The Art of Self-Cultivation
Filling your cup, worshipping your own light, and becoming the holy annointing oil
[Photo by Julia Corbett]
This month, in my intimate group apprenticeship container, The Art of Conjuring, we are working with the theme of "Cultivation."
The word cultivation, in its origins, means to prepare or to worship.
Self-cultivating is preparing the self for receiving.
It is to prepare the self for your creative mission/artistry.
To prepare yourself for birth.
And even to prepare yourself to be in union with another without losing yourself.
When you self-cultivate, you are quite literally filling your own cup so that you are not starving for anything outside yourself, caught in a cycle of seeking rather than receiving what is already available to you.
But in order to do this, you first have to know how to feed yourself.
Most modern women only feed themselves on a superficial level, which doesn't satiate their deeper hunger for their own divinity and the love of God to fill them.
You may think you need/want more money, more love, more clients, more success, and so on, but if you keep seeking to be filled with energy outside of yourself, you will never learn to cultivate your light source and the heavenly nectar that will feed your deeper desires.
I first began to understand this when I became pregnant in 2020. Leading up to the conception, I had a lot of visions and prophecies about fertility and what it meant to be a fertile woman. During the time of exploring these teachings, I would often start my days by sitting in the sun on my front deck between two massive rosemary bushes and drinking herbal infusions, writing, and painting, which would often flow into movement or singing before going out of the land to harvest blackberries and herbs.
I had a couple of hummingbird feeders, and the hummingbirds would swarm the feeders, sometimes having 15 hummingbirds around the feeder at once, waiting their turn to sip from the nectar provided! I couldn't believe this as I always thought hummingbirds were more territorial; you rarely see more than 1 or 2 at a time. Amazed by the frequency of these visitations, I started talking to them.
During this time, I would channel the energetics of fertility I often write about today:
Health, receptivity, joy, pleasure, and nourishment.
I learned that when a woman cultivates her joy and pleasure, feeds herself what deeply nourishes her, tends to her body and mind, and allows herself to be receptive to life, she becomes a fertile vessel of infinite creation. The hummingbirds gave me a tattoo symbol initiation that would anchor this medicine, and I was excited to mark it on my body in time.
But then I became pregnant. I was previously told by spirit that I would conceive on the earth with my body touching fertile grounds, and I did. I understood this because I feel the most sensual, in my power, and embodied when my skin touches the earth—another teaching around these themes.
But almost instantly, things started to change. The week I became pregnant was the week we went into global lockdowns. Fear was everywhere I looked, especially in my partner. The masculine is designed to penetrate with their consciousness, and I let this fear penetrate me. I didn’t protect my feminine essence.
They closed all the state parks and places of nature worship I would visit, and I was cut off from that fertile food-source. Though I would still sneak through the trails and explore the lands around my home, my partner's sense of right and wrong made me shrink my truth and desire to obey and go along with what was happening, even though I could clearly SEE.
At this time in my life, I was at my most prophetic, expansive, and precise in my visioning because I was the most connected to my fertility, but that quickly started to change.
I began to have nightmares and a type of psychic panic attack that was very new to me. I was so open, and the energy swirling in the collective field was unlike anything I had ever experienced. The fear was paralyzing and depleting. I started to lose my light.
Most of my 11 weeks of pregnancy were spent oscillating between fear and grief. I (EYE) wasn't afraid. I knew that motherhood was my destiny, and I wasn't scared of birth; I also understood what was going on in the collective field and what the initiation of COVID was calling us into, but fear surrounded me like ropes tied tight.
I wasn't in an environment/relationship where my truth was accepted, and it felt terrifying to express myself fully. Later I would realize this was the number one thing holding me back in creation of my legacy work.
Through the nausea and fatigue, I lost the motivation and energy to tend to my deeper needs and desires and just did what I could to get through the chaos. I got off Instagram/the internet because the protests and mass cancellations, political separation, war, hatred, and madness were making my nightmares worse, and I knew I needed to protect my peace for my baby and myself, even if that meant I was judged and shamed for not speaking up during that time.
I took a lot of baths and laid in bed watching movies and drinking tea. I gardened, cuddled with my cat, and snuck into the river trail to be with the water as much as possible.
I devoted to the silent cultivation of my own truth at a time where opposing truths were a target of attack.
But when I was honest with myself, I didn't know if I could nourish my fertility truly in the life that I chose. I didn't know that I could cultivate my pleasure around a partner who was so rooted in fear and scarcity and didn't see the world as a place to seed heaven the way that I did.
I didn't know if I could cultivate my joy if I was to be cut off from the three primary lifebloods that bring me joy: my community, freedom to travel (we were in lockdowns and we lived far away from any airport), and unrestricted access to nature. I didn't know if I could genuinely nourish myself without feeling free to respond to my desires. I didn't feel super healthy in those early weeks of pregnancy through nausea and extreme mental/psychic distress, and I could not be receptive to life when all I wanted to do was hide in my room with my cat and shut down.
So, I lost my light, and I lost my fertility.
My baby stopped growing on Earth Day that year when I went to the creek for a ceremony. I was feeling the weight of feminine oppression from my lineage and so wanted to free myself from those chains so I could expand into what I knew was possible for me and the way I am here to create in the world, despite the chaos around me. I claimed the wet and fertile earth as my mother, me as her daughter, and I buried an item from my motherline in the creek bed to claim my fertility.
I claimed my true desires, my true hunger, and what brings me real joy and pleasure. I made a vow.
The next day, I woke up, and I felt free. I felt light and joyous for the first time in at least a month. Even though I felt physically very different, I didn't yet know my baby had stopped growing, and I did not yet miscarry, but I felt this undeniable sense of gentle liberation.
