Title: goddess of transformation

Gender: Female

Age: Ageless

Sun Sign: Sagittarius

Chinese Sign: Water Horse

Location: San Antonio, Texas

As a Sagittarius with Pluto ~ the planetary archetype of death, transformation and rebirth ~transiting my sign from 1994 until 2008, I've shed my skin and grown a new one many times. ( Other Sages can relate!) I am no stranger to metamorphosis. Frankly, I'm proud to claim spiritual promiscuity. Journeying into the spiritual unknown is my signature…for this lifetime, absolutely. And I am not done yet, or even close to honoring the spiritual nudges which impel me and our green planet towards rebirth and transformation. 

The Cliff Notes of my spiritual journey go like this: I fainted dead out when I “joined” the Presbyterian Church at twelve or so. I'm not actually sure how old I was. Only that the minister was anxiously fanning and hovering when I finally came around. He smiled hopefully and said, “Well, I guess it took.” 

I wasn't so sure. And went right back to my uneducated worship of clouds, birds, trees and good ole' dirt as my oldtime religion…very old, actually. As a young child I was religiously innocent. I had no idea that ancient cultures once worshiped The Great Goddess. I had no clue about Druid worship in the sacred oak groves. The magic which I experienced in nature was simply natural. I assumed that everybody talked to the wind and heard it whisper their name.

And then I grew up and became sensible about religion rather than instinctual. Throughout my married adult years I mainstreamed my faith, seated fourth row right in an Episcopalian “faith of our fathers” church. But a six year intense study, and word-by-word exegesis of every syllable in the canonized Christian Bible, transported me through mystical  portals. The inner doorway to other worlds opened wide. I met Sophia/Wisdom.  Jesus made love to me. Entranced and on fire to translate my mystical experiences, the study of Carl Jung provided structured knowledge of the deep unconscious. 

I was naive. I assumed that others in the church were experiencing similar transcendent connections with The Divine. It shocked me when sharing my experiences didn't go well within the conservative halls of Christendom. Announcing that I had the plague would have been more welcome.  

It was lovely ~ actually ~  to be branded as dangerous…if not outright Satanic.  Once I digested the notion that my experiences qualified me as a certified heretic, I was released from the confinement of orthodoxy and free to wantonly explore all the great religions. There is something very right about being wrong. In my spiritual search I found the Christian Mystics. It did me a world of good.

Navigating the realms of nonordinary reality with an edgy confidence (…off the deep end the church would say?) I soon recalled past lives. Or was it  collective unconscious recall? No matter the construct ~ or the paradigm  ~ in a deep cellular way I experienced myself as a Druid, an Essene, a Native American, a Wolf, a Rock (this was a LONG metmorphic lifetime!), a Suffragist, African Tribal Goddess. In these mystical re-member-ings, I discovered the common bonds of love across cultures, within antimate and inantimate ensoulments, and the great truth at the core of all religions: 

By my mid-thirties I was on a spiritual roll. I couldn't learn fast enough. Encounters with the numinous rekindled passion to follow the paths and purposes my soul had traveled all along. There were relationship casulties along the way. No adventure is without peril…but I do love rocky trails. 

In the Eighties I fully broke from “the church” (as organized Western Christianity). Since then I've sweated and smoked pipe with Native Americans, sat, drunk tea and walked for peace with my sangha, retreated in mystical communal space; worshipped The Great Goddess, studied alternative healing practices, followed Thoreau's footsteps from deep wood to misty shore and lived the gypsy life ~ most especially during this recent  fourteen year Pluto Transit of Sagittarius. Something must die before the new can take root. Transformation doesn't happen without loss. Of course I've experienced actual deaths and normal human heartache during the past decade. Personal evolution demands that we hang in the dangle between the life we are leaving and the life that is not yet fully in form. 
  
