Unholy

Volume XI

The first time my parents brought us to church when I was 5 years old, we got a lecture in the car about the importance of looking in someone’s eye when they shook our hands and told us they would quiz us on their eye color afterward.

As we entered the large white building and walked up the stairs draped in burgundy velvet, I approached the 7-year-old, shook her hand, and looked into her eyes. It was as if I knew her whole life when I looked into her eyes. I could feel her personality and her dreams and could see everything she would ever do.

And then I went to her Mom and shook her hand and looked into her eyes and was met with nothing but a blank wall. I started to wonder why I could see into some people and not into others.

When we got to the top of the stairs, the minister was standing there to the side about to process, and as I was holding my mother‘s hand, I looked up to her and I said “Mom is that God?”

“No, that’s the minister, but he can talk to God.”

I sat in those pews every Sunday, feeling unconditional love and acceptance. For many years, I didn’t even listen to the words but sang my heart out with the hymns and loved reading about all of the stories of the Bible at Sunday school.

When I was in fifth grade, I was eligible to be mother Mary in the nativity play and there was nothing that was going to keep me from playing that role. Every year, I watched a fifth grader walk down the aisle holding a baby with a light blue cloth draped over her head and thought there was nothing more sacred.

On Christmas, I became her, feeling her fear and feeling her pride.

In middle school, we put on a church play and a girl two years older than me got to play Salome and danced down the aisle with scarves and bells draping over her hips, and as I watched her move so eloquently through the pews, I could feel the tears start to pour on my face.

As I got older, I started to notice that women were barely mentioned in church. Sometimes I would wonder where they were, but mostly I was getting the unconscious message that we weren’t important enough to be put in the most famous stories that have ever been written.

In high school, on Saturday nights I’d get into trouble with my 3 best friends. We’d hike through moonlit woods to go skinny dipping in the town lake. Bring a joint to our favorite cows. Pop into a party, make out with a few boys, and bolt. Roll down hills in the pouring rain. Camp out under the stars with marshmallows and Captain Morgan’s and identify constellations. We’d share our dreams, talk about the mysteries of the universe, and complain about our parents.

I started to notice that I felt more alive, naked in the lake with my besties, than I did at Church the next day in an uncomfortable dress, needing to avoid one of the boys I made out with in a closet the night before.

Why did my unholiness make me feel the most alive?

I tried to go back to Church so many times from 18-25. I missed it, in a way. I missed the pause, I missed glimpsing the divine. I missed the peace.

But every time I went, I was never as taken as I was when I was lying naked in the grass, or dancing my heart out at a bar.

The hunger never left me though. I kept looking for Church.

I looked in yoga.

I looked in meditation classes.

I looked in personal development seminars.

I looked in retreats.

And finally I found Sacred Feminine Ceremony, where we danced in rooms draped in burgundy velvet, sobbed our hearts open, burned our shadows, met Goddesses in our visions and our souls in each other… and afterward we would lay in the grass (yes sometimes with my shirt off), and bathe naked in nearby rivers.

And I learned that the Unholy, is the Holiest of all.

But I wanted more. I wanted it all the time. I wanted it digestible. And I wanted it for everyone.

And I created Holy Woman.

In my quest to bring this gift to the world, I tried to make it Church, I tried to make it approachable, relatable, normal-ish. I tried to take something people knew and give it a twist. And I watered it down.

And it was still beautiful, but it wasn’t IT.

Holy Woman is nothing like Church.

Holy Woman is a timeless Mystery School where you will do the deepest soul work of your life. You will be forced to face the truth inside of you that you have been avoiding your whole life – maybe many lifetimes – and cultivate the bravery to speak it, to be it, to walk it in your life.

Holy Woman does not rely on dogma, on rules or isolation.

Holy Woman will ignite your aliveness, stretch you, spot you as you walk the edge, and make you feel so deliciously unholy.

Every woman is welcome, every woman is capable, every woman is ready, but not everyone will say yes to this path, because it requires devotion.

It is my deepest hope that at Unhinged on Thursday, you will know if this path is truly yours. And if it is, that you will choose it, remember who you are, walk in the world as a sacred, Holy Woman, and not be quiet about it.

I can’t wait to tell you all about it on 5/23.

Click here to join us, it’s free.

Love,

Sarah (with help from the Goddess)

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Some nuts & bolts:

UNHINGED is on Thursday, May 23 from 12-1:30 pm eastern & tomorrow we’re diving into exactly what’s going to happen over those 90 sacred minutes. I’ll send you an email and I’ll also go live on my Instagram account to talk it through.

The workshop will be recorded and we will send you the replay if you can’t make it live – but trust me when I say, if you can come live, you should. You’ll get more from the transmission.

If you missed our messages in this series you can read them here: