Power Archives - Shakti Priestess

A Tigress In The Temple

January 9, 2015 by Zinnia Sophia 1 Comment

Being true to yourself is old magic. It’s a key to self-realization, to being all you can be and to living an abundant, joyful, harmonious and rewarding life. Being true to yourself is a way of living where you stay connected with the beauty of your innermost Self, listen to Its guidance, follow your heart, and speak and take actions that express your truth, ideals and values. One of the greatest challenges in being true to yourself is knowing what choices best honor you and reflect your deepest truth, your sacred beauty. Being true to yourself requires self-awareness, where you are in touch with your dreams and vulnerability. It means knowing what empowers you and what does not. Self-awareness comes from being in contact with the divine within you.

To be true to who you are, to know how to express your deepest truth, requires awakening to your true identity as a soul that is greater than your mind, emotions and body. This is how the spirit of Ibiza awakened me. Through the Goddess. And through dance. Three years ago I traveled to the island of Ibiza, Spain. My intention was to live there, retreat and rejuvenate during my divorce. My healing journey in Ibiza happened when I decided to unleash my wild sacred self. To untame the tamed woman I had become. And to release the tigress within, the priestess, dancer, the wild woman who ran with wolves, who danced in ancient temples amongst tigers and forests. This was a woman who was buried deep inside of me. And this was a woman I needed to uncover once again, if I was going to live from my true authentic self.

I arrived in Ibiza on a warm spring day in March. The breeze was playful. The island was green with rain and I could feel her thawing, opening, blossoming as if I was one with her heart, her round hills and electric skies. My first week I was introduced to the island’s longest living resident dancer, Zorah LeDuc. She was a beautiful, sensual belly dancer and lover of gypsy music. She was a gateway. She awakened me to dance again. In the first class, I felt the awkwardness of my body while watching young, beautiful, supple belly dancers shimmying and sashaying through the room. I was terrified of the feeling bubbling up inside of me. There was an old voice shaming me, “who do you think you are?” Shame, self-disgust, fear, judgment. Why had I stopped dancing? Why wasn’t I slim, healthy and radiant like these women? How had I allowed myself to become fat? I cried when I got home and promised myself I would dance again. My wish came true. As I trained, ran, got in shape and practiced dance, I received a message from a Dutch woman who had met me in a restaurant in San Josep. I forgot we had exchanged numbers to discuss future events. She asked me if I would dance at her restaurant opening. I said, “Yes, yes, of course I would!” I thought I was ready. The day of the performance, there were not so many people at the restaurant. I was crippled with fear. I hadn’t choreographed anything. I was just going to move with the music. But my body could not move. My heart was frozen. Thankfully, the music system didn’t work either and so I could not dance that day. My friends who had come to support me all consoled me and told me, “Its okay, you’ll dance another time.”

That night I had a dream. I dreamt I was dancing inside a red temple. There was a blazing fire in the middle and I was dancing around the fire, waving my arms in ecstasy, swaying my hips in sacred circles and offering my heart as a prayer to the sky. A tiger came to dance beside me. She whispered something in my ear and afterwards I was able to dance with great force and devotion. My hair fell along my back like a river of dusk and in the red ray of light my spine opened to fire. I felt part of me hiding in the cocoon of my skin, until my heart began beating, drumming began. I heard ancient chanting, sounds floating on red steps. The sounds opened me. Orange flames rose from my heart as I danced in spirals, red hibiscus in my mouth. A flame whispered inside of me. Even the heat had music. I broke open. I broke loose like a snake uncoiling across hills into a fierce, old woman with round eyes and crimson plumes flying in all directions. The tiger symbolizes devotion and this word danced in my mind while I had the vision of a beautiful sun dancer dancing with the element of fire. I felt I wanted people to see my unique, individual expression in all its forms, and in all the ways I could dance. I felt my heart desiring and longing to express the fullness of my talents –- a full range of grace, drama, fire, discipline, devotion, softness, technique and skill. And I wanted to enjoy the journey through this process. Growing through the gift of sacred beauty and sacred dance and remaining in humility to the Goddess who bestowed her gift to me.

That night, I vowed to honor the truth flowing inside of me. Opportunity after opportunity flowed to me after I made that commitment to myself. Nature lives commitment. One month later, I returned to the restaurant in San Josep and danced my heart out in three choreographed performances and spontaneous ecstatic dances. Then I continued to dance at weddings, healing festivals, lead workshops, and opened concerts for famous musicians like Prem Joshua and the Sunny Singh Bollywood Dance Academy. I also created a dance movement called Sacred Dance, Shakti Flow and Dance of the Kama Sutra. I danced for three years in Ibiza and in Greece.

