Azra Bertrand Quotes

Truly committing to Love will take you on the royal road of the soul. Not only will you pass through all your own personal wounds and ancestral wounds, but it will also lead you through the valley of the original sacred wound of humanity—when sacred duality became separation. This is what we may call the feminine Christ path. We do not sit up on a mountain and ignore the valley beneath us—we walk down, flooding all experiences with Love and forgiveness, restoring connection.

I arrive suspended above the Cauldron of Wisdom. There are crones gathered all around the Cauldron of Wisdom. I ask if I can sip from the Cauldron of Wisdom. “Anything you want, my dear,” they reply, laughing. They begin to lower me into the cauldron, laughing again, saying, “The cauldron’s sipping you! Time to rebirth from the earth.” I swim deep in the cauldron. It is full of green dragons. There are earth dragons and water dragons and we swim around together. When I’m fully soaked, the crones pull me out. They give me the gift of tongues, the gift of wands, the gift of words, the poetry of the birds: “You are our daughter, lover, sister, mother—birth well, my dear.

The Glass Castle is also known as the Grail Castle, the pilgrimage place of the Grail knights, troubadours, Merlins, and bards, like Taliesin, who enter within the Grail Gates of her spinning, spiral tower to receive their initiation and rebirth. This is the hero’s journey, to make the pilgrimage into the Womb. King Solomon; Yeshua, descendent of King David; and King Arthur also walked this labyrinth Womb path and experienced the shamanic internment, and symbolic rebirth or resurrection through the Divine Feminine—at-one-ment with the Great Mother. The heroine’s journey is to not only enter the Grail Castle, but to become the Grail Castle; to become both the eternal pilgrim and also the sacred site that the knights and bards make pilgrimage to, to receive their baptism; to become a Magdalene, a magical doorway or womb portal for others.

Many people experience only the “theory of love” in this world, in which they “know” or “think” they are loved—but do not receive this love in a deeply embodied way. Often we look back on our “perfect” childhoods and cannot fathom where our deep emotional injuries have come from. Our parents love us, they say they love us and we know they love us; they fed and clothed us, worried about us, and took care of us to the best of their abilities. But often, at best, we have only been receiving the theory of love, and at worst we have been on the receiving end of emotional abuse or control, either subtle or overt. Primordial Love means original love, our first love—which extends from the Source of Creation deep into every cell of our being and every quality of our soul. In physical form it is given from a deeply loving heart presence; it is intimate, playful, sensual, sensitive, responsive, feeling, emotionally intelligent, kind, intuitive. When we have not received enough true primordial Love, we resist it and feel overwhelmed and out of control when we receive love—as if it is destroying the safe barrier we have erected around ourselves. Like a bud, we need to trust and open to deeply embodied love; to allow the “sunshine” in to nourish us and bring us back to life again. When we are touched by primordial Love we feel truly seen, felt, and received at a soul level. Our physical bioenergetic and spiritual pathways open to intimate connection with others, with earth, with animals, with All of existence. Primordial Love wires our physical, neural, and soulful pathways to become a living chalice for Love. We become wired to receive love from all sources, physical and nonphysical, and to trust in loving touch. From this embodied place we can truly give love to others and pass the gift of love on, rather than passing forward paradigms of lack, sacrifice, and suffering.

Womb cosmologies also contained the secret teachings of awakening the “Magdalene Womb,” or the “mystical rose,” by experiencing a mystical union with the Earth Womb. Through the spiral path of merging and harmonizing with the primordial elements, a person could once more enter the collective dreaming of Gaia. This mystical descension process into the Earth Womb, or the underworld, was the key to unifying with the arche, primordial feminine first cause, the deep silence of the dark mother. Uniting with the interconnected cosmic weaving allowed one to gain access to the vast knowledge store held within the Akashic field—the collective cosmic memory....connection with this energy was achieved through a feminine path of descent rather than ascent.

Trickster is amoral, and neither malevolent or benevolent. He teaches us through reaching into our own sexual wounds and seducing us to reveal them...In a wild sensuous epiphany, he confronts the forbidden psyche of the woman with his raw masculine essence that is alluring and sexually potent, and ignites her erotic imagination...Trickster, through his mischievous games, highlights our shadow— sometimes in a subtle way, sometimes in a shocking way. He brings us the gift of nous, instinctive knowing that comes from deep within. The message Trickster delivers is, “Never allow your compassion to get in the way of your discernment” or as Yeshua put this, “Be as wise as serpents and as gentle as doves.” Often what we mistake for love and compassion is actually a pattern of powerlessness, inherited from our ancestry, which we keep repeating.

