Sharon: Welcome everyone to our monthly Net of Light Online Teaching. Today we have Christa from South Africa, Peggy from the Eastern United States, me from the Western United States, and Ingvild from Norway.
Ingvild: Net of Light Meditation
Sharon: Thank You Ingvild, thank you. We come together like this every month to learn and share what we’re learning. We also come together many times throughout the month in Zoom groups, in-person groups, and we’ll be coming together in larger Gatherings soon. Our purpose is always the same: to deepen our connection with the divine, to deepen our connection with the divine within ourselves, and with the divine within each other, and with the presence of the divine, the presence of God on earth within everything that lives. We have learned that we are vessels for connection in the one love, and everything we do grows that connection, fosters it more, which makes us happier and happier and spreads joy everywhere we are. So today we’re going to talk about what is it to live this energy of Yin, what is to be this anchor point for the Net of Light on Earth, what is it to be this vessel of supply that is constantly flowing with love: giving, giving and receiving healing and being healed.
So Christa from South Africa sent me an email so sincere and heartfelt. She works with women in South Africa and her question was so full of longing to understand that I invited her to come on our Online Teaching. Christa, would you tell us a little bit about this place you find yourself, where you’re really wanting to learn more?
Christa: Thank you very much and thank you Sharon. What a privilege to be here and to be given this wisdom. My question is very sincere. I really am working with Yin, working with the books and the teachings, and I’m really trying to embody it and to live it and to be it, not only in moments but to really embrace it in my work. I work with women. I do a lot of leadership development, and I have a lot of exposure to women. So, what I want to do is to make it practical — without being in the context of the Grandmothers necessarily — just to start talking about the principles of Yin and to wake women up to the fact that they are Yin containers and use those words and start to gently introduce these ideas. I want to know how to answer when they ask, “but what does that mean?” So, I want to understand practically, not only energetically, what does it look like when I am a yin container when I hold steady? South Africa, where I am located, has got one of the highest gender abuse rates in the world, so how can women stand in their power and not take the abuse and still be a yin container?
Because women sometimes ask me, “so if you say stand steady, does that mean I keep quiet? does that mean I don’t do anything? do I just hold? what do I hold?” How do I respond to that? This issue is very practical and real. The question is: what do I do or not do when I am fulfilling my role and stepping into my Yin space and my Yin energy and being that anchor point in the world?
Sharon: Thanks, Christa, I got a similar question from Bilge in Turkey just the other day. She and I talked for a while and afterwards, she said “oh, I think this means you become big mama!” and I had to laugh, but I thought in a way that’s exactly right. The pain that women feel is from not realizing and not really knowing in their insides just how powerful, how forceful and how unified they are with the force of Life. Women embody Shakti life force, and that is no small thing. All the yelling and screaming or beating that men may do has nothing to do with that elemental life force. I’m going to say a few things and then I’m going to turn over the discussion to Ingvild and Peggy.
It’s no accident that women bear children. It is no accident that most healers are women. We are natural healers, we are the ones who sit with the sick child, we are the ones who sit with the dying parent, we are the ones who reach out in our communities and care. We have this capacity because we are the storehouses of Yin energy, this life force energy for the Earth. We are very, very potent, and because we are, we are constantly helping and giving it away. Inside we are full of this life-fostering energy for life — this is who we are. As women recognize more and more who they are, they come to this naturally, and each woman will bloom the way she was born to bloom; she will bloom as the flower that she is, and each woman is unique; no two flowers are exactly the same. So, she needs to learn how to go within and receive. You can use all of the meditations the Grandmothers give you (available on the netoflight.org website). Please do! You can change the wording, you can do whatever you like; the Grandmothers are not jealous, and they do not demand that you speak to them. They don’t care what form of the Divine you call on. They say just call, do not try to get through this life right now. It’s too hard without some help, so call. They said if you call on us, we will direct you wherever is the best supply source for you. So, they may direct you to a particular form of divinity, a particular discipline, a particular sattva or religion or whatever, or they may just work with you straight up, but they have come to empower women, to awaken us to the power that is within us, and then to help men awaken to that within themselves as well. But we women must lead; it can be no other way. Because the men don’t know how to do that, they are not full. They tend to be emptier. They are out of balance now, and they do not have this peace, this abiding life-force energy flowing easily within them.
