May 2022 - Deborah King

The Healthy Way to Get That Summer Body

Memorial Day is the unofficial kick-off to summer, so chances are you’ve already been bombarded with images of perfect bodies in perfect shape in perfect locations. From bikini-clad girls and shirtless men like in those sunscreen commercials, to ads for fad diet products or lose-weight-fast exercise programs, the emphasis on bodily perfection this time of year can make you feel overwhelmed and depressed, which is never the right mindset for meaningful change.

It’s perfectly okay to want to get in better shape—as long as you do it in a safe, healthy way and for the right reasons. Energy medicine can be your guide to both the how and the why, and not only will you look great, but you will feel great too — and even more importantly, find confidence in your own body, just in time for swimsuit season.

Weight Loss Starts Within

How many times have you tried to lose weight? If you’re like millions of other people, probably quite a few. I can’t tell you how many crazy and unhealthy weight-loss tactics I’ve heard from attendees at my energy healing courses and in my years as a spiritual teacher. Everything from cabbage soup diets to napping through mealtimes to hypnosis. But like you, none of my students found success with any of these methods because they weren’t really addressing the deeper problems.

The attitude that if you simply try harder—eat less and exercise more—you will look svelte and ready for Baywatch is a devastating lie. It’s true that eating well and exercise are an essential part of being in good shape, but that is not the only part of the equation, otherwise all my followers who starve themselves and live at the gym would have the bodies they desire. There is something deeper going on here, and recognizing that fact is the first step to getting and keeping that summer body.

Your Weight Is Not Just Physical

Losing weight and getting in better shape is not just an issue of physicality. Western medicine tends to treat healing as solely a physical process, and this culture treats weight-loss the same way. In both cases, the true healing needs to happen on the energetic level, which is where energy medicine comes in.

The blueprint for your body is stored in your energy field, which means that if your energy field is distorted, your body can become out of balance as well, causing problems from headaches to allergies to weight gain. Energy healing addresses the health of your energy field, clearing blocks or imbalances in your chakras and directly influencing the health of your body. If there are energetic causes for your inability to lose weight or get in shape, until you address those, all your efforts will be undermined and less effective.

Here are a few ways you can begin the process of using energy medicine to heal your whole being, including your waistline.

Express Your Emotions, Don’t Eat Them
As a child, were you given sweet treats or candies as a consolation for grief or disappointment? You may have created an association between comfort and food that has stayed with you into adulthood and is thwarting your weight-loss efforts. To combat that food-to-mouth response to emotional pain, be aware of when you are eating your emotions. A few tell-tales signs are mindless binge-eating and urgent and sudden cravings for sweet, salty, or fatty foods.

Drowning your sorrows in ice cream is bad for you in two ways: you ingest unnecessary calories while burying those feelings. When you don’t process negative emotions, they become lodged in your chakras and create blocks in your energy field. So eating your feelings creates current weight gain and can cause further weight gain down the road—a two-fold attack on your attempts to lose weight. Journaling your feelings will allow you to release them in a healthy way and keep your body from absorbing the emotional damage.

Stress Less You probably know by now that stress takes a big toll on your whole being, but did you know it can also lead to weight gain? The stress hormone cortisol has been linked to belly fat, stress hampers your sleep which you need to maintain a healthy weight, and stress can lead to anxiety and depression which can make you lethargic. My first recommendation for stress reduction is always meditation. Meditation slows your mind and body down, allows you to connect with Source, and brings a sense of peace that lasts for hours beyond the meditation itself.

Along with meditation, deep breathing techniques are helpful for lowering your stress. Try to inhale and exhale through your nose, and maintain fluid, regular breaths. This practice can help boost metabolism, and aid the body in removing toxins. Breathing deeply also helps you use oxygen more efficiently, which improves your ability to exercise. Exercise is a bonus weight loss technique since it burns calories and relieves stress.

Examine your intentions.
Losing weight is a noble goal if your motivations are pure. Do you feel sluggish and tired? Has your doctor warned you of health complications from your weight? Is your figure causing you to miss out on things you enjoy or making you feel too depressed to spend time with other people? Do you just want to have more energy and feel better? These are some examples of healthy reasons to begin the process of trying to lose weight. Being motivated by a true desire to be healthier for yourself will keep you on the path when the work gets tough.

