The problem with the divine feminine and my experience with it
I want to talk about how the term divine feminine has been coopted in different circles and also my experience with the divine feminine and what I mean by it.
When I say divine feminine or feminine energy, I am not referring to gender roles or traditionalism in any way. And I am not referring to aesthetics either. Quite the opposite.
The true feminine and masculine are frequencies or energies that exist in all of us. We all have both within us. Feminine energy is creative and free thinking. Masculine energy is structured and disciplined.
Although some individuals can have more of one than the other, regardless of their sex or gender, there should be a balance of both in all of us. Both are needed. But not in some of the distorted, controlling ways that it has been made into sometimes. It is not about polarity between people. If anything it’s polarities within ourselves.
However, the feminine energy has been suppressed in many ways, and especially so in men but also in women. It has been suppressed in all of us and in society and the world as a whole.
I want to tell you how my journey with the divine feminine started, what it means to me and why I don’t use the term as much nowadays.
I discovered the divine feminine for myself in 2017 through some teachers and also through my interest in mythology and in feminist theory.
For all of my adult life and since I was a teenager I have been a feminist and when I studied sociology and politics at university I read a lot of feminist theory and also postcolonial theory.
And a few years after my spiritual awakening through meditation, I then started researching female archetypes in mythology from around the world.
While doing this I also realised that I don’t need to just draw on cultures that are not my own to connect to divine feminine archetypes, because this can lead to a type of cultural appropriation. I then instead first looked at my own ancestry, which is Scandinavian and Northern European and then made connections from there to other cultures.
While doing that I realised that there are a lot of women who are interested in connecting to the divine feminine within their own ancestry, and many of them are displaced from the countries that their ancestors are from.
So I created a course called Divine Feminine Ancestry that sought to help women to reconnect to their own ancestry from a divine feminine goddess lens, using my own journey as inspiration.
And one book that really influenced me in that work is called If Women Rose Rooted: The Journey to Authenticity and Belonging by Sharon Blackie. She talks from the perspective of the divine feminine in her own Celtic ancestry. And her work is a type of eco-feminism, where the connection to land and nature is integral. She talks about patriarchal capitalism as a type of wasteland.
When I researched different female archetypes and goddesses I realised how diverse these archetypes are and how the divine feminine cannot be confined to any one type of energy, which is also why I get so frustrated when the term is coopted to try to tell women to be feminine in a certain restrictive kind of way.
The divine feminine is as diverse as the psyches of women themselves or the nature of humans and nature in general.
The famous psychoanalyst Carl Jung, who was also very much a mystic, talked about archetypes being a part of our collective unconscious and also our personal subconscious, and something that we can access.
I also discovered the dark goddesses at a time when I needed it and the one I connected to the most was The Morrigan from Irish/Celtic mythology - she is a shapeshifter, sometimes appearing as a raven and sometimes as a triple goddess. She is associated with war, fate, death, rebirth and sovereignty.
And although I’m not from the British Isles, I feel a strong connection to that mythology because I’ve lived most of my adult life in the UK, in London, for 14 years and I was still living there then. The Morrigan came to me while I was still in a relationship where I experienced narcissistic abuse. And I woke up to the realisation about what type of person I was dealing with while I was still in that situation.
This coincided with me finding the divine feminine. And this is something that I have heard from other women too, that many have experienced these two things simultaneously. The Morrigan, as an archetype, helped me through this transition of waking up, and reclaiming my sovereignty and eventually leaving that situation. These are real energies that are within us and that can help us through different transitions in our lives.
Another book that has impacted my divine feminine journey is by Clarissa Pinkola Estés - she is a poet, a Jungian psychoanalyst and a cantadora (which is a keeper of the old stories in the Latina tradition), so she is a storyteller.
The book is called Women Who Run with the Wolves: Contacting the Power of the Wild Woman. One of my favourite quotes from it is about spending time with the Wild Woman in the underworld. And this is a kind of metaphor for being in the dark night of the soul and waking up from it:
“The time with Wild Woman is hard at first. To repair injured instinct, banish naïveté, and over time to learn the deepest aspects of psyche and soul, to hold on to what we have learned, to not turn away, to speak out for what we stand for … all this takes a boundless and mystical endurance. When we come up out of the underworld after one of our undertakings there, we may appear unchanged outwardly, but inwardly we have reclaimed a vast and womanly wildness. On the surface we are still friendly, but beneath the skin, we are most definitely no longer tame.”
To me that puts it so beautifully how it feels to come out of trialing times in our lives, and be the same person on the outside but there is something that has shifted on the inside. There is a transformation and rebirth and sense of sovereignty that comes from having survived certain parts of our lives, and the dark goddess archetypes are especially helpful with this and with rebuilding our boundaries and our strength.
So to me, the divine feminine is about our own psyche and finding the archetypes and energies that can help us in different parts of our lives. It’s about becoming more of ourselves, not about contorting ourselves to society’s or patriarchy’s idea of what it is to be a woman.
The divine feminine for me is about reclaiming the word feminine from the limiting beliefs about gender roles or societal expectations.
Even so, since the word feminine has also been used in such restrictive ways, I nowadays prefer to use the term woman-centered mysticism, because this encompasses much more than the term divine feminine, and it feels more aligned to me at this time.
Michael Jackson, matriarchal values and the divine feminine
I’m an MJ fan, and I have been since I was a child. I saw him live in the History tour in Gothenburg when I was 12. Lately he has received a lot of attention again, 17 years after his passing, because of the biopic Michael.
What do I mean by Michael Jackson and matriarchal values and what does he have to do with the divine feminine. Firstly, when I talk about what I mean by the divine feminine, I’m very aware of the coopting of that term that has been happening in some circles.
When I say divine feminine or feminine energy, I am not referring to gender roles or traditionalism in any way. Quite the opposite. And I am not referring to aesthetics either. The true feminine and masculine are frequencies or energies that exist in all of us. We all have both within us. Feminine energy is creative and free thinking. Masculine energy is structured and disciplined.
