Carrying the Dharma of Leadership During Dark Days

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I end up speaking to a lot of leaders. Many of you are coaches, healers, teachers, and even if you’re not in a formal leadership role, everyone in this community is a leader. You’re a leader in your family, or your social groups, or your local community, or at work. 

And what I’m hearing from many of you is that being in leadership is really heavy right now and you don’t know if you want to keep carrying the weight of it, or how to do so. I’ve experienced this myself recently, feeling totally flattened by what’s going on in the world - the reality of this nightmare we’ve woken up within.

I heard someone call it getting “black pilled” – meaning it just gets to be too much and you basically give up trying. You give up hope. 

So I want to talk about what it means to carry the dharma of leadership during dark days, and how we can do that, and not take the black pill, but keep going, keep up.

One of the things that’s happening is we are all receiving initiations where any last parts of us that were hoping the grown-ups are coming to save us are being taken away, and we are being called to step forward into these aspects of our own power and sovereignty. 

I have had my own initiations recently, one of which was the unexpected death of my kundalini yoga teacher, Guru Jagat. She was someone who was out in front, blazing the trail for us and holding the light on the path so we could follow. Her death really showed me the places where I am still waiting to be saved, where I am still hoping someone else has the answers and is going to do it for me. 

And I’m not gonna lie, when I was grieving in those days immediately after, I didn’t want to keep fighting. It really felt like, well, if she left the planet, how come I still gotta be here holding the torch of leadership?! How are we supposed to do this without her? That black pill of despair and hopelessness was looking really tempting. 

I know many of you are going through your own versions of initiation and having similar things happen.

Persephone

So, I’ll tell you, the Persephone myth keeps coming up in crazy synchronicities for me. We are literally IN the Persephone myth. And for those of you who don’t know, Persephone was the daughter of Demeter. She was the maiden, frolicking innocently in the fields, just enjoying herself, when the ground beneath her feet opened up and Hades himself came from the Underworld and kidnapped her, and dragged her back down to the Underworld with him. He then tricks her into eating the seeds of the pomegranate, which binds her to the underworld forever, she can never leave. She becomes the Queen of the Underworld and spends half her time with Hades in her role as Underworld Queen, and during the other half of the year she ascends to the land of the living to be with her mother.

This is a very brief retelling of what is a rich and nuanced myth. I talked about Persephone more in depth in another video in my free Facebook Group, Feminine Mystery School, about the Dark Goddess, which is absolutely worth listening to for more context and perspective, so I would encourage you to go listen to that.

As I see it, we are IN this Persephone myth – we are Persephone. Here we were, innocently enjoying ourselves, when suddenly the earth shifted beneath our feet and we were thrust into a scary alternate world. And many of us are in this myth presently at the moment after Persephone has eaten the seeds of the pomegranate. Her fate is sealed; she can’t “unsee”, she can’t turn back, she can’t “unknow” what she knows. We’re in this moment before she picks up her crown and chooses to become the Queen of the Underworld. That’s what many of us are being asked to do right now – to make the choice to become powerful and sovereign – to assume the throne of our destiny. 

This myth of Persephone – and other underworld queens – Inanna, Psyche, Kali, just will not be done with me. I’m here to teach on the feminine mystery of journeying to the underworld and back, as it’s such a huge part of the mythic journey to the soul of the deep feminine. 

When I became a feminine embodiment coach, I didn’t know I was being asked to midwife this transition of eras on this planet, and to serve others who are also here to midwife this paradigm shift. I thought I was doing it to help people get more pleasure and be more satisfied with their lives. (So cute of me - like Persephone sitting innocently among the flowers…) But actually I’m here to mentor women on this journey to embody and understand the soul of the feminine because that’s medicine our planet needs right now. It’s not the only medicine, certainly, but needed nonetheless.

We are here to midwife the birth of a new era on this planet, and when most people think about midwifery, they do think of birth. But we are also here to attend death. We are in a huge death phase right now on this planet - both literal and metaphorical. Aside from the focus on death and mortality that a global pandemic is forcing us to focus on, many structures and institutions are in the process of dying; some have died already; and other things need to be destroyed. 

As carriers of the feminine mysteries, we are uniquely positioned to understand how to attend death. The feminine is not only the creatrix. She is also the bringer of death, the destroyer. She is not only love and light. She is also Queen of the Underworld, like Persephone. She is able to traverse both realms. That IS the feminine, the totality of both creation and destruction. She has fluency in how to go into death, and how to be reborn. She understands how to descend, and then ascend again. She doesn’t fear death because she understands that every death is inherently also a birth. Just like every birth inherently also gives death. When you gave birth to your children you also gave them their deaths. There is nothing more certain than the fact that all who are born will experience death. But the soul of the feminine understands there is no finality in death, there are only cycles unto infinity.

This is what we are being called to as feminine leaders – to midwife this death period without fear. And to walk the liminal space between death and rebirth. You literally carry these codes in your body. If you have a womb and a monthly hormonal cycle, you experience a death and rebirth every month. This knowing isn’t something you have to apprentice and spend a long time learning about. It only needs to awaken in your body. It’s yours already, this wisdom and understanding of how to traverse from the underworld and back again. 

Does this resonate with you? Are you ready to awaken this wisdom in your body? I’d love to talk more with you about what it is to be in leadership right now and how to gracefully attend this period of intense transformation. Book a free activation call and let’s connect. So much love!