How To Love & Live The Feminine with Madelyn Moon
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In this episode, Chandresh sits down with Madelyn Moon, author of Artist of Love. In his conversation with Madelyn, Chandresh goes over various questions, including:
How do you navigate belief systems when they don’t align with the family?
What’s the one element of shiva energy and goddess kali that feels most empowering?
How to heal the wounds with the biological mother while connecting with goddess kali energy?
What are women avoiding today?
What are women tolerating today?
Madelyn is a yogic intimacy and polarity teacher who teaches couples how to make art from their relationship drama. To learn more about Madelyn, visit her website at maddymoon.com or check her out on Instagram @madelynmoon.
Episode Transcript
Your body was designed to do all of those things you may now consider weird, crawling, yelling, laughing, dancing. Any time you feel insecure about using your instrument in a different way, just remember that insecurity belongs to society, not you. You are a wildly open goddess of creativity and every time you do the thing that society tells you isn't proper, you are evolving as a woman, you're taking a stand for ancestors and future generations alike. These words come from the book Artist of Love: The Modern Woman's Guidebook To Unleashing Her Creativity, Deepening Her Relationships, And Becoming The Leading Actor in Her Own Life. It's written by my dear friend, Madelyn Moon.
As I've been sharing, the divine feminine has been angry, but also hopeful. Currently, we are going through the Navaratri time, the divine feminine celebration, but there's also revolution happening in the divine feminine. For this week's episode, I thought, "Let me take a backseat and bring on a woman who could talk about the feminine energy, the love, the Goddess Kali energy, and anything that has helped her to liberate from the conditioning. As you will listen to this conversation with Madelyn, my hope is it's going to shake, invoke and dismantle many of your own old belief systems, many of your own conditioning patterns that have been limiting the goddess, the muse, the healer, the seeker that you are. In this conversation, I've explored various topics, questions with her, questions about Goddess Kali, questions about how to heal the father and the mother wound, and truly embrace your own truth. Questions about how to become your greatest lover, questions about the threads between creativity and love, what are women avoiding today and what are they tolerating, and how does tantra fit into all of this. I hope you enjoy this conversation. I hope it unleashes the divine feminine in you. I am Chandresh Bhardwaj and this is Leela Gurukul.
Chandresh: Hi, Madelyn. So happy to have you here. How are you feeling?
Madelyn: Hi. I'm so happy to be here. I feel so honored. I was just thinking as we were just chatting before we hit record, how many guests has he had on this podcast before? So I was having that moment realizing right then, I don't know if I've listened to a guest on this show before, so I feel so grateful to be here.
Chandresh: Yeah, you're marking the debut of the guest series on Leela podcast, and I've always been very vocal and open about not having guest. I'm like, I like to do solo podcast. I can share my bit and then step back. I'm very lazy or maybe unplanned to coordinate schedule, have the guest go through conversation, but yeah, I think I'm always going to break the rule for certain people. You are, of course, that person and those who are watching the video, this is your book, Artist of Love.
Chandresh: This is what motivated me to have you on the podcast and I want to mention one thing, Madelyn. You have self-published it and I think anyone who's even thinking of writing a book, they're going to find self-publishing the most bold and brave way of publishing. So of course, we'll talk about a lot of topic subject, the soul of the book, but I want to, as a writer, I'm curious why self-publishing and how do you feel about it?
Madelyn: Yeah, thanks for asking this question. I have a lot to say on it. It's actually my third book to self-publish. The other two were very small and I wrote them at a time in my life when I was thinking like, I'm just going to have these books be out into the world as purely marketing materials. It felt like this genius idea of, I'll say I have this book and it wasn't coming from the deepest place within me. It was coming from a 22, 23 year old me that just wanted to push something out into the world, and so that was my experience and ever since I was a child, my number one biggest, biggest dream has been to be published by a big publishing house, see my book in Barnes & Noble under the recommended or the new release section. That's always been such a big deal to me.
Madelyn: And so since I had those experiences pushing out books quite quickly/sloppily when I was younger, I was thinking the next book that I publish, this has to be through a traditional publishing house. It's going to have to be because my connotation with self-publishing was only what I had already done, which wasn't that great, but that wasn't the self-publishing world's responsibility, that was mine. So I got an agent for a different book that I was going to put out into the world and I just started realizing through that book that wanted to come through, which was different than Artist of Love. It had a different name, different premise. I was waiting. I was waiting a lot. I got this agent and I was waiting for her to look things over and then it was a month later and I was waiting, and then we finally created a list of houses to send it to and I was waiting.
Madelyn: And I think seven months went by and I was still waiting to hear back if I was going to get a deal on this. By the time that seven months went by, I lost the fire around this book. It was gone. It came in so strong and because of waiting to get the agent and then waiting for the houses to pick it up and just waiting, it was really dimming my fire around the creative spark that was there, and so I put that book to the side and I said, well, it seems like it's not going to happen for me for a while, wrote some more things, and then this came through very strongly and it was in my awareness that I had these two paths and I had some friends that were like, girl, I will get you a massive advance. You will get a publishing deal. It'll be so worth it. Just trust me, write the proposal.
