RELATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS and the FEMININE 


a 10 minute Podcast: M.McFeely interviews Alex Warden

a conversation about the 

Importance of the Feminine in Birthing the New Level of Consciousness of Humanity

– a Relational Consciousness that perceives the Oneness of Life in Full Awareness –

to listen, please press on the title below:







The Feminine Principle and Our Evolution of Consciousness

A few excerpts from my latest article recently published in
Light of Consciousness Journal Summer 2013, VOL. 25 NO. 2.
--and posted with these lovely images on Light of Consciousness Facebook Page.


As an aspect of consciousness, the feminine is natural wisdom, an understanding that often manifests as Knowing without thinking. This primordial wisdom senses and understands from within. -- Alex Warden, The Feminine Principle and Our Evolution of Consciousness



By witnessing and consciously experiencing how the thread of life weaves everything together and unites all, the miracle, grandeur, and magic of existence becomes visible once again.


When we live from the feminine consciousness, life is experienced as wondrous and alive. There is a natural sense of togetherness and belonging...The child does not experience herself separate from her mother, the human does not experience herself separate from nature. 
They are One.




The feminine knows its unity with “all” in the same way a pregnant mother knows her union with her unborn child--through experience. 



“If we understand the universe as an increasing embodiment of consciousness or spirit, we can appreciate how consciousness has been incarnating into matter, rooting into substance, or as depicted in the Bible, by being breathed into the dust of the ground. Matter, a word that in its ancient origin signifies mother, source and substance, represents what is often called the Feminine Principle.”

“The Feminine Principle, worshiped for thousands of years as the goddess, the feminine side of God and the sacred feminine, is the protective womb of the spirit, the container that brings the uncreated into existence, the cup that holds the meaning of life, as well as the web that keeps the whole of life together. This principle holds the knowing of union, wholeness and interconnectedness, the understanding that everything is linked to everything else. The feminine expresses itself throughout the cosmos in myriad forms and ways—as a type of consciousness or knowing, as Earth, as nature, as a woman, and even as an aspect of both men and women.”




WOMEN in POWER 


Megan McFeely interviews Alex Warden

to listen to this 15' podcast, please press below










MEETING  DEATH


I woke up on Monday feeling light, relaxed. Like most mornings, it took me a while to be fully awake and feel my body. It seemed fine. I rose to sit up but could not. There was a sharp pain in my lower back. A vertebra had pinched a nerve. My body tightened; it did not let me turn to either side. The pain went up the spine until it reached between my shoulder blades, behind my heart. A stabbing sensation shortened my breath to a minimum. My neck was next. The immobilization now was total. A soft moan, some tears. I tried to push my head and shoulders backwards to expand the chest. It did not work. Instead, the effort made my body slide off the side of the bed. I hit the floor with the weight of a dead body.

My husband heard the noise and came to my aid. He massaged and aligned my body with care. My back cracked like fireworks as he stretched it. I spent the next couple days with my body armor on—lower back, upper back, and neck straps and holders. Lying down was uncomfortable, so was sitting, standing was the worst. Discomfort, much discomfort, reactivity, flashes of nervousness and irritability. I felt like screaming and screamed some, and took painkillers.

By Thursday morning, I felt much better. I took the straps and holders off and was able to walk with care, to turn slowly and to sit with my back straight and turn at the waist. My neck continued to be quite stiff but there was a bit more flexibility. Everything was definitely going back to normal.

For many years, from time to time I had had similar arthritic episodes. Although each had been getting more painful and incapacitating over time, I had grown kind of used to them by now. Nevertheless, they bothered me all the same, every single time. Aging is a persistent teacher.

Thursday evening when I was resting on an armchair watching a movie while waiting for my husband to finish some reading and join me for dinner, from one moment to the next, I felt ill, very ill. It was not the bones. This time it was my belly. It did not feel like food poisoning or bladder or kidney stones. I recognized all those. This was not anything I knew.

In a matter of seconds, an excruciating pain spread all over my body. My senses got blocked. It was as if a thick transparent cover, which stopped all connection with the outside world, enveloped me. I only heard, felt, inside me. A metallic, nauseating noise rang in my ears and a vibration like tiny ants walking everywhere shook me. It was hard to think; I just embraced myself, held myself the best I could. My head, heavy as a rock, pulled my torso forward against my legs. I tried to sit up, but it was impossible. The pain brought me to my knees, onto the floor. My husband was only a few yards away, in the next room. I tried calling him. My voice was low, inward. I managed to say his name. Caught up in his reading, he asked me what I needed but I was barely able to speak. After what seemed like years, I was able to repeat his name. 

Time dissolved. I do not know how long it took for my husband to get to where I was; I was going in and out of consciousness. I remember looking sideways at one point, and seeing him looking at me with a worried expression. He was unsuccessfully trying to keep my head up and kept calling my name. My husband was scared. The noise in my ears, inside my head, got louder. My voice went lower, to a murmur. This pain was strange, indescribable. I felt a boiling heat running through my nerves, my veins, and my muscles. It felt like a powerful invisible hand tightened and twisted my upper body, my head, and my legs, like one does with a wet cloth about to be hung on a rope under the sun.

