| THE PATH OF THE PRIESTESS A way of everlasting learning (*) "A person of medicine, a person of true wisdom is somebody who learns how to transform her limitations into power. Not everything is possible. But everything is possible if it´s a true part of your destiny". I wrote this sentence as a part of a letter I sent to a young woman some time ago. She was complaining because "she couldn´t go to Glastonbury and become a Priestess of Avalon. She made me remember the times when I decide not to be an opera singer. I love to sing and I love to stand on a stage, wearing beautiful clothes, uttering heavenly sounds from my throat and receiving lots of applause and admiration from people. I sounds gorgeous, doesn´t it? But it is only a little part that we can see of a person who is walking a very long path. An opera singer has to work a lot to become that. She can´t do other ting but to train herself very hard, studying and practising during many hours. She has to be obsessed with caring for her diet and her health. In other words, she has to surrender her whole life in order to accomplish her task. So I asked myself, "Do I really want to change my own life to do that?" The answer was, obviously, "No". So I decided to continue working as a successful journalist and earning money enough to buy beautiful dresses and a very expensive car, which was as important to me as it was my little baby. Of course, I didn´t feel happy with my success. I felt an empty void inside me. I knew that I was living in a way that had nothing to do with my true mission in this lifetime. But I didn´t know what the mission was that I committed to do here, before my birthing. I was agnostic for most of my life, instead, of studying in catholic schools, or maybe because of that. So the Goddess had to call me many times before I notices that She was doing that! Anyway, it seems very strange that a girl who never believed in any other world but the materialistic physical world, who lived only inside the boundaries of their own mind, could be conscious that each person has very special task to do in her life... My first experience of the Goddess was something that happened to me when my mother had breast cancer. I felt really desperate because doctors had not a word of hope for us. So I remembered of a rosary beautifully made of perfumed rose petals which a beloved friend gave me some years previously. I took it in my hands and I decided to ask Mary for help. "I don´t know if you truly exist", I told Her. But if you are in some place of the Universe, please, send me a signal I can understand. I need to know how to prepare myself to help my mother. Whether you give me good or bad news, I need to know what can happen to her and how can I help her". I was sobbing and having difficulty breathing. I couldn´t make any noise because my mother was on the other side of the wall in the next room. Instantly I felt a sweet calmness inside me and I sensed a breath of fresh air surrounding my whole body. My mother was treated with hard therapies but finally she was healed. It was 17 years ago and she´s now happy grandmother and a very committed Priestess of the Goddess. Nevertheless, I didn´t yet know anything about the Goddess, nor that Mary could indeed be the Goddess. Six more years passed until I met an astrologer who told me about Her Divinity and recommended lots of books to me which talked about the Sacred Feminine. She also taught me how to read the Motherpeace Tarot Deck and with time we became friends. During a trip we both took to a sacred place in Argentina, I experienced what I knew later was Her call to become Her Priestess. We were going to a very mysterious hill at midnight. I felt scared and quite excited at the same time. Then I heard a voice from inside myself which told me: "You are really going to a place with no return. Are you sure you want to go?" I felt a different kind of beat in my heart, a sense o such an extraordinary adventure waiting for me. "Yes", I said without any shadow of doubt. "Just tell me where I have to stop". I added, remembering I was driving my car over an unknown road. The voice told me that I was going to receive a signal to stop. And I found it, looking at my friend's face. She looked so frightened. She told me she was hearing a voice inside her telling her we were going to a place of "no return" but she answered "No" to the voice. So we came back to the hotel without the slightest idea of the meaning of what had happened to us. As many women of my generation, I was captured by Marion Zimmer Bradley's book, The Mists of Avalon. But that world seemed to be only a fantasy in my life. Anyway I decided to create a chat room called Camelot, where I was Vivian, the Lady of the Lake. Each night for a year, I played with a group of people at being different heroines, heroes, gods, goddesses