Goddesses Never Age: The Secret Prescription for Radiance, Vitality, and Well-Being (22 page)

As you’re writing down your dreams, allow other images, thoughts, emotions, and impressions to arise, because they will be part of the message of the dream. She also suggests you give the dream a title, as though you were reporting for a newspaper. The title generally nails the issue. For example, you might name it “Filthy toilets and company’s coming” or “My childhood home is for sale” or “Basement floods: Everything must go.”

Keep a journal in which you record your dreams. You can also record them in the voice memo section of your phone and listen to them later. That way, you can correlate your waking life with your dream imagery. Over time, themes will arise. For example, this past year, I’ve had recurrent dreams about water—rivers, lakes, bathtubs, flooding living rooms, and so on. Water represents emotions and cleansing as well as spiritual power and abundance. I have gone through a huge amount of emotional cleansing in the past couple of years, and now I can feel how this process has been preparing me for the next phase of my life.

Journals can also be a great container for your feelings and help you break the habit of unproductive ruminating. They are an excellent tool for helping you reflect on your life, which is important when you consider how much pressure women are under to keep their focus on everything and everyone except themselves! I like them because you can go back to earlier entries and see how far you’ve come in processing your experiences and moving forward in your healing. I keep all my journals in the basement of my house (akin to the subconscious!). They are labeled with dates so I can easily look at what I was thinking, feeling, experiencing, or intuiting at a certain time. I also like to correlate them with astrologic cycles such as Jupiter or Saturn transits. Over the years, this has shored up my faith in the Divine and a Power and plan much bigger than I can imagine.

A LIVING, JOYFUL, PRESENT ORIENTATION

Emotions don’t have to get stuck in the connective tissue and energy system of your body, burying themselves ever deeper with the passing years. You can release them as they come up even as you’re working on releasing the old ones. If you adopt a living, joyful, present orientation, you can end the habit of letting unprocessed emotions adversely affect your health and well-being. Dwelling on the past and keeping the old stories alive by retelling them as stories of sadness and loss will age you quickly. You don’t have to be the grieving widow, parent, sister, or daughter anymore. Maybe you’re ready to stop going to the cemetery or to the school where they annually present a scholarship in memory of your late loved one. It’s okay to move on.

First come the grief and anger. Then comes the party to celebrate everything that was, is, or will be good. The party has already started and it’s called life, so put on your dancing shoes. I currently have about eight pairs of dancing shoes, and I keep them on an altar—with candles! It’s really just a display, but I feel it’s a tribute to the goddess of dance who lives within me and whom I have wanted to welcome my entire life!

Having a living orientation means paying attention to the goodness in this moment right now. Every time I sit down to have a meal with friends, we join hands and I say an impromptu prayer—I bring Divine Love into the food, I praise whoever is sitting at the table, and many times, I comment on whatever pleasure or good has shown up that day. This raises the vibration of the whole gathering and helps keep attracting more happiness, great people, and wonderful situations. You can do the same.

Speaking of shoes, whenever you see someone wearing a great pair, tell her or him, “Those are gorgeous shoes.” Compliment and thank people whenever you can. Share a joke and a burst of nitric oxide. Spreading joy in the moment is a spiritual practice—and so is saying yes to life by allowing yourself to ask for, or go for, whatever it is you want rather than giving in to fear and shame (“Who am I to ask for what I want?”). A couple of years ago, I asked my tango teacher, Paul, to come down to New York City from Portland, Maine, with me so we could dance
together at the opening of men’s night at Mama Gena’s School of Womanly Arts. He said yes. I was shocked—and thrilled. When I thanked him afterward, I said, “I can’t believe you came down. You’re such a great dancer!” His response was, “Well, I can’t believe you didn’t ask me before. Why wouldn’t I want to come down and dance with you in New York?” Even though I believe we should always go after what we want, I had convinced myself he wouldn’t want to dance with me because I’m not a master, like he is—and that it would be too much to ask of him to perform with me as his partner. As it turned out, I was completely wrong. He felt it was an honor for him and, in fact, the experience led to an entirely new career for him both in teaching tango and in writing about what this dance has to teach men and women about relationships and pleasure. The lesson is that you can’t get what you want if you don’t ask. And if your desire is genuine and coming from your heart, you will find that the fulfillment of that desire has the power to transform everyone who assists you in fulfilling it.

Discard the past and the old ways of doing things. You can create rituals around saying good-bye to the way you used to experience life as a struggle, or to your identification with something that happened long ago that you don’t want to keep breathing life into. Write a letter to the person or situation that you want to release. Read the letter out loud to a trusted friend—or just into the ether. Then burn the letter, letting the smoke rise into the night as a symbol of your transformation. Do this ritual as many times as you need to completely free yourself.