Peggy: I have many thoughts on this. They’re a bit all over the map because Christa’s questions were so poignant, and they tapped a lot within me and much has risen to the surface as I’ve thought about the questions. Some of the thoughts that arose surround the issue of women being containers of new life. In my earliest professional life as an obstetrician, I was present for hundreds of births and was always astonished at what was happening. As women these containers for new life were bearing new life. Women as containers for New Life and not just new life but of everything. It’s that expanded concept that has occupied my time and my thinking for decades now. One of my early mentors was a dear Indian man, and he had a poster in his office that said, “all of the wonders that you seek are within yourself”, and it struck me in such a deep way, but I had no clue what it meant. I knew it was very important, but I didn’t know what he meant by that. Later in my life, a wonderful dear friend spoke from the pulpit about how we as women contain it all, we can take all. And that made me remember what my friend from my Air Force days said in the poster “all the Wonders that you seek are within yourself.” And then Doris saying “we contain it all” combined those ideas about containers have been an important part of my thinking and my practicing and experimenting for many years now. I do feel as if I have some personal experiences that have helped develop my ability to contain it all and I think this is the point that you’re trying to drive at Christa. How do you do it? It sounds great, but what do you do, what’s the practicality of it? and so perhaps Ingvild would like to speak to that and then I can address things you bring up and we can continue the discussion.
Ingvild: I’ve been thinking a lot about this this week also and these thoughts feel like they’re all over the place, but I think the one thing that really strikes me most is that the Grandmothers’ messages have given me a consciousness of the Yin energy. I can consciously say “yes” to that inside me. I hadn’t heard about that anywhere else. It takes also a consciousness to say yes to it because we all bring various energies to any situation and sometimes, we’re stressed and sometimes we’re this or that, and whenever we take a breath, like the Grandmothers say, like we are observing a thing, the Grandmothers will help us. Calling on the Net of Light will make me calm. It takes away the fear and then whatever I meet I don’t have to take on its energy. For instance, the other day I was in the shop, and I felt the energy of the man that was next to me. It was so angry, and I felt this anger always coming, and he probably wasn’t aware that he was sending out so much anger. He was just in his own world, but then instead of reacting to that I thought “oh Grandmothers, just hold me, hold him” and I could be so much quieter and I felt that even though his anger was there, I could accept it and I could just let it flow out. I didn’t have to hold it in. Okay I’m container, but it changed the whole situation. So practical things like that for me is how I experience being a container. I can allow the energies around me to be what they are, and meet them in the Net of Light in a calm way.
Peggy: Ingvild, I think it’s a beautiful way to summarize a practical experience and how do you deal with it in the present moment with a guy standing here and you can just feel that energy, which is typically, not a very pleasant thing, and yet you could exist peacefully next to it and hold it. You bring up this idea about what we can do, and it’s a bit of an irony that asking about what can we do when the whole goal is to how can I just be how can I be with it? But Christa is addressing the practicality aspect, and I had an idea about some of the things that that I do like what you describe Ingvild. It sounds simplistic because it is, but I find it’s helpful. I call it my ABCs when I find myself in a mental construct up in my head and I’m not existing in my heart and containing it all. Instead, I’m reacting in judgment, like “why can’t he just take his anger somewhere else?” That’s my tendency if I’m if I’m reacting to somebody’s emotions that are very unpleasant. So, I started my ABCs of Asking, Breathing and Centering, that’s the ABC. So, the “Ask” is to ask the Grandmothers, ask the divine just take over. I can see this another way; I can tune the radio dial into something else that is not up here but is heart-centered and can lovingly contain it all. Then I “Breathe”, the goal being to get back in my body. Because we’re asked to embody the Grandmothers’ teachings and we can’t do it having all of this stuff going on up in our heads. Embodying it means that we must feel it and ground it, and that’s what we have these bodies for. So, the breathing is very much helping us to ground and then the C is for “Centering.” So, I breathe and I’m aware of my body again and then I can feel centered in my heart space where judgment gets transformed from reactionary judgment to compassion. The Centering allows me to have compassion, so I don’t have to get into that same kind of mental state that the other person is coming from. I don’t have to mirror what’s going on with the person next to me who is clearly not very comfortable or very happy in this world. Christa, is any of this helpful to you?
