Francis X Caulfield

The Sacred Feminine and the Descent into the Body:
Mother, Matter, Matrix

For the past 20 years, my bodywork and healing practice has yielded a rich vein of information regarding the nature of the body. The giving and receiving of bodywork has revealed that the Body is a Teacher, Healer and Revealer of the Mysteries of Life. From this vantage point, the body is seen as the Original Body of Life, the Edenic Body, or the Body of Paradise. In Somatic or body centered therapy it is understood that the body has its own mind. I am taking this statement further. The body has its own cosmic design and multi-dimensional intelligence. The body is a living library of terrestrial, cosmic and universal consciousness and ancestry. From the viewpoint of holography we know that information that is stored anywhere is stored everywhere, a modern way of expressing the same idea. Unfortunately we moderns barely inhabit our bodies and live instead in our ideas of the body.

Most of my clients are women, thus much of what I have learned about the complete nature of the body has derived from my own work of becoming fully embodied and from working on female bodies, which has given birth to this article. By the way, it’s not that I don’t work with men. it is just that women are the ones more willing to do the inner work that is part and parcel of bodywork.

In the teachings of the Sacred Feminine, time is seen as circular, cyclical, moving in and out of its center. Creation in this cosmology is not linear, did not only happen hundreds of thousands or millions of years ago. It is happening right now. And it is occurring within the archetypal motifs and primordial depths of your body.

In reality, the human body is naturally attuned to the elements, to the seasonal cycles, and in a much larger sense to solar, lunar, planetary and galactic cycles. We are out of touch with this reality though it continues on within the depth dimensions of the body, waiting to be activated. Remnants of this attunement however are found in ancient and shamanic cultures whose mythologies and cosmologies extend way beyond that of our linear, mechanistic, logic oriented civilization.

To my way of perceiving, to restore sanity and truth to the earth and to the human being, the best and only place to begin is with the body. Obviously, aside from the Genesis story of creation, all humans are born of the mother. The words mother, matter and matrix are all derived from the Indo-European word mater. It is from the mother earth and the personal mother that all life materializes. It is from the material of the body that the soul emerges, while the matrix is an enclosure within which something originates or develops. A womb then would be considered to be a matrix.
In the Bhagavad Gita, the Song Celestial, the warrior Arjuna, while on the battlefield of life, asks Krishna, the Divine Avatar, why the human race has fallen into warfare and ignorance. Krishna responds that it is due to the loss of female purity or in my words the disempowerment of women. In the Carlos Castanada books, after a few years of teaching under the tutelage of the Toltec sorcerer, Don Juan Matus, Carlos is shocked to learn that Don Juan has another group of students composed entirely of women. Carlos immediately wants to learn of their progress and inquires who are the better or more adept pupils. Don Juan explains that it is the women as they are natural sorcerers. It is because women possess a womb (a matrix) that gives them an innate power.

In my twenties I was a teacher of the Transcendental Meditation. It was typical for women to have refined spiritual experiences and experience higher states of consciousness than men. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of the TM Program, explained this phenomenon was due to women having more delicate nervous systems then that of men. In Tantric teachings and in Hellenistic times the male could approach the deity through ecstatic sexual copulation with the Tantrika in the case of the former, or the Sacred Consort of the Goddess in the latter case.

For the most part these teachings are completely suppressed or violently denied. Women as a sacred vessel of ecstatic remembrance has been degraded in our religions as a temptation to sin and been replaced by ascetic priests wearing long robes reminiscent of female garb, demanding obeisance and sacrifice to an all powerful sky God. In most spiritual traditions the monastic life and the renunciation of the flesh and the pleasures of the body are viewed as the highest way to spiritual realization. In the biblical story of Genesis, Eve the first woman is born of Adam’s rib, a neat trick for sure and a biological impossibility. Concomitantly Mother Earth has been desacralized and defiled.

In his text World religions: From ancient history to the present (1971) Geoffrey Parrinder describes how ancient Greek mythologies referenced a splitting between male and female, mind and body. The myths described the marriage of Sky and Earth. Their union safeguarded fertility. Next the cosmologies described the forcing apart of Sky and Earth. They were no longer united in sexual union. Parrinder notes that this was the beginning of rationalization. Attention was to be withdrawn into the cerebral watchtower and for the most part the soul nature dropped into the unconscious body-mind. Sharon G. Mijares, Ph.D.

