"Why did the patriarchy feel the need to subdue the feminine? They knew that women possessed powers far more potent than physical strength, financial wealth, and man-made laws. These forces include fearlessness in the face of death, the ability to purify and transform, the power to create life, the gift of inspiration, and , most importantly, the power of love."

Dr Christine Page,
The Healing Power of the Sacred Woman

My relationship with my body has changed dramatically. I’ve gone from wincing when I saw myself in the mirror to smiling at my image and laughing with joy.

Everything has changed. But not because of anything I did.

This reversal isn’t the result of any diet or exercise regimen. It’s not about clothes or hair or anything I’ve done to alter or improve my body.

Yet my body is happier and healthier than it has ever been. I would say she’s singing. Singing her love songs to herself, to me, to the goddess, to life itself.

I didn’t plan this shift. It was done unto me.

It began on December 1, 2014, when I got so sick I could do nothing but sit in my soul writing chair reading the next book on the table beside me, staring out the window, then reading a little more.

The pain and exhaustion ended on January 9. I looked at my journal entries, and was startled to see I’d been in that chair for 40 days. And when I looked at my reading table, I saw I’d ingested 9 books on one topic: the river of the divine feminine moving through history from ancient Egypt through Mary Magdalene.

In the middle of those 40 days, my relationship with the divine changed. Dramatically.

After a lifetime of calling the divine, God, I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. My hand would not write, “Dear God.” Instead my hand wrote, “Beloved Vibration of Sophia! (complete with exclamation mark). And with that, everything began to change.

The most startling change was the location of the divine in my body.

Growing up in a strict Catholic family, I was trained to obey the rules—of God, of the church, of the priest, and especially, of the father of the family. There were a lot of rules to be memorized and spouted back. Or else.

At the time, no one asked me where God lived in my body. That would have been a sacrilegious question. After all, the creepy Garden of Eden story made it quite clear that God the Father didn’t like the feminine body. My body. Not at all.

It was a long slow slog to relocate God from rigid ideas in my head to a soft warmth in my heart.

That drop happened in Oaxaca Mexico in 2010.

I held my first deep soul writing retreat in Oaxaca the year after Writing Down Your Soul came out. We were the only guests in an intimate 10-room brick hotel on a verdant hillside with donkeys braying in the distance, cicadas swarming the trees, hawks soaring above, and hummingbirds feasting on purple passion flowers below.

When I opened the door to my room, I blinked. On the wall over my bed was a large red metal sacred heart of Jesus. I thought I’d left that image behind in my childhood. But there it was. In my room. In everyone’s room. Restaurants. Museums. The sacred heart of Jesus was everywhere.

By the time I left Oaxaca, I’d fallen in love with that symbol and brought one home where it hovers over a small Dali drawing. (I think Dali would like that.)

When I made my 2011 mandala, I drew a red sacred heart at the center—the god spot—and closed my prayers chanting: I am a sacred heart.

God moved into my heart in 2010 and nestled there until Sophia nudged Him out in 2014.

Or so I thought.

But over the next couple of years I began to have an odd sensation that She was moving lower in my body. Definitely lower.

I was pretty sure this wasn’t normal. At the time, publishers were sending me over 150 books a year for my radio show and not one talked about the divine in your womb, or prayer happening in your womb, so I kept my perception to myself.

Then in December of 2017, I invited Kahu Lahela Johnson to teach us Ho’oponopono in The Lotus and The Lily, and the first thing she said is that in the ancient Shamanic Hawaiian tradition, your greatest intelligence, your divine intelligence is not in your head, not in your heart, it’s in your gut.

A wise woman, Lahela said, lives from her gut. Good thing I was muted because I shrieked YES!!!

A week later, on the winter solstice, I heard “Sophia’s Voice” in the night. It frightened me to be asked to be the voice of the divine feminine. On a visceral level, I knew it meant talking about the living presence of the divine feminine in the womb, and I didn’t feel ready to be that voice.

You know what happened next. I was awakened in February hearing “Prayer Artist.” And prayers began to come. Ten guesses what was in all of them: Goddess in the womb.

Here’s a snippet from “There You Are” written on July 9, 2018:

everywhere I look

there you are
there you are
there you are

inside the container that is me

goddess in goddess
lover in lover
holy in holy

From the moment this prayer poured onto the page, I felt the need to move my hands in a triangle from my head (goddess in goddess), to my heart (lover in lover), then invert the triangle and drop it reverently into my womb as I say holy in holy.

