The Sacred Third: Where the Divine Feminine Meets the Noble Masculine with Elayne Kalila

PodcastSpiritual Ecology
Written By Geneva Tolentino

What happens when we stop choosing sides between light and shadow, masculine and feminine, right and wrong—and instead stand in a sacred third space?

Meet Elayne Kalila Doughty, MA, MFT, a priestess‑psychotherapist whose life’s work is reclaiming the divine feminine and midwifing women into their full, unapologetic power. She is an ordained priestess and focalizer of both the 13 Moon Mystery School and the Rosa Mystica Mystery School, and has been on a path of passionate service for the past thirty years, inspiring women around the world to unleash their leadership gifts and step into their full potential.

Elayne is also the Dean and Founder of the Priestess Presence School of the Sacred Arts + Temple, a modern mystery school that serves a sisterhood of over 100,000 women worldwide. She trains, initiates, and ordains women as modern‑day priestesses, ceremonialists, and powerful feminine leaders in all walks of life and professions. Her work specializes in helping women tap into their deepest wisdom and harness their own transformational power so they can be more effective and whole in every aspect of their lives.

In this conversation, you’ll hear about Magdalene consciousness, internal alchemy, and the “noble masculine” now stepping into the room, as well as Elayne’s work with women in perimenopause and menopause, which she frames not as decline but as a second becoming. The episode closes with a powerful blessing and invocation for the divine human in each of us.

If this episode moves you, please share it with a friend, leave a review, and help us widen this field of love and sacred inquiry.


In this episode, we cover so many topics, including:


  • (00:00:01) Opening, Divine Feminine Context & Offerings 

  • (00:05:00) Spiritual Awakening: First contact with her Magdalene Consciousness

  • (00:11:08) Church of England’s erasure of the Feminine Faces of God

  • (00:12:47) Global Pilgrimage and Goddess Traditions

  • (00:18:02) What is a Mystery school?

  • (00:25:24) Internal Alchemy and Shadow Work: Transforming Judgment and Shame

  • (00:36:39) The Sacred Third and the Middle Way Beyond Right/Wrong Polarity 

  • (00:44:35) Divine Feminine and Noble Masculine: Sacred Union and Christian Tantra 

  • (00:50:04) Emergence of the Noble Masculine and Co‑Leading Sacred Union Work 

  • (00:52:07) Menopause as Second Becoming: Wild Knowing, Spiritual Rebirth, and Leadership 

  • (00:57:06) Closing Blessing and Invocation for the Divine Human



Helpful links:

Upcoming Offerings by Elayne Kalila, visit her website for more information


Your host:

Ongoing Classes by Christine:



Brought to you by Rosebud Woman, Award Winning Intimate and Body Care:




Christine Marie Mason

@christinemariemason

@rosebudwoman

Founder, Rosebud Woman

Co-Founder, Radiant Farms and Sundari Gardens

Host, The Rose Woman on Love and Liberation: 

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Transcript

Christine Mason  0:01  

You cannot love something in another that you have not loved in self. Hello everybody, it's Christine Marie Mason. If you're new here, welcome to the Rose Woman Podcast on love and liberation, where we cover all kinds of stuff on consciousness and embodiment, how we make a world where we're more connected to ourselves and each other and the earth and create cultures and societies and structures that come from this sense of oneness and shared wonder and enchantment at the mere fact that we are alive. I have been doing a lot of writing and work recently on rethroning the divine feminine in our heart, and in the process of doing that, I came across the work of Elayne Kalila. You may recall a little bit ago that there was a website called Motherless that was found, discovered as sort of a rape academy, and it was incredibly, I don't know, like heartbreaking on one level, disgusting on another level, shocking on another level, and the very name of it pointed to this thing that you know we'd been sensing that without a divine feminine there are all kinds of warps that happen. It both happens for women who can't fully step into their own potency and beauty and kind of gets trickled out in unhealthy mothering, and the masculine sort of doesn't respect the feminine, and as the feminine is degraded on the outside, he can't see and access in his own amazing embodiment, his capacity to be nurturing and creative and soft in the ways that he needs to be soft to be fully alive, so this rethroning of the divine feminine masculine was really on my mind when I came across the work of Elayne Kalila. She wrote a beautiful piece about motherless, and I responded to it. Dialog began. So she is our guest today. Before we start talking about how amazing she is, I want to tell you about my own programs that are coming up. If you're listening to this in the summer of 2026 I am teaching Wednesdays at noon Pacific Time, a whole series of mini courses out of the Living Tantra curriculum. One is on Waking down, waking down into the body, feeling into your sexual, sensual, erotic self as a pervasive life force in your capacity to create and live more freely. I am teaching a unit on Rasa, the practice of cultivating beauty as a devotional spiritual practice, including scent and flowers and music, and like, really intentionally being in the beauty way, and where that comes from in the ancient scriptures. I have a unit on The Willingness Teachings, vasana and frequency. You can have what you really want and what to do when there's something you clearly desire, and you know exactly how to get it, but you don't act. How to sort of go in and sneak around and discover the frequencies that are blocking that, that comes out of ancient teachings on Vasana. And then my fall courses are up for registration, hoping to see some of you there. The retreats are up for registration also. We have our November immersion once again, and that will be on the Big Island of Hawaii, so check me out at christinemariemason.com And if you are looking for sensual, sexual, erotic support with your perimenopause, menopausal, or other kinds of transitions, please come to Rosewoman.com and enjoy the products we've created, as well as the products we've curated for more sensual and embodied pleasure, reverent living in your body your whole life long. So, my guest today, Elayne Kalila, has spent more than three decades following a single question across cathedrals and continents, a question that arrived when she was 13, and the sacrament that she longed for left her cold. The question is, where are all the women? Elayne is a psychotherapist, an ordained priestess, a best-selling author, and the founder and dean of the Priestess Presence Mystery School and Temple, a community of 10s of 1000s of women around the world. What you're about to hear is part initiation story part working theology of love. We trace her path from the Anglican Church to the goddesses of India to the lineage she now carries, and we go deep into the heart of her practice.


