I admit I felt a bit of doubt and uncertainty traveling to Cambridge University to speak about the divine feminine. After all, it was a patriarchal bastion of intellect and power for hundreds of years (founded in 1209!), and excluded women for much of that time. Although much progress has been made since its founding, the institution was built upon an entrenched patriarchal order of knowledge and ways of understanding the world.
Somewhat tellingly, my lodging for the weekend was called “The Fellows House.” And here I was, ready to talk about feminine spirituality and creativity! The irony didn’t escape me.
However, as the conference commenced, my heart and the Goddess began telling me a different story. I was the first speaker on the very first day, and my talk was entitled “Creativity as a Feminine Spiritual Practice.” Insightful questions and dialogue followed, and over the next two days, woman after woman got up to speak about a broad array of topics related to the feminine and the arts. The collective energy in the room was palpable.
The weekend brought together people from a myriad of different cultures and countries—Oman, Brazil, India, China, Japan, Qatar, Nigeria and more—25 different countries in total. This international milieu greatly enriched the global understanding of “She” rising.
One Lebanese participant described the gathering aptly: “It was a privilege and blessing to listen to all the different stories that liberate us and that make us whole.”
Circle facilitator Rona Frye shares a similar sentiment: “To heal the Divine Feminine within ourselves, we need to tell our stories and have them witnessed. The story itself becomes the vessel holding us up, sustaining us, allowing us to make order out of our jumbled experiences and bring them into meaning.”
As I walked around the university campus, I began to see symbolic signs of divine feminine life springing up in my surroundings. A beautiful majestic tree whose roots were so large, they were breaking up the concrete sidewalk: a picture of the old order crumbling and being pushed out by the new. A yellow flowering vine growing in the middle of barren brush: a symbol of new life blooming in spaces that appear lifeless. An old stone church building, previously empty, now a bustling cafe: an outdated relic renewed with community. The Spirit realm was speaking.
Even the college where the conference was held—The Lucy Cavendish College, named after an early proponent of women's education—represented the new. In contrast to the gothic, tower-like structures of the rest of the campus, the Cavendish College was a warm and inviting series of low-rise brick buildings. Their look and feel was in stark contrast to the cold, pointed spires of the other campus buildings.
As I watched the full moon rise on my last evening in Cambridge, it was if the Divine Feminine herself was saying, “Here I am.” “She’s everywhere,” I remember thinking. And, “She’s here.” At this university and this region of the world that I had pre-judged and limited by its more recent history. It was a wonderful reminder to not underestimate the power of the new to break out in the most unlikely of places. And especially in those places where we are most likely to make assumptions based on the past.
In many ways, the weekend was a reclamation. One evening, while wondering Cambridge’s stone alleyways, I came across a book entitled BlueStockings: The First Women’s Movement. In it, I found the stories of five women who were early forerunners for women’s rights in Britain in the late 1700’s. They made serious attempts to shift the culture and belief system of that period, which, in essence, banned girls and women from learning. Women who aspired to learn anything, or who enjoyed writing or deep thinking of any kind, were forbidden to pursue these activities. And if they tried, or appeared too curious or too ambitious, they were scorned and outcast from society. The sentiment of the time was: “Fits of writing are unbecoming in a girl.”
Fast forward to 2024: A room full of deep-thinking women publicly sharing their insights, writing, and ideas at an institution that was the definition of patriarchal thought for centuries is a reflection of how far we have truly come.
Embracing our voices not only leads to our own reclamation, it also leads to the reclamation of our ancestors. I had a very strong sense of doing something powerful for my lineage when I spoke with all of the other women gathered at Cambridge. It was as if chains were falling off of them.
By using my voice in a way that is aligned with my dharma, something significant was reclaimed for them—something that either wasn’t possible or simply didn’t happen in their lifetimes (due to either cultural restrictions or to their own internalized limits).
Furthermore, any reclamation work we do not only heals our ancestral lineage, it also showers blessings upon our descendants. Our work paves the way for future generations to rise (and this is true for all of us, whether we’ve chosen to birth children or not).
The old ways and order of things don’t have dominion forever. In this, we can take hope. The new is always springing forth, regardless of what historical or current realities provoke us to fear and doubt. As we regain and amplify our vision to see Her, anchoring in a higher reality, we create the seed bed that shapes the future.
The new is here, and She is rising.