RELEASE THROUGH DECLUTTERING

Discarding the past can take a very literal form too. Possessions carry emotional energy and constantly talk to you, so let go of objects that you don’t love
even if they’re practical.
If you keep that ugly dresser that your mother gave you because it seems foolish to get rid of it, even though every time you look at it you remember how your mother used to harp on you about your clothes, you’re keeping alive all of that negative energy associated with your relationship with your mother. You’re not storing
sweaters in that dresser—you’re storing grief, hurt, frustration, and disappointment! Pitch the dresser and release those emotions. In fact, when you’re feeling stuck or depressed, often it’s empowering to clear out a drawer or closet, shine your sink, or even paint a room or a wall.

Clutter isn’t just draining. It can accumulate dust, mold, and mildew and cause respiratory illnesses. You’ll literally have trouble breathing because of all the old stuff you’ve been carrying around. That’s why it’s very important to let it go—along with any old emotions attached to it. Invite chi, the life force of the Divine, to flow freely through your house. Don’t create obstacles for the flow.

As an ageless goddess, you deserve a home that’s a haven from the outside world, a place where you can replenish yourself. I like to use feng shui to help me create sanctuaries within my home. Feng shui is based on the idea that by using elements of nature and arranging the objects in our physical space in ways that allow chi to flow freely, we become rejuvenated. My home hugs me now after years of working with feng shui. Your home ought to be your haven too, even if you live in a studio apartment. It’s difficult to feel happy, sensual, and sexy when you’re tiptoeing through clutter or your space says to you, “Take care of others but not yourself,” or “You haven’t followed through on your intention to fit in those clothes, or worked out on that exercise equipment, or lived up to the financial success of your parents or your ex.” Who needs that in her space?

You might think of your storage areas as the “colon” of your house. If these spaces are stuffed with old, unused materials, chances are good that your body will be too. Our physical surroundings are a reflection of our bodies. And like our bodies, they require regular purging and circulation. I hired a personal organizer a while back because I had renovated a bathroom and didn’t want to move into it with all my old stuff. What started with just one bathroom eventually became a cleansing of the entire house. Yes, it was exhausting, so I devoted an afternoon at a time to purging. But within two months I finally had the kind of physical space I had always longed for: neat and organized (for the most part). I no longer come across a stash of toothbrushes I bought on sale and forgot about. I don’t feel weighed down by
too much “stuff.” Better yet, I know where everything is for the very first time in my life! (I’m not kidding.)

Once you’ve created a haven-like home, establish routines to keep up your beautiful, replenishing space so it doesn’t become cluttered again. Do this even as you continue your emotional release work and it will be easier to let go of things you feel you ought to hang on to “just in case.” Every time you bring something new in, take something old out. Feel the pleasure of letting go of the junk and the emotions like guilt and shame attached to it so you can restore the flow of chi. And if you want to retain a sentimental memory, take a photo or digitalize your pictures and videos so you can go back and reminisce without having a basement stuffed with storage bins.

If you find yourself overwhelmed by clutter, try the following exercise for restoring order within and without.

Exercise: Decluttering 101

To further make your home a haven and let the chi flow, bring nature indoors through nature sounds, fish tanks, natural light, plants, photographs, and window views of nature—all of which have been shown to reduce stress.
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Decorate your living space with natural scents and flowers, or pinecones or stones from the beach, or whatever makes you feel a connection to the Mother Earth energy of nature. Bring in the sounds of nature: you can get apps for your computer or devices that play the sounds of birds singing, waves lapping against a shore, and so on. Design your home as if it were your goddess palace, a refuge and a foundation where you can replenish yourself.

No matter how small your space, no matter what limitations you feel you have in your life, open up to possibilities by letting your grief, anger, and shame flow out and your joy flow in. Emotional release and physical decluttering open you up for living agelessly, with a renewed sense of vigor and enthusiasm. In the next
chapter, you’ll learn about an important part of ageless goddess living that is easier to reclaim once you’ve purged the old emotions of grief, anger, and shame: your sensuality and sexuality.

CHAPTER SIX

GODDESSES ARE SEXY AND SENSUAL

Sex begins long before women enter the bedroom
and reverberates long after.

— G
INA
O
GDEN
, P
H
.D.,
W
OMEN
W
HO
L
OVE
S
EX

A
woman named Charise went to a community picnic where she began chatting with two World War II vets eager to flirt. Charise was lapping it up as these older gentlemen tried to one-up each other to impress her. “I felt like a French village girl sharing a bottle of Burgundy with a couple of hot young Allied soldiers,” she said, “which is strange when you consider both these fellows were several inches shorter than I was, and one even had to lean on a cane! I mean, they were in their nineties but I swear, they were making me hot! And I forgot
my insecurities about the weight I’ve gained and felt like I was in my sexual prime too.”