The Path Of The Priestess: A Guidebook For Awakening The Divine Feminine
by mythologist and metaphysician Sharron Rose is an impressive and "user friendly" spiritual guidebook of exercises and visualizations to understanding the metaphysical essence of being female. From exploring the divine roles of women, to the mysticism taught in traditions of Hebrew Kabbalists, Christian Gnostics, alchemists, and more, The Path Of The Priestess is an inspirational tome of transcendental spirituality embracing the role model of the Great Goddess. The Path Of The Priestess is strongly recommended reading for anyone seeking to understand the feminine experience as spiritual teachers, visionaries, peacekeepers, and archetypal models of the Great Goddess in Eastern and Western spiritual traditions.

This is a magical book, rich with the feeling of the Great Goddess, who is within us all, although much wounded. Sharron Rose is a masterful teacher and writer. She manages, even through words, to communicate the primacy, the beauty, and the majesty of the Goddess straight to our hearts.

"Goddess Consciousness is the evolutionary path of choice for the planet," says Penny Slinger Hills. Sharron believes this, and so do I.

Sharron describes the path of one woman, a Westerner, herself, who develops her Goddess energy through connecting with ancient wisdom

"There is a sacred current of light that runs throughout time and space," says Sharron, "the light of the Divine Feminine. It is a continuum. It arises at the birth of creation and forms a sacred path into the denseness of matter and back again. This light is always present to nourish and sustain us. Flowing through all our lives and incarnations, it is the vital and transformative current of truth, virtue, and integrity, a shining stream of spiritual essence that leads us along the path of emanation to the path of return and reunion with the primordial source." She continues: "As women, as emissaries of the Great Goddess, it is our sacred duty and privilege to hold this current of light in our hearts and carry it from generation to generation. This is our essential role as women: to hold this pure light of Divinity in our hearts, to keep the lamp of inner freedom burning in the darkness, to nurture and protect this light whatever the cost, and to transmit its radiance, its exquisite beauty, to our men and children."Throughout the ages, women know that they carry the light and, like Vesta, keep the hearth ever-glowing. With good reason, Vesta was the most revered of the Roman goddesses. And she was the only one who never left the hearth to go sit in her assigned seat on Mt. Olympus.

Over the years, the Great Goddess has fallen from respect. In this rich and wonderful book, Sharron lifts some of the veils which have been obscuring her, and allows us to know, bond with, and celebrate this great central principle of life and creativity.

Sharron was a professional dancer in New York City. She had a variety of experiences related to dancing which touched her with Goddess power. But it was after a "dark" retreat that she decided to fully pursue the path of Goddess. It was a challenge for, as Sharron points out, we live in a society that has almost forgotten the Great Goddess. Sharron began with her connection with India, through dance, and systematically explored ancient teachings and practices all over the world where the feminine principle was esteemed. She shares her journey of discovery with us.

Looking within is the key to unlocking the feminine power deep within us. Sharron devotes three chapters to meditations and visualizations designed to help with this process of spiritual awakening. Each of these three chapters is devoted to a different aspect of female embodiment, and Sharron includes pictures and descriptions which give us a good idea of the goddess qualities of that embodiment. These are powerful chapters, and do indeed bring us home to the goddess within.

I found The Path of the Priestess one of the most outstanding and satisfying books I’ve come across for many years. I can pick it up, open it anywhere, and be reminded—in beautiful, graceful, heartfelt prose—of the value of the feminine.

For me, the Statue of Liberty, holding aloft the torch of freedom as a beacon for all who enter the United States, exemplifies the destiny of this country in returning us to the goddess.

Thank you, Sharron Rose, for sharing your goddess wisdom with us. Reading this book can be a big step in reclaiming our feminine heritage.

Sharron Rose, a Fulbright scholar, dancer, teacher and writer has led an exceptional life, training under the tutelage of 60-year old Sitara Devi, the foremost Kathak dancer in India. From her she learned to embody the manifestation of the panoply of India’s gods and goddesses like Shiva, lord of death, and Saraswati, the goddess of learning, music, poetry, the arts, purification and poetry. To those in the West this may sound just picturesque, but in India it is highly monumental and means training as the embodiment of a deity, a cultural legacy, a literary and art repository, and becoming an everyday object of worship.

