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Through honouring the Feminine Divine, we reconnect with our inner goddess.
We respect and empower ourselves spiritually, psychologically, emotionally, and physically to nurture
the inner goddess and achieve balance in our work, home and social lives.
We will
- explore our unique bio-energy systems
- chakra vitality
- introduction to sacred sexuality (Tao & Kundalini)
- open circuits to enhance our sensuality
- connect and nurture ourselves
- ceremonies and rituals
- divine feminine archetypes and their influence in our daily life
- meditation & cellular memory healing
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Fee: $90/series of 6 workshop
Please inquire regarding our payment terms
Pre-registration required! We wish to keep our group intimately small!
Location: Inspired Health & Wellness Centre
24 Dunlop St. 2nd floor in Richmond hill
(1 block East of Yonge Street, South/West corner of Dunlop & Church)
Parking available
First series:
Sunday, February 24/08 noon-3pm
Sunday, March 30/08 noon-3pm
Sunday, April 27/08 noon-3pm
Sunday, May 25/08 noon-3pm
Sunday, June 29/08 noon-3pm
Sunday, July 27/08 noon-3pm
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Second series:
Sunday, August 24/08 noon-3pm
Sunday, September 28/08 noon-3pm
Sunday, October 26/08 noon-3pm
Sunday, November 30/08 noon-3pm
Sunday, December 28/08 noon-3pm
Sunday, January 24/09 noon-3pm
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Exploring female spirituality
Goddess Gathering is engaged in reclaiming and celebrating female energy. Women's empowerment is both the
ultimate goal and the path to the goal. We share a variety of beliefs and practices: different things
empower different women.
Spirituality of the Goddess Gathering is rooted in the daily experience of being a woman
Whether we are cultivating herbs or cooking with them, diapering a baby, giving a presentation, or dressing
for a formal dance. Our spirituality starts with our own search for meaning and encourages each
of us to reclaim female power. It involves the actualization of ourselves to be self-transcendent.
It teaches women to exercise our own authority for our own lives. It both recognizes and strives to
develop a basic oneness with reality.
Goddess Gathering explore each woman's connection to the divine.
We draw strength and power from our female ancestors, from the goddesses, from the archetypal divine
feminine, and from honoring our own sacred path in this lifetime. Focusing on ourselves as divine beings,
as part of creation, and as co-creators is incredibly uplifting to women and leads us not only to feel
better about ourselves but also to become more gentle yet confident in our lives. We believe that all people
are a spark of the divine and that we ourselves are the best determinants of what is meaningful in life, what
is sacred, what is moral and what is beautiful.
Goddess Gathering looks at Nature and the natural rhythms of life
We know that all life forms are interconnected, and we try to live our lives in accordance with this
understanding. Some rituals and practices are drawn from ancient pagan rites in which the seasons
and cycles of nature are celebrated and studied. We share an interest in the cycles of the moon and its
effect on our lives. We are learning about medicinal plants and herbs that nature offers us to heal and
treat ourselves naturally. We view gardening as a spiritual practice. Whatever the form, remembering our
connection with nature reminds us of our place in the world. We recognize our interdependence and oneness
with Mother Earth.
Goddess Gathering values the beauty and wisdom of our Bodies
Our psychological being has been severed from our biological selves for so long that we are completely cut off
from our true natures. One thing few women in our culture escape is a powerful sense of dissatisfaction,
even loathing, of our bodies. Almost every woman we know has a distorted view of her own body, always looking
to modify, coerce, force, and coax it into looking some other way.
Goddess Gathering encourages women to appreciate our bodies whatever size, shape, color, or age. This flies in
the face of all our social conditioning. The message is that our bodies are sacred, part of
nature, and deserve to be loved and cared for as part of the divine. Bodily functions such as menstruation,
childbirth, and menopause are considered opportunities for honoring the body. We are awakening to the joys of
yoga, dance, massage, and other bodywork as ways to bring us back to our senses, literally. The body has wisdom
for us if we learn to listen to its teachings.
Goddess Gathering rituals are based on ancient traditions. Our rituals are drawn from an array of
disciplines and traditions, like Native American, Buddhist, neopagan, shamanic, African, Hawaiian and occult.
These rituals to celebrate the divine within us and is a sacred act that we create and conduct.
Ritual serves many functions, including creating a sense of community and connecting us to the divine within us.
We decide individually which symbols have power for us, which movements make us feel more grounded in our
bodies, which words bring us strength.
Our Goddess Gathering is not based on any organized religion.
Our gathering is based on play and joy. There is no set of principles, established doctrine, written creed or
dogma and we do not worship anything or anyone. It is all about self empowerment and finding the divine
essence within.
