I am Coming to Alchemy to Offer a Giveaway

I have been very blessed in my life. I have two beautiful children who were born in the water at home and have grown up in touch with the light of nature and their own beautiful light. I have a husband who adores me and is the best father I have ever witnessed. I was born to parents who wanted me and adored me completely. My parents and my husband have all been willing to weather the storms of my intensity and moodiness with unconditional love.

I have been blessed, too, to work with the earth in peace my entire adult life, eating the delicious fruits of the land and enjoying space to seek growth and healing. I had the great good fortune to meet a real spiritual teacher when I was twenty, and the meeting with this majestic outer figure catalyzed an inner journey led by an inner teacher even more mysterious, an invisible shapeshifter I have come to call the Beloved.

This May, deep in the intricate backcountry canyonlands of Southern Utah, I fasted and prayed, crying for a vision I might be blessed to share with my people. In the depths, I gave juice from my own heart to my Beloved escorts, the ones who had showed me the way. My life is now a giveaway. Through mystery, and my dear friend Alex Warden, I find my way to the Alchemy conference, to offer my sacred gifts. I don’t know exactly what I will have to give. Life is too alive for that. But I know my work has to do with the Beloved and the way he/she moves through nature and the body.

Intensely, for twelve years, the Beloved showed up in my life as a masculine power, like Jung’s animus, that would take me and leave me breathless. Those experiences I will treasure always. Now, the Beloved is coming to me differently. She is coming as Kundalini, Shakti herself, hissing in my ears, shivering up my spine and giving me energy to live and love fully. I am learning to befriend this powerful goddess who has fed me so much energy at times that my life has become chaos. I am learning how to love her.

Sacred ecology, spiritual ecology is an understanding of the inner aspect of the outer environmental situation. My understanding of this is that it all comes back to our relationship with our own bodies. As Gabrielle Roth said, “Between the head and feet of any given person is a billion miles of unexplored wilderness.” In our bodies, we can find our own way to live spiritual ecology, a healing of the split between spirit and matter.

Lucy Funkhouser Yanz