Although some individuals can have more of one than the other, regardless of their sex or gender, there should be a balance of both in all of us. Both are needed. But not in some of the distorted, controlling ways that it has been made into sometimes. However, the feminine energy has been suppressed in many ways, and especially so in men but also in women. It has been suppressed in all of us.
Michael Jackson, on the other hand, was not afraid to embody this part of himself. He was a creative free spirit. He was sensitive and deeply empathetic and didn’t conform to what society expected. And all of this made him very powerful in the most positive sense.
When we talk about matriarchy, we are not talking about patriarchy the other way around. Patriarchy is a system of oppression. Matriarchy is a completely different way of viewing the world.
It’s not hierarchical, but instead communal. It’s peaceful, and it centers children, women and those who are most marginalised and most vulnerable. But it wants what is best for everyone.
Michael Jackson centered children and people who are vulnerable and marginalised. He spoke up against injustices and he gave so much to causes that helped children especially. This was then misunderstood and weaponised against him.
Some people thought he was weird because he didn’t conform to what a man was expected to act like. He had creative, playful, soft and sensitive qualities about him as well as being very influential and powerful. He embraced not only his inner feminine but also his inner child.
I even think finding our creativity and playfulness is maybe the only way to be truly powerful, because it’s the most effective way to manifest. And MJ was a master at manifesting.
Even his appearance was considered somewhat feminine or at least androgynous. He embraced these parts of himself unapologetically, and many people were drawn to that, even if he also received a lot of scrutiny for it. He, consciously or not, went against the status quo for what a man is supposed to be under patriarchy.
In one of my favourite songs by him, ‘Will you be there’, he even refers to this in the lyrics where he says:
“But they told me a man should be faithful and walk when not able and fight ’til the end, but I’m only human.”
That brings me to his friendships and relationships with women. I mentioned how he embodied matriarchal values by centering children and marginalised people, and even animals.
But he also centered women, in the sense that he surrounded himself with women that often were his closest confidantes and that were very powerful, influential people in their own right. He truly respected and listened to women.
Some of these women were:
His mother Katherine. It should be mentioned that he left his whole estate to his mother and his children, which says a lot about who he centered in his life.
His best friend Elizabeth Taylor who is an absolute icon, both as an actress and as an activist. And it’s worth mentioning that she was 26 years his senior. In matriarchy older women are revered because they have the wisdom and life experience that we can learn from. And these two also had a lot in common having grown up in show business.
His friend Princess Diana, also an icon. Diana Ross, a musical legend, who helped him in his early career.
His sister Janet, who he collaborated with and who is an iconic artist in her own right.
I will go as far as to say that Micheal Jackson was a matriarchal type of man. He shows that having these values is not about diminishing yourself as a human being, because you are male.
But it is about becoming more human by embracing the whole of your humanity, of not being afraid of going against the norm and also centering others. Even though he was immensely successful, he didn’t make it all about himself.
Embracing his feminine energy, which is within us all regardless of sex and gender, meant he was able to perceive other people’s needs, and especially children’s needs, and to decenter himself and be nurturing to others.
He has said himself that: “If it wasn’t for the children, I’d throw in the towel. Everything, in my heart, is for them.” And he said that children meant the stars, the moon, the universe. And that all children do, not just his own (and he had three children himself). He said he’s not territorial, and he always felt a responsibility to take care of others.
These are true matriarchal values. Centering children, but not just your own children, and realising that we are all responsible for the caretaking of the children in the world, in one way or another, whether we have our own children or not. Me as an example, I am child free but I can still feel a responsibility as a human being, for the care of children in general.
Matriarchal values is not about nuclear family or having our own children if we don’t want to. It’s about building community and extending our circle of care beyond our closest family. And this is what Michael Jackson did and embodied, and he had the resources to do so in a larger sense because of his talent and success.
Matriarchal values are about equality, equity and it mostly rejects hierarchies. It’s not about who has power over who. It’s about rejecting oppressive power structures altogether for the good of everyone.
MJ never saw himself as above anyone else as a person. Someone who is that excellent at what they do could easily get a big head. But he never did, not in the way he treated other people.
He even saw his fans, not as fans, but as family. Again, this comes back to extending the idea of what family is and creating a larger community. I could continue on about this in relation to his love for the earth, what is often called Mother Earth. But that’s for another time.
Before God there was the Goddess
What if I told you that there was a time when the main creator God was a Goddess and that she was the one who was seen as the ultimate source of everything and both women and men prayed to her.
There was such a time. And the mythology and scriptures around the Father God in later creation stories are even modelled after the earlier creation stories about the Mother Goddess.
Whether you believe in a higher spiritual power or not, this is still relevant and interesting as historical knowledge and because we are fed the idea through patriarchy that power, whether worldly or spiritual, is a male trait. And this affects us all, even if we don’t believe in it as such.
In the book The Creation of Patriarchy, Gerda Lerner details the history of how the Mother Goddess became the Father God instead, through patriarchal norms taking over. But it was not always like that.
What many perceive as something ancient and given, that the creator God is a father figure (whether you believe in God or not), is in fact a reinterpretation of something more ancient, which is the image of the creator as a Mother Goddess. And in this ancient tradition, female sexuality was celebrated instead of denigrated.
I have researched ancient goddesses and female archetypes for many years and most of us know about some of the powerful and interesting goddesses from different cultures. Some examples are Freja from Norse mythology, Athena from Ancient Greece and Kali Ma from Hinduism and there are so many more.
But back in Mesopotamia, which was located in modern day Iraq, and that existed for a few millennia BC, and before Ancient Greece and the Ancient Rome, the Mother Goddess was the ultimate creator and source of everything. She had different names but and two of the most common ones were Inanna and Ishtar.
Women in that society had already started being more and more subordinated, but there was a lag between the subordination of women in society and the subordination of the goddesses and priestesses in the religions. A good later example is the one of the Vestal virgins in Ancient Rome that were elite priestesses dedicated to the goddess Vesta. They, unlike normal Roman women, held privileged status and were legally emancipated. They could, for example, own property.
