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The Feminine Grows as Love and Light by David Deida
As you grow spiritually, your feminine art and mastery can deepen. In addition to superficial energy play
(make-up & clothes) you learn to intuit and move energy more deeply.
(make-up & clothes) you learn to intuit and move energy more deeply.
The Feminine Sexual Essence
If you are a person who has a feminine sexual essence, (about 80% of women and 10% of men) then you identify with the light of divine love (rather than freedom of divine consciousness). You want to be seen. You want to feel radiant. You want your hair, eyes, and skin to glow, but mostly you want your heart to shine. That is, you want to give and receive love. Love is the way light feels. When you are truly loving, your inner light shines as a perceptible radiance regardless of your age, and this radiant love flows from your heart as an expression of the feminine divine.
Just as freedom fulfills the masculine essence, love fulfills the feminine. Whereas a truly free and conscious man is full of presence and purpose, a truly open and loving woman flows with the love-force of the universe. She is full of intuition, life, and light. She graciously radiates love-energy. Divinely radiant women attract and are attracted to men who are divinely conscious.
Beauty Attracts Wealth
Feminine radiance and masculine consciousness are attracted to each other at every level. At a superficial level, this is why physical beauty and financial wealth are so often found attracted to one another. A physically radiant woman can almost always attract a wealthy man, and a wealthy man can almost always find a physically radiant woman to marry. At a more profound level, a woman whose awesome radiance is founded in divine love is attractive to and attracted by a man whose unwavering presence is founded in divine freedom. A superficial but wealthy man doesn't interest her as much as a man of profound depth, humor, and free consciousness--and if he is wealthy too, so much the better!
You know how powerful your radiance is. You can turn it on and wrap a man around your little finger with it. Men are suckers for a woman's radiance. The more her radiance shines, the more a man is willing to do for her and the more his consciousness is attracted into her. Some women are born with great physical beauty just as some men are born with wealth. This kind of attractiveness is genuine, but relatively superficial. Eventually a woman's body ages and withers, and a wealthy man who never develops depth loses his charm real fast.
Feminine Spiritual Growth
Genetics and social conditioning certainly cause many of the differences between men and women. But spiritual causes--the differences between the masculine and feminine sexual essence--must also be comprehended so men and women can understand how to grow spiritually as well as biologically and socially.
As you grow spiritually, your feminine sexual essence identifies with more profound depths of love-light. In your feminine youth, you probably spent substantial time beholding yourself in the mirror, learning to brighten your eyes with various shades of eye shadow, trying on different earrings and outfits to see how they effected your flow of radiance. Little girls--if they have a feminine essence--don't have to be forced to play with make-up, jewelry, and clothing, as many mothers can attest.
Playing with dolls and make-up as a young girl is the beginning of your spiritual growth as a woman. You learn how to cultivate love and energy. Caring for your doll is the beginning of learning how to open your heart--regardless of your mood--and embrace the world in love. Looking at yourself in a mirror and feeling the difference between what a red skirt and a blue skirt "does for you" is the beginning of learning how to feel subtle flows and work intuitively with energy, how to heal, enliven, and bless the world with your bodily expressed love-radiance.
Do You Feel Attractive?
In your heart, you know that you are love-light. You know that you have the power to bless others with your love-light by shining energy through your body. You want your radiance felt and acknowledged. Therefore, a big part of your sexuality is about feeling attractive. Nothing is more important to the feminine than love, which shines through the heart as light, through the body as radiance, and through relationships as care. Your sexual essence is always shining, though surrounding your essence may be all kinds of physical blocks, emotional resistances, and psychological kinks which can limit your shine. Sex is one place where you discover just how open are your body and heart. As you make love, do you shine as the bliss of love-light? Or, do you close your body and heart to some degree, allowing less of your radiance to shine, denying energy and joy to yourself, your lover, and the world--and then doubting your self-worth?
As a teenager, you were probably obsessed about your physical appearance; what was most important to you was how others saw you.
If you grew beyond this level of feminine concern, then, as a young adult, you began to affirm your own radiance; what was most important to you was how you saw and felt about yourself.
If you grow from this level of self-concern into an even greater fullness of feminine expression, your concern is with the light of love itself: "How surrendered am I as the light of love which shines through the heart of everyone and through my body to all others?"
How Feminine Love-Light Grows
Learning how to dress and put on make-up is a full-fledged feminine art. Most women in our culture participate in this art to a greater or lesser degree. Some women master it, others only dabble, but most women spend a significant amount of time concerned about and adorning their appearance, becoming artists of energy ("Does this or that earring make me feel better?") and of light ("What color blouse brings out the shine in my eyes today?").
Eventually, as you grow, this kind of concern begins to feel superficial. Some modern women have chosen to jettison the feminine art oflight altogether when they grow beyond this level of concern. But as you grow spiritually, your feminine art and mastery can deepen. In addition to superficial energy play ("Plaid or solid?") you learn to intuit and move energy more deeply. Through the arts of dance, yoga, massage, and many others, you can develop the same kind of expertise you have with clothes, but with your internal energy flow itself (as well as with that of others). You can learn how to breathe and move so that your body opens to your deep flow of love-energy, and thus your radiance grows. As your bodily obstructions are released, the love-light in your heart is able to shine more and more through your entire body as a blessing force in the world, regardless of your age.
Your intuition and radiance of divine love-light grows deeper as you learn to feel, breathe, and surrender more fully. Is there a subtle tension in your heart? Are you guarding your heart, hiding the depth of your love, disregarding your ever-present yearning to give and receive deep love? The deepest form of feminine beauty is love itself, shining freely from the heart, radiating through the body and into the world, unobstructed and unguarded.
