Oshun ~ An Orgasmic Water Invocation

On Tuesday a storm swept through New York, the night thunderstorms raged and thrashed, the water Goddess roared her wrath and then lay still - thick in her humid sexual afterglow... This piece was inspired by that night.

Isis Phoenix on Theatre & Tantra

I had a delightful time watching this 2003 video of my final theatre performance in Tulsa, before I moved to New York City and the interview that followed in 2007 with my friend Steve Otero, the manager of Sexy Spirits.

Reclaiming Natural Ecstasy

Dear Ones,

I am just back from a glorious week in the green mountains of Vermont celebrating a late Lughnasadh - the ancient first harvest festival with the Celtic Witch Priestess who initiated me onto my path and her new apprentice who is already in the throws of this life changing ancient transformative magic that is permeating the season. Vermont continues to be a place that inspires magic, transformation and access to open portals of wisdom from the proximity of the land and the way the community must live in relationship to it. I spent my days stacking fire wood, hanging a bat house, perusing the local markets and fairs and cooking good wholesome food all the while reminded of the depth and magic of simple Earth-based living and the beauty of human existence when it falls into right relationship with the planet. My body aches this morning from the hard manual labor of the past week and I smile with a deep pleasure at the sensual wholeness of the return to the land. A conversation that spun out of this time was the "turn on" of human existence when we reach this integrated relationship. When we are simple doing what we are here to do and living the way we are here to live. My dear friend the Celtic Witch Priestess spoke of her new apprentice's new amazement at her own limitless and expanded sexual energy and how it now colored every part of her life. I laughed, remembering my own initiations unfolding to the natural state of being sexually functional, always turned on - reclaiming the ancient brain and animal body of our existence and plugging into the Earth's perpetual state of orgasm - how truly exuberant existence becomes.

A meditation - When in your life do you experienced true wholeness and interconnectedness? Where is desire and passion currently running through your life? Are you following it freely or resisting it? What would shift in your life if you consciously plugged into this energy all the time?

In Natural Ecstasy,
ISIS

Death of the Maiden: Transitioning from Maiden, to Priestess-Mother-Wife

Death of the Maiden: Transitioning from Maiden, to Priestess-Mother-Wife

Beloveds,

There has been space since my last post where transformation, archetype shifts and life-changes have rocked my core. Most I speak to have undergone or are undergoing transformation in their lives as our consciousness continue to climb the ladder of ascension and the old world and old ways continue to fall away.

Both full moon and new moons in June and July were met with eclipses symbolizing a time of climactic fulcrums, new beginnings, transformation and renovation. My own journey lead to the marriage to my Beloved of four years on June 26th. During the transition before marriage, the Priestess I previously apprenticed with and four Goddesses Sisters escorted me through the gateway of transformation with the powerful ceremony - Death of the Maiden. A ritual unlike any I have ever experienced, I am reminded of ancient times where group rites of passage for both men and women were held in sacred community rituals and not ushered through bars in drunken stupors like many are today.

I chose a black dress for the occasion - symbolizing this death transition from Maiden to Priestess Mother Wife. My Goddess sisters, draped in flaming colored sarongs, escorted me to a sacred grotto in the back hills of Vermont where streams converged into pools and fairies and nymphs danced freely amidst us celebrating our coming. I waded into the excruciatingly cold water and called the maiden to me, feeling all she was, all the days she served me, her flirtation, her playfulness, her eternal youth - We embraced each other singing a soft swan song as she stroked my cheek and said our final good-byes. My Priestess sisters encircled me, walking me to the waters edge and veiled in black, I began my descent. I sucked in air, hit by the cold water stream and descended into the frigid underworld as the black dress billowed around my waist. In a final breath, I submerged myself completely - deep silence in the freezing underwater and in the gateway of transition - She left me. The black dress rose up over my head and fell from my body to the bottom of the grotto's swimming hole, and I watched her go, this delightful archetype and season of woman that is part of every woman's life. I paused for a second/an eternity in the magic of the in-between - and then crashed through the surface - gasping for air - new life re-born of the mother's womb - this archetype awakening in me - naked, powerful, I rose from the waters - reborn.

