A Meditation on Womb Wisdom – Five Gifts
“Remembrance”
Today we are pleased to have a guest post from WeSpace participant and friend Vivien Claire.
Vivien Claire has immersed herself in the writings and prayerful practices of Christian mysticism for most of her life - and drinks freely from other streams of wisdom. She loves the way poetry, storytelling, sacred rites and icons can be transformative art forms that are ever new. She lives in a rural village in the Little Karoo of the Western Cape - and is the creator of Magdala - a home for heart to heart conversation and community (www.magdala.space). She is harvesting fruit from her experience of being present and listening creatively in many roles – as a poet, hospital chaplain, spiritual director; a retreat leader and Focusing trainer both in the UK and in South Africa. Nowadays she leans towards becoming a wisdom keeper and elder planting seeds for the future.
With one hand on the heart and the other gently covering the pelvic area we have a simple physical gesture for tuning into a quite distinctive kind of spiritual intelligence. This ‘heart-womb’ spiritual intelligence comes alive when we become aware of the womb centre in relation to the heart centre - two connecting nodes. Or to say it another way – when the deepest source of love in us is connected to the deepest source of fertility and creativity in us womb wisdom comes to life. Many healing gifts begin to rise spontaneously into our awareness. They might include these five.
The first gift renews the sense of sacred to the physical body.
When women connect with their womb centre they may be in truth connecting with their uterus – that small yet extraordinary physical organ tucked away inside of them. They may be offering appreciative attention to their uterus with its astonishing capacity for expansion, holding, nourishing human life and retracting. And this appreciative attention has the power to activate the whole immensely complex neural and hormonal and energetic system in that area so it pulses with life. This womb aliveness can be sensed even after surgical removal, before and after menopause, and whether or not a woman is able to conceive.
My hunch is that men practicing whole body contemplation are connecting with women’s bodies in an act of profound empathy that goes beyond the logic that says ‘I haven’t got a womb’. Perhaps they do this through the innate intelligence of their own reproductive organs that knows everything it needs to know, organically speaking, about continuing human life. We could see this as a moment of profound and healing empathy when both men and women are sensing together into the visceral aliveness of the womb centre. This contemplative ‘one-ing’ will surely begin to heal learned shame, or neglect, or trauma in this area of the body most associated with fertility and sexuality.
The second gift restores birth as a primary spiritual experience.
The body memory of birth as primal experience and rite of passage is held in the womb centre. Birth is the most unifying, leveling and universal experience – along with death. Somewhat obviously - no one can be excluded. A spirituality that embraces that original primary human experience cuts through any exclusions on the basis of gender, sexual orientation, marital status or excluding dogma and morality. We all come from a woman’s womb and in this belong to humanity. In our contemplation of wombs, we come to know our belonging to the same spiritual source - which we may name if we wish the Womb of God.
“Bringing Love to Everything”
The third gift restores the flow of eros energy as a spiritual resource.
In much of Western Christian spirituality the purpose of eros energy is limited to sexual relationships. Many are not aware of the wonderful circuitry between the pole of the heart centre and the womb centre outside of sexual activity. The practices of whole-body awareness can restore this flow of eros energy and bring back into play the qualities of holy eros.
Eros energy has particular qualities of tenderness, of intensity, of beauty, devotion and wholesome delight. Eros energy is drawn from the womb centre up into the heart centre to nourish and intensify the spiritual heart of perception. Eros energy moves not only within us, but between us and beyond us radiating out into the world. The divine eros in the deeper self attracts human eros infusing and aligning the powerful sexual instincts for its own purposes. This is vitalising for healthy bodies, for bringing a quality of devotion to all kinds of intimacy. This flow feeds the deep longing that enables us to fulfil our late life vocation and our spiritual life purpose. And it is eros longing that is our fuel for devotion and prayer.
A fourth gift is a mystical love language.
Where we experience for ourselves mystical communion in the mystical body of Christ, we try to find words – even though what we experience words cannot express. So gradually a shared vocabulary of love and communion and new life grows as we evolve and grow. Spiritual womb language is much loved by spiritual masters because it helps them speak of the changing states of mind and soul. St. Augustine says, “What does it avail me that this birth is always happening, if it does not happen in me? That it should happen in me is what matters.” Spiritual masters speak of a sense of ‘virginal’ ripeness in a soul, of periods of fertility and other-times of barrenness, of a state of being consumed by sweetly piercing spiritual longing. They speak of devotion and prayer as an infusion of spirit penetrating the core of our being, of an inner ‘marriage’ between masculine and feminine. Womb language is helpful archetypal language of hiddenness - a hidden conceiving, of periods of womb-like darkness and expectant waiting, of dying being a birth. It is also a language for spiritual evolution speaking of the long labour of love and being spiritually mid-wifed into a new humanity.
The fifth gift opens us to the spiritual feminine.
In all of these gifts experience we may begin to ‘taste’ the spiritual feminine as a mothering presence. We may be specially open to her presence when the womb centre and the heart centre align. We may be opening to Her not as separate and other to us, but in am among us. As theologian Matthew Fox observes - ‘We are all meant to be mothers of God.’ Surely this is the gift of all wisdom gifts from the womb centre.