Here goes: Do female suicide bombers get 40 male virgins if they complete their mission successfully? Like, if you get this right, Barbara, you can look forward to 40 male virgins when that thing explodes. And its just a common thing that you hear day in and day out and you see women on the news strapping on the suicide vests because, yes they believe in the cause, yes they hate Americans, yes they hate capitalism, yes they hate it all but what they REALLY want, what REALLY will motivate me to get my ass off the couch and into the vest is the spine-tingling thought of all those virgins. 40, specifically and just for me.

Just sit with that, the idea that a flood of women would be motivated to kill in order to get their hands on 40 male virgins. Really let that roll around in your head for a moment. Close your eyes (just read the next bit and do it, okay?) and try to imagine that you actually live in a world where that’s going on. See how that feels. No, you didn’t REALLY do it. Try again. I’ll wait.

Now open your eyes.

We do live in that world. In reverse, as you well know.

Do you know how to kill a frog? If you put a frog in boiling water, it will jump right out and spit in your eye. If you put a frog into cold water and turn on the heat, you don’t even have to put the lid on. He’ll sit there and cook himself to death, gazing at you the whole time.

We have become acclimated to the hot water not realizing we’re almost dead, ladies. Wake up and jump the fuck out of the pan. Patriarchy has woven itself into the very fiber of our being. State your truth. Circle your sisters. Protect women. Men, tell all your female colleague what your take home pay is. Start a revolution.

Why You Need To Get Dark + Ugly With Tonight’s Solstice

Its the time of the year when the day is short and the night is l o n g as the sun reaches the most northerly point above the equator. It signals, strangely because it can feel like we only just entered winter, the ‘return of light’ which means from here on out, the days will gift us a little more light (the opposite is happening on the other side of the world).

It’s the perfect time to look at our own individual darkness, to explore its shapes and patterns, so that we can discover to our suprise the gifts within it. By fully embracing our darkness, we paradoxically make ourselves available to experience our light.

It can sometimes feel in some of the more popular interpretations of the Divine Feminine that darkness and its challenging components are somehow unwelcome, that the Divine Feminine is only about light and love and happiness. I assume the thinking is, this is how we counter the darkness we see in the world. But its more the perspective of a spiritual pretender, someone who has not truly ‘done the work’. It’s an affect, a posture. They didn’t win it, they are stealing in a sense. That’s why it rings in so yuck. A part of you understands it’s a crock. An empowered woman is terrifying. She’s not smiling and fetching and hoping and wishing and wondering if she’s pretty.

Think Kali. Think Anath. Think Mama Wata. These ladies aren’t fucking around. Nor are they acting wantonly. They aren’t so called ‘losing control of themselves’ or ‘being hysterical’. They know exactly what they’re doing when they destroy something. Try to remember the last time you took a man’s apt apart when you found out he was cheating. Do you recall how that felt? It felt…R I G H T, no? Until someone told you it was shameful. In college, I tossed a cheating boyfriend’s entire dorm room out the third floor window while what felt like the whole school watched, including his stereo system and his $$ bike. And it was right, in a sense. You’ll need that level of fierceness and more to dismantle any patriarchy. Ask yourself what you’re really doing when you act ‘nice’.

When we understand there are gifts to be found in our own darkness, we can relax into it, experience it, even when its challenging or scary. When we aren’t willing to enter our own darkness, we never learn where our light comes from. Its through looking at it directly and experiencing it fully, that its gifts come forward: strength, courage, compassion, resilience, empowerment, willpower, vision. You may spend a lot of time crying. Yes! Allow yourself to be with it and allow her to guide you to the light. Happy Solstice everyone!

Its a tragedy in a woman when can’t find her self-esteem. In the end, that really is the quality that is preventing you from meditating. I should know, that was me. The science is out — it’s indisputable. I ignored it too. To not meditate is, in a way, an almost willful disabling of oneself, a kind of adolescent rejection of health, a willful pushing away of self-jurisdiction, a deliberate and conscious refusal to get your shit together. Why not just pick up a cigarette?

You know, whatever you feel now, it doesn’t get better as you get older or something like that. It’s not like there’s some ceasefire to Life some place in the future that you can white knuckle your way to in the meantime. It stays just like it is except its worse because you’re now running out of time to make it different.

It’s like, if you had cancer and someone said, oh I cured my cancer. Do you want to know how I did it? And you replied, no. I’ve heard all about that cure and I know actually thousands of people who have cured themselves that way? But I’ve got a lot of my plate right now what with chemo and all.

L I T E R A L L Y.

When anyone first begins to consider meditating, it can seem like such a grand, noble decision. Then you sit down and it’s…something else. Like a fallow field that has been ignored forever, your mind is overgrown with rocks and boulders, unwanted rodents and weeds. You are trying to return the field to it’s original condition, when it was pure, open potentiality. You know, the you before life too a two by four to you not once but countless times…meditation returns us to that open field of undamaged potential.

When you make the room to learn how to meditate, when that becomes a daily experience, who you are, where you come from and what you are made of becomes clear as day. You are ‘armed’, if you will, with an unfamiliar kind of self-knowledge. As a result, the world can appear even more horrifying than it already was, because you know for a fact, due to your own daily experience in meditation, that we are all One.