. Her beauty in all its oppositional complexity and it’s complete interconnectedness.
I’d love to write about the Goddess way to beauty using only soft pastel words—the elegant cream, the baby teal, the honey peach. It would be lovely. But that would be the watered-down version, the version our culture would have us believe is “feminine. At least when they are not selling the hot young harlot. As if there isn’t a hag out there, along with the prized maiden. As if the Mother who birthed us in all Her messy wracking writhing joyful bliss has been forgotten. No, Her way to beauty must also include the deep maroon, the torrid blue, the black-as-void-black.
And here is my true confession: I like it that way.
Her way to beauty is not for the faint of heart. If you ask to know any of Her names—which brings a beauty like none other—you must become willing to know all of them. You cannot choose only one or two of Her forms to regard with awe and ignore the rest. She doesn’t work that way. She is the maiden, mother, and crone. Whole and complete, She is the lovely and grotesque, the shapely hips and the rotting teeth. Her road is a road of roses, yes, lined with the finest of petals. But the thorns are not a mistake, nor your sliced feet.
But, wait…. I don’t want to instill fear. She is the opposite of fear. Not because there are not hard and sticky and gruesome parts to her path, but because they are not excluded from the definition of beauty in Her eyes.
Truth be told, I’m nervous, taking on this task of writing about the Goddess way to beauty, let alone speaking directly of Her. It is like trying to compliment a queen whose power and glory are more than established. It’s impossible to do justice and easy to make a mistake, especially if you speak with anything but the utmost of sincerity.
The topic is too big for words, anyway. Could we describe the beauty of art? The beauty of history? The beauty of the mountains, the canyons, the oceans? If we cannot do justice to these, how to do justice to their Mother? Besides, writing of beauty is something poets are ever circling round and round about. The truly fine wordsmiths are glad to find one turn of phrase, or even a single perfectly placed word, that captures a genuine hint.
It would probably be better if I could give you some secret handshake or write some ancient code on your palm, then nod you in the right direction. But I don’t know the handshake, I have no code, and my right direction might not be yours. So I’ll go just on, so long as we all understand that I’m taking a shot at the impossible.
Her Beauty
By now you realize I am not talking about the kind of beauty you find on Madison Avenue. I am not talking about standard-issue inner beauty either, at least if you’re thinking of the kind of sweet sincerity and golden-heartedness that is supposed to make the “ugly girls” feel they’ve still got a chance.
No, I’m talking about the kind of beauty that, by being it, which is to say fully embodying it, everything within you and everything outside of you becomes transformed. I’m talking about the kind of beauty where everything shifts from a judgment of value to a recognition of the priceless nature of all that exists. You walk around stunned at the glory of the Goddess, so amazed to be alive that even pain and humiliation and injustice are not without their own meaning and merit.
It’s not a second-rate booby prize, it’s a grand-prize, winner-takes-all blazing bonanza. Because once you really get it, it is yours forever. That’s what I’m talking about. That’s what I mean.
A Word About Her-Story
To learn about this kind of beauty, it is best if you take a step back in time. Way back. All the way to the time when the Goddess was God. And not just for a handful of feminine fanatics. For the world. Back to a time when a woman’s womb was symbolic of the ultimate mystery, and the ultimate mystery was something to revel in, not scientifically solve and then write manuals about.
There was a time when God was a woman (and I highly recommend Merlin Stone’s book by that title.) When the feminine was revered, when dark was not evil, when the snake was not Satan in disguise. There was a time when beauty included nature, indeed, was founded on nature. Mother Earth was not something to have dominion over; she was a living, breathing being to offer our gratitude to.
To follow the Goddess way to beauty, we must remember the time when She was the Queen of Heaven. When Her image brought one into balance, and joy, and outright awe. A time when sexuality was not only in the province of the harlot and whore, but welcoming to all women as a sacred path to divine ecstasy. A time when women had power, and a woman’s beauty was viewed as a celebration of her power, not a cheap trick to manipulate her way into gaining something that was not really hers.
