By LiYana Silver | Yoga Journal
Author LiYana Silver explains why she thinks Cate Blanchett got it right and women ought to begin trusting their innate feminine genius and looking to their yonis for guidance.
Did you catch Stephen Colbert’s interview with actor Cate Blanchett on the Late Show earlier this month? As they talked about the Broadway play she is currently starring in, The Present, Blanchett explained that the main question the play is asking is: “As you move forward in life, what’s your moral compass, where does kindness and humanity sit in a really brutal world?”
Colbert followed up by asking Blanchett where her own moral compass sits, Blanchett immediately responded: “In my vagina.”
Yes, she did.
Watch the interview now
It is amazing not only that she said this incendiary word on network television, but also that she said it with a twinkle in her eye and absolute confidence in her body, as if she were sitting on a secret to living a good and true life.
She is.
We all need and want a moral compass—to help us get clear about what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s true and what’s false, what step to take next, what to create or what to let go of—to guide us in ways that honor all of life and humanity. But a moral compass in your own self? In your own body? And in your vagina? Rather than via the expert, the leader, or the PhD? The simple answer is yes. Instead of vagina, I call it your Oracle—the Oracle Between Your Thighs to be exact.
Discovering Your Own Oracle
For millennia, an oracle was a person or sometimes a place like a cave, shrine, or spring, said to have the ear of the Divine and be a mouthpiece for the Divine. If you had a question you needed an answer to, a quandary about which direction to go, an indecisive moment, you would head to the oracle and ask.
For the past 14 years, I have been working with women to help them consult their own Oracles. I encourage them to look within before consulting any expert, leader, or PhD outside of themselves, as the rest of the world too often and too quickly instructs them to do.
Your Oracle is the area of your body that is below your belly button and above your tailbone. It holds most of your female reproductive organs including your uterus, ovaries, cervix, vagina, clitoris, pelvic nerve, and labia. It is also an area that will orient you toward wisdom, kindness, morality, and humanity, as Blanchett proclaimed it does for her.
It is an honor and a joy to support women to not only clear away blocks, fear, and shame from this powerful, vulnerable part of our bodies (and identities) but also to learn how to use the powers of our “Oracles” as a moral compass—and a mouthpiece for the Divine. As writer Seth Godin says (and I couldn’t agree more), “You think you need a map, but what you really want is a compass.”
5 Reasons Your Yoni Makes an Excellent Moral Compass
1. It’s holy.
The Sanskrit word for this area of the body is yoni, which translates as “divine gateway to life.” Vedic Tantra, a philosophy that originated in the first millennium CE, and informed the more esoteric branches of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism, believed that this spot on a woman’s body—the Yoni, the portal through which all physical life comes—is holy. Women and their Yonis were held in high esteem, considered to be physical embodiments of the Goddess.
2. It’s creative.
This part of your body is creativity central. It is intelligence central. Whether you choose to create a book, a business, breakfast, or a baby, your Oracle (also home to the Svadhisthana Chakra) has been considered for millennia to be the metaphysical seat of passionate creativity as well as to hold the physical power to create and sustain life. A woman who is feeling a lack of creativity or a lack of passion is often also feeling cut off or numb to her body, her femininity, her Oracle. To get back in touch, try the Sacral Chakra Tune-Up Practice.
3. It’s feminine.
This group of organs (below your belly button and above your tailbone) physically distinguish us as female (males have different ones). This group of organs metaphysically connect us with our “feminine” strengths. All genders have “masculine” and “feminine” strengths within us, but as a world we grossly overuse our “masculine” to the point of personal, cultural, and planetary breakdown. (Note, you are no less able to wield “feminine” strengths, and certainly no less of a woman, if you don’t have all of the female reproductive organs I mentioned above). While the masculine in us thinks, the feminine feels. While the masculine in us reasons, the feminine intuits. While the masculine in us competes, the feminine collaborates. A powerful strength of the feminine in each of us is about creating and nurturing humanity, rather than controlling it, exploiting it, or dominating it.
