Otherness
There is something powerful about stepping into places that is not part of our ordinary reality. Places like Blue Osa offers us mainlanders an opportunity to transcend a life of busyness, traffic laden roads that produces road rage, appointments, to do list, and an ongoing sleuth of needing to do. Here we get an opportunity to share in Agni - the sacred reciprocity that exists between us, the land, the ocean, the animals, the trees, and between ourselves. It is the connection with this otherness that we are building and receiving as deep nourishment.
On this second day of our retreat, our light and vibration is growing and it is doing so simply by being in touch with our true selves and the medicine Mother Nature is offering us. Our eyes light up at the sight of macaws flying close by. Everyone stops and our gaze fixed in pure joy. That is the offer the sacred Mother is offering us, to open our eyes, our heart, and the way we see. She is reminding us that joy is in the simple things that cost nothing. This otherness, reconnecting to nature, self, and each other is medicine that can’t be found in a pharmacy or social media. Otherness requires active participation with life and to remind ourselves that we are life and nature itself.
The mornings here are sacred. Silent time begins our day and doesn’t end till seven-thirty in the morning. My morning ritual around four-thirty is to make my way in the dark to the beach. There I sit and watch the stars until the first sliver of light begins to peak through the horizon. It’s a deeply moving experience for me. To experience the dark before the light shows itself.
We spent the day meditating for an hour, enjoyed a healthy breakfast, yoga, free time. On this second day, we did a shamanic journey, a new experience for some of the women. I love the openness of these women, to try something new, to be seen, to express themselves. This is othering, listening to their stories.
But it was the group work we did later in the afternoon that held a a safe place for each woman to share intimately. The work to prepare those intimate shares began with a beautiful sister Amber, sharing her wisdom and knowledge of how to cultivate and feel safety within your body, how to listen to where you’re at in the present moment. I can’t tell you how powerful that activity was. Rating where we were in our emotional, physical, mental, and spiritual/energetic bodies. That felt like coming home. That foundation set the stage for deep sharing to happen, for stories to feel safe to be brought forward. Sitting as a group of powerful women, we are reflecting to each other and with each other. We are being seen and witness. An allowing of the selves that we are, that we were not willing the way society is, to toss any aspect of us away. Our stories hold power and these wild woman group sessions we have, is reactivating a time when we women held circles and healed as one. This otherness is what we need. To laugh, cry, and share in each other’s hope and dreams.
We carry our hopes, dreams, desires, on those waves rolling towards the shore. The ocean brings it ashore for us, what lays within. When it reaches the shore, that is when we are faced with choice. To begin to participate by taking action or to say no, not this time. The choice will always remain ours. But as I sit watching the ocean as dawn breaks, I see my life as those waves rolling in. It carries everything I hold within me. My heart’s longings, fears, uncertainties, joys, gratitude. I see my whole life rolling forward, as an offering. Life is an offering. Mama Cona, the ocean, is powerful, and vast. Her womb goes deep and the life she carries lives bountiful below, hidden from the world above. She is the liquid divine feminine. Her womb is expansive and life dwells deep within her.
All around we are reminded of the sacred womb that exists. All around we are reminded of the divine feminine that exists in varying forms. We are reminded that life is ever growing, ever expanding, including within us. We tend to be so external with our living, with life that we fail to remember that there is an abundance of life also growing within us. It is the pauses, the need for stillness that brings us back to this knowing that we are life itself and that our own sacred womb is more abundant and alive than we realize.
These days are revealing life to me anew. Experiencing myself with these women and growing with them. We’ve added two new women to our group, one from Ohio, a woman staying her for her down time and a young woman volunteering here for three months, as fate would have it, also from Charlotte.
The divine mother knows what she’s doing. She’s called all of us to come and witness the other. To practice in this othering and to experience otherness. Life is good and we must get out of our small, safe, spaces to know and experience that.
Life is a blessing!!!