Layer by layer, I unfolded. I followed my inner child, my little girl who was full of talents and gifts to share with the world. As she revealed her pain I listened and held her in her pain. I listened to her stories of shame, abuse, humiliation and I held her so she felt protected, loved and cherished. That it was safe to be vulnerable and express her gifts again. I’m no longer frozen dancing. I’m whirling in the joy and existence of my body.

This feminine power that flows deep from within me. It was the courage of a new beginning that set me free. The voice of courage was wiser and deeper than the old ancient voice of shame. And she roared. She said, not now, not ever again. The fire of that inner courage unfroze me and awakened me. Now I empower myself and tap into inner power. Now I allow my inner power, grace and beauty to shine. Now I listen to my intuition and inner guidance. I flow moment to moment. I believe in my heart’s deepest desires and dreams. I follow sweet delicious feelings inside my fountain of joy. I open to the language of my body. I open to pleasure, sensuality and delight. In Ibiza, I unleashed every wild, waking moment inside of me. I set my inner soul free. I danced on cliffs, sang with stars, swam nude in the midnight ocean with the lunar light floating upon me. I did everything my wild soul wanted. And I drank in Ibiza. I drank her in.

I continue this journey with a woman who is wide awake, alive and open to all the strength that lives inside of her. This was the gift of the journey. To reclaim truth and a divine vision of myself. To not believe any longer the stories of a broken, damaged, less than woman.

Now when that voice asks me “who you do think you are?” I am vulnerable to it. I do not hide from it or let it control me. I open up and meet it, shake loose my hips and I reply, “I am a Goddess, dancing my truth. Join me.”

Awaken Your Inner Queen

December 29, 2014 by Zinnia Sophia Leave a Comment

It’s time. No longer are you a sleeping princess unaware of your power and beauty. You’ve grown up. You’ve been a warrior in battle and you’ve transformed yourself through challenges, scars, initiations and unimaginable experiences. I hear you. Your stories of devastating loss, Dark Night of the Souls, spiritual awakenings, healing, perseverance, fearlessness, and fighting through Ego and old emotional wounds to find a rainbow at the end of a storm. I know you. The path you have taken powerful, courageous woman. I bow to you. It’s time to take the throne. Feeling empowered, masterful, and free. You choose the life you want to lead. You choose the partner of your dreams. You choose how your deepest desires and dreams will manifest in this life.

What legacy will you leave? How will you mentor others? Who will you inspire? What gifts are leaping from your Queenly heart to shine out to this beautiful, bright world? 2015 is an 8 year. Executive energy. Leadership. Power. Strength. Goals. Long-scale plans. Stability. Queendom. We need your light. We need your life force. Awaken your inner power this year and HOLD it. EMBODY it. MASTER it. EMPOWER it. LEAD with it. Every moment has led you here. No more playing small. Open the ferocity of your soul.

Claim your power and AWAKEN YOU INNER QUEEN.

Be The Heroine of Your Life, Not The Victim

December 29, 2014 by Zinnia Sophia Leave a Comment

Transformation is in the air.

I feel it in my circle of friends, my family, priestess community, among my teachers. And I certainly feel it within myself. We are all in different stages of spiritual development. Like a butterfly cocoons, chrysalis, breaks free and transforms into a completely different creature than it was previously. This magical and often painful journey requires learning, crisis, growth, transition and transformation. In terms of women today, we too are journeying through layers of ancient stories and birthing a new way of being, a new story. While some women are living an old story, some women are finishing up writing the old story. Some are in a Sacred Pause or have begun to flow within the Co-Creative Wave, and some of brave, courageous souls are actually writing a New Story.

The old stories are old and ancient and speak of a time when we were victims of violence, war, poverty and discrimination for 5,000 years. We have been collectively carrying the wounds of generations of women for so long. Too long. Now in this lifetime we are being asked and guided to let them go. In the old story, we internalized shame and felt this shame about our bodies. This story we have been telling ourselves is an illusion and a lie. It is distorted and disconnected perspective on sexuality. It is disconnected from the juicy, vibrant goddess that lies with each of us, who knows she is whole and has a divine purpose to bless and heal the earth and all beings with her love, sensual, erotic, passionate and compassionate nature.

We now have a choice to change this story around.

