Soul-Power | Authentic Voice | Archaic Knowing | Labyrinth | Inner Guidance | Connection to the Mother | Origin of Dreams
Healing Sleep | Peacemaking | Resonance with the Earth | Tribal Survival

When we honor and energize our bellies with movement and breath, we open ourselves to experience an umbilical connection to the creative power of the universe.

Call that creative power what you will—Great Spirit, All That Is, Mother Goddess—we humans crave this connection, this link to the all-nurturing divine. She is the temple we seek, the home for which we hunger. Despite this hunger of humanity, Western civilization has thoroughly rejected the Divine Feminine in all her names and forms. The illness, injustice, poverty, and violence that plague our times, I believe, follow from our separation from Her.

Living in a culture that debases the Feminine, we must move beyond ignorance and convention to find our own ways to Her. Likewise, living in a culture that has deeply wounded many of our own mothers, we need to release these women from the expectation that they link us to the Mother. The umbilical connection we shared with these women incited our longing. Now we must discover our connection to the Mother on our own.

My own hunger for the Sacred Feminine manifested quite literally as a twenty-year eating disorder: twenty years of alternate dieting and bingeing in which I gained and lost more than 2,000 pounds. My healing has come through learning to fill my belly with energy rather than food. I've learned to forge an energetic connection with the Mother, the source of true nourishment.

My healing has come in the last ten years as I've developed and shared a program called "Honoring Your Belly," a sequence of belly-energizing exercises drawn from yoga and other movement traditions. Set to a woman-affirming story of creation and the heroine's journey, the sequence becomes ritual, a rite for reconsecrating our womanhood. Set to another narration, a series of invocations addressed to the Sacred Feminine, the sequence becomes a meditation on relationship with the Mother.

Not long after beginning to practice "Honoring Your Belly," a vision of being mothered came to me:

I saw a blue-rimmed field of golden energy standing behind my mother during the time that I was developing in her womb. I understood this golden energy to be Shakti, an Indian name for the Great Goddess. This Shakti energy streamed into my mother's body through a point in the center of her lower back and filled her belly with light. Shakti energy also infused my body as my mother's belly sheltered then birthed me out into the world.

This vision showed me that, in giving birth to me, my mother had allowed her body to be a vessel for the Great Mother. I felt a new dimension of gratitude and respect for the woman who is my mother.

Later, I learned that the point in my mother's back through which I saw Shakti streaming is the Ming Men, Life Gate, in the Asian healing arts. Counterpart to the tan tien, the belly center, it is a point of entry for source energy. I also learned that in Egyptian tradition the universal soul that attends the individual soul at birth and death is Ka. The benediction she bestows is: "Behold I am behind thee, I am thy temple, thy mother, forever and forever."

Enlivening our bellies with movement and breath activates the pro-creative power, the source energy, centered there. As we honor and energize our body's center, we begin to heal and transform our relationship with mother in every dimension-with our own mothers, with Earth as mother, and with She Who Gives Birth to All.

Soul-Power | Authentic Voice | Archaic Knowing | Labyrinth | Inner Guidance | Connection to the Mother | Origin of Dreams
Healing Sleep | Peacemaking | Resonance with the Earth | Tribal Survival

articles index
information & inspiration