You’ve been around the spiritual block. You’ve read The Law of Attraction and The Secret. You know you are what you believe. You understand that negative beliefs attract negative experiences and positive beliefs attract positive ones. And in the last decades, you’ve made a conscious effort to choose beliefs that are more in alignment with your greater good and happiness.
So why aren’t things changing faster for you?
The reason is your conscious and subconscious minds are two different galaxies. And though you might have all these sparkling new beliefs within your conscious mind, you still have old beliefs hanging out in your subconscious.
The good news is that even though these two galaxies are light years apart, they also live right next door to each other in your upper and lower chakras.
Your upper chakras (heart through crown) connect you to the unmanifest universe. Your lower chakras (solar plexus through root) connect you to the manifest universe.
When all of your chakras are in communication with one another, you are able to bring the unmanifested universe into manifestation.
But until this happens, you will remain split. You might have a whole new vision for your life from the heart up, but be unable to manifest your vision in the world, because of what’s going on from the pelvis down.
You are like a snake with two skins. You have formed your new skin. But you haven’t shed the old one. Why not?
Because your subconscious mind is ruled by your feminine aspect, and the beliefs within it must be felt. They can’t be undone on the mental plane through practices like meditation and affirmations. Older and meatier than your conscious thoughts, these denied beliefs are accompanied by lifetimes of unrecognized events and experiences.
I consider my yoni work with women to be quantum therapy because I help my clients to access feelings, memories and beliefs they didn’t even know were there. After years of traditional therapy, and still not knowing how to change certain patterns in their lives, women come to see me.
Not that traditional psychotherapy doesn’t have its purpose. Especially in cases of sexual abuse, it would be overwhelming and even harmful to do yoni work without first establishing an inner foundation of mental and emotional safety.
In any shamanic quest, the journeyer must connect with her higher or immortal self and know how to access the beliefs of this higher self before she can face the giants of the subconscious realm. And yoni work is very shamanic.
I consider each session to be a three way conversation between the beliefs in a woman’s subconscious, the elders in her pelvic temple, and her conscious self.
My client’s vagina and her subconscious guide my fingers to the points within her that are holding energy. Old beliefs are always surrounded by immense energy. Many lifetimes of experiences and emotions cover them, as well as judgments against ourselves and others. I feel these pockets of energy as unusual protrusions or indentations – as pulsing or gripping heat. When I press my finger into these hot spots, my client will usually experience some degree of pain, either emotional, physical or both.
Most women aren’t aware of the pain they hold in their vaginas until I help them touch into it. Unfortunately, we can’t release pain we don’t even know is there. And until we do, these hidden beliefs will continue to sabotage all of our conscious efforts. Which is why we often take two steps back with every step forward.
Fear of pain is always greater than the pain itself. I consider all pain, emotional or physical, to simply be contracted, concentrated energy. Our fear of pain is our fear of the unknown. Nothing makes us feel more out of control than when we are deep in pain or pleasure. Pain and pleasure are not opposites. Pleasure is, in fact, the origin or the essence of pain. And all pain can be unwound into pleasure.
I help women to feel safe in the chaos of the unknown by providing a space for them to engage with their yonis and their subconscious in a non-sexual way. By bringing awareness to their unconscious pain and breathing into it, women begin to unwind the tangled threads of their judgments, emotions and experiences all the way back to their root beliefs.
Breath is essesntial to yoni work I help women to make their breath bigger than their pain. The breath holds the subconscious mind, like a mother cradling a baby.
I always say “I can’t forgive, but my breath can.” Or “My breath creates the spaciousness for forgiveness and grace to take place.”
Whether I need to forgive the violations of another or my own self violation, the breath helps me to do what my mind can’t possibly comprehend.
Because the subconscious is made up of everything our souls have denied, unwinding pain is like untangling a big ball of unrecognized events, experiences, feelings and beliefs. As I help my clients to unwind their pain into pleasure and ultimately self empowerment, they will often have flashes of memory. Some of these memories are from other life times. Along with memories come unexpected emotions, like disgust. My clients will hear statements inside of them like, “I am gross” or “I hate myself.” This is true for women across the board, including ones who have never been sexually abused, who consciously love themselves and think they are beautiful. Because those of us who have healed ourselves are helping to heal the collective feminine pain body.
I specifically say “feminine,” because I know from both personal and professional experience that these beliefs are connected to the shame or internalized beliefs we hold around our feminine aspect, which has been demonized.
So I might have my clients say things like, “My feminine body is gross. My feminine aspect is weak. I hate my feminine self,” which often trigger tears.
It’s always humbling for women to bare witness to their own anti feminine beliefs. Ironically, our judgment is what holds these beliefs in place. And our grief that liberates them.
When a woman is able to feel the pain of her feminine self hatred, she can unwind it back into the pleasure of her love.
Hatred of our feminine being, body and sexuality shows up as different issues in various women’s lives. One of my clients came to me wanting to lose weight. After years of psychotherapy from having been molested as a child, she had done a lot of emotional healing, but was still using food as a substitute for sexual pleasure. Her weight both served to keep her feelings of hatred for her feminine body in place, as well as protect her from potential lovers, because she believed “it was not safe to be in a female body” and “her body was bad, along with her experience of it.”
The missing link for this woman, and many victims of sexual violation, was moving from blame to self responsibility. This is a tough step, especially for those of us who were abused as children. But if we know that every soul incarnates not as a blank slate, but with akashic records and a spiritual contract, we know that even our earliest experiences are based on our beliefs, however subconscious.
In my case, I came into this life with a kind of spiritual arrogance, judging my physical body and humanness to be less than my formless limitless self. Because of this belief, I hovered above my body for many years, allowing others occupy it and even violate it. I moved through life back and forth between denial and victimhood, abandoning myself and being abandoned by others, until I finally took responsibility for all of it.
I have spoken before about the demonization of the feminine, the body and our divine sexual energy by patriarchal religion. These anti-feminine, anti-body and anti-sex beliefs are so insidiously hidden within the human psyche, most of us don’t even recognize their hold on us. Let alone recognize the mirror that patriarchal religion is for the anti-feminine, anti-body, anti-sexual aspect within us.
As my client and I worked together to uncover her feminine self hating beliefs, she started occupying more and more of her body with her awareness, and needed less and less food to fill her. As she started bringing her awareness into her lower chakras, which govern the physical body, she became more sensitive to her physical experience and didn’t need to rely on food as her sole source of pleasure. Knowing her ability to unwind her pain into pleasure with her breath, she now welcomes all experiences, instead of denying herself and denying her life.
She now has more capacity for love and joy than most spiritual teachers I know.
This kind of capacity and self realization doesn’t come from ascension alone. We can only know the full width and circumference of our being when our height and depth meet. Just as space curves in to meet itself, our height and depth form a circle. When we stand in the center, we can look out in all directions.