If you’re more motivated by the societal pressure to be thin, or by someone who has told you you aren’t beautiful, or a general shame about your body that will never truly be satisfied no matter how skinny you become, then you might not be as willing to put in the work needed yet, but energy medicine will help you with that. Not only will energy healing help you shed pounds, but it will help you to go deeper into your psyche so you can get to know yourself.

Losing weight is just one of the many ways energy medicine can improve your life and lead you on the path of discovering your true self, the self you came to Earth to become. To learn more, please join my LifeForce Energy Healing® I Certification Course.

The Divine Feminine: What the World Needs to Create a Just and Balanced Future

If you remember your early American history, you may recall a letter which Abigail Adams wrote to her husband John, who had finally managed to wrangle out of a cranky Congress a declaration of independence from Great Britain. Part of what Mrs. Adams wrote was this: “In the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”

Apparently, Abigail’s letter fell on deaf ears. And that ladies’ rebellion she referenced? Well, it still hasn’t really happened. As a result, yesteryear’s women lived in the shadows. And sadly, today’s women haven’t yet walked entirely free of them. It has been an uphill climb, gals, there’s simply no skirting around that fact. (no pun intended ☺︎)

A key reason for this fact is that our academic and mass media-driven western cultural history has, until relatively recently, been entirely white male-defined and dominated. Only recently has there been any backlash against the authorities who ordained and established the practice of the male “white”-washing of history.

In school history books in the United States women, people of color, Native Americans, and non-European immigrants occupy the back seat behind the exploit of white men. That’s why we learned more about John Adams than his wife Abigail, more about Charles Lindbergh than Amelia Earhart, more about John, Robert, and Edward Kennedy than their wives, daughters, sisters or nieces who also dedicated their lives to public service, and more about the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. than his mother, Althea, who was also assassinated and a major influencer and contributor to the movement at the time.

In fact, among the scant few times when women’s activities have been mentioned in western histories are the instances in which they were accused (at the time) of behaving in an “unwomanly” manner (as witches, “possessed of the devil,” or as prostitutes, contrarians, or out-and-out insane). The homemakers, children raisers, and life partners of most men have come and gone from the world largely unheralded, undocumented, forgotten. I am reminded that my poor mother, may she rest in peace, had a terrible time keeping me in the Catholic boarding schools that she favored for high school. After I had been unceremoniously expelled from yet another high school, worse, in the final year, she arranged an interview for me at a prestigious school run by some nuns in San Francisco. My mother and I arrived, all white gloved and hatted for the interview, and the sisters suggested I go into a side room for half an hour and write a little piece on any topic I desired while they and mother had tea in the parlor. I brought my little piece back shortly after, and read it aloud: in it, I took the position that Joan of Arc was more than a saint – she was a transgender war hero, or whatever the polite word at the time was that would convey that concept. My mother and I were quickly escorted off the property and the next interview was at a decidedly not Catholic high school for young ladies of refinement.

Throughout our history, noteworthy women have (during their times) been egregiously mischaracterized as outlaws or outliers of patriarchal white society: from Susan B. Anthony, Harriet Tubman, and Rosa Parks, to Gertrude Stein, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and Jane Fonda. These women, as well, as other human rights and women’s advocates and activists, are often castigated as contrary, anti-patriarchy individuals because they dare to present themselves as equal members of, and contributors to, the human race. As singer/songwriter Caryl Simon wrote, “A really strong woman accepts the war she went through and is ennobled by her scars.”

