The Painful Problem and How the Divine Feminine is the Answer by Caryn MacGrandle

Two young kids and an Airline Pilot husband who got caught in the 911 lay-offs, a first divorce, struggling, a second marriage and struggling again.  Moving around the country with no ties and not knowing many people. I remember after my first marriage having to move to a less expensive neighborhood, I had the thought “Match.com? I don’t need a Match.com, I need a Friend.com!”

Only “Friend.Com” doesn’t work.  It is awkward to go out to lunch “Do you want to be my friend?”

And so I remained isolated and struggling alone.

I drank daily in order to quell my anxiety and fall asleep.

We are communal beings.  Seeing the same people, small talk and coming together to mark the passing time and seasons give us a sense of comfort and security that is often missing in today’s society.

I found a progressive Church that I liked. My son stared up at the rock band, “Mom, are you sure this is a Church?”

Yes, I was sure it was, and I liked it.  I found solace in the sermons, but I was still surrounded by strangers listening to the minister at the pulpit.

Second marriage and finding myself pregnant with my fourth child, I felt as if I had hit rock bottom. With the stress of a blended family and again financial insecurity, I was still struggling and just trying to survive through the day. I had forgotten what ‘joy’ felt like, and my anxiety remained sky high.

I realized that I had to find like-minded mothers that I could connect with so I started a Mother’s Group and through it, I found the concept of Women’s Circles.

In 2013, I wrote about these first Women’s Circles that I participated in, in an article in Elephant Journal. It was a rebuttal to an email that I received from my mother saying, “Seems to Me You Have Given up on God, Mary & Jesus & Taken Up with the Occult.

I explored and dismissed the folly of that, identifying only with one aspect of the occult, “Mysticism”.

Mysticism, according to Wikipedia, is the “pursuit of communion with, identity with, or conscious awareness of an ultimate reality, divinity, spiritual truth or God through direct experience, intuition, instinct or insight.” It goes on to say that mysticism usually ‘centers on practices intended to nurture those experiences’.

This, I believe, is directly linked to the divine feminine and what has been out of balance in our history of the past thousand of years or so.

It is time for Our Story not just His.

Through Women’s Circles, Sacred Circles of all genders, retreats, online courses, podcasts, webinars, books and more all concerned with this concept of the Sacred Feminine, I have found:

• Divinity within myself:  a divinity that looks like me and speaks like me.   Meditation, Goddess Spirituality, archetypes and hearing the stories of others have given me space and experiences that motivate me, inspire me and have helped me to grow.
• Embodiment.  I grew up in Plano, Texas a rootless subdivision of Dallas that exploded when several corporate headquarters established themselves there.  My graduating class had 1500 students. There was no participating in sports, cheerleading or drill team unless you were a “Star” and had given your life over to it.  My Junior and Senior year, my football team won State.  It was serious stuff.  Our stadium held 50,000 people and had miles of traffic on Friday’s.  Our drill team looked like the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders.

And if you did not fit in with that, you learned to be quiet and invisible. 

Only our human experience demands expression. Through Women’s Circles, I learned to speak up, to sing and to move my body.

And I learned that it is fun to do so.

• Alignment with Nature.  In Plano, Texas, they grow strip malls not trees.  Until I left Plano and found solace amidst rivers, mountains and trees did I learn how very much I needed that.  The divine feminine begins with Mother Earth, and the foundation of the Sacred Feminine is a respect for the cycles of the earth, the stars, the planets and everything that inhabits them. 

Staring up at the stars from a dark forest,  the ocean from an empty beach or a waterfall endlessly and forcefully cascading down a mountain puts in perspective our human experience.  I have learned to quell my anxiety and put the foibles of my human existence into a perspective through Nature.  I have learned to establish a relationship with the Land I live on and travel to, a respect and an interchange between what She provides: plants, herbs, flowers, trees, beauty, fish, animals and so on. 

I have learned that we do not live in a vacuum, when we treat animals as mass consumption and an endless conveyor belt, pumping them up with steroids and hormones in a pursuit of ‘more, more, more’, the abuse continues to us, passing on the stress hormones they have accumulated. Continuous lights and overfeeding so that chickens can grow and be ‘harvested’ within six weeks, the McDonald’s chicken nuggets contain way more than chicken, they contain disease and cancer. It is no wonder.  

Indigenous people know that this abuse is passed along to our human bodies as well.

We have much to learn from Indigenous cultures and that too is an aspect of the divine feminine: respect for all of our individual gifts and perspectives. 

We are all Her Children.

• How to Truly Have It All.  I think many of us grew up thinking the United States had it all:  freedom and opportunity. If you only worked hard enough and did what was expected of you, the world (and by that, we mean things:  big homes, expensive vacations, STUFF) would be your’s. An essential part of our ingrained American culture is ‘paddling  your own canoe’. Our independence is aligned with personal independence.  Depend on no one. Don’t be a burden on others.  Figure it out yourself.  Take.  Our lives are formed by our choices, and if you are struggling, you have yourself to blame. Pick yourself up and get going. Anyone can make it here. See, see that person who came from nothing!  They did it. You can, too.  Focus.  And work harder. 50-60 hour work weeks. Three day expensive and chaotic vacations. Ah, yes!! You have made it.

Only you have not. 

The gulf in the United States has widened. Moses parted the Red Sea, and we have parted those who have ‘succeeded’ with those who have failed. The latter hopelessly struggling to make ends meet with $15-20 an hour jobs that cannot pay for all of the ‘needs’ we have today nor buy homes or create retirements but instead are falling into the abyss of medical bills and debt.

And those who have ‘made it’ keep their heads down and their feet moving so as not to see the pain of those around them nor to question exactly what they have ‘made’ as they sit isolated in their large homes, estranged from their children and wondering how to fill their few hours of ‘relaxation’.

With the divine feminine, the ‘intangible’ becomes ‘tangible’. We understand that good mothering is not providing Lululemon pants and Martha Stewart homes but providing the framework for families that are able to get along and support each other.

Spiritual feminism is a concept of being strong in maternal strength: the ability to create a nest in which children or projects grow strong and confident feeling their security and able to ultimately fly off, but realizing the importance of returning and their roots. 

It has nothing to do with the corporate boardroom and everything to do with qualities of the divine feminine: nurturance, collaboration, circles, shared leadership and our unique strengths while overcoming our unique challenges.

Truly having it all involves finding balance in your life: 

• a secure, joyous home
• • close friends
  • passions outside of work and family

The divine feminine and the wisdom of the sacred feminine will lead the way there.