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These are no ordinary times.
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And you, my friend, are no ordinary woman.
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The feminine is rising.
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And a new way of being human is emerging on the planet.
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It's time for a return to the body.
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Where truth lives, pleasure flows, and love leads the way.
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Hello, beautiful soul, and welcome to the Vital Goddess Podcast.
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This is a space for what I call the Venusian Revolution, a return to the body, where truth lives, pleasure flows, and love leads the way.
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Here we explore what it means to live as a woman who is rooted in her truth, guided by her pleasure, and led by love.
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And for many women, midlife becomes a powerful threshold for this journey.
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A moment when something deeper begins to call her forward.
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The path of the feminine is rooted in the temple of the body.
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Here we root to rise.
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Embodiment is the reclamation.
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Welcome to the Venusian Revolution.
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I'm your host, Diane Shepard, and I'm so glad you're here.
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And if you've been here before, you're tuning in again, you are probably, at least on some level, used to me calling you a goddess, right?
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So yeah, that's how we roll around here.
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And if you're brand new, just found the show, maybe you just stumbled upon the show, and you're wondering, what the heck did I get myself into?
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What is this all about?
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Well, hello there, and I'm Diane, and I run a sacred feminine mystery school where we focus on the archetype of Venus Aphrodite quite a lot.
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And I help women reclaim the sacredness of their bodies and the power of their pleasure and their sensuality, especially as they're navigating midlife, because it's a really powerful time to do such work.
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Yeah.
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So indeed, I believe you are the goddess.
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And um, this work is all about helping you remember that yourself so that you can step more fully into that and embody the goddess you were born to be.
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And so if that sounds like your thing, you are in the right place, and I am so happy to have you here.
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Welcome.
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So today I want to dive into our upcoming Pisces full moon lunar eclipse, which is happening on August 27th or 28th, 2026, that is, depending on where you live in the world.
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For me, it's going to happen in
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the very wee hours of the 28th.
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But again, depending on where you are in that portal, but I feel this moon energy, whether it's new moon or full moon, is really active for a few days before and after even.
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So we have this whole portal to be feeling into this um, this energy.
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And we just had our solar eclipse in with the new moon in Leo, the total eclipse, and that was pretty powerful.
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I had some friends that actually traveled to Europe so they could actually see it, which was so cool.
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You know, got some pictures.
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Um, but yeah, that was a powerful one as well to really help us release what's what's been obscuring our radiance.
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And um, so this has a similar theme, I think.
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I'll go into why I think that, but um, eclipses in general can be really powerful invitations to to do some inner work, to do a deep dive inner work that will support us long term.
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That's the way I like to look at it.
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I know some astrologers like to talk about eclipses as very um chaotic, perhaps.
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And, you know, sometimes they can be for sure.
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They can bring in things that we didn't see coming.
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It could be a bit of a wild card, if you will.
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But I think it's nice to be prepared, right?
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If you kind of have this on the back burner of the energy at hand, it's going to help you navigate it a lot more successfully, and you'll just be like, oh yeah, and get the most out of it, really, because it is a beautiful invitation to support you.
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So again, the full moon lunar eclipse coming up in the sign of Pisces.
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I've been sitting with this for a while now, for a few days, because it just feels like such a powerful invitation that I think so many of us are deeply craving right now and have been craving for quite some time.
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And it does connect, I think, to the themes of our solar eclipse and the new moon and Leo.
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And that is to release the mind.
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I'm talking about the analytical logical mind from having to know the way.
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We are so hyper-focused on our logical mind that we completely forget we have this other way of using our mind, right?
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The magical mystical realm is what I'm talking about, which we all have access to, but we've just been conditioned to, you know, disconnect from it.
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So this full moon in Pisces, the sign, the water sign of mysticism.
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Oh, I love Pisces.
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Mysticism, surrender.
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It's about the oceanic realms, ecstasy.
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It's very much about devotional bliss and ecstasy, and our very human and soulful longing to dissolve into something larger than ourselves.
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So, this is about, in many ways, I feel like the highest octave of love.
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And um, what a beautiful thing.
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Let's just take a moment to breathe that in, feeling that kind of sparkly, magical, kind of mermaid, mermaid-ish Piscean energy of this full moon.
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And also under this moon, right across from the moon, of course, the sun and moon are opposite each other on a full moon.
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We have our sun just freshly moved into the sign of Virgo.
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She's moving in on the 22nd, I believe.
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And this is the sign of the priestess.
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So very devotional and very much about ritual.
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Very much about like what are the practices, what are the rituals that truly support us to embody more love, is the way I like to look at it.
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And that Sun and Virgo is very close, like cheek to cheek with Mercury, right?
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The planet of communication and thinking and logic and all of those things, and also the south node, right?
