When I was 21, I'd just had my first daughter, and woken up to a whole other world where my experience didn't fit with the mainstream, and I searched for where it did fit. One of the things I did to see what I'd woken up to but didn't understand yet, was to engage in a healing therapy called Prebirthing, with a woman who went on to become my mentor, and teach me many things.
In our very first session, where she was asking all about me, and where I'd been and what I'd learnt, she sent me off with the homework of a candle meditation. I was still relatively fresh out of a very complete religion, that considered just about everything to be potential tools of the devil to sway you from your righteous path, so even the thought of staring into a candle as I went to sleep was a bit oo er to me at the time. I was living with my mother and daughter in the house I'd grown up in, and after tucking my baby in to sleep, went to sleep myself while staring at the flame of the candle. And I kept seeing this triangle with a cross underneath it, and rubbing my eyes, and then seeing it again, and wondering what the hell that meant, and it was my companion the whole time I was awake.
My mentor had also invited me to a psychic fair the next day, held in the local RSL hall, and seeing all the tie dyed and velvet skirts swishing round the space made me fairly nervous. And there was this fella who hand carved wood in all different symbols, and lo and behold, there was the triangle and cross that I'd been seeing the night before! So I bought it as a necklace, and wore it always, and only found out later what it meant.
It's the symbol of the Greek Goddess Athena, also known as Athene and Pallas Athene, and also sometimes the symbol used for Sulfur.
And then a year or so later, I lent the necklace to my sister in law to be and never saw it again. Further down the track again, I had a lover who called himself a Yowie, who was a Kali devotee (he spent all his money on incense every week for the 'Black Darling' cause she was a 'jealous Goddess') and Archdeacon of the Church Of No World Order, as well as introducing me to Bob Dobbs and his head….who was horrified when I told him the story of the symbol. He couldn't believe I'd been given a magical alchemical symbol and then given it away. He was so distressed he went out straight away and carved me another symbol from pine bark, and instructed me to wear it till we went and got it tattooed on me in the proper respect and fashion. Which we did.
I drew it myself in my diary on the train down to Sydney, and when it was freshly done, it looked very similar on my skin to the bark that I'd been wearing. I went on to slowly find out all sorts of things about Athene over the years since then. She turns up in all sorts of ways through all sorts of myths and permutations, as explained surprisingly well by Wikipedia, but the bits about Her that have always appealed to me were from before She was born out of Zeus's head, and when She was a goddess in Her own right as Athene, and Pallas Athene. And I only found out She was also the patroness of spinning 6 years after I started spinning myself, which was pretty kooky. To me She's become the Goddess of Passion and Logic, Administration and Warfare, Spinning and Weaving. At least that's what I tell folk when they ask me what my tattoo means. I love the paradoxes, and the shadow, and just about everything I've heard and read about Her. And always considered that She was my personal Goddess who had picked me way back in that candle meditation.
And last year, I had a Kahuna Massage and met Her.
I really don't know how to describe it without sounding like a new age tosser, but happen it did, and no matter what opinion you may have about me and how whacky I am…….I don't make shit up. I do my best to relate the stories of my life as honestly and authentically as possible, and just lately, I've realised that all my favourite stories of mine and other people's……are the stories that we all find it hard to tell each other, for fear of being laughed at, or disbelieved, or having our sanity questioned. And let's face it, most spiritual and religious experiences seem totally whacky unless you experience them yourself.
I'm not gonna go into every detail, cause for that you'll have to come over and stay the night so we can tell each other our real stories around the fire, but suffice to say I really met Her. Lots of people had been asking me about my tattoo, and I was finding myself telling the story often, and feeling like it was a distant magical experience that had become a bit dim over time, and then as soon as Kahuna hit my body She was there.
Have you ever had a Kahuna?? I've only had one, and it rocked my socks completely. I've done quite a few rebirthing therapies over the years, and they've been powerful and potent experiences, but this was a full body mind-blowing trip. In a Kahuna massage, a healer dances round your body, stripping your flesh with their oiled hands, and dragging what feels like the earth and mountains of your flesh down and out and through your body. The first thing I thought was 'Here's Birth!', as my body totally recognised the whiff of birth and surrendered instantly to the well known energy. The woman doing the massage knew I'd had 8 babies, and figured I could hack the intensity, and went as hard and strong as she could, squeezing my flesh in exquisite agony. My body moved the same as it does in birth, and I was making the same sounds. The next thing I thought is that THIS was a REAL rebirthing experience. The last time I felt that kind of moist pressure on the whole of my body, was when I was getting my body squeezed in the birth canal on my way down to earth. And there She was.
