Kaliyani Sundari
As I lay in my crib, watching my mom teach my three-year-old sister the sign of the cross for the first time, I felt at the same time curiously mystified as well as left out of something that felt inscrutably numinous and sacred. They had formed a secret bond that I was not a part of, tracing intricate, coded messages, like Christian mudras; first over her forehead, then over her lips and finally, over her heart. Of course I didn’t understand that my sister was being taught because she was two years older. I felt unworthy and I cried out. As my mother approached to comfort me, I grabbed her hand and smeared it across my face. Confused at first, she soon broke into a wide understanding smile and proceeded to honor me with my very first ritual initiation into my spiritual path. What was an ordinary daily practice for my mother awakened the latent mystic within me, manifesting into a lifelong search for the true nature of Consciousness and my direct connection with It. From that moment forward and far into my adult life, this form of prayer became an integral part of my life.
Strangely enough, this early awakening to Spirit was part of the reason why it wasn’t simply the fact that I was sexually molested a few times between the ages of six and eight, that brought my deepest pain; the Soul-crushing experience of a fall from grace.
At an age when I was supposed to be dreaming of fairies and mermaids, at the prime of my innocence, I felt damned. A fallen angel; an impure soul cast out from God’s favor. This was an agonizing experience plagued the core of my being beyond any other psychological wounds it created. With time, however, as a silver lining always initially hidden within the cloak of our deepest pain, it exposed to me a spiritual wound that I much later recognized not only within me, but was as mirroring a collective cultural-spiritual shadow: Pious Fraud. This often-unaddressed shadow has been so repressed that it has managed to remain unchallenged for many countless generations.
Can it be that this collective shadow is the main cause of the pervading sexual abuse women have had to endure for generations? Can this awareness finally bring hope for healing the unconscious dysfunctional patterns influencing the masculine to enact these mental distortions that are now rising from the depths of our collective unconscious in many displays of public media? I believe so.
Although I had not experienced the traumatic impact of a physical rape or suffered the horrid torture of the long-term sexual abuse so many others have had to endure, my cultural assimilation of our statutory biblical doctrine of original sin was the death sentence that killed my innocence and separated me from the God I so worshipped and adored.
The subliminal understanding that women are born in shame, like Eve, the mother of us all, and at fault for the fall of man, was a silent cross I confusedly carried for too long and what ultimately broke my Spirit most and drowned my young heart in the shadows of shame, guilt and sorrow.
The sudden realization that sex was not only an “ungodly and sinful” act, but also that women seemed to be at fault from the very start, felt like a double sentence. Like a scarlet letter deeply brazed onto my heart, it painfully reminded me each day that regardless of how much I prayed, I was inherently and unquestionably unworthy of God and thus perennially condemned to hell…And for many of my childhood years, that is exactly where I resided within.
My awareness around the damnation of our human sexuality, in association with my experience, rendered me an impure outcast. I was now stained by sex’s “curse,” which enforced by a lopsided creationary myth, declared me eternally at fault. I was Eve… and Heaven’s Gates were forever closed to me. Or so I believed.
Time, in the surface, heals everything…and yet this subconsciously repressed material, like a virus within your divine program, corrodes, undermines and limits the heights women can reach, had not their confidence been squashed from such a foundational stage by the hands of none other than the ultimate authority: my own divine Creator. How could that be?
The notion that women are a mere byproduct of an original, and therefore, are precluded from being original themselves, is culturally woven into the fabric of our formative years. This seminal, culturally entrenched, and malignant misunderstanding of our true essence and origin, has been the main and only shameless culprit of the enduring vilification and oppression of the feminine, and her sexuality. Its insidious ripple effect continues to still corrupt every level of the female conscience and evolution even today. This deceptive message is the decrepit and still unquestioned shadow aspect of our entangled religio-cultural norms, which permeates and disseminates through countless avenues of our global cultural expressions today, regardless of faith or religious practice, through film, music, art, and more. It is utterly inescapable, and what robs us early on, of our birthright to believe in our worth in the most fundamental level; that of the Soul.
