Sacred Devotional Practices
A Living Relationship with the Goddess
For me, Goddess Spirituality has never been simply about believing in the Goddess, learning Her mythology, or honoring Her through ritual.
It is about developing a living relationship.
The Goddess isn’t merely an archetype, a symbol of feminine qualities, or a metaphor for something within ourselves. She is a living expression of the Divine—a presence we can know and develop a relationship with.
Like any relationship, it grows by spending time together.
Sacred devotional practice is one way we make space for that time. Through prayer, meditation, ritual, writing, movement, creativity, or other practices, we turn our attention toward the Goddess.
We listen. We speak. We wonder. We return.
And over time, we may discover that we aren’t only coming to know Her, but we know ourselves differently, too. She can illuminate truths about ourselves that we may have forgotten.
This is the heart of sacred devotional practice within this Temple.
It isn’t about learning how to be more spiritual, but about spending time in relationship with the Goddess and discovering what becomes possible within that relationship.
Devotion Without Abandoning Yourself
For many women, the word devotion carries complicated associations.
We may have learned that devotion to the Divine requires obedience, and faith means accepting someone else’s interpretation of truth. Spiritual authority belongs to someone outside ourselves. Being devoted means surrendering our questions, desires, bodies, or inner knowing in service to something—or someone—else.
Devotion doesn’t mean that to me. Rather, quite the opposite.
In my experience, a relationship with the Goddess doesn’t require you to abandon your relationship with yourself.
My relationship with the Goddess continually brings me back to myself. She illuminates places where I’ve accepted beliefs that aren’t mine. She shows me where I’ve diminished myself, ignored what I know, or forgotten my own sacred nature.
The Goddess challenges me, surprises me, comforts me, annoys me, makes me laugh, and sometimes shows me truths I’m not particularly interested in seeing.
That’s a relationship.
The practices I create and share aren’t meant to tell you what your experience with the Goddess should be.
I can only share what I’ve learned. I can create a practice, hold space for exploration, introduce you to a Goddess as I know Her, and offer ways of spending time in Her presence.
But I can’t tell you what She will mean to you.
Nor should I.
Your relationship with the Goddess belongs to you. Your own experience, discernment, questions, and inner knowing remain part of the relationship. You don’t have to surrender your authority in order to enter into devotion.
Within this Temple, devotion and Sacred Selfhood belong together.
Meeting the Goddess Today
I work with Goddesses from many cultures and times.
I honor their stories and the cultures where they originated, but I’m not attempting to reconstruct historical forms of worship or create modern versions of ancient religions.
Rather, I come to the Goddess with a different question:
Who is this Goddess as She meets us here, in this time and world?
I believe the many Goddesses humanity has known are individual expressions of the Feminine Divine—what I call, She of many names and no name, the Feminine Avatar of Source. Each has Her own presence, stories, qualities, and ways of revealing the Divine, while also being an expression of something greater.
When I spend time with Lakshmi, Isis, Freya, or another Goddess, I want to know Her.
Her mythology may give us a doorway. History can give us context. What others have experienced can enrich our understanding.
But none of those things replaces being in a relationship with Her, which leaves room for discovery, for questions, and for Her to surprise us. Our understanding deepens and changes as our relationship does.
Practice as Time Spent Together
Sometimes, the word practice makes spirituality sound like something we need to become good at or perfect.
“Do the meditation correctly. Remember the ritual steps. Maintain the daily routine. Finish the program. Master the technique.”
My understanding of devotional practice takes a different approach.
You don’t master a relationship. You live it.
A practice gives us a way to return—to the Goddess, to ourselves, and to whatever we’re exploring together.
One day that might mean sitting at an altar in meditation. Another day it might mean writing in a journal, repeating a prayer, moving your body, or creating something. Some days, it happens through preparing food, walking through a garden, or noticing how an insight from your practice is showing up in a conversation or choice.
Some practices may become part of your life for years. Others may belong to a particular time or season. You may return to something you practiced months or years ago and discover that it meets you differently because you are meeting it differently.
