CAUGHT RED HANDED
We linger on the edge … as if it is comfortable … as if it is our home. The most loving thing I can offer you is a push.
THE RED LADY
The first time the Red Lady played my body like a Red violin was a week before my first book was published and a year after I had left the energy school. The Red Book: A Deliciously Unorthodox Approach to Igniting Your Divine Spark (named after my Red journal from graduate school) was written to help young women navigate the crowded spiritual arena, without falling off their particular path or losing their authentic selves in the process. I was terrified that the book was about to be released. I have a weak constitution when it comes to delivering my work to the world. I’m overly sensitive, way too self-critical, and nothing scares me more than doing what I’m here to do. Okay, fine, maybe cruise ships scare me more, but offering my Redness to the public is definitely a close second.
So, right before my book’s pub date, I did what most Northern Californians do when they have a psycho-spiritual issue: I attended a workshop. This was one of those earnest Human Potential derivatives, where the facilitators put you in the middle of a circle of participants and ask a series of personal questions that gently, or sometimes not so gently, push you to your edge, and then over it, so something pent up — an emotion, trauma, memory, or unlived aspect of you — releases through relatively healthy expressions (pummeling pillows, dialoguing, screaming, sobbing) in a safe environment.
Honestly, I hate these kinds of things. Stick me in a spiritual retreat to talk about God all day, and I’m In. Stick me in a room to release my emotional shit with a bunch of strangers, and I’m anything but In. But, I figured my resistance to these workshops and to emoting in front of strangers might be part of what I needed to release, so I nervously waited until the last day to plop myself in the hot seat.
The skilled facilitators began questioning me, prodding — closely watching for any signals that I was approaching “my edge.” But nothing was happening. I wasn’t biting or budging or edging. They eyed one another, perhaps wondering why they had allowed the super-resistant one’s turn to come before lunch. Finally, a fellow participant piped up: “I feel like you’re holding back, Sera. Like, I want to know you, but you won’t allow me to really know you or experience you.” My eyes welled up with tears. My goddamned shyness and inhibition always cost me intimacy. One of the facilitators said, “Sera, you seem to know things that you don’t know how to communicate. Perhaps that’s why you hold yourself back?” I shrugged, perhaps. Another participant burst out, “Well, I want you to tell me what you know about me!” I squirmed like a slug in sea salt; the facilitators noticed and pounced — finally, Sera’s edge!
They brought the woman who asked to “be known” in front of me. I wasn’t quite sure what I was supposed to do. I’m not a psychic (despite my best efforts in that energy school), and I’m not used to communicating subtle impressions I have of strangers to their faces. But I realized this might be my fast-track ticket off the hot seat, so I focused, and shared a few insights with the woman. She nodded, thanked me, and was about to return to her seat when suddenly, without thinking, without having any idea what the hell I was doing, I randomly, almost involuntarily, stepped closer to the woman, rose up onto my tippy toes (she was tall), grabbed her head, and planted a kiss right in the center of her forehead.
SMACK!
The room gasped. Strangely enough, a few participants burst into tears. I looked around, dazed. Quickly, the facilitators had my fellow participants form a standing circle around me and I/She/We totally went to town.
I spontaneously moved from person to person without thinking and started to touch them where it felt like they needed to be touched. I rubbed the belly and gently tweaked the nose of one tall, overweight, balding man. He was crying and laughing. So was I. I grabbed the hips of a woman who had been raped and pulled them into mine. She started to wail. I ran my hand down the back of the next woman in order to release her, uh, dead mother, whose energy just happened to be hanging out behind her. I gently whispered, “You can let her go.” Tears poured. Then I started hitting a tightly muscled macho man’s chest, hard.
SMACK!
(Again.)
SMACK!
As I was hitting him, I kept looking into his eyes, smiling
Clear
Love
A facilitator, who was watching from outside of the circle, suddenly spoke (what he said, I can’t quite remember now), and I immediately became self-conscious. The effect was like a rapturous record roughly scratching to a halt. The energy of Us broke. A tall (like, seriously tall), beautiful black man, named Sid, who had not been touched yet, cried out in his deep baritone voice: “Come on, man! Don’t let her stop!”