Madelyn: And then I had other people saying, go the self-publishing route. Just do it right this time and put all your love and attention to it, and I was weighing these two sides and I was really feeling into let's do this publishing house thing. Let's go the traditional route, and I wrote the whole proposal. I wrote this massive proposal and I couldn't send it off because I knew in my body the moment it was sent off to houses, my waiting journey would need to begin, and it was so clear in my body that to choose waiting over creating was a big no-no in the same way it feels like a no-no in love and relationship. There was just a big part of my body that I was like, No more gatekeepers. No gatekeepers. I've been living by gatekeepers telling me when I can go through the certain door and the gate to get to heaven in some way.
Madelyn: And I was just like, I'm just going to be very, very meticulous in how this book is created and I'm going to create it from start to finish in the most Madelyn-esque way I could possibly make it. I'm going to throw all my money into it. I had no idea how much, but I knew that I was going to really create this as my baby with no other gatekeepers, and it was definitely an initiation in so many ways and ultimately, so worth it for me. Every side has its pros and cons, but the fact that I got to create everything from choosing cream or white papers, to the font, to the style of the interior, to the cover, to the dress I'm wearing, to every single sentence and word, that kind of sovereignty feels really empowering. Chandresh: And this is how you lead with example. I had planned a few questions and I was thinking of my audience, the people who follow me on pages. So I wrote down a lot of questions, keeping them in mind, what would they want to ask from you, but this question was from me. I was really curious why self-publishing because I know it's not an easy decision and exactly what you said, this is probably what I was thinking, that this is why probably you thought of it. Yeah, publishing is changing and I'm so glad you chose to listen to the Shakti within. You chose to honor that expression of the divine feminine. Chandresh: And also, this is the second day, Madelyn, of the Navaratri, the second day of celebration. So I'm happy we are recording in the Navaratri and the day Navaratri concludes, that's when the episode will be releasing. So it feels very sacred and auspicious to me and the book is so solid. I mean, the content of the book is so in depth, so sacred and beautiful, and many people relate self-publishing books with a lower quality of content and I think that's an old school thinking, but the new school of writing is very much empowering into the self-publishing, but I'm going to reach out to you when I plan my self-publishing book.
Madelyn: Yeah. I'll also just add that's because I hired a really amazing editor who didn't do any actual writing. I mean, when I think of editor, I think of someone who's going to go in and rewrite things. No, no, no. I mean, I called him the personal trainer of editors because he would go in and highlight my sentences and be like, your reader's not going to understand this. Rewrite it in a way. He made me do all the work and he also guided me through creating this reader's arc and journey, and I think that's the difference between a lot of traditional and self is that in traditional, you've got a team of people saying we need to create an outline and arc.
Madelyn: The reader starts somewhere and then end somewhere, and for a lot of self-publishing, it is, a lot of times, people writing whatever is on their mind and it's not in a clear and crisp here's the beginning, here's the middle, here's the end, and I really wanted that. I was very aware that I wanted to take the essence of professionalism of the traditional world and do it in my self publishing. So I found an editor who would make me do that and he did, and I just wanted to strangle him sometimes because it was so challenging that he made me write everything myself, but it was so amazing that I got that experience of like, you can take that professionalism and do it in a way where you have total control.
Chandresh: Yeah. And I'm glad we started our conversation with this topic because everyone struggles to find their purpose, their dharma, and I want to come to the dharma, to the dharma transition in later part of the podcast, but I feel whenever people look in journey of someone like you or me or anyone who's doing this work professionally full time, it looks very even glamorous at times. It looks, oh, they are their own bosses or this is how the healing work is, but there's so much of dismantling that happens behind the scene, dismantling of the belief systems related to money, abundance, career, healing, relationships and so on.
Chandresh: What we see in form of a book program or even a talk or a meditation gathering out there, there's so much of inner strength that you are trying to build. What looks so calm and composed on the outside, there's a lot of fire and volcanoes happening inside and this is normal, this is natural. So I'm so happy you're sharing what went into creating this, and we have known each other for few years now, Madelyn. Whenever I have glimpsed into your journey, I always feel you have lived a few beautiful lives already. You're not 60, 70 or 80 year old. You have lived several lives so far. How did you get into this feminine, masculine dynamic of the world? Was there one incident or a bunch of them because this is very specific subject now you talk about, so I'm curious to know how did that start?
Madelyn: It's interesting because when I was 20, I was like, I'm going to be a coach, and it wasn't even a thing yet really. I mean, Instagram was just starting to pick up speed. People being coaches on Instagram was not really a thing, but I remember it was the time when I was body building, which is a completely different life, but I was body building and I was doing health and fitness coaching and I thought I was going to go down that path and be this world renowned body building trainer for fitness plans and things, and that evolved as my journey evolved and I healed my own body stuff until I want to be a life coach, I want to be a spiritual coach.
