Welcome Beloved
Our Intentions
As Earth is now entering a higher patterning and spiral of human evolution, one that honors the wisdom of male and females equally, it is time to bring forward the ancient-future ways of the Sacred Feminine to co-create in Unity Consciousness.
The Sanctuary of the Open Heart offers portals to experience the ways of the Divine Feminine through:
Stepping into the 13 Moon Mystery School
Our Vision
We are a Sanctuary that nurtures the illumination of consciousness through honoring the re-balancing of the Divine Feminine and the Divine Masculine, celebrating the beauty and sanctity of the natural world and the embodiment of our Essential Selves, through the Wisdom teachings of the Divine Feminine.
We are planetary midwives celebrating Unity Consciousness. Joyously following our sovereign paths, we join in unified service to Love and heart-centered awareness.
We delight in focusing on the mythic, archetypal, and soul-directed dimensions of being. We hold sacred Temple spaces where creativity, connectedness and cooperation vibrantly flourish. We envision stewarding physical Temples in devotion to Love. With all sentient life, we rise in Love, in peace, for nature and each other.
About Our Founder, Ariel Spilsbury
As I was growing up, I always had different interests, gifts, sensitivities and priorities than most of my friends. Though I looked like the other kids, I always felt like the movie character Powder. I longed for something insubstantial, un-namable. I felt like something essential was missing in my life, but I couldn’t put my finger on what that could be. I had very unusual sensitivities with sound and color. I could see energy and feel what other people were feeling. These “gifts” were considered to be a cause for concern in my parents who instead of seeing these special abilities as “gifts,” thought they indicated a trip to the psychologist. It wasn’t long before my gifts went underground.
I continued to have a rich inner life, but became more and more reclusive as no one else seems to find what I did, real or valuable. This process went on into my teens until the peer pressure against my apparent differences became so great, that I finally capitulated and began to sadly repress who I truly was, to try to become like everyone else in what felt like an effort to simply survive. By my late teens I became very depressed because I had lost the thread of who I authentically was, that would have steered me in directions that would have served my evolution. I became very solitary and sad.
Finally in a gift of grace, (or perhaps as scheduled at a soul level), I met an older woman in a University class who turned out to be a spiritual mentor and guide that reawakened me to my true nature as a priestess of the Goddess. She came as a total blessing in my life when I was in the midst of deep despair and forgetting. She died shortly thereafter, but the door to remembrance had been opened.
It was at this time that I became deeply involved in Native American practices where I was trained in the Lakota tradition of being a Sweat Lodge/Moon Lodge Keeper. With the insensitive and harsh ways the Earth and all her plants and animals were being treated, (not to speak of the Native Americans themselves) I became literally embarrassed to be Caucasian. I also became an avid activist and protester for equality for all beings. And presently we are still working out how to interest more “women of color” in our 13 Moon Mystery School training. We are actively pursuing creating a better balance of beings of all ethnicity’s. And we heartfully own that it is undeniable that Caucasian people have privileges by default that they take as an assumed given. We are doing our best to rectify the inequity and not to bypass or ignore the fact that people of color have and presently do experience unkind and inequitable treatment. For that I am truly and deeply sorry. The 13 Moon Mystery School is Pan-cultural, that is, it has been intentionally designed for inclusiveness, to honor all ways and Divine Feminine archetypes from many lineages and Goddess traditions.
When I was a young girl, no one was talking about priestesses or the Goddess. It was considered blasphemous. I longed for a priestess school where I could go to learn and remember what was important to my heart, my skills in sacred work for the Goddess. Needless to say, no such school existed. As it was, it took years of patient meditation, prayer, research and voluminous reading, teaching and sharing to come to be in the position in which I now sit, as a priestess of the Goddess. I have scribed a manuscript for the Goddess called The Alchemy of Ecstasy: Initiates Guide to the Goddesses’ Mysteries which is a guidebook for direct, mystical initiation into the Female Mysteries. It embodies an on-going curriculum for an Avalon priest/ess school.
I am seventy years old this year. In Mayan terms, that means I have made it a full round (plus ten years) around the sacred calendar, the Tzolkin, and ma was finally thus “prepared” to have had enough life experience to actually “teach” and share my journey. The Sanctuary of the Open Heart has been born out of this journey.
You are welcome, beloved, into this sacred space of The Sanctuary of the Open Heart. Here you can discover your unique expression of the Divine Feminine, your essence, meet like-hearted sisters and brothers in a community of love and service, and step ever more deeply into your soul path curriculum in the 13 Moon Mystery School.
The longing I had as a young girl is realized here for all beings! You are not alone. Together we remember and together, we open our hearts to Love and through that raise the vibration for the collective ONE!
Welcome!