mmm… I love this

mmmmmm… it is Friday afternoon, and candles and  fireplace is burning, outside  the wind is ice cold and fierce, we even had some snow here in the Californian mountains.

I made some delicious Nori Rolls today, I am totally hooked! Here is the recipy:

Put some sheets of raw nori sheet down on a cutting board.

Cut some fresh vegetables up in small strips (I used carrots/purple kale/avocado/baby spinach and cilantro), and place it in a row in the middle of the sheet.

Spread a nut/seed pate on the sheets around the veggies (I used raw almond butter)

Roll it all into a roll, and wet the ends with water so they glue together. Now you can cut the roll in two or more pieces.

Enjoy!

Happy weekend,

Chameli

How to Live Feminine Leadership

 

Back in 1990 when I started to play around with the techniques that later evolved into the women’s awakening and empowerment process that we use at Awakening Women Institute, I did not really know how to be a woman in the world.

All the role models I saw around me seemed to be constricted in one way or another. The women in Norway, where I grew up, had thoroughly proven that they could “do it as good as men,” but on the other hand it seemed like “doing it as good as men” only made women tense, unhappy and stressed.

In my early twenties I fell in love with meditation and a reality outside my own little boring mind. Through this passionate love affair, a place inside me revealed itself, a dimension of being that was peaceful, limitless and always present. From there my life changed dramatically, but there was still a deep underlying confusion around living in a woman’s body: a body so alive, so deeply yearning and so ready to love. I struggled with how to be with my rich emotional world, when and how to set boundaries, and my relationships were basically a mess.

The Awakening Women Way

As an effect of thousands of years of imbalance toward masculine, left brain values, many women today often find themselves in a severe state of disembodiment and inner tension.

We may experience success in life but the price we pay is often that we move around with parts of our being and bodies frozen in involuntary “shields” of protection that sabotage our relationships and even our connection to the sacred.

Many of us have turned to different spiritual traditions to quench the thirst of our souls, only to find ourselves estranged by the same emphasis of masculine values.

At AWI we explore empowerment beyond the fighting and competitive mindset that says, “we can do it as well as men.” Feminine empowerment the AWI way is a relaxed and aligned state of being that transcends power games altogether.

We explore spiritual awakening beyond dusty dogmas and far fetched goals of the future. Awakening from the AWI perspective is a fully embodied realization of freedom and love uniquely experienced and expressed through each woman.

In the AWI trainings your feminine wisdom and beauty are celebrated and honored.

Your body becomes soft and radiant again as you learn to listen to the gentle whisper of wisdom from within. By doing so, this experience is anchored in the body so that it is always readily available to you as you move through your life.

We learn not only to listen, but also to speak and act with clarity and truth from this inner guidance so that we can be shining examples of feminine awakening and empowerment in our world.

In our trainings, you are invited to reclaim, honor and embrace the wild beauty of a full range of feminine feelings, from the most gentle to red-hot fierceness, bringing healing into the world from this untapped well of wisdom.

We would love to hear your comments on how The Awakening Women Way has effected you in your life.

With love always

Chameli

Photo: ‘The eye of the Goddess” ; Mikaela Larm

The Invitation

By Oriah Mountain Dreamer
It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living
I want to know what you ache for
and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.

It doesn’t interest me how old you are
I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool
for love
for your dreams
for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon…
I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow
if you have been opened by life’s betrayals
or have become shrivelled and closed
from fear of further pain.

I want to know if you can sit with pain
mine or your own
without moving to hide it
or fade it
or fix it.

I want to know if you can be with joy
mine or your own
if you can dance with wildness
and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your
fingers and toes
without cautioning us to
be careful
be realistic
to remember the limitations of being human.

Are you friend with your mind?

 

In spiritual/personal growth circles we often hear that we have to “get out of the mind”. We are tired of having our every experience filtered and analyzed by our thoughts, so we begin to seek out inspiration from cultures that move more from the heart. Cultures like India or Peru.
We want to be like them, we want to get rid of the mind, now we want to only live from the heart.
And here we go again, right into the same old familiar pattern of inner conflict.

In South America there is an old legend about the eagle and the condor.
Long time ago human societies divided and took different paths: that of the condor (representing the heart, intuitive and mystical) and that of the eagle (representing the brain, rational and material).  The prophesy says that the eagle would drive the condor to the verge of extinction, but that a time will come in which the condor and the eagle will have the opportunity to reunite and fly together in the same sky, along the same path. If the condor and eagle accept this opportunity, they will create a most remarkable offspring, unlike any seen before.
Many believe that the time as come.
Not for the eagle to turn its controlling conflicting energy away from the condor and instead direct it towards itself. No. It is time for the two to fly together. Mind and heart united.
The mental realm is familiar to us people from the north, can we instead of fighting this, take on the sacred job of being the guides and masters here?