Madelyn: And it was literally the moment you're asking for, the moment that this came into my awareness was at a hotel bar when I was 24 and I had a friend who was meeting me there and she had just gone to a workshop on the feminine and the masculine, and she brought her journal and she was like, look at the masculine quad, look at the feminine. We were just sitting there and I was like, it was this one sheet of paper of these lists that she wrote down from this workshop, and I was like, whoa, and my whole body was taken over by this one little page and to see this column and this column, and I have goosebumps right now, it's so small, but it was like everything in the world made sense. All my trauma made sense, all my relationship issues made sense, all my desires made sense.
Madelyn: My woman body who wants to be a bodybuilder, who hates her emotions and can't figure out how to be soft, everything made sense, and through that lens, I guess six years ago, seven years ago when I started putting that together, these two little columns have just made everything in my life understandable and in other people's lives. It just nothing has ever resonated, and of course... Let me finish that sentence. Nothing has ever resonated so much, and of course, in the past seven years, the studies just keep going deeper and deeper, and that set me off a course into going to be with teachers and doing year long studies and finding new teachers and doing deep dives in tantra and doing all the different angles, all the different angles we can look at the feminine, masculine dynamics through and it's endless and it's beautiful.
Chandresh: What kept you going? I bet there were moments where you felt probably scattered, confused, right? What kept you going all these years?
Madelyn: Well, it's interesting you say that because I got very deeply into the polarity world on looking at feminine and masculine through the embodiment of the body and using the energetics of embodying the feminine to magnetize and polarize the embodiment of the masculine, which on its own, is a really beautiful field, a really beautiful body of work, and I ended up going very deep into that world and having some experiences where I realized, oh wow, polarity matched with abusive tendencies equals patriarchy, and that flipped my world upside down because here, I had found this thing. Polarity, this is so fun, it's so romantic, it's such a cool practice.
Madelyn: But then when done in unhealthy ways with wounded people who find their way together, it ends up being just like the patriarchy again. So what's really served me and kept me holding on is coming back to the basics, the ancient basics of Shiva and Shakti where there is no abuse and there is no patriarchy and there is no boxes we have to fit into, and that's been my anchor over the past, particularly this year. 2022 has been a tough year for me, even though it's the year this book came out, of unraveling beliefs and writing this book was a part of how I unraveled them.
Madelyn: This book is a byproduct of unraveling beliefs and I really had to pull apart out of all these worlds around polarity and feminine, masculine dynamics and this is the way you should be a woman and this is the way a man needs to be, what holds the test of time? What holds the test of time out of all of this work, and to me, it was Shiva and Shakti. That's something that you can't manipulate, you can't even touch it with our wounded selves. It just stands the forever test of time and that's kept me going is coming back and anchoring into just this very deep, untouchable, unchanging love affair between consciousness and light. The one thing that will not shift no matter what we as humans do.
Chandresh: One thing that I feel, I never told you this, but I feel one thing that added a lot of warmth between our friendship was when I got to know that you were diving deeper into the authentic Shiva and Shakti work, and I know plenty, maybe countless people here in Europe and US who are talking about Shiva, Shakti work, but they have not gone into that work. They have maybe listened to a bunch of podcasts or attended a retreat and then basically, that's what got them started and they went on doing a lot of professional work around that, and it's fine what they're doing. You impressed me by stepping into that work and you would ask me questions.
Chandresh: I remember you sending me specific voice notes about the cultural appropriation, other stuff that is this good? Do you think this is valid or not, and I started, I think my energy toward you started shifting in such a beautiful way. I mean, it was always that I always felt a very gentle, safe, beautiful friendship between us, but I think that just made it more like tantric buddy friendship also when you started going that direction. I've never asked you this, how did tantra stepped into Madelyn's journey, body building to polarity, Shiva, Shakti, tantra, and now it's pretty much a deeper part of who you are? So you tell me more about that.
Madelyn: Yeah. The order of events was definitely finding this column at a bar and then going into personal studies at the age of 25 and then hiring teachers to work through polarity. So I went from nothing into the polarity work, and I remember in the polarity field, my teachers at the time would tell me to express my anger like Kali Ma, and I was like, who is that at 25, 26, and they were trying to explain it, but not really fully explaining who Kali was, just saying some in Kali energy, and I didn't get it and I wasn't being really taught about these deities and I also was terrified of expressing even at 25. I remember my first time when I stood up in front of the space and the whole group was saying, Madelyn, in order to feel you more, I'd need to feel your Kali Ma.
Madelyn: And I was like, what is that, and they were like, just express anger, and I was just like, "haaahh" and that felt like such a big amount to show and I remember going home from that intensive and being like, who is this Kali Ma? I still don't understand. Y'all teaching me who this is, and I left it out of my consciousness because that wasn't the work we were doing in that space. We were doing a different kind of polarity, but her name came up and I was just conflicted, and I remember probably about three years ago, I had this moment of it's time to go deeper into understanding that name or that world, and I spent a bit of time searching for a teacher I would resonate with and I found this woman named Dawn Cartwright, and she's in her sixties, I think, and she looked to me like... I don't have a relationship with my mother, haven't talked to her in three years.