It is a sad fact that until the mid-20th century, outspoken women were frequently committed to mental hospitals for refusing to silence themselves and adhere to their male-designated second-class status. Among the reasons stated for committing women to asylums — are you ready for this? — were ill treatment by husband, intemperance, immoral life, jealousy, laziness, masturbation, suppressed masturbation ( that is, damned if you do, damned if you don’t!), novel reading, overaction of the mind, tobacco use, political excitement, excess religiosity, inadequate religiosity, loss of law suit, desertion of husband, bad habits, decoyed into the army, domestic trouble, epilepsy, excessive sexual abuse, women troubles, superstition, feebleness of intellect, and hard study. The list goes on, and most of it is similarly unbelievable. Freud originally announced to an alarmed male audience of fellow physicians that his research had revealed that most women who were accused of the crime of “hysterics,” were in fact victims of sexual abuse by a family member, most often, their own father. He was castigated so severely by his colleagues and threatened with the immediate end of his career for taking that position that he promptly retracted this position, never to voice it again.

If we have any doubts about the position of women, they didn’t even win the Constitutional right to vote across the United States until 1920. And the Equal Rights Amendment still sits in the wings, waiting to be enacted.

What western history books and Judeo-Christian holy books have neglected to mention (except to decry them as superstitious pagan cultures) is that there have been a great many matriarchal societies on Earth, and many patriarchal societies with female Goddesses. In passing, I should mention that the Vedic culture I’ve immersed myself in is one such heavily patriarchal society that, like Catholicism with its Mary figure, has many female gods that soften the story but don’t, in fact, give women any sort of equality in real time.

As a sad result, we’ve been taught far less than half of the human story, which has made far more than half the human population appear to be less consequential, less powerful, and therefore less visible than we instinctively know them to be, and which is why movies that correct the history books to include brave, valiant and powerful women, and why superhero movies like Mulan, Wonder Woman, and Black Widow, and why authors like Maya Angelou (the beloved author of the poem “And Still I Rise”) and researchers and scientists like Jane Goodall, Marie Curie, and Katherine Johnson, make us want to offer fist bumps and high fives to their high-profile notoriety and courageous contributions. As Marge Piercy once wrote, “A strong woman is a woman determined to do something others are determined shall not be done.”

Now is the perfect time to revisit The Divine Feminine and The Divine Masculine, two energies that exist in all of us and which (when balanced) create a culture in which everyone can thrive. These two energies are the perfect antidote to the toxic masculinity that has marginalized and minimized the contributions of literally billions of people across time and that is so visible today.

The Divine Feminine is a both a spiritual energy and a concept which serves as a counterbalance to the patriarchal historical and worship structures that dominate Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. The Divine Feminine goes beyond a single belief system, so it can be embraced by anyone who is interested in co-existing in peace with others.

Despite its gendered name, The Divine Feminine is an aspect of every human being, as is the Divine Masculine. These complementary energies exist in all of us humans. The Divine Feminine is characterized by receiving, doing, and acting in powerful, loving, and caring ways. (Mother Mary and Eleanor Roosevelt are representatives of this type of energy.)

The Divine Masculine, on the other hand, is characterized by giving, doing, and acting in powerful, loving, and caring ways. (Abraham Lincoln and the Dali Llama are representatives of this type of energy.)

But when masculine energy is toxic/aggressive, it goes beyond mere assertiveness, determination, and action- and goal-oriented practices, which all too often results in environmental degradation, societal segregation, and national disintegration.

The Divine Feminine, when it dominates or becomes toxic, although less destructive (because it isn’t driven to compete or to assert), allows phrases like “boys will be boys” and “as long as there are greedy people in high places, there will always be wars and injustice” to enter the vernacular to help convince ourselves that “it is what it is and no one can change it,” which is patently untrue and reduces the desire to work to make things better. The Divine Feminine is immensely powerful and change-making, but only when it’s named, claimed, and activated by intention.

Given this refreshing new perspective, the Divine Feminine and the Divine Masculine, when in balance, are the perfect solution to the troubles and challenges that face us as a species and as a planet.

Those of you familiar with Chinese philosophy will recognize the similarity to the yin and yang energies. The yin and yang symbol, in which the black and white shapes swirl into and out of each other instead of appearing as harshly bordered no-fly zones, show us in visual form that the divine masculine and feminine complement and balance each other. It is when one side dominates that a culture suffers from imbalance and injustice.