I like to do it three times. I feel the point of the triangle penetrating my womb and planting the seed of the divine feminine in me. It’s a very holy prayer.

All of this, it turns out, has been preparation for what Sophia is asking of my now. And what she is asking is big. Bigger than anything I could imagine.

Just as she prepared me for Her arrival in 2014 by sticking me in a chair to read 9 books about the divine feminine, this time She dropped me into my sister’s and sister-in-law’s back yard in Minnesota, where once again I had nothing to do but read.

I wasn’t sick. (Thank Goddess.) But my planned retreat hadn’t panned out, so I had a whole week with nothing to do but sit under their maple tree and read and soul write.

In exquisite synchronicity, I had three books with me:

1. Mysteries of the Dark Moon, by Demetra George, a cosmic introduction to the ancient pre-patriarchal goddesses and their relationship to the phases of the moon—phases that resonate in our wombs.
2. When God was a Woman by Merlin Stone, a mind-blowing look at the powerful creative lives of women in the goddess-worshiping cultures until northern white male-god worshiping tribes invaded in 3000 BCE. I was thrilled to learn that women invented agriculture, art, writing, justice, governance, healing, and prophecy.
3. Red-Robed Priestess by Elizabeth Cunningham, author of The Maeve Chronicles, eye-popping stories of a wild sensuous Isis-worshiping Celtic Magdalene.

As I devoured the wisdom of these magnificent feminine teachers, I uploaded clear detailed instructions on how to structure a Goddess Rising initiation ceremony to honor the return of the goddess—not in our heads, or even our hearts, but in our bodies—in our wombs.

When I told my sister-in-law what I was doing, she blurted, “I have to make you a quilt!” Between now and next January, she is creating a 5-foot ceremonial sacred fire quilt.

I’m on fire to lead the first ceremony, but I have to wait until it’s finished.

When I got home, I realized it's perfect that we have to wait, because before we can invite such a sacred powerful energy into our bodies, we need to clear out five thousand years of patriarchal conditioning.

Like Jesus said, you can’t pour new wine into old wineskins.

And our wombic wineskins are full of untruths that have been passed down generation after generation surfacing in menstrual pain, brutal menopause, and dozens of female cancers.

The hour has come to cleanse and heal our wombs and resacralize our relationship with our bodies.

But how, I wondered?

Oh me of little faith. I should have known Sophia was ahead of me, lining up the perfect teacher.

It happened during the Mary Magdalene intensive in May. Keren Brown in Toronto held up The Healing Power of the Sacred Woman by Christine Page M.D. and said, Janet you’d love this book.

I’d never heard of the book or Dr Page, but I’d been in a telesummit with Keren and was deeply impressed by her sacred knowledge of the body. So I got the book.

Oh. My. Goddess.

Dr Page brings the deep wisdom of Demetra George and Merlin Stone down, down, down into the womb—your womb, my womb—where we store not only our traumatic memories but those of our mothers and grandmothers before us.

I asked Keren if she’d like to work with Emma Kupu Mitchell and me to develop a new intensive to resacralize our relationship with our female body.

I am calling it Healing Your 3 Wombs. Your 3 wombs are your:

• Maiden Womb when you began to menstruate but under patriarchy there was no celebration, only an introduction to “the curse”
• Mother Womb who is your wild creative goddess-self capable of creating anything
• Myrrhophore Womb I prefer this title rather than crone because it awakens the memory of the ancient priestess lineage that resides in each of us and goes way way back before patriarchy

Keren said she’d love to work with us. So, I asked if she could lead us in some healing movements—she’s a dancer—or perhaps even a meditation. Emma and I almost fell out of our chairs when Keren said, “Oh yes, I trained with Dr Page for ten years.”

Well, all I can say is Janet didn’t plan this. Janet couldn’t. But the divine feminine can and did! And she planned it for you.

So now Emma Kupu, who will assist us in tuning into the moon movement in our wombs, and Keren Brown, who will invite 3 goddesses to teach us how to cleanse and heal our 3 wombs, and I invite you join us in this radically different prayer intensive.

We open Monday, September 9 at 7pm eastern and meet for 4 consecutive Mondays.

We'll have 1 full week to cleanse and celebrate each womb, then come together in our 4th gathering for an ecstatic closing ceremony to celebrate our dramatically changed relationship with our bodies!

Healing Your 3 Wombs

to falling in love with your precious, sacred, goddess body

Janet