Spiritually at Different Stages
of a Woman's Life
Stages of a Woman's Life
There are different stages in a woman's life. At a young age, a woman's mind can be controlled by the longing to have a partner and children. That desire should be developed in spiritual exercises so that that one Supreme Beloved has taken physical form in all forms.
Then comes the family and children stage. At that point, there will be a need for practical applications; a woman may be interested in studying to be a spiritual healer, a midwife, to work with children, to teach children a spiritual lifestyle. Women want practical application and at that point those working with women should emphasize the practical side of mental exercises. It inspires women because many of them are focused on caring for their families and don’t think of themselves at all.
When asked, "Don't you want your own enlightenment, don't you want to feel the Most High?", The woman says, "Yes I do, yes I would, but I have to take care of the children and the man." Then a woman can be encouraged to take some time to meditate, develop intuition, a special characteristic of women so that she can better perform her duties, develop her healing abilities, become very pragmatic by gaining more knowledge, and better serve her family. This is when a woman gets inspiration and starts meditating because she wants to feel the Supreme, she wants to learn yoga and kirtan. They can apply these practical exercises to their daily lives. They feel the benefits of a spiritual lifestyle.
Then comes the time when the children have grown up and are leaving home. The man is present but has not been with her for a long time, the desires of youth have disappeared. At this point, it should be emphasized to the woman that everything is one eternal Self and that selfless love is the nature of all being. A woman can give all her sorrows and longings to that Eternal Love. It happens not only in meditation but also in narratives and their sharing. Based on that love he developed, he himself can become a guide, a teacher of younger women, children, and grandchildren as they share their love. He receives his own inspiration through a deep spiritual connection, from deep love to the Supreme.
Women’s spiritual exercises should include awareness of the cycles of a woman’s life and specific times and exercises related to menstruation. By realizing their relationship to the moon and its phases in relation to the phases of a woman’s body, a young woman can be taught the mysteries of a woman’s life. It happens best in mystery schools developed by women, where young women get initiation and take part in rituals and exercises. With these, they get in touch with their bodies, the forces of the universe, the moon, the stars, the earth, and find their eternal Beloved who is at the heart of all of them. Such mystery schools are beneficial to women and can help them make close contact with their bodies, desires, sexuality, and the Supreme, Infinite Source. They help women adapt to different roles: the role of a young woman to find her strength and love, the role of a mature family woman who maintains contact with the Source and other women, and as a grandmother to record her wisdom, to find Eternal Love, and to give younger women information about women’s lives.
In ancient times, every village had a women’s house where women went during menstruation. The older women lived in that house, served as priests, instructed and taught the younger ones. Those women who had a family came regularly to listen to the wisdom of their grandmothers; how to breastfeed a baby, how to guide a child’s soul, and how to maintain their own spirituality through their own meditation exercises. The women of the village gathered on certain nights to hold ceremonies, meditation, and celebrations to support each other in their care work.
There is an old tradition that has taken different forms at different times, in different cultures, but always women have been looking for women to follow and women’s spiritual lives have been practical.
The world is changing and it is important that women rise to their own power and knowledge, re-establish these spiritual centers or communities for women. That way of coming together at different stages of life to guide other women in spiritual life has been forgotten under the power of an ever-growing patriarchate over the past thousand years. In Europe, it was considered a crime for women to gather, to act as healers in search of the company of other women. Millions of women died because they were considered witches, if they were healers, if they cared for the sick, if they knew someone’s herb or cream to help others, if they had mental vision. With the power and persecution of the patriarchy, these practices of women have disappeared.
The patriarchy is now disappearing. There is a balance between the strengths of men and women. There is now a need for women to come together to develop women’s practices and support women of all ages in their communities.
Women’s spiritual exercises are not just silent meditations or lectures on various topics. They are hands-on mental exercises related to childbirth, grief work when children leave, childcare, community healing, and nutrition at all levels. Women should now look for other women to follow in all areas of life.
Women have feared because they either consciously or subconsciously remember the horrific persecutions of the past that took place when women came together. It has been and gone and now is the time for women to come together again and set up spiritual centers to guide and help women of all ages.