When the sacred entered her life, along with it came the awakening and responsibility of an understanding of the hidden dimension of dreams, visions and feelings and recognizing that they were not just part of an overactive mythic imagination. As a true temple dancer her responsibility was to depict the "play of energies and forces". She had to become the embodiment of the seductive milkmaid Radha and her beloved lord Krishna, Mirabai the 16th century princess of Rajasthan who became a visionary poet and saint and Durga’s wild and protective energies. Sharron managed to do this while raising a young son (who accompanied her during this time) and flitting back and forth in her role as wife to a increasingly successful American entertainment lawyer.

With her marriage in shambles, she returned to the United States and became a student of Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche, immersing herself in Tibetan Tantra. Norbu taught her to face her obstacles and she became more sensitized to the forces that "lay at the root of both my own actions and those of others". She also became a chod practitioner and embarked upon a 10 day dark retreat.

But Sharron didn’t stop there, and the book chronicles how she also became the student of Dr. Robert E. Lee Master and his wife, Dr. Jean Houston, authors of "The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience". She journeyed with Dr. Masters to the "inner landscape of vision", ancient Egypt to meet the Goddess Sekhmet and experience her elemental forces, similar to what tantra would refer to as kundalini unfolding. She learnt how to heal, belly dance, and cojoin with her tantric consort, the hermetic scholar Jay Weidner, who furthered her investigation into alchemy and its connection to mystic Christianity.

The Path of the Priestess discusses a history of the feminine mysteries and offers insights on how to break away from the "cult of consumerism", with a call to create a sacred society with "a real desire for spiritual transformation". Sharron includes illuminating stories of the myths of the goddesses. The final third of the book is a step-by-step "how-to" primer of visualizations and meditations. The first, on the Strong and Fiery Goddess uses breath and imagery to evoke chakra energy. Another exercise evokes the goddesses of strength and power through guided meditations centered on self-confidence, divine pride, the glance of penetration, amusement, majesty, deliberation, fierceness, pacification, intoxication, determination, playfulness and wildness and passion.

Using the Tibetan princess Mandarava as an archetype, the book offers an entire chapter in exploring sensuality by focusing on receptivity, dreaminess, passion, demureness, mysteriousness, flirtatiousness, bliss, joy, enchantment, contentment, ecstasy, and finally love.

The final chapter is on love and compassion, discussing female deities like Isis, Mary, Kuan Yin and Tara with explanations of each ones mythology. Sharron then instructs on how to create an energy field of the Peaceful Goddess to evoke humility, inspiration, gratitude, devotion, divine love, empathy, nobility, compassion, meditative bliss, soothingness, radiance, and rapture.

And what would the world possibly be without rapture? Or this book.

In 1983, Sharron Rose left her life in the United States, with only her young son beside her, to study sacred dance in India. What she learned there, so at odds with what she had been taught up until that time, changed her life.

The Path of the Priestess is partly biographical, the story of how Rose came to the path she chose, and partly instructional, with discussion of the place of women in the world and in divinity and exercises to free the divine feminine in all women.

The book is divided into two sections. In Part I, Rose discusses her path, her time in India, where she studied temple dance and learned how to embody the various divinities of Hindu culture, and what happened when she returned to the U.S. She talks about the next phase of her training, when she was a student of the Tibetan teacher Chogyal Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche, and learned the Tibetan ways of clarifying one's mind. She goes on to discuss her studies of ancient Egyptian dance and culture, and then her trainings in various healing arts. It is a fascinating biographical study, and includes some lovely photographs of Rose dancing.

Part II of the book is devoted to the place of femininity in Western and Eastern cultures and how the West has suffered by displacing the feminine energies of the goddess. It is a section sure to provoke deep thought in any reader. This section also includes meditations and exercises to help the reader experience the various aspects of the divine feminine.

The Path of the Priestess is a fascinating and thoughtful book, interesting both as biography and as an argument on why we need to return the divine feminine to our modern lives.

- written by Laurie Thayer

In our world at this time, there is a great imbalance between masculine and feminine energies. It goes further than that - the Divine Feminine needs to be literally rediscovered. The sacred energy of the Priestess needs to be put back in place for the world to heal.

The sub-title of this book is A Guidebook For Awakening The Divine Feminine. The Path Of The Priestess is a guidebook in that it points to the path of the Divine Feminine. It also acts as a workbook, in that there are meditations and exercises that open all women to the full experience of Goddess energy, and to their inherent sensuality and sexuality.

Because it is so important, I am going to give you Sharron Rose's biography from the back cover of The Path Of The Priestess: "Sharron Rose, an internationally acclaimed teacher, writer and performer and Fulbright scholar in world mythology, religion, and sacred dance, has been investigating t he wisdom of ancient cultures for the past twenty-five years. She lives in Los Olivos, California, with her husband and hermetic scholar, Jay Weidner."