Christine Mason  4:32  

How we meet our own shadow, something you've heard on this show before. How we move past right and wrong into what she calls the sacred third, or a space of, in my opinion, non-judgment and unconditional love, and why, after 35 years of working only with women, or primarily with women, she's now calling the noble masculine into the room. Stay with us to the end. We close in a beautiful blessing. Here is Elayne Kalila. Hey.


Elayne Kalila  5:00  

I was raised in England, and I was raised in a pretty fractured family, but what was real was on one side of my family was the Church of England, which was like, you know, imagine the Anglican stuffy hymns and old ladies and tweed jackets and all that kind of stuff in the Holy Communion, and then on the other side, my mother's side, she became a born-again Christian, so she was an evangelical Christian, which is very different breed of Christianity, as you probably well know. And so I was from a very early age very, very connected into Christianity. I loved Jesus. I thought Jesus was my boyfriend. I thought I was going to marry him when I grew up, and I had a very intimate, special relationship with him. So, I grew up kind of in these two different churches, and I decided somewhere along the line that I was going to become confirmed, and that meant going through the Church of England too, because I really wanted to take the bread and the wine, like that was a whole mystery that I was like I want to get up there, I want to be able to drink from the chalice and eat Jesus's body sounds very into it, right? So I went to what they call, you know, confirmation classes around the age of 13, you go to be confirmed in the way that happens is you go to a cathedral in England and there's a bishop with the big pointy hat, and you know, he comes along, and there was all of us standing there, you know, in our white dress. This is not quite like the Catholic tradition, where you're the brides of Christ, it's not quite, quite that explicit, but he comes along, and he is to anoint you with the holy oil, and the holy oil is placed upon the third eye in the shape of a crucifix, like the sacred, you know, shape in symbol, and he stood in front of me, and I looked up into his eyes, and I had this experience of seeing that there was no one there. It was like he was blank, and he was just going through the motions, so when he put his hands onto my body, and I was waiting to receive the Holy Spirit, right, the Holy Ghost. I thought there was going to be this extraordinary experience. Nothing happened, and in that moment, my 13 year old self went, "This is bullshit, and I went, whoa, and I heard another voice say, Where are all the women? Where are all the women? And that moment changed the whole direction of my life, because I left the church in disgust, you know, as only a 13 year old can do in her pre-adolescent years, and it set me upon this really pretty much a dark night of the soul, where I, I was looking and searching for something that felt like the thing that I knew I was looking for. I was looking for a feeling, and I couldn't find it, and that set me off on this massive pilgrimage that I traveled all over the world in my late teens, my early 20s, all the way, you know, in India and Thailand and Africa, and you name it, looking for the feminine face of God.


Christine Mason  8:11  

I have a question about the self trust inherent in that moment, and do you experience the moment as a 13 year old of being able to say grotto this isn't right as a precondition something that was already in you as a grace or as something you were acculturated to were you raised to trust your own inner voice where in your mind did that come from


Elayne Kalila  8:36  

I feel like that was my first contact with my higher self my first real contact with what I would call my Magdalene consciousness, what later I identified as being her presence within me, but that piece was no, I was raised in an environment where my, whenever I spoke what was true to me, that was questioned, you know, because I was always labeled as the one who was too reactive, hysterical, too sensitive. Right, I was that kid inside of a family that did not understand me, and so I was actually taught the opposite. I was taught to mistrust my feelings, and that led to a whole slew of issues later on with mental health issues, where I couldn't discern what was true or not true, so this was a very unusual experience, because I was very clear, beautiful. There was a level of clarity, Christine, that that came out like a bolt of lightning. You know how we talk about an epiphany, where it's like a shard of light, it was one of those where it was like an.. and there was no choice but to leave,


Christine Mason  9:41  

so in a way the anointing didn't give you the experience of the spirit in the body that you'd expected, but it gave you another one outside of the constraints of the church, that's so beautiful,


Elayne Kalila  9:55  

exactly. And how ironic and wonderful and beautiful is it that it was the sacred act? Of anointing, which all these years later is one of the primary priestess sacred arts that I now teach and ordain priestesses into as sacred anointresses. So it's wild. I often think about that, you know, how could I didn't know, but I knew, right?


Christine Mason  10:18  

I learned about the practice of anointing the entire body from Shiva Ray, yeah, sort of the daily self massage, and then the sacred anointing that goes on in Buddhism in Nepal, it's like across the planet, that's an act of sacred crutch. Okay, so you, so you begin this acknowledgement, like, where are all the women, and I'm imagining that in England at that time that that was a pretty difficult thing to find. As a side note, I've just spent quite a couple of months in Southern Europe, in Portugal, and Southern France, and Southern Spain, where it's all Mary. It is Mary, Mary, Mary everywhere, Black Madonna, it's Mary, Mary Magdalene, all the Mary's Mother Mary, it's all the aspects of the divine feminine everywhere, and I'm like, this was not part of what I saw, but yay. So, how did you move into the inquiry around where are all the women?


Elayne Kalila  11:08  

That's a great question, and you're exactly right, because in England, certainly with the Church of England, there are there are not even any Mary's, right? In the Anglican Church, there's no Mary, there's no Mother Mary, let alone any other Mary, so the feminine face of God really became erased. I just want to jump in on that, because I met Rupert Sheldrake. Oh, I love him. Yes,


Christine Mason  11:30  

he's a Magdalene devotee. It's like when his ish to Devata, and he was saying that the reason for that was that King Henry the Eighth, you know, when he started the Anglican church. One of the first things he did was eliminate all the shrines to marry and all the earth-based pilgrimage paths, and so it's like baked into the sort of the man who forced the split with Catholicism already had the misogynistic attitude that he was amplifying through his own wives, and so the entire spirituality sort of is a shadow of this guy,