My greatest pain and anguish lay far beyond the resentment or fear of my perpetrators. The thoughts that kept me up at night were the ones that didn’t let me forget that the Spirit in me was unholy, undignified and originally flawed. The feeling that I was forsaken by God, somehow was something beyond what I have ever experienced as an adult ever since. I was unable to function and to speak. I had to stop going to school for weeks because I could not separate from my mother without going into a panic. Life became a torment as I absorbed all the guilt and shame that was fathomable, carrying the weight of eons of oppression in my young and innocent mind, body and soul. A psychiatrist had me finally submitted to opiates so I could go back on living and allow everyone else around me to do so.
After many adult years of Self-realizing practices, shadow work and much healing, I was able to lift the veils of my own unique experience, to see with greater clarity, how the actual unholy nature of this less-than-spiritual construct, this false postulate, by which the ends justifies the means, worked as a trap from which no woman could ever escape, even before she begins.
I deeply feel this ancient persecution of the female and the harassment of her sexuality, sanctioned by the genesis myth of an institutionalized spirituality, and further sanctimoniously enforced by our Church forefathers with iron fists, has for time immemorial been the culprit that usurped women of all aspects of sovereign and authentic living. In sum, we were from the start never allowed to be the true expression of our essences, for we were programed to believe we were something else. This “something else” was bad, guilty and thus unworthy of being held as equal, honored, or heard.
Though old and ever so slowly-but-surely dying, this paradigm still holds many imprints in our cellular memory that play toward our fear of being shamed, blamed, and intrinsically evil. Continuing to work its subliminal tyranny of keeping us small in a world in which, in spite of a few small gains, women are still falling far short of being honored as equals. Under its “holy” permit, this one-sided myth spread its ills over all things feminine, including the sacredness of our bodies; proposing even to this day that our softer feminine physical form is good cause for the masculine’s continued acts of perversion, freeing them from any form of conscious accountability and thus preventing their own soul’s growth and emotional maturity.
Under this agenda, all that was once admired or deemed sacred in the feminine by more ancient spiritual practices was methodically vilified. In one example, our menstrual flow once considered holy was made to be a period of impurity that once again, by the use of shame, separated women during “sacred” services. Women were the natural healers of our ancient past, masters in herbalism, midwifing, and counseling; in sum, our original doctors and shamans. Once considered wise and deeply respected until the biblical religions saw them as a threat to their “holy” mission, justifying the fallacy of the Witch Hunts that tortured and burned at the stake hundreds of innocent females and the males that at the time dared siding with, learning or standing by them. Just a few of the many means used to keep women as outcasts, thus preventing them from exercising their own authority in service to the divine. The implications have been endless from this underhanded canonical decree, that for eons, even as an invisible unconscious current, at a minimal, kept us small, discouraged and lacking in confidence, while at a more primordial and foundational Soul level it told us we were essentially not good enough for “God.”
Today, drawing the parallels, I realize that more than anything; I was just one of the uncountless victims in at least the last few thousand years of a collective spiritual rape of the divine feminine that began much farther back than we had ever imagined. Regardless of our ability to see it unfolding clearly within our lives, it is always present in our subconscious.
This ill premise is part of a religious bigotry, which having its roots set far before the beginning of our Common Era, has served to keep us women as outcasts from the priesthood circles that represented the apex of influence and empowerment from the start. Somehow spreading beyond our western religions to pervade even other less institutionalized spiritual paths such as Buddhism and Hinduism; and I say without a doubt, it is the primary reason for the discrepancy of freedom and power present today between women and men in our global community.
Ironically, today we can clearly observe the blunt objectification of “God” by man, using Spirit as a means to enforce a hypocritical agenda. Pious Fraud is a religious, ”sin-based”, male supremacist propaganda for the self-serving abuse of power and control attained through forceful and violent means; through the use of persecution, torture, and mass murder. To have our Spiritual representatives, our institutionalized religions, deliberately and unapologetically betray the true nature and essence of God, replacing it with an overly processed and manipulated pre-packaged version to suit their hunger for power, control, greed and domination; is the ultimate betrayal. And if there were to be one capital sin, this would be the one.