Christa: Yes, it is extremely, thank you very much. I think it is helping me a lot and for me it is confirming the direction I was going, but I wanted to ask because I’m still busy learning and internalizing so it’s so helpful to get the practicalities. While you were talking something that came up in me, a question; was “what would love do?” That just sparked immediately in me. ‘What would love do’ in the example Ingvild gave, and Peggy gave, instead of the reaction in the judgment, in the yang energy, that lashing out. So, for me, what would love do? — that’s what I’m sitting with at the moment.
What was also very helpful is a reminder that we are “it”, that we already contain it, so the consciousness of waking up to it was also very helpful, because I’m thinking of women who are angry, who are hurt, who haven’t woken up to this, who feel they need to fight the world, or they need to prove a point. For them, I need to help them or to wake them up or to give them an alternative, to say, “but there is another way” and maybe then the teachings do come in handy to help them with the consciousness so that they know that they can make a different choice.
So, my question is how to help women? Is education the best way to do this? How do you wake them up to the fact that they have a choice or to the fact that who they actually are as a yin container, that they can start realizing that they can do it differently, and they don’t have to fight. What I see around me is men are so unhappy and angry and weak, and women are stepping more and more into the male role in terms of carrying the responsibility bringing in the money, looking after the kids, fixing things, doing things so they’re so busy with that, they don’t allow themselves time or the space to step into the yin way. Because life is hard, they need to survive. If you could give me some thoughts on that, it would be very helpful.
Sharon: One thing you might want to go look at again (in Our Love is Our Power) is when the Grandmothers introduce the idea of a man as Moy. A lot of times it really helps women to name this “Moy”, which is the combination boy-man. This way that the male has gotten trapped in that place, and they are not able to really step into that place o being a man who looks for the highest good for his community and his family. He has become caught in that selfishness of the of the little boy, “me me”, and the Grandmothers talk about how to work with that. Basically, if women can see where that man is trapped in that helpless place of being that little boy in his great big man’s body with his big voice and powerful fists and stuff like that, it really helps us pull back from having to fight it. You can’t fight a two-year-old, you’re never going to win if you fight a two-year-old, but you do need to recognize: “oh, that’s a two-year-old, that’s what’s going on.”
Ingvild: I also think about the goddess and about the divine feminine, that women also should honor the goddess energy and that immense power, that is the power yin. Sharon talks about it a lot in the fourth book, Return to the Mother Return to Love, and that energy of being the goddesses, the names of the goddesses that need to be spoken. That imminent yin power that you talked about initially, I think that also is so good for women to hear. When I read that I thought ‘oh yes, Freya, the Nordic goddess of love, yes’ and I was saying her name a lot. Women have this power in us that hasn’t been acknowledged for centuries. I just want to say one more thing: we talk a lot about the “doing,” but how it takes time to change from the “doing” to the “being.” I have a little card I took from the English Gathering. It has been by my bedside. It says, “step into the light and own it”. I’ve been looking at that for years, just looking at it and slowly understanding it’s not something that I have to “do” but it’s something that I have to “be.” I have to own the light
Peggy: I don’t know that this directly addresses your most recent question Christa, but I was so struck in book two (Our Love is Our Power), where Sharon wrote about Yin being the Mothership, the container, and that was such a a powerful image for me. So, I think when we’re adrift at sea and there’s all this tumult, lots of stormy waves, and realizing who we are, the vastness of our beings, we contain the storms, we contain the waves, we can contain the beautiful rainbow, we contain it all. When the storm is at its worst — and that’s a judgment put on by our egos which are so fearful — we always have the recourse to go to the back to the Mothership. Remember the mothership, we contain it all. We are the Yin; we are the mothership, and the container isn’t affected by what is going on inside. It’s such a powerful concept: the container isn’t affected by what it holds. Nor is the pitcher. It doesn’t matter if it’s got water or milk or cream in it. A pot doesn’t care if it’s got soil, flowers, a small tree. The container isn’t affected. It’s not a matter of being in denial and just closing your eyes or being an ostrich and putting your head in the sand so you don’t have to deal with it. It’s just realizing that instead of contracting you expand because you do hold it all. I love this idea of just regarding the 50-year-old man in his terrible twos and he’s having a tantrum here and that’s a very sad way to be. he’s out of control some aspect of himself knows that and maybe we become the great Mother and part of us just reaches a figurative arm around his shoulder and offers some love and maybe we don’t do that with an actual arm, but maybe we do it energetically from our hearts, and maybe he can even feel that.