I started crying and snotting with grief and relief as knowing tumbled and gurgled out of me from the tips of my toes, and realised that She'd always been there for me and always would. She was there with me as I squeezed into life, holding me and helping me be born. She was there with me through every one of the births I've experienced with my babies, and I felt Her there with me as I die. I felt and saw and experienced my death, and it was into Her arms and Lush and Soft and Embracing body. My biological mother and me as a mother and everything I know about the energy of mother is wrapped in Her arms. She is my real mother. She's always been there, and always will be, Her eternal and all encompassingly unconditionally loving self, is with me at the core of my being. All of this was happening within me as the Kahuna stripped the muscles of my body, and stripped me to my insides.
I was a bit surprised that it was Her after all these years, and after the story of Her had almost become a cliche. But it also made complete sense. I was thinking it was going to be some kind of lofty quantum realisation, or a pagan birth/death goddess, but of course it was Athene all along. As it was all happening, and I was feeling the waves of Her wash all over me, I thought to myself that this is the kind of spiritual transformational experience that can set a person off on a pilgrimage or quest, and was wondering to myself whether I should get another tattoo in honour of it, or wear certain colours, or set up an alter, or some other kind of ritual to signify the event, and I got the most profound sense of peace. That my form of worship was my life, and every single thing I've done has been my quest and pilgrimage, and I'm already doing everything I need, and a big and overwhelming knowing that everything was happening as it should.
And then She channelled through my body. The only way I can describe it, is if you could contain the energy of solar systems and galaxies into a beam of energy that was about the circle of my linked arms, and rush that energy through my body in an electrical pulse that had me stretched out like Sigourney Weaver in Ghost Busters, where she's being electrocuted by spirits on a pedestal……. The healer was a bit disconcerted, as my body took over and this experience overshadowed everything. I felt the tunnelling of energy powering through my body, and then my arms raised up towards the skies, and I felt the energy rush through me and into the atmosphere. As it charged through, I eventually felt the end of it, and felt the end move through me and up through my body until at last I was holding Her hands, and crying and grinning with the absolute beauty of Her. And the Love. I was trying to explain it to the healer standing by with her hand on my heart. Trying to explain, while caught up in an ecstatic union, that I was holding the hands of my Goddess, and She was so utterly beautiful. This whole event was a kinaesthetic feeling experience as well as a visual and external one. And those last moments of holding Her hands were divine.
And She hasn't left me since. I've had fights with Currawong, and a rather intense journey through my personal fertility since then, and every time I've been on my own and would normally feel lonely, She's there. Every time I sink just a little below the surface She's all around me. When I'm feeling sorry for me, I can nestle in Her warm Belly and Breasts, and She'll hold me. And She shows up in all sorts of ways around me.
It's changed everything and nothing. It's been who I always was but more of it. It's made sense of my personal story. It's connected me with my personal version of the divine. That makes sense to me. And it's real. To me. I've believed enough things in my life to know that this is all that really matters. I take her literally and not at all in the same instant. She is the ancient Greek Goddess, as well as more ancient versions of the Divine Feminine, as well as a metaphor that can come together under the umbrella of Quantum Physics. She's my personal metaphor that makes sense to me.
I don't need anyone else to believe me, and I don't want to start a church or cult, in fact I don't need anybody else to believe what I believe at all. But it works for me. And I think that's all we're really meant to find. Our own version that works for us. Makes sense of our own personal journeys in a unique way that powers our spirit. That can be the same story that a lot of other people share, or a totally individual and inner honed one.
So Happy Mothers Day. To me, and to Her, and to my biological mother, and all the mothers of the world wherever they be, and in whatever state. To the divine feminine within us all, male and female and whoever lays between, and all the ways She shows up through all of our metaphors.