We must remember when The Queen of Heaven reigned if we are to have any hope of recovering a woman’s true beauty. For many, if not most, women today, that remembrance is tucked away, coiled up in the base of her spine, trapped by lifetimes of oppression and fear. But it is there. May these simple words begin the unraveling, and so the rekindling of Her flame.
What It Takes
Coming back to this day and age, it is important to be honest about what it takes to follow the Goddess way to beauty. Because it takes everything. Everything.
Oh, it may not start out that way. It may start with a more simple seduction. You may be lured by the power that can be yours—the power of magic and a seemingly easy route to abundance. Or maybe it is Her holy presence you would wish to be a carrier of. Or, not seeking Her beauty for yourself at all, you may wish to experience the simple magnificence of gazing upon it in the form outside yourself. But watch your eyes do not become locked, your passion set off. It can happen in the moment between moments, which is the space where She reigns supreme.
Yes, you may think you can dabble a bit in Her beauty, take a taste here and there. Try it on, like perfume in a tester bottle you’re not obliged to buy. But once Her beauty has you, it has you. You’ll live for nothing less and—when it reaches its height—become willing to die for just a bit more. If you’re not already hooked, I suggest you go now. If you are hooked, come along. Like it or not, you, yourself, are a Goddess in the making.
To Be Specific
The Goddess way to beauty takes a complete rearrangement of your priorities. The first order of business is to forget your preoccupation with what you look like. When it comes to the kind of beauty we are talking about, it doesn’t matter. Really. The Goddess is not a Goddess because She has a lovely face. The Goddess has a lovely face because She is a Goddess. And Her face is not always lovely. She doesn’t need it to be, nor want it to be. It’s not Her anchor or Her security blanket. It’s not Her ticket of entry to the good life. Nor is it the source of Her self-esteem. The Goddess knows that, sometimes, a lovely face gets in the way of the real task at hand. And the Goddess is always about the real task at hand. Unless She is goofing off. (I did mention Her complexity, didn’t I?)
Anyway, on with the rearrangement of priorities. Sooner or later, those on the Goddess path to beauty begin to disconnect from common culture, seeking beauty somewhere out of town. It will just happen, traveling Her way. But if you want to get a jump on it, you can begin by banishing the concept of “normal” from your ideals. It’s a trap designed to create a herd mentality—get the masses to do what the leaders of the masses want them to do. It is designed to create consumers, and cookie-cutter consumers at that. No, the Goddess doesn’t fit in. That’s the whole point.
You can also get things moving by relearning the rhythms of life. Do you know when the tide comes in? Or the time of the sunrise and sunset? Are you aware of the longest day of the winter and summer? When the moon is full, or waxing, or waning? Do you have any idea what these have to do with you? How these rhythms are connected to your own specific moods, your own sense of timing? The Goddess may speak to us with a voice from the sky, on occasion, or even through a potent dream. But it is much more common to hear Her in the energies that pulse through our days, weeks, months and years. Likewise, Her beauty comes most often to those who are in tune with Her rhythms. So if you want more than a splashy shooting star, put your ear to the earth, and listen.
You might also get your hands cleansed (what others might call “dirty”) by growing something in the earth. Witness the seasons, the stages. Note how long it seems that nothing is happening, and then a little something, and then the eruption, and the long growth. Watch the withering that makes room for the next season’s harvest, and in doing so, get some perspective on death. It will do us all a world of good to stop fearing that.
Wait, There’s More…
The Goddess way of beauty also requires you to face and embrace your dark sides. You’re a being of light, yes, but you are not immune from darkness. In fact, it is not even separate from you. You are light and dark. You are the coin, not the head or the tails. You are the white of milk and the wet of milk—there is no having one without the other.