I went to the river that afternoon and saw two white seals, a mother and a baby. We watched each other gently, with no one else on the beach, and I felt like I was looking into the purity of my creative essence and how I am designed to mother a child and my own light in this lifetime.
When I eventually found out I was experiencing a missed miscarriage and I would have to midwife my body through the process of labor, I started calling back what I needed to cross the threshold of death: fertility.
I connected to the ocean, the sun, and the plants. I made medicines. I cultivated my light and protected my peace. I yoni steamed to relax my uterus and body oiled to relax my nervous system. I cultivated trust in myself and my body through body communication, movement, and pleasure. I cultivated non-stop like a full-time job with a deadline, so that I would be prepared when my body was ready.
This was even more essential than I thought because my partner could not hold me through my labor. He could only sit and watch while he trembled in fear and silent panic. Now and then, I would instruct him to get hot water for tea or more rosemary from the front of the house, but I knew I was on my own.
I had contractions for 6 hours, moved between worlds to connect to my guides and allies, thought I was bleeding out I lost so much blood, but eventually, my body fully released.
I felt powerful and strong because I had cultivated my light to cross the threshold of death into new life. And though I was annoyed that I was married to a man who couldn't support me in my power and be that anchor of the masculine I desires, I didn't need anything from him because I became that myself and fed myself with what I truly needed: my own light.
Eventually, I tattooed my hummingbird marking over my heart to integrate these teachings, and it was the most painful marking I have ever done because even though I understood the medicine, there was so much in the way of fully embodying it. I couldn't be fully fed by my light and my power in the life I chose, which ultimately led to me leaving my marriage.
This process of self-cultivation isn't just important during times of labor; it is fundamental to all creative processes. If you are not fully fed by your light and cultivating your life force through creation/transformation, you will seek to be filled by anything but yourself.
I often come back to Mary Magdalene for this, as she is the one who guided me to these teachings when I first came to live on the land I would conceive, die, and be reborn on. Mary was a priestess initiate in the ancient goddess cults where the mysteries of creation were studied. Your average priestess would spend decades of their life cultivating their divinity before they could share themselves with another or step fully into their medicine.
This is so different from the modern world, where the pressure of money and production forces women to rush through cultivating their medicine to prove their worth and be filled with what they think they desire: external security.
Because Mary had practiced the art of self-cultivation and moved through many spiritual initiations of death/life to embody the mystery, she could anoint Yeshua as the messiah by sharing with him her holy nectar (her light).
Because of the consciousness he carried, if she had not been in her power, she would have probably been demolished by his (more on this in another piece coming soon). But it was the cultivation of her light, sexuality, sensuality, and love, and sharing it, that he was able to transcend death and become the holy son (to become truly spiritually enlightened as a soul, creating a bridge of light for others to follow), seeding Christ consciousness on the planet.
This could not be done without a sovereign woman in her cultivated creative power.
Like in Mary's time, being sovereign in your feminine, mysterious power still isn't widely accepted. She was ostracized, exiled, hidden, and did what she had to protect her peace and true lineage of Christ. She taught and preached to those open to the feminine leadership she was destined to provide. But it wasn't easy. She became silenced. Her teachings were erased, her gospels burned, and her name forgotten. She became a whore to most for simply being a fertile force of feminine mastery, one that changed the world.
The teachings she anchored and the legacy she birthed have started to be remembered by the feminine consciousness. She came to me in 2019, between writing my book and becoming pregnant, and asked for her voice to be heard and to speak for her. She gave me the seeds of these lessons of creative mastery, and with her gentle yet firm guidance, I threw myself into the spiral walk to embody what I see and know about the mysteries of life, moving through initiation after initiation and cultivating my power so I could share it with others.
I want to teach and remind the feminine of these sacred ways, and only now do I feel ready to share my light more fully because I have been learning how to better protect it. I have been in my own phase of self-cultivation and reclaiming my light in recent years to arrive where I have the energy to share myself without it feeling like my light will be taken or believing in the scarcity stories protected onto the feminine, which also took me through a painful journey of letting go of many relationships that did not serve my mission, and calling in more connections with people who are rooted in their own light too.
I have claimed my desires and padded them with a fence of truth so they could no longer be denied, and I have been making myself a holy anointing to bless the feet of the people I meet. It has required so much strength and devotion to myself in a time with self-cultivation is projected upon as selfish. This is the biggest lie that is at the root of the mother wound (which I dive deeply into in the book I am currently writing). But I have no choice other than to see through the myriad of illusions and claim the truth within the infinite mystery, because I want to see a world where women are fully in their creative power. So I will stay in mine.
As we cross the threshold of Beltane and settle into the sensual bliss Taurus Season brings us, how might you more deeply cultivate your sacred nectar? Where do you need to reclaim your joy, protect your pleasure, honor what is and isn’t healthy for you, and nourish yourself more deeply? Where do you need to get to know your deeper desires? How can you devote yourself to this practice?
If you need support, working with me in a soul/past-life regression (my weaving your web sessions) are a powerful way to explore the mystery of you and learn where you are denying or dismissing your soul desires, and what you may be feeding in your life that is cutting you off from the holy nectar so ready to pour into your life. These are powerful journeys of revelation, remembrance, and reclamation that can gently reorient you towards a higher timeline of destiny where you can devote to your soul’s truth. They often reveal your deepest truths, purpose, and how your light is best expressed in your life.
I am offering these sessions at 20% off through May. You can book your session from now through the first week of July, but the discount can only be applied if you book your session slot this month. The discount will expire on June 1st or before if capacity is reached. Limited availability due to the depth of the space holding, but I am feeling the importance of this feminine remembering work more and ever and I am ready to serve you.
Click the button below or email connect@ashleyriver.co to book
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