So when I say that women had started being more subordinated, this also means that women had not always been subordinated in the way we are used to hearing about in history. Patriarchy is created. It has not always existed. It’s man made. But that’s a topic for another time. Back to the goddesses.
The goddess Ishtar was regarded as all-powerful, not as a complement to other gods, but as powerful all by herself, and more powerful than any other gods. Female sexuality was also celebrated through the goddess, rather than vilified as in many later religious beliefs.
Gerda Lerner writes:
“…they celebrated the sacredness of female sexuality and its mysterious life-giving force, which included the power to heal. And in the very prayers appealing to the goddess’s mercy, they praised her as mistress of the battlefield, more powerful than kings, more powerful than other gods.”
And she details a typical prayer of the time, which I will read to you:
“Gracious Ishtar, who rules over the universe,
Heroic Ishtar, who creates humankind,
Who walks before the cattle, who loves the shepherd…
Who give justice to the distressed, the suffering you give them justice.
Without you the river will not open,
the river which brings us life will not be closed,
without you the canal will not open,
the canal from which the scattered drink,
will not be closed … Ishtar, … merciful lady …
Hear me and grant me mercy.”
I wanted to read that prayer to you, because to me it has such a resemblance to later prayers within Abrahamic religions because it talks about the all-powerful source and creator that created us, rules over the universe and who is the source of all good things and who can grant us mercy. You can almost hear and sense how the actual source of some of those later prayers and beliefs came from this even more ancient origin.
And the Goddess also represented duality, night and day, birth and death, light and darkness. The female force was seen as awesome, powerful and transcendent, not just as one part of a duality.
The supremacy of the Goddess also shows in the earliest myths of origin. In Egyptian mythology the primeval ocean, the goddess Nun, gives birth to the sun-god Atum, who creates the rest of the universe. In Babylonian myth the primeval sea is represented by the goddess Tiamat. In Greek mythology the earth goddess Gaia creates the sky and humans.
I’m not going to get into how the Mother Goddess was replaced by the Father God, but in the book this is also laid out.
When you realise that back then, the ultimate source of the universe was a feminine or female energy, a Goddess, a mother, it really turns some things on its head and gives a new perspective.
It makes us realise that things are not as we thought they were. And it really spikes the imagination for what could be instead of what is. We can use the old mythologies to create new stories.
Not to bring the past back, because that is neither possible nor desirable, but to take inspiration from the past to create something new and more complete.
I decentered men by centering women and myself
There is a lot of talk of decentering men in our lives, because if we want to deconstruct patriarchy and our internalisation of it as women, we have to decenter men.
But I want to tell you how I started doing this almost intuitively many years ago before I even had the words to name it. I wasn’t listening to social media channels or YouTube videos about decentering men. I did, however, listen to women who talked about spirituality from a goddess and divine feminine lens. I was also drawn to women who shared content about self-help, psychology and spirituality.
And before this, I studied sociology and politics at university and I immersed myself in intersectional feminism and thinkers like bell hooks and many others.
So before the divine feminine came to me I was well versed in the intellectual part of feminism. We’re talking about 15 to 17 years back in time now.
After I finished my studies, I started meditating, which was often a deep experience of centering into myself and finding that unconditional peace and bliss within myself and an expansion of my consciousness that I had never felt before.
At the same time I started dreaming about what I wanted to do in my life and what I wanted to share. I started my blog and I realised more and more that I was mostly interested in directing my content towards women.
If I ever wanted any type of validation for what I shared online, it was women that I appreciated getting it from.
I realised that I had almost no interest in men understanding what I was doing or saying because it wasn’t meant for them.
In terms of how other people perceived me, I started caring more or almost only about how other women saw me, and what women had to offer me in terms of teachings and knowledge and what I might have to offer them.
I also realised even more that I especially should learn from black, indigenous and non-white women.
And this woman centered path that I have been on ever since then has felt natural, like coming home to my true self, and to where I’m supposed to be in this life.
Of course, to center ourselves also means to at least partially decenter other women and other people in general. But I found that to center women and to learn from other women was a very healthy step in the right direction for me.
So what I’m trying to say is, I didn’t so much decenter men, I centered women, and I centered myself.
I started realising that my life and my future was going to be focused on women from then on, if it hadn’t been before. For me, the future really became female, because my life and my future became mostly about myself, about other women and our experiences.
I also realised that I had to live my life for myself, if I was ever going to be able to be a positive influence for other women and girls.
My divine feminine awakening, what I now like to call my awakening into woman centered mysticism was one of the catalysts for all of this.
I became fascinated by goddesses and mythology centered around the female mythological archetypes and creatures. I started learning more about Mary Magdalene and the women in Christian mysticism, and how that has been suppressed for many hundreds of years.
I have also for many years been drawn to almost exclusively female centered creators, films and series with few exceptions. The films and streaming series that I watch have mostly women in the lead roles and are also created and written by women.
This is not something that I had to think about consciously. It has come naturally to me. But now that I have learnt more about the movements of women centering themselves, and decentering men, I realise that this is what I have been doing.
Sometimes I do feel the need to consciously think about it and make conscious choices to stay on that track. But when I think back on my life, I have actually always been a girls girl.
It’s just that now, it’s more conscious, whereas when I was younger I still felt the need to get male validation and sometimes found it hard to fit in with other girls.
I have more or less internalised some of the patriarchal ideas and ways of being, like most of us have. But I have become highly aware of the internal male gaze that many of us sometimes have towards ourselves and other women.
But becoming aware of it is the first step to dissolving it. And that is something that I will keep doing, because once you see it, you can’t unseen it.
My day job since a few years back is at a workplace dominated by women. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I think I drew that experience to me, because I do believe fully in the law of attraction which simply is ‘That which is like unto itself is drawn.’ What we focus on expands. We create our own reality.
I have been thinking, living and dreaming up a woman centered life for many years and that journey continues. In fact, it has turned into dreams of a matriarchal world.
And I know that I’m not the only one having those dreams. And when ideas are shared, they multiply and become even more powerful.
