What is Enlightenment is a monthly magazine that features a themed articles and a dialogue between guru Andrew Cohen and philosopher Ken Wilber. This month's title was The New Women's Liberation.

Since my letter to the Editor probably won't get published anyway, I am posting it here.

Anyaa

Dear Ken and Andrew,

While I very much appreciate you “white guys” taking up the task of examining the higher evolution of women, and presenting some excellent insights and observations, I feel you are missing some huge pieces. As a transpersonal~shamanic psychotherapist for the past 30 years, and a spiritual teacher of women for the past 15 years, I have traveled the journey with women through victimhood to personal empowerment, and now to reclamation of spiritual authority. My overview is that women walk very differently towards spiritual evolution than men do, and that you are attempting to work with women from a male perspective that does not honor the natural wisdom and source of the feminine, which transcends and includes the biological factors and is very much based in her connection to Mother Earth.

Andrew, I am left wondering why your challenge to women would be to transcend (but apparently not include) the emotional body (which you call relational~biological) and sexual power? In my experience, these aspects of the feminine in ALL of us, are what defines the feminine, not what defines women at lower developmental levels as conditioned egos. Yes, the emotional body and sexual power has been repressed, denied, feared and perverted through the ages, but does that necessarily mean they are to be done away with while transcending? What happened to including?

Certainly I agree that we have been conditioned to be fearful and guarded and manipulative, etc. at lower levels of development, but what of a higher development, i.e. emotional, and sexual enlightenment? In my circles, I find that if emotional safety is provided, and women are encouraged to take responsibility for their shadow conditioning, and own their personal and spiritual authority, they will naturally delight and trust and demonstrate impersonal caring with each other. It is not as rare as you apparently think it is. We who have been on the forefront of spiritual feminism, are bright, evolved and conscious creatures who have been doing personal psycho-emotional~spiritual work for an average of 10-15 years longer than men. The key to the level of sisterly trust you are talking about is that we do this work with other women who also resonate with the female experience, rather than with a male guru. In the context of men, women will naturally take longer to self-actualize and differentiate. We have been so male referenced, especially spiritually, that no wonder it took you 12 years to crack the code and see results!

In reading your women student’s account of their evolving group, I am struck by how these women did what I would call a “spiritual by-pass” around feminine embodiment straight into the male spiritual world of the seeker~meditator. It occurs to me that their current interest in transcending their femininity is a direct result of having to back-track into and through a previous stage of development. This is also my experience in working with long-time women meditators who have not integrated and embodied their authentic feminine selves. I do feel, however, that after a woman has done her work with other women, that working with a male spiritual teacher may in some cases add to her evolution, but not necessarily!

There is exhilaration in integrating healthy emotional genius and full-life force Shakti energy as a valid feminine spiritual path. This is one of the major contributions that the feminine has to offer in healing her world. Yet, what I hear you both agreeing to is that enlightenment only comes in male versions…the “up and out” kind that is ascending, ego annihilating, and sweet and good. Isn’t it time we call enlightenment INTO the body, the emotions, our sexuality, sourced as a new paradigm that includes the feminine nature rather than expecting us to conform to the standard versions of no-self?

We do not need male teachers to tell us how to drop our egos and dis-identify with our own Source, the emotional, diverse, juicy, sexual, wild, nature of the Divine Feminine. Evolved Feminine Spirituality includes consciousness and transpersonal caring, for each other, our people, our communities, our world and our planet….all four quadrants. Please do not try to take away our emotional bodies and our sexuality! Instead, encourage us to grow through the lower stages into healthy emotional and sexual integration so that these become the source of our passion, aliveness, radiance, and movement toward enlightenment. And, please, can we start talking about another kind of enlightenment? Can we acknowledge Descending & Agape as a valid spiritual path? I hear Ken attempting to do this but there is really not enough of an emphasis in your dialogue. The self can be a big Self in the body just as easily as out of it, and the ego can be our servant so that we don’t have to annihilate it (Goddess knows if we don’t have healthy egos we WILL get annihilated these days!).

Let’s bring heaven to earth for a change. Let’s descend (and ascend) for a change, finally coming into a Sacred Union with All, Masculine and Feminine, all polarities and dualities finally coming together in a dance as the Divine Third. Isn’t that another way to view the next stage of development? Let’s acknowledge that the real reason we need the New Divine Feminist to take the lead is so we can finally integrate the Feminine Face of God~Spirit~All That Is within each of us….including you white guys.

Anyaa McAndrew

A Psyche & Spirit Empowerment Path for Women

Coming to the Seattle area

Special Introductory Weekend!

The New Priestess and Women’s Mysteries

Sat & Sun, June 30th-July 1st , 2007

AND

Tues & Wed, July 17th-18th, 2007

10am-6pm each day, $260 for the weekend or two-day session

Designed to allow women to experience the priestess within and the Priestess Process BEFORE commitment is required

to the entire 9-month journey!

FREE PREVIEW EVENING IN SEATTLE:

Thursday, June 28th 7:30 pm

The Integral Loft, 80 Yesler Way, Suite 300

Power is our sacred birthright, yet many of us
have disowned it due to the destructive ways we have felt and witnessed
its misuse on the planet. As women, we often view “power over” or
warrior~achiever mentality as good enough reason to stay away from
power. However, we walk very differently on an empowerment path when we
are fully encouraged to be with our soul as the source of our power.