Fortunately, from early adulthood until now, my spiritual quest has enabled me to pick up a couple of degrees. Beginning in the Eighties and my break with orthodoxy, I embraced not only the world's great religions, but also transpersonal psychospiritual work as a licensed psychotherapist.  In love with healing practices, I've gathered a back pack of experiental therapies which integrate body/mind/sprit in the now: Gestalt, Eriksonian Hypnosis, Psychodrama, Breathwork, Focusing, EMDR, the list goes on.  

My website design (see link below) reflects a numinous experience which has guided me for many years. In a deeply meditative state…  A glowing sun ~ streaming brilliant beams of light ~ completely fills my inner eye. A silvery moon, smaller than the sun, yet no less bright, gently eclipses the solar brillance. Radiant silver and golden beams entwine. A resonant inner voice declares: When the sun and the moon become one, there will be roses without thorns.

I am transfixed and en-tranced as the mind-movie scrolls forward through my imagination. The luminous sun and moon transform into a circular stained glass window…and a delicate pink rose glides into the elliptical center of the joined sun and moon…now become one.

As a student of Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell and Stan Grof, I recognized the symbology: The sun is masculine. The moon is feminine. The rose represents the Goddess. The circle is a mandala which symbolizes wholeness.There are many layers of probable meaning built into the simplicity of the image. I translate the message as universal wisdom and prophesy and at the same time, a personal message, meant to fertilize my own growth: When the sun and the moon become one, there will be roses without thorns.

Studying the Nag Hammadi scriptures ~ a few years after I experienced this vision ~ expanded my knowledge of Gnostic beliefs and gave me hope that humanity is awakening to greater truth:  For two thousand years, Western Civilization has lived with only half-truth. Jesus was not a celibate priest. Jesus very much loved women and Magdalene in particular. 

This does nothing to erode my belief that Jesus was an avatar, savior, holy, and even Divine, man. Knowledge of Jesus as a completely human man encourages me to believe that the early church acknowledged and honored sacred partnership between men and women. The relationship between Jesus and Mary is therefore, the MODEL for human partnership in the here and now!  The role of women has been repudiated for far too long. And you don't have to be a feminist ~which I'm not ~ to grasp this truth: men and women are equal…neither greater than the other…we are meant to bond and equally share the business of being human.

So this is my work, to heal the split between men and women (it's the same dance in gay relationships!), between patriarchy and matriarchy–to reconcile the opppostion  between the chalice and the blade.  And not just at the level of human partnership, but to heal the split within the psyches of both men and women. This in turn, will transform western males–who choose war over negotation–into completed men, whole, and in partnership with their inner (feminine) intuitive awareness.

And we women can heal and “make love to” the dark man who sometimes torments us in dreams, and who we sometimes fall in love with in the real world as a human partner. Loving our own inner male empowers a woman, and we no longer “need” our partner to do for us what we have never learned to do for ourselves.This is true rather we are in a man/woman relationship, a woman/woman relationship, or a man/man relationship. Doing the integrative work, a woman becomes both yin and yang. If we pay attention (I do this sometimes) we might learn that within ourselves, and manifesting in our outer lives, we are both male and female…embodied in female form.  

Make no mistake, a whole woman does long for a flesh and blood partner…a best friend…someone to love and be loved by…someone to share the highs and lows of life. Yet even in times of singularity we are enough, and complete within ourselves.

As to the day to day particulars of my life…In May 2009 I returned to San Antonio and my practice of psychotherapy after living in Upstate NY for two years…close to family…living in a tree-top Brownstone…the quiet of winter, a womb for working on a manuscript. It's been years since I've owned my home. This hardly feels like a problem. I'm seriously getting into the light-on-my-feet sense of freedom which reminds me of one of my favorite verses from the Gospel of Thomas: “Be passerby.” 

Tolkien says: “All who wander are not lost.” Branching…stretching…tearing down and building up (both inside and out) have had their way with me–at least today. I'm a believer in the now…a work in progress. Now I'm still finishing that book! Now I'm planning workshops and groups. And more will be revealed…. 

Check me out at:  http://www.sandyfostermorrison.com/ 

Member Since: Monday, September 18 2006

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