Womanspiritspeaks: 52 Weeks with the Divine Feminine: A Journal with Writing Prompts for Digging Deep

By Barbara Garland

For every person who has struggled with the idea of an exclusively male god, this journal is a year-long spiritual challenge to help clarify their relationship to themselves and the Divine. It is a deep dive to help resolve doubts and struggles that are real and human. Inspired by the author’s own spiritual journey, this journal is a human voyage to the Sacred, to help you find your own god self, your own Soul.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9798765233719

Barbara Garland

Barbara Garland has been on a spiritual journey away from patriarchy and toward the Divine Feminine her entire life.Through journaling and meditation she discovered a rich trove of feminine wisdom that led to this interactive journal. She has facilitated women’s spirituality groups for over thirteen years. In that time she has discovered that each of us, especially women, come to the Sacred, not through dogma, but through our inner wisdom.

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Copyright © 2022 Barbara Garland.

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The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

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Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1946, 1952, and 1971 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

ISBN: 979-8-7652-3370-2 (sc)

ISBN: 979-8-7652-3371-9 (e)

Balboa Press rev. date: 08/30/2022

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Dedication

Introduction

How to Use This Book

Week 1 The Goddess of a Thousand Names

Week 2 The God/dess Speaks in Signs and Wonders

Week 3 Embrace the Capacity to Be with What Is

Week 4 I Love You, You Are Enough

Week 5 Divinity is in Everything and Everyone

Week 6 A Woman’s Inward Journey

Week 7 Sitting With Uncertainty

Week 8 Embracing My Humanity

Week 9 The Paradigm of Wholeness

Week 10 Balance - the Key to Wholeness

Week 11 I Am God/dess

Week 12 Inviting – A New Paradigm of Co-creation

Week 13 Say Yes to the Presence of the Sacred in All Things

Week 14 Where Opposites Meet

Week 15 Forgiveness

Week 16 Making Space

Week 17 Truth with a Capital T

Week 18 Holy Mother

Week 19 Dancing the Dance of Yes

Week 20 Being Love

Week 21 Transfiguring Anger

Week 22 More on Being Love

Week 23 Sitting in the Muck

Week 24 The Shadow of Perfectionism

Week 25 The Courage to Be Authentic

Week 26 The Pregnant Void

Week 27 An Interconnected Life

Week 28 She Who Weaves the Web of the World

Week 29 Freedom to Be

Week 30 What is Your Song?

Week 31 That Which Brings True Joy

Week 32 Practicing Joy

Week 33 The Heart’s Longing

Week 34 Being and Doing

Week 35 Creativity

Week 36 Coming Back – In the World, but not of the World

Week 37 A Challenge with Closure?

Week 38 The Transforming Darkness

Week 39 Relaxing into Being

Week 40 It’s That Simple

Week 41 Love is a Superpower

Week 42 Transmuting Grief

Week 43 Patriarchy Must End

Week 44 Spirals

Week 45 Walking Through the Storm

Week 46 Deep Soul Healing

Week 47 My Heart is Cracked Open

Week 48 A Moment for Self-Care

Week 49 Reclaiming Myself through Spiritual Practice

Week 50 Pebbles in the Stream, Ripples in the Cosmos

Week 51 Tick-Tock

Week 52 Why?

Afterword

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have been blessed with many soul sisters who have encouraged me and taught me along my life’s journey. I want to especially acknowledge my daughter, Dr. Kristen Hosaka. She is an old soul who always keeps me grounded in reality. In addition the women in my spirituality groups have been invaluable teachers who willingly live the questions of life and who walk with me on this spiritual path. Our many discussions have been the catalyst for this book.

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to every woman on a spiritual path, but especially to my granddaughters Alex, Mara, and Maddy. I hope that it will be a guide as they navigate their spiritual lives.

INTRODUCTION

For many years I have been called by the Divine Feminine. Even as a young child, I felt a deep pull toward the Sacred. However, I had no words for my inner calling except those taught by my family, which was devoutly Christian and even more devoutly Southern Baptist. When I was seven, I remember looking out of my window at the full moon and being filled with an inexpressible longing for something more. I called my dad and told him I wanted to invite Jesus into my heart. It was not until years later, that I realized that the full moon was not Jesus, but the Divine Feminine calling me to her.

I always questioned why I, as an intelligent and faithful Christian, was denied the office of deacon, elder, or minister just because I was female. However, during the feminist wave of the sixties and seventies, I lived in a Christian bubble in conservative west Texas. The church I attended was a more liberal Baptist church, so I was not yet allowing those feelings of doubt and struggle to surface in my consciousness. In the late seventies, as my first marriage was falling apart, I was faced with survival questions, like buying a car and having credit in my name. At that point, I began to openly question the patriarchal system and how unjust it was for women. As I questioned the political realities of the time, I also began to question the religious ones.

