Jeanne Michele on Spiritual Equality

Jeanne Michele on Spiritual Equality

Subscribe on iTunesSpotify, Google Podcasts or Spreaker

What does the resurgence of the sacred feminine look like? How do we make space for both men and women to evolve? How does one have a courageous conversation?  In this episode, Jeanne Michele and Angela Levesque explore the messages that Mary Magdalene has for us as we move into spiritual equality and the Age of Partnership. We discuss moving out of resistance and getting out of the ‘fight’ mentality, and how to break through our collective molds and allow space for our evolution. Jeanne also shares stories from her pilgrimage to the ancient Mary Magdalene sites in France.

Receive your special gift of a sacred anointing rite that allows you to give and receive a blessing. 

You can find it here at https://drjmichele.ac-page.com/the-anointing-and-blessing

About the Guest

Woman by a treeDr. Jeanne Michele is many things: Part teacher. Part modern-day philosopher. Part change agent. Part Coach.

Her dynamic and engaging mentorship with individuals, couples, leaders, and so many others takes a departure from traditional counseling or marriage counseling in that she encourages people to identify what they really want in life and helps them design a plan to create it.

Through her work with people from many different spiritual backgrounds and belief systems, she is able to help them get in touch with the deeper truth of who they are and how they want to walk in the world. She then merges her passion for helping people create extraordinary relationships with her strong business background to deliver personalized programs to men, women, and couples helping them create and sustain dynamic lives, relationships, and business partnerships.

Dr. Jeanne believes in the power of relationships to help heal the past, and teach us about ourselves. Her relational work helps people deepen their connections with themselves and their partners, and to clarify and live more joy-filled and passionate lives.

Her personal spiritual sojourns have taken her to the heart of Bali, as well as explorations into France and Italy to explore the influence of Art and Myth in the reclamation of spiritual legends. From the small gypsy town of Sts. Marie de la Mer to the caves of Southern France, she has engaged in dynamic discoveries of the powerful legends of the Mary Magdalene Mysteries. She is planning on leading a group pilgrimage to France in 2022.

Links

Jeanne’s Websites

Join Angela on Substack

Seeing Beyond the Lens of Patriarchy

Seeing Beyond the Lens of Patriarchy

“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any”. ~Alice Walker

I remember the moment that I really understood how my lens of patriarchy affected me and how it altered the way I showed up in the world. I was in the midst of reading the Women Who Run with Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes and I could feel a fire rising inside me. I felt the need to sit in deep meditation and witness as generations of suppression, repression, and helplessness moved as waves of emotion through my body. I cried for the harming of societies past who felt the brunt of a system much more deliberate than the version I was currently living. I grieved deeply as I saw the actions of myself and generations through this understanding. Then I sat with the revelation that I had never really understood the lens from which I viewed the world.

The Divine Energies

If I look at that experience carefully, it wasn’t just the suppression of women that brought me to such depths or the past hurts they’ve endured, it was much deeper than that. It was the diminishment of many of the values and ideals that I held dear. Aspects of the Divine Feminine that as a society we accepted as less than. In our current climate, it isn’t just about the suppression of women but about the imbalance of both the feminine and masculine energies. It’s about what we have decided is worthy and noble and what isn’t. The Divine Feminine is the embodiment of emotion, creativity, flexibility, and intuition. She is receptive, inclusive and mysterious and yes, even dark. The Divine Masculine is about loyalty, logic, reasoning, strength, and security for all. In our Western culture, we favor many of the characteristics that are inherently masculine and diminish those that are more aligned with the Divine Feminine. Though, in our patriarchal system, neither are well represented.

This isn’t a conversation about gender though it is through gender roles and stereotypes that the conversation has become muddied. It is about creating a new paradigm that benefits everyone, and this requires that we recognize and value both the masculine and feminine that exists within every individual and every culture. These energies have nothing to do with gender and everything to do with restoring balance, harmony, and wholeness. It is time for us to re-evaluate what it is we value and what brings us to the world we want to create. It is also time for us to understand the lens from which we see the world and how that defines or limits our power and what we believe is possible.

A Time of Revealing

Over the past decade, we have seen the underpinnings of our deceptive financial systems leading to outrageous wealth extraction and income disparity. We have seen the biases and racism of our political and judiciary systems, and now we are shedding light on sexual harassment and predatory behavior.  All of these are forms of abuses of power and all of these are symptoms of a system that benefits a few at the cost of the many.

In our most recent revealing, we have been bringing to light feelings of shame, self-betrayal, and feelings of powerlessness. But in our attempt to bring these wrongs to the forefront of our consciousness, we are substituting shame for shaming. We are bringing light to our own internal feelings of shame and replacing that with public shaming as a means of social control. Does that bring us toward the world that we want to see? We have talked about predatory behavior as really being about power over another. In this call out culture, are we not using the power of social media to destroy lives? We are at a point where a single allegation can bring down the life of another human with no conversation of due process, or opportunity for redemption. This can’t be our end game.

