A Crone’s Life, an Embodied Experience

In January of 2013, I wrote an article here for FAR called Embody the Sacred. In it I wrote,

“If we are to fully embrace living a magical life it is important to remember how to live in our bodies comfortably and safely. If we re-awaken all of our senses, our awareness is expanded and our perceptions clarify and develop. Without this, our magical life will not develop as it could. Our enjoyment of all that is Sacred will be impeded, as if walled in and separated from all that is possible.”

I would like to rephrase this statement just a bit to reflect where I am in my thinking now.

If we are to fully embrace living, it is important to remember how to live in our bodies comfortably and safely. If we re-awaken all of our senses, our awareness is expanded and our perceptions clarify and develop. Without this, our lives will not develop as they could. Our enjoyment of all that is Sacred will be impeded, as if walled in and separated from all that is possible.

To clarify my own personal meaning of Sacred, I see the Sacred as All of Life. This includes everything we can see, hear, taste, smell and feel. It also includes all that is known and unknown to us, quantifiable and intuited. The All is Sacred. I choose to call this All, Goddess, as my own personal preference because I see the necessity of a feminine presence in the All. I am a part of this sacredness, a part of Goddess, for I am a part of the whole. My experience of this sacredness, of Goddess, is through my senses. Of course, we have a lot more senses than the five Aristotle described.

Through many years of learning to be aware of what my senses are open to, as well as placing more of my focus on what my body experiences, rather than what it “thinks” all the time, what I have discovered is that life truly has become an embodied experience. This comes from the sense that I call “knowing.”

About twenty five years ago I became acutely aware of suddenly knowing something that I did not know before. This increased for me as I developed my ability to “journey” or travel via trance to other realms or dimensions of our reality. This “gnosis” seems to have increased with age. It has helped me define my spiritual practice as well as guide me deeper into the Mysteries. I used to need drumming or singing, some outside source to help me trance, but now I just go. When necessary, I ask and just know.

It has also affected my sense of time and space as well as the cycles of sun and moon as I move throughout the seasons. I no longer have to look at a calendar to know that it is a new moon. Or that the moon is at its peak in the light it reflects.

My body feels the changing seasons and responds to them accordingly, and not always when the calendar informs me. For example, I had this incredible burst of energy around the first of February. I was creative, active and productive in my online work and writing endeavors. I got seeds for my garden then as well and had my garden planted before the first of March instead of in April. All of this activity typically hits me mid-March to mid-April in a normal year but this year it came early. Usually it is just now happening but instead I have now leveled off in my energy and found myself in an less frenzied state. Puzzled by that, I had to reflect for a moment and I realized that of course, here in South Central Texas, we really had no winter and our spring began in early February. Small green leaves, early flowering all began then and not now. Now we are fully green except for a few really late budding trees. Our bluebonnets are in full bloom along the highways. It was simply my body’s awareness of the changing season and responding. I was responding to the surge of beginning growth, the need to fuel what is blooming in me.

Because I am basically retired (I don’t have a job that I go to every day), the need to watch the clock has vanished. I eat when I am hungry and I eat what I am hungry for. I dropped the shackles telling me to eat breakfast food at breakfast! I stay up until I am sleepy and I sleep until I wake up. Occasionally I do have to use an alarm but when I do, it feels like an imposition.

It is a comfortable way to be, to live life through embodied experience while at the same time have an active mind, digging and learning all while sharing that knowledge with others. It is a nice give and take with the Universe just as it is a nice give and take with those in my life.

I am excited because I am beginning to feel the energy rising around me again as my summer rapidly approaches. I look forward to completion, nurturing my early spring projects to fruition, ready to embrace their fullness. I am dancing in Her rhythms, in tune with her song.