The Feminine Crisis
At their deepest level, feminine love and masculine freedom are one openness of being. Nevertheless, the feminine and masculine journeys of growth unfold quite differently. The feminine sexual essence identifies with the love-light of being ("How do I look? Am I loved and loving?") and the masculine with the freedom of being ("What is my purpose? Am I successful and free?"). Spiritual growth, for women and men, is about growing from superficial to deeper levels of these identities.
Feminine spiritual practice involves surrendering as and expressing the deepest light and love that flow through your heart, devoting your body to dancing love's dance, breathing love's bliss, and radiating love's light, moment by moment, regardless of how bad you feel. You don't need to deny your emotional ups and downs or your physical pains while you practice being love in their midst.
Your body is going to rot, no doubt. Sooner or later--usually sooner than you hope--you will look in the mirror, see your wrinkles, gray, and flab, and your heart will sink. This is the equivalent of a man's mid-life crisis, when his family life or career suddenly seems empty to him. The masculine part of you can experience the same mid-life crisis that a man does. But the feminine part of you goes through a very different kind of crisis, not of purpose but of light: "Am I still radiant?"
Because the feeling of light is love, when you doubt your radiance, your heart doubts love--unless you are able to grow in feminine depth. This requires learning to identify more with the radiance that shines from your heart through your body, rather than identifying with the superficial shine inherent to youthful flesh. At a certain age in middle life, it is entirely natural for you to feel like your body is "betraying" you. Once you have learned how to cultivate physical radiance through dress, make-up, jewelry, and the sensual sashay of a feminine body, you have made your youth obsolete. Your young body--which is naturally radiant with energy--has served its purpose for the sake of your spiritual maturation. It is now time for you to continue growing and deepen your feminine art of love-light.
Your Embodiment of Light - Locate the love in your heart and practice shining it through your body.
Allow the full spectrum, the entire rainbow, of love-energy to flow through your body. What might this practice look like in relationship with your lover? While making love, you can practicing giving him the energy of a mother, your body transmitting nurturing and comforting love. You can give him the energy of a wild animal, your body transmitting love through untamed, dangerous, bestial force. You can give him the energy of a whore, your body transmitting love-energy in its slutty, lusty, dark form.
If your body is resistant to flowing with some aspect of feminine energy, then you will limit the force of love that can shine from your heart; you will weaken yourself. Practice flowing with the energy of love that you most resist. If you are comfortable giving tender motherly love but resistant to humping your man like a drunken slut, then you have more to learn in the art of transmitting love and light. If you have a feminine essence, then you grow spiritually by learning how to let every shade of love-energy flow from the depths of your heart to the tips of your tongue, fingers, nipples, and toes, into and through all of your relationships.
Spiritual growth means growing in your capacity to incarnate love and light. Your body learns to flow with the entire spectrum of love-energy, savage and pristine, motherly and witch-like, bitchy and saintly. Ultimately, your love embraces the whole universe, the entire display of energies, every possible form. To love this big, you must be willing to feel every possible emotion, allowing your body to flow with every possible energy, whether you like it or not.
You Will Meet In Others What You Won't Embrace In Yourself
Whatever energies you are unwilling to incarnate in your own body you will also resist in others. Your very resistance will attract these energies into your life so you can learn to embrace the whole spectrum in love. For instance, if you are resistant to being uninhibitedly happy and sexy in every inch of your body, you will despise women who you think are bimbos, and thus attract them into your life. If you deny your own power to influence others through your energy, then you will disdain women who you think are manipulative, and thus attract them into your life. Until you learn to be love in every shade and color, you will attract others with the energies you most resist.
Loving Through Intense Emotions
To grow spiritually, learn to embrace and express every energy in love.
Your body grows in its capacity to give and receive every kind of light, beautiful and ugly, cosmic and infantile, pastel and dark red. To open yourself like this takes practice. It is easy to practice surrendering as love in the forms you find comfortable: your man massages your back, fixes you dinner, and then ties you to the bed with velvet ribbons in order to torture you with his tongue--you can probably handle that. But when you are angry--your man lies to you about something important--can you allow the energy of rage to flow through every cell of your body and at the same time keep your heart open to his heart?
Your body grows in its capacity to give and receive every kind of light, beautiful and ugly, cosmic and infantile, pastel and dark red. To open yourself like this takes practice. It is easy to practice surrendering as love in the forms you find comfortable: your man massages your back, fixes you dinner, and then ties you to the bed with velvet ribbons in order to torture you with his tongue--you can probably handle that. But when you are angry--your man lies to you about something important--can you allow the energy of rage to flow through every cell of your body and at the same time keep your heart open to his heart?
Practice love especially during intense emotions. Can you feel your anger and also stay with your man heart-to-heart, feeling the depth of love and yearning that churn in both of you? Can you breathe love--inhaling and exhaling love as if it was air--while also shouting at your man, demanding his integrity, tolerating nothing less than what you know is true of him?
It may take years to learn the art of magnifying your physical radiance with make-up and jewelry. Likewise, it takes time to develop your capacity to shine love through all the shades of emotional intensity. Ultimately, your body learns to incarnate every form of energy in the universe while your heart remains open to shine the radiance of love with every breath. Once your body and heart have learned to remain open, then you can practice relaxing as light itself, as the very love that you are, the deep bliss of being. As you learn to surrender, you also learn to trust this force of love that lives as you, beating your heart, moving your limbs, speaking your words, flexing your vagina, and beheading any fool who stands in the way of love.
Adapted from Finding God Through Sex
by David Deida