But isn’t this the opposite of what we’ve been taught?

Especially as girls and women we’re taught to say NO to food, to savoring, to slowing down, and to pleasures that have nothing to do with buying or acquiring anything — NO to that which nourishes and feeds us.

At the same time, we are taught to say YES to ignoring our own needs, smiling and pleasing others when we don’t particularly want to, ingesting toxins and poisons in the name of “beauty” — YES to that which overrides and harms our bodies.

But your hunger
— for food, for pleasure, for space —
is made up of the same energy
that urges a plant
to lean toward the sunshine.

And yet, you may be wary about lifting the lid of your hunger and letting your longing loose in the world. Aren’t your desires the very things that limit your awareness, dumb down your human potential, lead you astray, and propel you compulsively toward pleasure one moment and away from pain the next? 

Not necessarily. 

Heeding your hunger
is not the same thing as
compulsion, addiction,
or unconscious consumption,
though many people
mistakenly confuse them.

(H/T to my friend, colleague and author, Jena la Flamme for that)

Pandora, if you don’t know her, is a much-maligned, mythical female, famous for lifting the lid of the very box she was told not to, because she hungered to understand the mystery of what lay within.

In our modern understanding, to open Pandora’s Box means to get into big, regrettable, perhaps irreversible trouble. We understand that our desire will open a troubling can of worms.

But I, like many others, 
do not interpret Pandora’s myth 
as a cautionary tale of how 
trouble comes into the world 
— through a woman’s desire. 

Pandora certainly isn’t the first (or only or last) woman to be condemned for her disobedience, shamed for her longings, and blamed for letting loose all manner of torments and troubles into the world because of following her desires.

One understanding of the name Pandora is “she who sends up gifts.” In an alternate interpretation of her story, Pandora embodies the s3xy fertility of the earth and its capacity to “send up gifts” such as seeds and fruits and other treasures for the benefit of all humankind. 

By this understanding, Pandora’s Box is filled with treasure, and it is her very hunger for what’s within that reveals the gifts.

Feminine Genius — the feminine flavor of the divine, the intelligent energy of our collective soul — loves to get your attention through your desires. 

The very things you have
assumed will ruin you
— your impulses, urges, hungers —
are actually designed to
reconnect you with
your life-force and holy fire.

Your hunger has something brilliant to point you toward, if you would only unearth the treasure box and let yourself lean, like a succulent plant, toward your own personal sunshine.

Let’s lift the lid,

PS: Photo by Julia Maryanska photography