This reunion of solar and lunar consciousness into one state of being is the Great Work of all alchemical traditions. As we start to enter the sacred marriage of consciousness, we merge our lunar and solar selves into one—gaining access to the wisdom and gifts of both. In the sunlit paths of waking life we still have access to the great dark ocean of dream consciousness that birthed us; in the lunar dreamtime paths of the night, we can bring the clarity and lucidity of our waking consciousness to interpret our experiences, and bring back messages, visions, and insights into the solar world.

This dimension is nowhere else but here, it is not supernatural or enlightened nor a heaven far away. It is our human birthright, born of the very essence of existence, which loves because it is love. It is a deep feeling, a space you melt into, an infinite realm of magical possibilities. Feelings become tangible, shadows, wisps, whispers, caresses, opening out into undulating vistas of sensual perception. Feelings embrace us, submerge us, commune with us, envelop us, dissolve us—take us beyond time itself. There are no imposed rules, no enforced boundaries, no narrow definitions to measure yourself against. Everything just is, and is embraced gently in loving arms. Flowing, fluid, graceful, enchanting, the Heart opens into fairyland. A place of ecstatic innocence and wonder, where love is breathed in and exhaled out in every moment, shared, circulated, played with, creating a trust that makes all things safe to feel and be...It is a place of nonachievement, of giving in, letting go, surrendering, of crying tender tears for all those places that still feel hurt, unworthy, unloved. It is a place to be real, to be free, to relax fully into the heart...Feminine consciousness is fluid, oceanic, opening us into the ecstatic experience of life as a mystical dreamtime of love and possibilities. Once we have touched this mystery it will whisper, embrace, and entwine with our most contracted places, gently opening them out into the mysterious magic of existence . . . it will reunite our masculine selves with the unknown.

This journey into the Cosmic Womb can be felt as an inner death; falling into the abyss, the Void, with no known way to come back out. Surrendering into this perceived individual death and trusting the process opens the heart and Womb back to the great web of life. The initiation comes from emerging at the otherside, forever changed, neither here nor there but fully present, able to enjoy and give the wisdom, gifts, and fruits of all worlds, while fully grounded and born back into this world, middleworld, as an innocent, sensual, wise being. In Celtic lore this journey into the Cosmic Womb is encoded in the story of Arianrhod and her spinning tower. “Arianrhod’s tower is also called Caer Sidi, the Glass Castle or Spiral Tower and is traditionally the place wherein lore keepers serve their apprenticeship. The terms are strict and it is thought of as an imprisonment. Taliesin says he spent three periods in the prison of Arianrhod, learning his trade as seer and poet—the art of seeing clearly (clairvoyance) and the art of telling well so his audience could learn too (poetry); two basic skills for the shaman.

Creation is a love story; we are created to fall in love, to be love in love with love. Sacred relationships are the foundation of the Grail path—the act of coming together in a deeply loving union mirrors the most primordial cosmic movements of creation. Making love mirrors the making of the world itself. Our longing is full of creative birthing power. In Kabbalah (from Hebrew word roots meaning “womb,” “vulva,” and “to receive”—the feminine chalice or Womb) the creation myth records that Ein Sof (the Divine field of eternal formlessness) desired to experience itself and that a yearning arose to meet with itself face to face, in sacred duality. And from this longing the tree of life and the masculine and feminine twins were created; their destiny was always to merge in love and meet with their Creator, so Love could “face itself ” in a new and evolutionary way.

This twin or etheric double, who acts as a protective guardian and interface between a human being and the infinity of spirit world, is found throughout the world—encoding the knowledge that just as we have a placenta-being who mediates for us in the womb, and brings us nourishment from the mother, so do we have an energy double who performs the same function throughout our life. We have often lost touch with this twin, who holds our magical, supernatural, spiritual powers. To the magician or sorcerer, the stronger your energetic placenta, or spiritual double, the stronger your magical powers. The purpose of the magical path was to unify mind, body, and psychology with this energetic twin, the interface between you and the universal life force. Thus, in Egypt and many other cultures, a great emphasis was placed on building and strengthening the ka body, for purposes ranging from spiritual rebirth to black magic and the accumulation of wordly power. The life force is neutral and can be accumulated for selfish or spiritual purposes.

Matter is the most precious form of light. It is embodied love, and is part of an incredible cosmic experiment to bring light into the deepest vibration of ecstatic expression, flowing as liquid gold.

The true feminine vibration or essence will always feel healing, loving, kind, non-hierarchical, wild. It will awaken your own power, rather than having power over you; it will inspire you with trust, not fear of negative consequences. Love will always be enveloped in a kind, nurturing Divine softness, even if it is delivering radical truth or fierce compassion or is wild with primordial passion. As a race we have hardened up; love invites us into softness again.