Sharon: Let’s just sit in this together for a few minutes and ask the Grandmothers. All these words are gold, they’re so valuable, and each of us has spoken from our heart today to one another to help everyone everywhere. Whoever hears this or can use any of this, be elevated by it, but let’s just sit together now inviting in the presence of the Divine, however you think of that, and I’ll say the Grandmothers name because the Grandmothers are the form of the Divine that brought us together to learn this and they work with all forms of the Divine. So, all forms are here and we gratefully call on the presence of the Divine that is within us and let yourself just be curious and willing, happy to learn and be. Let yourself just be held now, be held. You don’t have to do anything. Lots of information and lots of feelings and some wisdom has passed between us today and it’s all filtering in, and we ask the Divine to take charge of that and let everything filter in to where it’s needed the most. The Grandmothers have promised that we’re always learning and always growing more, always able to take in more love. Our capacity to receive Love is growing within us every moment, with every breath, so as you breathe now, be aware that there’s more settling in, more nestling in, more in-filling of good way beyond what you can keep track of. Way beyond all the machinations of the mind. The learning is so great and our capacity to receive love has become and is becoming so great that we can’t even keep track of it; it’s huge, and we just let ourselves float in that now, being held in love, rocked and held as we breathe and take in all the good that’s got our name on it, everything that we’re ready to learn now. We are learning all that we’re ready to take in now.
And just notice how your body feels, always the body helps, always it’s ready to teach us, and all we need to do is say ‘oh, how do I feel right now? what do I feel?’ So, notice now what you feel. It might be physical, it might be an image, it might be a temperature feeling or a feeling of texture or softness or hardness, it might be a memory, might be a song — let it be, just let it be — and receive knowing that for every question you have there is a wonderful answer, and it will come, it has to. Where there is a pure desire of your heart the Divine cannot resist; it will give to you what you most desire. So, we ask now that we learn more and we love more and we soften more, expand even more, and feel your body.
Before we end we’ll each express whatever it is we feel right now to stay with this assimilation of feeling. I just feel this kind of waving fluttering softening energy rolling in, and everybody else can share too please do.
Peggy: I feel as if I’m being rocked, as if I’m in a rocking chair, just moving back and forth, very soothing, like a mother soothing a child in a rocking chair.
Ingvild: I feel as though I’m held, really held, and it’s like the power of the earth is coming up through my body, fanning out like a big fountain.
Christa: For me, it is an immense sense of the capacity that I have, thinking about it, feeling it, sensing it in my body, to love, to nourish, to hold, and a a deep knowing that it is so.
Sharon: Feel it all. Let yourself be as you are. Feel it all. You are this, and so much more.
Net of light, Net of Light, floating on the Net of Light,
Net of light, Net of Light, holding in the Net of Light,
Reaching out, reaching in, reaching through the Net of Light,
Loving all, serving all, holding all within the light.
Net of Light, Net of Light, Net of Love, and Net of Light,
Net of Light, Net of Light, our hearts are one within the light.