Madelyn: And I was like, that looks like a mother. I want her to be my mother. I need an older woman to come into my life and mother me, and just so happened she taught tantra and so I signed up for her year long program, and what's unique about her is that she teaches classical tantra and neo tantra both, and it's this accumulation of both the different lineages. She studied in India for years and years and years. She has gurus, she's a devotee, has such a powerful relationship with Shiva and it's just beautiful to watch, and I discovered in that training that every time she talked about classical tantra, the Maha videos, there's certain names she would bring up and my whole body would be like, oh my gosh, I want to go get flowers, I want to pray, I want to sing, I want to chant.
Madelyn: And then every time we did any kind of neo tantra, my body was like, I just felt a very distinct essence in my body of, I thought I was entering her realm to learn about the sexual sharing of energy of tantra, but through that, I discovered my heart was in the classical tantra, which of course, has pieces of sexual energy, but was the deities that lit me up. All the way from that first time I heard Kali and I didn't know what that meant, something in my body was activated and I completed my time early in that program because the neo aspect of tantra was not resonating with me so strongly and I wanted to go deeper into the classical.
Madelyn: So I've been working with her ever since around the classical tantra and deepening with different teachers with the Maha videos and it just became so apparent in my body that these dynamics of Shiva and Shakti and masculine and feminine are all within the classic, in the classical world of tantra and even just in the Maha videos and the relationships with their power and grace and strength and ferocity, everything about being a woman for me. Everything I need to learn about the feminine lives there, not in the polarity workshops. As much as I learn there, as amazing as it was, everything I want to learn about how to inhabit my instrument as a feminine being full of power and grace is right there in the text and in the images and the faces of the deities.
Chandresh: May I ask you, what about Shiva's energy fascinated you the most? Is there one particular element of him that, just one that you would say that's what makes you a true Shiva?
Madelyn: That's a great question. It's the unwavering, even when I look at an image, it's just power. Deep, deep power, and I resonated more with Krishna actually. Kirtan and all the singing, I've really felt alive in the energy of Krishna and he has been the music and I love reading the books like The Rosebud Lips and all the sweet imagery is so colorful, but lately, I have been feeling a deeper and deeper connection with Shiva because of that immovable mountain of consciousness I feel.
Chandresh: Yeah. I know you mentioned his power being the most attractive feature of him and I resonate with it because Shiva's power is not aggressive, it's not violent. It's very grounded, it's very rooted, and in eastern traditions, they call him holy baba, means the innocent monk. He's so generous, so innocent, he's wanderer. He doesn't have any diplomacy in his head and heart. So I'm glad you mentioned the power, and what about Kali? What's that one element of her that really fascinated you?
Madelyn: Man. I mean, I come from a Southern Baptist family. This is really interesting. Here's where we go a little deeper. I come from, I was born and raised in the Bible Belt-esque land of Dallas, Texas, and my dad went to India as a, what are they, as a missionary to take people out of the temples and teach them about Jesus Christ, our Savior, and I remember whenever Kali was brought up in that container that I was in, I knew nothing about it, but I remember talking to my sister because she went to India for this missionary trip and she was like, don't say even Kali. Don't say it. I went to India missionary, I pulled the kids out of the temple. They're literally being prostituted in the name of Kali, and she was like, don't say it, don't talk about it.
Madelyn: And me being a little sacred rebel, I was just feeling something was off about what they were saying to me, that kind of fear, and I have lots of obviously, my dad loves me, but I've gone into the total direction of what he never would've imagined and he's totally surrendered and I think he's actually learning from me now, and I have lots of feelings about people going into other people's lands to tell them what they're believing is not right because I witnessed my family doing that all my life, but there was something in me that was just the place I come from, the beliefs that I come from with my family lineage is not mine. It's not mine, and that was so painful honestly to be tugged between these two worlds of my family saying, don't you dare, and my heart saying something is here for me and am I going to go to hell?
Madelyn: Am I going to burn forever, which is what my family would tell me is you're making a choice that you're going to be burning and it breaks our heart that you're going to be in hell. We love you, and I watched my dad cry as he came to this realization that he would not spend eternity with me, and I had to go through that for three years of fully stepping into there were two paths in front of me. I keep going down the way of what everyone's telling me or I follow my heart and I follow some deeper truth, and I discovered in this path there's nothing... It's the most love. I was actually raised in a home without that love, which is why I don't have that connection with my actual mother, and so it's been so important for me to choose my mothers and she'll always hold that place in my life of being my biological mother and the person who nurtured me in so many ways.
Madelyn: But the ways that really have mattered have not been there, and I have sourced so much motherly love from Kali and her, even especially this year of cutting out, she came in and she just powerfully took out so much from my life this year and gifted me so much in its place, but the stripping away was, it couldn't have been anybody else but Kali Ma. It was just very fierce and it also felt like the most protection of this relationship is not serving you. We are cutting it off. This city is not serving you. They're not your homeland. All this stuff, chopping away, and that felt like I got it. Just to me, something clicked around the fierce motherly love, the mama bear love that people would say Kali has, but I didn't have the felt experience as much as I received as medicine this year.
