The Importance of Finding a Local Sacred Circle or Event by Caryn MacGrandle

“What not many know that the founder Caryn MacGrandle (aka Karen Lee Moon), who is a soul-sister to me, has devoted her life to the building, developing and promoting of this app, in service to the Rising Feminine … “ Jonita D’Souza, Rising Feminine

I came back this weekend from my land in North Carolina to two email messages about women finding divinely feminine events through the divine feminine app. I cannot even begin to tell you how happy this makes me. After nine years of nurturing, developing, daily work and pouring my personal funds into the app, it is truly working.

I came to the app at one of the lowest points in my life. Struggling in marriage number two, 42 years old and pregnant with child number four, every day was painful. I had forgotten joy. Everything was a matter of survival. Get through the day. Get through the panic attack. Get through the unpleasant experience. After the baby was born and breastfeeding was done, I turned to daily drinking. Have a few drinks so that you can numb the pain and finally fall asleep. Repeat.

Women’s Circles saved me.

This is an article I wrote back in 2014: the smell of good mud and the fox and your cells becoming alive and calling ‘this way, this way’, from Clarissa Pinkola Estes who so many of us found when we got together in Circle.

What no amount of drugs, therapy and journaling could ever do for me, Circles and the divine feminine did. Community. Inspiration. Coming together in love, in laughter and in crying. Looking within and finding Her.

The Mother.
The Goddess.
10,000 faces.

It is Her time I believe. And the world needs Her for its next evolution.

In the first few years of the divine feminine app, I used to wonder what I was doing putting my time, energy, and money into it. I have spent tens of thousands of dollars on it. Computer apps are expensive and demanding.

I would frequently tell myself to give it up.  But it would come back in the form of an encouraging email or phone call. She kept tapping me on the shoulder until I finally said, ‘Okay. I’m in. Keep showing me a door or a window to crawl through, and I will.’

I set benchmarks for myself. The app is working when you yourself use it frequently, when people consistently are putting on their events and when you can get it working on a local basis with paying members putting on their events and the audience to see those events.

I’m hitting those benchmarks.  Every one of them.

As for my struggling marriage, it finally crumbled a couple of years ago, and I have been reinventing myself.

It’s hard work. I have large gaps in my resume where I traveled around the country with Airforce husband number one and raised four children through subsequent marriage number two. I am overqualified for many jobs, but my computer experience is only mid-career level and who wants to hire a 53 year old women who needs her Reader glasses and has a weird app full of Witches so I struggle through minimizing all my expenses while dealing with the hostile environment in Alabama. 

You cannot even begin to imagine the conversation I had trying to get food stamps in Alabama. They threatened me with jail and implied that I was a lazy, conniving person. It was horrible and inhumane.  It made me think of Karen Tate’s new book Normalizing Abuse, about the inherent abuse in our systems.

Thank the Goddess I know that is not The Truth. Again because of the work I have done over the past nine years, I know who I am.

I know who I am.

And so, I have just kept going. 

And now the signs are that it is working and that it might actually, finally start paying some of my bills.

Oh my Goddess.

This wave of relief and happiness rolls through me.

I sit, and I savor it.

And then I start to think more on the emails. One is from a good friend of mine who just recently moved out West.

“So….I went to the singing circle last night.  Holy Mother, it was absolutely incredible.  There was singing, howling and deep sharing: the energy [was] just off the charts.  Thank you, thank you for pushing me.  It was perfect timing.  Love you  In Gratitude.”

This woman is amazing, deep and mystical. I sat in Circle with her in Illinois for years, and now she is doing important, healing hospice work out west, often helping people move through the shame and guilt of their Christian indoctrination to die more peacefully.

And this is not a slam on Jesus. She is bringing the feminine back into its rightful place.  Jesus is smiling. This is Christianity in its own evolution.

And She needs her chalice filled at the end of these long days.

I know that feeling of sitting in Circle, finding your people and being held and nurtured. 

And all of a sudden, my thinking shifts. I’m not thinking of the money I might be making. I’m thinking of those connections.  I’m thinking of this absolutely amazing, life-changing, world-changing opportunity I have been given to help heal the world.

You see she leaves that Circle flying high with good juju, and she brings just a little bit more to the next person and family she is sitting with as their loved one passes.

And they are a bit more at peace with their loved ones passing, and they bring more to others because of it.

And it just goes on and on and on and on. 

Ripples moving out from Circles.  Changing the world.

And then I sit on that feeling, and wave after wave of gratitude flows through me as tears stream down my cheek.

I am so freaking honored.

It is Her time.  And to be able to help people connect in their communities, Holy Mother.

I am also not knocking virtual and online community. It got me through covid and connected me with amazing people all over the world. But life is not balanced when it is just virtual. As humans, we are meant to interact with others in person with all the smells and irritants and conflict that accompanies that, but heart to heart.  In person.

It is time to push back our chairs from our computers and leave our homes to find and create actual physical community where we live.

They are ready for us.  They are ready for the Goddess.

“I love watching how your vision has grown and grown and grown.  It’’s so awesome!!!  The only problem I have with the APP is that I sit and drool over all of the possibilities!   It gives me such hope that there are so many womyn in the states AND the world that are doing such amazing things.  Yes, such hope!!!”  -Shelley Graff, SingFest

Such hope.

Sign up at theDivineFeminineApp.com . It is free and quick to do so. You will be sent weekly emails on local events in your community. There may not be any yet. But there will be.