Again, masculine, and feminine energies are ever-present inside every individual, at every moment, everywhere on earth. When they’re divinely inspired by Spirit/Source, they work together to create cultures of lovingkindness and practices that restore and replenish the planet.

National divine feminine conversations and actions revolve around caring for the earth and its inhabitants (human and non-human), promoting racial and gender equity, and advocating universal health care. Each of these conversations and actions emphasize nurturing and creating balance within a supportive society built on lovingkindness and the recognition that other human beings exist and are rightful heirs to identical rights and needs, and that denying one is an abrogation of our responsibilities to care for all. Amy Tenney wrote, “The world needs strong women. Women who will lift and build up others, who will love and be loved, women who live bravely, both tender and fierce, women of indomitable will.”

And harking back to the wild, wild west, Calamity Jane said, “I figure, if a girl wants to be a legend, she better start now.”

That’s the spirit, and the formula! High vibrational energy, can-do/will do attitude, and pure intention – the three key ingredients to making sure the things happen that you want to have happen!

Calamity Jane by CE Finn, c1880s-crop.jpg

The Divine Feminine is active, loving, compassionate, and forward-looking. It anticipates the next best thing that can occur and works to ensure its fruition. It nurtures, fosters, and promotes wellbeing and lovingkindness. It doesn’t compete: it completes.

With that being said, to find balance in all aspects of your life, it is necessary to focus on both energies. And our bestselling Awakening the Divine Feminine course can help you do just that. If you’ve ever felt that something in your life just isn’t right – out of balance – then this might just be the solution that you’ve been searching for. Click here to learn more about this course >>

3 Tips to Renew, Recharge and Clear Blockages to Your Energetic, Emotional, and Physical Systems

While much of the regret we harbor inside comes from our own actions (infidelities we’ve had, accidents we’ve caused, debt we’ve gotten ourselves into) as well as from those important things in life we failed to do (opportunities unexplored, love not shared, forgiveness unspoken, once-in-a-lifetime events not attended), sometimes regret stems from something that has nothing to do with us. Something we have absolutely no control over or say in. Sometimes regret—those feelings of grief, sorrow, and remorse—come from our exposure to the world’s innumerable tragedies and devastations.

We all feel how small the world has become through the advances in technology. With a mere click of the mouse or remote control, the whole world comes into our lives and living rooms. On a daily basis, many of us witness unimaginable violence and suffering. Kidnappings, murders, suicides. Genocide, terrorism. Natural disasters that leave millions in their wake. Public figures coming to tragic ends as they lose battles with drug addiction or disease. And, of course, a national and global economy on the brink of depression. The daily news provides no shortage of things to feel empathy for, and for those who continually tune in with an open heart, this constant negative input eventually takes its toll on their psyche and physical health.

The mind-body connection dictates that what enters our consciousness also enters the rest of our being. When we take in the energy from the outside world, and attach to it emotions such as sorrow and remorse, that energy has to go somewhere. Unless we release it—which few know how to do—it goes into our body, where it blocks our energy field, causing stagnation and, ultimately, a physical or mental disease condition. I hear this complaint all the time at my energy healing workshops. I see the havoc too much empathy is having on people’s lives.

At one seminar, for example, 20-year-old Jen joined me on the stage, complaining of recurring bladder infections. Talking with her, I learned that she was a passionate, empathetic young woman who worked for an animal rescue while attending school part-time. Her frequent health problems kept her from work at times, and she regretted that she was not able to devote more of herself to saving the plethora of homeless animals.

Jen is clearly a person who feels deeply. Not only does she advocate for the animals at the shelter, but she also regularly goes to disaster zones to help animals there. As we talked about her terrible regret over the current devastation and displacement happening to people and animals in a current warzone, the picture of her health became clear.

In Jen’s energy field I picked up a great deal of bitterness, the result of frustration about all the animals she felt powerless to help. This unprocessed bitterness was the cause of her bladder problems. While her heart was in the right place—she wanted to do her part to alleviate the suffering in the world—she wasn’t aware that she was allowing her need to help overpower her ability to help, leaving her feeling frustrated and bitter.

