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The mystery is not because I can't or won't disclose what the action or
activity of the ritual might be. It is because these ceremonies
are an attempt to create a state of body-mind which invites direct
encounter with the ineffable divine nature within and without...
- Goddess experienced as Mystery - paradoxically both beyond the grasp of our limited human consciousness/mind and yet, as the mystics teach, available to our direct inward experience.
- This mystery is something that can't very well be communicated
in words, although it is the very soul of poetry. Something that
can be invited and invoked. Something bigger than our small selves.
Something which stretches and surprises.
These Ishtar mysteries are women's mysteries in that they take as their jumping off point a series of experiences directly known to us as women through the diversity and commonality of our embodied experiences as female human beings. The human life cycle viewed through the eyes of a woman, experienced in the embodied reality of a woman's being...
- Women's mysteries : those aspects of our experience as women which can only be fully appreciated through direct lived experience - the wisdom of the body which is inseperable from our spiritual being/essence.
- Moments in the cycles of our human existence which have the potential to stretch our restricted habitual sense of self - in love-making, in pregnancy, in childbirth, in the presence of the dying... The experience of surrender, of loss of control, of being possessed by a greater force - something deeper and more primal than our limited ego-identity might otherwise allow.
How we encounter the Goddess in the numinous dark of the gaps in our self-image.
- Mystery, meaning something that can be invited
and invoked through sounds and words and colours and movements.
Something that elders and foremothers can help us to prepare
for, yet which we can't truly know without having experienced
it, and which reliably takes us by surprise.
- Like the flow of moon-blood, the mystery of fertility - which is a force so powerful it drives the biosphere of our mother planet, and yet, as we women keep finding out, we make a mistake when we take for granted.
- The fundamental learning: that we are not in control. And yet
we can learn to ride and dive with the waves... at times can discover
deep satisfaction... full-bodied pleasure... a blissfully high
state of mind... rediscovering what we are.
When our limited selves would plan and fret and sweat, there is some relief to be found in handing the wheel to a "Higher Power". Coming back to a place where we can remember who we truly are.
Which brings us back to our beginning:
Where She and we are One. And there is no separation.
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