The Spiritual Way of a Woman
6/18/2016, The Feminine Path to God
Excerpt from the book Women's Spiritual Practices, Maetreyii Nolan
Published in The World in Change and other messages from a source of spiritual knowledge
The subject is the feminine path to self-realization (as opposed to the masculine path). Women are known to tend to be more human-oriented than men; women tend to be more emotional than men. There are biological differences between men and women, and because the physical body affects the psyche, differences in the physical body and the function of the endocrine glands cause psychological differences between the sexes.
This is, of course, a generalization and does not apply to everyone, as some women are very masculine and some men are feminine. But in general, it can be said that women’s strengths are interpersonal relationships, emotional development, and emotional intelligence, and men’s strengths are consistency, intelligence, and mental functioning. This is because a woman’s entire biology is related to her ability to give birth and nourish. Women tend to express themselves by caring for children and creating an interpersonal circuit that strengthens the child’s development.
Men, although fathers of children, are not necessarily directly involved in the birth or upbringing of a child. A man’s strength is related to his ability to protect and defend women and children, to hunt, to obtain food, to protect the environment from enemies, so that a woman can develop a close relationship with the child, raise and teach the child to live in the world.
It can be seen that in a stressful situation, men start fighting or run away, while women resort to communication and trust in others. These are the biological differences between the sexes. Although women are at the forefront of many intellectual fields, they tend to have less interest in mathematical subjects than in fields related to history, language, and interpersonal social relations, psychology, sociology, and anthropology. In addition to these, women are also more interested in medicine and healing than in mathematics, computers, and engineering skills. The latter are of more interest to men. There are, of course, exceptions and that does not mean that men do not have the ability in those other fields or that women do not have the ability in mathematical fields and engineering skills.However, the general tendency is that there is interest in one or another field of gender.
Some may say that this is due to the conditioning of society, but I think there is much more to it. It is due to the fundamental biology and genetic coding of the sexes that comes from the survival of the mother and child and the evolution of the species.
There are many shades of biological differences between the sexes; endurance, a relationship to pain, not to mention a woman’s menstrual cycle, which is a much more significant cycle than a man’s cycle; of course men also have their cycles. At the emotional level, cycles affect a woman more due to the cyclicality of hormonal activity. Men’s emotional states vary less, they have less emotional fluctuations because their cycles are smoother and their impact is less.
Because of these biological differences, there are clear differences in the mental path between men and women in terms of strengths and abilities. During the patriarchy, the spiritual leaders of several religions stated that women were able to support men in their spiritual path, but were unable to reach the highest goal of communion themselves. This is a completely erroneous and false belief, but it dominated religious thinking for hundreds of years and was the cause of widespread repression in the practice of the spirituality of many women.
The differences between men and women stem from the physical body, the way in which the physical body affects the mind and the mind itself. The differences are not related to the intuitive level, they are not attributes of higher, subtle mind levels. There is no difference between the sexes at those subtle levels. They are one and the same. The soul has no sex, only the body. An individual can live many lives in a woman’s body and many in a man’s body. The soul has no sex but the body has, and therefore gender influences the approach in a spiritual way.
For the past thousands of years, yoga exercises have been aimed at men: abstraction, discipline, and intelligence, known as men’s strengths — disciplined meditation exercises that aim to lift energy up the spine into the crown chakra. The exercises have relied primarily on men, male biology. A woman has an equal ability to realize the connection with God within her. But women’s strengths on the spiritual path are different. Women’s strength lies in their emotional side, in their ability to feel and react emotionally, and to accept emotional challenges.
When a woman’s heart is truly opened, she overcomes all obstacles to achieve her goal. So what opens a woman's heart? Abstract ideas and concepts mean little to most women. The role in childcare reinforces a woman’s tendency to find purpose in relationships, love between people. When a woman feels loved and when she loves, she is at her best. Of course, men also want love and feel love, but the approach is a little different. This is why many men want to be with women, because in a relationship, a woman often evokes the feelings of a man’s heart and a man feels a strong affection and commitment to a woman that unlocks their ability to love.
That ability in a human relationship is a woman’s specialty in the biological sense. Because of this ability to feel loved, nurtured, cared for, women often take it upon themselves to care for other people or form emotional relationships with them, whether they are men, friends, or family members in their lives. For many women, abstractions of esoteric spiritual exercises are irrelevant. Those that matter are relationships.
