People endure so much from day to day. Financial difficulties. Marital strife. Relationships with children. Stress on the job. Author and speaker Doreen Virtue, Ph.D., who has been a longtime proponent of calling upon angels to assist us in our life challenges, says each of us has an additional resource that we rarely utilize in our lives: the goddesses.
Author of 22 books in the mind-body-spirit realm, most recently Goddesses & Angels: Awakening Your Inner High-Priestess and Source-eress (Hay House), Doreen might be thought of as an "airy fairy" princess who exudes positivity and ignores the rest. Far from it. She’s a grounded healer who knows from personal experiences that beings in the spiritual realm do exist and do help us when we ask for their assistance. A psychologist by trade, she founded the WomanKind Psychiatric Hospital in Nashville, Tenn., and managed the Woodside Women’s Hospital in the San Francisco Bay area. Her real-life call for help, following a carjacking, led her to realize and cultivate relationships with angels and ascended masters, and now she is sharing more about her work with goddesses.
She spoke by phone with Edge Life about this new work, as well as her upcoming workshop on Saturday, April 1, at Minneapolis Convention Center. To register, call 1 (800) 654-5126, or register online at www.angeltherapy.com.
Who are the goddesses?
Doreen Virtue: I work with goddesses from all different traditions and religions. Goddesses are for both men and women. It’s getting in touch with the feminine aspect of the divine power that we all have. In plain words, the goddesses help us all to be a lot more intuitive, accurately psychic, and they help us to get our timing really good so that we show up at the right time at the right place and things just start to synchronistically come our way.
Are they actual beings?
DV: Yes. Most of them that I am in contact with lived on the earth as people, such as St. Brigid, who was an actual person, a very powerful activist and healer in Ireland who now she helps those of us who need the help of a stage mom, those of us who are being pushed to go out and raise the bar a little bit or talk in the public eye. She’s wonderful at giving you courage and opening doors for you and then pushing you through those doors if you’re balking.
Kali is a Hindu goddess with whom I work very closely. She is very often misunderstood because of her strength. I find a lot of these goddesses bring up feelings we have about strong women. People who have any kind of issues with mom or teachers sometimes are reluctant to work with the goddesses, but they can be our very best friends.
Kali, for instance, is wonderful for desperate situations and clearing obstacles and blocks in our path. I’ve called on her a lot while traveling. When I’d get to a place and they’d say, "Sorry, we don’t have a room for you," or "We don’t have a seat on this airplane," or when we were buying our house it looked like we might lose it in escrow, every single time I’ve called upon Kali, she has come to the rescue.
Do you personally connect with the goddesses in the same way you do with angels?
DV: Yes. The difference is that the goddesses come across as very down-to-earth, very practical. The angels’ way of healing tends to be more about rising above the situation – love and forgiveness – which, of course, is very important. What I do is I call upon both. I always think, "The more friends the better!"
Is there a connection between the goddesses and the angels themselves?
DV: They don’t work together, per se. It’s like having the colors of a rainbow covering a broad spectrum. They’re parallel or next to each other.
You’ve shared a few ways that you’ve called upon goddesses in your daily life. What cumulative effect have they had on your life?
DV: I feel very safe. I feel safe about the future of the world for all of us. I am constantly reminded that we have this help available, if we’ll only ask. They can’t impose help on us, so it really becomes a matter of self-responsibility to ask for help from this team that’s with us all.
Much of my work is helping people to overcome the fear of being powerful. There’s a real reluctance to do this, particularly because my audience tends to be mostly women. I’ve found that a lot of the women are afraid of abusing their power, or that people will leave them if they’re powerful, or they confuse power with aggressiveness. The goddesses can help us to know that we can be both highly feminine and attractive, both physically and emotionally, and also be powerful.
Why is it important that the goddess be included in our everyday life at this time?
DV: I think you know this, but for anyone who is not aware of it, the patriarchal monopoly, any kind of monopoly, doesn’t work. Matriarchal monopolies don’t work either.
If there is too much male energy, then we lose touch with nature and intuition. If there is too much female energy, then we often lose touch with taking action. The feminine helps us all to be more balanced. It’s like having an artist, and a manager of an artist, within you. The feminine is the artist and the masculine is the manager of the artist, who makes sure you get out and get jobs.
Makes sure you get things done.
DV: You need both. I find that many folks in the New Age get unbalanced, and that’s when they start to have money troubles and relationship troubles. And of course, government is too patriarchal. Not just our government, but every government I travel to. That’s why we have war as a solution to negotiating as a solution.
I’m not talking about physical gender. I’m talking about a style, a patriarchal style of being. That style can be in women, too.
You mention that mostly women come to your talks. What is the goddess relationship to men?
DV: Men who get in touch with the goddess are the ones who open their heart and get answers based on being honest with themselves. A concrete example is that a lot of men are in jobs they can’t stand. When they work with the goddess, they start to get really honest with themselves. They start to admit, "Gosh, I just can’t handle this job, it’s going to kill me." The goddess can help the man work himself out of an inappropriate job situation and find the job that really makes his heart sing.
So it’s tied into being an authentic person.
