Ancient Images of the Sacred Feminine:
Your Gateposts

What are the gateposts in your life? How do you cross over the threshold? How do you find your path through the gateway?

I often find myself banging sideways from one gatepost to the other, reeling between extremes, alternating between the opposing elements in an apparent duality.

Or, fearing one side, I’ll clamp onto the other. Can you relate? Fearing uncertainty, for example, I’ll wrap my arms around predictability. Fearing sickness, I’ll try to hang onto health. Fearing failure, I’ll squeeze on success.

I may get a measure of predictability, or health, or success this way, but mostly what I experience is fear. Whatever predictability, health, or success I achieve feels empty, dry, vapid.

Because what I really want is the juiciness, the vitality, that’s only found within the cauldron of creation. What I really want is the experience of the Sacred Feminine. As she advises in Starhawk’s rendering of an ancient incantation, the “Charge of the Star Goddess”:

I am that which is attained at the end of desire.

She is that which is attained not by clinging to either gatepost but by taking the path between the twin pillars and crossing the threshold. She says to us, “What is success, what is failure? Put them both aside and move forward: step into the central mystery.”

Practicing “Honoring Your Belly” has become a way to step forward into the experience of my body’s center as the dwelling place of the Sacred Feminine. The process of energizing my belly, moving my awareness into my core, has become in all manners a journey to meet the Goddess.

Love your belly—that’s where she lives! Stretch your sides, mark the twin pillars, step through the gateway. You’re on your journey home.