A woman who has truly found the path of mysticism, who has opened herself completely to know the Supreme, has most often done so by finding a personal relationship with the Supreme Self. Most women are not interested in the abstract concept of a high and holy God, Infinite Consciousness, who has no relation to the emotional side of a woman. Most women want to feel that they have an emotional connection, a heart connection to that Supreme Self. For so many women, the real path to spirituality opens when a woman realizes that that Infinite Self is her true loved one. He rejects everything else because of this relationship.
This ability is also present in men, although it is quite rare. It is also rare for women that true passion for the Supreme has flared, but when this happens by the grace of the Supreme, a woman's heart rises to heights. His ability to surrender to a relationship becomes his strength, his greatest ability.
In Indian classical thinking, the relationship between a lover and a loved one is most beautifully described as Krishna and his beloved Radhanin dance. Radha loved Krishna so much that he could not take a moment to be apart from this. Krishna filled Radha's mind day and night and all that Radha did, everything he said was just for Krishna. And Krishna who so loved Radha, danced with this dance of love, played the game of love, taking different forms, delighting Radha with his presence in so many different ways. This dance of love between the lover and the Beloved represented by the relationship between Radha and Krishna is a dance of love between the unity mind and the Infinite. In this great dance, the Lover and the Beloved become one.
This is a very direct path to self-realization because it bypasses the beliefs and thoughts of the mind. It opens the heart to direct experience through deep longing.
How many women have cried at night in their sleep mourning the man who left, went away, did not treat properly. When such a woman awakens from the dream of duality, she realizes that all the men she has longed for are only manifestations of one eternal Self, the Supreme, in her life. And he begins to realize that the longing of his heart is to return close to his true Loving One. As he experiences the grace of the Infinite Being, his heart turns away from worldly objects of affection and moves toward that Infinite. He begins to dance the dance of love with the Supreme Beloved.
This path is open to both men and women, but for a man it is a feminine heart that opens up to the touch of the Beloved. For a woman, it is also a feminine heart that opens up to the dance of love, grabs the Hand of the Beloved and dances with subtle dimensions a dance of infinite love where the heart expands and all mental functions, beliefs and boundaries melt away. The presence of a loved one is fully experienced; the lover and the Beloved become one.
When a woman finds this love and becomes one with it, then the Goddess takes on the character in her because she is the manifestation of the Supreme Beloved. There is neither masculine nor feminine in the soul, but there is still a trace of them in the minds of living beings. The dance of these two in the heart is a dance of love between the individual and the cosmic essence.
The Goddess is the incarnation of the Supreme as the Goddess and in numerous masculine manifestations: Krishna, Shiva, Brahma, all gods, prophets, Mohammed, Jesus. Aren’t they all characters of the Supreme? Are not Lakshmi, Kali, the Virgin Mary, Sarasvati the characters of one Self? When an individual finds the Supreme Protection, the Self melts into love.
A woman who wants to feel the Infinite Self opens her heart, saying, “O Supreme come to me. You are the most beloved. Sit on my doorstep, look me in the eyes. Take me in your arms. ” Calling the Supreme, he finds the Beloved when he wants to come and make himself visible.
When Krishna came to Radha and revealed his presence, his true nature to him, Radha immersed himself in love with him. That love was a gift of grace. One can prepare oneself for the Beloved by meditation exercises, practicing bhakti yoga, the yoga of love and devotion, but the presence of the Beloved is manifested only by the grace of the Supreme to his devotional worshiper, the soul who longs to reunite with the Supreme in holy love.
Masculinity and femininity is a play of biological body difference, it symbolizes the play of the individual and the cosmic. Your most beloved may be Jesus, the Virgin Mary, Buddha, Krishna, Shiva, the Holy Mother. It does not matter. By the grace of the Supreme, that Essence will come to you in a natural form for you if you open your heart and invite, “Beloved, come to me, I miss you. I want you." Sit at the door of your Beloved and invite, “O Supreme, you are the only one. My heart has longed for you for eternity. I have come to you and I miss to return back to you. Open your door, take me in your arms and take me home to you again! ”
This is the secret path of female mysticism that was hidden in the old mystery schools of women. In this way, women take the Supreme Essence as the most important thing in their lives.