However, from the non-dual perspective there is no sin, there’s only choice and consequence that follows the natural laws. From this place we know that all things are always in service, and yet, the true God, exists as the ever-pulsing eternal inner spark inside our hearts, that is always calling us to show up and rise to the occasion with courage and raise our voices against all barriers that separates us from love. Our mind is a most precious ally as it expands in the discernment and awareness that is necessary to fuels our impetus to actively participate in engendering positive change.
The awareness that we have been caught up in a very predictable karmic wheel that is undermining our potential by maintaining a much lower threshold on our happiness is beginning to gain the critical mass point that we need to transmute, transform and transcend this 3rd dimensional frequency into a much higher one.
In service to our mindfulness and growing awareness, here’s how the planting of this Pious Fraud weed in our conscience is affecting us today. In men is, at its best, it acts as the silent reinforcing agent to the existing distortions that co-exist inside them against the grain of their own conscience. In spite of the occasional doubt and confusion it creates, even in the new generation of awakening men, when faced with the pain that’s natural to the tides and turns of life with its many times unavoidable wounds of relating, they become easy pray to an array of less than responsible and outdated default responses. In the unawakened man, it becomes a fertile ground for the growing lack of accountability that stunts their emotional growth and further maintains the large emotional processing gap currently present between men and women. It provides them a false sense of comfort and convenient escape routes that were falsely and yet “divinely” justified for them eons past, and which in present day, only serves to continue to undermine their own pursuit of happiness and corroding the fabric of a much greater reality within their own inner universes.
In today’s women, its subliminal version lives within the collective feminine programing as an insidious invisible prosecutor that entrenched in the female unconscious and subconscious mind, manages to maintain women bound by the chains of a cellular memory that produces at best, a tendency towards an “unfound” and generalized fear and anxiety that can range within many degrees of intensity and oscillating along the varying levels of day-to-day stress. This pattern often precludes women from stepping more into their courage, believing in themselves as capable of sovereignty, while making them more susceptible to self-sabotaging their own success when the opportunity knocks and shutting down their voices. At times, it can evolve into a need to overcompensate through overachieving, and proving themselves by mastering the “rules of the supremacist game” or on the other hand, becoming overly responsible within all their relationship emotional dynamic to the point of their own self-neglect, in order to compensate for their male counterpart’s lower emotional fluency, to prove their self-worth and/or to compensate for a lack there of.
Is it possible to heal from this?
Definitely. Individual healing on one end has many stages that go beyond the scope of this writing, and yet, it’s important to point out that it can never be achieved all the way, unless it is echoed back to us in critical mass within the collective. It is thus absolutely paramount at this critical and opportune time in history that we rise to face the dragon and look it in the eyes. As women, we must continue to grow in courage to release our trapped voices with a mix of as much passion as compassion, and begin to express our awareness of the truth as we pierce through the veils of illusion. Our individual inner experience of this awareness regarding our past programing is only a part in this healing process, as it helps restores our mental coherency, reclaim our higher-Self and regain, at least in part, the sense of honor we once lost.
As men, it is crucial that our privileged conscious and awakened wonderful masculine, get involved and step forward with action to give this awareness a voice towards healing. Ironically, I believe, men are the ones who can actually create this shift towards healing at a much more expeditious pace before we end up at the point of no return. You don’t have to be Jackson Katz or Steve Connell, all we need if for you to do your part in your own unique way, regardless of what medium you use, your voice matters much more than you know. As the saying goes, not saying anything, is saying something too, so we may just as well say it in a conscious way.
It is in the dissemination of our voices in unison, in opening to creatively share our stories and renewed awareness that we can heal the primordial emotional pain-body that lies beyond the mind’s ability to reason. It is through the integration of our inner individual healing process with the collective, our soul family, that we can feel the total embrace that heals us in all levels. From this place of rebirthing to our original innocence we can at last consciously mature and embody our divine nature, from whence we’ll be able to properly steward a more responsible, truly loving and coherent; integral and authentic, paradigm for living.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~*~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Kaliyani is a spiritual psychologist and midwife to the rebirth of the sacred feminine as an artist, producer, singer-songwriter, and author. Most recently she has launched her second single Tears For Inanna, a true invitation for women to rise and to become inspired to living as their own myth by embrace the mystic within themselves.
For more information please visit:
http://kaliyanimusic.com
http://stargatealliance.net
|