What the lionness taught me about power

Sovereignty, embodiment and the power within We are living through a time where it is very easy to feel powerless.

Every day we are confronted with forces far larger than ourselves —political upheaval, technology accelerating at extraordinary speed, environmental destruction, war, economic pressure, algorithms competing for our attention and maybe even our ‘souls’.

There is SO much in the outer world that we cannot personally control.But beyond the social milieu … there is another kind of power that we rarely talk about. The capacity to become sovereign within ourselves.

To work with our own attention, energy and emotional states rather than being endlessly pulled by everything happening outside us.

And perhaps even more importantly, to restore something modern life has steadily weakened:our felt relationship with the living world.

I’ve said it a million times .. and will say it a million more because it is something we might intellectualise but RARELY actually feel . We are not separate from nature. We ARE nature. We ARE the Earth.A part of it. A part of it’s consciousness. Our bodies are living, sensing organisms, that have that ability same as creatures ..even if albeit unconsciously, to respond, sense other bodies, landscapes, sounds, rhythms, animals, weather, light and the world around us.

Ancient and traditional cultures understood this relationship very differently from us. Their age-old path of animal totem traditions was trying to express.

The appreciation that animals — are a moving, sentient aspect of nature — not merely resources or interesting symbols.. but are actual fellows, teachers, kin, ancestral presences on our journey through time and stars — a bridge between humans and nature .. who contain unique qualities and forces that we can draw on, absorb and find within.

The greatness of Ancient Egypt emerged from a landscape already rich with powerful animal identities and emblems.

Falcons, cattle, canids and other animals appear in early standards and identities, developed into the extraordinary animal-human language of Egyptian religion.

Perhaps there is something here worth remembering … that animals awaken the animal within us.Not the dull beast .. but the special qualities, abilities, powers each animal represents. This is certainly what the immensely popular yoga traditions are based on ..not showing off the latest Lululemon yoga gear and tight bods ...But that every pose, every concept was developed from the long, long observance of the Indian yogis of nature and animal themes. 

Encountering this reality of the intelligence and somatic symbolism that animals and nature carry is something that our own body senses and intelligence recognises and can absorb, state-shift into.

The lioness, for instance .. has always been an archetypal image of sovereignty, presence, power ... and centred nobility.

I experienced that power first-hand one morning in Africa.

I had been tracking elephants for a week, had already encountered four of the famous“Big Five” safaris covet— elephant, leopard, rhinoceros and buffalo, some very close.

My tracker kept telling me I needed to complete it and see the lions. But I wasn’t interested. I was there for the elephants. I had been studying and living with rescued elephants in Southern Africa .. and wanted to follow them in the wild.

And yet every morning, at dawn, I could hear lions roaring from my tent.

Their deep calls travelled through the landscape before sunrise.I was stirred by their powerful calls, nervously wandered around my tent, but didn’t feel any particular need to find them.

Then, on my final morning out there, I heard them again.

We were up early and I gave into my colleague and decided to try to find them. I had a strong sense of where they were. After some resistance, my tracker friend finally agreed to follow my ‘silly woman’s intuition’.

I was drawn to a hill, and after driving around in circles, where he had said that the lions would never be up on a small hill, he finally gave in and we climbed that hill.

There the first morning sun was falling directly across the African savannah. The whole world had turned gold. It was breathtaking.

Then …something changed and that view fell strangely still. Super still.

It was one of the eeriest sensations I have ever experienced.T he landscape seemed to STOP. Suddenly, a herd of frightened zebras charged in front of us. I still remember that look of wide-eyed terror in their eyes. They ran silently. Tip toeing.

The heavy stillness fell again after they passed. And into that stillness walked in the lions.

A small pride that strode through the golden landscape l ike they owned it. Led by a powerful lioness, with her sister following very closely behind. two large males pranced behind them as all the world bowed down. Even the morning birds had gone silent.

.The lead lioness was powerful. They were covered in blood from a recent kill and completely uninterested in us. She did not look over at us even once even though we were so close. (see photo). I felt in that moment her contempt.

There was no display.No attempt to dominate. They simply moved through the landscape with an unmistakable awareness of their own power.

They were so close that I looked into the eyes of the Lead Lionness and could see the morning light reflected in her eyes. They shone gold. Almost as if she was looking into the very heart of the Sun. Absorbing and mirroring it’s power.

I had spent years in Egypt studying its mythology, surrounded by images of lioness goddesses. I took part in an archaeologists’ summit where they named the golden throne of Egypt as the head of lionesses, not lions. They talked about their recent excavation of over 200 powerful statues of lioness Sekhmet. It was an awe-inspiring summit.

But sitting there out in the grasslands in Africa, I suddenly understood something I had never understood from a temple wall.

I understood why the lioness is known to represent majesty, sovereignty and power. Not power as aggression.Not even confidence. Power as a state of being.

Everyone with me also felt the extraordinary shift in the atmosphere. We looked at each other wordless.It was a life-changing moment. We felt that power.

I felt it in my bones, my gut, my upper abdomen. A kind of raw fire stirring.

The ancient Egyptians had a word for power or potency: Sekhem. And this is where the ancient image becomes interesting to me somatically.

We tend to think of drive, confidence and will as mental qualities.

We tell ourselves: Be stronger. Get motivated. Have more confidence. Push yourself.

But so much of our Western self-help speak is just words ... ideas. Often rehashed, worn and repeated words in our commercialised sense of spirituality.

When the spirit of power has a body. We feel it when the breath changes. When muscles gather. Posture changes.Attention focuses. The abdomen and diaphragm engage as the body prepares for effort and action.

Power can be felt. Perhaps this is one of the things the living world can still teach us. Animals embody states we have increasingly learned to intellectualise.

The lioness doesn’t need to think herself into being a lioness.She inhabits herself completely.

In later years I became fascinated with lions and their voices.I recorded them, studied their extraordinary low callsand even had experiences of singing with lions in a nature park.

I carried some of those sounds with me into Egypt —sounding them inside ancient places,in the Great Pyramid, on Mount Sinai and elsewhere.

Creating a neuro-somatic voice technology where .. like the animals, thesound of winds and waves, like ancient and traditional people,we can wake up that nature consciousness within.

Sound gives us another way to move out of thinking and back into the physical experience of ourselves.

Breath. Voice. Vibration. Muscle. Attention. Fire.

This is the touch of Sekhem. Our drive. Our will. Our force to live.Something we can learn to inhabit.

And perhaps this is one form of power that can never be handed to us —or entirely taken away from us.

Our ability to inhabit the theme of nature within ourselves, to feel and reclaim our relationship with life, there in the bones ..and feel again that sense of sovereignty beyond the commercialthat leads us back to the song of the world.

Meaghan Maria is a certified counsellor, arts therapist, mythologist,musician and sound composer .. who tries to show people howto transcend stress and emotional overwhelm not just to ease our distressbut also reclaim the deep current of meaning and belonging underneath.She teaches the path of Sekhem as one of her lessons in the Somatic Artsof the Ancient Feminine 9-week program for women. Check out her work here … www.thesonglinepath.comand her somatic arts program here … www.thesonglinepath.com