Goddesses Never Age: The Secret Prescription for Radiance, Vitality, and Well-Being (5 page)

As we enter our ageless years, we can also finally free ourselves from the need to prove ourselves. We look back and see that we didn’t do so badly after all. Maybe we have some regrets, and maybe we disappointed some people, but that’s part of being human. Now is our time to focus on ourselves more instead of always worrying about everyone else. According to Chinese and ancient Ayurvedic medicine, at age 60, women end their householder life and begin to develop their souls. Our fertility stops being about having children and starts being about what we create for ourselves that benefits us and the people around us.

CREATIVE GODDESSES

This new form of creating means seeing new possibilities all the time. Ageless goddesses aren’t jaded. They recognize that there are always new things to learn and discover, and new relationships to begin. They’re exuberant about life and they let loose their curiosity and playfulness. A friend of mine went on a cruise to a tropical island with a turquoise lagoon and was practically “drunk with joy,” as she described it. She eagerly climbed into a boat that would take the group out to snorkel in a coral reef. But two women near her, both 20 years or so younger than she was, could only talk about how they wished the boat taking them out snorkeling had a quieter motor, and how the wind was too strong, and how the waves were going to be hard to navigate once they jumped into the water. Hello—you’re in a sparkling
tropical lagoon communing with the fish! If you can’t enjoy that, you need to reconnect with your spirit and earthly pleasures so you can participate in the creative process of the earth herself.

Agelessness is all about vitality, the creative force that gives birth to new life—the divine feminine that makes it all happen. Blades of grass will push up through a brick patio even if there is a foot of gravel underneath the brick because nature is determined to push outward, upward, and forward in the act of creation if it has to. Vitality is our natural state. Taking all the right supplements and pills, or getting the right procedure done, isn’t the prescription for anti-aging. It’s ageless living that brings back a sense of vibrancy and youthfulness.

I’m all for exercise and healthy eating, but forcing yourself to go to a badly lit basement gym and work up a sweat on an elliptical machine while staring at a concrete wall or a depressing 24-hour news channel, and avoiding all of the foods you really love, is not going to make you ageless. Don’t “battle” aging when you can dance with life, moving your body joyously. The perfect combination of weight training, low-impact aerobics, and interval training isn’t going to do it either. If you have a passion for tweaking your workout routine, by all means go ahead and do that, but don’t think you have found the magic formula. The real fountain of youth is the fountain of happiness, well-being, and connection with what Tosha Silver calls “the Divine Beloved” (or God—and you get to call it whatever you want, whether it’s God, Goddess, Source, your Higher Power, the Universe, All That Is, or any other name that speaks to your heart and spirit). The anti-aging prescription is to love life, try new things, and savor your experiences. Joy comes from feeling connected to the life force.

While your skin may not glow as it did when you were 20, you can glow with vitality if you see yourself as an expression of the Divine and a being through which the Divine Beloved operates. For you, agelessness may mean you finally find the courage to stop dyeing your hair to hide the gray, or it may mean you finally start dyeing it because it makes you feel better and you don’t care what anyone thinks of your decision.
You
get to decide what makes you feel ageless and how you want to express yourself. If your daughter says, “Oh, Mom, you’re too old to wear that,” tell
her, “No, I’m not!” Learn the skill of standing up to and defying the cultural editors of our joy and freedom—especially in your own family. We have to teach our daughters to become ageless too. They need to reject the notion that at a certain age, their value begins to decline. Those lessons start with you.

You can turn back the hands on the clock when it comes to physical health and vitality by being open to what’s new but not afraid to hold on to what’s old if it still works for you. If you’re an analog woman in a digital age and you despise figuring out how to operate a new piece of technology, enjoy the fact that, having been around for a few years, you can you trust your judgment about whether you need to learn this skill. If you feel like trying something new, try it simply because you want to, not because you’re afraid of being left behind. On one hand, listening to new bands and musical performers will help you to remain ageless, just like spending time around people 20, 30, and even 40 years younger than you are will help you stay connected to what is happening now. What you will also discover is that interests in things like art and music are completely ageless. I know 20-year-olds who adore the music of Jimi Hendrix and Bruce Springsteen and are into vinyl records. My tango community encompasses people from 25 to 75. Age couldn’t matter less. Agelessness means you make your decisions based not on a fear of looking foolish but on feeling comfortable in your body and being keenly interested in the world around you.

SACRED FEMININE ENERGY

The energy of receiving and accepting balances the energy of doing and acting that we get pulled into much too easily. A crisis or intense call to change can make us realize that we can’t go on using up all our vital energy and not replenishing it, always doing and rarely receiving. I call this “donating bone marrow.” Energetically, it really is that!

It’s not just women who are in transition. Around the globe, people are aware that life is changing. Astrologically, we are experiencing what’s known as “the turning of the ages,” when the planet Earth moves back into the eleventh house of the zodiac.
This is a point at which the feminine rises in partnership with the masculine—both within us and between men and women. Even if you don’t follow astrology, you can see that human beings are undergoing a massive change and turning away from old perceptions and ideas. Technologies, especially communication technologies, have had a huge effect on how we perceive each other and have helped us see ourselves as part of a larger whole. Our hearts break over an online video of something happening halfway around the globe, or we’re moved to tears at some child’s triumph that was recorded on his father’s smartphone and appears on the screen of our own as we’re sitting at the airport. We all sense the truth so beautifully documented in my friend Dr. Larry Dossey’s book
One Mind: How Our Individual Mind Is Part of a Greater Consciousness and Why It Matters.
We really are connected to everyone and everything, and unless we get serious about how to collaborate more effectively, the problems that seem to be “over there” will appear “over here” if they haven’t already. The world needs a lot of creativity right now if we’re going to solve our problems, and it yearns for the wisdom of seasoned women who own their goddess nature.

