oracle of the windswept womb

an explanation of my new monthly offering

Greetings

Surprise, it's me on a non-Monday!

I am recording this video to explain something that I plan to start posting approximately every month, which is something I'm going to call Oracle of the Windswept Womb,

which I intend to sound a little “out there,” with tongue in cheek but also not totally

The idea for this has several origin points that I'll try to weave together in a fairly concise explanatory video here.

One piece of this comes from my experience as a woman who is childless by choice. There was a brief season of my life where my husband David and I thought about having children very seriously and briefly “tried,” but almost immediately when we opened that door,  

the energy within me stirred up in such a way… and that was actually the first experience of what is clinically called mania that I experienced: for me, a very spiritual experience;

and when I saw a particular psychiatrist a few months later, he asked a really great question which was, “If part of you was trying to get your attention or give you a message by this event, what were you trying to tell yourself?”

and without thinking about it, I pretty much immediately said, “Not to have a child.”

And there's a lot more to that story, but for purposes of this I will say that in the years since then - and it's been about 8 1/2 years since then –

I have come to believe that by choosing not to have biological children, I made the choice to birth many different aspects of myself instead;

but also that I have chosen to give creative life to various healing energies that are coming forth from me and spanning backwards in time and forwards in time…

You want to talk about “out there,” that might sound a little wacky,

but I think often of my grandmothers, both of whom were very intelligent and multifaceted, creative humans whose lives were in some ways confined because they “had to” do the normal thing of getting married and producing a lot of babies.

I'm not going to go further in the direction I could go here, because again I'm trying to not be incredibly verbose here, which is always a challenge for me.

But one piece of this is this realization that there are things that I have gotten to birth and create as a result of childlessness: this idea of a windswept womb, like it keeps getting swept out each month, not creating any human life: creating other forms of life instead.

So that's one strand.

Another strand that I want to weave in is to read briefly from Sherri Mitchell, the Indigenous [Penobscot Nation] author/activist/lawyer Weh’na Ha’mu’ Kwasset (She Who Brings the Light), her beautiful book Sacred Instructions:

One of my favorite lines in here is,

A woman's body is a bridge between worlds. Within a woman's body, there exists a direct link to the source of creation. Thus, the energy of the feminine connects us to divine knowledge and guides that knowledge through the body in direct correlation to the heart. [the womb is right beneath the heart] …Feminine energy is expansive, intuitive, creative, and life-affirming. The feminine is the keeper of intuition and the translator of heart-based wisdom.

So, that understanding…this practice that I have is a claiming of that, I think: of being a channel to divinity as a female body.

And the final piece comes from this wonderful yoga teacher who I encountered on YouTube. I happened to take one of her menstruation yoga videos right around a year ago, and she suggested setting intentions (I believe is the wording she used) around what you want in your next cycle on the day that you begin to menstruate,

So I started to do that kind of loosely in my journal initially, and then as I became more invested in what it means to be vibrationally creative and attuned (which has been so much of the healing of the past year of my life), as that became really central to me, I started to record myself speaking to myself…

and in some ways kind of speaking more broadly to whatever needs nurturance.

I began recording myself on the first day of a new cycle, which is a day of release and a day for me that has become sacred because of this practice

And at one point a couple of months ago I shared one of these “oracles” with a muse and she was really touched and blessed by it

And it just planted the seed in me at that time of like, Hmm, maybe this is something that has a directionality beyond my own nurturance and nourishment, and so I started to kind of inquire with myself,

And at the beginning of my last cycle, I had a clarity of like, Yeah, starting next month we're gonna go ahead and share these, put them out in the world;

So it feels in some way even a little more “out there” than the average Monday Morning Muse, but it is my intention to share Oracle of the Windswept Womb each month.

It'll be an audio recording that I'm likely to release just as an audio recording to start with, but then generally the few days after I record it, I journal it into my journal in a bunch of colors,

So, I'll put the images of the words in the post after the fact; that is my intention.

I'll be curious to hear people's feedback and thanks for listening