The One With The Divine Feminine Awakening

I hold a belief that places call to us. Not only physical places, but places in time; moments. And that call comes from the inside, from a voice we can only hear when the world is silent. At first, the call is subtle, like a light breeze that touches your skin on a summer's day. Then, it becomes a gentle nudge, the way a stranger might graze your shoulder as they hurry past. And soon, if the call still hasn’t planted a seed in your conscious mind, it may turn up the volume and start appearing in the form of physical signs—you know, those signs that seem so unusual, yet so innately relatable you can’t ignore them? 

I’ve developed quite the knack for seeing the signs and following them like marks on a treasure map. Even when the signs point me to something so bizarre, somewhere so seemingly out of reach, I’ve learned to trust them—admittedly with the help of the occasional tarot card or conversation with the Spirit realms. Some define this deep knowing as intuition: the ability to understand something instinctively without the need for conscious reasoning. This, I believe, is the birthright of every human being on this planet. We have a gift to know ourselves deeply, and that gift strengthens when we trust ourselves enough to believe in the messages that appear before us. 

Intuition guided me this year, and in February, I relocated to Brisbane, Australia. For the first time in at least ten years, all of my material belongings—which equate to as much as would fit in the back of my Nissan X-trail—were in the same vicinity. That might not seem like a significant feat, but as someone who has never lived in the same house for more than a few years, it signalled that, perhaps, a renewed definition of home wasn’t too far around the corner.

It had been a wondrous ten years, albeit full of displacement. I basked in the identity of a nomad, yet simultaneously longed for roots that would release me from the need to pack my life into a backpack (or a car) and move on. Living from a backpack was the norm for me. I moved every few months, sometimes every few days. I crossed vast oceans, met beautiful people, and collected experiences like stamps in the passport of my life’s story. It was who I was, until it wasn’t—until the signs started to appear, nudging me as if to say, ‘it’s time to find your tree now. It’s time to find the tree where you will build your nest.’

So I listened, and drove the roughly ten hours north from Sydney to Brisbane, knowing deep down that this was the way forward; that this unwavering decision to wholly and permanently relocate my life was an integral part of the transformative journey my soul had chosen to embark on. Some decisions feel temporary. Others feel like there is no going back—as though you are staring deeply at a part of your old self disintegrating in the flames, watching it vanish to create space for the new to enter. I knew there was no going back to Sydney, my birthplace. That story was complete now. 

Upon my arrival in Brisbane, unwrapping the belongings that had waited patiently for the last ten years inside boxes labelled ‘Bianca’s stuff’ made me feel like a child on Christmas morning. There were old photographs captured at a time before photographs were few and far between, before we kept Google drives full of pictures of what we had for breakfast. There were clothes I’d forgotten I owned, birthday cards from people I once loved intimately, and knick-knacks from as far back as Grade 7. These few boxes contained a collection that depicted my life. Enough for a small, yet meaningful, exhibition about the life (or many lives) of Bianca Jade Caruana. I had been so many women in this time; we embody so many versions of ourselves in one lifetime, don’t we?

I continued to sort through my belongings, discovering an unopened gift. I’d almost forgotten what it was until I began to carefully remove the bubble-wrap cover of a beautiful, handcrafted clay artwork I’d been gifted in 2014, when my friend and I helped fund the construction of a village school in Siem Reap, Cambodia. That era of my life felt so long ago. Yet, a piece remained all these years later: a work of art depicting three Cambodian goddesses (Apsaras), dressed in traditional costumes, with ornate headdresses crowning their heads and hands poised in sacred mudras. I couldn’t help but feel as though the artwork was waiting for this exact moment in time when it would emerge from the bottom of a storage box and be put on display on my bedroom wall in the suburbs of South-east Queensland, as if carrying a message from the past. Were these goddesses here to remind me of something I had forgotten? Was it a sign I never knew I was looking for?

The goddesses of times gone by had appeared more frequently to me in the last two years, revealing themselves to me moment after moment, like a dream I once had but couldn’t quite remember the finer details. From Inanna to Sekhmet, Freya to Mary Magdalene, the divine feminine had appeared to me in many forms, and it was becoming apparent that there was something I had forgotten—or perhaps, something that had intentionally been hidden from me. 

I was raised in a modern, patriarchal-dominant Western culture that has forgotten its connection to the feminine. Force-fed Catholicism since birth, I was told we worship one God, the Father. And we do as we’re told, and we mind our manners, and we don’t speak out, and we don’t question what the Bible (aka the authorities) say. Essentially, we are told to behave how we’re supposed to according to the men who wrote the doctrine. And in adhering to this way of life, for much of my lived experience, I became severed from my own femininity. 

It wasn’t until I left my corporate career almost ten years ago that, unbeknownst to me at the time, my path was to find my way back to my most innate essence as woman. That was, to exist like the sea in all her forms, to be wild and untamed, to commune with the spirits of land and sky, to see the unseen and to stand at the cyclical thresholds of life, death and rebirth with a primordial knowing that flows through my blood and the blood of those who came before me.

This unravelling—this unbecoming—had me question everything I’d ever been taught; everything I’d ever been told to believe. And for the first time in a long time, I felt like I was home in my body. Home in this miraculous, life-birthing vessel that holds a power so fierce it threatens those who stand before it. When I started to reconnect with myself—my femininity—I started to explore the long era of the suppression of the feminine and why those who sought to erase her from the story did as they did. They were threatened by her power, and so they sought to make us forget it. 