But I had stopped. As I shyly looked around at all these shiny, big-eyed people, I felt utterly vulnerable, utterly alone, utterly connected, utterly Me, and utterly Her.
Then we all went to lunch and ate turkey sandwiches and talked about our new haircuts and the current political bill threatening reproductive rights and the weird thing our dog sniffed the other day. This is the punky paradox of modern spiritual life. This is the Divine Feminine meets the human woman reality.
That night, after the weekend workshop had completed, I sat on my bed and asked for Divine guidance. Specifically:
“WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?”
There was no immediate answer, but my feelings brought me back to that experience in that room.
What did I know to be true?
Well, I knew that what happened in that room was Divine … not that what happened in the room before me or after me wasn’t Divine. But I knew holy hot rods of Divine Love accelerated through us all during that particular time, and for some reason, I happened to be the conductor, or the reflector, or the reminder, and definitely, on an unconscious level, the eager beaver.
Slowly, awareness spread like melted butter across heated skin …
I’ve been craving This.
I gave that woman a smackeroo on her forehead because of a previously unconscious Burning Inner Impulse that I had never allowed myself to act on, and this Divine Feminine Instinct — in that moment, in that workshop — was stronger than my ego, my fear, my shyness, my self-consciousness, and my social conditioning. So, She took full advantage of the situation. And then some.
I suddenly had another Redvelation: No wonder I’m a bit standoffish, socially awkward, and not touchy-feely (which makes me stick out like a Red flag in this Northern Californian uber-huggy, boundary-loosed culture). The truth is, if I let myself unleash, if I did what I really wanted to do, I’d probably just mack on random people all day. I’d love their shit up — pat their bellies, hit their chests, honk their noses, squeeze their cheeks, and say what needed to be said. And then go out for vodka shots.
Right after these cheeky Redvelations, intense waves of pain wracked my body as I finally allowed myself to actually feel how devastating it had been not to do this.
Not to Love you like I was created to Love you.
Not to reach out through this very page and smooch your forehead
and More.
My body bent forward from all the energy it had taken to hold myself back. How contracted, defensive, dismissive I’d become. How carefully managed and well maintained. How stiff I’d grown in reaction to this Red Impulse.
That night, I realized one of my edgiest edges is giving Red Love and being witnessed as It. In other words, a huge fear of mine is offering Her to others as She comes through me and being seen doing so. It’s an odd edge, but I don’t think it’s mine alone.
FEMININE SUPERPOWERS
After this experience I began to recognize that besides all the spiritual superpowers taught at the energy school, we each also have feminine spiritual superpowers, such as touching, knowing, feeling, relating, expressing our true voice(s), visioning, healing — and even more that you will soon read about, like pussy power (it’s no joke, my friends), sacred rage (“seeing Red” is not always a bad thing), and our natural ability to conduct eros. Many of these feminine spiritual superpowers are unrecognized and underappreciated in most spiritual systems, or are even feared. In fact, not so long ago, the very “stuff” that made us women was used against us. It still is today, which is why many of us have stifled our feminine superpowers.
In Jalaja Bonheim’s splendid book Aphrodite’s Daughters, a woman named Shoshana tells us,
Women once knew the realms of magic. They understood how to work magic. We still can use those powers. It may sound like hocus-pocus, but when you really get the subtleties of what energy fields are all about — we have it all at our fingertips. We need to unlock the tremendous knowledge within us…. We are so afraid to admit we are magic. We are so afraid somebody is going to think we are witches. I want to be called a witch. A witch is a wisewoman.1
Although feminine magic might look and feel different from traditional spiritual “gifts,” it doesn’t make it any less powerful or needed or divine. So, in case you’ve forgotten, I just wanna remind you that you have super-powers — real ones. Phenomenal, mystical, scientifically provable (well, sometimes). And it’s time to start acting like it. You’re far too important to the Universe to remain unconscious of your natural abilities.
Witch reminds me, I’ve got something to say to all those fearful forces throughout history that did away with women who dared to display their divine birthrights and authentic gifts publicly:
We’re baaaaack!
You might want to drink a glass of Red wine before reading the next chapter.