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So, and there's also a very tight square from the planet Uranus, who, which is like the liberator, right, wants us to break free.
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And this is where some kind of abrupt energy might come in.
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Like you didn't see that one coming, that kind of energy.
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So we have Uranus and Gemini squaring this full moon, right?
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Creating this kind of almost electric tension around this eclipse to, I believe, kind of release, you know, the the overthinking, over-analytical, over-logical mind and surrender more into bliss and universal love.
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And I think it's a really beautiful timing here to like let go of the need to figure everything out.
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Now, I love the mind, uh, our minds are brilliant, but sometimes it could certainly get in the way of some of the deeper truths that we're here to explore.
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And perhaps this eclipse is inviting us to release the mind from all of that ultra responsibility because there is another kind of intelligence available to us.
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And quite often we just we've just obscured it with our modern ways of how we do life.
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And we certainly don't access that other kind of intelligence by thinking harder.
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We access it by allowing ourselves to actually settle in to the
bliss that already resides within us.
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This is bliss intelligence and becoming quiet enough, the mind, let the mind become quiet enough so that we can receive the wisdom and the presence that that experience of bliss can bring.
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So there's a quote by Joseph Campbell that I've always loved, and I'm sure you've heard it many times, follow your bliss, right?
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It's it's um very wise and very powerful, and I love it.
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But lately I've been really wondering like, what if we don't really need to follow our bliss?
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It kind of insinuates that, you know, we have to be on a quest, right?
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And maybe we don't need to be on another quest of like chasing bliss in a sense.
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Like, where is it?
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Where is my bliss?
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What should I be doing?
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Where is my bliss trying to lead me?
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You know, it can lead us back into the logical mind.
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Before we know it, we're back in our heads trying to figure out our bliss and kind of micromanage, in a sense, our bliss, right?
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Are you with me?
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So I've been playing with like a different kind of invitation here, just letting ourselves be in our bliss.
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Like, what if bliss isn't something you know out there waiting for us to find it, right?
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We don't have to find bliss.
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What if there's this subtle current of aliveness, pleasure, radiance, and love, well bliss, right?
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Already moving through the body.
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And I truly have experienced that there is.
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And the spiritual practice is becoming sensitive enough to feel it.
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We don't have to chase peak experiences, we're not trying to manufacture ecstasy, like make myself feel ecstatic, that kind of thing.
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And we're not even asking our bliss to take us anywhere, right?
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Just kind of land it and be in our bliss.
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And from that place, noticing what reveals itself.
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I like to think of, yeah, bliss as a pathway into love.
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They're interconnected, interwoven.
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And I think this distinction matters because I'm not talking about bliss as an escape from our lives.
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And I'm not talking about walking around in some perpetual ecstatic state where nothing difficult ever happens.
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Absolutely not.
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But what I am talking about is devotional bliss as a pathway
into love.
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And when we slow down enough to feel the subtle pleasure already alive in the body, when we breathe, when we soften, when we become intimate with sensation, something begins to open.
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And beneath all the noise of the logical mind, like all this driving and all the figuring it out and um needing to heal and needing to transform, even, there can be this incredible, very simple, but incredible experience of I'm here, I'm alive, I can feel myself, and I can feel that I am love.
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And perhaps that's why so many ancient spiritual traditions have included practices of pleasure, breath, scent, beauty, movement, prayer, ritual, anointing.
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We're talking goddess culture, goddess ceremony here, because they soften the places where we've become defended and contracted, right?
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They bring us back into relationship with the body where all the magic happens.
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And they make us receptive, they give us access to our receptivity and access to an ancient truth that bliss opens us into love.
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And this is where the pearl wisdom comes in.
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I've been contemplating this a lot lately, just the image of the pearl.
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And the pearl appears again and again in feminine and mystical traditions.
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And I've been working with this image in my own practices for quite some time now.
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And I have a meditation that I call Pearl Wisdom, where we focus on the pearl of the clitoris.
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Yes, I said it.
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We are sitting on this beautiful pearl, and she's the crown jewel.
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Yeah, it's incredibly simple.
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But this little part of our anatomy is just um so powerful.
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There are over 10,000 nerve endings devoted solely to pleasure, just in this little part of our real estate.
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And when we bring awareness into the body in this area and just breathe into this inner pearl rather than trying to make something happen, right?
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Performative kind of thing, we begin to sense the aliveness and I would even say the intelligence of this part of the body.
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There's a glow, there's a warmth, there's a luminosity and pleasure.
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Yeah, pleasure.
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But it's not like the roller coaster kind of pleasure that we're used to, right?
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This is bringing presence into our sensuality and really experiencing a deeper realm, from my perspective, of pleasure.