What The Gospel of Mary and A Course in Miracles have in common
The principles of A Course in Miracles are compatible with the Gospel of Mary, and with Christian Mysticism that are all distinct from institutionalised patriarchal religion and dogmatic Christianity. The Gospel of Mary is part of the Nag Hammadi Scriptures, also called The Gnostic Gospels. I have the English translation and I have read it.
It’s believed to have been written in the second century AD, between year 120-180 AD. It was found again a little more than a hundred years ago. So the old gnostic and mystic teachings of the early christians were suppressed and discovered again fairly recently.
A Course in Miracles is a channelled metaphysical book written in the 1960s and 70s. I’ll call it The Course from now on for simplicity. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the old mystic teachings have been translated and released again at the same time as new texts have come out that are compatible.
You might have heard about he Council of Nicaea which took place in the year 325 AD and organised by Roman Emperor Constantine I. They chose what writings should be in the official Bible and which ones should be excluded. This was a patriarchal council of men in power, who were part of and wanted to uphold institutionalised religion to help them hold power in different ways.
This is so far away from the mystic teachings that are part of The Gospel of Mary. In the Gospel of Mary it even says that “we should announce the good news…, and not be laying down any rules or making laws.” My interpretation of this is that dogmatic religion is not the way. Following rules and regulations in the hope of being obedient to the right religion is not the way.
But realising that Source, or what in the Gospel of Mary is called The Good, is within us, not outside.
In the Gospel of Mary - Sin does not exists. In The Course - sin is an illusion, and in effect does not really exist. Sin is merely a lack of love, a mistake to be corrected, not an evil to be punished. Some might say, what about people who commit horrible violent crimes towards others? But if we think about it, the concept of sin has not usually been used to combat those things.
It has been used towards normal people, and more often women, to shame us into obedience and to try to make us feel that we are inadequate and not good enough. Even the idea of original sin is connected to women. Of course, a gospel that says sin does not exist would be a threat to the institutionalised religions. And it has been suppressed, I think, partially because of it.
Because if you took away one of the very tools that gave them power over people, by being able to dangle the idea of sin over people and especially women, in order to oppress them, then that will take away some of the psychological power that these religious institutions and teachings hold over people.
We are collectively the ‘Son of God’ - or what in the Gospel of Mary is called the Child of (humanity).
And what I often call Source (what some call God) is called The Good in Mary’s gospel - and to put it simply it’s Love - which is our Source. It’s the creative Source within us and the knowledge that we are all one.
A Course in Miracles clarifies these deep metaphysical concepts and reminds us that the creative force of love lies within ourselves, not outside us. It also reminds us that following dogma is not beneficial. It makes it clear that The Course is not a religion or a new dogma to follow.
Back to Mary Magdalene herself. A woman was the most important disciple and the apostle to the apostles. Some of the other disciples questioned why she received teachings that they didn’t. It was because she had a higher understanding. She was called a prostitute by the Catholic Church, and tried to downgrade her importance. They then very recently corrected their mistake and admitted that they had been wrong.
The Course uses male pronouns for God and for humanity as a whole, which it calls the Son of God. Now how do I reconcile this with a woman centered spiritual view?
I have thought about this and in my view The Course uses the old religious concepts and words, including male pronouns for God and our collective consciousness in order for us to move beyond it, and to understand what it is we have misunderstood in these concepts and words.
It also clearly points out that words and scriptures, including The Course, are only signs trying to point us in the right direction. They are not dogmas to be worshipped and followed without critical thinking.
The true source of guidance is within ourselves, not in any scripture or outer teaching. Teachings and texts are only meant to lead us back to our inner knowing. Any teaching that points you away from your inner knowing is not beneficial, and can even be harmful.
When it comes to the wordings in The Course or any other text, because I don’t follow any text or specific teachings religiously, I have no problem with using other wordings for some of the concepts and teachings in. The Course itself broadly says that we should not hang on to any specific words or texts.
In conclusion, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that texts like the Nag Hammadi scriptures along with the Gospel of Mary have resurfaced again at the time it did, when humanity started to be ready for it.
When we started to be ready to see the real teachings behind the misconceptions and move away from the dogma and control of the institutionalised teachings that have misinterpreted these truths for so long.
Why I don’t follow male spiritual teachers
There have recently been revelations about a particular influential spiritual teacher having had a friendship with Epstein.
You probably know who I’m referring to, but I will not mention any names. And the reason for that is that I don’t want to give them more attention than necessary. Because it’s not about the specific people, it’s about the structures.
I have actually never followed him much, but I have heard some other women I follow within this field saying that they are not surprised. Disappointed maybe, but not surprised.
Like I have said before about spiritual teachers in general, just because someone seems to have spiritual insights or abilities that others don’t seem to have, it does not necessarily make them a person with spiritual authority that we should listen to.
I am especially careful with spiritual leaders or teachers who seem too sure about what the truth is and that their perspective is the right one.
And as we know, the patriarchy has given men the privileges of feeling that they have authority and that others should listen to them. There is a brittle, overinflated ego that gets created from this type of entitlement.
If you also give a person influence in any field, even spirituality, or maybe especially spirituality, this can get out of hand.
Now the example I mentioned is serious given the circumstances, even if the person allegedly hasn’t committed any crime, but there are many instances of male spiritual cult leaders and yoga teachers committing serious abuse towards women in their following. One famous example is the founder of Kundalini yoga.
But there are also less serious or less obvious examples of male teachers or coaches taking liberties, and using abusive and gaslighting practices to make women doubt their own inner knowing and guidance, or just abusing their position and thinking they are authorities when they are not.
They just have inflated egos and use their influence to prop it up even more. And many of these still have large platforms and many followers.
These men I’m referring to are not even people I have ever really followed much at all but it’s sometimes hard to avoid coming across some of these examples even just from other women mentioning it.
I don’t have my own story of being duped by these men and waking up from it. I guess I was fortunate because it could have been me. I’m not better or less able to be fooled or manipulated. Anyone can be manipulated at some point in our lives, but once you see it and once you know, you become very aware of it.