Many people, like Jen, feel that selflessness is the only way to be a “good” person, that anything less is narcissistic or self-centered. I adamantly disagree. I see all the time the kind of toll this takes in people who come to me for help; it’s in their energy fields and in the various dysfunctions of their life, including emotional pain and, for some, like Jen, illness of the body.

Please don’t get me wrong, empathy and compassion are high virtues. They stir us to alleviate suffering and to uplift others where we can. But we all have to know the point at which it becomes too much to handle. As we’ve seen, getting bogged down in the tragedies of others, distorts our energy centers, or chakras, blocks our healthy energy flow, and lowers our own vibration to the point of disempowering us and making us susceptible to dysfunction and disease.

So, what can you do if you’ve already depleted yourself to the point of anger and resentment, disempowerment, and/or illness? The following 3 simple steps can help pull you out of a regretful state and reverse any blockage accumulating in your energetic, emotional, and physical systems.

3 Ways to Renew Your Energy

Take time for yourself. We all need time for ourselves, time to just be—to relax, unwind, socialize, play. We need time to enjoy being alive without an agenda of getting something done. Otherwise, life tramples our boundaries and some of our essential needs go unmet. Talk about the perfect recipe for anger and resentment! Bottom line: Before we can give to others, we need to first fill our own wells.

Tune out some of the negative and tune in more to joy. Go on a “news diet,” cutting down on the amount of death and destruction you take in and adding in its place something lighter, like play. While it’s important to know what’s going on in the world (which you can do, by the way, by skimming Internet news sites for about two minutes), you don’t have to witness the replay of every mass shooting or every moment of COVID news. Instead, add to your day some laughter and joy. I watch one rerun of Seinfeld every night an hour before going to sleep to get my laughter quota and to take a few minutes to relax my mind. You’d be amazed at what a powerfully renewing “therapy” this is.

Uplift the planet by raising your own consciousness. Instead of trying to rescue the world in person, which will eventually deplete you, try uplifting the world by raising your consciousness. The easiest ways to do this are through journaling, meditation, and prayer. Writing in a journal helps you clear out your emotions on a daily basis. It’s great emotional hygiene!

Back to Coat Hangers and Back Alley Abortions

When Roe v Wade became law back in 1973, I was in my last year of law school. For those of you who have read my first book Truth Heals, a national bestseller, you know I wasn’t in a good place emotionally, having been sexually assaulted by my father since early childhood.

But, given my youthful experiences with sexuality, by the time I reached the age of consent, I certainly realized the immense power that sexuality held over men, and I used mine to pole vault higher and faster than many of the men in my class. (There were very few women in law school at the time)

I knew the key to power wasn’t just brains and good grades. I knew that short skirts, and more, would aid men in positions of power to help me up the corporate ladder. I eventually outgrew the technique when cancer came calling at age 25, and I realized that what Daddy had taught me was on course to kill me.

In my earlier years, I suppose (and I confess my unwillingness to admit this) I wasn’t terribly different from notable powerful men who flaunt their sexuality, men like Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh.

But of course, the rules are different for men

Men’s excesses – even when blatantly coercive and unsought — are explained and excused as “young men simply sowing their wild oats,” innocent of any true intention to subjugate their conquests, while I was enlisting my sexuality as a useful tool to get ahead. I remember well my mother excusing the boys and men in our family for any indiscretions, with her offhand “boys will be boys” remarks. Men can use their bodily autonomy to press their power and manhood, no matter the cost to the women they mistreat, while I was negotiating with men who knew exactly what they wanted. (For me, it was Let’s Make a Deal, as opposed to Let’s Take From Women What We Want!)

Imagine what could have become of me had I become pregnant during the times I was “negotiating” my way to early career success, had there been no Roe v Wade ruling to ensure another medically safe way to set myself free of the results of my father’s early training? I would have had to drop out of law school and the trajectory of my life would have taken a tumble that may well have been impossible to recover from.

Fortunately, I never had to make such a gut-wrenching decision due to my bodily autonomy, but millions of women have, and I am firmly in their court because I could have ended up standing in their shoes, and I know it would have been a dismal and shame-inducing decision, no matter which way I decided. I would have felt obligated to hide that decision from nearly everyone else for my entire life.