Chandresh: And you mentioned three years of just fighting, standing for yourself, and I was thinking your love for Ma Kali has to be so strong that you stood for it for three years. How old were you then, Madelyn?
Madelyn: I guess I was, it really started around the age of 25, which feels crazy because I'm 31. How it doesn't sound that long ago. Feels like forever ago, but it's 25 to 28.
Chandresh: Wow.
Madelyn: 24 to 28 when I was really starting to shape shift my beliefs and travel and go to places where I was seeing like going to Asia and seeing different deities and being with bananas at their feet, and I'm like, what is this? I've never seen anything like this before. So my eyes started to open around that time and then the choices had to be made. I had to make choices around what I believe, and it's so distant. It's such a distant memory now that was even a thing I had faced, but at the time, it was soul crushing because I literally was making a choice, for at least a year, it felt like I was making the choice to leap into hell, to be honest. That's what it felt like. It was like, it's not just a choice to separate from religion part of it.
Madelyn: For anyone that is not familiar with this kind of patriarchal Christian lineage, I don't think the real Christianity is made up of this stuff, but what's happened to it when you make a choice to leave it it, literally feels like making the choice for hell. It's not clear yet. You don't know your own beliefs around if there's a heaven or hell yet. I've since grown, I've since don't believe in this hell, but at the time, I was in the world. The world was small and all there was, was heaven and hell and to leave heaven meant automatically that polarity, hell.
Madelyn: And so I had to choose that for a year and find a way to love myself at the same time, and you're taught your whole life if you're worthy of hell, you're not that lovable, but for me to be like, I am choosing to walk away from this path and therefore, I'm deemed as like ugh, and I have to find myself. I have to pick my feet up and coach people and help people while I'm also realizing, and over time, it's all dissolved away and I'm like, God only wants to love. God is love. There's only love. There's only love.
Chandresh: We make our belief systems our reality and the problem begins when we stop seeing the possibilities beyond that belief system, and I like how the story of your father had a plot twist now, that he is opening up in his heart, he's learning, and I personally know many people who are struggling with this right now, that their belief system is X, Y, Z and it's empowering them, blooming them, but the family that they truly love, the family that has supported them, cared for them, they have a very different belief system and they are in this conflict whether to please the family or to listen to that new belief system that's showing up. Is there any word of advice, anything at all you want to share to those women who are struggling with this?
Madelyn: I mean, the thing that, this is going to sound quite simple, but the thing that I remember telling myself and that I continuously come back to whenever I have a big abrupt shift in my life is space and grace. Giving yourself so much space, this idea of shifting your belief system around religion, nothing comes close to it as far as I know. I mean, I've gone through so many different change your beliefs around love, and money and that's a piece of cake compared to religion and faith and what happens after this life. It's ego shattering, and so giving yourself so much space because if you come from a family or a church of faith that is based off of these heaven and hell principles or anything that's about this, then that, you're probably not taught actually about space, about giving yourself space to learn your way.
Madelyn: You're just supposed to know. When I was young, I had all these questions about you only get into heaven if you ask Jesus into your heart. Well, what about the kids in third world countries that don't know or never hear about it? Do they go to hell? I would ask all these questions. I don't understand. Why would they burn in hell when they don't know? They're not deserving of that, and my family would always be like, faith, just have faith, and that didn't answer my questions. I didn't understand, and so it's very spiritually bypassing to have these questions about what you believe in and then to go to your elders and be told, have faith.
Madelyn: It's telling you to bypass all these very good, smart, ethical questions, and it's as if, if you do question, if you do continue to question, then you're not being the good, studious practitioner of God. You need to skip your questions in order to be a good, faithful, humble student of God, and that's not to me true. They live alongside each other. Ask your questions, go deep, and don't stop until you get your questions answered, and sometimes it means finding your own answers, which if anyone's here listening to this and resonating with this, that's this whole space and grace thing. You're in the period of asking your own questions and you're going to have to find them yourself most likely, and that's a brave thing to do.
Chandresh: I think there should be a t-shirt with space and grace. That's space and grace. Thank you. This is simple, but so effective and powerful. If you feel comfortable, Madelyn, can we talk about the mother energy that's just collectively out there? This is one question that I have answered for various students over the last five, seven years. For me, my spiritual practice was very sacred and personal and private and rarely shared about Ma Kali years ago, but as I started sharing about it mainly on different podcasts and conversations with others, people started diving deeper into Ma Kali.
Chandresh: But most of them had one question, that you call her Ma Kali, you say it's divine mother, but I have a very painful, abusive relationship with my mother so it makes me very uncomfortable accepting a goddess, a deity, as my divine mother, and I've always shared my perspective, handled it with all the grace and love and compassion, and because you have gone through that space, I feel whatever you feel comfortable in sharing about how the woman can release that biological mother energy, heal it, nurture it, and then celebrate and dance with the Ma Kali energy, how can that happen?