We’re entering a new age of experience and bringing back the sacred feminine energy, also known as yin or the female principle, that was central to the lives and beliefs of humanity for the vast majority of prehistory. The sacred feminine influenced the rituals, ceremonies, religions, myths, legends, and artwork of ancient civilizations all around the world for thousands and thousands of years—far longer than the relatively new era of “written” history, which is a mere blip on the screen. And according to many anthropologists, the sacred feminine was worshipped as a Great Goddess or Earth Mother.
¹⁵
Well, it’s time to bring Mama back!

If the lost feminine principle sounds far removed from your life, think about the buzzwords you have been hearing lately. Business leaders are saying we need workers who are creative and who have good people skills (read: they’re intuitive and can collaborate and communicate easily). Political leaders are talking about how we have to stop the partisan bickering and work together. Both men and women are questioning the endless quest for financial rewards at all costs and the sacrifice of time that
could be spent building community or developing relationships with others, including our kids. Feminine energy involves heeding the messages of our emotions and taking the time to care for our physical bodies and the earth herself. It means listening to and receiving new ideas and taking in what other people feel, and then putting it all together to better understand how to interact with someone else in a way that benefits both people. That’s just what all good mothers do automatically.
This
is how the lost sacred female energy can work in the modern world, and each of us is part of it. We’ve tried war and conflict and being alienated from our bodies, our emotions, our pain, and our needs. How about trying something else?

Although the divine feminine is often associated with women and how we perceive, think, or behave differently from men, it’s absolutely part of men’s lives too. The hearts of men feel very deeply, and most men are hardwired to serve and protect those they love. If you look at the symbol for the Tao, which represents the balance between the male and female principles, you find that there’s some feminine energy in the masculine and vice versa. You can see this balance reflected in our bodies’ hormones: both men and women have the male hormone testosterone and the female hormones estrogen and progesterone. Now we need that balance in our communities. Women have to work with men to bring forth new life—and together, we have to invent new ways of relating to each other and working together.

The values of patriarchy—or what scholar Riane Eisler, author of
The Chalice and the Blade
(HarperCollins, 1987), calls a “dominator culture”—have to be balanced by feminine values that support life and collaboration. We need to learn to reconnect with the divine feminine and be like the moon, which waxes and wanes. Our bodies are connected to this mysterious, beautiful orb that was worshipped by the ancients. But we think that if we are to be good people and valuable to society, the sun can never set on our generosity and hard work. We have to be on call constantly. For thousands of years, we’ve been expected to produce more and more whatever the cost, driving ourselves relentlessly. Instead of collaborating, cooperating, and creating, humans have been competing. Now that the human population has topped 7
billion, we’re going to have to come up with some plans for sharing the planet’s resources and living together healthfully and harmoniously into the future.

Today, it’s relentless progress without reflection and competition without collaboration that are “old school.” Fueling ourselves with adrenaline, sugar, and caffeine is no longer sustainable for anyone. Fueling ourselves with thoughts of “I’d better get mine before someone else grabs it” or “I’d better try to reverse aging or some younger person will beat me to the job or take all the good romantic and sexual partners” isn’t working either. We have to know when to rest, recharge, and begin envisioning what we want to create next—together.

Whether your life force is draining because you are constantly trying to please others, or gobbling down fast food, or not nurturing your soul, it’s time to get off that stressful course that leads to exhaustion and degenerative disease. Exercise your goddess-like power to renew and rejuvenate yourself through joyful, pleasurable everyday practices that are crucial to mental, emotional, and physical wellness. Get rid of the idea of health as the absence of illness—as a temporary respite from the discomfort of the body’s decline—and instead see it as the natural expression of your innate divinity. The divine force is loving and joyous. It has the power to repair, restore, and fortify your body. However, we can access it only if we allow ourselves to experience what has been denied women for millennia: guilt-free pleasure, self-love, and joy.

CHAPTER TWO

GODDESSES KNOW THE POWER OF PLEASURE

Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can
cure the senses but the soul.

— O
SCAR
W
ILDE
,
T
HE
P
ICTURE OF
D
ORIAN
G
RAY

T
he connection with my tango partner was delicious. We were in close embrace, and my eyes were closed as he held me firmly against his chest and we moved to the music together. Argentine tango is an earthy dance that blends male and female energy in a moving meditation in which both partners move as one. This dance, which is completely improvisational, allows a man and woman the opportunity to both give and receive exquisite pleasure.

Although I wasn’t consciously thinking about it, I knew my brain and body were awash in naturally produced chemicals that were creating a feeling of euphoria. I was in a completely safe
environment, enjoying the bond between me and the men who served as my partners during that night at the dance studio. With an open heart, I consciously experienced a powerful high that I would be able to re-create again and again. I was mindful of how wonderful it felt to be in my body.