Things have changed drastically since I first began seeking
information about the Divine Feminine nearly 10 years ago. Stories and references to Goddesses
and the Divine Feminine are much easier to find now, and yet we are barely
scratching the surface when it comes to the rich herstory and philosophy that Sacred
Feminine traditions offer us. Given this, here are my top five reasons why we
need a school like the Home to Her Academy, now more than ever:
While the field of education is primarily led by women, the subject of history is dominated by men – who in turn, tend to focus specifically on men’s accomplishments. If you want to learn specifically about our sacred herstories, the outlook gets even bleaker. I was a graduate student before I ever learned a thing about witch trials and the Divine herstory that the Church of my European ancestors went to great lengths to bury, discredit, and destroy. You shouldn’t need an advanced degree to learn about spiritual traditions that have been credibly documented around the entire world. This information is your birthright, and it needs to be easier for us to access it.
In current dominant culture, “sacred” has become
synonymous with “religion.” We desperately need to disentangle this
association, particularly from patriarchal religious institutions that center a
male father god within a rigid church structrue, and reclaim our understanding of the sacred as the wild Mother Earth that
supports us and all of her inhabitants, including ourselves.
We tend to prioritize facts, data, logic, and academic
information at the expense of the vast wisdom of the body, which all too often
is seen as unreliable or even nonexistent. We don’t have to choose! In fact, we
are more powerful, more engaged human beings when we honor and access ALL the
forms of wisdom available to us. And for those of us who have been well-schooled
by patriarchal traditions, we really need to learn how to drop into the full
presence of our bodies. Exploring the ways that Sacred Feminine wisdom shows up
in the body can help us get there.
There's a lot more Goddess-inspired memes and videos floating around the internet these days. Unfortunately, they are usually paired with
images of young, beautiful white women, are short on substance, often culturally appropriative, and many
times don’t bother to verify or quote sources. We can do better than this. We
MUST do better than this. There’s valid, credible information available to us, much
of it meticulously gathered by women who weren’t taken seriously and were paid
next to nothing for their labor. Let’s honor their efforts by taking the time
to learn the real herstory that’s available to us.
If we fail to acknowledge the messy intersections of spirituality, colonialism, racism, ableism and rigid adherence to the gender binary, we are bypassing. Because patriarchy has spawned them all, they are ALL inherently intertwined, and they are part of our collective lived experiences. As we seek to reorient ourselves to Sacred Feminine wisdom, we need to do so in a way that acknowledges how we’ve consciously or subconsciously been complicit in upholding systems of domination. It might not be comfortable to do this. We might it get it wrong, and that’s OK. We need to keep trying anyway.
