Divine Feminine Starts With Your Playful Self

The doorway to the practice of the the Divine Feminine or the Goddess tradition in Indian dance is by coming into your playful self. This is the self that is free from the burdens of past knowledge and can be open to life as a ever renewed adventure and revelation. This playful self is the soil in which the Goddess wisdom flowers for you to find your unconditional freedom. The playful self is an important practice for women whose essence is constrained by the demands of the many roles, most of which demand a linear way of living. Women often find that even their spiritual practice has been subsumed by this masculine linear drive of daily life. The Divine Feminine practice invites women to enliven their spiritual practice by stepping into their nonlinear selves. Indian dance, as the modality of ancient Goddess wisdom from Indian culture, is a powerful language of nonlinear transformation.

Divine Feminine Starts with Your Playful Self Transcript

SPEAKERS

Padma Menon

Hello there, welcome to my channel. I'm so happy and delighted that you will join me today. On this channel, I talk about ancient goddess practices and traditions from my culture, which is India. And today, I wanted to share some reflections on how a spiritual practice can become stuck at times, especially for us, you and me, as women. In my individual program, I work with a woman who has a job in a corporate workplace. As you know, many corporate workplaces are emotion neutral, they don't really want you to bring yourself there. You are there as a human resource to do certain jobs and meet the outcomes of the organization. So she has quite deliberately decided she doesn't want to be too ambitious. She has a reasonable job. She's very good at her job. She's very diligent, she's very quiet, just gets the things done. She's also a single mother, and she has been the breadwinner in her family for her two children. And she has been there for them, and she has supported them and set them on their lives.

For many years, she's had a spiritual practice, she has been to several masters, and she has really committed herself to deepening her practices over a period of time, the spiritual practice is a place where she really feels seen, she feels in that space, that she has something magical, something special, something deep to offer in her life.

When we started working together, I noticed that her spiritual practice had become stuck. And what I mean by this is that, because it was so important for her, you know, here she was, in other so many other roles, almost not being seen, because she was so good at what she did. People didn't even see the things happening, she drew so little attention to herself. She was such a generous, doer and giver. And the spiritual practice was literally the only place where she felt seen and acknowledged. And because it was so important for her, she had really set it and it was almost like she had nailed it down. And suddenly, there she was, with this yearning for something that was present something that was playful, and something that was nonlinear, because suddenly the spiritual woman had also become a role, just like the role of the corporate officer, the role of the mother, the role of the front, this had become another role. And it had lost its a liveliness, and it had lost its nonlinearity. Its playfulness.

And so the goddess practice, it starts with coming into your playful self, coming into the youth—but it's not about the age. It's about coming into the self without any past. It it's that self which is  in amazement. Everything is new, you see with new eyes, everything is alive. It's a self that has no time. You're just in the moment playing, you're not coming from anywhere and you don't have anywhere to go. You don't have anything particular to achieve. You are just there just like children are just playing and you are in abandon. You are happy to be taken.

You can fly off the ledge without a parachute. And the wings will you will trust that the wings will come. It's that kind of Abandon. And so that is the start of the goddess practice. And that really helped her to realize what she needed to bring to her spiritual practice to enliven it again, so that it can really be for her what she needed it to be in her life.