Excerpt from "Body of Wisdom"
Women's Womb: Portal of Power
by Hilary Hart
There is a sacred vibrational field inside of women that is the place of all things born. What women have done before time began is to take that sacred vibrational field and move it outside into ceremonial space to create the womb on the outside, so something new can be birthed into this world.
If women don’t do this, human beings as a species are done for.
Ilarion Merculieff, Aleut Elder
Women’s spiritual power is a missing piece in a world out of balance. Human health, the vitality and regeneration of the earth, the maturity of our worldly systems so they can serve the needs of the whole and not just the few, and our collective spiritual evolution all depend on women living their power as women. Women are not, collectively, doing this yet. In part because so many of us simply don’t understand how our power works – how it’s different from men’s power, how it’s activated and strengthened, and how it serves life.
And women who do have a sense of it still often don’t trust it. Women’s power is so at odds with the workings of our patriarchal world that to live it means going against almost everything that is modeled and expressed and valued outwardly, and internalized as “good,” “important” and even “spiritual.” Many women feel hesitant to live as we are. We don’t understand that there are times when forces are in our favor – like now – to help us discover and create an entirely new territory of power and possibilities.
To enter this new territory, women will need to reclaim aspects of our own nature that lie hidden in our psyches and bodies, which have been denied and desecrated by the society most of us live in. And perhaps the greatest source of women’s power is the womb.
The womb is a portal, an opening, an invitation for creative energies to descend, emerge, and join life anew. As we look at life around us today, we see the dire need for something new – new ways of living, of building community, of healing, of serving the Divine. Larry Merculieff, Aleut elder, describes the role of women in this process:
If we don’t create something new, we will just reproduce the same system we have now, and nothing new can be created in existence without coming from that sacred container that women create. Nothing new. In other words, everything else we do outside of that will perpetuate the old paradigms.
In order to participate in creating something new for the continuance of life on this planet, women must remember how our creative power works.
How do we reclaim and honor what is natural to us in a world that continually throws up distractions and substitutes? We can trust that just as life needs us to contribute to life as we are, it will show us how. For many women, it is happening already. We feel an unrest and unease with life around us and with how we, as individuals, are living. We feel an emerging and undeniable longing for something radically different. We long for lives that feel more natural.
Women’s longing itself is tremendously powerful and will draw to each woman her own opportunities to wake up to what is real and shed what is false. Often, this happens through dreams with their capacity for revelation beyond the restrictions of the mind or cultural conditioning. And many women are drawn to meet with other women – in circle and in ceremony – where they can feel something deep and true reflected back into their being.
Regardless of how it is happening, this surge of remembrance in women forces an honest reckoning and a removal from the structures – social, spiritual, psychological – that have restricted us from living as ourselves. It includes recognizing that we are part of a dominant cultural paradigm that enshrines primarily masculine values like effort and individualism as means of achievement, and fails to honor the tremendously powerful aspects of our collective feminine nature, like longing, honoring the earth, and a natural capacity to nourish all of which serve life more than our personal goals. It shines light on the patriarchal aspects of our spiritual heritage and how our major world religions have been designed by and for men’s spiritual development. This heritage includes an emphasis on effort, ascension beyond the earth, a mastering of the body and its needs, and exaltation of our suffering. This approach is generally antithetical to women’s natural spirituality, as women do not need to master our bodies, but to explore and honor our bodies and how they serve the whole of life. Women focusing on ascending to transcendent realms risk abandoning the perhaps more important descent into the creative darkness of earth. One of women’s greatest spiritual gifts is how we sustains in an ongoing way – not gains knowledge about – the sanctity of life. We do this through love, care and attention, not through knowledge or effort.
And we do this through activating the creative power of our bodies.
Portal to Power
The womb is not just about creating new human life. It is about creating new life of many kinds. From the Dagara tribe in West Africa, Sobonfu Somé emphasizes our womb as “a gift that has been bestowed on us”:
The womb is not just a place for babies, it is a very charged magnetic center for a lot of energy that comes from many different dimensions. We need to take better care of it and value it more, and know that this is a very delicate and powerful tool that we have been given.
And Dr. Guan Cheng Sun, Chi Gong teacher from China who now lives in Seattle, concurs:
The uterus is a powerful assembly of energies. The lights of the uterus are amazing. There are three dominant colors and energies – one is like dark blue or shiny black. Then in that there are lots of dots like white energies blended together. And also there are pink or fresh red energies. These are the dominant energies and they are very beautiful.