As one of my mentors says, ‘Any teacher or coach who does not lead you back to what feels right and true for you is not worth listening to’.
Spiritual pride is one of the worst and most insidious forms of pride, because it can hide behind a surface of enlightenment, righteousness and special abilities. This can exist in both religious leaders and in alternative spiritual teachers, psychics and coaches.
Discernment is very important when navigating this world.
This applies to teachers, both men and women, but with men there is the added layer of patriarchal conditioning.
They are schooled, whether they admit it or not, to think that women’s perspectives are secondary or not valid at all.
I have heard accounts from women who genuinely wanted to advance their spirituality and had experiences with male teachers that were disappointing at best and damaging or traumatic at worst.
Now there are teachers (especially historically) that can be exceptions but they are few and far between.
Because even the most well meaning male spiritual teachers will still not be able to teach women very well, unless they have really deconstructed their role in the patriarchy over a long time.
Even if he has amazing spiritual insights, he is still a man in a patriarchal world.
The male, patriarchal ego is not immune to getting ahead of itself when endowed with spiritual authority of some sort.
I guess in a way, these people I have mentioned that have committed abuses or abuse their positions, they really are spiritual teachers, in the sense that once we see through the veil of deception, it strengthens our intuition and our dedication to our own inner guidance.
But preferably we should not need to go through bad experiences to have these realisations.
I was fortunate to have my divine feminine awakening early on in my spiritual awakening, so the ones that have mostly influenced me are women.
I also feel naturally more drawn to women in this field, and in all fields, and now I hardly follow any male teachers at all.
If I occasionally do, it’s for some specific knowledge that I need at the moment, but I don’t see the person as a general authority. I don’t even put women teachers or coaches on a pedestal but I can look up to some of them to a certain extent and I am not as wary of them as I am with men.
I heard someone say that men in general never or very rarely have to experience ego death, which is something that women experience all of the time.
Just by walking around in this world we experience ego death continually.
Also, women already largely possess all of the spiritual virtues that are often talked about in different spiritual traditions. Humility, kindness, selflessness, a loving heart, empathy, healing abilities, and the list goes on.
That takes me to the realisation that women have spiritual authority. Women are the actual, real spiritual leaders. They always were as far back as our history has shown us.
If you think of examples like the Oracle of Delphi or the Völvas of the Norse tradition (which is my ancestry), who were able to cross over to the spirit world through entering a trance state and communicate with the spirits.
In both these examples and cultures, these women were highly revered and people saw them to get answers to important questions.
It’s not a coincidence that these people were women. Women are the spiritual authorities in this world. Why otherwise would the patriarchal, institutionalised religions have tried to suppress these abilities. Because they knew the power and potential that women had to communicate directly with the divine.
My experience with the dark goddess
I have recently been one of the speakers in an online summit called Dark Goddess Rising, put together by Noraleen Adele.
I want to tell you about my own journey with the dark goddess that I spoke about in the online summit. One of the dark goddesses that I have connected to the most is The Morrigan from Irish/Celtic mythology - she is a shapeshifter, sometimes appearing as a raven and sometimes as a triple goddess. She is associated with war, fate, death and sovereignty.
Although I’m not from the British Isles, I feel a strong connection to that mythology because I’ve lived most of my adult life in the UK, in London.
The Morrigan came to me while I was still in a relationship where I experienced narcissistic abuse. I woke up to the realisation about what type of person I was dealing with while I was still in that situation. It coincided with my divine feminine awakening. This is something that I have heard from other women too, that many have experienced these things simultaneously.
The Morrigan, as an archetype, helped me through this transition of waking up, and reclaiming my life and sovereignty and eventually leaving that situation and moving from the UK back to my home country of Sweden.
As Noraleen, who organised the online summit has said:
‘These are real energies that are within us and that can help us through different transitions and awakenings in our lives.’
This is related to Carl Jung and his theories about archetypes being a part of our collective unconscious and also our personal subconscious, and something that we can access.
A book that has impacted me a lot is Women Who Run with the Wolves: Contacting the Power of the Wild Woman by Clarissa Pinkola Estes. She is a poet, a Jungian psychoanalyst and a cantadora (which is a keeper of the old stories in the Latina tradition).
One of my favourite quotes from it is about spending time with the Wild Mother or Wild Woman in the underworld. And this is a kind of metaphor for being in the dark night of the soul and waking up from it:
“The time with Wild Woman is hard at first. To repair injured instinct, banish naïveté, and over time to learn the deepest aspects of psyche and soul, to hold on to what we have learned, to not turn away, to speak out for what we stand for … all this takes a boundless and mystical endurance. When we come up out of the underworld after one of our undertakings there, we may appear unchanged outwardly, but inwardly we have reclaimed a vast and womanly wildness. On the surface we are still friendly, but beneath the skin, we are most definitely no longer tame.”
To me she puts it so beautifully how feels is to come out of trialing times in our lives, and be the same person on the outside but there is something that has shifted on the inside.
There is a transformation and rebirth and sense of sovereignty that comes from having survived and come through certain parts of our lives,……and the dark goddess archetypes are especially helpful with this and with rebuilding our boundaries and our strength.
I also want to say that there is a lot of religious trauma amongst women especially and although I personally haven’t had a traumatic or negative experience with the specific Christianity that I grew up with, it still did not align for me fully.
But reclaiming the core teachings and the divine feminine within the Christian mythology, is a whole different thing.
There is a representation of the dark goddess in that tradition and that is the Black Madonna. She has continued to be a symbol of the great mother hidden in Christianity and has been revered, sometimes secretly.
I read an article about her and it says:
“The Black Madonna…carries a connotation of mystery, of the dark, of deep spiritual longing, of caretaking and miraculous healing. She is also seen, as by Romany people, apart from the religious mainstream and male-dominated hierarchical establishment, and represents “the mother of the oppressed, exploited, silenced, marginalised, and the reconciler of all races”.”