Elayne Kalila  12:03  

exactly. When you think about what he did to all his wives, you know, when they, when they went against him or didn't obey him, I mean, he just, you know, killed them, cut their heads off, if you know, exiled them. I mean, it's kind of a wild thing of what he did to the feminine in his own reign, as an example of what he was doing in the church, right. So you're exactly right, but it's hidden in the land everywhere for those ways to see it, and that's what happened. So this is the, this is the, the traditional thing, like I couldn't see it at that time because I was uninitiated, and I couldn't, I couldn't see beyond the layers that I could see, you know, how when you're in the mystery, you can only see to the level that you've been initiated into. You can't. So I left England when I was 17, and I went to Israel, and I lived in Israel for a year and a half, two years, and I went because I had always wanted to go to the Holy Land. I'd always wanted to go to Bethlehem, in Jerusalem, and Galilee, all these places I'd learned about as a little kid, right. And I ended up going to the village of Migdal, which is the Magdalene's birthplace, right, that place where she's named after, without knowing anything about her on the Sea of Galilee, when I was 18 years old, I was taken there by a boyfriend that I was hanging out with, whose family happened to have come from that area of Israel. Very bizarre, right? Okay, I didn't know that at the time, but I was walking in her footsteps. I then went from Israel, and I was like, "Okay, I'm still looking for the feminine faces of God. Where can I go? I ended up going to India, which, let's face it, has an enormous pantheon of feminine faces of God - wild, crazy, wonderful, beautiful. And on and off, I was in India for four or five years in my 20s. I kept traveling and going back and forth and back and forth, and I fell in love with all of those stories of the Indian goddesses, the Vedas, you know, just the stories, the magnificent mythic stories that were missing, seemingly from what I had learned in my upbringing in England, and you know, Kali and Durga and Sarasvati and Lakshmi and Lalita, and all of these goddesses who like had all these wild different faces, and something in me awakened, and I started to see how the feminine spirituality existed and had not been right exiled or cut off or severed, and so I went back to England. I went to university, I went and did graduate studies, and I basically couldn't stop. Grasping for and and drinking in anything to do with women's spirituality, and this was I was very, very lucky. I went to the California Institute of Integral Studies, and I got to study with Star Hawk and Vicky Noble, and you know, Clarissa Pinkola Estes and Louisa Tichen, all these amazing elders who were holding the keys of the archeological excavations have been done all over the world in the reclamation of the blood mysteries and the reclamation of the divine feminine, and I was in all of that, and so that was where I really started to feel it, but it was still somewhat of a scholarly pursuit, but


Christine Mason  15:40  

even, but even at CIIS, like their origin story is in part from Aurobindo, so they already came in with like the mother narrative, right? They totally did


Elayne Kalila  15:50  

that, was why I went there, was because it was the only place that I found that integrated East and West psychology, and and this whole idea of the mother, right, being founded on that lineage, and also coming from an Indian background, right, it came from an Indian lineage. So, so this is an amazing sort of smorgasbord, but I always think about what happened for me is, is that I then stumbled upon the 13 Moon Mystery School, which is the school that I am since trained in and ordained in and I focalized that path, and it wasn't until I did all of that that when I went back to England, it was like the whole land opened to me, and I began to have very profound, mystical, deep experiences on the land in my birthplace, particularly around Glastonbury at modern day Avalon, you know, Somerset down into the southeast, which is where I'm originally from, and what I discovered, and I'm not lying, and this is amazing, when I was a kid, the church that I used to go to, and I did not remember this, and I just discovered this last year because I drove past it and stopped. Was called the Mary Magdalene Church.


Christine Mason  17:09  

Come on,


Elayne Kalila  17:10  

I had no idea, and this was a mile from my house, and was a church that I would often go to. I didn't know it was dedicated to Mary Magdalene.


Christine Mason  17:19  

Isn't it amazing when you start to piece back the dots, like the through your life, and how they all make retrospect, you're always being led if you're paying attention,


Elayne Kalila  17:26  

always, and that's the piece about it, right. And being a pilgrim, and I consider myself a pilgrim and devotee of the divine feminine, it's following those breadcrumbs, who knows, is it past lives, is it lineage pieces that we're picking up is it activations that we're going to receive from sacred sites, from temples, from certain lands, from certain languages, or music, or foods, or whatever, right? But it all begins to activate a remembrance in us, and I think that that's the truth of it, is we carry it all within us. It's about getting it activated and remembered,


Christine Mason  18:02  

there's two things you said. I would like to tie them together. One is that you can only see the layer that you've been initiated to, and then the 13 room mystery school. So, let's talk about, like, for those who don't know what a mystery school is. What's a mystery school? Why did you choose this one, and how does that relate to the initiation that allows you to see


Elayne Kalila  18:27  

so a mystery school is literally a place where we go to train our consciousness to be able to go beyond the surface of the concrete third dimensional world to see into the mystery, in other words, what exists in all that we cannot see. Okay, basically, we could go back to the ancient Egyptian lineages and the science of hermeticism, which says for everything that is seen, there is the equal and opposite, unseen, right? So, for everything we can see with our eyes as concrete, there is equal and opposite that we can't see with our eyes.


Christine Mason  19:06  

Omium, the implicate is the explicate,


Elayne Kalila  19:08  

exactly.


Christine Mason  19:09  

Angels are a thought form of the divine, and the land is a thought form of like that, all that stuff,