Madelyn: Yeah. I mean, I think a really big... Okay. That component, that fear may need to be played out for as long as she needs to be with that, and I never have any interest or desire to intervene with someone's resistance that needs to play out because if it's ever intervened too early, then choosing a deity to come in as divine mother will feel forced and it won't come from your heart. So there's a part of me that wants to be like, okay, if that's not resonating with you, play that out. Be with that sensation, be with that experience until you've shifted that or until that's shifted for you. Let's see what happens next. I think that it's an element of choice that I think is really important. If someone's even asking the question of this, my mother was this way and I'm afraid to rely on a deity or love a different angelic or fierce mother energy, there's a curiosity naturally there.
Madelyn: And it's great to ask these questions and it's great to feel into this, but there's going to be a shift that happens in her own body at the right time, I believe, and let the resistance be there for a while, for as long as it needs, refuse because she comes when you're ready to receive and she's always there anyways, but coming into actually being a force of good in your life that you can lean on, that's got to be when you're ready, and I think for me honestly, it's always made sense. It's just always made sense that I chose, I believe all of us as spirit beings choose our family to be incarnated through for specific reasons. It makes perfect sense to me why I chose my parents. I'm like, okay, that makes total sense. I was raised in a family that did not value expression of their children and I teach about expression.
Madelyn: I needed to go through that initiation to learn the importance of it, fight my way through, and because I have the perspective that I was always sovereign in choosing my mother as my mother, that helps me a lot. I chose her. I'm in control, I chose her, and there's a reason, there's a dharma there of why that family was my chosen family. It didn't happen to me and I'm like, cool, Madelyn, your little spirit knew exactly what she was doing and look at what I've created from this. So I'm actually feeling very empowered in this now and I had to sever my connection with her. I'm not saying that, I'm like, great, I chose this and I'll also keep her in my life because I chose this. I'm saying I chose this family and now I have another choice to make is do I continue to let different forms of harassment and bullying and abuse into my life.
Madelyn: Or do I say thank you for the blessings and the gifts you've given me and I set you free, and that's what I chose. I made a very, very tight, strict boundary and it's something I've got to be with every day because I've got lots of emails ending up in my spam every day with bullying and blocked voicemails that sometimes are really tempting for me to not listen to, but I've had to create forms of protection because there's also forms of love that come into my spam and into my voicemail and it's very confusing of getting a voicemail that's angry with me and then happy and then angry, and I just realized there was an expiration date to my being in connection with her, at least for now.
Madelyn: And I want to heal my relationship with the feminine. Having that essence of bullying in my life does not heal it. So that isn't I'm a no to that, but I'm a yes to the forms of the divine feminine and mother that I choose. I chose my teacher specifically because I wanted her to step into my life as a mothering role, and then I've chosen deities. So I have my physical team and my spiritual team and it's something that we all have to choose if we value that. If we value having these kinds of elder roles or feminine, masculine roles in our life, it does require us making a choice to seek it out and be responsible for bringing it into our life to heal that woman.
Chandresh: It takes a lot of courage to go through and even share this publicly on the podcast. So thank you for just opening up your heart and I know this is one of your strengths, Madelyn, I've always, always loved. You are very vulnerable, open, very much in alignment with that Shakti heart. I promise I'm going to keep the rest of the conversation a bit lighter and relaxed.
Madelyn: That's great.
Chandresh: Yeah. I want to talk about the thread between creativity and love. I feel tantra is all about creativity, Ma's energy, Ma Kali and Dus Mahavidya, they're so creative, playful, always dancing with the Shiva energy, and I know you have a section in the book about the creativity and love thread. Can you talk about that?
Madelyn: Yeah. Creativity and love, one in the same truly. So I have a very big belief based off of what I've learned from Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt, and they have a book called Getting the Love You Want. It's a very simple title for a profoundly deep book, Getting the Love You Want, and it's the premise of the book that I learned was that we often choose partners who remind us of our parents or our caretakers. A lot of times, the partners that we choose have the absolute best qualities of our parents combined and the absolute worst qualities of our parents combined, and our subconscious finds a way to find that specific person that has these best and worst qualities because, especially with the worst qualities, there's a part of our unconscious that thinks this person loves me deeply.
Madelyn: But also kind of shames me in the same specific way my parent did. If I could just make the love part stronger, if I could heal this situation and make them never shame me and totally love me completely, then I'll heal that wound I felt when I was five, finally, good and for all, done. That's what our unconscious is doing all the time when we choose partners and that's why we end up in relationships that look strikingly similar to things we experienced as kids, and firstly, we want to bring that to the surface and just see if that's a pattern that we are experiencing. I know that's certainly a pattern that I've experienced, and what I have found is that the pattern is not bad. It's not bad at all to find a partner that has the best and worst qualities and to keep reliving these things. It's not bad and you're not less evolved for choosing partners like that.