This point about her being seen as separate from the religious male-dominated mainstream reminds me of how the Nag Hammadi Scriptures, also called the Gnostic Gospels, have revealed the Gospel of Mary (which of course refers to Mary Magdalene - often referred to even by the Orthodox Church and now even the Catholic Church as the Apostle to the Apostles).
In the Gospel of Mary the true meaning of some of the Christian terms are revealed, that have been misunderstood in mainstream Christianity. One of those terms being is sin. According to the Gospel of Mary, sin does not exist.
And this is also reflected in newer texts like A Course in Miracles, which is a modern continuation of these Gnostic scriptures and Christian Mysticism, and it turns away from the dogmatic teachings, that some of us have grown up with - although it still uses some of the same terminology (even male dominated terminology), but in my eyes it’s done so that the reader can understand how we have misunderstood these terms.
But that is a topic that I will get to soon…
The importance of rest for women
I want to talk about the importance of rest for women.
I saw a quote the other day that said “Exhausted women are easier to control. Rested women piss off the patriarchy.” And then it said: “Go and have a nap."
And this is so true!
It is well known that it’s easier to control people who are not rested and who are mentally, emotionally and physically tired and exhausted.
You might have heard about different ways that cult leaders control the people that are members of the cult by exhausting them mentally, physically and emotionally, and this also happens in abusive relationships and narcissistic abuse.
I would like to suggest that this happens on a societal scale to women, although it’s not as targeted or intentional.
We all know that women in general have less down time and less time to rest, especially women with children but not only.
And women make up the majority of people with exhaustion symptoms.
There is a lot of research done and books written on how women bear most of the unpaid work, while often also having jobs.
Not only that, women take on a lot more responsibilities at our workplaces that take up time and energy but are not always rewarded, and we are often expected to say yes to these extra tasks. There is actually a book about this called The No Club.
So to rest is a form of rebellion against all of this.
Women with a balanced nervous system are hard to control.
Women who have stopped fawning and people pleasing, who tend to their own needs and wellbeing first and foremost cannot be exploited easily.
I want to be a part of a movement and culture of women who make resting and tending to ourselves, first and foremost, a priority.
Lets aim to be women who say no without guilt, who disappoint peoples’ expectations of us without feeling bad.
And if we give, we give from overflow and love, not obligation.
This is your life and you are here to live it on your terms, no one else’s.
So lets come back to resting. What do I even mean by resting?
There are different kinds of rest. Physical, emotional and mental rest are the main types.
Physical rest can be lying down or sitting, resting your body. Of course sleeping or taking a nap are some of the most deep forms of physical rest.
Mental and emotional rest can also look like taking a walk in nature, or exercising. Listening to calm music or a guided meditation. Meditating or reading something that makes us feel calm. Doing our favourite creative activity. Having a drink with girlfriends or taking a walk with a friend. The last form, which is social, is more of an emotional rest since we often process emotions by talking to friends about them.
All of these can be a form of rest.
Of course by getting enough sleep and getting good sleep, that is one of the most deep forms of rest for both our minds and our bodies.
Meditation is a deep form of rest for our minds and emotions and can release stress from our bodies.
The key is that anything that makes you feel relaxed, more at ease and more like you have come back to yourself is what I am talking about here.
It can look differently for different people.
A good friend of mine sometimes says after stressful periods that:
“I have to bring myself back home now.”
That’s what I want us to do, over and over and over, to bring ourselves back home to ourselves. To find a safe space within and with ourselves where we can rest our souls.
Because a woman who is at peace, who lets herself rest and who is relaxed and at ease, is someone who cannot be controlled.
Art by Frederic Leighton - Flaming June
Otter Spirit Gemstones
I’ve had the opportunity to partner with an amazing company that feels really close to my heart.
I have loved the ocean all of my life, and I’m a mermaid at heart. When I was a child I first of all wanted to be a mermaid and later I wanted to become a marine biologist for a while. The last one is a bit more realistic perhaps.
One early memory for me is from when I was nine years old and visited the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California with my family. I fell in love with the sea otters and I still remember this experience quite vividly.
So I am so happy to now be able to collaborate with Otter Spirit that creates beautiful intentional gemstones jewelry while also protecting the wild sea otters of Monterey Bay that have been endangered over the past years.
They source the gemstones carefully and ethically and they are very transparent about this.
This is what they have to say about themselves on their website:
“Born in Monterey Bay, California in 2023, Otter Spirit is a jewelry brand on a mission: offering authentic gemstones jewelry while protecting wild sea otters.”
From what I understand the idea came in 2020, three years before that, when the founders encountered the sea otters while travelling the California coast and wanted to help protect them.
How it works is that they donate $1 from every bracelet sold to nonprofits dedicated to ocean conservation. Otter Spirit joined the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Business Donors Board in 2024.
Use my referral link to browse the Otter Spirit website here and the coupon code REBECKA20 will be added to any purchase you make, giving you a 20% discount.
The bracelets, in the picture, that I was gifted are made of Rainbow Moonstone, Watermelon Chalcedony and Green Jade. Otter Spirit started out by creating bracelets but now also make other jewelry, like necklaces.
I am so honored to be able to collaborate with this amazing company with a beautiful mission and I recommend them wholeheartedly.
What is an Empress of Equanimity?
The name of my new course Empress of Equanimity comes out of the feeling I want you to have when you go through the material and that I would want you to cultivate every day.
It has a sense of grace and power to it. An Empress of Equanimity is at peace with herself. She is self-assured and confident from within. She doesn't always need to express her self-worth, although she can too. It shines through her very being.
For me, inner power and inner peace go hand in hand. One cultivates the other. Power here means power over ourselves and over our inner empire.
When we become the Empress of our inner world and are able to conjure up that inner peace and love that lives within us, even in circumstances that are not ideal, we become energetically untouchable. We are then able to not be swayed or taken aback by outer events as much.
This takes practice and there will be moments when we get into old patterns, but the more we practice and remind ourselves of our true nature, which is peace and love, the easier it will be to come back to it.
In Empress of Equanimity we will practice this deeply. ✨
Find out more or sign up below:
I’ll say it again: Business is not a virtue
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Busyness is not a virtue.
