A Spiritual Path with Equality at its Heart

Jocelyn is known for the highly acclaimed, ‘Feminist Counselling in Action’ and for her most recent book which was published in 2008 by O Books entitled 'Deep Equality - Living in the Flow of Natural Rhythm'. This is a tapestry of examples, quotes, exercises, thoughts and pictures on the subject of reducing hierarchical structures and replacing them with rhythmic ones. It's a marvellous system, organic and natural! Species do well in certain years and not in others, if certain species always did well, the ecology of the world would collapse." Jocelyn is facilitating a training course for priestesses in London and has had two major London exhibitions during 2011.

Jocelyn was brought up in Southern Sudan and Ghana. As a small child, she was impressed by the immense beauty and variety of the natural world, its vigour, colour and creativity - and its rhythms. She was a white child in a massive country of black people and, at a young age, she became aware of inequalities that was to influence her future life and work. In her mid teens, Jocelyn left Africa to attend sixth form college in the UK and then attended Durham University where she studied anthropology and psychology, returning to Uganda to research painting and psychology at Makerere University. In her 20s and early 30s, she taught social anthropology but her life changed in 1988, when she travelled to Crete to study the ancient philosophers and to explore the ancient Minoan civilisation. It was here that she rediscovered her deep attunement to the rhythms of nature and learnt of the divine feminine where stories of the nature and fertility Goddesses date back to earliest recorded times. The wonderfully decorated palace with its marvellous solid stone bull statue is reminiscent of the story of King Minos (he gave his name to the Minoan culture) who kept a grotesque monster, the Minotaur, within an underground labyrinth. Having enjoyed this trip and gained so much from it, Jocelyn took a group of Goddess seekers to Malta to explore the huge pre-patriarchal temples to the Earth Mother within the landscape. On the island of Gozo, there is a statue of the Goddess where the midsummer sun shines through a hole in the base plinth. These and other visits to ancient sites inspired Jocelyn's artwork, based upon the great goddesses, which she describes as 'prayers'. "These ancient matriarchal societies were based on equality, caring and co-operation and were therefore more spiritually advanced than under patriarchal types of religious worship. Women as nurturers, would care for the weak and infirm and have greater ability to avoid confrontation, competition and war."

Jocelyn's journeys led to her becoming an ordained priestess of Rhea, the Greek Goddess of Flow. "Being a priestess of Rhea is not like officiating in a temple. Everywhere is holy ground or can be made into sacred space. The priesthood is about remembering the Goddess in the breath and in every flow of life, honouring her with words and a smile as well as in rituals." In 1988, she co-founded 'the Serpent Institute' which trained therapists within a framework of goddess spirituality. Jocelyn was led to develop a rhythmic philosophy that embraces a flowing movement based on the awareness of planetary and personal rhythms, and these explain how we can move from cultural structures - which will eventually destroy the planet - such as consumerism and hierarchy, to a more holistic, natural and organic understanding of life without harming each other or the planet.

I joined a midsummer rite that was facilitated by Jocelyn at Rosslyn Chapel in Hampstead on 20th June and approximately 30 people attended. We were seated in a circle around a central table on which were placed red candles, yellow flowers, oranges and other items that reflected the sun at its zenith. Jocelyn called upon Elen, Lady of Britain and of the Ways, to oversee our ceremony. Four attendants called to each of the directions to protect and unite the circle. Each person within the circle was blessed with the flowers of Hypericum (St John's Wort) which is a known antidepressant. A drink of elderflower was offered to each participant, followed by poems and readings. The circle was then closed by thanking the spirits of each direction and we had time for tea and chatting after the ceremony.

Jocelyn spent some time with Eckhart Tolle In Glastonbury and he impressed her greatly. She recommends Starhawks's books as they combine pagan spirituality with activist and radical politics, subjects that are at the centre of Jocelyn’s view of the world of tomorrow. She considers that the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tsu is still one of the wisest books available today. Each day she lives to share her life, trying to equalise the opposing forces and the hierarchies and patriarchies that are secretly inbuilt into our Western lives.

Today, her spiritual path as a priestess is of one who remembers the flow and rhythms of life in her meditations and in routine moments of her day. Her artwork depicts the energies of Mother Nature personified as the Divine Feminine. She is a ritual practitioner and psychotherapist and sometimes uses ritual in personal development work with her clients. She feels deeply honoured to be able to accompany others on part of their journey towards personal and spiritual maturity. She is a writer and also teaches.

Her philosophy is based on the rhythms of nature. The human body has heartbeats, brain rhythms, breath, peristalsis, and many others. Women, of course, have a monthly cycle. Plants have a rhythm which oxygenates the air, trees shed leaves in seasonal manner, providing rest and recuperation after flowering and fruiting. One rhythm is not 'better than' another, each aspect of the rhythm, the hard and soft, quick and slow, high and low notes, is natural and necessary to overall wellbeing. Throughout our life, we have rhythms, of weakness and strength, success and failure, ease and difficulty, energy and inactivity, joy and sadness, life and death. Each level, value and experience is part of a natural rhythm and a time of learning and experiencing. By accepting the variety of rhythms and allowing for them, we can move from a direction of striving for perpetual attainment of possessions, to a greater resonance with nature, allowing happiness and health, which flow from contentment, self acceptance and a union of opposites.

Jocelyn believes our world is dangerously unbalanced and needs a new paradigm to provide movement towards a less competitive society that can flow between opposites and maintain the tension between them without creating distress. This ability would include bringing back the feminine to balance the masculine, not just with a few ambitious women but with a renewed respect and love for all forms of planetary life.

Jocelyn Chaplin is a psychotherapist (Soul Healer), natural spirituality teacher, author, artist and writer, living in London UK Visit: www.serpentinstitute.com/

© Article by Wendy Stokes www.wendystokes.co.uk