The soul itself is described as feminine by many. She is wild,
willful, chaotic, earthy, sensual, sweet, empathic, merging, deeply
emotional, passionate and compassionate. The soul could also be
described as shamanic. She dives deep into the earth on her human
journey, gathering jewels to take back to Spirit, which can be seen as
masculine. The soul does not care about rules, dogma, or right and
wrong, as she seeks pure experience through all the realms and layers
of life in a body. The cycles of life and death, joy and sorrow, change
and stability are the natural shamanic realms of the soul, and of the
Feminine, once she is reconnected to her inner wisdom.

The priestess archetype is found in all religions throughout
time, yet has been lost somewhere in our psyches for the past few
thousand years. She is the vehicle through which the Divine Feminine,
or the exiled Goddess, is returning to earth. Women everywhere are awakening to their Divine and Sacred selves, no matter what she is called. The
priestess path is one vehicle for this return, while the shamanic path
is another. Priestess consciousness teaches us to live our lives in a
sacred way in service to the world, while shamanic consciousness
teaches us about the natural cycles of death and rebirth, shadow and
light, human and divine. Both show us how to embody both human and the
divine through spiritual inititation and embracing transformation for
the greater purpose of living our deepest and most powerful sacred
purpose.

Now at the Turning of the Ages, when all wisdom is being
resurrected, and we are re-integrating what was exiled in patriarchy,
it all seems to fall into the same domain. Women’s
mysteries, earth-based spirituality, sexuality, and the mysteries of
death and rebirth all fell into a shadow or taboo realm in patriarchal
times. The power of women is equal to the power of
sexuality is equal to the power of the ancient mysteries schools that
understood the ways of sacred power and life-force energy.

With some courage, we are finally able to take these mysteries out of the dark. We
can reawaken to our natural wisdom inherited but disowned, due to
atrocities such as the Holy (? ) Inquisition, massacres of women,
Templars, Cathars, and more recent genocides and crusades against
indigineous peoples everywhere. We can also reclaim our
loss of soul connection to our bodies, resulting in centering ourselves
from our neck up, denying the life-force energy that enlivens us and
makes life worth living.

The shamanic priestess seeks to embody the deep feminine and the
human earthwalk with so much compassion, passion and full-chakra
aliveness that she magnetizes heaven on earth, once again calling in
the spiritual forces of transformation with grace, dignity and beauty.
As conscious women, we are calling back our right to be spiritual
beings. We are calling back the power to call on the Divine, to do
ritual and ceremony and magic, to journey as shamans and bring back the
visions to our communities for manifestation of our dreams of a new
earth. We call back the best of the ancient, into the present to build
a new future. Like Inanna, Shamanic Queen Goddess of
Ancient Sumeria, we to return to our inner knowing, as she too was
called to do in her own time. Inanna made the descent and learned to
consciously walk between the worlds. This journey gave her the humility
and compassion to embody spirit in human form and thus unite heaven and
earth, known to some as the Sacred Marriage. At this time when our
world is threatened by severe destruction and political upheaval, many
of us find ourselves feeling powerless about what possible difference
we could make to support the evolutionary changes called for on our
beloved Gaia. The concept of the Shamanic Priestess offers each of us a
way to find the inner peace, wisdom and guidance so needed for the next
part of our individual and collective journey.

Initiations of the heart, such as conscious death & rebirth,
sacred marriage work, embracing our shadow selves and our inner
masculine, telling our shamanic life stories, journeywork, and embodied
sacred sexuality take us deeply into our core belief systems which
block our true natures from full expression. By expressing, forgiving
and integrating all parts of who we are in our fullness, the power we
have been missing in our lives emerges naturally. The Shamanic
Priestess takes her rightful place on earth, as The Compassionate
Transformer.

The various stages of Initiation, and finally Emergence, can
result in the full empowerment of a woman as a priestess whose temple
is the everyday world. She exerts her influence in all of her roles—as
daughter, mother, lover, career woman, neighbor and in every
interaction she has, moment to moment. At last, the divine feminine and
the divine feminist are joined. Finally, we can embrace a movement of
soul and spirit, human and divine. We can include the very essential
factors that make the new feminine mysticism grounded and practical,
yet imaginal and sacred.

Women’s spiritual work calls for full embodiment if we are to co-create a New World
with Spirit. We can no longer afford to be disembodied victims of a
worn-out patriarchal system on any level: physical, economic,
political, social or spiritual.We are consciously calling back power we
may have never known in this lifetime or for thousands of years. As many have predicted for these times, it is women and the feminine that can have the greatest impact.

The new priestess walks everywhere and does everything within the ordinary flow of her life. The
difference is that she is fully aware that where she walks is sacred,
what she does is sacred and who she is, is sacred. The shamanic
priestess “priestesses” the World.

See my website Coming Events: The Shamanic Priestess Process
for circles starting in Seattle, North Carolina(2007), Sedona, San Francisco and Massachusetts (2008) contact Anyaa at anyaa@verizon.net or
404-432-1499