Why Women Need to be Goddesses

In these times, as women, you are called to reclaim your divinity, which is the ancient Goddess waiting for you to feel her. This experience of the Divine as material in the nature of embodied sensation will allow for a perception of sacredness that is not abstract and figurative.

In ancient Goddess-centred practices such as Indian dance, the woman's body and state of being are the sites for the material emergence of divinity. Women custodians of dance helped communities experience the Divine by holding it in their dance and their bodies. This visceral experience of sacredness is vital for humanity to feel the material connection between human life, body and feelings, and the earth and everything she holds.

The loss of this embodied connection has resulted in the chaos we have manifested in our relationship with earth. As women, you hold the key to radical change, as women have done since ancient times. The Goddesses wait for you to turn around and face them.

Why women Need to be Goddesses Transcription

SPEAKERS

Padma Menon

Padma Menon  00:00

It's time for us, you and me, as women, to claim our divinity, to claim the source of the Divine, the divine itself as Goddess, as womanhood. For centuries, women have been patient. We have knocked at the door. We have listened to innumerable male gurus and teachers, telling us what to think, telling us how to train our minds. All these 1000s and 1000s of philosophical texts that were the word, language, everything sourced from the mind has been given to us as the source of knowledge and guidance. And then look where we are today. Look where we are today. How can you think that scrambling in the chaos, continuing to rummage in this mess, is going to bring us something new? How can it be? And the Goddesses have been waiting. They were here before time. They were here before the Gods. This is true in so many ancient traditions, the source, the woman, the Goddess, before word, it was dance. The Goddess was Dance, dance was the Goddess. 

They were here. And they have been waiting. They have been waiting for women to turn around and face them. And when I say to you is that the greater the othering of women—and to me it seems like the intensity of that in our times, I feel it's even more than when I was younger. The the way in which women have been set aside, exploited, ignored, disregarded. That space of darkness is exactly where we can begin. Because the darkness is the continuum with the domain of the Goddess. That is why she lives in the depths. That's why she lives in the unknown. Because when we're thrown out of the doors of this system, the story, which anyway isn't working for anyone, why not start dancing in that darkness? Why not be the Goddess? Why not reclaim that divinity which is really a material experience unlike a philosophy, unlike a concept, unlike an abstract deity that lives in the sky. This is the sensation of the body. The Divine Presence, the Goddess is the sensation of the body. So, I'm saying to you don't bother to knock at the doors-aren’t your knuckles frayed? Mine are. 

Just step into the darkness because the darkness is what holds everything else. Even this story that has excluded us is part of this darkness, this divinity and when we know that, when we move that, when we dance that you will be divine be sacred, be free, be powerful—without knocking on any doors.