I’ve seen groups of people trying to silence other groups because how could they know the challenges and lives of someone else, someone different from them. The answer is we don’t, but if we tell anyone they shouldn’t be heard, then we diminish all voices. It further perpetuates the atmosphere of separation, polarization, and resentment. People should be able to engage from where ever they are and from their own experience; this is speaking their truth. And we need to listen, but when our truth also involves the silencing of another’s voice, then we are just doing to someone else what we have had done to us. That is matching the same level of consciousness that created the world we are in. So if we want to create something different, we have to approach it from a new place, from a new lens of our own conscious creation. Matching fear with fear, anger with anger or shame with shame will result in more of the same.  If we want to create a climate where all people are valued, welcomed and heard then we can’t squash one voice for the sake of another.

Tales of Power

Patriarchy isn’t just about men. It is a system. A system we all take part in. In order to dismantle this system, we don’t go after men; we unplug from the story that created it. We see the lens from which we have been viewing the world and opt to take another viewpoint. We are seeing people unplug from this story all over the place. What we are saying right now is that we will not plug our spirit and our wellbeing into a story that keeps us small. At the same time, we need to be mindful of what we are unconsciously creating and of the destruction that we are leaving in our wake. Otherwise what we are creating is no better. That is the reformation of a system, a Band-aid approach, that doesn’t let wounds heal, it only creates more. We want to birth a new system and this requires a new story. It is time to take our power back as individuals, not so we can have power over another but so we can witness our own power.

There are some very real things to be offended by, but being offended is a choice that we must consider carefully. Because when we do, we also accept the role of the victim. I know that some people are still in their anger. Anger, grief, and condemnation are all part of the healing process but so is forgiveness and compassion.  Anger is a powerful entry point into action and has the ability to destroy what no longer serves us. But without moving through it into forgiveness and compassion, anger’s destructive force can take over and leave more wounds.

“Once you do away with the idea of people as fixed, static entities, then you see that people can change, and there is hope”. ~ Bell Hooks

 

Our world faces many difficult challenges, geopolitically and ecologically. We need to be able to come together more than ever. For myself, the endgame in this time of revealing is creating a world of honor, harmony and mutual respect for all living beings. What is yours and are your actions in alignment with it? Otherwise, we stay in the cycle of us versus them, or the victim and the perpetrator. What if we don’t move from a place of powerlessness, not at the level of the collective, but as an individual? What if we are powerful beyond measure and that is the lens we now see the world? Or if that is a hard place to see, can you use compassion and forgiveness and witness the wounds in another? Can you aid another in their healing, so there is room for redemption?

At some point, we have to have a conversation about how we begin to heal. How we learn to forgive those who have hurt us. Moving from a place of radical love for ourselves and for our fellow humans. A place where we can receive information that challenges us, triggers us even,  without going directly to a place of bad or good, or us versus them. Where we don’t feel the need to control the world through the lens of our wounds. Where we can hold space for forgiveness and provide the opportunity for people to continue to grow and develop and deeply heal. Arthur Schopenhauer said, “Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world.” How does your lens limit your power, your potential and what is truly possible? Are you ready to create a new story?

(c) Can Stock Photo / Jozef

Join Angela on Substack

Should the Masculine Serve the Feminine?

Should the Masculine Serve the Feminine?

Should the masculine always serve the feminine? In this special edition of the Chaos & Light Podcast, Andrew Martin co-hosts with Angela Levesque. Andrew and Angela both speak and write on subjects in spirituality, consciousness, and personal growth. They decided to come together once a month to dive deep into these subjects in a light and playful way. 

In this episode they discuss:

  • Synchronicity
  • The process of things moving from the formless into form
  • Are science and spirit equally important? Is the nature of all science inherently masculine?
  • Why Be-Do-Have is the very nature of all manifestation
  • Why it is important for the masculine to be in service of the feminine and what happens when that doesn’t happen?
  • The perils of perpetual progress

Subscribe to the Podcast Directly on iTunesSpotify, Google Podcasts or Spreaker

Links

Andrew Martin

Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress by Christopher Ryan

Sam Harris

 

 

Join Angela on Substack

The Warrior, Anchor and Visionary

The Warrior, Anchor and Visionary

In this episode, Angela Levesque explores the Warrior, the Anchor & the Visionary. Different roles emerging from different perspectives in our current paradigm. All of them valuable and all of them necessary. We also explore the difference between conscious and unconscious chaos and why this idea of destruction and dismantling our system using our current approaches will only lead to more of the same power dynamics. If we want to create a new world, we fundamentally need to operate from a different story of power with instead of power over.

