Who is the Cosmic Feminine?

Who else would be at the heart of the great energies of the Cardinal Cross that are sweeping through the depths of our individual and shared realities? Who else but the primal power the Vedic texts call Shakti, and that astrology tracks in multiple ways?  The personification of the creative power of the Divine Feminine, she’s the primordial cosmic energy that flows throughout the Universe.  Her very name, which  means “to be able,” refers to “the power” at the heart of life.  She’s the living principle of empowerment.  

In countless forms and by numberless names, her relational, sensual, emotional, lunar, fluid, receptive, nourishing energy has been recognized as feminine for as long as humans have named reality.  She’s been called Durga, Kali, Inanna, Ishtar, Gaia, Demeter, Persephone, Medusa, Hekate, Luna,  Venus, Mary, the Magdalene, Bride, Freya — and more.   Her modes have been dreaming, healing, diving, mothering, midwifing, hospicing, creating, lovemaking, cooking — and more.

Whether we recognize her or not, she exists everywhere and in everyone, regardless of gender.  Every time we create, or dream, or love, we’re in the realm of the Goddess.  She’s always within us and everywhere around us.

Transformation: The Core Expertise of the Goddess

At her core, the Divine Feminine is a virtuoso in the arts of transformation. This, her essence, is exactly what we most need now .    From the Moon (who disappears every month to create seed energy with the Sun) to Venus (who, as Inanna, was the first divine being to descend into the underworld to die and be reborn), she’s always showing us how to go within, shed our dead skin, and renew life within us and around us.  She knows how to enter the Void and invite new worlds into being.

For thousands of years now,  we’ve turned away from her wisdom.  We’ve all but forgotten her, and as a result we’ve become exhausted, over-stimulated, brittle, rigid, and dry — closed off from our depths, which are also hers.

Without her, life becomes a shambles and a travesty — and across our planet, it is.   From our economy to our planet, everything required for her flourishing is in crisis.

One of the primary carriers of Cosmic Feminine energy in our solar system is Earth’s sister planet, Venus.

Return of the Many-Formed Goddess

Yet this is also the time of her return. We can see it everywhere, from the growing awareness of the importance of our food and our environment to the resurgence of ways to connect with Her.  From Chameli Ardagh’s Awakening Women Institute to Toko-pa Turner’s dreamwork practices to Tsultrim Allione’s Tara Mandala Institute and the late Emilie Conrad’s Continuum Movement practices to awaken the  biocosmic memory within us all — to name only a few — she is pouring herself into the world everywhere there is an opening.

And she is creating openings, within us and around us, by the minute. We are living amid a proliferation of such openings.  Because they don’t look like the model we’ve grown used to, it can sometimes be hard to recognize them.

The Blessing of the Cardinal Cross:  The Venus-Chiron Conjunction

As if to signal us to leave our fear of change and transformation behind us, on Thursday — three days before the Cross perfected — Venus and Jupiter magnified their auspicious vibrations with a trine of sweet grace and blessings.  On Sunday, as the Cross came into exact form in the skies within us and around us, Venus made the same harmonious, auspicious alignment with Chiron, the shamanic healer of the Cosmos.  As we stepped across the energetic threshold, the Cross perfecting around us,  she was with you. She was with all of us, where we always find her — in our dreams, our intuitions, and the opening of our hearts.  

The Way of the Goddess

With the tense and dynamic pattern of the Cardinal Cross, the Universe is stacking the deck every way it can.  We’re being urged to release the outworn emotional baggage of the past and surrender the desire to control outcomes.  Wherever in your life you’d like to do things differently, the Universe invites you to let go, open your heart – and trust.

BioCosmic Resonance, the Power of Love: The LIfe and Work of Emilie Conrad

On April 14, the day before we entered this portal of transformation through a Venus-ruled total lunar eclipse, a woman who embodied the potential of the Uranus-Pluto squares left the planet.

Emilie Conrad was born just after the Uranus-Pluto squares of 1930-1934. Her life work represents the creative potential of the Cosmic Awakener in the XX energy of Aries, and of the Cosmic Regenerator in Cancer, the sign of the Divine Mother.  Known as Continuum Movement (which she began to develop in 1969, just after the Uranus-Pluto conjunction in Virgo, where her natal Neptune was placed) is a way of bringing the body into alignment with what she called “the choreography of life.”

Emilie Conrad’s Sun was in Gemini, but half the planets in her birth chart were ruled by Venus, and three were in Cancer.  Using movement sequences based on the wave, the spiral, and the energy of pulsation, Conrad developed a process for expanding our ability to “receive the vibrations of the larger field of pulsating life.”  The profound power of this approach is movingly described by Cherionna  Menzam-Sills in the essay “A Continuum Experience: Trusting the Field”,

In what we call the body, Conrad sees the movement of “interpenetrating  wave motions that have stabilized within a particular electromagnetic field called earth — for a purpose that we don’t know.”  Noting the fluid nature that is the inner essence of our physical reality, Conrad observes that “fluid in the galaxy, . . . in the planet . . . and in our bodies, is engaged in a resonant stream of what I would call biocosmic nourishment.”

Like all of us who are alive now, Conrad was a pioneer, using her intuition and her own resonance with life as a map.  “I had no map to follow except my strong urge to experience our essential bio-lineage and my certainty that our existences were fed from far beyond our cultural moorings. It is my belief that we carry in our cells, in our tissues, in the very throb of our existence, an underlying flow that urges and inspires, flares our nostrils and beats our heart. This encompassing atmosphere of Love has its own destiny.  Perhaps using humans as its messengers, this Love has arrived on Earth.”

It is this Love that the Cosmic Feminine — within us and around us — is both receptor and transmitter for.  She’s calling us now, loudly and clearly.  Are you listening?