Mysteries of the Rose
Fall in love with Life
An 8-week long container for women
Begins January 19
Calling forth those brave women whose souls feel the longing for a richer, deeper kind of Love in their lives and in the world.
It is a journey of personal growth, connection and discovery. It is a journey of remembering.
Over 8 weeks, we will explore myths, mysticism, stories, and history, while also forming a special connection with the Rose.
Why the Rose?
First, let go of all your associations with Hallmark cards and high school boyfriends. That’s not the real power of the Rose.
The Rose is more than just a flower. It is a teacher. A talisman. A portal. It offers both spiritual protection and ancient wisdom.
Contemplating the Rose unlocks deep secrets about the nature of life and reality. It reveals to us that life is an inseparable blend of things we enjoy and things we don’t: petal and thorn, growth and decay, love and loss. Working with the Rose teaches you that the difficult parts of life are not indicators that something is wrong, nor are they even something we just have to “accept.” Instead, they are actually an essential and sacred part of life’s design meant to open our hearts - if we allow them.
Opening our hearts to the challenges takes practice, but surprisingly so does opening your heart to the beauty, wonder and everyday sensuality of life! Most of us walk around at least half numb and then wonder why we feel vaguely dissatisfied and unfulfilled. It is as if we are sitting at a feast, starving, because we have forgotten how to eat. Rose helps us remember.
This is a journey of initiation
Opening to Life
To allow ourselves to drop in and open more fully to what life is, it helps to have frameworks, stories, practices and community support. That’s what this course is designed to offer.
One of our guiding lights on this course will be the ancient Sumerian Goddess Inanna, long associated with the Rose, whose story is a template to understand something profound on many layers at once - personal, psychological, spiritual, seasonal, and historical.
Ultimately this is a course designed to help you fall in love with life as it is. With its ebbs and flows. With its seasonal and cycles. With its mysteries and messes. With its petals and its thorns. This is a course designed to help you open your heart to Life, to Love and to Yourself.
“Women find their way back to themselves not by moving up and out into the light like men, but by moving down into the depths of the ground of their being.”
— Maureen Murdock, The Heroine’s Journey
What you will get
8 weekly 90 minute long live calls on Zoom.
A private Mighty Networks Group for additional sharing, resources and interaction with like-minded women called to the same path
Embodiment practices for nurturing the divine presence within
Short writing prompts to nurture your own creativity and intuition
A new or renewed understanding of your spiritual power as a woman
A greater ability to relax into the ebbs and flows of life
A deeper relationship with Rose as a plant ally
The story of Inanna as a map to help guide your own transformation
A Taste of the Experience
Week 1
Ground
We will prepare the ground by learning about the Heroine’s Journey and how it differs from the more well known Hero’s journey, and you will be introduced to The Sacred Compass to always help you orient yourself in all time scales.
Week 2
Root
Long buried in the ground of the Earth was a whole different story about who we are as women and about our role in the human family. We will look at what the archeological record tells us, and what the images that have been found can do for our psyches.
Week 3
Bud
The Rose as the Heart Path will begin to grow in us by learning and practicing the Gateways into Love. We will talk about the aspects of the Goddess as they are seen in Intimacy, Impermanence and Incarnation.
Week 4
Bloom
The Courtship of Inanna and Demuzi will guide us to reconnect our erotic lives to the life-giving force of the Earth Herself. We will practice sensation as sacrament and reorient ourselves to a new blueprint of pleasure.
Week 5
Wilt
Here we explore The Descent of Inanna as a journey of initiation and renewal for women. We’ll examine how to stay connected to yourself during life’s most challenging moments, using this timeless myth as a guide for resilience and transformation.
Week 6
Death
We will learn about embracing impermanence and about grief, loss and surrender as profound heart openings and part of the sacred design of life. We will learn heart practices for difficult times.
Week 7
Seed
How do we come back from the underworld? What wisdom do we bring with us when we do? What dies and what is born? Here we will learn about embracing rebirth and the power of longing.
Week 8
Integration
We will close the container with talking about how to carry forth what is needed into the world and our lives. We will celebrate each other and weave together what we have learned.
Calendar
Live Calls will take place on the following Sundays at 12 noon PT
Registration is closed
Reach out to be put on the email list to hear about future offerings.
olivia@theessentialself.org
“How
Did the rose
Ever open its heart
And give to this world
All its
Beauty?
It felt the encouragement of light
Against its Being.
Otherwise,
We all remain
Too
Frightened”
― Hafez
My path to the Rose
For most of my life, I never particularly liked roses.
To tell you the truth, I thought they were kind of cheesy. Symbols of a kind of love that felt a bit uninteresting to me.
But all that changed when the Rose entered my life most unexpectedly as the only force powerful enough to help me deal with a particularly intense trauma from my past. A trauma that had an ancient, archetypal pattern to it.
It seemed to me that the power of the Rose had opened a portal for a kind of Love to come through that I had never encountered before. It wrapped a web of protection around me that made it possible to look deep into the shadows. It opened my mind to a whole different way of understanding what had gone on in my life and how it tied into a much larger story. Rose was a doorway to the heart of the Goddess of Creation. The Goddess of Reality. The Goddess of Love.
Seeing what Rose and Love could actually do, I never thought of them as cheesy or uninteresting again.
Since that awakening, I have followed where the Rose had lead me. This has included spiritual pilgrimages to the island of Crete to try to feel in the power of that land what it was like before Spirit and Matter were separated, and to the South of France, where I had a profound encounter at the Mary Magdalen sites. And also into the underworld, where I learned from the ancient Sumerian Goddesses Inanna and Ereshkigal the deep lessons of the descent we all try to avoid (generally kicking and screaming most of the way down).
Slowly, the Rose taught me how to luxuriate in her petals and in the everyday pleasures of being alive as well as how to carefully navigate her thorns and the and pain that is simply not separable from love and aliveness, no matter how much we wish it to be otherwise. Even more so, she taught me that parts I try to avoid are actually part of the heart opening I was long seeking.
I am now hopelessly, shamelessly in love with the Rose. A devotee to her mysteries. A student at the feet of this master plant teacher.
This course is my offering to share some of what she has taught me, from my heart, to yours.