My Extreme World Blog

10/01/2024

Sarada Devi embodies the feminine power that initiates seekers onto a spiritual path through unconditional love.

As a guru, Sarada Devi was known for treating all of her disciples as her children. Many of her devotees relate that she initiated them in a dream. She appeared as a goddess in human form and gave them a mantra. When they met her for the first time, they would recall the dream and know instantly they were encountering their guru.

When your soul selects her card:

Sarada Devi loved all her disciples unconditionally and equally. In her teachings she emphasized that there is no such thing as a stranger. She encouraged her devotees to understand that everyone we meet is actually a part of us, and is connected to us. And that if we want to experience true peace, we need to own the fault and judgment that we project onto others. We need to see our own faults and forgive them with love.

Sarada Devi whispers gently to us, “No one is a stranger, my child; this whole world is your own.” So if something keeps showing up in the people we meet, and in the relationships we are cultivating, Sarada asks us to meet them from within us. Meaning, the aspects of this “other” person might be causing pain or frustration or just plain aversion, these same aspects exist within us.

If we are willing to really meet with these aspects within us, the universe will keep
presenting them to us in our relationships. And it’s not to p**s us off, it’s to free us. It’s out of a deep love for us to fully heal. The goal here is for us to love ourselves fiercely from within, without judgment or shame for where we are in the moment. The goal is to let us mother ourselves with unconditional love. That’s the only love that will quiet those harsh, critical voices within us. So we can stop wasting our time mired in judgment, of others, or ourselves and get on with being the perfectly imperfect light that we are. “

- Meggan Watterson, the Divine Feminine Oracle

“Sri Sarada Devi”
Mixed Media
2019

10/01/2024

In my research, I came across the tale of Margery Rivel, a Pythoness condemned as a witch in 14th century England, and felt compelled to restore her image through art. For centuries, gifted women have been persecuted for channeling mystical powers men could not comprehend. But these women were lightbearers - their legacy still relevant.

The word "pythoness" comes from the ancient Greek "Pythia" - the high priestess at the Temple of Apollo in Delphi who served as the Oracle. The Pythia would channel Apollo's prophecies while in an ecstatic trance state, offering guidance to seekers.

The Pythia exemplified the sacred feminine ability to act as mediator between spiritual realms, decoding messages for the enlightenment of humanity. Her title honored feminine power to tap source energy and live from the intuitive.
Once a revered female oracle in ancient Delphi, communing with spirit to offer prophecy and wisdom, the early church recast women with second sight as dangerous agents of the devil. Poor Margery was likely a cunning woman or psychic healer engaging forces misunderstood in medieval times.

In my portrait of the Pythoness, she gazes calmly into a crystal ball as the cosmos surrounds her. She represents feminine power to traverse inner and outer realms. Having her image in sacred space pays homage to forgotten seers, reminding us to embrace our own intuition and magic today.

Like Margery, each woman contains the capacity for vision, connection to source, and healing. Yet we have been taught to fear power not originating from external authority. What universal truths might women access if we released these limiting beliefs? reclaiming her image today reconnects us to the sacred purpose of mystical vision. The pythoness teaches spiritual sovereignty - direct access to divine wisdom, unbound by any institution. Her story celebrates the seer in us all, as we each steer our own sacred vessel fearlessly charting courses beyond earthly rules. With her as guide, we too can journey far, if we dare to see.

‘The Pythoness”
MixedMedia
2023

Prints available: shewhoisart.etsy.com

10/01/2024

THE SHYNESS OF LOVE

Today, walking
toward each
other,
saying
‘I love you’
again,
half
in recognition,
half
as strangers,

you might
not know
who you see.

Because
I have decided
when
we meet again
today,

not to be a stranger
to love’s
unsettling
and
never-ending ache

and to say
the words
again
to you
as shyly
and as nervously
as I
said them
for the first time.

Today
I have decided
to become negligent
of my fears:

I have decided
to stop
being their father
and their mother,
and to let them
be free
to find a home
in the world
wherever
they would like.

Today I am going
to walk as if coming
to meet you
for the first time,
but not caring
about the way
I look
or where I find myself
from hour to hour
or day to day.

Today I am going
to forego
the long
dull hours
of the day
and turn
shyly
toward what
has always
dazzled me
in you.

Today, with you
I am going
to teach myself
in that shyness
how to sit
in love’s radiance.
and when
I am ready,
I will follow
that radiance
along every
beckoning
path.

Today,
you might look
at me
and see someone
you have never
seen before.

Today
I might live
so completely
but therefore
so invisibly
within the seamless
parallel of love’s
eternal presence
you might almost
brush right
by me,

but
not before
having seen
and having
recognized
and having
understood
so shyly
and so intimately,
the tiny everyday
miracle way
we were able
to bless each
other
in passing.

