I adore autumn. The trees grow sleepy, seducing us as they shed glorious colors. The air becomes crisp enough to enjoy my morning cacao with delightful contrast. After much birthing, burgeoning, and blooming, nature takes a big sigh and begins to shift its energy into the underworld. This also has me sinking deeper into my own roots.
The veil is said to be more permeable between the physical world and the spirit world around this time of the year. While many of us celebrate Halloween, the origin of this holiday dates back thousands of years to the Celtic festival of Samhain, meaning “summer’s end”. It signified the transition from the lighter half of the year into the darker half. If you peel back enough layers of any modern tradition, especially religious ones (way beyond the scope of today's share), you’ll likely find its original context to be an homage to the natural world. Ancient cultures understood the wisdom of honoring natural cycles to live in reciprocity with all relations, including our earth guardians.
During the early months of spring, my mom and I were looking at family photos one afternoon. It was on this day a particularly old monochrome photo caught my eye. I asked my mom who the woman in the photo was, sitting regally for a portrait shot in her elder years with eyes that looked slightly defeated, yet wise. She told me this was my maternal great grandmother, Mariam. The moment I laid eyes on her, an overwhelming feeling of familiarity, protection, and connection overcame me. Even her name, which drew resonance for me through my love of Mary Magdalene, activated an urgent desire to know more about her. I added Mariam's photo to my altar that day to strengthen my connection to my maternal ancestors. We'll come back to dear Mariam, but that's all for now.
Over the last couple years, my curiosity to connect with my ancestral lineage grew into an insatiable hunger. It began to feel like my life depended on it, and the last year or so finally began to unveil the mysteries of this for me with more clarity. When there's a feeling that's anchored bone-deep, it's not mental - it's intuitive. I'm not talking about fleeting emotions. I'm talking about the things that make your eyes twinkle with a tinge of madness. A full-body "F*CK YES". A dream or a meditation out of nowhere. A synchronous series of events. An instinctual desire to research something for days on end. It could even evoke some fear coupled with nervous excitement at the thought of what's possible on the other side of resistance. And here's the best part, it doesn't need to make sense! In fact, most times it sounds absurd to the mind, because now we're passing the threshold of rational sense-making to wild soul calls connected to destined potentials of the unknown.
Pay. Attention. To. This. I cannot emphasize this enough. Feel it in your body and learn to build trust with these moments when they occur.
These are the whispers of your inner compass beckoning you towards untapped possibilities the world is waiting to experience that uniquely flows through you.
The discernment between what stems from my mind and my intuition has taken time to cultivate. It's a feminine superpower and a practice that requires continuous refinement. In moments of uncertainty, I call upon the primal wolf within and let her sniff around. She'll tell me if we need to dig deeper or move on. I wanted to dig up ALL the bones I could about my maternal ancestry. I couldn't understand it at the time, but I ached to learn more. It was an ache that came from my womb.
For me, the earth has always been what I naturally gravitated to in tumultuous chapters of life. She is the master teacher of navigating cycles and seasons. I can easily say the last 12 months were the most painful yet transformative seasons of life for me. I spent so much time outside it became a ritual for me. When we imbue sacredness into something, it becomes a ritual. Nature became my spiritual nourishment, my sacred temple, and the altar of every prayer. I started learning how to sit in Her presence as an act of devotion, surrender, and guidance. She was my teacher, my muse, my lover, and my solace. Like all relations, consistency and presence builds trust. My daily presence eventually opened up communication between my vessel and the Great Mother in a way I hadn't experienced before. Sometimes the messages and energetic dance between us flowed like a gushing snake of rivers through my body. Other times, it was as subtle as the wind whispering through the rustling leaves.
For some time, I resisted, dismissed, and even doubted my connection with the natural world. I convinced myself I was imagining everything. I continued to give my power away in ways that were reflected in other facets of life, such as clinging onto things or people out of fear, unworthiness, or playing the victim of my circumstances. I didn't realize how much capacity I held to wield and co-create with the natural world for a vision that had yet to be birthed through me. There was a part of me that feared being seen in this way. In Jungian archetypal psychology, this is known as the Witch Wound. Generations of collective suppression, physical trauma, disempowerment, and shame cloaked the remembrance of our unique gifts we each carry through our ancestral lines as women. Understand that you are powerful beyond measure and there was a time in history when women's abilities to channel divinity through their bodies was feared by systems of control (i.e. religious systems, medical systems, etc.).
Dear one, these are the ancient feminine mysteries that were never taught to us because it was life-threatening. We are now collectively remembering these mysteries in our collective consciousness. There is medicine you carry in your bloodline which, once reclaimed, can orient your life on a path of liberation and unbound expression of who you are. This can be a lot to digest as truths, feelings, and perhaps even triggers arise on this topic for you. I'll pause here to let this brew in the cauldron of your own gnosis. I invite you to drop into your body with some loving breaths and see what comes up for you around the feminine mysteries of your own lineage. And if you're feeling really inspired, perhaps some journaling could support deepening into this process for you.
With gratitude & love,
Arzina