If one is pregnant, the energy is there. If not pregnant or if you don’t do energetic practices, the energy is available but doing nothing. This energy is about creation and synthesis – synthesis and creation.
Larry (Ilarion) Merculieff, Aleut elder from the Pribilof Islands, also describes the womb as a powerful assembly of energies. He calls the womb a “hologram” and a “matrix of energies” that are the exact energies at the center of the universe, or the “womb of the universe.”
What is the womb at the center of the universe? How is it reflected in the woman’s body? It is not just reflected; it is identical. A woman’s body contains the same field of energy that is found at the center of the universe. It’s a field of infinite potential. It is the formless void.
According to Larry, at the beginning of time, humanity was given “original instructions” for how human beings should live on the planet. The instructions included wisdom about how this energy matrix functions in women and in human transformation. Traditionally, it was a woman’s responsibility to work with this energy matrix in her own life and in ceremony with other women, during which “the womb is brought out from the women into the ceremonial space to birth something new,” says Larry.
In many indigenous spiritual traditions, including the Aleut, ceremony is used to restore balance and health, and to activate and align individuals and community with spiritual power. And for women in ceremony, there is a unique possibility not to just heal individually, but to birth something new into the world through activating the energy matrix of the sacred feminine and projecting it outwards so it can be present in a trans-personal context.
Being in ceremony for the sake of personal and community healing, honoring of the sacred, and the regeneration of the earth is a spiritual gift and also a responsibility that most women have forgotten. And yet this is a work we must remember not just for our own selves but to serve the times we are in, times that so clearly suffer from women’s forgetfulness and our unconscious absorption into a patriarchal culture. Larry says:
Women have that sacred space of creation and creativity inside them. Energetically the womb is identical to the womb in the universe. So, everything new that is in harmony with the universe was always created by women. Women help create the energetic field of the womb on the outside. This is the purpose of ceremony. To access that place and put it in the physical world, outwardly. It has to be in ceremony. That’s how it has always worked.
The power of people with open hearts with no judgments is so great. We need to suspend judgment as part of the preparation of going into the circle.
More and more women are gathering in ceremony, as though drawn by a knowing that coming together amplifies and supports our creative power. We are gathering not to “get something” for ourselves, but because we are called to give. We are catching glimpses of the truth that we have a unique – and critical – role to play in the regeneration of life on this planet. This knowledge is emerging from the depths of our hearts as well as our bodies, which we are coming to know as a source of tremendous wisdom.
We are entering an age of divine immanence – when God is coming to earth in a new way. As this age approaches, we are compelled to recognize and honor the wisdom of the body, the sacredness of embodiment. And with our birthing power, we are acknowledging the unique and utterly necessary contributions of women’s spiritual power. Coming together in ceremony is key. Women can birth new life not just individually, but in circle and ceremony. We need to trust this process, trust how life is calling us to serve a greater unfolding. Larry continues:
There are women who understand how ceremony works. They come with an intention. The intention is set out at a cellular level of the body. The body knows. The heart knows at a cellular level. It’s an energetic expression that comes from every ounce of who we are. It comes from knowing, feeling, sensing – the inherent intelligence in the body all working and synthesizing at the same time. And the transformer that provides direction is the heart.
This is far more profound that most people realize. The women who know don’t just carry knowledge. They know that the most important aspect of the work is invisible. Knowing comes from a place of great mystery, that is vibrationally expressed through our bodies.
The formless is about expression that happens in the moment from the heart with trust in the process. That is why it’s new! Everything else is created in this world by those indoctrinated into the patriarchy, created from a disconnected consciousness, which repeats itself over and over again, and gets worse over time. Even the most brilliant people can’t solve these problems in the world because they aren’t accessing the sacred womb. Only from this sacred womb can something new come because it comes from this ultimate consciousness.
This is why every single woman who has this in her body is going to lead the way.
Hilary Hart writes and teaches about women's spiritual empowerment and its role in our collective evolution. She is author of three books on women's spirituality and the sacred feminine, including "Body of Wisdom: Women's Spiritual Power and How it Serves." Hilary attended Yale University and earned a Masters Degree in Philosophy before turning her attention tot he traditional spiritual search. She has extensive training in Sufism, Tibetan Buddhism and dreamwork and is founder of Women's Power Wheel, a network of women's circles around the globe designed to help women uncover, honor, and live their power. (www.womenspowerwheel.com; www.hilaryhart.org).
“Body of Wisdom” is available at bookstores, on Amazon.com, and is available as an ebook. 311 pages, $20.95, ISBN-13: 978-1780996967?published by John Hunt Publishing
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