Spiritual Cowgirl

Andrew Harvey - Cambridge Scholar, Rumi Translator, Divine Feminine Lover, Sacred Activist and a Deliciously Red modern day mystic. Sigh. He was probably my most favorite interviewee I experienced on the film shoot this summer.

OK, I’ll admit, I totally fell in love with Andrew – from his beautiful red icons of the divine feminine to his utter glee at seeing wild baby bunnies to his spontaneous recitation of Rumi poems to his joy in eating ice cream to his brilliant and grounded ideas of activism - this man is the real deal, and we should all pay attention to his fiery love song to the planet.

Andrew believes this planet is currently undergoing a dark night of the soul, but instead of this being a negative thing, we need to understand that “destruction is only creation in drag”. This birth canal-like phenomenon will eventually lead to rebirth, a quantum shift in reality, a total renewal of life as we know it - if we apply divine consciousness, love, and action.

If.

Who’s leading this seemingly dark, yet if we choose wisely, utterly transformative movement? Oh, that would be the Great She She of Us All. The Mama. The Big G with Breasts. According to Harvey, the return of the divine feminine is producing the best show in town, and guess who the stars are? Uh huh. And we need to start acting like it.

How? By getting mystic with it. By marrying the mystical passion for the divine to the active passion for justice. The enlightened mystic floating off to the cosmos is of no use to us anymore. We need to ground our mystical asses to the dirt, as well as lift our ego consciousness to the stars. We need to be “both and” - and then some. And as we all know, mysticism is not the same as religion. In fact, Harvey asks us to get out of the boxes of religion and create a direct relationship with the divine so we can “dive into the sea of burning honey”. After all, this is our birthright.

Hot Salty Honey Love? Sign me up!

Sound a little abstract?

Here’s the “oxygen” to get you sweetly burning. According to Harvey you need:

1. cool practices: practices that keep you calm and serene, like walking, deep breathing, meditation
2. warm practices: practices that open your heart and keeps it alive such as the mystical systems of metta or tonglen
3. sacred body practices. A) tantra, sacred sexuality B) tantra of tenderness to connect you to the planet and animals and interconnectedness C) yoga, reiki, sacred dance, and so on, so your body can be ready to handle tremendous amounts of divine energies. The physical body needs to be kept at a high level of empowerment or we’ll be too exhausted to help.

And all these practices need to be done with concentrated realism, divine practical intelligence, not airy fairy woo wooness.

And here are Harvey’s 5 paths of service:

1. service to the divine – gratitude, prayer, passion, meditation, so the divine can pour into you.
2. service to yourself as instrument of the divine – work on self, shadow work, physical work, deep meditation etc.
3. service to all sentient beings – treating everyone you meet as a manifestation of the divine, including animals.
4. service to your own local community – get involved with local politics, local environmental movements, local volunteer opportunities that excite you.
5. service to the world - become a global citizen and make clear choices: vote, invest in green healthy companies, live life with awareness and compassion.

Sound a little challenging? A little sticky? A little sweaty? A little red? I think we’re up to it. We have to be.

Many people practicing some form of spirituality fully suck at receiving compliments. Usually because they’re so freaked out about appearing or being egotistical. I agree that the ego can be a tricky little sucker, but there’s a dangerous amount of “spiritual” people shooting themselves in the halo because they’re trying so damn hard not to be all egoey - when really, their halo needs some healthy recognition to get its’ full shine on.

I’ve found that more often than not, those who are most worried about being egotistical are usually the ones who couldn’t turn into egomaniacs, even if they consciously tried. “Big Headedness” is not a chemical their body knows how to mass produce. Sure, they have to keep mindful of their ego, who doesn’t, but I’ve found that if these people experience a flush of pride or break into a spontaneous toothy grin when their work or love is appreciated by another, they immediately think “oh crap that’s my ego reacting…must not be attached, oooh no, must not be lured, it’s not about little ol’ me.” And so they push the glory away or make a joke or quickly turn the compliment around “ no, you’re the amazing one!” and so on and so forth. They tame their spirit’s natural spontaneous response into a dull egoic ache.

While I in no way champion some sort of new agey superficial self-indulgence, I do believe that it’s harmful when we squish ourselves, play down our talents or deny how our presence positively affects another’s life. Because as Nelson Mandela and Marianne Williamson remind us, when you small your self you’re denying the divine’s grandness.

Can you imagine going up to some great being of the past (if you were, you know, alive back then) and saying “Hey J.C. (or Buddha, or Mohammad) I really like what you’re doing here, I find you and your teachings to be incredibly inspiring and powerful”, to witness J.C respond by lowering his head, shuffling his Birkenstocks and muttering “naw”? You’d probably think a bit differently about him after this reaction, eh?

So what if we practiced just saying “thank you” after someone gives us a compliment. What if we paused, breathed it in, let it wash over ourselves and truly nourish us. What if we let love in? Waaaay in?