My story isn’t unique. A friend of mine back then was able to get a medically safe, legal abortion when she needed one, thanks to Roe v Wade. She went on to have four children later in life after she could afford to raise them. (Her husband, a freelance illustrator, raised the children while she brought home the bread and bacon that sustained them all those early years, before his career took off.) She does not regret her early abortion decision.

The Defining Difference

For men, youthful indiscretions get “attaboys” in this patriarchal culture, while sexually active women get branded as “sluts,” “gold diggers,” “seductresses,” or “party girls.”

This twisted and bizarre prevailing attitude — that men should be able to do whatever they want with their bodily autonomy, but if what they do results in a pregnancy, then the women they impregnate should carry their pregnancies to term — has brought us perilously close to losing our precious (and hard-fought) right to remain the masters of our fate. Are you aware that, already, in 31 states, rapists can gain visitation or custody rights to the children produced by their felonious conduct? Can you imagine the emotional upheaval that rulings like these cause the female victims of their violent acts? It’s enough to turn your stomach.

If “settled law” can be overturned (which the present majority of Supreme Court Justices deemed Roe v Wade to be during their confirmation hearings, but have since conveniently forgotten), so can marriage equality, the rights of LGBTQIA+ folks, and even women’s voting, credit card, and property-owning rights.

We already see what’s being done right now to keep people of color from voting in so many states. Individual “settled case” human rights laws which are subsequently deemed by the powers to be “federal overreach” are also on the chopping block. Where will it all end? I shudder to think.

Suddenly, Margaret Atwood’s description of a society in which women fall under the total control of autocratic white men, as seen in the TV series, The Handmaid’s Tale, appears to be on the cusp of coming to life, step by calculated step.

The right to bodily autonomy, as determined by the Roe v Wade decision in 1973, is a single domino. But watching it fall into additional human rights dominoes will be our undoing. We are an exceedingly fragile democratic republic. It’s rulings like these that will determine our ability to remain so. Autocracy is waiting in the wings to replace what we’ve been on course to correct and perfect for hundreds of years.

If Roe v Wade is Overturned

If the pending decision can’t be overturned, there needs to be an immediate outcry over the three most recently appointed Supreme Court Justices who intentionally misled Congress on their way to their present positions.

Additionally, there needs to be the first steps toward an increase in the number of Supreme Court Justices which a President who is in touch with the wishes of the American people can put into place to counteract the extremist positions that threaten women’s rights to bodily autonomy.

Something to consider: Establishing mandatory vasectomies for unmarried, financially insecure men would violate bodily autonomy, too — no one gets pregnant without sperm — and I don’t see a single law on the books, or pending, that subjects men to any such responsibility constraints. What’s good for the goose should be good for the gander. That’s what equality is all about.

And — parenthetically — why is the Equal Rights Amendment still not the law of the land? Is it because equality scares men who want to control women’s bodies and fates? It’s time to push back.

The Supreme Court has recently been barricaded against a potential backlash

The Capitol police are anticipating fired up women doing what the former president’s mostly-male adherents did in Washington D.C on January 6th, 2021. If ever there was sufficient justification for such an action, this might be it. But invasion and violence aren’t options; they just inflame and solidify positions.

Consider Laci Wooten-Holway who has been bravely protesting outside Brett Kavanaugh’s home. She is going it alone (usually) and she is being both applauded and vilified.

She is taking a terrible chance.

But it is long past time — for those of us who believe that women should not be dictated to when it comes to their bodily autonomy — to take some terrible chances, and I applaud her courage.

With Laci’s courageous, unilateral act in mind, I encourage those of you who can, to show up at local and regional protests in your area. There are many happening in the next few days. Here is a link to help you find out more about them. The protests started on Mother’s Day and will go for a week. I urge you to join one near you. Do a search on “Roe V Wade protests” and your zip code to find the one(s) nearest you.

And join me on Facebook where you can comment on a post and thus stand up and be counted.