Then comes the family and children stage. At that point, there will be a need for practical applications; a woman may be interested in studying to be a spiritual healer, a midwife, to work with children, to teach children a spiritual lifestyle. Women want practical application and at that point those working with women should emphasize the practical side of mental exercises. It inspires women because many of them are focused on caring for their families and don’t think of themselves at all.
When asked, "Don't you want your own enlightenment, don't you want to feel the Most High?", The woman says, "Yes I do, yes I would, but I have to take care of the children and the man." Then a woman can be encouraged to take some time to meditate, develop intuition, a special characteristic of women so that she can better perform her duties, develop her healing abilities, become very pragmatic by gaining more knowledge, and better serve her family. This is when a woman gets inspiration and starts meditating because she wants to feel the Supreme, she wants to learn yoga and kirtan. They can apply these practical exercises to their daily lives. They feel the benefits of a spiritual lifestyle.
Then comes the time when the children have grown up and are leaving home. The man is present but has not been with her for a long time, the desires of youth have disappeared. At this point, it should be emphasized to the woman that everything is one eternal Self and that selfless love is the nature of all being. A woman can give all her sorrows and longings to that Eternal Love. It happens not only in meditation but also in narratives and their sharing. Based on that love he developed, he himself can become a guide, a teacher of younger women, children, and grandchildren as they share their love. He receives his own inspiration through a deep spiritual connection, from deep love to the Supreme.
Women’s spiritual exercises should include awareness of the cycles of a woman’s life and specific times and exercises related to menstruation. By realizing their relationship to the moon and its phases in relation to the phases of a woman’s body, a young woman can be taught the mysteries of a woman’s life. It happens best in mystery schools developed by women, where young women get initiation and take part in rituals and exercises. With these, they get in touch with their bodies, the forces of the universe, the moon, the stars, the earth, and find their eternal Beloved who is at the heart of all of them. Such mystery schools are beneficial to women and can help them make close contact with their bodies, desires, sexuality, and the Supreme, Infinite Source. They help women adapt to different roles: the role of a young woman to find her strength and love, the role of a mature family woman who maintains contact with the Source and other women, and as a grandmother to record her wisdom, to find Eternal Love, and to give younger women information about women’s lives.
In ancient times, every village had a women’s house where women went during menstruation. The older women lived in that house, served as priests, instructed and taught the younger ones. Those women who had a family came regularly to listen to the wisdom of their grandmothers; how to breastfeed a baby, how to guide a child’s soul, and how to maintain their own spirituality through their own meditation exercises. The women of the village gathered on certain nights to hold ceremonies, meditation, and celebrations to support each other in their care work.
There is an old tradition that has taken different forms at different times, in different cultures, but always women have been looking for women to follow and women’s spiritual lives have been practical.
The world is changing and it is important that women rise to their own power and knowledge, re-establish these spiritual centers or communities for women. That way of coming together at different stages of life to guide other women in spiritual life has been forgotten under the power of an ever-growing patriarchate over the past thousand years. In Europe, it was considered a crime for women to gather, to act as healers in search of the company of other women. Millions of women died because they were considered witches, if they were healers, if they cared for the sick, if they knew someone’s herb or cream to help others, if they had mental vision. With the power and persecution of the patriarchy, these practices of women have disappeared.
The patriarchy is now disappearing. There is a balance between the strengths of men and women. There is now a need for women to come together to develop women’s practices and support women of all ages in their communities.
Women’s spiritual exercises are not just silent meditations or lectures on various topics. They are hands-on mental exercises related to childbirth, grief work when children leave, childcare, community healing, and nutrition at all levels. Women should now look for other women to follow in all areas of life.
Women have feared because they either consciously or subconsciously remember the horrific persecutions of the past that took place when women came together. It has been and gone and now is the time for women to come together again and set up spiritual centers to guide and help women of all ages.