We begin our journey with Sharron, a young Jewish wife and mother, a product of the feminist movement - a career in dance behind her - journeying to India to study sacred dance with the foremost Kathak dancer Sitara Devi. Journeying with her was her three year old son, Ari. Over the next five years, Sharron Rose would study all aspects of sacred dance and the divine feminine. She would change her view of herself, and of the world around her. At the end of this time, she would return to the United States to resume her life as the wife of a high powered music industry lawyer - a man who was devoted to his work, and expected her to fulfill the role of wife to a high powered executive.

Into the author's life came Tibetan Master Chogyal Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche. She joined his community and studied Tibetan culture with him. It was here that she met Paul Leake, who was to become her primary accompanist and creative partner in the venue of the sacred dance of India. It was in her studies with Rinpoche that Rose learned to manifest what is called the rainbow body - a tool for purifying body, mind and spirit.

The Path Of The Priestess is filled with stunning pictures of Sharron Rose in numerous Goddess and sacred dance poses, as well as some featuring her Guruji Sitara Devi. It is filled with the background of the Tibetan, Indian and Egyptian Goddesses, and the nurturing role that they play in the energetic, emotional and psychic life of those around them. Rose also speaks of the world of the alchemist, of Hebrew Kabbalsits and Christian Gnostics. She also speaks of the chakra's, and how we manifest the energy within us.

The second half of The Path Of The Priestess is devoted to exploring the three aspects of the Goddess through visualization, meditation and personal exercises. The first aspect of the Goddess is strength and power, as seen through the goddesses Kali, Sekhmet and Simhamukha, and through the myth of the warrior goddess Durga.

The second aspect of the Goddess is sensuality, as shown through the goddesses Lakshimi, Hathor, Mandarava and Inanna. 

The third aspect of the Goddess is experiencing love and compassion, as shown through the goddess Isis, the Blessed Virgin Mary, Kuan Yin and Tara.

For anyone who truly wants to understand Shakti energy and the sacred historical role of Goddesses and Priestess's, for anyone who wants a thorough background in Goddess myth and lore, for anyone who wants to experience this energy in their own life - I highly recommend The Path Of The Priestess. One last thought - be willing to do the work! 

- Written by Bonnie Cehovet, TM

New Dawn Magazine

Once, we are told, God was a woman.…

To the ancients the mystery of birth and death as expressed in the seasons, the phases of the Moon and the movement of the stars meant that the creator was feminine, and therefore women, and all that is feminine, must be closest to that essence. For millennium priestesses held the power and the Earth prospered.

There is a universal longing to return to this time of balance, and for author, dancer and priestess, Sharron Rose, her life's journey has been one of uncovering an ancient wisdom that seems lost in this world of the Internet, telephone banking and mobile phones.…

The Path of the Priestess takes us on a compelling journey deep into the heart of feminine experience. It presents a glimpse of the essential and significant role of women as caretakers of the psychic, energetic and emotional landscape of society.…

Author Sharron Rose has been investigating the wisdom of ancient cultures for the past twenty five years, and the reader is carried with her on a delightful journey of spiritual exploration.…

We first travel back in time to the 1970s and to India where the author spends many years under the tutelage of her teacher and mentor Sitara Devi in India. There she learns that she is too "boyish" and must eat more to become a round and curvaceous woman. The jeans and T-shirts are cast to one side as she embraces the silk and embroidered sari and learns the ancient art of seductive dance.…

Through dance, Rose learns to embrace the energies of the great goddesses of India and their wisdom for this world. With so many young women suffering from eating disorders and many others over-eating and facing a life of obesity, it is interesting to look at the advice given to Sharron by her teacher, Sitara.…

In India women are encouraged to be ultra-feminine and to wear seductive clothing, not to tantalise but to celebrate their feminine charms.

From there she embraces the wisdom of the Tibetan dakinis through her teacher Chogyal Namkhai Norbu. She discovers the many parallels between the Indian Goddesses and the dancing Dakini spirits who are connected to nature.…

The next part of the journey takes us to ancient Egypt and the wisdom of Hathor and Isis through her teacher Dr. Robert Masters.…

Here we discover that even from the most ancient of times, the wise Goddesses ruled the world.…

Finally the author discovers the wisdom of the Kabbalah, the alchemists and the Gnostics and the connection to Egypt, Mary Magdalene and the Tree of Life.