 

 

Episode Summary

  • Divine Spectacle

    • In this segment, we take a deep dive into the current power dynamics that underpin our dominant narratives. Using the framing of stories, structures, and systems we uncover that all attempts to dismantle the system without challenging the story and the zero-sum power dynamics that exist within it, are just doomed to repeat the cycle. The idea of conscious and unconscious chaos is also explored noting that destruction is only one aspect of chaos, we also need to embrace the void aspect and its importance in giving rise to new stories, structures, and systems. The path to any change occurs not from being in resistance to a dominant system but by making the current one irrelevant.
  • Sacred Mind

    • In this segment, we look at the different roles that one might play in bringing in a new paradigm. We look at the warrior, the anchor, and the visionary. None is more important than the other, each person needs to assume the role to which they are called.
  • It’s Worth Your Time

Join Angela on Substack

Science and Spirituality: Parallel Paths to Truth

Science and Spirituality: Parallel Paths to Truth

Science and spirituality are sometimes tricky to reconcile. The core of the issue is asking ourselves – what is truth? This is an important question, but an even more interesting question is how do we decide truth? Some people think of truth as objective, and measurable. In our Western culture, we hold scientific inquiry as the ultimate mechanism by which we gain this knowledge. But in our daily actions, it is often our emotions, memories and past experiences that drive our behavior. And beyond that, aren’t there ways of conceptually understanding the world through story, that is just as meaningful?  If truth can only be known through what is replicated and reproduce through the scientific method or based on what the five senses can tell us, aren’t we dismissing the core of our spiritual/emotional nature?

Some think these two paths to truth are in direct contrast to another and many of us are desperate to find a way for them to fit neatly together. Let’s consider for a moment that we do both, science and spirituality a disservice when we want them to converge. Perhaps, they are parallels paths and they both provide us with truth. Each one giving us a different offering and a way to understand the universe and each equally important to our navigating our lives with meaning. They are the masculine and feminine aspects of our nature, and just like the yin/yang, they were meant to complement and not converge.

What Spirituality Tells Us?

Spirituality is our connection to what is meaningful in our lives. And an understanding that this meaning is connected to something that is larger than the individual. For some, this is God and others could describe it as oneness. But, regardless of the language, it is about our relationship to ourselves, our communities and our universe. Through the use of story, meditation, and direct mystical experiences, people deepen their awareness of a shared universal consciousness. These truths are not easily quantified or explained as a string of data, but they help us to understand who we are to one another and more importantly who we are to ourselves.

What Science Tells Us?

Science, on the other hand, is riddled with doubt and skepticism by its very nature. It aims to be faithless and only infer knowledge from observation and experimentation of the physical and the natural world. It tells us how our world operates within the confines of time and space and gives an accurate way to measure and predict the universe’s behavior. Our scientific knowledge has given us huge advances in technology, extended our lives and allowed us to build the infrastructure of our modern world. If science tells us of ‘the how’ or gives us the mechanism by which things work; spirituality sheds light on ‘the why’ or the purpose for our being here. 

The Limitations

Each path to truth has its limitations and it is important to understand them. Science does a great job explaining to us the actions of a single ingredient or the statistical truths of large populations, but it can’t tell your story. And more than that, it doesn’t know the story you tell yourself.  There are many aspects of the mind/body relationship, our subconscious mind, and our relationship dynamics that can’t be measured and accounted for. All of these factors contribute to our unique biochemical make-up. In a very real sense, our stories shape our biology. 

Seeing the world through a spiritual lens only, also has its limitations. It can find itself entrenched in dogma and rigidity in the case of organized religion. It can also fail to explain why something manifests the way it does on the material plane. It has been used as a way to control others as well as an opportunity for some to give away their power and/or responsibility. We can miss out on actionable steps that greatly improve our physical lives if we are too focused on waiting for a sign.

Analytical & Conceptual

For example, let’s take the creation story. There has been a huge debate about it being addressed alongside the evolution in science class. Opponents consider it anti-science and many Christians believe it should be a critical part of our education. So while the creation story does not belong in a science classroom, it still has value to our human experience. In the Native American culture or African folk traditions, they both used mythology or metaphor to describe their world. They have passed on their origins, their philosophies, and the wisdom of their ancestors through the use of storytelling. Maybe these hold just as much value and importance as knowing the chemical constituents of the Big Bang. 

Neither view can fully encompass humanity’s truth, but if we stop moving from a place of either /or and move into the space of both/and, the world does not have to be reduced down to the sum of its parts. Can we live in a world that can appreciate and see the value that science has to offer, but understand that story and myth speak to a part of us that can’t be reached by data alone?  Let’s let them co-exist and not be so eager to abolish or combine them.  Data is great, but we won’t change the world without a new story. Conversely, a new story can only be implemented with the technology and innovations that science provides. 

What are your thoughts? Are you hoping for the day where science & spirituality merge? Listen to archived episodes of On Health & Healing and Entanglement Radio for interviews & information on this subject.


(c) Can Stock Photo / Creative_Hearts

Join Angela on Substack