The Spiritual Way of a Woman
6/18/2016, The Feminine Path to God
Excerpt from the book Women's Spiritual Practices, Maetreyii Nolan
Published in The World in Change and other messages from a source of spiritual knowledge
The subject is the feminine path to self-realization (as opposed to the masculine path). Women are known to tend to be more human-oriented than men; women tend to be more emotional than men. There are biological differences between men and women, and because the physical body affects the psyche, differences in the physical body and the function of the endocrine glands cause psychological differences between the sexes.
This is, of course, a generalization and does not apply to everyone, as some women are very masculine and some men are feminine. But in general, it can be said that women’s strengths are interpersonal relationships, emotional development, and emotional intelligence, and men’s strengths are consistency, intelligence, and mental functioning. This is because a woman’s entire biology is related to her ability to give birth and nourish. Women tend to express themselves by caring for children and creating an interpersonal circuit that strengthens the child’s development.
Men, although fathers of children, are not necessarily directly involved in the birth or upbringing of a child. A man’s strength is related to his ability to protect and defend women and children, to hunt, to obtain food, to protect the environment from enemies, so that a woman can develop a close relationship with the child, raise and teach the child to live in the world.
It can be seen that in a stressful situation, men start fighting or run away, while women resort to communication and trust in others. These are the biological differences between the sexes. Although women are at the forefront of many intellectual fields, they tend to have less interest in mathematical subjects than in fields related to history, language, and interpersonal social relations, psychology, sociology, and anthropology. In addition to these, women are also more interested in medicine and healing than in mathematics, computers, and engineering skills. The latter are of more interest to men. There are, of course, exceptions and that does not mean that men do not have the ability in those other fields or that women do not have the ability in mathematical fields and engineering skills.However, the general tendency is that there is interest in one or another field of gender.
Some may say that this is due to the conditioning of society, but I think there is much more to it. It is due to the fundamental biology and genetic coding of the sexes that comes from the survival of the mother and child and the evolution of the species.
There are many shades of biological differences between the sexes; endurance, a relationship to pain, not to mention a woman’s menstrual cycle, which is a much more significant cycle than a man’s cycle; of course men also have their cycles. At the emotional level, cycles affect a woman more due to the cyclicality of hormonal activity. Men’s emotional states vary less, they have less emotional fluctuations because their cycles are smoother and their impact is less.
Because of these biological differences, there are clear differences in the mental path between men and women in terms of strengths and abilities. During the patriarchy, the spiritual leaders of several religions stated that women were able to support men in their spiritual path, but were unable to reach the highest goal of communion themselves. This is a completely erroneous and false belief, but it dominated religious thinking for hundreds of years and was the cause of widespread repression in the practice of the spirituality of many women.
The differences between men and women stem from the physical body, the way in which the physical body affects the mind and the mind itself. The differences are not related to the intuitive level, they are not attributes of higher, subtle mind levels. There is no difference between the sexes at those subtle levels. They are one and the same. The soul has no sex, only the body. An individual can live many lives in a woman’s body and many in a man’s body. The soul has no sex but the body has, and therefore gender influences the approach in a spiritual way.
For the past thousands of years, yoga exercises have been aimed at men: abstraction, discipline, and intelligence, known as men’s strengths — disciplined meditation exercises that aim to lift energy up the spine into the crown chakra. The exercises have relied primarily on men, male biology. A woman has an equal ability to realize the connection with God within her. But women’s strengths on the spiritual path are different. Women’s strength lies in their emotional side, in their ability to feel and react emotionally, and to accept emotional challenges.
When a woman’s heart is truly opened, she overcomes all obstacles to achieve her goal. So what opens a woman's heart? Abstract ideas and concepts mean little to most women. The role in childcare reinforces a woman’s tendency to find purpose in relationships, love between people. When a woman feels loved and when she loves, she is at her best. Of course, men also want love and feel love, but the approach is a little different. This is why many men want to be with women, because in a relationship, a woman often evokes the feelings of a man’s heart and a man feels a strong affection and commitment to a woman that unlocks their ability to love.
That ability in a human relationship is a woman’s specialty in the biological sense. Because of this ability to feel loved, nurtured, cared for, women often take it upon themselves to care for other people or form emotional relationships with them, whether they are men, friends, or family members in their lives. For many women, abstractions of esoteric spiritual exercises are irrelevant. Those that matter are relationships.
