When I was ten years old—the space program was just beginning—my father told me:

Two astronauts went up in a spaceship to meet God. When the men returned, they were found walking around the base of a mountain, thoroughly dazed. When asked whether they had met God, they replied: "She's Black."

This "joke" is epilogue to ancient knowing.

The Mother of the Universe. Kali. Lilith. The Black Madonna. The Big Chocolate Woman. Images of the Sacred Feminine as the Big, Black Woman are our legacy; such images are again emerging into consciousness, appearing to us in dream and vision. She is asking us to speak and enact our truth, to show ourselves as the gutsy women we already are.

Who is she? She is expansive, inclusive. Creative, sustaining, transforming. Fearless. Abundant, immanent, embodied. Playful, relational. She moves in cycles and spirals, Her radiant blackness the all-absorbing mystery of infinite reality.

Where is she? "Abide in the core of your being—you will find Me there," she says in an ancient scripture of India. "Abide in Me as I abide in you."

I'll tell you my truth: the Big Black Woman lives in my belly. She comes to me on the breath, she speaks to me in the voice that rumbles up from deep in my soul. She is the center of my being and lives, coincidentally, in the center of my body—in this belly, this womb, this palace of creation.

I've been calling to her with dance and drumbeat, with tears and temper tantrums, with ritual and praise, with gesture and breath. I've been making a place for her within me. I keep throwing out the clutter of self-criticism and other relics of internalized patriarchal oppression. I offer her abundant room to breathe within my belly.

I met her in the process of resolving a twenty-year eating disorder. Even in the midst of my addiction I knew that recovery depended on discovering an inner source—a Deeper Wisdom dwelling within me. I hardly expected this inner source would be the presence of the Sacred Feminine. I hardly expected to find this spark of divinity dwelling in my belly, the battleground for my shame and self-hatred.

From the time I was seventeen I was at war with my belly. I struggled with compulsive eating, alternately dieting and bingeing. In twenty years I gained and lost at least 2,000 pounds.

In an attempt to call a truce I began to practice and then teach yoga. In my training as a Kripalu yoga instructor, I learned about hara-the Japanese word for the belly both as the central region of the body and as the home of the soul. What I read about hara totally inspired me. Strengthening hara with movement and breath seemed to be a direct way to develop the sense of fulfillment and soul-fullness I craved but couldn't acquire by filling my belly with food.

The belly as the source and site of our soul-power? I had only known my belly as a source of embarrassment, shameful evidence of my uncontrollable appetite. Now I suspected that developing hara would be a practical way to connect with my inner source.

Accordingly, drawing upon yoga and other movement traditions, I designed a sequence of eighteen hara-strengthening exercises together with a myth—a story of the heroine's journey—which narrates the sequence.

I've practiced this ritual of self-affirmation and spiritual empowerment almost daily for the last seven years. The practice has dissolved the eating disorder which used to torment me. What's more, it connects me to the tangible sense of a wise, powerful, compassionate presence within my belly—the inner source which I experience as the Sacred Feminine.

How do I experience her presence? When my belly is active and alive, I feel radiating warmth and expansive vitality there. I feel pulsing—a stirring or spinning sensation—as if a small world is turning there. I feel a spacious satisfaction, a sensation of being full and whole.

When my belly is awake and energized, I feel a resonance with the center of the earth, as if there's an invisible cord extending from the center of my body to the planet's center. I feel that from my belly I'm umbilically linked to the loving, protecting, nurturing, guiding energy that surrounds us. I feel that I belong, that I'm welcome in this world.

I feel a big, beautiful, black woman dwelling in my belly like a volcano rumbling deep in my soul. Provoking my gut feelings and gut instincts, she delivers wisdom and guidance in no-nonsense, down-to-earth terms. She's feisty, and she's infinitely loving. She reminds me: "Love your belly! That's where I live!"

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