How a Woman Reclaims Her Body as Her Holy Temple and Earth Home

If there’s one piece of advice I would offer to my younger self, it would be this:

Your body is your savior.

Ironically, this realization that only began to emerge within me after I had lost my job, ended my relationship, severed every outer reference of stability, and moved to the jungle of Costa Rica, has contradicted everything that my culture conditioned me to believe about what it is to be a woman and what it is to be alive.

Like many women incarnated through ancestral lineages that have long forgotten their shamanic roots, raised in a patriarchal society that has placed Mother Nature, the Goddess, and the feminine as lower than, and conditioned by a system rooted in the fear of the wild itself and in turn the instinctual nature of the body, safely inhabiting my own skin, embracing my sexuality, and rooting into my personal place in the universal dance of creation, is not something that was taught or modeled to me by my family nor by my culture at large.

Since leaving the United States in 2012, living in dozens of remote and magical places across the world, and becoming a facilitator of many modalities of feminine embodiment, remembering my way home to the temple that is my birthright has been a long, winding, and at times confusing journey. In fact, it has been the most beautiful and painful homecoming I could have ever imagined, bringing me deeper and deeper into the roots of the human wound of separation, our collective fear that we are separate from one other and our very Source.

I see this wound of separation in myself, in women, and in our world weaving itself in myriad directions and forms. It calls to us through the longing for home. The longing for safety. The longing for freedom. The feeling of stuckness or entrapment. Dissatisfaction, indifference, and depression. Insatiable hunger. Fear of power. Fear of expression. Fear of freedom. Fear of life.

The expressions are many, but the root is one: our collective has forgotten who we really are, and why we really came here.

In truth, none of us are separate from nature, we ARE nature.
But many of us exist in a world that has forgotten.
And many of us came here to re-member for our future generations.

When a woman is at home in the sacred sanctuary of her own flesh and bones, she is at home in the world. She ebbs and flows with the cycles of creation. She meets her own deaths and rebirths with a heart cracked open wide to life. She celebrates the ecstatic beauty of the impermanence of this precious breath, she holds onto nothing, and she trusts in what moves her from within.

She allows herself to be animated by the dynamic expressions of all that is, free from judgement, free from fear, free from judgements, free from outer projections of original sin. White, black, brown, light, dark, swirled, and mixed, she knows that she is the same magnificence as the setting sun, the crescent moon, and the burst of Spring.

Few women in the world fully embody this wild capacity to both surrender and create and truly love themselves through the realization of their true Goddess nature.

Returning to the wild harmony that pulses through every cell within the human body and dances in every codon of DNA, is what we are designed for, it is how we really remember our worth, and yet at a time when we have drifted so far away, it can feel like a huge ask.

This is why a woman choosing to reclaim her own body as the blueprint of creation, the matter of her flesh and bones as one with the matter of the soil and the rock, and the elements of earth, air, fire, and water, as one with her body, breath, spirit, and blood, is one of the most powerful things she can ever do.

Reclaiming this body as the sacred body of our Earth, is real empowerment rooted in Source.
A knowing that nothing can shake, and nothing can taint.

In this article it is my joy to share these invitations for returning home to the body as the temple of the soul. This list is in no way exhaustive, I encourage all women to curiously call upon nature, pleasure, pain, emotion, and the wild spark of life to guide them on their own unique path home.

Your body. Your truth. Your way.

Let this be the beginning of another remembering...

Unravel the Collective Distortions

When we trace our way back to many of our original creation stories, particularly those of us raised in the West which has been heavily influenced by Christianity whether we were raised with religion or not, we meet with the story of original sin, when Adam and Eve left the garden, and when our true divine nature was forgotten.

The more we begin to unravel and untangle these stories and the wounds they have created, the closer we come to the source of who we really are.

For thousands of years the ancient sacred ways of the feminine have been burned, buried, and distorted, priestesses and shamans denigrated to prostitutes and witches, and our true powers as medicine women to heal through the Earth that created us replaced with man made synthetic solutions.