I refuse to be impressed by how much someone can fit into their calendar and how thin they can spread themselves as if it's a badge of honor, while I can feel the tension in them.
Many women do too much, striving for the perfect life or the most full life, doing everything for everyone, until they cannot do anything anymore because they burn out.
Women make up 79% of the people who are on sick leave due to exhaustion syndrome in Sweden (where I live).
What I have learnt in my life, is to create space for myself. Because that space is where peace, contentment, guidance and true creativity can grow.
It’s not about not being engaged in causes that mean a lot to us or not being there for others, but we can differentiate between things that we really want to do and things we say yes to out of obligation.
This energy of obligation creates negative stress and can cause resentment in relationship to other people. The contradiction here is that we will be able to show up so much more and better for others when we first show up for ourselves and our own wellbeing.
Next time you are asked, or feel compelled, to take on a new responsibility, whether professionally or personally, take time before you decide, center into yourself and ask; Is this something I really want to do or need to do?
In my course Empress of Equanimity, open for enrollment now, we will go deep into how we can retrain ourselves to prioritise our space and peace.
This course will be added to with more modules coming. It is right now at the lowest price it will ever be, but only until around 13th October! ✨ (I will let you know before it closes.)
Find out more or sign up below:
The problem with spiritual teachers
Just because someone seems to have spiritual insights, psychic abilities or visions that others don’t seem to have, it does not mean they have all the answers.
Only you have the answers for your life. The only thing others can do is to reflect back your truth to you as a confirmation.
I am especially careful with leaders or teachers who seem too sure about what the truth is and that their perspective is the right one.
Discernment is very important when navigating that world.
A teacher I follow once said something along the lines of: ‘Any coach who does not lead you back to what feels right and true for you is not a coach I can get behind’. This is something I keep in mind when listening to others and it has always been reflected in my own work, even before that.
I don’t have the whole truth either, I seek it just like you, and we can help each other in this. But I have experience in seeking and finding that inner peace, inner guidance and joy which I now experience again and again. I want to help you find it within yourself too.
I basically want to help lead you back to what feels right and true for you and your inner guidance.
In the Empress of Equanimity course we will do this and more. ⚜️
Through meditation and other inner peace practices and finding peace within us, we can become more accepting of not knowing everything but also more open to possibilities.
This is the most important foundation for creating a life lived from inner wellbeing, peace and purpose.
This course will be added to with more modules coming. Once you have bought the course any future updates and bonuses are yours without any extra cost, so get in now at the lowest price it will ever be! ✨
Find out more or sign up here.
My course Empress of Equanimity is here!
My new course Empress of Equanimity is here!
I have seen too many women being burnt out and exhausted by outer and inner demands. And I have been on the verge of that too, if it wasn't for my inner peace tools that I have kept coming back to.
True liberation for women must include a reclaiming of our own inner and outer space, peace and centeredness, where our true creativity is found and can flourish.
Through trial and error over the past 13 years, I have explored different ways and methods of coming back to my inner peace through meditation, introspection and spiritual principles. I now know how to center into myself and connect back to my inner peace almost instantly.
I have learnt to carve out space and time for myself continually and made my inner peace practice a daily habit.
And I want to show as many women as possible to do the same for themselves.
Shift your mind from:
Stress to calm.
Chaos to peace.
Overwhelm to tranquillity.
Over-giving and self-abandonment to clear boundaries and self-love.
⚜️⚜️⚜️
Empress of Equanimity
is the course where I will share everything I know about how to do this.
These teachings and methods are not frivolous or unimportant. They are the most important foundation for creating a life lived from inner wellbeing, peace and purpose.
This course will be added to with more modules coming. Once you have bought the course any future updates and bonuses will be added without any extra cost, so get in now at the lowest price it will ever be! ✨
Find out more or sign up here or below:
Women’s spirituality
I’ve been thinking about the difference between what spirituality women need vs men.
The worldly feminine gender roles often include:
Selflessness, being caring, sharing resources, being self-sacrificing.
Religious ideas of becoming selfless and serving others are useful for men (divine masculine) not for women in general.
These are good traits but women already have them, mostly.
Women need more self-centeredness.
I think that’s a reason why many women turn away from organised spirituality towards other types of spirituality. And this is coming from someone like me who is a Christian in my own way, although I'm no longer religious in the traditional sense.
The divine feminine focuses inward, not outward. Becoming aligned within herself. That is where creativity comes from and thrives.
And I will go as far as saying that we as women need more selfishness, not at the expense of others but for both self-preservation and self-fulfilment.
The depletion and burn out of women is a pandemic and the initial answer is not more self-sacrifice, but more self-centeredness.
In my upcoming course we will dive deep into how we can reclaim our inner peace, clarity and guidance. Stay tuned for more about that in the next couple of weeks ⚜️
In the meantime, you can sign up to my free Peace of Mind Meditation Series here.
Become self-sustaining & center yourself
Make yourself the center of your life.
If you are someone who feels you have more feminine energy than masculine. Remember, the feminine is self-sustaining. It’s the creative force and the source of everything.
When I say feminine I am not talking about the manufactured, patriarchal idea of gender roles. I’m talking about the feminine that exists in all of us. The more structured masculine energy also exists in everyone. We don’t need to look outside of us for any of this.
The feminine is free, unfettered, creative and knows how to relax and receive. And if we balance it with the more organised, structured part of ourselves (which we are all in a lot of the time in this world), we can create the life that we want for ourselves.
Everything is inside of you. There is no one else that can create this for you. You are the source and the center of your life.
Personally, I mostly feel free to do what I want with my life, but I have not always felt this freedom. Now that I do, if I can help other women also have this freedom or start taking steps towards it, I will.
Nothing makes me more frustrated than seeing women being limited or giving over their power to someone or something else. I want liberation for all of us, not just myself.
To start with, we have to take time for ourselves regularly. We need to center ourselves in our own lives and put ourselves first. That means sometimes or often saying no to other people or demands made by the world around us.