…

THE SHYNESS OF LOVE
in ‘STILL POSSIBLE’
Poetry by David Whyte
© 2022 Many Rivers Press

Please join me for my Three Sundays series beginning tomorrow, live and recorded, looking at the way we grow shy of what is best in ourselves, what is precious in our work, and what is nourishing in our intimate relationships. DW

Please see comment section below for the link to sign up...

…

Woman and Passing Clouds
Photo © David Whyte
Sharrow Bay Hotel. Cumbria.
July 8th 2016

10/01/2024

FRIENDSHIP

is a mirror to presence and a testament to forgiveness. Friendship not only helps us to see ourselves through another’s eyes, but can be sustained over the years only with someone who has repeatedly forgiven us for our trespasses as we must find it in ourselves to forgive them in turn.

A friend knows our difficulties and shadows and remains in sight, a companion to our vulnerabilities more than our triumphs, when we are under the strange illusion we do not need them. An undercurrent of real friendship is a blessing exactly because its elemental form is rediscovered again and again through understanding and mercy. All friendships of any length are based on a continued, mutual forgiveness. Without tolerance and mercy all friendships die.

In the course of the years a close friendship will always reveal the shadow in the other as much as ourselves, to remain friends we must know the other and their difficulties and even their sins and encourage the best in them, not through critique but through addressing the better part of them, the leading creative edge of their incarnation, thus subtly discouraging what makes them smaller, less generous, less of themselves.

Friendship is the great hidden transmuter of all relationship: it can transform a troubled marriage, make honorable a professional rivalry, make sense of heartbreak and unrequited love and become the newly discovered ground for a mature parent-child relationship.

The dynamic of friendship is almost always underestimated as a constant force in human life: a diminishing circle of friends is the first terrible diagnostic of a life in deep trouble: of overwork, of too much emphasis on a professional identity of forgetting who will be there when our armored personalities run into the inevitable natural disasters and vulnerabilities found in even the most ordinary existence…

Friendship transcends disappearance: an enduring friendship goes on after death, the exchange only transmuted by absence, the relationship advancing and maturing in a silent internal conversational way even after one half of the bond has passed on.

But no matter the medicinal virtues of being a true friend or sustaining a long close relationship with another, the ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the self nor of the other, the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.
..

‘FRIENDSHIP’ From
CONSOLATIONS:
The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning
of Everyday Words. © David Whyte:
Many Rivers Press REVISED EDITION 2020

…
Talking All Day.
Photo © David Whyte
The River Cong. Co Mayo. Ireland

The celebrations marking the return of the light and the possibility of new birth at this momentous time of the year brings their close parallel, friendship to mind and the closeness of the lives of our friends, no matter their geographical or emotional distance from us. We think of our friends at this time of year and at the beginning of a new year because every friendship is a testament to the possibility of new beginnings and new adventures shared physically or at a distance. Above all, the sense of having been seen and continuing to be seen, no matter if it is from far away, a witness no only to our flowering and our successes but our disappearances and our griefs. Friendship is the conversation between our intuitions of the joyous eternal and the necessities of being in a body and a life and the pain of a life that needs another to see it, to acknowledge it and most of all, to accept the hand of necessary help when needed. DW.

20/11/2023

20/11/2023

Yep!

09/10/2023

Dearest You,
I've spent most of this year wondering how you compete with a ghost? Or maybe the better question would be how do you move past a ghost?
Saying goodbye to something that was that big part of my life might as well have been my burial; at least the burial of that version of me. Loss is loss and the anger, the grief & depression, the insanity of trying to find your way in this new chapter... It's traumatic. It's painful. It bloody sucks.
But I digress...
My point is you can't compete. You don't really move on. You just try to cope and adapt to this new life, maybe learn a little about the life you never really lived.
It was somewhere along this path I finally figured out that the ghost I've been trying so hard to move around isn't yours; it's mine.
You're just an anchor to that lost version of myself & I've been trying to hold onto it like a security blanket. So, yet again, I'm finding out that it's me that's getting in my own way & not some fictional ghost. I actually am the problem.
But accountability is a part of growth & healing and it's past time I owned it. It's a process but I'm getting there lol!
Lovingly Me

Picture credit:
https://www.facebook.com/gusfinkstudios?mibextid=ZbWKwL

09/10/2023

Kindness matters. ❤️

09/10/2023

Focus on the now ❤

29/08/2023

One of my favorites ☺️🩷

29/08/2023

🌓

29/08/2023

In need of and definite wanting this a his and hers style

That's what I need.😌