If we are to reclaim this body as sacred and holy, we need to first look into the eyes of the distortions that have caused us to believe that it is dirty and sinful to begin with.

(I wrote about this in much more length in this article: When Eve Ate the Apple, The Beginning of Our Journey as Earth Daughters.)

Root and descend Your Energy

Many of the ancient cultures across the world, from the Mayans to the Sumerians to the Celts, document a time when the myriad forms of the Mother Goddess were replaced by a single Father God. Goddess worship acknowledged all life in harmony with the birthing power of the universe that exists in a woman’s body, and understood the life death life nature of all things.

However, through patriarchy a new belief formed, that to descend down into the womb of the Earth, into the soil, was a frightening death only for the lowliest of peasants, and those who had attained true spiritual power would directly ascend up to heaven without being destroyed first by the dark mother below.

Our obsession with ascension based spirituality and the avoidance of death can likely be traced to these origins. Undoubtedly, choosing to descend, to root, to dive into the shadow, into the fertile soil of our bodies and this Earth, is to meet with death and the dark face of the feminine. And yet, paradoxically, it is here that we also meet with our light, our source, and what makes us safe.

Through the body we can practice slowing down to meet the discomfort of descending. Slowing down the breath. Slowing down our rhythm. Laying naked on the Earth. Practicing yin yoga at least as often as yang yoga. Forward folding. Bowing. Child’s pose. Offering awareness to the pelvic floor, the sexual organs, the root of life. Pressing our hands onto our feet and choosing to be here as long as it takes to arrive. Allowing the heavier emotions. Celebrating the divinity of our density in form.

Access Your Innate Life Force

Just as the feminine descends down into the depths, she also rises up from the stillness like the sprout bursting from the seed. If you have ever witnessed or participated in trance dance, you likely know what I mean. It is the total allowance of pure energy to overtake you, no mind, moved by a greater force of creation that cannot be controlled and breathes ecstasy into everything it touches.

As a dancer I have met this pure energy as Shakti, the feminine principle in tantra, that is life itself. The power that animates everything into being. All forms of ecstatic movement, breathwork, and self and partnered pleasure can open gateways to accessing the wild truth that is your own life.

If you’re new to the practice it can take time to surrender your mind deeply enough to allow this kind of orgasmic takeover, but it will happen eventually. Just like a woman, Shakti loves to be courted, the body loves to be courted, true life force comes alive when the mind devotionally hands itself over to her like a lover to be consumed. Then a truly authentic creativity, profound ideas and realizations, and the true wisdom that hides within the cells of body can awaken... beyond anything the mind could ever conjure up.

Liberate Your Instinctual Nature

The body never lies. If you want to know what you truly desire, what will harm you, what is safe or unsafe, what will serve you, and what resonates on the deepest level of your soul, you need only pay attention to your body.

Our bodies never lie but many of us have learned not to listen. We betray and dishonor and harm the body by overriding our innate intelligence, judging what we feel against outer standards and repetitively enacting patterns imprinted by our own traumas (collective, ancestral, childhood, lifetime, karmic). It’s overwhelming to realize that many, if not most, women’s first sexual experience was non consensual and the tendency to dismiss a true “yes” or “no” and instead act from societal expectations of “appropriateness” is rampant.

To liberate the instinctual nature of a woman that exists beyond the clutches of trauma and oppression, is to reawaken the wild within. Just as this knowing lives within the body, we welcome it to come alive through the body. Through breathing life back into the body. Through establishing trust within the body. Through letting the body take the lead. For allowing pain to be felt, trauma to be met, and discomfort to be faced, as that is often what is first necessary to reconnect with the true deeper self.

Develop a Healthy Body Dialogue

Just as the body speaks to us through pain, illness, and various diseases we have come to call normal, so can we speak to the body, ask it for guidance, for wisdom, for direction, and for healing. If you know, then you know, and if you don’t yet know, soon you will discover that this body is filled with mystery, magic, and truth that mind can only begin to fathom.

