Nourishing and Strengthening our Roots The Grounded Spiritual Practice of Feminine Awakening

“The image of the Goddess inspires women to see ourselves as divine, our bodies as sacred, the changing phases of our lives as holy, our aggression as healthy, our anger as purifying, and our power to nurture and create, but also to limit and destroy when necessary, as the very force that sustains all life. Through the Goddess we can discover our strength, enlighten our minds, own our bodies, and celebrate our emotions. We can move beyond narrow, constricting roles and become whole.” - Starhawk

 The practice and way of love and enlightenment through the ancient Love Goddess is practical, simple and yet profoundly healing.  After growing up as a devout Catholic in my childhood and then spending the first decade of my adult years dedicated to esoteric and new-age ideologies, I found myself completely ‘top heavy’ with no roots in the Earth to allow me to fully integrate the divine and sacred into my human experience.   It felt as though there was a huge gap in-between the spiritual principal of my mind and how the world, humans and my body actually functioned.

I had to constantly work on pushing my humanness to bay as I was trying to do everything from the space of the mind.  There were many times that I felt shameful of even being human with all of my emotions and desires. I believed I was separate from my spirituality.  There were many times that I was looking forward to no longer ‘having to be human’ anymore and to get a chance to be something ‘more sacred.’ 

Yet, my decent into the underworld through the grief and complete surrender to life, allowed me to deeply tend to my roots and to discover the enormous beauty, love, and sacredness of being a full-human being.  It was here that I built a solid foundation completely grounded in the Earth and in this precious life.  It was in my roots, in grounded spirituality, that I connected to what it means to be a whole human being integrating both my light and dark integrated as one.  I became aware that shining the light on and integrating my full ‘humanness’ was where I was going to be able to find the place to fully live a life of inner peace, love, passion, joy, wisdom and connection to all of life. 

My body and heart were going to be the gateway to fully realizing and integrating these higher principals I so desperately wanted to embody that always felt so far away from my grasp. 

All of my previously well-intended spiritual practices were instructing me to disregard, ignore, detach, and persevere in ‘letting go’ of being human.  What I learned so profoundly is that the most transformative experience was about understanding what it truly means to be human and how divine and sacred we already are.  It was about shining the light on and embracing my humanity through love and compassion and surrender to fully heal and realize my true essence of the sacredness that we inherently are. 

So many of our spiritual traditions, as well as the ‘new age,’ is still based on spiritual principals that can exclude and shame the human experience, disregard the integration of the shadow and mistake what it means to be a whole human being, naturally connected to our spiritual gifts.

As we have been cut off of our true nature and shamed in our human heart and body for thousands of years, we have developed a paralysis in our way of being.  What we consider to be  ‘normal’ human behaviour is so completely different than that of the whole human being. We have stopped feeling and connecting deeply to our bodies and hearts and have become numb to our very connection to source.  We do not understand the intelligence or the sacredness of our emotions or how to access our own inner wisdom, which is natural and innate in all of us. 

When we return to the love and peace that resides deep within the core of us all, within our soul, and we integrate its wisdom throughout our whole bodies and hearts, we return home and to Eden.  It is in this state that we can move forward, daily, through a way of being that can assist in healing past traumas and deep pain and help us return to our innate human state of peaceful joy.      

In this new state of wholeness, I became entirely aware of my eternal connection to all that is.   The higher principals of love, connection, unity, inner peace, and one-ness then started to blossom naturally, rather than being abstract concepts which I could not experience directly in my daily life in an on-going basis. I could surrender and fully allow life to unfold as a mirror to my opening heart. 

Before my ‘rooting,’ I was constantly ‘striving to become yet never quite arriving.’  I was constantly searching, taking workshops, getting healings, meditating and yet never felt fully comfortable in my body, heart or life as a human.  Worst of all, I had always felt like ‘there was just something wrong with me.’

Once I fully uncovered my eternally sacred heart and the connection to the Goddess within through the path of a Swan Priestess, my searching suddenly stopped.  The more I let go of layers of false conditioning and false beliefs, everything began making sense and naturally melt into place.