Elayne Kalila  19:15  

exactly. And we are mystical by nature, we are symbolic by nature, it is not some weird woo woo thing that we've been taught it to be, which is what the patriarchy did to our intuition, to our psychic abilities, to our mystery schools. By the way, so this is a training and consciousness to be able to see through the world of form into the world of spirit. It is a reconnection to our essence self, to our spiritual self, to our higher self, to our angels, to our guides, whatever you want to call it. So I had always been looking for a mystery school without knowing it, that's the truth. Like I kept going to all these different, you know, spiritualities, but what I was really looking for was a mystery school, and I was looking for a divine. Feminine mystery school, because I wanted to be a devotee to the mother. One day, my friend Dava, who we've just spoken about, says to me, Kalila, you need to come meet this woman, and this was 25 years ago. You need to come meet this woman, and I said, okay, so I go to meet this woman. I don't know why I'm going to meet this woman, only that Devas told me you should meet her, and they go to this tiny suburban house in the middle of suburban Marin County, California, and nothing unusual. It's all about Harry Potter, you know, nothing unusual to be seen. I go in through this front door, and there's this beautiful velvet curtain, and there is copal, which is a kind of resin burning and billows of resinous smoke are coming up and I smell the kopal and I start to feel like goosebumps all over my body, you know, how you have those goosebumps that go, oh my gosh, something's happening. I go in through the curtain and I'm greeted by a woman in silence with a robe on, and she leads me over to this beautiful bowl of water with these flowers floating in it, and she takes my hands and she begins to bathe them, and as she's bathing my hands in silence, I just start to weep, and there's tears just streaming down my cheeks, and I'm having a mystical experience of remembrance. It's as if I'd been transported through time, and this ritual that she's doing with me is activating. I know this, I remember this, and I heard a voice inside of me say, whatever this is, this is it. You're a yes. I don't know what it is, but this is home. I know this. And then I went in, and I sat with my teacher, Ariel, who's still alive and an incredible being who founded the 13 Moon Mystery School as a lineage, or I should say, really boarded through. She remembered it, and I sat with her in silence, and we barely said more than three or four words to each other, and at the end of a timeless amount of time I said to her, I don't know anything other than that. Am a clear yes, and I'm stepping over this threshold to whatever this is, and that changed the whole direction of my life. And that was 25 years ago. I stepped in, I did the work with her, and then I stepped into being a lineage bearer, and I have been vocalizing and sharing this work with women for the last 20 years.


Christine Mason  22:51  

I could feel every moment of that story in my body, the welcoming in the secluded shut off space, the sensory experience of the water and the petals, I can feel her presence through you through this screen. It's very moving, Elayne.


Elayne Kalila  23:12  

Yeah, and it changed my life, because I, I listen, I was willing to listen to something that was so visceral and not question it with my mind, and not try to figure it out. It was just a remembrance that, and I can feel the chills on my body, even when I sit. It was a remembrance, and the weeping brought me to that sacredness. I had been waiting for that moment, that was what I wanted to receive at the anointing when I was 13, was that thing the activation of a remembrance of holiness, of sacredness, of divinity, of the honoring of the divine in me, and the awakening and the meeting of that.


Christine Mason  23:57  

I feel also a relief coming. It sounds like, for the maybe the first time, you're not on the pursuit alone.


Elayne Kalila  24:04  

Yeah, I found the doorway in, and this is what they speak about when we talk about being in the mystery, you know? When you're seeking for a path of initiation or a teacher, it's not a straightforward path, you get turned away a lot of times, because for whatever reason you're not ready, you're it's not time, and it was one of those moments where I knew in every part of my body that this was it, and there was no doubt, and remember, this is not something self-doubt was definitely something that I've struggled with in my life, you know, and so the fact that it was so clear to me, and my mind was out of the way, like it was not a decision from my mind, it was a remembrance from my heart.


Christine Mason  24:49  

I want to make a side note, and a little boost for Devaa, Devaa Haley Mitchell, with two A's. She's the co-founder of the Shift Network, and she's doing some beautiful offerings. For women in midlife,


Elayne Kalila  25:01  

yes, she is, and she's been my dearest friend for the last 2530 years. So, I've known her a really long time.


Christine Mason  25:09  

That's a good company to keep,


Elayne Kalila  25:11  

indeed.


Christine Mason  25:12  

So, these mystery schools then like train you into the access to seeing beyond the reality. You said that. How is that done, aside from the transmission through presence?


Elayne Kalila  25:24  

Well, it's done through internal alchemy, right? And internal alchemy means that the mystery school that I'm training, and really any mystery school that you could, you could look at, because I will just say this, that Jesus and Mary were not even Christians, that was in label given to them later. They were actually mystery school keepers of a mystery school called the Rose Christianity or the Gnostic Mystery School, right? It's like there wasn't a religion, it was a technology for accessing our divinity, for the sacred marriage between spirit and matter, between human and divine. And so the ancient Egyptian mystery schools were this, and the mystery school that I'm trained in has roots both in Hermeticism and ancient Gnostic mystery schools. It's the same language, it's the same ideas, only translated through the divine feminine.


Christine Mason  26:14  

In the school that I teach from is classical tantra, so it's Shivan Shakti are one movement,


Elayne Kalila  26:20  

right? And in ours it is masculine and feminine, King and Queen, Yeshua, Magdalene, for me are the divine union, exactly same, same, only different, right? We know we're in the presence of truth when we access that, because it's the same story, only been translated through different lineages, and so for me the mystery school teaching has really been about working the personal alchemy of revealing, stirring, and revealing any and all of the shadows that we carry. Okay, so shadow being understood as the unconscious material that our ego mind is attached to and working with that keeps us from connecting to our divinity, that is in the way of us connecting to our higher self, so you know, greed, competition, jealousy, envy, separation, projection, judgment, hatred, you know, all the things that we do as human beings, right, normal, but within the mystery school we take that material as being the prima material, the lead, if you will, of the alchemist consciousness, and we begin to work with it, and the alchemical elixir we use in the mystery school I'm ordained in is the alchemical elixir of love, unconditional love, so whatever it is in self that is shadowy and unloved, we bring it to the light of consciousness to love it fully into wholeness, which is exactly the opposite of what we are taught to do in the general culture, which is, is that when we've got something that we're embarrassed or ashamed of, or a part of self that we haven't loved or we don't think is lovable, we try to hide it away, right? We try to push it down, shove it down, put a mask on, pretend to be something else. Well, the mystery school teaching is exactly the opposite. It is about revealing all of that and choosing to love it, and in the act of loving it, it is transfigured. it is transformed within us, and it becomes part of the whole of who we are, and no longer exiled. That, in very short form, is the journey of internal alchemy, and it is freeing ourselves to be the fullness of who we are as the mythic beings that we actually are, which means that we are magical beyond belief, that we are create all creatrixes, that we all have access to creating from a level of magic and majesty, and it is not just a few who have that capacity, that we all have that capacity to cultivate, and that in essence is what a mystery school is.


