I Didn’t Go Looking for the Goddess

I didn’t go looking for the Goddess, not consciously anyway. And when I found her, I categorized it under spiritual growth, which is probably exactly what I needed at the time because if I’d known what she was about to deliver, I’d likely have run.

Without me even being aware of it, something inside of me was desperate to know there had once been a way of seeing a woman’s body as holy. Who honored it instead of shaming, and often, defiling it.

I was still sorting through my own trauma and the collective wound around the female body at the time. I wrote a piece that got picked up by Elephant Journal called, “That Glorious Vagina,” which was a deeply personal exploration of what it felt like to actually reclaim my vulva at a time when people in Congress were refusing to even say the word because it was considered “bad.”

Even the most clinical names for our beautiful lady bits were being held up on a national scale as something that couldn’t be uttered. It enraged me, and it also broke my heart. In that moment, something got set in motion, behind the scenes of my own consciousness, that didn’t actually come to full fruition until several years later. I didn’t know it at the time, but that was the day my pilgrimage quietly began.

A friend read that article and sent me a link to Meggan Watterson’s first book that had recently been released — Reveal: A Sacred Manual for Getting Spiritually Naked. I devoured it, like I would eventually devour every book on the divine feminine I could get my little paws on. I also immediately sent Meggan a friend request and landed my butt in an upcoming retreat of hers that changed my life.

Meggan’s book opened a doorway that led me down a path of profound reclamation. It was still several years before I actually realized what I was doing, though the work was getting done.

As I got further down the rabbit hole, or deeper into the womb would actually be a better expression of what was happening, I was led to authors and books that were about the pre-history of the Goddess, what I refer to as herstory. I was positively stunned by what I encountered. Everything I’d inherited from culture, history, and the media told me words related to a woman’s body were insults. Points of shame to be hidden, guarded. Yet, here was another story.

Poems about the beauty of a woman’s vulva. I found etymological interpretations of words that pointed to a time when “whore,” “bitch,” and “cunt” were all words of veneration of the Goddess. When “hag” and “crone” were spoken of awe and carried the meanings of “holy” and “crown.”

I found cultures across the world who held up the feminine and honored every phase of womanhood. I became obsessed with sharing this information, transmitting it in every place that I could. I used the word “pussy” freely in my newsletters. I talked about how gorgeous the female vulva, body, and expression is. I led Red Tents with my soul sister. I dropped herstorical transmissions. I even wrote a book proposal.

I stayed true to my course when I got angry emails calling me dirty and abusive. I recognized that not every woman is ready to hear this truth. That so many of us feel the deep shame of being a woman, of being all of the things the patriarchal culture has called us for the last several thousand years: dirty, weak, whorish or prudish, smelly, bitchy, nagging, haggish… all the while objectifying us and holding us up to a standard that can rarely be reached.

The internalized patriarchy is a doozy. I’m still working through it myself and likely will be my entire life. It’s ancestral and it’s societal. It shows up in our words, our media, billboards, and the way we’re talked about. It shows up in our inability to have all-out, pleasure-fueled sex. Heck, it even keeps us from experiencing deep pleasure in any area of life. It keeps us people-pleasing and man-pleasing while rarely addressing the option for self-pleasing.

It teaches us how to become experts in everyone else’s desires while remaining strangers to our own. It domesticates and curates us into acceptable ways of behaving when inside, every one of us has a wild woman in hiding.

Looking back, I don’t think I was looking for the Goddess. What I was searching for, and what she delivered, was reverence. A way of seeing the female body that wasn’t rooted in shame, but holiness. I didn’t even know I needed to hear this different story. The impact of hearing it, that there were once entire cultures that venerated the female form and her wisdom and power, gobsmacked me. It rearranged me.

I needed to know this other story, because… if it existed once, perhaps it could exist again. Over the years that I’ve sat with the Goddess — and reached back beyond the patriarchal reshaping of her I’ve been able to recognize and re-member myself. I’ve stretched through the discomfort of my conditioning. I’ve let go of the programs that were placed on me, but never were me.

And as I embark on this pilgrimage, I know I’m not searching for the Goddess. She’s everywhere, even in the mundane. I’m traveling to deepen my experience of myself and the ways that I see Me reflected in Her. Every step I take reminds me that there is nothing shameful about inhabiting this body… and there never was.