The Bottom Line

Every child who is born should be wanted, cherished, and adequately supported by their parents. Sadly, if Roe v Wade is overturned, unwanted and inadequately supported children will be the result. I simply can’t imagine a worse fate for them, or for the world.

There are enough humans already, and far too many of them already feel marginalized, abandoned, and hopeless. Overturning Roe v Wade will only compound the tragedy.

If you’re with me on this crucial issue, please don’t sit this one out.

Three Ways to Honor the Wisdom of the Great Mother

One of the wonderful things about Spring is that it really gets your attention. No matter how busy, distracted, or frazzled you’ve let yourself become, those first bright yellow daffodils wake you up and bring a smile to the most downcast souls. The blooming earth is calling you to take a joy and gratitude break. Just look at the marvels around you—the bright green leaves, the flowers, and the nesting birds—and consider the gifts you receive every day from the Great Mother, matriarch of this living, loving home.

Worshipped from ancient times in traditional cultures around the world, the Great Mother, Mother Earth, or Gaia, as she is also known, is the goddess of motherhood, fertility, creation, and the bounty of the natural world. She is the feminine counterpart of the Sky Father, of God the Father. The Great Mother shelters, nourishes, and sustains life. She is the feminine face of God, and her powers are reflected in all the nurturing, healing, creative, and life-giving work that helps make this world a home. In its purest and most profound sense, “home” suggests peace, safety, belonging, solace, joy, sustenance, and empowerment. The Great Mother bestows all you need to live and thrive, to learn and grow, to heal and awaken.

Strengthen the bonds of love – Think about your relationship with your fellow members of the human family. The Great Mother empowers and shelters life as it forms and grows. Just as you were nurtured and brought into the world by your own mother, so the Great Mother gives life to all creation. The protective love between family members makes life possible—whether these family members are your parents, siblings, friends, neighbors, or the people on the bus. All children of the Great Mother are family and share the same needs and aspirations. What are the relationships that nurture your life and how do you honor them? What can you do to send a message of love to your extended human family? Think about the spirit of the Buddhist prayer, “May I be filled with loving kindness.” How does that feeling take shape in your life as both a giver and a receiver of love?

Keep learning how to heal, thrive and grow – One of the greatest gifts of mother love and the family bond is learning. Consider how much you’ve had to learn since arriving here as a helpless infant. Every day of life was a new experience as you grew and added to your knowledge and skills. As an adult, you began to direct and shape more and more of your learning. The realm of the Great Mother is all about growth and change. Just as the natural world blossoms with new life in the Spring, you are designed to discover new ways to grow in spirit by opening your heart and mind. What have you learned about who you are and why you are here? What are the talents, gifts, and abilities that define you? What can you do each day to foster your gifts, just as a loving mother fosters her child?

Take loving action in the world – One of the Great Mother’s most important lessons is the tie that binds. Modern science is revealing what ancient wisdom always knew—that everything in this world is connected to and dependent upon everything else. The natural world, the web of life, is truly a web that can carry the vibrations of movement from one side to another distant side, from top to bottom. Cutting down the rain forests in Brazil affects the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which affects the melting of the polar ice caps which affects the sea levels around the world. Could it also be that the child you teach to read in Los Angeles will affect the future of the child in Nigeria who needs a desk and a book and a school? Why not? The interconnections of the natural world are exactly this miraculous. Whatever actions you take to provide loving service in the world will send forth ripples of healing energy. Choose a way to give service that matches your gifts (that brings you joy). It can be any helping action. Then imagine the ways in which this action could connect you to a distant positive outcome.

The wisdom of the Great Mother both shelters and challenges and so meets the needs of the human spirit. A loving mother provides the sustenance and security her child needs as well as encouraging growth and independence. You can honor the wisdom of the Great Mother by honoring your gifts and using them with joy and gratitude to help heal the world. As you look up at the sky, down at the newly-green earth, and all around at the blooming energy of spring leaves and flowers, thank the Great Mother for her abiding love!

For more ways to awaken your gifts and bring them forth into the world, join Deborah for a very special 7-week journey to Awaken the Divine Feminine within you.

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