14 Steps to Awaken the Sacred Feminine: Women in the Circle of Mary Magdalene

This is a good book for people who want practical ways to bring the Sacred Feminine into their lives. Each chapter has a brief explanation and overview, a guided meditation, and questions for reflection and journaling/discussion. The poetry alone is beautiful and inspiring. It is more creative and personal to me than some of the other books I've read on the Sacred Feminine and Mary Magdalene. Most of them were scholarly dissertations on the validity and history of Magdalene and the Sacred Feminine. I already accept that women have had an important and definitive place in Spirituality and was looking for ways to honor and experience Sacred Feminine presence. This book delivered that for me.The Resources chapter was also very helpful and interesting. It includes other books, groups, organizations, artists, and websites devoted to the Sacred Feminine.

This book is written for a group but can be easily adapted for a solitary practitioner. Upon starting it, I realized that I personally needed to read a couple of the books by Margaret Starbird that came before it. Standing on its own, the book offers powerful insights and meditations that can help lead you into the mystery of Mary Magdalene. I am reading this book and another at the same time, this book for the meditations and the other for the history. This book is a must if you are drawn to Mary Magdalene and the teachings hidden by the Church.

I am enjoying this book. The one problem I have with it is the same problem I have with most books about Mary Magdalene. The portrait painted of her is that of victim. Because this is a devotional, readers are encouraged to touch those places inside where they can identify with the various ways Mary Magdalene was victimized in her life and in the mythos that was created about her by the Roman Catholic Church.If what is written about the Magdalene is true, she led a life of great adventure and love, worth and meaning. Of course, to go there, perhaps we first have to begin with no longer seeing Jesus as a victim but as the powerful creator of his life and destiny. I don't believe it serves her memory or us living now to focus on the victimization at the expense of experiencing Jesus and Mary Magdalene as co-creators with God of their lives and their destinies!How can we take charge of co-creating our own lives when religious and spiritual leaders and teachers continually teach that we are victims? By having the courage to step even further outside tradition than the Magdalene teachers do!

GOOD READ

This is an amazing book for women's groups. An inspiring guide, it helps women create viable, intensely functional Mary Magdalene Circles. What are Mary Magdalene Circles? They are groups of women who share their focused energies on understanding and enacting the wisdom that has come down from Mary. The purpose: to gain insight and understanding of the path life takes and how the sacred feminine can enhance and enrich personal growth. There are 14 lessons in the book, which are the steps to creating that path for women who have come together to share and help one another to discover that inner light and strength that comes to both Christians and spiritual feminists alike.For many, this book will provide a conduit to self-understanding and awareness. It brings forth the call to appreciate and proclaim the validity of the Sacred Feminine, long kept under the thumb of the Church. Western Christian tradition has kept secret, denied, tainted, and exiled positive mentions of Mary Magdalene in biblical and religious writings. This book will help transform that trend into an affirmative way to experience and enjoy the revered female side of faith, without being defensive or critical of mainstream religion.The book is divided into two halves, each vital in recovering our beliefs and standards. Part One covers the steps, called lessons, to educating women in the Magdalene story. It covers the warped history of Mary as a prostitute, the time with Jesus in the garden, the weeping Mary and more. Starbird and Norton discuss with great clarity the mythology and the metaphors that abound in Christian literature and the way women have been denied their place as partners in the hierarchy and oligarchy of the Church. Their intent is not to criticize or demonize traditional beliefs, but to show us that the Sacred Feminine should be part of our lives, part of the profound, deeply personal journey to the inner self.Part two is equally remarkable. Focused on Prayers and Poems to Complement the Lessons, each section corresponds to the lesson in the first part of the book with the same name. In Lesson Two of Part Two, (where the erroneous history of Mary as a prostitute is discussed,) there is a prayer-poem by Susan Kehoe-Jergens, Self Re-Creation through the Magdalene. Powerful and hopeful, we can read these within our groups, or alone, to help us understand and appreciate the need to acknowledge and affirm our personal soul power.The resource section of the book is extremely useful as well. It lists Internet Discussion Groups, Spiritual Training and Sacred Feminine Information Websites, Books, and Art and Icons. This inspirational book should help those struggling as individuals to comprehend that part of our feminine psyche. We do not have to struggle alone; we can create or join groups that will give us clarity and strength to be complete as women, awake and aware of our passions and our passages through a spiritual life. To know that as women we can be part of a greater whole is a life-changing piece of knowledge, a step I encourage us all to take.by Laura Strathman Hulkafor Story Circle Book Reviewsreviewing books by, for, and about women

This book is a must if you are following Mary Magdalene ae a friend and I are. Mary Magdalene has far more influence on the life of Jesus than most people realize.

The small book 14 Steps to awaken the sacred feminine, Women in the circle of Mary Magdalene, edited 2009, written by Joan Norton, licensed psychotherapist with 25 years of experience helping women, who founded the Los Angeles Mary Magdalene Circle and Margaret Starbird, author of the bestselling *The Woman with the Alabaster Jar* is a wonderful book to get in deep healing contact with the energies of Mary Magdalene. Women*s circles have been called a *revolutionary-evolutionary movement hidden in plain sight* by Joan Shinoda Bolen and have been hailed as capable of affecting global change. Magdalene Circles are groups of women who focus their shared energies on the wisdom of Mary Magdalene to gain insight into the role of the sacred feminine in their own lives and to help them advance on their spiritual paths.This book helps to understand the wisdom and mythos of Mary Magdalene and her real relation to Jesus, how to carry the Grail in our daily life through meditation and sharing in groups wisdom, power and nurturing energies through bonding with mother earth and nature to embody the sacred feminine.The Old Testament prophesized a wife that would come with the messiah. *She was the one who would return from exile and cause the land and life to be fertile again. She was the deeply honored Divine Feminine embodied in a woman living an earthly life. People recognized her as *The Magnificent* and *The Great*, both titles have always belonged to the feminine half of God.**When stories circulated about the anoiting of Jesus, the sacred marriage on the Mount of Olives, it was most likely recognized that the Bride had returned to claim her Sacred Masculine partner, Jesus.We all know by now that the label of *prostitute* was falsely placed on Mary Magdalene by the church fathers in their efforts to consolidate their power and their story during the first hundred years of Christianity. Even the modern church has officially corrected the prostitute story, but it has not put any effort into restoring her stature. That has been left to the women of today who intuitively recognize the presence of the Sacred Feminine, come to heal the wasteland.Now we have the eyes to see, that Jesus was not alone, was not a celibate lone male god. He was in sacred partnership with a soul of magnificence and he was in physical partnership with a woman of great heart, Mary, called the Magdalene.*One of the most beautiful nourishing meditations in the book *The Bride in Darkness and Hiding*, invites to step on a wonderful way to create a spirit of safety and security, imagining the warm sand under our feet, to get in deep contact with the energy of the earth through our breath within our body.*Now remember that there has been a part of you that had to go into the darkness and hiding through so much history and so much personal life.....**But exile is over now......the Magdalene returns within women everywhere*.*God and Godess of All That Is,Come together in sacred union within my body, my heart, and my spiritHeaven and Earth meet in me, together, to make the desert bloom.*SUSAN KEHOE-JERGENS

The info in this book is very very basic . There arnt many pages in it . Don’t buy

Ok if you have a group sessions and a pure heart