There is no spiritual prize for finishing. What matters is only the experience of returning and discovering what is here now.
This is why repetition can matter in devotional practice. Not because repeating something enough times guarantees an outcome, but because relationships deepen through multiple encounters.
We come back and notice more. We listen differently and allow the relationship to unfold.
The Sacred Belongs in Ordinary Life
I don’t believe we incarnated into physical bodies so that we could spend our lives trying to transcend them. Nor do I believe spiritual life exists somewhere apart from ordinary life.
The Goddess doesn’t disappear when we blow out the candle. She isn’t confined to an altar, a ritual, a meditation, or the moments when we feel particularly connected to the sacred.
She is with us while we’re making dinner and paying bills. While we’re writing and painting and tending gardens, She sits next to us. And She’s with us even while we’re working, loving, grieving, celebrating, arguing, choosing, changing, and figuring out what comes next.
Our bodies belong to our spiritual lives. Even the messy parts of being human are part of our spiritual experience and journey.
For me, the purpose of spiritual practice isn’t to help us escape any of that. It is to help us become more fully present within it.
Sacred devotional practice can create a space where we intentionally meet the Goddess. But what happens within that space doesn’t have to stay there.
- An insight follows us into an ordinary Tuesday.
- A prayer changes the way we notice something.
- A Goddess’s presence comes to mind while we’re making a decision.
- Something we’ve been exploring in ritual suddenly becomes recognizable in a relationship.
The boundary between our “spiritual life” and the rest of our life becomes harder to find.
That is part of what it means to dance with the Goddess.
The dance isn’t somewhere else. It is here, in your body and in your heart.
Practice as Remembrance
I don’t approach devotional practice from the belief that we’re broken women who need fixing. Certainly, we may want to change things to reveal what’s truly inside us.
We carry conditioning, inherited expectations, old beliefs, habits, wounds, and stories about who we’re supposed to be. Some of them can become so familiar that we mistake them for ourselves.
But underneath them is something that can never be erased.
Our Sacred Selfhood.
The wholeness of who we are beneath the conditioning—the self that knows, desires, creates, chooses, loves, questions, and experiences her own relationship with the sacred.
This is why I think of so much of this work as remembrance.
Different Goddesses may illuminate different places within us.
One may invite us to reconsider what we’ve learned about abundance and receiving. Another may illuminate the way we love ourselves and others. Another may bring us face-to-face with questions of worth.
The Goddess doesn’t manufacture those qualities within us.
She can help us see what conditioning has obscured.
And devotional practice gives us somewhere to remain with what we’re discovering rather than rushing immediately toward an answer.
Sometimes remembrance is beautiful. Other times, it’s uncomfortable, even scary. And sometimes, nothing dramatic happens.
Remembrance changes the questions we’re asking, especially when we keep returning. Then, one day we can realize that something we once struggled to understand has become part of how we live.
That, too, is a sacred practice.
More Than One Way to Practice
There isn’t a single practice that defines a relationship with the Goddess. It’s impossible.
Relationships are living things.
What draws you closer at one point in your life may not be what you need at another. You may long to spend an extended period getting to know a particular Goddess. At another time, a prayer you can return to regularly may be what keeps you connected. Sometimes you may want ritual and structure. Other times, you may simply need to sit with a question.
The practices I create reflect that understanding. They offer different ways of spending time with the Goddess while deepening your relationship with Her and with yourself.
They don’t prescribe what Goddess Spirituality should look like, because that is your own personal experience to determine.
My practices offer places to begin, return to, explore, and make your own.
Because ultimately, I’m not trying to create my relationship with the Goddess for you.
I am creating ways for you to discover yours.
Explore the Sacred Devotional Practices
There are many ways to spend time with the Goddess, and different practices can offer different ways of entering that relationship.
You may feel drawn to spend an extended time exploring with a Goddess or discover another practice that gives you a way to meet Her and yourself differently.
There isn’t one place you need to begin or a practice you’re supposed to choose. What feels meaningful now may be different from what calls to you another day or another season.
Take your time. Explore the practices and notice what invites you into the Dance.