Again, this facing and embracing your inner darkness will naturally occur. The sliced feet, as I said before, are not a mistake. Your failures, your outbursts, your lethargy (a sin if there ever was one, or so they say), your projects marked “incomplete”...they are all part of Her way. Even stuck is an appropriate stage on Her path. Just ask the innocent nearly-born how she feels about the crushing contractions regularly bearing down on her tiny frame in that bewildering time when it appears there is no way out. It happens to us all.
Again, this making friends with your dark side will occur on its own. It is built into the process. But if you want to get a head start, begin by making the shadows your friends. Be curious about them, instead of horrified. Welcome them. Offer them tea. Ask them what power they hold, what secrets they are keeping, what beauty they can offer you. Go ahead and ask “Why me?” There may actually be an answer, if you ask without self-pity.
Remember, too, that the fairy tale of “beauty and the beast” is not really a love story between a man and a woman. It is a love story between parts of ourselves. So when the hag shows up at the door, we must welcome her in, even give her a seat of honor, lest the curse to take on her hideous appearance be ours.
In short, accept the forms of darkness you carry as yours to carry, be they doubt, or worry, or pride, or a great and grand mean streak. Take them as your portion, as you do your gifts, and play them out as they play out. The Goddess will approve. I promise.
January’s Shapeshift
Each month in this series, I offer a shapeshift for my readers to consider. As I’ve suggested before, you can work with the shapeshift and expect results. But you can also simply read these words, and perhaps something will begin to shift in the arena of beauty all of it’s own accord.
So… Imagine a woman, elegant by anyone’s standards. She stands straight in her cashmere coat, her little black dress with perfect underclothes, her string of pearls at the neck, with earrings to match and a diamond studded watch at the wrist. There is a trace of expensive perfume about her.
Imagine her, this ideally “packaged” woman. A success in the contemporary world. Any man would want her. Only she does not wish to be herself. In fact, she wishes she could be anyone except herself.
Now, we take off her cashmere coat and put it neatly on the couch. We take off her pearl necklace, and earrings, and now the diamond watch. We take off her little black dress, and the perfect underclothes. She stands, naked, at the mirror. Now imagine her going deeper, past her skin and bones, her form. Looking inside.
She sees the spiral in her dantien, that archetypal symbol every woman carries in the very center of her physical self. It is alive, pulsing, animating her. It connects her to the grandmothers seven generations back, and the granddaughters seven generations forward.
In her heart, she sees a chamber with many rooms, rooms upon rooms, room enough for everyone and everything she loves and will love. Rooms where the Goddess has done all the interior decorating. Some rooms this woman has explored and some she hasn’t. There is a sense of adventure in each room.
She sees that each of her breasts have a bear claw within them. She knows what this means—she is strong, even fierce, and she will protect the young when the young need protecting. At the top of her head, she sees a funnel, opening her to the heavens. And at her feet, a strong cable, linking her to earth. She sees a green emerald at the point between and just above her eyes, and realizes she has the capacity to see with wisdom. She sees her throat, crystal clear, able to speak truth.
At the base of her spine, she sees the Kundalini coil. Once wrapped tight, she watches it loosen up, allowing her vital life force to begin moving up her spine. She knows this uncoiling is unraveling who she was. It is allowing her to become the woman she is meant to be. She beings to hear the names of the Goddess coming to her as if on distant ocean waves…. BoAnne. Hera. Yemaya. Sheila Na Gig. Hathor. Isis. Artemis. Quan Yin. Skemet. Ashun. Aphrodite.
There is much more within her, of course, and a thousand more Goddess names to hear. But for now, it is enough to recognize this much. She redresses, knowing the Goddess is alive within.
And as she redresses, we know something, too. Whatever the details of the accessories, whatever the specific form, whether adored or loathed by the standards of contemporary society—under it all, we are this woman.
To further this shapeshift, you may wish to imagine this shapeshift several times over the course of the next month. Imagine yourself undressing before the mirror, removing everything but these most essential symbols, and then the redressing. Repeat the names of the Goddesses that come to mind. As you do, ask the symbols you see to awaken in you. They will.
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