A woman who has truly found the path of mysticism, who has opened herself completely to know the Supreme, has most often done so by finding a personal relationship with the Supreme Self. Most women are not interested in the abstract concept of a high and holy God, Infinite Consciousness, who has no relation to the emotional side of a woman. Most women want to feel that they have an emotional connection, a heart connection to that Supreme Self. For so many women, the real path to spirituality opens when a woman realizes that that Infinite Self is her true loved one. He rejects everything else because of this relationship.
This ability is also present in men, although it is quite rare. It is also rare for women that true passion for the Supreme has flared, but when this happens by the grace of the Supreme, a woman's heart rises to heights. His ability to surrender to a relationship becomes his strength, his greatest ability.
In Indian classical thinking, the relationship between a lover and a loved one is most beautifully described as Krishna and his beloved Radhanin dance. Radha loved Krishna so much that he could not take a moment to be apart from this. Krishna filled Radha's mind day and night and all that Radha did, everything he said was just for Krishna. And Krishna who so loved Radha, danced with this dance of love, played the game of love, taking different forms, delighting Radha with his presence in so many different ways. This dance of love between the lover and the Beloved represented by the relationship between Radha and Krishna is a dance of love between the unity mind and the Infinite. In this great dance, the Lover and the Beloved become one.
This is a very direct path to self-realization because it bypasses the beliefs and thoughts of the mind. It opens the heart to direct experience through deep longing.
How many women have cried at night in their sleep mourning the man who left, went away, did not treat properly. When such a woman awakens from the dream of duality, she realizes that all the men she has longed for are only manifestations of one eternal Self, the Supreme, in her life. And he begins to realize that the longing of his heart is to return close to his true Loving One. As he experiences the grace of the Infinite Being, his heart turns away from worldly objects of affection and moves toward that Infinite. He begins to dance the dance of love with the Supreme Beloved.
This path is open to both men and women, but for a man it is a feminine heart that opens up to the touch of the Beloved. For a woman, it is also a feminine heart that opens up to the dance of love, grabs the Hand of the Beloved and dances with subtle dimensions a dance of infinite love where the heart expands and all mental functions, beliefs and boundaries melt away. The presence of a loved one is fully experienced; the lover and the Beloved become one.
When a woman finds this love and becomes one with it, then the Goddess takes on the character in her because she is the manifestation of the Supreme Beloved. There is neither masculine nor feminine in the soul, but there is still a trace of them in the minds of living beings. The dance of these two in the heart is a dance of love between the individual and the cosmic essence.
The Goddess is the incarnation of the Supreme as the Goddess and in numerous masculine manifestations: Krishna, Shiva, Brahma, all gods, prophets, Mohammed, Jesus. Aren’t they all characters of the Supreme? Are not Lakshmi, Kali, the Virgin Mary, Sarasvati the characters of one Self? When an individual finds the Supreme Protection, the Self melts into love.
A woman who wants to feel the Infinite Self opens her heart, saying, “O Supreme come to me. You are the most beloved. Sit on my doorstep, look me in the eyes. Take me in your arms. ” Calling the Supreme, he finds the Beloved when he wants to come and make himself visible.
When Krishna came to Radha and revealed his presence, his true nature to him, Radha immersed himself in love with him. That love was a gift of grace. One can prepare oneself for the Beloved by meditation exercises, practicing bhakti yoga, the yoga of love and devotion, but the presence of the Beloved is manifested only by the grace of the Supreme to his devotional worshiper, the soul who longs to reunite with the Supreme in holy love.
Masculinity and femininity is a play of biological body difference, it symbolizes the play of the individual and the cosmic. Your most beloved may be Jesus, the Virgin Mary, Buddha, Krishna, Shiva, the Holy Mother. It does not matter. By the grace of the Supreme, that Essence will come to you in a natural form for you if you open your heart and invite, “Beloved, come to me, I miss you. I want you." Sit at the door of your Beloved and invite, “O Supreme, you are the only one. My heart has longed for you for eternity. I have come to you and I miss to return back to you. Open your door, take me in your arms and take me home to you again! ”
This is the secret path of female mysticism that was hidden in the old mystery schools of women. In this way, women take the Supreme Essence as the most important thing in their lives.