Some of us belong to spirituality groups, some communicate on the Internet about women's spirituality, and
still others have a foot in both organized religion and nontraditional women's circles. Despite all our
differences, groups and individuals practicing women's spirituality share several core characteristics.
Contrary to what some may think, we are not a movement exclusively for those fed up with traditional religions.
True, many of us have felt deeply wounded by the religion of our childhood and will not set foot inside a church
or temple. These women are devoting their considerable energies toward restructuring their churches and temples
from the inside. Women are changing the way churches do their business.
Goddess Gathering are non-hierarchical. Our goddesses are encouraged to do their own research and
experiment and share their findings with the rest of the group. We rotate leadership at our gatherings. Even
though some members of the group may have skills and talents in facilitating groups, it is important that all
members are given an opportunity to lead with their own unique styles. And these unique styles and methods are
respected and honored by the group. There is room allowed for personal preferences and open discussion. Power
among women is conceived and practiced more as "power with" others than as "power over" them.
We believe in strength through consensus rather than through dominion.
Goddess Gathering offers aplace to strengthen our senses, intuitions and ways of innate knowing
We create the space and environment that foster the development of individual gifts. In our group, and
in all the groups we have participated, women continually come home to themselves. Women's circles afford an
atmosphere of discovery, growth and strength not found elsewhere in contemporary culture.
What Is The Role Of The Goddess?
What does these figurines from ancient past have to do with women in the 21st century? In our time, in our
culture, Goddess, once again, is becoming a symbol of empowerment for women, a catalyst for an emerging
earth-centered spirituality, a metaphor for earth as a living organism, an archetype for feminine consciousness,
a mentor for healers, an emblem of a new political movement, an inspiration for artists, a model for re-sacralizing
woman's body and the mystery of human sexuality. Why the Goddess? The Goddess is yet another manifestation of the
rebirth in feminine energy and power on this planet. Many women find something compelling about these images - we
dream them, we draw them and if we are given a lump of clay, we automatically form them. The Ancient Goddesses
resonate and activate something deep within us. We celebrate the goddess not by worshiping but by recognizing it
as the manifestation of our collective feminine from our past reawakened into the now.
Reconnecting to the energy of the Goddess Helps Us To Remember
And for many.. Goddess symbols may open wounds. We find that there is a profound disconnectedness from our
mothers. It can be very confusing, especially if our personal mother was "always there". We have now
come to realize that personal feelings of mother-loss reflect the collective loss of all women in
patriarchal culture. And so the spiral path leads us deep into the background of origins and forward into
the collective future in search of our "lost mother" and her wisdom. For many of us, the Goddess
becomes both the way in and the way out...the way of the future and a source of renewal and regeneration from
the past. Once again we can experience the freedom of the female psyche. To journey with the Goddess is to
experience the path of the embodied soul. It is the path of slow, measured turnings, the circling, cycling
energy of the earth, of our own body rhythms that take us forward. The spiral that moves us gracefully from
morning to night, from waking to sleep, from past to future, from foreground to background, from birth to death
and back again.
An awareness of the Goddess helps to awaken women to ways in which our deepest female body experiences, our
psyche's realities and our spiritual quests are all related. It is critically important to bring an awareness of
the Goddess forward now, because she adds a needed dimension of dignity and meaning to women's current struggle
of self-becoming.
The magical, mythological and feminine ways of dealing with existence--left behind thousands of years ago--
must now be reclaimed by consciousness. Even though the women's spirituality movement may seem like a new
phenomenon - something the baby boomers dreamed up - it's not. Throughout herstory, women around the
world have come together in circles to celebrate and pray, to explore their relationship to the sacred, and
to connect to the divine in the everyday.
Many scholars have unearthed compelling evidence that suggests there was a time
(beginning about 27,000 years ago and flourishing 9,000 years ago) when the way
humans viewed the world, and their role in it, was vastly different from the
way we now view it. At that time the kinds of ideas that are now viewed as new
and revolutionary were commonplace, the way we lived. These Goddess-worshiping
cultures shared several similar characteristics: the divine was represented in
female form; the cultures were Earth centered, body affirming, and egalitarian,
humans were viewed as part of nature, not masters of it; and the sacred and the
mundane were inextricably interwoven. Sound familiar? Not unlike the core
characteristics of the awakened feminine of today.
The Essence of our Goddess Gathering is to provide a flexible forum to look for and trust the truth of our
own experience - reclaiming spiritual authority and responsibility for
ourselves
Now is the time for these "old ways" to come forth openly, to be rediscovered
and reinvented for our time, to serve women serving themselves, one another, and the planet
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