Prayer to Yemayah

You fold over yourself in ecstasy

Your rapture holy eruption

Your crest challenging the poise of the universe

as you quench the thirsty moon

Through your constant roar

the Warrior Goddess speaks

and I have come to listen

Oh Divine Mother

guide me as a vessel

worthy of your creative vibration

Leela Francis is the founder of Vividly Woman. An embodiment Expert, facilitator and coach, she inspires the values of the divine feminine in work and in play.

Circle Addiction

I am Vividly Woman! I want to shout it from the roof tops and throw my bra out the window!

I feel compelled to share yesterday’s Ah Ha moment with my Sisters because I want this for all of us.

Life happens each and everyday, thank Goddess. Yesterday happened to be one of those days that challenged my nerves and tested my resolve. At midnight my youngest daughter woke me up with the news that her belly hurt.

For the next five hours she proceeded to throw up thanks to the stomach flu she picked up at school. It was an agonizing, exhausting night and an even harder morning getting my other kids up and off to school.

The clean up began and I was feeling quite cranky. In the midst of the chaos I looked in my agenda to make sure I wasn’t missing something and I saw that I had scheduled a call with my business partner and Vividly Woman Sister, Leela. A smile crossed my lips. Yeah! I get to have a little sister time.

The familiar tingles rose through my body. It was then that I reminded myself to close my eyes and bring myself back to my circle of sisters who I had just left a few weeks back while at Vividly Woman Leaders Circle 1 in Ojai, California. I held my left hand up and my right hand down and I was transformed back to ME in all my Goddess glory, mop in hand and all.

Another jolt of joy and calm rose up when I reminded myself that I would be once again physically in circle in just a few weeks when I assist at Sacred Sensual Splendor in Mexico. Ahhhh, yesssss!

I know for sure that participating in circles as often as possible, live and virtual, is an indulgence, verging on addiction, that I’ve consciously chosen to give/gift myself. I am worthy of the support, the love and the sisterhood that fuels my soul and ignites my spirit. I am in true awe of how I’ve peeled away the layers that had built up over time and I’ve allowed myself to bring back that little girl that was buried deep inside; the excited, sensual, curious, playful and hopeful girl – the girl who knows not to just get through a day, but to dance through it.

I am living breathing proof that Vividly Woman & sacred circle changes lives.

I"m embodying and exuding what I'm learning from each circle. I’ve become a beautiful example for my family to see how I value taking care of myself physically, emotionally and spiritually. The peaks and valleys I experience come much more smoothly. In return, those around me serve ME, the Goddess, in reverence and respect. I love my life, I love my sisters, and I love being Vividly Woman.

Contact me any time for a hit of Vividly Woman Sisterly love
randi@VividlyWoman.com

Randi Markel is co-founder of Vividly Woman Vivapreneur Academy and a Vividly Woman Co-Facilitator. With a background in education and fundraising project management, and as the mother of 4, she is a woman who lives fully and vividly!

Power of the Circle

Come to us however you are.
Come whole.
Come broken.
Come and gather your pieces here.

Bring your heart and mind and soul, and know that we hold space for you.

If you are stuck, sit in the center of us, and we will buoy you forward, like a lifeboat on the tide. Even if four of us are stuck, we are strong enough. Even if half of us are stuck or hurt, we are strong enough. Even if ALL but one are unable to move, that one is strong enough.

And if we were all unable to move, every one of us broken or scared or stuck, we would join arms, look upward to the Great One, and scream. We would reclaim our power, as one, and then each take it with us, back to our lives. Our ferocity.

So come if you are RADIANT. So radiant you're afraid to blind us!
And come if you are in shadows, so shadowed you're afraid to mar us.
Come. However you are, BE WITH US. Be here, in our circle.

Because we are a circle that meets and holds one another -
with golden shimmering ties of love -
that neither time nor distance can efface.

May LOVE hold us and buoy us forward, beating hearts of sisterhood. RIGHT at this moment, beating. Living. Hands held for our lifetimes.

Vividly Woman guest blogger Mary Agnes Antonopoulos

Mary Agnes Antonopoulos, Vividly Woman Leader Sister, is a writer and social media expert and coach.

RockAwayWriter.com

Brag a Little Would Ya??

Having landed back in Mexico for the winter, I'm now taking the time to recapitulate the last year, the last 5 actually because I'm now dancing into Vividly Woman's 6th year and I know the foundation of the last 5 has enormous lessons to reveal to me for what's to come.

And through my reviewing process, I've decided that these first few weeks of 2011 are officially time to brag. So I invite you to visit the Vividly Woman Facebook Group page and brag yourself silly. You'll find it tremendously therapeutic! Here's mine..........

I'm bragging about realizing a dream in the last few years to see the Vividly Woman Embodied Leader Training Program not only birth 20 Gorgeous Vividly Woman Leaders, but out of those, 5 of them are now actively engaged in the VWoman Co-Facilitator Program. Where once I thought I couldn't possibly guide others to facilitate VW events, these amazing women are proving me very wrong and they are doing a great job of it!

I'm also fluffing my feathers to boast that Vividly Woman Leader Sister, Albertine Phan has been nominated to the UN Commission on the Status of Women and she largely credits her Vividly Woman Training and our community for helping her to achieve this profound designation.

Further bragging takes me to my achievement of including soulful retreat time and space for myself each and every year for the last 5 on the beach in Mexico where I self-renew and source divine spirit in nature to nourish and inspire my service.

And while I'm bragging, I have to include the fact that I love myself & my body way more than I did 5 years ago! That in itself is a huge accomplishment.

And last but certainly not least, I am feeling exceptionally blessed and braggy to have snagged the most amazing man in the world and 5 months ago made him my Husband!

So what do you have to brag about?

Remember, it's officially time to Brag, so let it all hang out and share your bragging on the Vividly Woman Facebook Group Page. We want to know how amazing you are, and you're inner Goddess wants to know too!

Go crazy!,

Leela

Leela Francis is an Embodiment Expert. She helps women dance their power and rock the world with their passion for life.
www.VividlyWoman.com

Melting Open to Savor instead of Save the Natural World

I just arrived back in Mexico where I spend my winters. After 9 months of bebopping around from place to place, circle to circle, I have landed for the next 3 months in a place I think of fondly as my winter home. I come her to replenish and remember my truest essence.

I know, from past years, that when I first arrive it takes me a good few days to really land and feel truly here. One of the awarenesses I have is that I feel like an outsider looking in somehow. Though I love and appreciate the beauty of the natural world here, it's why I come back year after year, I still feel separate from it at first. I'm awoken to the reality that I'm usually walking through life armoured against and away from my immediate environment. I don't notice it until I come back here. At first I watch the roll of the waves, the blending colors of the sunset, the swooping of the pelicans, instead of merge with these natural wonders and become their enchantedness.

A few days from now I know the boundaries of our separateness will be blurred and I'll be remembering with my whole being, body, self and soul, our oneness.

I'm passionate that all beings know that one-ness, not just with our mind, but as a visceral experience, a delicious savoring of the present moment's sensual delights. A melting open that softens our separateness and weaves our web of connectedness. I believe that we need to savor our beautiful natural world in order to see her flourish, instead of seek to save her which is a domineering objectification, a separation that defeats the purpose entirely.

So please start savoring instead of saving! Just as I re-discover the richness of savoring each year anew to replenish my own wholeness, I know we can support the earths wholeness in the same way.

Leela Francis is an Embodiment Expert. She helps women dance their power and rock the world with their passion for life.
www.VividlyWoman.com