To find our way back to the Garden then is to find our way back into our bodies, back into matter, into the matrix and the mother and reclaim the Garden from which we were expelled. This is both easier and more difficult than it sounds. It is easy because the Tree of Life, the Axis Mundi, is encoded within us. This expression of the body is but one of several expressions. For instance there are structural, somatic, energetic, shamanic, alchemical maps of the body as well as a living cellular matrix that has recently emerged. The World Tree or Axis Mundi is a hidden and lost map that was known in pre-modern times particularly in shamanism, Tibetan Buddhism and western alchemy.

"According to this viewpoint the world has a center, and when you go to the center-which is inside yourself-there is a vertical axis that allows you to travel up or down. There are celestial worlds, there are infernal worlds, there are paradisiacal worlds. These are the worlds that open up to us on our shamanic journeys, and I believe we have an obligation to explore these domains and pass that information on to others. At this time in our history, it's perhaps the most awe-inspiring journey anyone could hope to make." Terence McKenna ethnobotanist

It is difficult because we have to let go of our cherished beliefs and assumptions about reality. More than that we have to confront the very forces that drove us from the Original Fire of Embodied Existence in the first place. These can be traumatic events, injuries and insults suffered in our formative years or soul imprints from other lifetimes that we are carrying with us in this present incarnation. We could also encounter archetypal memories that were disowned by our culture or our ancestral inheritance that live within the depths of our bodies. These can be terrifying mysteries that overwhelm the ego identity or personality.

“Memory is inherent within the genes and cellular structures of DNA. This memory contains the stories of our genetic ancestors and those of the collective unconscious. These memories also contain dramas depicting human pathos. They are teeming with narratives of destruction, power and beauty. Repressed feelings, memories, ego-states, sub-personalities and archetypal forces can be hidden in energy blocks”. Sharon G. Mijares, Ph.D.

So we retreat from these encounters and stay safe until an extreme crisis, trial or tribulation pushes our unconscious narratives to the surface of our consciousness. Or perhaps it drives our conscious attention deep into the archetypal depths structured within the biology of our body. Then with the overthrow of the old, a revelation occurs and beckons us forward into a new life, a new way of being in the world, one in accord and alignment with the mythological motifs that light the landscape of human evolution.

To return to the myth of the Garden of Eden, It is not so much that we have fallen from Grace. It is that we have vacated the body or the more exactly the union of the mind and body, for the life of the mind, of concepts, of ideas, explanations and so on. Here in our cerebral watchtowers, we abstract and conceptualize our existence. And what we don’t understand we fear and deny. Ken Wilber, in his book No Boundary, lays out this problem clearly. ‘It is not exactly that man loses touch with his body. Rather, he loses touch with the unity of the body and mind, the unity of feeling and attention. The whole clarity of feeling-attention becomes disrupted and distorted, and in its place is left compulsive thinking on the one hand, and the dissociated body on the other.’

The descent into the body is the descent into the unconscious, into dark matter or the dark mother, the dark goddess. Deep within the body, within the personal and collective unconscious that lives within the DNA, cellular matrix exists a rich and substantial library and living knowledge of cosmos, of direct participatory revelation, of gnosis. As the master Jesus reminds us ”the Kingdom of Heaven is within”.

The way to access this living material is through bodywork. Since women tend to be more embodied and more intuitive and feeling oriented than men it is perhaps no surprise that women would be instinctively drawn to bodywork, like a bee drawn to pollen. Since most of my clients were and still are female for me that meant becoming acquainted with the journey that women take in our modern culture which was a real shock to me. Yet the female body exhibited an astonishing ability to both be penetrated by light and become activated within its deepest core. The spiritual ecstasies that I was acquainted with from my spiritual meditation practice were innate to the female body, indeed to all human bodies.

In other words ecstasy is a biological, organic ability or memory stored within the cellular level. It is not a spiritual experience per se. Furthermore women would spontaneously travel along the world tree and receive messages and guidance from their ancestors and guardians. Given the right circumstances, women would merge deeply with their own source whereas men had a more difficult time merging, surrendering to being penetrated by a superior power. Women have direct access to this core espression. In contrast, men seemingly have a no merging allowed stamp on their personality Of course this is changing as there are more men embracing the Sacred Feminine, caring for the earth, for family and friends, returning the gift of revelation to the community.