Christine Mason  29:05  

I want to just explore this a little bit on loving everything, including everything. I've been working in a process personally where you let the light into the shadow, basically a similar way, like you feel what you're feeling, you see it as a universal archetype in humankind, and as that dissolves, what I'm noticing is each chunk of the thing that was unloved dissolves into love. I see outside of myself, not only do I see and understand inside more clearly, but my lens of perception clears in a way that I see the outside world more clearly, and this connection you're making around the ability to see past the material d and being able to love what's in the self completely and include it are completely intertwined as long as there are places in yourself that you refuse to look, include, and love. If you cannot see the world clearly, and, moreover, what you oppose opposes you


Elayne Kalila  30:06  

exactly. You cannot love something in another that you have not loved in self,


Christine Mason  30:12  

or even see it accurately, because you're in a defended state with projection, blame, all the non-looking filters, when they exist inside of you, seem to exist in all directions,


Elayne Kalila  30:27  

exactly because we are creating it. It's a hall of merits.


Christine Mason  30:31  

You're shut down to perceiving angels in the landscape or the sacred permanent land of England,


Elayne Kalila  30:36  

right? And therein lies the truth. Is is that you know until you've opened the doorway, you know. They say, for those who have eyes to see it, may they see it. For those who have ears to hear it, may they hear it. And what they mean is, you've cultivated the capacity to be able to see the symbolic realm, to see the mystical realm, which, by the way, is happening all the time, and we are naturally attuned to it. It's not like it is some out there capacity. It is the realm of poetry and song and dance and creativity. All of that is mystical perception. All of that comes out of our connection into the creative daemon, the creative stream of life force. Right, yeah, yeah, exactly, we we are all that one


Christine Mason  31:25  

of the things when you are writing and you're a prolific writer, I feel you've done something now where you've taken it from the mystical as a concept to think very applied to behavioral psychology, psycho-emotional work, relational work, life stage development, and even more recently in like cultural change, like what has to happen at a planetary scale from your depth of understanding of the divine feminine, like how these early insights and discoveries have translated into particular life stages or the masculine feminine balance in the world.


Elayne Kalila  32:08  

Well, I think the thing that I want to say about that is one of my devotions and commitments in writing or sharing anything in the world is founded on a very simple premise, which is that I know that the voice that I am being called to bring forward is the voice that refuses to slit and separate, it's the voice of the divine feminine, the mother that says I will not continue this journey of perpetrator and victim, and and blame and shame and eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, like I absolutely cannot participate in that conversation, because it is not real to me. It is not what I see is true. A


Christine Mason  32:54  

great mother loves all her children,


Elayne Kalila  32:56  

exactly, and if I'm really a devotee of the great mother, then I have to be willing to love, or at least attempt to extend my compassion and my understanding to those that I would naturally want to push away, separate, judge, and blame, and believe you me, I am not an angel over here, I have my judgments and my separations, and the people that are on my top 10 list of the baddies in the world, and I make it a point to hold my own feet to the fire of not continuing to just project my revulsion, my hatred, my disgust at the behaviors at the ways in which they are choosing to govern or poison or hurt and maim people, and it's a deep practice, and this is really for me why I started writing in my Substack, Christine, because I was like, I really need to have a space where I'm challenging myself to actually do the work that I'm trained to do, which is to hold all the shadow and the light together. I love my shadow as I love my light, for all things are transformed in that love is one of the core principles of the work that I've been doing,


Christine Mason  34:22  

so even loving the place where you're still in judgment,


Elayne Kalila  34:25  

exactly. Because this is the thing, is is that I'm judging. So, can I love the part of me that's judging? Can I love the part of me that's struggling to find the humanity in that person right now?


Christine Mason  34:38  

Oh, okay. You know, I can love it for you. If you can't, I can say, "Oh, I see. How your judgment is really a movement of protection for the vulnerable, or desire for equanimous love, or a desire that all beings are in a mood of steadiness and sweetness as the great blessing from the yoke of sutras goods. You know, and so I feel.. I feel that once you see. That's the root of the desire, that it's a movement toward love. Then it softens, and actually it also works the other way, like that the movement of some, some of what we perceive. Just on the Jesus story, for a second, I wrote a book that came out in December on the mystic art of Easter, and I was teaching from it at an Easter retreat, and I had to look up and like try to apply it to the story of the crucifixion, like the Sanhedrin and sentencing Jesus over the thief, right. And so I go, oh, when you go into the history of it, the Sanhedrin is operating inside of this context of Rome, and their main goal is to continue to keep the Jewish people safe, and any aggregation of people in a crowd that is uncontrolled will draw the Romans' attention, and they'll lose the right to administer their own people. So their selection of Jesus as a figure to prosecute is their attempt to love their own people, which is like, was a, was a crazy twist for me. There is no blame, and in the mystical sense of like that, it all has its own tellus, and you know it's called there's a purpose to everything, and it's we know not why at this point that that was a hard one for me, because it can come off sometimes as being utterly uncompassionate toward people who are being harmed, you know, if you don't pick sides, then you're on the side of the perpetrator, the quote unquote perpetrator, and so that's that's the one where I, I still get snagged because one more really like me and I want to be perceived as a goodie, but the I don't see the world that way anymore, so it makes it a little


Elayne Kalila  36:39  

well, and what's interesting to me, when you say that, though, is that because the conversations that are happening out there in the world are still so much of the time based upon I'm right, you're wrong, I'm right, you're, you know, this whole kind of to present the sacred third, which is neither one or the other, but is the sacred marriage of what happens when we sit with both positions in consciousness, and we do the work internally to find what the sacred third that unifies these two positions, because that is alchemy, and that's available to all of us. It just takes work in the consciousness to hold ourselves there in a kind of sacred love and discipline for something else greater than imagined to be birthed, so we have to cultivate this. From my perspective, we have to cultivate the capacity to be with the terror, to be with the beauty, and hold both, and come to what happens when we hold both, there's something else that gets born from human consciousness, and this is what Yeshua and Magdalene were talking about, was this something else gets born, the divine human gets born from that conversation, because they're no longer trapped in this samsara, right, this place of constantly blaming and shaming, and being in the hall of mirrors, we pop out the other side, you know. Rumi says there's a field where I'll meet you beyond right and wrong, right, and we'll gather there. That's what he's talking about, a place where we have transcended that conversation, and it's not just one of us. We all need to be willing to do that, that's what I believe. At this point,


Christine Mason  38:27  

I think the idea of the sacred third, which I've never heard expressed before, could become a technique like if I'm in a conflict with someone or we're in a right and wrong polarity, maybe we could call together sacred third, like let's find this, let's investigate this together, let's try it, like, what would that, what would that be? To invoke the sacred third would mean asking what.