In brilliance

Chameli

 

ps: In class 10 of our Feminine Awakening Series, I speak about a great teacher in how to use our mind in creativity; the Goddess Saraswati.

THE AWAKENING

Samme Samareta is part of my amazing Face Book community. Today he posted this text that I want to share with you all.

Namaste,

Chameli

A time comes in your life when you finally get…when, in the midst of all your fears and insanity, you stop dead in your tracks and somewhere the voice inside your head cries out…ENOUGH! Enough fighting and crying and blaming and struggling to hold on. Then, like a child quieting down after a tantrum, you blink back your tears and begin to look at the world through new eyes.

This is your awakening.

You realize it’s time to stop hoping and waiting for something to change, or for happiness, safety and security to magically appear over the next horizon.

You realize that in the real world there aren’t always fairy tale endings, and that any guarantee of “happily ever after” must begin with you…and in the process a sense of serenity is born of acceptance.

You awaken to the fact that you are not perfect and that not everyone will always love, appreciate or approve of who or what you are…and that’s OK. They are entitled to their own views and opinions.

You learn the importance of loving and championing yourself…and in the process a sense of new found confidence is born of self-approval.

The Gift Of the Mother~ a Practice

This practice will open to a more intimate relationship with Mother Earth, Gaia.

In the Andes Mountains, the indigenous people have a practice of bringing gratitude to the food.

When they eat they open themselves as if they are fed by the Mother.

When they drink their thirst is quenched by the Mother.

When they open their heart in gratitude like this, the earth and nature will reveal secrets to them through the leaves, through the shadows over the meadows, through the ripples over the water.  Just because they have opened their hearts and tuned in, they will be able to receive wisdom and to communicate intimately with the Earth.
This practice is to not only bring gratitude to your food, but to be very aware that you are being fed by the Mother all the time.

When you drink, notice that you drink from the Mother.

When you walk, notice that you are held, supported by the Mother.

When you breathe, notice that you are being breathed. You are so supported by this loyal breath.

Simply through your receptivity you will open for her wisdom and her communication deeper than the intellect.

 

In gratitude,

Chameli

This practice is from the recorded class: Awakening the Feminine Body

opening ~ closing ~ opening

 

Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes,
if it were always a fist or always stretched open,
You would be paralyzed.

Your deepest presence is in every small
contracting and expanding,
the two as beautifully balanced
coordinated as bird wings
~Rumi

 

photo: Gregory Colbert at http://www.ashesandsnow.org

The Women’s Temple group

For the balanced feminine to blossom it is helpful, and in our experience crucial, to create and sustain women’s circles that truly nourish us in the deepest sense. Instead of enforcing the status quo by focusing on our problems and personal shortcomings, circles like this connect us with truth beyond our fears and limited self-images. From this deeper place we can effortlessly radiate clarity and guidance instead of exhaust ourselves in trying to be leaders from a tense, competitive and ego-centered state of mind.

The Women’s temple is not a therapy or a support group. It is a space were we come to mirror, celebrate and empower each other. A space were we can drop our masks, and let the beauty of our authentic face to be seen. In all its glory and pain and passion and vulnerability.
In our Women’s temple we meet beyond the personal, and in this expanded meeting the collective feminine as well as the personal is healed and celebrated.

Women are the teachers of compassion

The Dali Llama says that the future lays in the hands of women, because women are the teachers of compassion.

Compassion, caring and unconditional love, are all qualities very close to the woman’s heart. They are natural to us.

Yet we have come to view these qualities as weak, or soft, they don’t have any place out in “the real world”, in leadership, in political interaction or business transactions. They are qualities we keep at home.

It is obvious to me that the time is calling us women to step forward,  to bring these qualities into every interaction we have as human beings on this planet today. Not only with each other, but also with our earth and the other beings that we are sharing our earth with.

Many of us have closed our hearts because of being hurt in the past, being taken advantage of when we were giving and we didn’t receive anything back. In closing our hearts, we think that we protect ourselves, but the truth is that in closing our heart in this way, to stop giving, we are amputating the very source of nourishment and expansion in awakening and rejuvenation of our feminine being,
So instead of closing our heart, as Awakening Women we are learning how to live in the world with a broken heart.

Lets move to the heart.

Yours Chameli