Madelyn: In fact, if both of you, or at least one of you very strongly realize this, you can start to look at your relationship as a playground to consciously heal that stuff, truly. Instead of saying, oh man, I've picked another partner that does this thing that I hate, you can go, oh, picked another partner that does this thing that I hate. I wonder if they're down to do the work and create healing out of this, and it goes to say that this person, I would love if they had an open heart, if they were willing to do the work, and if they cared about you immensely. If they have those ingredients, yes, great partner to do the work with. If they actually don't care about you or value your sensitivity, they don't want to do the work, they don't care to heal you, help heal you, and they have a closed heart.
Madelyn: Not a great person to practice this very sensitive material with, but if they are at least those three basic things, they don't have to be the smartest person in the world, but if they're down to help heal and you want to heal each other. The way through that is the creative arts, is the arts, and there's so many different ways that we can create art and be artists of love. We can reveal emotion in real time, we can create stories, we can do skits, we can write screenplays, we can do sacred theater, we can surprise our beloved, we can give gifts, we can dance for them. There's all these different ways we can create art out of these pain points, but it's through the creativity in the relationship that these things get healed.
Madelyn: It's not so much, in my perspective, talking about them. It's not so much about going to talk therapy with that person to talk about that trauma that they keep touching. It's instead to go, okay, they keep touching this thing. What's a way I can create something out of this feeling I have and give it to them and then witness it and receive it, and what I believe is that it's actually not in... The major healing is not in their response to whatever you create. It's actually in you doing it. You get healed to creating out of that wound, out of that trigger. It's the mere act of saying, I'm going to create from this place. I'm going to turn my pain into purpose in love, in the context of relationship, that inner child wound from five years old gets healed.
Chandresh: And I've noticed in the book, you have mentioned so many practices, templates, and they all are very playful. Nothing is aggressive, intense. Nothing is, like you said, go to a therapist together. I mean, you have mentioned and shared some really fascinating, very creative, playful elements in the book, and I wanted to mention one part I highlighted. This is on page 101, you mentioned about the conflict a woman goes through. Close your knees, but always be ready for sex. Dry your tears, but don't be too rough or don't be too tough. Put your children above yourself, but don't let it go. Let men lead, but don't ignorantly trust them. When I was reading this, I'm like, this is all happening around us, mixed messaging from family, culture, religion. What do you have to say about this constant confusion, constant hypocrisy that feminine energy has to face every single day? Yeah, I would love to hear your take on this conflict.
Madelyn: Yeah, it's interesting because that was actually the introduction and I ended up moving it to the middle of the book, but that was the very first thing that you were going to read, but my editor had me move it in the middle for various reasons, which actually ended up being perfect, but that came so strongly through me, which is why it was the intro because I have my whole life, when I reflect on it, has been this actual polarity, this dichotomy between this world and this world and always feeling like I'm stuck in between two, and it's not a texture for me of not being good enough. That's not quite what it is. It's just not doing it right, not doing the feminine right. There's always a way to do it right and I'm never quite hitting the mark.
Madelyn: From my family telling me how to be a good little Christian moon girl to being in the polarity world and being taught how I'm supposed to express the truth of my feminine heart in a different way than I'm currently doing, and to be an artist means to create something out of nothing, really, when we feel into that. It's like there's nothing and then there's a cosmos. There's nothing and then there's something, and to be an artist means, especially of, let's say an artist of the feminine means you get to decide what the feminine means to you for once, finally, and that's how the true liberation happens is that when we keep looking, society and culture keeps habitually looking to teachers and the books and even men to tell us how to be woman, and it hurts my heart and I've done it and I do it.
Madelyn: And the Artist of Love concepts are based off of a few components, archetypes, acting, improv, feminine, embodiment, pleasure, longing, expression, and all of these things come from this dark abyss, especially one of the reasons why I love talking about acting as a tool for feminine embodiment is because acting, it's like you're literally creating a character and what if we approached our feminine essences as creating characters for the first time in a screenplay that we're writing right now? The screenplay has never been written and you put pen to paper and you write about a woman, who is that woman you're writing about, and that gets to be you instead of going to all of these teachers telling you what men like and how to be a good wife and how to be a good daughter.
Madelyn: How to be a good faithful yogi, what if there was space and grace to create this and stand boldly and proudly in it and let the people pass out of your life who do not match that character you're creating? It's taking the power back. It's having agency, autonomy, and sovereignty and who you want to be as a woman, and same thing for men. It applies to men as well of here's the way to be a man and here's the way you shouldn't be a man and a son and a husband, and what if we created, through our own casting calls, who we get to be and it could be a thousand different versions of us and every day, we choose a different version, but the point is to take back the power, take back the definitions and truly liberate that character and characters within that want to come through and live life through us.
Chandresh: I know we are running a bit. I can talk on this for episodes and episodes. I want to pick just my favorite next two, three questions. One is related to what you just shared. What do you think, what are women avoiding today to be an artist of love? What are they avoiding so far?