Elayne Kalila  38:48  

Okay, so you have a strong feeling about something, right? So, on one side, you might feel disgust with somebody, right? Okay, so imagine you've got your feeling contempt and judgment of someone for something that they did.


Christine Mason  39:04  

Can't imagine that nobody come into mind at all on that one.


Elayne Kalila  39:10  

Exactly, I know, right? The beautiful thing is, we are all inherently human, we're all inherently judging everything all the freaking time, and the point is not to try to think that that's wrong or bad, it's part of our human experience, but we also have a powerful witnessing self who can see that happening, and so, okay, so on one side I'm judging you, I'd have contempt for an action that you just did, okay, and so I'm gonna go, I've got that feeling over here, and then this feeling over here is, is that you should be better behaved. You should know better, right? I, you should be a better person. Okay, so I've got this: should be a better person, and the judgment of you doing this wrong. What is the sacred third? And the sacred third means dropping out of the mind. Mind, for a moment, and feeling for the higher octave of what will bring these two together, and I'm just gonna feel it with you. You


Christine Mason  40:15  

should know better. You should be a better human. Why are you doing that? You shouldn't be doing that for me the sacred third is compassion. Now, when I got my Indian name, it was Badrakali, the goddess of compassionate destruction, who makes way for the new to be born. And I never.. I was.. I was like, "Why didn't you give me Lakshmi or something? Like,


Elayne Kalila  40:36  

no, no, no, no.


Christine Mason  40:38  

Give me, like, you know, I want to be Saraswaddin, make pretty songs. Yeah,


Elayne Kalila  40:42  

exactly. I don't know


Christine Mason  40:43  

this one. You know what


Elayne Kalila  40:45  

is the


Christine Mason  40:46  

name? Padra Kali. It's one of the aspects of Kali, and she's got a specific purpose to clear the way, and that things have to be sunsetted. It's literally the thing I cannot do in my life, or was, and I had to live. It took me a decade to live into the name I


Elayne Kalila  41:03  

hear you, which is what a spiritual name, by the way, is because it's holding a frequency of an emergent self.


Christine Mason  41:10  

So, as, as you're saying, as we're going through this, this process, like to be brave enough to clear out what you used to think of, or the clear the way of all of your things you hold on to so firmly out of compassion for what wants to come like the thing, the thing about your sacred third, it's a finite point, it's a doorway to what wants to be born next, and only when you get out of polarity can you walk through that door


Elayne Kalila  41:41  

exactly, because that is the middle way. Yeshua and Magdalene talked about the middle way. Buddhism talks about the middle way. What the frick is the middle way? The middle way is when you have resolved the polarities of left and right, male and female, love and hate, whatever you want to call it, the polarities, and you have brought them together, and you will forge them into a sacred third that now opens a doorway to the middle way, where we can go through the portal to another state of consciousness that sees the world differently, right. That's what the divine human, that's the, you know, the Homo spiritus, or the Homo etticus, that we are portending we are the emergent collective self that is birthing itself right now in the darkness of the dark night of the soul that we're going through collectively, that's, you know, to be is extraordinarily taxing on our human selves. We are also at the same time, being birthed into this new form, and it is awakening within us, but we have to be willing to find the middle way, and the ego is very attached to the old story line.


Christine Mason  42:55  

Last last fall, it hit me like, oh, the whole goddess movement is a psyop, like it's a way of defanging feminism instead of like rethroning the divine feminine, and all of her breadth and glory of her archetypes. It's like it's just a bunch of beautiful young women in flower crowns, and not even come to my temple, by the way. I was, I met someone a month ago, Ramuel, and he told me about this 13 moons, and I'm like, how is it possible that I would hear that for the first time there, and then hear it from three different people within a few weeks was alerted this this sense of part of the divine feminine emergence in sort of Instagram or popular culture has been inside of the polarity, not inside of like I'm uniting the divine masculine and feminine in myself, not I'm rethroning the divine feminine alongside of the divine masculine in my heart. That movement is not what those, those have been inviting. So this third way for me, and one of the things I loved in the recent work that you've been doing, sort of including the noble masculine, is that the call is to transcend the polarity in the self and between us, and part of it is you have found the god, the goddess traditions, you have found the divine feminine, you have walked in the path of the Magdalene, but now multiple times in this interview you keep mentioning Yeshua and the Magdalene together, and so talk to me a little bit now about the beyond polarity between the genders and between the gendered nature of the divine and what you're inviting with this noble masculine.


