Women Working with Oneness: Turning Our Attention to Embrace All of Life
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.
The first Women Working with Oneness Forum held in San Rafael, California, drew together women from different spiritual, professional, cultural, and ethnic communities. The second gathering in early ????? allowed for more intimacy because of its smaller venue and the third event brought together Blackfoot, Sufi and Buddhist women. In each event 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 are 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 was reflected in a vision I had. The vision revealed that women were ready to work together, but that before this could take place, each woman needed to be given a flower.
I understood that this gift of a flower, representative of a gift from within, allows women to work together, as individuals within a dynamic whole. This flower is the conscious recognition of the individual soul of each woman; it affirms the innate beauty of the feminine, 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 deeper reality that we have experienced, and to bring this 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 conditioning, our 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, an aspect of consciousness in women, to reveal itself. Without it, the earth cannot be healed by the energy of oneness. Women have a very real contribution to make now in learning to weave this inner feminine consciousness into the outer world of form. This new language, as it arises from within the new feminine, does not easily find a place in the masculine structures of the world. And yet, we are being asked to draw this wisdom into the heart of life as it is right now.
This consciousness 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 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."