Madelyn: The thing they want the most, which is to be seen.
Chandresh: Oh wow.
Madelyn: Yep. I think that's the number one thing women want because the feminine is radiance, it's beauty. She's designed to be celebrated, she's designed to be seen, and again, this is so funny. Women are shamed all the time for taking too many selfies or having pictures of, she's so full of herself. We are designed to be seen, and yet even when we do it in our modern day culture, we're doing it wrong. It makes me so mad. It's the thing we want more than anything is to let our beauty be seen. It's not to get... Then people say back, but she shouldn't need validation. Number one, she doesn't need it. Number two, she gets to need it. She wants to need it, she gets to need it. It's her right to need validation. She gets to choose that. She's sovereign.
Madelyn: So you're very passionate about this. It's to be seen, and there's all these ways that we hide through our clothing, through our adornments, through our lack of expression, through the lack of sharing pictures of ourselves, through the lack of asking for what we want because we're terrified to be seen because what does that mean if we're a woman who wants to be seen? It means we're asking for validation and that's so bad. It's not bad. It's built in us and we get to claim that. We get to want that, all we want. So I'm here for liberating seen us, being seen, asking to be seen and demanding our right to be seen.
Chandresh: This was one of the most powerful, one of the first lessons I learned in the tantra teachings, that a woman is designed to be seen. So she'll always thrive and bloom when she's seen and celebrated, and until this day, I see it happening every single day, and also that explains why I still haven't been able to take a good selfie of myself because it's just not so well designed software in me as much as it is in feminine, but yeah, this is such a solid point. My next question, Madelyn, is what do you think women are tolerating and they got to stop doing it?
Madelyn: Oh man, laundry list is popping up. I would say what I wrote about in the book is pretzeling. This word came strong to me this year because I kept feeling like I was pretzeling to become a certain shape, a certain shape of a woman to fit, and we do this when we start to expand big in our business and someone gives us criticism or critique or there's gas lighting, we start to pretzel. We cower life force to make ourselves smaller so that we fit into the appropriate size shape, and we're tolerating this in our family life, in our relationship.
Madelyn: We find ways to compensate and pretzel our energy so that we fit rather than lovingly taking the shape we're meant to take and setting beautiful boundaries to protect ourself, saluting to the lions of the world that's saying, hey, you're not allowed to be inside of my den, and we can do this as feminine beings in a loving way and we can also do it in a really fierce way, but there is so much to say about the un-pretzeling process to find your true shape again with your breath, with your right, with the ways that you're going to claim the life you want. Stop tolerating pretzeling from the pockets and places in your life that are unconscious. Go towards the places that are conscious and unpretzel.
Chandresh: Beautiful. This raised my heart beat. This was so beautiful to just receive and listen. Last question, how can we love women better? How can we hold space for them better? There's divine feminineness, angry and hopeful. I have been writing that on my Instagram lately and I keep reflecting on this. How can we love them better? How can we make this place a little safer and cozier for them?
Madelyn: I'm just going to give something very specific because there's something very specific that I love and I just want more people to know about this. Hold eye contact and say what else? I think if more people, both women with women friends or men with women and women with men, if we just can sense when our beloveds and friends have some charge around something, if we can just hold eye contact, listen, and then say, what else? What else? Tell me more. What else? Until it's all dried up, until there's nothing left. Wow, I think we'd be in a much better shape and place as a society if we just let, because eventually, it will end, it will stop, it will get cleared out, but the reason why it's there's so much rage is because there's so few spaces in our world to really let it all out.
Madelyn: I've heard of stories of people working in chocolate factories and the people that work there at the beginning are like, eat all the chocolate you want, and the people when they start first start working at these factories will eat all the chocolate and then eventually, they're so sick, they'll never want to eat anymore chocolate, and I sometimes feel like if we just had this all you can eat chocolate moment to just let everything out, eventually we'll be like, I feel heard, thank you, and be done, and so it's a short term discomfort of holding a lot of space, but then it'll clear out, I believe. As a society and a culture, if we do this collectively together for each other, that would be my practical tip on that one.
Chandresh: I'm making a note of this in case you receive a text from me any random day, what else, Madelyn. So just-
Madelyn: Thank you.
Chandresh: Last thing, where can people buy your book? How can people indulge with Madelyn energy in a deeper way?
Madelyn: Absolutely. So Artist of Love is available on Amazon, paperback and Kindle. It's also on Barnes & Noble. You can order there, and I am all over Instagram at Madelyn Moon. I've got lots of reels, some comedy reels and teaching reels, and my website, maddiemoon.com, has my current programs and offering if anyone wants to go very deep.
Chandresh: Thank you, Madelyn, for being on the Leela Gurukul podcast. Thank you for your beautiful energy and all the listeners, let's support this bold, beautiful, fearless woman and a dear friend. Thank you, Madelyn.
Madelyn: Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Chandresh: Thank you.
Useful Links
Find Your Source of Happiness - 21 Day Challenge
Private Guidance Program with Chandresh