DV: Correct. Being honest with yourself authentically, having integrity.
What can goddesses share in the lives of children?
DV: Oh, they’re brilliant at helping children – especially the Indigo and Crystal children. The goddesses are very concerned that we watch over these kids and make sure that all the gifts these children have brought us stay awakened.
Goddesses can help us individually with fertility issues. Historically, that’s where we worked with goddesses going back to ancient times. Women who wanted to become pregnant would call upon goddesses to help them through the pregnancy, lactation and birth. That’s the basic goddess work right there.
What would a daily practice of working with the goddess look like?
DV: It would be moment-to-moment, situation-to-situation, just like working with the angels or any other deities, with God. It’s not enough to give them a general "Help me with whatever comes up" permission. You’ve got to talk to them moment-by-moment. The goddesses hear our thoughts, just like angels do, or any sensitive person for that matter.
Think the thought, "Please help me with this." You don’t even have to know specifically what goddess or angel you’re talking to. But I do find that once you get to know who’s who, things move a little more quickly and a little more powerfully. Then you start to enjoy a personal relationship with the particular goddesses and angels you’re working with. To me, the benefit of the personal relationship is that you feel really safe. I know that I can always call upon Kali when I’m traveling. When I’m going to the airport, I feel really confident that I’m going to have a good trip.
Would you say that the number of people who connect with goddesses is probably a pretty low percentage right now?
DV: It’s lower than people who connect with Jesus or Buddha or angels, yes. It is growing, and I’m finding that folks are more open now to working with goddess beings than they have been in the past.
What would you say to someone who might say, "Well, you’re just talking about worshipping goddesses and I don’t think that really fits in with my religion."
DV: Well, I agree that the goddesses and the angels don’t want to be worshipped. They want to be just like any helpful person, they would like to be useful. As guides.
No, they’re not Gods or Goddesses, in the terms of the capital "G." They’re lowercase "g" definitely. A nice word for them is divinity. It’s just a matter of utilizing the gifts that our Creator gave us. It’s also understanding that in our history as humankind, we’ve always recognized a male and a female Creator. It’s only been in recent times that we’ve made God into a single father, without mom. I think we’re just going back to our roots.
For whom is your upcoming seminar intended?
DV: This is for open-minded healers, people who are interested in healing, people who are interested in taking their spiritual practice to another level by having a "who’s who" guide to new friends. I’ll be talking about goddesses who can help us with abundance and giving concrete examples of that. I’ll be talking about goddesses who can help us with healing.
So I invite healers and those who need a healing to come and enjoy some experiential and very safe processes. Nothing weird or "woo-woo." It’s very down-to-earth.
Having worked in hospitals and health-care centers, how would you characterize our nation’s attitude toward the use of alternative modes of healing in our society right now?
DV: I see it very parallel to what’s going on with religions. We’re becoming more individualized and gourmet. Instead of saying, "Well, I’m going to just take exactly what this church says, and that’s my practice," you take a little bit from Catholicism, a little bit from Buddhism, and little bit from Hinduism. With health care, you’d say, "Well, I like Reiki, and I like herbs, and crystals, and angels."
We’re becoming very eclectic. I think the big concern that we all need to watch for is that we have the right to use herbs and that we don’t allow any sort of legal maneuvers in Washington to take away our rights to have herbs available freely for all of us.
What do you sense is shifting right now in terms of the energy surrounding humankind?
DV: This is a time of that we’ve been preparing for, a time of instant manifestation of thoughts.
The most recent message from the angels is that this is a time in which our thoughts are greatly reflected in the exterior world. Everybody’s going to seem to have different experiences. For some people, this will be the best year. For some people, this will be the worst year. The angels call this time, this energy, The House of Mirrors. Everywhere you go, you see yourself.
And they’ve been talking a lot about forgiveness. You can only forgive yourself. You can’t forgive anyone else. Ultimately, it’s yourself that you’re mad at.
So collectively, perhaps we are getting more of a realization of the connection we have with each other?
DV: Completely. More mainstream people are coming to my workshops and contacting me – doctors and lawyers, realtors and accountants. Everybody’s having psychic experiences now. I’m writing a weekly column now for one of the most mainstream magazines in the country, Women’s World, which you can buy at the checkout counter of your grocery store. There are so many indicators that this is the time of the re-awakening.
On the flip side, a lot of people are feeling great despair, depression and anxiety. What advice do you have for them?
DV: It’s the House of Mirrors effect, because there are also people telling me that they’re blissed out of their minds and everything’s going their way. While I have compassion for people suffering in pain, feeling like that’s the dark night of the soul, I find that many of those who are suffering are having a victim mentality, the attitude of "why me, why does this always happen to me?" If you put those questions out, and focus on them inside your head, then you will attract more circumstances where you’re going to say, "Why me?"
I have to watch that myself. Every one of us can be vulnerable to flipping into the self-pity trap. That’s the value of working with the divine, however anyone wants to do it, working with God or goddess or Jesus or angels. Nobody should be trying to live alone. Get some help. You’ve got this team that is free of charge – available to every single one of us. It’s insane to do this alone.
For more information, visit www.angeltherapy.com