However, slowly I became aware that there was a deep silence and calmness inside and all around me. I was absorbed in this silence and calm more and more, such peace. The mind was thoughtless. My eyelids, heavy, kept closing, wanting to fall asleep. There was sweetness in the air. There was stillness. It felt like a delicate caress. I tried to tell my husband that everything was all right…the pain did not matter any more. Nothing mattered, nothing. I felt lighter and far away. In that moment, I knew I was dying. My husband knew it too.

The room felt empty as if I were alone, not lonely, but alone. A prayer came to my lips. With the little awareness that was left, I breathed in and out the mantra, the name of God, and tried to be with the moment. Something in me wanted to stay conscious. It was difficult. In my heart I called my Teacher, his Teacher, and her Teacher’s Teacher, our spiritual lineage. I prayed that they helped me and stayed with me. I felt with God. I felt ready.

All the while, my husband desperately continued trying to help me get up and was wondering aloud how he could make me feel better. He brought me some water, wanted to call an ambulance, a doctor, anything. I just mumbled no. I had fought my way back into health every time sickness or illness had stricken me. This time was different. The pain did not upset me; neither did it anger me or make me afraid. There was no resistance in me, only acceptance.

A few minutes passed, maybe hours, maybe more. I do not know how or why but I did not leave. I am still here, very much alive. It took me several days to get better. I continue to feel tired easily.

A few days after my collapse, I remembered a dream I had the night before it occurred. In it, a man gave me a medicine that healed me. The dream did not seem important at the time and I had quickly forgotten about it. But once I recalled it, it made me wonder. What did it mean? Could it have been that this man’s medicine was what kept me alive? Or could this dream have been an announcement, a warning of what would happen that evening? Or did it point to something else I might find out in the future? Hard to know for sure…

Death did not want me after all, not yet. But I am glad she came. On our brief meeting, I learned from death something aging had not been able to teach me in all these years—surrender.


by Alex Warden

THE FEMININE LIGHT IN THE MIDDLE EAST SYMPOSIUM


The Final thirty-one minute Video is Online for all to watch. Speakers of all walks of life were present. A great event!








Click below to watch the video: 



Or if you were unable to connect with YouTube, please go to: 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaI_VweykfI


You can find two short parts of my talk on minutes 3'50'' and 12'50''

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Please take a moment to Check Out the Photo Album with a few pictures from the Talks and Retreats in Argentina and Chile that took place last October and November '12. The events were incredible! So much more than I could have ever hoped or imagined... I felt so honored to host such wonderful events.

Here is a little pick.  This is the view from the Meditation Room in the Retreat Center in Chile. The energy of the place was palpable.







Short Video


Dear Friends,


I invite you to watch the short video (by D.W.White) of this wonderful book, 



“Dummy, a Memoir”

It is the amazing true story of a man who could not read or write--a story of tragedy turned into triumph.


This trailer includes a few short interviews to professionals who speak about the profound impact David Patten's book had on them. I was lucky to be included among the interviewees (minute 5:01).


To watch the 7 minute video, please press here:  Dummy, a Memoir by David Patten 
or go to (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HLpK4zmFOc&feature=youtu.be)



A New Step in Consciousness 10/2012



RELATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS: 
A NEW STEP in the EVOLUTION of CONSCIOUSNESS






You are Welcome to Read my New Article (Below) 

THE FEMININE LIGHT IN THE MIDDLE EAST SYMPOSIUM











The institute has posted a short video of some the presenters and our talks. 


You can have a peek at my talk in minute 3:22 of the video below:










BEHIND THE TEARS



Weyden,_Rogier_van_der_-_Descent_from_the_Cross_-_Detail_women_(left).jpg



I cried and cried and cried.  I have been crying everyday for months. I am still crying.

I told myself many reasons why I could not stop. It is my kids leaving home to go to college; it’s my friend’s illness; it’s the idea of moving to a new home and leaving the protection of the walls I know so well...

Every time I cried, I looked for something that would justify the uncalled tears inundating my eyes, that would make my chest heat up, full of something I could not put into words. And while the departure of my kids or my friend’s disease indeed make me sad, most of my tearing had nothing to do with them.

I cried at home, in the streets, on the phone. I cried watching the sun rise and set, at the sight of a baby, and hearing a bird singing in the distance…I cried watching a movie, listening to the radio news, singing a soft rock song.

I just could not stop crying.

My tears seemed to come and go as they pleased—when I was not sad nor felt like crying either. In a way, they were very impersonal. And yet, at the same time, everything that happened around me somewhere felt deeply intimate. It was as if I had made mine, as if I had taken possession of something—an event, a situation, an encounter—that originally did not belong to me, but whose emotion, the feeling it provoked in me made it mine. I knew it did not belong to me, but I was partaking of the experience of it nonetheless, as if I had been invited to commune with it.