Elayne Kalila  44:35  

Yeah, well, exactly what you've been saying, darling, which is that the journey, the internal alchemical journey, is to have a marriage between the male and the female within, and let's be clear on what we mean by that, right? Masculine and feminine, not in terms of like male, female, man, woman, but polarities of energetics, right? So electromagnetic, let's talk about it in low. Terms, which is non-gendered, for a moment, it's energetic between the penetrative and the receptive, the magnetic and the electric, and we are looking to bring those polarities into union within self, because that's what opens the middle way, when we bring all the polarities together within self we open to access the channel to the divine right to that greater aspect of ourselves, which then is able to be coming through us, you know, and the reason I love the work of Mary and Yeshua, of Magdalene and Yeshua, and what they were up to with this work, was it was so clear that they were giving a sacred technology of how to clear our channels and how to awaken our capacity to move beyond the world of polarity into a unified field. Physics talks about this, quantum physics talks about this. We know that this exists, it's not just some, you know, woo woo new age concept. This is what we are working towards as a consciousness. Okay, so what does that mean for me? To become a divine human means the marriage of spirit and matter, the other two that have been separated, right? So, the marriage of spirit and matter doesn't mean transcending my humanity, it means becoming more freakin human. I become more human when I admit to my vulnerability, to my fallibility, to the fact that I keep falling out of love, and I have to keep finding my way back to love through love. That's the journey, and Magdalene and Yeshua were walking that path together, and the reclamation of the Magdalene first has to happen, because the bride was exiled by the church, you know, in 591 AD, when Pope Gregory set up that whole thing that he did around the Magdalene, and basically aspersed that she was a prostitute, and that went off like wildfire, and became the story that we were all given, so for me it's not about just the divine feminine, we have to reclaim the divine feminine, so she can meet the noble masculine, we need both of them within ourselves and then within each other in the world, because we all carry different energies, we all have different layers of these two aspects, because we're here, and this whole world is an electromagnetic world. There's no way to get away from it. Everything is our cells are the planet herself is the water.


Christine Mason  47:33  

Is how are you tapping into that in your own body? How do you feel that in your own body that you're both electric and magnetic?


Elayne Kalila  47:39  

Because I can feel the part of me that is charged right now, that's the right this energy that wants to come forth, and you know my shock is up right, it's like, wow, and then I can feel the part of me that's pulling in and just sitting in the center of my own being, and I can feel the wildness of the of the feminine, I can feel the strength of that Shiva, that we might call the Shiva energy, the masculine anchor inside my own body, and how they make love to each other in every moment that I'm breathing, that's what I understand the Gnostic Tantra to be the Cultic Tantra, or the Christian Tantra to be, is that dance. It is erotic, it is alive, it is being breathed through every moment. I'm creating right now with all of you. We're in a love field, making love to one another in the field of greater than imagined possibility of what we can create in this world. This world is not a fixed and finite story. We are an emergent creative wild beauty that is the pulse of life, that is the sacred union, that is the divine and the human making love. There's a reason why Yeshua and Magdalene talked about the bridal chamber, right? That's one of the deepest mysteries of Christianity, is this bridal chamber. What's happening in the bridal chamber is the bride and the bridegroom are coming together and making love, not just in the physical, but in all ways there is when you bring the polarities together into union. There is a love making that happens that creates the divine child, sacred third. That's what happens.


Christine Mason  49:36  

Whoa,


Elayne Kalila  49:37  

just that.


Christine Mason  49:39  

I have a question to ask you. You minister to a lot of women, but lately you've also been getting picked up by the masculine who's willing to partner with you in doing this work. What are you seeing emergent in the field where male leaders who speak to men are connecting with women leaders a. Who are speaking primarily to women, and kind of weaving the third way.


Elayne Kalila  50:04  

Think it's just that time, I think it's that time, and that I did not realize, to be honest with you, when I first put out, started putting out on Substack. I, I, you know, you know how one of those things it says, 'Oh, you should do this, and you just go, 'Okay, I'll just do this, and you have no idea really what you're up to, and you do it, and there's a beautiful example of, like, following being spirit-led, right, heart-led, and, and what's been amazing is, is because I have been writing a lot about the intersection of the masculine and the feminine, calling forward the masculine, calling forward, Hello, where are you? I've been.. I've been caught, I guess. I've been called to put a very strong call out there. What has been happening is they're coming out of the woodwork. I'm.. I mean, I'm suddenly.. I mean, I have been.. you have to understand this. I have worked exclusively with women for the last 35 years of my life, like.. and now, because I'm in a different place of my own evolution, I believe I am finally ready. I have finally done enough of my own sacred union work to be able to call the men into a place where there isn't judgment, where I'm not going to be judging them for where they are on their path, or for how far down their path they are, or for how awake they are, like I'm just saying, come, and that has resulted in a lot of very powerful conversations and meetings of minds with men who are writing to me or responding in the comments to articles, and I am next year running my very first retreat with a man, and it's going to be a sacred union retreat.


Christine Mason  51:48  

I love that so much,


Elayne Kalila  51:49  

and it's going to be with Andrew Harvey, who's a dear, dear friend of mine, who's a complete madman and wonderful, wonderful Christ devotee, Magdalene devotee, and we're coming together to bring our magic into sacred union with each other.


Christine Mason  52:07  

That sounds wonderful. Yeah, I want to just give you the opportunity to talk a little bit about where people can find you and the things that are alive that you're birthing, and in addition to this retreat, you know, what are the things that are up in your world right now.


Elayne Kalila  52:21  

Okay, well, you can find me on Substack at Elayne Kalila, which is my Substack. You can find me also on the web at Elaynekalilah.com You can also find me at priestesspresence.com which is the mystery school that I'm the dean of, and that I run along with many, many, many other women who are also teaching and and holding that space alongside me, what I'm just about to birth into the world. Oh my gosh. Well, I, I have been on this tremendous third blood mystery journey of my own life, through perimenopause into menopause. The last 11 years, I've been on this odyssey of a journey, and so what I'm offering into the world is that I'm starting in July a free webinar series called Wild Knowing, which is for women who are going through their perimenopause into menopause years and who are birthing themselves anew and who are ready to step into their full power and majesty of their legacy is of what they're really here to do now, and so there'll be a new program that I'm starting in August, which will be a nine month container for women to go through that rite of passage, and it will be a juicy, wild gathering of perimenopause and menopause women who are ready to..


