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Women Working With Oneness:
Turning Our Attention to Embrace All of Life
by Anne Scott
O women, there is a way that we can help life so much now. It is
not as you expect. It is not about your doing, although we each need
to do the work we are here to do. This is about being – a state
of being that is your power, and many of us have forgotten that we even
have it. Your forgetting can bring despair. Please, sit a moment. Breathe.
Allow. Your soul is a power, an empty space within that connects you
to all life. We need only find and recognize this vibrant, healing stream
that flows through us from head to toe; it is our recognition that allows
it to flow out into life.
When we come together without judgment, creating a sacred space
for this place in each of us, love pours through our differences and
creates new pathways between us. It is the Real coming into life. We
are the vehicles for this awakening because it takes place in our own
lives. This is a beauty that has nothing to do with our problems. It
just is. And within it are the qualities of peace, healing, and nourishment
for life.
Imagine columns of light that reach from the earth to heaven. That
is who we are. We need only come together from our different communities,
and in the space between our differences, oneness can nourish the earth
and bring the energy of real change into life.
Women Working with Oneness: A Forum for Women in Service to Life, was
held in San Rafael, California, in Fall 2004. It drew together women from
different spiritual, professional, cultural, and ethnic communities. The
second gathering in early Spring 2005, allowed for more intimacy because
of its smaller venue. The third event brings together Blackfoot, Sufi,
and Buddhist women. In all events, it was demonstrated that when women
come together from different communities for the sake of the world, the
pure current of love and oneness is given. This way of women working together
is so new that we barely dare to believe that it is real, and that it
can have an effect on the suffering that exists in the tumult of our time.
Oneness needs our differences. It is breaking down the isolation that
we have come to know as women, and drawing us to the wonder and joy that
is present when we come together in this new way. As one woman said in
the last gathering, “We are so different. But when I close my eyes,
I feel I am Home. I have never felt this before, only when I go to my
land in Mexico. But here, today, I feel threads that connect me to every
woman in this room. It is connecting in my heart to the hearts of other
women here.”
When women come together for the sake of life, without imposition or
agendas, something extraordinary takes place. A pattern woven out of new
relationships comes into being, as a quality of oneness nourishes those
present with a light that is unmistakable. And because we are a part of
life, this nourishment goes beyond our individual lives, and touches the
whole. We are ordinary women who come together from different communities,
for the sake of the world.
Women are ready to work together with the energy of oneness, to help
life come alive so that it can heal itself, and be nourished by the light
of oneness and love. When this full agreement in the hearts of women becomes
a lived reality, we will hear life sing in a new way.
This understanding appeared in a vision showing that women were ready
to work together. But before this would take place, each woman needed
first to be given a flower. This gift, that actually comes from within,
allows women to work together, individuals within a dynamic whole. This
flower is the conscious recognition of the individual soul of each woman;
it affirms the innate beauty within women, a dimension of being. This
is the reality of oneness, so close to us now that we need only turn towards
our longing to help the world, and it is present, freely accessible to
those in service to life.
Yet when we go back to our Home, for some, the rational mind can return
and the despair can creep in, the doubts arise. So it is our work to remind
one another of the reality that we have experienced, and to bring into
our own daily lives, to learn to trust the ways of oneness. We need to
remind each other of the power that women carry in their being, so easily
drowned out by our own conditioning, our own fears.
There is a new language that women are finding, to articulate the feminine
wisdom that has been hidden within us for centuries. It will take time
for this language to reveal itself. Without this language, which is a
form of consciousness in women, the earth cannot be healed by the energy
of oneness. Women have a very real contribution to make now. This new
language does not fit in the masculine structures of the world, that also
exist within our own psyche, but it arises from within the new feminine,
and is itself a manifestation of working with the masculine in a new way.
This language is emerging through the sorrow of the world, through the
awakening of the hearts of humanity. We must find within ourselves where
we deny our own feminine spirit, where we continue the masculine devaluation
of our own real nature. Then the wisdom of the feminine will open to us,
showing us how to work with the interconnections of life in a new way.
And it is in our hands to value the contribution of the feminine at this
time of such suffering in the world. It requires that we dare to live
our deeper passion and devotion for what is Real, in the full light of
day.
Women have worked on themselves so much. Improving this, polishing that,
beautifying this quality, strengthening that one. But what happens if
we focus instead on life, on this red bursting life that wants to be lived?
It is only too easy to be caught in the cycle of self-improvement. If
we unknowingly identify with the masculine idea of purity or perfection,
of a transcendent quality of the divine, this identification steals our
attention from where we most need it. Here, in life, in our imperfections,
we will come to know the divine. This tiny turn of our attention, from
what is imperfect, to what is alive, can nourish life immensely. Life
is a dynamic, self-regulating organism, and it needs us not to try and
fix ourselves. It needs us to turn to what is alive, what is singing,
to the reality that we adore life because it sings of the Creator of both
the darkness and the light.
This oneness, this love is awakening inside of us. The more we give to
life, the more access we have to its power, and to the knowledge and love
that is needed for life. The more we can wake up each morning and say,
"My life is for You, my Beloved. Let me live my life for Your sake,
for the sake of life, for the two are not separate any more. Let me sing
to You in all that I do. Let me not forget what I am here to remember.
And may life know that it is infinitely precious. May I remember this
for life."
Here is a dream sent to DreamWeather Foundation at the new millennium.
It came from a woman in England who had not read or heard about the new
energy.
"A dream which I had at the turning of the new century seems to
reflect the new emphasis on a feminine energy rather than the patriarchal
energy of former times. It requires our love and attention to bring
it into the world, however.
I am walking with friends in the countryside on open grassland. It is
dusk. In a dip beneath a hill I see a brown eagle which is injured deep
beneath its left wing, close its heart. I pick it up and hold it against
my heart, anxiously considering how I may find veterinary assistance
for it out here. I look down at my hands to see if the bird is all right
and find it has transformed. Since holding it to my heart it has become
a brown paper market bag filled to the brim with absolutely perfect,
unblemished white mushrooms.
The mushrooms represent for me a feminine form of connectedness (via
the mycelium with which they grow beneath the surface of the earth),
a feminine form of networking rather than the former, vertical style
of connecting represented by the now grounded form of the wounded brown
eagle. The perfect white fruits are now above the ground, harvested,
vulnerable, yet available in the marketplace (the brown paper bag).
It was the heart of the old way that had become wounded but through
the heart of compassion it became transformed into its new form of expression."
Anne Scott is trained in the Naqshbandi Sufi tradition.
Dedicated to working with women, Anne lectures and leads workshops and
retreats around the country on dreamwork and spirituality in everyday
life. She is the author of Serving Fire: Food for Thought, Body and
Soul, and The Laughing Baby.
© 2005 Dreamweather Fdn, www.dreamweather.org
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