Because of its simplicity and all that it had to offer in the peace and passion in my own life, relationships, and my open channel to the divine wisdom, I became so passionate about sharing this way of being with others.  I want ever so much for others to embrace and integrate their humanity and divinity as one and to experience the peace, love, and wisdom in their lives and to share that magic with the world. 

The Tree of Life

The symbolism of the tree has become a core way for me to symbolize this way of being into wholeness.  Alike the roots being the base of the tree and the upper branches being the expansion and higher principals, it is the coming together of opposites that are interdependent upon each other that create wholeness.  It is the marriage between our light and dark aspects, our masculine and feminine, and heaven and earth.  It is the understanding of the importance of the interdependent dance upon the polar counterparts, which is the natural dance of love which is the experience of life itself forever creating and forever becoming.

As we root our foundation from the richness of the dark soil of the underworld, we can fully blossom into the sacred tree of life with lush full branches completely supporting one another, allowing the other to thrive in this completeness.

The image of the tree as the synthesis of these numinous powers is also effectively seen in outer reality, for the tree grows from the darkness and underworld into the light and consciousness. It is anchored in the underworld and grows toward the heavens. The tree is a part of the three kingdoms: the underworld of Ereshkigal, the earth of Enlil, and the heavens of An. The wonder of the tree continues to exist today, for although we still cannot explain the mystery of the first seed, we can take the seed in our hand and say, here is the beginning of life. It will emerge from the underworld, strive toward the heavens, and die back into the underworld, from which one of its descendants will emerge.”

- Diane Wolkstein, Innana, Queen of Heaven and Earth, Her Hymns from Sumer

By separating matter and spirit, mind and body, and the God and Goddess, we lost our ability to understand how to obtain enlightenment naturally as integrated human beings.  We falsely assume that ‘once I can no longer feel bad, sad, or triggered, then I will finally be enlightened.’  But enlightenment is ever present, and the never-ending embodiment of all of life.  Being enlightened through the awareness of the Love Goddess is not about being perfect, but rather it is about being conscious of all of our parts and integrating them into wholeness through compassion, love, integration and acceptance at every chance we can. It is the illumination of our humanity through the embrace of love and therefore the integration of our humanity with our divinity as one.  It is through this self-compassion and acceptance that we can interact with life in a more whole way which gives us profound inner peace, love, connection, and wisdom from within and allows us to be deeply connected to Spirit.

We are already born with these gifts within. We are already one, but we don’t see that we are an expression of the creator exactly as we are.  We falsely believe there is something inherently wrong with us, with our animalistic impulses and our messy emotions.  We go to Gurus and give our power away to them, falsely believing they have a connection to divinity that we don’t.  We have been cut off from our feminine wisdom and therefore are emotionally confused, starved and dis-attached in our society and communities.  Anxiety and depression are unfortunately incredibly common and are most often the result of not paying attention to and honoring our human emotional and physical needs.

Because of our dis-attachment to our emotions and authentic self, we develop a shadow and ironically it is with our unconscious shadow that we become separate from each other and from embodying a more compassionate, whole, and evolved self.

 “The soul embodied in matter, manifested in the Goddess as container and transformer, will take us beyond dualism, beyond the defensive splits within our psyche if we open up to her energy within us.  She faces us with our greatest fear and by showing us the treasure hidden away within it, she takes us to a place where love is born.  Love is the true antithesis of fear.  It expands where fear constricts.  It embraces where fear repels.”    

-Marion Woodman

You are and always will be whole and complete. You are and always will be one with the Divine. You must only remember how to return to your sacred heart within you.

If you would like assistance in returning to this peaceful, healing place of the garden of Eden within you, where the divine and human are one complete whole, I welcome you lovingly into the Swan Priestess Sanctuaries or to join my Swan Priestess Program for a deep dive into discovering your naturally innately healing Divine Self within.

With Love and Blessings to you dear beautiful Soul,

Daniela Elizabeth