These past few years have been about remembrance. You can make the mind forget, but wisdom will never die; it lives beyond. And that wisdom has been returning to me. As I unpacked the boxes in my new home, that wisdom was erupting through me like a dormant volcano ready to light up the night sky. 

Goddesses of times gone by had first reappeared to me while I was conducting research for a book I was working on about women in 16th-century Malta. That research took me on a journey thousands of years into the past, arriving in the Late Neolithic era at the magnificent limestone structures of Ġgantija, located on the small Mediterranean island of Gozo, Malta. Here, archaeologists have discovered ancient artifacts (~6000 years old) in the shapes of women’s bodies, revealing an age-old worship of the feminine in her role as creatress. It ignited a question from deep within—where were all the depictions of women in the history I had been taught? Where were the stories of her role in the long story of the Earth? I’d been made to study the Christian Bible since childhood, but the older I became, the more I realised I’d been force-fed a story written by men who promised salvation while setting the world on fire.

It was my biggest awakening—coming to terms with the fact that most of what I had been taught throughout my Western upbringing was a stolen story plagiarised and repackaged by the blood-stained hands of those with an endless hunger for control, waging war on the collective human consciousness. Once I’d witnessed this reality in all its dystopian form, there was nothing left but to revolt. Though this revolution was not of violence or division, it was of spirit, of truth, of a deep acknowledgement of that which had been taken away from me; from us. The revolution was upon us. And you, my friend, are here for the show.

Around the time of this ancient stirring, as I settled into my sedentary lifestyle in the Sunshine State of Australia, there was a calmness to my life I hadn’t felt in years. I had space, not only in the literal sense but space in my inner world, an unconfined capacity to sit with where I was on this life’s journey and ask, ‘What now?’

So, I did as any writer would do with that kind of boundless space, I put pen to paper (or in my case, fingertips to keyboard), and started writing. By mid-March, I had half a book under my belt, post-it notes sticking out of about twenty research materials on my bookshelf, and an unrelenting engrossment in the long story of the feminine—in my long story of the feminine. As I wrote the pages of my novel, appropriately titled Reclaim Your Power, I realised that I was living out a chapter in the pages of my story. I was witnessing the patriarchy’s last stand. 

Intrigued by the role I had to play inside the pages, I let myself be guided by my intuition. I was understanding by now that this innate power, when trusted unwaveringly, can guide us to where it is we ought to be going. So I trusted, and the path began to appear in front of me, in sacred moments that spoke the language of the cosmos.

Just like places call to us, I believe so do people. In a world of, allegedly, eight billion, it is no coincidence to feel an instant familiarity with someone you’ve only just met. That stranger at a coffee shop with whom you’ve shared more of your soul in an hour than with your entire extended family over a lifetime. That chance reunion with someone you met years ago, only to see them again in a quaint Mediterranean village on an island thousands of miles away. That soul-stirring collision with someone you instantly knew would change your life forever… This beautiful life has a way of entangling us with one another in ways that are somehow meant to be.

That’s how it felt when I met Heather, a vibrant, brunette, Scottish-born lass who entered my orbit at the birthday gathering of a friend of a friend back in the summer of 2023. In an instant, we knew we spoke the same metaphysical language and connected that evening over our shared love for life and all that it brings. It wasn’t too long after this serendipitous encounter that she reached out to me and invited me to a Kundalini Activation experience on an unsuspecting Saturday morning in late January. 

I may have declined this offer had I not received a seemingly unrelated message three hours before this invitation. That message was from another almost lifelong friend, who’d never met Heather, nor knew of my encounter with Heather. The message read:

“Hey, question? Can we get matching snake tattoos?”

I casually replied with, “Hmm, I feel like I need to awaken my kundalini first.”

At this time, I don’t recall really understanding exactly what the word kundalini meant. It must have entered my sphere of awareness once or twice, dancing around me like a fleeting butterfly, but not yet landing. The symbolism of the word is rooted in Vedic tradition and relates to ‘Shakti,’ the divine feminine energy of creation. The word itself translates in Sanskrit to ‘coiled,’ as in the coiled serpent. Hence, serpent imagery is associated with the word. A part of me must have known this to make the snake-kundalini correlation. Nevertheless, that morning, almost three hours after this message was received, Heather texted me to invite me to a Kundalini Activation experience the following day. 

The text read, “I’m thinking of going to a Kundalini Activation on Saturday if you’re interested.”

Three…hours…later!

If I needed a sign, this was it. There was no asking for a signier sign. I was meant to be in that experience on that Saturday morning at that modest yoga studio on King Street, in Newtown. I was meant to learn about this ancient medicine that had been buried beneath years of controlling, dogmatic rule. I was meant to keep following this path of the divine feminine, following the signs that would continue to awaken the knowledge that lived deep within me.

I have no doubt She called to me, across time, across place. I could feel Her in the winds. If I’d learned anything in this long, beautiful life, it was to trust those callings, even if they don’t make sense to anyone else, even if they don’t make logical sense to you. Contrary to popular belief, logic doesn't always need to run your show. Intuition can. Believe me, I’m the proof. 

What happened across those days, my friends, is what you call serendipity, fate, destiny—all of the above. That was the beginning of my journey—at least in this lifetime—with Kundalini Activation. That was the moment I knew I would say yes to this path; this path of remembering the ancient divine feminine arts, of reclaiming my power and role as a mystic in this lifetime.