That peace of mind that we seek is inside of us but to find it again we need to cancel out some of the noise that made us get disoriented and lose track of that peace.
I’m here to help you with that.
Start by signing up to my Peace of Mind Meditation Series.
Women’s unpaid work at home
Studies show that even in the more equal societies, like Sweden where I live, women still do the majority of the housework (cooking, cleaning, planning etc).
This is the case even when the woman is earning the same or more than her male partner that she lives with (for heterosexual relationships that is). Of course there are always exceptions.
We can discuss gender roles and different solutions to this, but my main concern is the creative potential in women that gets lost in the busyness and the distraction and sometimes even burn out that comes with this.
I live by myself and I know many women who do, but not everyone wants or can live by themselves.
So how do we change this and carve out more space in our lives?
Some might say that we can’t as long as there is inequality and as long as many men do not take their part of the responsibility.
But I say that we can make changes, small changes one step at a time, to reclaim that space and peace and creativity for ourselves.
If we can carve out even 15 minutes a day to meditate or write in our journal or just sit down with something we like to drink and breathe and clear our thoughts in silence, or listen to some calm music or guided meditation, that is a good start.
Because many distract themselves by scrolling without aim and use that amount of time or more.
It’s sounds so simple and like it wouldn’t do much difference, but it does make a difference.
And when that clarity of thought starts coming to us, we can more clearly decide what we are willing to do and not do, and start questioning if the way we are living our lives works, and make more conscious decisions, which can change the dynamic of women doing all of this unpaid work on autopilot, one woman at a time.
Venus
Venus, the Evening Star or the Morning Star depending on its position, has been shining bright lately.
Venus is a symbol of the divine feminine and just as the star Venus descends in the sky and seemingly falls towards the Earth or the underworld the divine feminine has had downfalls in mythology.
The fallen angel Lucifer, meaning light-bringer, is a mythological figure representing Venus as the Morning Star. It was the name of the star Venus in Roman folklore. He has been wrongly confused with the idea of the devil.
Lucifer did not want to obey or be subservient to the patriarchal god and was cast out of heaven. It’s no surprise that he has been demonised just like Lilith, the first woman who did not want to submit to Adam.
This casting out into the underworld is recurring in mythology about the ancient Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar and the Norse goddess Hel.
I think it represents the time when the divine feminine was made secondary, was only allowed to exist underground and patriarchal systems took over.
It is time for Venus to rise again. ⭐️ ♀
Art by Alana Fairchild (Rumi Oracle Cards) and unknown.
The soft life vs The path of least resistance
You might have heard about the internet trend ‘soft life’, which usually refers to women who don’t want to work too much and have an easy, soft life with a lot of leisure time. This may even come at the cost of independence.
I talk about de-stressing and finding inner peace and stopping ourselves from becoming exhausted or burnt out and from accepting all of the obligations that outer circumstances put on us. But I would not recommend the ‘soft life’ as it’s currently being presented. Even though I can understand parts of it, because it’s a reaction to women burning out and taking on too many responsibilities.
The kind of inner peace I talk about has nothing to do with not putting ourselves out there or not challenging ourselves. Having goals and dreams (whether big or small) is going to challenge us.
Learning to relax, de-stress and find inner peace is not about being too easy on yourself, being lazy or lowering expectations on our life and goals.
It’s about increasing our expectations of ourselves and life, and realising stress and overload is not necessary to have the life that we want.
It’s about expanding and seeing that there is another way of doing things. One that grows out of inner guidance that we find through stillness even if there is a lot going on in our outer world.
It’s sometimes called the path of least resistance, most commonly used by Esther Hicks. For me, this does not mean giving up on our goals to make life easier on ourselves in the moment. It means doing more of what we are called to do instead of what we feel obliged to do. It will still be challenging at times, but there is an excitement behind it instead of obligation.
You are the ruler of your experience
The famous psychiatrist Carl Jung said:
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
A Course in Miracles says it like this:
“I am responsible for what I see.
I choose the feelings I experience, and I decide upon the goal I would achieve.
And everything that seems to happen to me I ask for, and receive as I have asked.”
This is not to say that we are to blame for what happens to us, but on a subtler level our own unconscious beliefs and patterns creates our reality. It can seem discouraging if we have patterns in our lives that our conscious mind does not want. But think about, if our unconscious has that much power, it means that we are much more powerful than we thought.
Carl Jung also talked about what he called the collective unconscious which are collective patterns in the world that affects our collective reality. So our unconscious is also entwined and affected by other people’s unconscious.
So since these beliefs and patterns are unconscious, how can we affect and start to change some of them if that is what we want? Some powerful yet simple ways to do this are through meditation and guided meditations or hypnotherapy (hypnotherapy is a type of structured guided meditation).
These methods activate the parasympathetic nervous system and can connect us to the deeper levels of the mind, the unconscious levels. From there we can have insights about our lives and internal patterns that we do not get from the conscious mind.
It’s really not as complicated as it can sound and to start you only need yourself, a comfortable space and some time put aside.
To get started you can access my free Peace of Mind Meditation Series here.
Morning habits for clarity, calm and focus
Take time first thing in the morning doing something that brings calm and clarity before consuming social media or interact with others (other than family).
Some suggestions are:
Do some short journaling on your intentions for the day.
Do some light stretching to get rid of the stiffness and sleepiness in your body.
Sit in quiet with a coffee or tea and read something for a few minutes (my go to for the past 10 years is A Course in Miracles).
Meditate. This is the most efficient method to get clarity of mind in the morning.
It may be enough to only carve out 10 minutes to do one or two if these things. I mostly only spend around 15 minutes myself: 2-3 minutes of stretching and 15 mins ACIM reading and meditation.
Start with 5 minutes and see how it feels. When you feel the benefits you may want to take it up to 10 minutes.
I focus on the number of minutes because some think that these things take a lot of time but they don’t have to. Most of us can find 10 minutes to spare, even in the morning. Try it out for yourself.
In my free Peace of Mind Meditation Series there is a short guided meditation called Preparing for your day. Sign up here to receive it.
