If you’ve hesitated to pick up a book on goddess spirituality or the sacred feminine before, this one may change your mind. Cynthia Abulafia is uniquely qualified to open up a rich, ancient tradition for those who are curious and seeking.
Abulafia’s is a book about curiosity, and also about nurturing and reverence as spiritual practices.
We appreciated how clear the writing was — for instance, at the start when she answers the first and obvious questions that people might have: “Who is She? What does it mean?” — to which the answer begins, “She is embodied existence — our thoughts, emotions, sensations, perceptions, and memories. She is mother, matrix, and movement.”
As for the answer to “What does it mean?” — Abulafia begins with, simply, “the Goddess is waking up.” She then unpacks ways to look to the normal aspects of life with fresh insight, in order to find the meaning of things. This includes looking to your dreams, your movements and your body, as well as your community, and your current spiritual practices, such as meditation or yoga, in new ways.
“The Goddess Path” is laid out clearly here, including sources throughout history of this spirituality, lineages and the importance of the feminine, and then how curiosity is at the root of all goddess explorations. Abulafia writes: “Curiosity is almost the same thing as reverence. Curiosity is reverence in action — reverence in motion. It is reverence directed at the heart.”
Throughout the chapters there are important teachings about the body and how we often neglect it or don’t listen to it as we should; the relationship between thought and emotion in our lives; deep intuition; the role of relationships and the part of sex in human life; and then transcendence.
Most of the sources quoted are from other teachers of goddess spirituality, but also from Eastern religious texts such as the Bhagavad Gita, the tenth-century Trika Shaiva teacher Utpaladeva, and contemporaries including Red Pine, Jeffrey Kripal, and Chogyam Trungpa.
A spiritual practice, or a series, come at the end of each chapter. Sometimes they are reflective questions, and other times they’re offered in a step-by-step format.