and other characters from myth and literature. If somebody asked me "Who are you?" I didn't hesitate to answer: "I'm from the Holy Island. I'm a Priestess of Avalon". I can't remember when this game became serious for me. One day I found myself being a kind of teacher and counselor, with lots of people asking me for help and healing, when I couldn't either help nor heal my own self. Real and virtual life seemed to start to blend, as if I were upon a barge, going nowhere in the middle of the mists. At those strange moments of crisis, I found Kathy's website and surprisingly I discovered that fantasies could be an important part of our true destiny if we can only find the courage to say "Yes" and jump the first step to the truly real life. I had thought I was condemned to live a life in black and white, while on the other side of the world a group of women were creating together another and colorful way of being alive on the Earth. I could see them dressing in red and fuchsia and orange, with beautiful hairdresser, full of flowers. Some of them seemed to be very proud to show their lovely grey hair as a symbol of their wise age. I could see their beautiful art: drawings, banners, sculptures, screen plays, I could see them dancing barefoot over the green grass o beautiful green hills, honoring the Moon and the Waters and the Sun and the whole existence as our beloved Mother Goddess. I felt happy to find such powerful women and I told myself another "Yes". I wanted to do something to help to create a most beautiful world. I didn't know exactly what i meant to become a Priestess of the Goddess. But I could guess that it means to surrender my whole life to serve Her. I wrote to Kathy asking for a place in her training. When she accepted me I decided to sell my flat and my beautiful pampered car, I gave away furniture, clothes, books and anything so I could fly lightly over 11,000 kilometres (7,000 miles) from Buenos Aires to Glastonbury. My one year of training (as the priestess training was when Sandra trained) was absolutely more difficult than I could ever have thought. The struggle with the language wasn't the only obstacle I found. Too soon my money flew out and I worked very hard to pay my expenses. Many times I felt confused and sad and alone. During the whole year I did pilgrimages to the holy place where I could remember some of my past lives and I faced my own monsters and ghosts, I wandered the dark trails of my soul to discover not only what my mission is, but who I really am and what my place is as a daughter of the Goddess. After my initiation as a Priestess of Avalon I said goodbye to the only place I could recognize as my home, I understood that the Goddess needs me in the sacred place where she called me and my sacred vow to Her was to say "Yes" to Her anytime and anywhere She calls me. I came back to my country where I have a lot of work to do, helping other women who are just as I was, seeking for their inner Goddess, struggling to restore Her beauty in their own lives. I love my work as a priestess, teaching, listening, accompanying, doing sacred ceremonies, honoring the land and all the divinity which lives "inside me and all around me". As a priestess, I've learned that my way to the Goddess is a perpetual learning. My work as a teacher is based on my own daily apprenticeship. I´ve learnt to accept and celebrate whatever lessons She sends me. And I've also learned that healing myself is the best I can do to help the healing of my sisters and our beloved planet. I don't need expensive dresses or applaud, nor fast and sophisticated cars in order to feel alive, because I've found the true song of my spirit and She is the Goddess. My ceremonial mask and robes are not frivolous, but my true sacred face and my goddess skin. They are a kind of vehicle we as priestesses need to travel to the otherworld. Where you see a beautiful Priestess performing a powerful ritual you can see a gorgeous lady, perhaps not an ordinary girl, but the Magic Presence who inhabits her human body during the ceremony. To become that, she must have trained herself very hard. The beauty you see is a product of the many kilometres she has travelled into the darkness of her own spirit seeking for her true bright soul. But it's such an adventure. So I don't hesitate to answer "Yes" wen somebody asks me, "Did you really want to change your own life to do that?" I can't imagine any better way to be alive in this beautiful and so exciting world which the Goddess creates and keeps for us. I can't imagine how the world could be so many centuries without the Goddess and Her priestesses. It couldn't be a true life. (*) Article written by Sandra Román, published in the book "Priestess of Avalon, Priestess of the Goddess", by Kathy Jones. losrostrosdeladiosa@gmail.com VOLVER |