Our new choices demand that we connect to the power and protection of the Divine Feminine within us. To our beautiful bodies, emotions and to nature. If we can relate to the Great Mother, to Gaia, the Goddess in any way, shape or form, we may have a better chance at getting to the New Story. What does this look like? Having values based on nature, ecology, collaboration, cooperation, harmony, wisdom, love, compassion, respecting the wild, loving with an open heart, abundance consciousness, beauty and radiance. Some women are waking up and discovering that their old story is falling away, and they can let it go more easily than ever before. They can no longer relate to it as who they are, and they recognize the signs that are telling them to release it and heal. Some women have done the work of releasing the old story and find themselves undefined. In a holy moment, a Sacred Pause of a Great Void. She is pregnant with possibilities for a new way of being, relating to herself and to the world. She is becoming her own sovereign, listening to her inner queen who is ready to rise towards a life based on the sacred feminine: an inner life shaped by connection to her body, the earth, her emotions, self-belief, self-love, self-care, nurturing, inner beauty and service to the community through her wisdom.

In this phase of her transformation, she needs rest, renewal, and a nurturing of her life-force energy and a reconnection to the sensual. Some women have caught and are beginning to ride the Wave of Co-Creation. The impulse and vibration of change is in the air for them, and they are ready to find a new way to be in their bodies. Dancing, moving and desiring a freedom of movement that allows desire to rise up into power. In this dance they are feeling the vitality and shakti of feminine flow in harmony with Gaia and the Goddess within. Some women are in the forefront, writing the New Story for the Feminine because they have been living it all along. The entrepreneurs, healers, prophetesses, tantrikas, shamans, oracles, priestesses and teachers who walk their talk in all areas of their lives.

The New Story is embracing this Divine Goddess within.

Imagine a woman who gets to choose her life’s experiences. She is no longer attached only to her light nature and limited by her dark nature, her shame, taboos and failures. She no longer fears being abandoned by a man while living in a world of masculine ideals and expectations. She no longer believes that purity is the only path towards the Divine. She is whole. She has lived and is integrating her her dark and light natures. She in balance with herself. Imagine how controversial this would have been in medieval times—in fact, it remains controversial in so many societies even today who do not receive a cherie a woman like this. A sovereign. A Goddess. In the old story we were split apart. We were not whole. You might recognize it as “slut-shaming,” the Madonna-Whore complex and the curious treatment of the Magdalene. Patriarchal religions did not allow the freedom of woman to be determined by her understanding of Self and the Sacred. Shaktism and Tantricism, paganism, mystic Judaism, Shamanic traditions, nature based practices and Goddess spirituality do allow this. And they also allow for the Divine Masculine to be a counterpart to the Divine Feminine.

We are one. That is new path. That is the new story.

These women who are transforming, evolving, healing, learning and growing; have rejected a worldly life where she was once a captured woman rejecting herself, her intuition and her instincts. She may appear as the single mother, the divorcee, the widow, the crone—a woman who has simply rejected her reliance upon a male energy as her only source for love, approval, affection and salvation. There is a deep, dark wisdom to all of this. The stages of feminine development. In the sacred pause of transformation, when you are alone and scared, fear not as others have gone before you. The Holy Sophia. Dhumvati, and of course Mary Magdalene. She is formless. Smoke. She is the Hermit, She is the Wandering-Sage, She is the Woman Unafraid to be Alone and Unprotected as She moves through the World. To reclaim her truth, her values, her power, her life, her song, she will sacrifice it all. She’ll burn herself down to ashes. And then she’ll rise up again, unashamedly to the rest of the world singing softly in their ears, “Wake up wake up.”

The Power of Joy

November 30, 2014 by Zinnia Sophia Leave a Comment

“When everything seems to be going against you,
remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.”

~ Henry Ford

Getting divorced was the hardest experience I’ve had up until now. It was frustrating, emotionally crippling and felt like spiritual abandonment. The experience forced me to face my darkness and to face what choices had brought me to this moment. Why I had separated with a partner who I had pledged to spend a lifetime with. I do not commit easily and when I do, it’s for deep soul partnership. When that dream shattered, I became lost.

I was fortunate to have the strongest weapon in my spiritual arsenal during that time period. My faith. I used the melancholy time to go inward and reflect. I committed to feeling the pain, understanding the pain, cleansing myself consciously and journaling every day. While all of that that helped me intellectually, nothing touched my soul the way that joy would. It was a journey I was meant to go through and it changed my life and gave me soul purpose in a way that nothing else had the power to.

At some point in the divorce process, I decided I wanted re-invent myself and change my career direction. I was an advertising executive working in San Francisco and New York. I began to dream of a life I’ve always wanted but was scared to pursue. One year in the Mediterranean. I imagined a life in Spain. I listened to flamenco music and Cafe del Mar all day long, I had vision boards of “My Life In Spain” in my house and at work, I listened to my intuition on places to visit that matched my inner desires, once I arrived there I networked and created trustworthy relationships with people who lived in a magical island called Ibiza.