We follow Sharron Rose as she takes the journey of the priestess and begins to understand her own spiritual journey through the eyes of the Great Goddess who is everywhere and yet always remains hidden.…

The first segment of this book takes us on a mystical journey through the eyes of the author as she explores and rediscovers the Goddess is indeed everywhere and in every element of Western and Eastern spirituality.…

At times the Goddess seems obscure but with focus and clarity. Sharron Rose reveals her majesty shining brightly in everything, including the mysterious Notre Dame cathedral.

The second part of the book uncovers ancient ceremonies and rituals to help women reconnect to their innate "Goddessness." The author has discovered many secret and forgotten rituals to help ignite the inner kundalini or chi-energies that dance through the body.…

She gently describes the techniques used in ancient Egypt, India and Tibet through focus and visualisation. This energy is inexorably sexual in essence and requires the adept to focus her attention on her reproductive organs, awakening them to their inherent spiritual powers.

There is a universal desire to return to the ways of the Divine Feminine. We see umpteen workshops and dozens of books encouraging women to return to these ancient ways.…

We see this also in the many books on the secret marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. However, with much of the wisdom lost or suspect, we need guides of the calibre of Sharron Rose to point us in the right direction.…

Many readers may still, even unconsciously, embrace puritanical and repressive ideas of feminine sexuality, but if you are truly going to embark upon the pathway of the priestess these austere and unbalanced ideas must be replaced by ancient truth.…

The ancient truth, as Sharron Rose points out, is that sexuality, when used for spiritual growth and nurtured with reverence and love, is a speedy and powerful pathway to enlightenment.…

The author is quick to point out that this liberation of sexual energy and sexual spirituality also liberates men. When the Goddess unites with the God, their oneness lifts them both from the heavy and negative energies of repression into the ecstasy of unity. This is the heart and soul of tantric wisdom.

In the millennium since the repression of the Goddess, women have been taught to believe that their bodies are not beautiful unless they fit the currently fashionable image.…

Women have been taught to put a lid on their sexual appetite because it is un-spiritual. Women have been taught that because of the temptation of Eve, sexuality leads to downfall. All of this is pretty heavy stuff and therefore not an easy thought-system to overthrow.…

Many women probably 'know' they are being manipulated to remain powerless, and therefore non-threatening, which is why so many are obsessed by their appearance and fear their aging bodies. But many women also know, deep in their hearts, there is a better way.

Sharron Rose's book sets the record straight, and in the process frees women from this subservient archetype. However, she emphasises that the journey must begin with self-love and self-acceptance. From there the would-be priestess is free to venture into the many ancient, secret and misunderstood rituals.…

Any fledgling priestess who seriously wishes to awaken her own innate abilities would be well advised to seriously study this book.…

The Path of the Priestess provides contemporary women with the means to walk this time-honoured path. It is an insightful book that both entertains and reveals ancient wisdom through the path of the intrepid explorer Sharron Rose.…

Surely all women in this world are currently exploring this path, and surely this book will prove to be a land-mark text in this ever-expanding journey of awakening.

- Lesley Crossingham

Appeared in New Dawn No. 99 (November-December 2006)

This 72 minute DVD features Sharron Rose, a dancer, artist, philosopher, and the author of The Path of the Priestess: a Guidebook for Awakening the Divine Feminine. In Yoga of Light she introduces her new creation: a feminine-based yoga practice. This gentle but profound practice draws on ancient energetic principles to create a series of asanas, or yoga postures designed to cleanse, restore, and protect women's bodies and the energy fields surrounding them.

The program is conducted entirely from a seated position, making it easy for people of all skill levels to participate. Like any yoga practice, the stretching and breathing techniques encourage stress reduction and relaxation. Rose explains the breath's important role in achieving harmony and balance and how to use it to open ourselves to possibilities.

However, Yoga of Light focuses on two specific techniques that enhance the unique dynamics of the female energy field. The first technique involves pulling energy from the feet up, following the path energy travels in the female body, through the pelvis and up to the heart; in so doing opening and strengthening the life force.

The second technique involves using the nearly lost art of mudras - hand gestures that mimic the flow of chi, or energy, through the body - to teach the viewer to consciously direct her own vital forces. The lovely mudras Rose offers are specifically attuned to a woman's energy.

Yoga of Light is a powerful program that links women to their own vital energy, thus heightening their awareness of the divine feminine. In it Rose draws from ancient wisdom, making it relevant to women seeking greater self-fulfillment and peace.

Kelly Walters, Sage Woman Magazine, NO. 72, June 2007