I cried translating my Teacher’s writings, reading a mystic’s life, and wording the prayers of the beguines. I cried while meditating, while watching the plums and apples redden, and while smelling the lavender flowers that grow in my garden. I cried when a child got hurt and when another happily licked a lollipop as big as his face. It is as if I was raw, my skin too thin to stop anything from coming in.

It was not that I was clinging to the emotions that came either. Tears came and went as things and events came and went. Water flooded my eyes in the very moment when the feeling, the emotion of the experience took place…and then they left. I wanted to find an explanation to what was taking place, but all I felt was confusion.

I ended up believing that I was falling into some kind of depression. I thought I needed some medicine…to  go to the doctor or to a new therapy. I took on yoga.

But every yoga class ended with me leaving as fast as I could, barely waving my hand good-bye, so that no one would see my tears falling. It felt that the relaxation, the opening of my chest, the stretching of my tight body, was not a remedy but rather a pill which made more acute this already hypersensitive state.

What was really happening to me?

Was I getting too old and weak?

Was I going mad?

Finally I shared my concern with a group of meditation friends…just to put the situation out in the open and get some perspective. A few kind and true observations were given—that after all I am Latina and one that is very emotional. Talking about this brought a few laughs and a few more tears.

Later we fell into silence and we meditated. And it was then that I saw something, which suggested like a kind of answer, something quite vague in the beginning that slowly began to take shape.

Yes I was raw; yes my skin had thinned up to the point of not being able to stop anything from coming in… Everything was too close to me. Everything touched me to my core—the taste, the smell, the touch, the hearing, the sight—of… and this is what surprised me… of life happening… the beauty and the horror, the joy and the pain; I was experiencing everything first hand without any packaging, unveiled, and uncooked.

Like a door opened in that moment and I understood something.

God lives in the myriad expressions of the life I was experiencing so intimately. He was present and I was experiencing Him, in my own body, through my own heart and my own senses. God, Life had been touching me so deeply… and I was able and lucky to feel it. Life and I were interlaced in the sense that I felt it as if whatever was taking place, was happening to me directly even though I was, and I knew I was, just a witness. The main character was life itself happening. But I was so identified with it that it felt like it was happening to me…and it was happening to me, in a sense it was, and in a sense it was not. It was both.  A degree of oneness.

So I knew. I know. My crying, the tears in my eyes at this very moment are grace.




By Alex Warden

Coexistence and Essential Oneness




Coexistence is a way to experience our Essential Oneness in our daily life. It is a beautiful word, a worthy ideal…like an elegant dance where we live our own life while accepting the ways of others.

Yet coexistence can also be much more difficult to attain than we think, because our unique way can often feel threatened by the ways of others. This may lead us to compare ourselves with others and even attempt to define our way as somehow better.

But it can be done. When I was in Chile over a month ago, I gave a seminar in a town whose mayor is trying to bring the reality of coexistence into practice. The town hopes to build temples for the three major religions of the western world—a synagogue, a church, and a mosque. Two of them, the church and the mosque, have already been built. And it was interesting to see that his inspiration actually worked. People from different religions participate peacefully in their spiritual practices at their corresponding temples. In addition, the mosque has a library that can be used by people of different religions and backgrounds to offer talks and seminars.  I had not been in a town before in Latin America with a conscious intention to practice coexistence, so I felt hopeful and impressed. I have heard there are other towns and cities like this one around the world…but not enough yet.

Buddha by Dr.S.M.Anwer.jpg

Coexistence is not only about learning to live with other people, but  also with animals and plants and the land. Life naturally coexists; ecosystems are a form of coexistence.  Plants and animals share their existence with the land. They are not separate from the universe, or each other. They are an integral part of everything. In their own way, they live in paradise.

But as human beings develop the capacity to differentiate from our environment, when we develop a sense of I and you, we leave the natural way of being and enter the realm of separation from life. Then we begin to see ourselves as different from everyone and everything else. We experience our uniqueness; and frequently in this process we forget our similarity with all.

In this way coexistence confronts us with the difference between our idea of essential oneness and the here-and-now reality of living it with other unique beings. Coexistence demands a quality of tolerance, of looking at what we have in common rather than stressing our differences. It means to live with one another in an open and respectful way towards both ourselves and all.

Coexistence does not mean to give up one’s traditions and ways, but rather to enjoy the diversity and uniqueness that the whole of life is, while perceiving the oneness that unites us underneath the variety of forms of expressions of existence. It means experiencing our essential oneness by consciously coexisting with the whole of life on this plane of reality—the plane of the opposites—on our own. We can try it, enjoy it, and encounter its difficulties.

Coexistence is a way to live our individuality within diversity. It is an experience of sameness and difference at the same time.  It is an experience of Reality.



Universal Worship Mandala, Art by Amara Karuna