For months I journaled through my resistance and transformed doubt and worry into passion and purpose. I channeled the joy I felt about this life. When I journaled about the possibilities of this experience, there were so many voices that cautioned me out of it. What will my parents say? What about my full-time job? I trusted the words that poured out of my soul. I followed that. I trusted my inner voice and my inner vision. I chose that. After hundreds of pages filled with the voice of a woman’s whose soul had been set on fire, I had discovered the ability to follow the voice of my soul consistently and discern between soul and ego. My body was tingling all over. My heart was pounding and I felt excitement and passion flow again through my veins. I had laid down plans for a new vision for my life. My deepest longings and desires to dance at festivals and concerts the way I once had when I was young girl. To swim in moonlight and dance across the shore of an ocean. I wrote down all the possibilities. I arrived in Ibiza with money to live there for a few months, retreat and rejuvenate. I took long meditative walks in nature, spent time meditating on my desires, enrolled in belly dancing classes, painted and wrote poetry. In other words, I connected with a beautiful, sacred and magical part of me. I was not only dancing at healing festivals and concerts and weddings again, I was dancing with life.

I had found joy.

After the first year of discovering joy, I knew I had tapped into a fountain of power and it had regenerated me. Now, how to maintain that power? This was to be my next learning. I created a daily manifestation practice as well as a seasonal one where I trained my mental powers and physical body. I made decisions based on my core values, spoke my truth even when that meant disappointing others. I took inspired action, believed in my worthiness and deservedness to receive all my heart’s desires and became a leader of my community.

The result?

I ended up living on a magical island for 3 years, developing a sacred dance practice, life coaching business and a wisdom school to mentor young women. Every year I felt stronger, eating fresh salads and fruits, swimming in turquoise Mediterranean waters, running 12 kilometers three times a week on an ocean road, learning new spiritual skills, belonging to a sacred community who embraced me. I had learned how to take care of myself again and belong. And not make my partner responsible for filling those needs for me. I marketed my dance company in the Mediterranean and was invited to dance in Greece. I danced with famous sacred musicians who taught me the value of joy through dance, song and music. I was so connected to my personal power and what I could manifest with that. By this point, I felt I had fulfilled all my wishes.

I looked back on my vision board I had created three years ago and I wept. I had achieved everything I wanted. A life based on music and dance, strong community relationships, and feeling beautiful inside and out. I felt very abundant. But there was something missing.. Something was still holding me back. There was resentment, bitterness and unforgiveness. I had to learn to let that go. If I was going to have a beautiful relationship with myself – clean and pure – I had to let go of old emotional programming.

The divorce was final. The courts had signed the papers. I was a free woman. I called my ex-husband and I wished him well. I let him know that I would always be here should he need anything and that I honored our friendship still. I gave both of us the gift of forgiveness. And I gave myself the gift of self-acceptance and peace with my past.

Once I did that, the magic began again. And a new set of opportunities presented themselves to me. I was done with my three year retreat on the magical island of Ibiza. I had finished the lessons life was teaching me. It was time to learn a new challenge. Now, a new career is now opening for me. To teach sacred dance, online empowerment classes and open a wisdom school to mentor priestesses in training. My new dream is to spread these rich teachings globally to women. Some are transitioning from a relationship, some have been abused or mistreated and some just desire more abundance from life. I have a message for these women, “Yes, joy exists, After everything you’ve known falls apart, it is this one thing that can save you. And you have this power within you.”

Here are my top 5 tips on how to connect with your power:

Trust your inner voice Envision your ideal life, desires and dreams. How do you feel? What are the things you want to do the most now? Let your voice flow and listen. Feel the quality of freedom of being able to do this. Journal to connect consistently to this voice.
Claim your personal power Believe in your worthiness. Write down all of the goals you’ve already achieved this year. Character traits you love about yourself. Read this list over and over. They key here is to believe in yourself and go after your dreams!
Manifest your dreams You can manifest anything by getting clear. Clarity cuts through confusion. Get clear on how your perceptions. Get clear on your imagery. Get clear on your expectations of your life. Feel into the possibilities of the picture you’ve just created.
Transform pain into wisdom Master how to change one form to another form. Transform depression into expression of life. Transform deep loss and regret into life lessons and joy. Shape-shift your career into your spiritual mission and life path.
Own your magnificence The world needs your brilliance, joy talent, grace and radiance. Hold the vision of your life, sing your soul song out to the world and be a light.

Joy is a practice. You have to practice it every day. Joy is based on pure desire. Desire it. Long for it. Claim it and own it. Not only will you attract and magnetize to yourself the life you want, but a life that you deserve.