Circles
Image by Sanna Sahil on Unsplash
“Stay at the center of the circle and let all things take their course.” Tao Te Ching
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Last week Beth Kempton suggested circles as our topic, specifically, “What meaning does a circle have for you?” The circle is the ancient symbol of the Divine Feminine, and this past week’s lesson in my year-long course A Year of Self-Care was about Women’s Groups, because women have been meeting in circle for thousands of years. Rather than fight, or flight, women’s way of working with stress, anger, and fear is to support each other in relationship. Sharing, listening and offering understanding so that personal growth is achieved not through strife but through experiencing the natural flow of life in a grounded community.
A Fibonacci spiral, the energetic cycles of the moon & the sun, the eternal cycle of existence, even the spiral of the healing process-all of it reflected in women’s bodies and the earth we live upon. The circulation of blood and lymph throughout our bodies, the growth and dissolution of communities and civilizations, the endless cycle of seasons, weather, planets and life itself whether human, animal or plant, all of it is permanently impermanent.
Circles and cycles occur in our personal lives too. Rest & activity, ease & challenge, sparsity & abundance, connection & loneliness. Impermanence means that nothing lasts, and, that we can greet something new at any time. This is a sacred journey through maturation & aging as we dance our lives into being.
If I asked you to name a joyful shape, what’s the first one to come to mind? For many the answer is the circle, a symbol of harmony and wholeness. Circles describe halos, King Arthur’s table, and the sun in Egyptian temples. It gives equal weight to every position around it, a most stable, complete, and inclusive shape. Circles and cycles represent wholeness, completion and impermanence.
What place do circles have in your life?
In our patriarchal culture we have denigrated many circles and spirals. Case in point: vicious circles or going around in circles to describe difficulty, as if a straight line is preferable; spiraling down to mean that things are devolving and therefore not building up, as though up is the only place where life will improve. Other examples-artificially stopping menstrual cycles, pushing children to excel or progress faster than normal growth cycles cause, inducing babies according to a manufactured timeline, removing calves from their mothers in order to grow them in a specific way for the meat market, staying up too late at night exhausting ourselves trying to do more rather than honoring the body’s need for rest, forcing land to be productive every year rather than allowing it to rest in between. There are so many more.
What is the answer to this madness? Honoring the Divine Feminine. Bringing her into conversation, teaching about her, honoring her and her cycles in our own lives, accentuating feminine qualities, i.e. intuition, silence, belonging, receptivity, to name a few. She is the light and power of the world, inside our bodies and all around us.
I invite you to comment below about the Divine Feminine, her circles and cycles as they show up in your own life.
