If the Saturnian style of FranklinCovey is the “father” of my approach to enhancing personal effectiveness, the Goddess is certainly its mother!
My entrepreneurial inclinations and spiritual practice took root simultaneously in 1996. It was then that I I began to walk the path of the Goddess.
I delved deeply into the arts of ritual and intuition, exploring wisdom traditions that honor the sacred feminine. Earth-centered spiritual practices attuned me to the natural rhythms of time. From Solstice to Solstice, my scope of awareness expanded to embrace the entire globe, not just my tiny self on it. The Sun rises and sets for all of us. Regardless of which nation plants its flag in it, soil needs moisture to bear fruit. The land provides food for people with no judgment on their faith. We all must nourish our bodies and quench our thirst. We all have a hunger in our souls, regardless of how we call spirit to feed it.
Community service converged with personal development in the eco-feminist microcosm of my spiritual milieu. I learned that all Earth-based beings — that includes you and me — abide by the same pulse of life whether we are conscious of it or not. Time is kept by the beat of day and night, growth and decline. Seasons affect us, though the shifts may be subtle or stunning depending on our latitude.
As a woman, I learned to attend to the Moon’s influence on my energy, my creativity, and my procreativity. Lunar waxing and waning made me mindful of gain and loss, come and go. I found that by aligning myself with the dance of Earth, Moon and Sun, I could collaborate with the larger forces already at work.
As a business-oriented individual, I practiced techniques for manifestation based more on the Laws of Attraction than on muscle. What I could accomplish in harmony with Universal forces was greater than what I could accomplish with my will alone.
Embracing the Goddess empowered me with a deep sense of self-worth as a woman. I came to value women’s ways of knowing — trusting my intuition and my body’s innate wisdom. My previous institutional learning urged me to intellectualism, practicality and measuring worth by outer accomplishment. My spiritual unfoldment in the arms of the Great Mother revealed that my presence could be as powerful as my product.
I developed my ability to “hold space.” I practiced listening. I found that I knew things without knowing how I knew them — and discovered that this knowing was just as reliable in the empirical sense as the fruits of logic.
Over the past 30 years, our Western culture has experienced a resurgence of interest in the sacred feminine. Born of the feminist movement, books like Starhawk’s The Spiral Dance and Z Budapest’s Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries celebrated the rebirth of the Goddess religions. Now the Goddess movement itself is entering its own Saturn Return. With the Hollywood release of The Da Vinci Code in 2006, the Goddess has even made waves in the mainstream.
Women are discovering they don’t need to disguise themselves as men to be effective in the office. “Slow food” is inching up on the fast food lifestyle, and voluntary simplicity is edging in from the social periphery. A global economy requires we recognize diversity amongst people. We are collectively beginning to ride a wave of respect for different ways of knowing, different ways of being.
A strictly top-down approach to time-management is no longer sustainable. The mind that dictates what should be is no match for the body that reveals what actually is. You may think you know what your values are based on fifteen minutes of scratching notes in the back of your planner. And you may be right. But your body knows for certain. Your heart knows.
And as I evolved spiritually, so I began to explore new approaches to values-centered time management. For years, my friend Kat Lilith and I dreamed of a “Magical FranklinCovey Planner.” We yearned for day pages that incorporated moon phases and astrology. We wanted discovery exercises and effectiveness coaching that embraced our intuitive styles of working and the feminine face of the divine. All of which would fit beautifully into our sleek leather binders and matching purses.
What germinated in Kat’s and my collaboration was ViA, or Values in Action, a system for mapping a person’s core values into a unique constellation — an inner star. The manner of ViA’s manifestation was entirely feminine… and magical. It literally just popped into existence during a mutual coaching session between Kat and me in 2004.
I was delighted to finally have a tangible system I could share with my clients that delves deep into self-discovery, inviting the soul, not just the mind, to tell what is true. Since the ViA system conceives of time as cyclical and relative rather than linear and fixed, it satisfied my craving for that Magical Planner. But more than that, it rounded out my coaching tool kit so that I could help creative, intuitive types do their own thing better… without pushing them into an uncomfortably logical mode toward effectiveness.
One of my aims is to marry the feminine talent for being to the masculine paradigm of doing. In my work coaching self-employed creative souls who resist being chained to their agendas and constrained by their appointment books, I have found that when people know what’s important to them in a way that feels true in their bodies, action unfolds naturally. Action becomes less a function of pushing and will and more the result of alignment and allowing. When you are connected with your inner star — your spirit’s own DNA — right action reveals itself. To live in integrity means listening and following where your inner light shines.
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