This practice becomes especially poignant when someone tells you “I love you” and you respond simply with, “thank you.” That’s it. No “I love you too”. Many movies and T.V. shows have entire story lines based around this (“thank you!? Thank you!!!” the main character whines to his friends “What the hell does that mean?”). But try it, I dare you. You might be surprised at what comes up for you.

By fully receiving a compliment it’s like saying “you bettcha bottom dollar, the divine, us, this planet, that bird, this air - we all rock, so thank you for noticing my truth, my divinity, my self”. Authentically receiving a compliment ultimately reflects the glory right back at the giver. After all, it’s simply the divine complimenting itself.

As Rabbi Hillel said:

“if I’m not for myself, who will I be?
if I am only for myself, what am I?
and if not now, when?”

So here’s your first red test:

I see you! Yes, You! I think what you’re doing and who you are is absolutely beautiful. You make the trees blow air kisses and the whales sing love songs and the heavens lean closer. It’s truly an honor sharing this planet with you.

Now go receive some more luvin’ rock star!

There is an independent film coming out right now that could help raise your vibration. It’s main character? The vibrator. That’s right, this buzzy little (and not always so little as the film Passion and Power: The Technology of Orgasm shows you vibrators from the early 1900s that look more like small Toyotas) technical marvel is finally getting the hand-held spotlight, well, outside of porn. It took Bay Area filmmakers Wendy Slick and Emiko Omori seven years to make this film which explores the hysterical (literally) history of the O-inducing device and it’s modern day mystical variety. That’s right, I said mystical. After all, there is a goddess Hitachi.

Back to the pulsing history. Did you know doctors, who were always male, used to relieve women of “hysteria” in the late 1800s and early 1900s through, uh, manual pleasure? The vibrator was invented to help prevent the good ol docs from getting carpal tunnel as it could take them up to an hour to “get rid of a woman’s hysteria” while this mechanical device could take care of bizness within 10 minutes. And after all, time is money.

Soon 30 companies like Sears Roebuck jumped on the vibrating board and advertised these mechanical contraptions (again, the images of these old buzzers will make you want to scream, and not in the fun way) in major magazines – as a health device. Its real use was culturally understood and commercially implied without being directly stated – thus safe and non-threatening to Texans and just like that new thing called the toaster oven that came out around the same time.

But then sex films became popular in the 1920s and they brought these “medical devices” into the films as “props” and the vibrators were publicly outted as being women’s masturbation devices and the advertisements quickly stopped and the buzzing mini Toyotas got pushed away from the mainstream and into the seedy dark corners of the nation’s garage.

Till the goddess let a little light in and Betty Dodson opened her own sex toy store and sex workshops for women in the 70s and voila one thing led to another and now we have vibrators galore gleaming from places like Toys in Babeland, Good Vibrations, Bootyparlor, and even Brookstone (yeah, you can run down to your local mall and buy your sister a “back massager” for her birthday). And we all remember “the rabbit” from Sex and the City.

So cheers to the sexual independence of women and the back massagers that never touch a back.

Buzzzz On!

“The resurgent interest in esoteric spiritual traditions and the wisdom of more ancient cultures is not an indicator of a return to the past, past patterns or ways of thinking, but rather of a species-level refocusing on Consciousness: a review (as distinct from repetition) of our previous spiritual and philosophical inquiries, methodologies and creative directions: integrating and incorporating still-relevant ancient knowledge, reminders and techniques as a base, benchmark and platform from which to spring forward into undiscovered fields of knowing and being.”

-Alan Sasha Lithman from An Evolutionary Agenda for the Third Millenium: A Primer for a Mutation of Consciousness

Regarding my below post, the one with Robin Rice’s video on Beauty - a friend found this image for me on Jezebel.com (love the name). If you click you’ll see 2 images of Faith Hill on a major magazine cover. The first, is the one you’re used to seeing on the stands - ya know the perfectly buffed and shaved “I am filled with plastic, Desperate Housewives and Lean Cuisine” one. The second, is the real photo, before the airbrushing.

Personally, I think the real image is much more bautiful - hell, the woman looks like she earned those smile lines and crow’s feet and freckles and healthy flesh - by living. How dare she. And even though the technique used on these magazine covers is called airbrushing, me thinks they should call it something else, like soulsquishing, or lifesucking, or “Jesus with a spackle of Maybelline foundation, I so have no idea what true beauty is, again, for like one more month of existence, now where’s the Zoloft”. Or something.

You know when I was in fifth grade I wrote a story about a girl who was given one wish from some frisky faerie-type elemental, and her wish was that people would turn inside out. No, not so their organs and veins and adipose tissues were hangin’ out all “eeew” like, but so their inner spirit would be appropriately reflected by their external carriage. Ah, the whims of the young.

So what do you do to let your true beauty shine? What could you be doing to shine it better?