In 1985, my second husband and I moved to Kansas and joined the local Presbyterian Church. While the Presbyterian church was more welcoming to women than Southern Baptists (they actually allowed women to be elders and ministers), I still felt as if there was something missing. I was on the church staff as the director of a community outreach center for women leaving abusive relationships. In that capacity I facilitated several women’s support groups. As I listened, I became more and more conscious of the inequities and injustices suffered by women. I began to read authors such as Mary Daly, Rosemary Radford Reuther, Carol Christ, Sally McFague, and Merlin Stone. And as I read, I got angry – angry at the patriarchal system, at the patriarchal church and its patriarchal god, and for a while, at men in general. I also became frightened.

Having been reared in an intensely patriarchal religion, I was terrified to think of God as having feminine characteristics or to contemplate any kind of spirituality that whispered that I, too, was divine. I struggled to reconcile what I was reading with what I had been taught. The new ideas that I was exposing myself to resonated in my bones as deeper truths. I couldn’t let them go. Ultimately, I had a big dream (which I describe in week 2) that gave my soul permission to continue with my studies.

I continued to read – Scott Peck, Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, Sue Monk Kidd, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Carolyn Myss, Judith Duerk, Jean Shinoda Bolen, Caroline Fairchild, and many, many others. With each new author, I felt the calling of the Divine Feminine. Over time I learned to trust that still voice inside of me and to recognize it as HER voice. And She called me to a different view of my spiritual path.

Frequently I use the term God/dess in these essays. While I believe that the Source (God, God/dess or whatever you name your deity) is neither male nor female, but rather a combination of both, our Christian culture, especially Protestant Christianity, has almost completely obliterated the idea of a Divine Feminine. Thus, we have a toxic patriarchal culture which demeans and denigrates the feminine. I feel called to the Divine Feminine as a counterbalance to the patriarchal structure in which we are all indoctrinated. We must see and understand the feminine as deeply as we see and understand the masculine before we can achieve real balance.

At the end of 2019, I was participating in an on-line prayer intensive led by prayer artist, Janet Conner. During one of the guided meditations, I heard the words, The Dance of Yes. Even though I had no idea what I was saying yes to, I chose to make the Dance of Yes my mantra for 2020.

I have been journaling off and on for over forty years. It was in those journals that I gleaned deep feminine wisdom. In early 2020, as the pandemic began, I decided to go back through my old journals and collect the most important lessons that I had learned over time. I felt called to put these into a journal, which I called The Wisdom of the God/dess. These were usually a sentence or two that felt like nuggets of feminine wisdom. Then I felt led to expand upon these nuggets by writing an essay about each one. When I look back over them, they feel almost channeled. I sometimes don’t recognize the words as mine.

Later in another guided meditation, I knew I needed to write a weekly blog. I already had enough essays for a year, so it felt like the next logical step on my spiritual path. After teaching myself to build a website (which was much more difficult than writing those essays) I launched womanspiritspeaks.com in October 2020. Each week I am led to write about my own struggles with life – grief, love, balance, wholeness, anger, isolation – whatever is going on with me at the moment.

Now I am being led a step further. I am being led to use my blogs as a stepping-stone for others to dig deep into their own spirits to find their unique path to their Soul’s calling. So I have made this into a fifty-two week journal with questions for each day of the week. It is my hope that it will be a tool for others to discover their own relationship to their Source and to themselves.

I don’t believe in a patriarchal, hierarchical, vengeful God that resides somewhere ‘out there.’ I believe in a loving presence that not only holds me but resides within me. I don’t believe that I need religion, dogma, or theology to walk in spirit and truth. I am not a member of any church, temple, coven, or organized religion. My path is solitary and deeply personal. My path has been to look within, deeply and honestly, to find my way to the Divine.

This book comes from my own personal spiritual journey over the course of almost 40 years. In these pages, I want to share what I have heard and learned on that spiritual quest. It is written out of my own discontent with an exclusively male god and the discontent I have sensed in my spiritual sisters.

Although it is written with women in mind, the quest to find wholeness and balance is not exclusively female. Men who are on this path may also find these thoughts helpful. While my Soul has led me on the path of the Divine Feminine, this book is designed to lead you on your own spiritual journey. It is not a call to convert to God/dess worship or to join the God/dess movement. It is