Christine Mason  53:38  

I love that it's nine months,


Elayne Kalila  53:39  

oh yes,


Christine Mason  53:40  

full rebirthing. It's just like it's just like you're giving birth to yourself again,


Elayne Kalila  53:44  

totally. One, that's what menopause is. It's called holding the blood within, so the blood becomes my gold, because I'm no longer bleeding. And what's so amazing about this, I'm really excited about, because I am, I'm a former thespian. I shouldn't say former, I am a thespian. I, my first world was as an actor, and I am having been revisiting that, and for the last two or three years, I've been in a show called The Menopause Monologues, which has been a fantastic group of women sharing their menopause stories out into the world, and so part of the program that I'm going to be running, which I'm so excited about, is we're all going to be writing our menopause monologues, and we're going to have opportunity to step into offering those as sacred theater, and that's going to be part of what's woven into my current work. So I'm really excited. So that's where I am. I'm birthing myself in you again.


Christine Mason  54:38  

I call the period after menopause the free period,


Elayne Kalila  54:41  

the free period, exactly, exactly, you're




Christine Mason  54:44  

free periods, literally, and you're free in so many other ways, like the bleeding, I saw some calculations about how much energy, how much mood variability, how much literal calories, how much time you get back to yourself that. Is beautiful, and then all of the anxiety about pregnancy goes away, and there's so many, there's so many things that, like, literally create an elimination of some of the ambient stresses of being in your reproductive peak.


Elayne Kalila  55:14  

Absolutely, well, and they've done so much research that they're just beginning. I shouldn't say they've done so much research, because truth is, they've done zilch research on menthol women, because they would call us in demise. I have news. This is your second becoming. This is you giving birth to yourself, ladies. This is your opportunity to finally do what you want to do with your life. And there it


Christine Mason  55:40  

is. You know, a little bit more about who you are, you have usually have a little bit of money, and you know one thing, I one thing I really loved is like a lot of the women in our community say, "Oh, I want to remember who I don't remember, even remember who I was, who I before I started having children, or you know, and I'm like, "You doesn't matter who you were then, because it's now, it's utterly different, who are you now, who are you in 10 years? I want to point people to the research that shows three stages after menopause, that including gerotranscendence in the very last stage, like there's all kinds of markers that are available that, as you're mentioning, are just beginning to get studied. It's,




Christine Mason  56:19  

it's beautiful.


Elayne Kalila  56:20  

It is beautiful. It's so beautiful, and there are so many shifts biologically that are affecting who you are becoming within this phase of your life that are shifting, namely, you know, the reduction in estrogen actually also reduces our sense of competition and comparison with other women. Hello, it's amazing. It shifts our neurochemistry, so that we are not wired to be feeling that feeling anymore, and that that's also shifts. So, it's like, you know, who knew. So, anyway, it's an amazing cornucopia of experience, and it'll be a nine month journey into the magic and mystery of who you are becoming now at this season of your life. Juicy things,


Christine Mason  57:06  

let's give them a blessing. Let's, let's close out. I would like to include in the blessing I'm noticing. If you could, if you'd like to, do you want to lead it? I want to include this masculine, feminine third way, and the inclusion of all of our life stages in some way, and no matter what, like spiritual tradition you're coming from, the ability to find the masculine and feminine in that tradition, and in your own heart. So, like, those are some of my desires to have included. What else would you like to have included?


Elayne Kalila  57:36  

Well, that feels juicy to me, this calling in of the divine human, the calling in of the awakening of that capacity that we have to be in that marriage.


Christine Mason  57:49  

Okay, so everybody, I want you to drop in. If you're, if you're driving, don't close your eyes. But everyone else, let's take a moment and bless out on some of these amazing topics.


Elayne Kalila  58:00  

You want to lead us, Elayne. Well, I'll start. Maybe you'll weave yourself in. And may we, in this moment, give great gratitude for everything that we have received from being together, for everything that has been ignited in remembrance in our hearts, in our blood, in our remembrance of who we actually are truly here to be. May we also bless all that has brought us to this moment, everything in our lives that we have traveled through, all of the challenges, all of the obstacles, all of the great gifts that we have been given, and see it all as leading exactly perfectly to the here now moment, where we are listening to these words and hearing them, maybe for the first time, may this awaken in every single one of our hearts the inspiration for us to continue to walk forward and be in the inquiry as to what it is that we are here to balance, which polarities are we here to bring into the sacred third, may we call forth the noble masculine as he lives within us, every one of us. May we call forth the sacred divine feminine as she lives within us, and may we see them coming together in our hearts and wounds and bodies and dancing to create something novel and new and beautiful, even in the darkest hour that we are sitting in as a humanity, because in the darkest hour, in the darkest night of the soul is awaiting the brightest light of renewal and rebirth, and we must become the flame of that renewal and rebirth in all of our bodies, in all of our hearts, and may we know that we are powerful to create the magic of that which we desire to see as making manifest in our world through our own hands and hearts, may we know that may we walk as love in every moment. Blessed be. And so it is. Thank you.


Christine Mason  1:00:00  

So much, thank you so much for your 30 plus years, 40 plus years, I don't know how long it is, of your, of the depth of your journey, I feel you so, so strongly, and for your continued writing. Everybody, go follow Elena and Substack and have a look at her programs.


Elayne Kalila  1:00:17  

Oh, thank you, Christine. Thank you graciously for this wonderful ride. It's been beautiful to meet you in the heart.


Christine Mason  1:00:26  

Thank you, everybody. That was Elayne Kalila. If something in this conversation lit you up, whether it was the sacred third or the marriage of masculine and feminine in your own heart, or the idea that the second half of life is a becoming and not a fading, let it keep working on you. You can find Elayne on Substack at elaynekalila.com and her mystery school is at priestesspresence.com Her free series, Wild Knowing, for women moving through perimenopause and menopause, has a nine month program. You can find out more about that on her site. Thank you, Elayne, for the depth and daring of your journey. And thank you, all listeners, for being here, for being in the love field with us. Until next time, may you walk as love. May you find the women and the men you've been looking for. May you be alive inside your own heart, in deep balance, and in complete expression of your full essence, so with that I will ask you once again to share this episode with people that might benefit. It always helps me. Please leave a review, please rate, and if you're wanting to support us financially, you can subscribe at christinemariemason.com in the Substack, or better yet, go to Rosewoman.com and find the products that we have created and curated to support beautiful embodiment and reverent lifestyle our whole lives long,


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