Traditionally, male culture has determined to steal this power from women, as they fear the descent into the dark mother or the dark matter of unconscious. Please understand that I am speaking in generalities here. Some men do carry a strong sacred feminine sensibility while some women are completely cut off from it. Yet in the main it does hold. It’s as if men have a no merging allowed sign or imprint in their cells. Thus they are limited to penetrating and dominating with disastrous consequences. Actually males need to be penetrated by spiritual forces so that they too can merge and melt in oceanic bliss and surrender. Men too need to be impregnated with spirit, so the soul, determined to be of a feminine nature by esoteric and mystical teachings, can come forth from the matter of their bodies. Then the ancient dictum of the body is the temple of the Soul will be realized.

From the eastern traditions we see the rising of the Kundalini Serpent, the pure life energy and in western alchemy the activation of the inner Secret Fire, as exemplified with the medical symbol of healing, the caduceus. This is the marriage of the Solar and Lunar life force, the heirogamos, or ArdhanaIsvara or union of Siva/Shaki. In our modern culture we think of this as something advanced or cosmic, but truly it is a natural and organic expression of the human body. Ecstasy of union with the beloved, with the matrix is the ground reality and natural expression of the integrated human, of embodied presence. It is not an advanced spiritual state.

It is my practiced observation that the path of the Sacred Feminine leads directly to this state. In other words, it is not necessary or advisable to engage in advanced spiritual practices of dis-identification, renunciation and surrender to a guru, a philosophy, ideal or teaching. It is in the surrender to the life of the body and the subsequent revelation of communion and connection with cosmos and that the Return to the Garden will be accomplished and Paradise will be regained.

In the words of Joseph Campbell, “…this is it, this is Eden. When you see the kingdom spread upon the earth, the old way of living in the world is annihilated. That is the end of the world. The end of the world is not an event to come, it is an event of psychological transformation, of visionary transformation. You see not the world of solid things but a world of radiance.”

From Moshe Feldenkrais we learn that the first principle of somatic bodywork is there is no principle. The second is that reality is entirely experiential and perceptual. This means to throw away all your ideas of yourself and reality. You read a book about Buddhism and think that you are a Buddhist. Or it may be of Christian Mysticism or Quantum/Holographic reality or Shamanism. Yet cognition and intellectual understanding alone are the booby prize. Affect, emotion, movement and sensation always accompany the revealing of truth and the reclamation of your wild authenticity. The increased flow of breath, the sensation of freed up feelings, the expression of voice, the flush of emotion, the increased range of movement of the body and the ability to act genuinely in the world; these are the somatic watchtowers of becoming embodied in matter, of union with the mother, of your authentic self rising from the matrix.

Under the aegis of body-centered approaches to Spiritual Awakening and Personal Transformation we find various practices such as Yoga, Tai Chi, Aikido, the spinning of the whirling Dervishes, somatic and movement therapies, expressive dance, and activities all of which require a unification of mind and body of feeling and attention. For example while spinning, skiing, dancing, or practicing yoga, it is impossible to be fixated in the head if one is to not fall flat on one’s butt, let alone derive maximum benefit from the exercise or sport. To master these practices, one has to access the innate rhythms, energetic flows, and balance centers of the body.

By painstakingly and diligently recovering the vacated, deserted realms of the body through somatic practices from the eastern and western traditions we can once again enter the living temple of the soul. Wilber defines this state as a ‘blissful state; cosmic love, reception of grace (higher energies), heightened bodily awareness (supersensory); highest function of bodily consciousness. The existential centaur, (his term for this state) then, is not only the higher-order integration of ego, body, persona, and shadow, it is also the major transition towards the higher subtle and transpersonal realms of being.”

Again this world of radiance is the natural world of the mother, of matter, of the matrix and by extension in the bodies of the children of the earth and of the mother. The world needs men to recognize this and return the gift of ecstasy and radiance to women and to children. Then the world will once again come into balance and the sense of the sacred will be restored. This is simply the basic value of life conceived in wholeness, balance and respect for the mother, for the earth and for all of her offspring.