Get Activated
Can you hear her? The Goddess is waking up. She is waking up in all of us. Maybe this is happening to you, too, but you don’t realize it’s her urging you forward.
The principle of stillness, which I call the masculine spiritual ideal, has been driving our contemplative and religious traditions for millenia. In this model the goal is stillness. We meditate. We pull inward. We turn away from distraction. We watch the mind until we see that it is not, in fact, real. In the masculine spiritual ideal we yearn for the cessation of the mind, for the stillness and peace of deep reality, which is like the sky above, through, and beyond the clouds.
The feminine is not quite this. She is the weather. She makes the clouds and she turns the clouds, spilling rain and throwing thunder and quietly irrigating thirsty soil. The feminine is that which moves. In the core of the heart, she is that which calls us home- speaking our name in many ways so that we might hear ourselves. I’d like to look at these many ways and explore these pathways with you.
I’d like to start by looking at what we call “triggers.” For one, I don’t like this word because it implies violence. In this word there is an implicit weaponization of our experiences. Once the sprung has lifted we have no control or agency over the reaction that is now flying forward.
But from the perspective of the heart we can look at what might be called a “trigger” and reframe it as an “activation” that is actually trying to show us something deep. I call compulsions, reactions, and hot spots that show up in our systems and in our relationships with people and the world activations because these impulses are simply made of energy- energy that is trying to guide us back to the heart. When we have an activation we feel it. We know that there is something in us that is asking us to listen, to look, to see. Sometimes an activation lives in a thought, sometimes in an emotion, and sometimes in the body. Sometimes an activation starts in the body and ends in a deep thought- a surprising thought that is running our system from behind the curtains.
In the Goddess path we look at our activations. We do not turn away, try to quiet the mind, try to “let it go.” We do the opposite: we turn toward. We turn toward what is being activated in even though it can really hurt to do that.
The reason we turn toward this hurt is because we know that it actually hurts more not to look. It takes so much energy to keep running our patterns, our compulsions, our hidden thoughts and beliefs. Once these are seen there is a deep freedom, even if we must walk through a patch of painful briars to get to this freedom.
The heart is deeply free. It is silence. The heart is the spiritual ideal of peace and stillness. But the heart also has a heartbeat. It pulsates. It expands and it contracts. It does not expand and contract sequentially, but rather simultaneously. When it expands, the space around it contracts, and when it contracts, the space around it expands. Expansion and contraction are simultaneous.
Our activations are part of the heartbeat. When we see this we stop fighting against our “triggers,” stop trying to outsmart our minds in order to “let it go,” and instead turn toward the heartbeat. We ask that activation: what are you trying to say to me? If you are armoring around my heart, then what kind of shield are reflecting at me? How do I learn to listen to that?
This is the genius, the brilliance, the illumination of the activation. For all things that cause us challenge can also break us open into immense freedom.