The body, like the inner child and the emotional self, opens when it feels safe. Slowing down is paramount for creating the intimacy that allows this connection. Consider this relating like two lovers getting to know one another. Romance, reverence, patience, and trust must be established for healing, love, and communion to bloom. Take time to really explore the terrain of your body through your hands, through breath, through devoted presence and awareness.

Within a woman, the womb has long been known as the voice of creation, source, knowing, and discernment rooted in wisdom. If you do not already, cultivating a practice of direct communication with your own womb is one of the most empowering things you can ever do. You will be amazed by what she has to teach you.

Harmonize With Earth Rhythms

Whether we are aware of it or not, we all come from a lineage of women and men who lived in harmony with Earth and her rhythms. All of our ancestors at one time or another were shamanic, meaning their entire lives were guided by the greater cycles and flows of our Earth body.

Simply spending more time in nature, forest bathing, moon bathing, swimming in natural bodies of water, going to places without cell signals, shutting off our phones and allowing dawn and dusk to guide our movements, it’s incredible our quickly our nervous systems regulate and return to a healthy state of being physically, mentally, and emotionally.

While we have been conditioned to operate in a linear, one directional, masculine way, this way of being is not sustainable evidenced by the commonality of burnout, adrenal fatigue, depression, suicide, and destruction of our Earth. Our Mother Earth operates in seasons, in cycles, and to sustain our health and well being, we too much operate in seasons, in cycles, allowing sacred rest in winter, rebirth in spring, full bloom in summer, and harvest in the fall.

These seasons operate through the year, but they also occur within the womb every month, within every moon cycle, within every day, and also in greater longer cycles in our lives as a whole and in our collective. Sometimes we are in a winter that lasts many years before the rebirth comes, and understanding the sacred context of our journey can make a huge difference between fear and faith.

Celebrate Your Blood

A woman can reclaim the sacred synthesis between her body and the Earth through taking back her power to heal through her blood.

We may have received the message that our menstrual blood is dirty, a “curse,” or shameful, but this fluid is one of the richest sources of healing stem cells and in ancient times priestesses were revered for their ability to not only heal themselves but the entire community through the rebirthing powers contained in their menstrual blood.

I have myself experienced the heart shattering ecstasy of understanding on a cellular level how my moon blood reorients me back into the womb of the Earth through free bleeding on the ground, and it is a healing that prophecies claim will bring an end to war. Choosing to bring sacredness to your moon time, to track your cycles, and to live your life in harmony with this flow is a powerful revolution for our collective rebirth.

Explore YOUR Pleasure

Depending on the messages we received within our families, our earliest relationships, from our peers, and from the media, many of us may have inherited the belief that pleasure belongs to another. The body belongs to another. Our sexuality belongs to another.

For a woman to truly be safe within her own body, she must know, trust, and ensure that her body, her pleasure, and her sexual essence belong only to her. They are treasures she can share with a trusted partner, but they are not forms of currency that she owes the world to prove her worthiness of being here.

When a woman explores her own pleasure, her own body, her own orgasmic nature, in whatever way she is guided to within a safe container with herself, she discovers her boundaries, her desires, and her naturalness that enables her to feel safe with another beyond the dynamics of codependency. We all deserve to reclaim this birthright.

Bless All That You Are as Sacred

In the breaths that follow betrayal, dishonor, harm, abuse, rejection, neglect, or abandonment from our own selves and others, it is no wonder that we may freeze, dissociate from our bodies, compartmentalize our wholeness, and distract ourselves from the sensual experience that is the gift of being alive.

As women devoted to awakening through the wild magic of our humanity, it is sacred work to choose to melt through the icebergs and return to whole bodied love, no matter what we have survived.

In healing my own layers of complex post traumatic stress and the many ways it began to appear in my own life, I intuitively began guiding myself through a very simple body blessing that mirrors time and tested trauma healing techniques within the field of modern psychotherapy, shamanic soul retrieval practices, and the ancient Priestess rituals of my own ancestors of Avalon. (I share the body blessing in this post: A Sacred Body Blessing for the Goddess in All Women.)

Tell me, what are some of the ways that you have come home to the majestic temple of your own body, and remembered all that you are as sacred and whole?