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Not the kind of pleasure where you feel like, oh, I'm overstimulated and I have to, you know, get rid of this energy or do something with this energy.
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It's more of like a quiet, calm that you're able to sit with.
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And also it's like deeply blissful, right?
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Um, it might start subtle, but over time, with practice, it be it can become more powerful.
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This is a very powerful part of the female anatomy and um our energetic body as well.
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And it's such a beautiful, simple pathway into our radiance, and our pearl is always with us, and our mind is always with us, our breath is always with us.
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So we can easily, you know, tap into this pearl wisdom once we understand how to do it, which is super simple, um, whenever we choose, as a practice.
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And choice is our sovereignty.
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So we we can choose again and again to strengthen our connection, our relationship with this pearl energy, this pearl wisdom, and strengthen our radiance and strengthen our love.
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It's as though something inside of us that has always been luminous begins to show herself again.
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And I just love the pearl because, you know, she doesn't need to be taught how to shine, right?
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Her luminosity is intrinsic.
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And here's another thing that I've been contemplating that feels especially powerful for women at midlife or navigating our second spring.
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A pearl forms layer by layer, and those layers are what creates her luster.
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The layers don't obscure the pearl, the layers actually create the pearl.
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What an incredible metaphor for midlife women, right?
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Because we live in a culture that constantly tells women that radiance belongs to youths, that we have to chase youth.
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Like we have to get our glow back, you know, our youthful glow.
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We have to somehow reverse aging to look younger, become the woman you used to be, you know.
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Um, but I have absolutely no interest in going backward.
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I think there's another possibility available to us in Second Spring, and it's more powerful.
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Like, what if aging isn't the gradual loss of our radiance, but the deepening of our luster?
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Because we've lived, because we've loved, because we've lost, because we've created things, we've made mistakes, we've had our hearts broken, we've experienced pleasure, grief, disappointment, beauty, rapture, rupture.
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We've cared for others, we've given our hearts away, we've forgotten ourselves, we've gotten ourselves back again.
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You know, there's a
lot of layers we're talking about here that we've accumulated.
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And yes, you can look at that as baggage, but I love the image of the pearl, especially when we can tune in to her bliss as a devotional bliss practice.
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Your pearl is a master alchemizer.
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All of our layers can become a part of our radiance, right?
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We aren't trying to recover the glow of the woman we were at 25.
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Hell no.
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We're discovering the luminosity of the woman we've become as a result of all of that living.
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It's a very different kind of radiance.
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It has depth, it has wisdom, it has texture, it has luster, real magnetic luster.
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And here's the thing that's so cool.
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The pearl is not something outside of ourselves, up there, up in the heavens.
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She's actually down in the depths in the ocean of our being, inside the soft body of the Yoni, which feels like such a beautiful image to be focusing on under this Pisces eclipse.
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Because the treasure we're seeking isn't out there above us.
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We don't even need to ascend towards it, right?
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The invitation is to descend into our breath, into sensation, into the pelvis, into the waters of the body, and into the places that we may feel disconnected and numb and discover that the pearl is still there.
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She's still glowing.
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Our radiance hasn't disappeared, our bliss hasn't disappeared, our connection to love hasn't disappeared.
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We can just choose, make a sovereign choice to reconnect, to get into relationship with ourselves.
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And perhaps, this is true for many women, that we've just become so busy, so stimulated, so overstimulated, so mentally occupied that we've lost the simplicity of this, of our sensitivity to the subtler realms that are so powerful.
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Right?
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Our pearl is just there, you know, she's waiting for us to connect, waiting for us to feel, waiting for us to remember.
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So you so you may have heard me say this before, but ritual is my love language.
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So I do have a pearl ritual for you under this full moon lunar eclipse.
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But it's a it's a ritual that I hope that you will return to again and again, and to really develop a beautiful, sustainable relationship with your Pearl Wisdom.
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And um, yeah, there's a lot there.
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There's a lot there that can really truly change your life if you again make that sovereign choice to connect and to say yes.
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So you'll find that linked in the show notes, Pearl Wisdom.
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And if this is something that really speaks to you and you would love more guidance and would love to be guided in ritual, that's again my wheelhouse is sensual ritual.
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And uh that's what we do in my Venus school, my sacred feminine mystery school.
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And we are gonna start up Wednesday.
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So this is getting down to the wire now for our fall semester.
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So if you are interested in joining us this round, I would absolutely love to invite you in to that temple.
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All right, my love, have a beautiful full moon in Pisces lunar eclipse and shine on.
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Thank you, my love, for joining me in today's episode.
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And if something true stirred within you, that's the wisdom of your feminine speaking.
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Lean into that, trust that.
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And until next time, soften, breathe, and let love leaders.