Gender Imbalance In Balance

The gender paradigm can often rouse passionate responses and heated dialogues from almost anyone who has actively explored masculine and feminine roles in our society. Today, on Mother’s Day, I pause to look back at the presence of the feminine in my life and reflect on how grateful I am to be such a privileged woman in the west who has had a myriad of powerful female teachers, mentors and leaders who have influenced my own spiritual maturity as a woman.

In the arch of my spiritual journey, the roles of masculine and feminine energy have influenced the core of my spiritual evolution because they exist at the very heart of our culture and the heart of our evolution as a species.

I’ve had my fare share of heady and aggressive conversations about the feminist movement, the monotheistic male center of patriarchal religion, the concept of Goddess and the place of the uprising divine feminine. As a fierce representation of the uprising feminine, I fought hard in my college years to let the voice of the feminine be heard and to quench my own insatiable thirst for mainstream information in reference to the sacred feminine and presence of Goddess Worship in the barren lands of Midwest America. My formal teachings of the Divine Feminine came behind closed doors and under a covenant of secrecy from the town witch, and while what she was teaching me may have cast me as a heretic in the Bible belt, today, it rolls off my tongue and passes through conversations between my friends, clients and community as quickly and easily as someone might discuss the weather.

In my flag-waving feminist days, however, I declared myself a female refugee of the patriarchy and quite often entered into relationship with men where I both dominated and resented their position as man and masculinized my position as woman in an effort to climb out of the years of patriarchal oppression and absence of choice. I martyred myself and my poor unsuspecting boyfriends at the time who fell helplessly in love with a women claiming her Goddesshood and owning her wrath of centuries of oppression and abuse. The early uprising feminist spiritual movement was laced with Martyrdom and rightly so after centuries of silence and oppression. In my individual uprising of ushering in the proclamation of the Goddess, I worked directly in the wound of the feminine, answering calls at Domestic Violence Intervention Services trying to put myself in a path of creating change and healing the world. I directed the Vagina Monologues, raised money to stop violence against women, took back the night. I became self-identified with what David Deida refers to as ‘Stage Two Feminine’ where the feminine embodies her inner warrior and challenges the masculine to meet her on that plane of existence. She has become empowered, liberated and demands equality and at times superiority on every level. She works under the solar influence of the masculine, not resting or nesting or nurturing but constantly creating, fighting the activist’s fight and coping with adrenal burnout from over-embodying dominant solar energy.

Today the split is mending and we are moving into an age of partnership, a time where the energies of God/Goddess are uniting within us and outside of us. The third stage of the feminine is the stage of partnership, a stage of inner God/Goddess Harmony, within and without. It is also a stage where we consciously embrace and celebrate our born gender identity knowing we can shift among all stages interchangeably. The feminine, becomes all aspects of the feminine AND masculine but rests in the love and balance of wholeness of her feminine body and archetype by choice of nature’s script and soul purpose. The masculine rests fully in his role as male after actively embracing his feminine and moving through his stages of masculine maturity and evolution.

The masculine/feminine relationship thrives from the inside returning to the oneness and balance it evolved out of from Source – God/Goddess consciousness. Many of us New Agers who have ridden out our own liberation from gender roles bemoan gender identification and the masculine feminine gender paradigm citing ‘people are people,’ but to know each energy separately is to know it as part of the whole as well. Just as on a Shamanic level the elements make up our world – Earth, Wind, Water, Fire, Ether, so do the masculine and feminine dance make up our universe and these very primary energies are at the core foundation of our creative archetypes. To disassociate from them, we must know them fully balanced both within and without and also be able to re-release them back to the cosmic void which often results in returning to them, acknowledging them, playing in these roles and stages of the masculine and feminine interchangeably and consciously and then releasing them to that cosmic source void of the universe once again.

Today, on mother’s day, I pause to look back at the presence of the feminine in my life. I look at the promises I made to myself in the arch of my feminine journey as woman. Promises about never getting married or having children and today I find myself on my way to marriage and for the first time in my life, hearing the future whispers of family life within me, which had always been previously met with silence or wounded protests. Today I find myself celebrating my role as woman, as matriarch, standing next to a partner who embodies all aspects of the divine masculine and acknowledges his feminine core. Today I stand and acknowledge the ushering in the age of partnership and holding a vibration of wholeness as we move towards healing ourselves, healing our partners, healing our planet.