REVEAL Your Soul

Photo by Tracy Toler

REVEALers Reclaming Their Bodies as Sacred:
The Vagina Whisperer
By Alisa Vitti

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Red is a sacred color for me. It’s the color of Mary Magdalene’s egg, it’s the sword-swinging goddess Kali’s signature color, and it’s the color of Dinah’s tent. To me it’s a color that represents a woman’s power- power that comes from knowing herself completely. It’s also the color of what makes a woman a woman, her menses. Embracing the color red is another path to reclaiming the body as sacred.

Alisa Vitti has danced blindfolded for hours in India. She has meditated with a Zen master for two months, and she has spun with Sufi mystics. She was raised Catholic but she has been to pagan ceremonies honoring the rites of spring, and never felt a contradiction or transgression. She has studied Tantra, and has spent weekends in the Berkshires communing with nature - all to see how she could get closer to the divine. 

Alisa was always seeking in her early life to find a person or a place that would help to facilitate an actual experience or an encounter with the divine. But all the while she was overlooking and ignoring the one temple that was screaming the loudest for her entrance, her own body.

Alisa suffered from acute symptoms of Poly Cystic Ovarian Syndrome - obesity, fatigue, acne, depression, and an absolute lack of monthly periods, or amenorrhea.

She also suffered from a very low self-esteem, a limping libido, and a painful belief that she was alone. She was on her way to medical school at the height of her symptoms and sought out medical experts to access her condition and help her bring her body back into balance.

But no one could help her. She was told she needed to be on the pill, and that many of her symptoms that were plaguing her life and isolating her from others were “just” in her head.

The symptoms served as the greatest wake up call in Alisa’s life. And the fact that no one would listen to her demanded that she finally begin listening to what her body was trying to tell her. She decided not to become a gynecologist and instead began to study functional nutrition and became a holistic health counselor. She began her four-year journey to reclaiming her hormonal balance and meeting the divine feminine face to face.

Fifteen years later, Alisa now believes that one of the key underlying causes of her hormonal breakdown was that at some elusive point in her childhood she became divorced from her inner feminine. She allowed the masculine energy within her to reign, and even considered it superior. What she learned of course over time was that this created an imbalance that had an erosive effect on her reproductive system, which is the physical symbol of her feminine energy.

The turning point in her cure came when, for the first time in her life, she began to view her physical self- aka her physical femininity in the form of her menses and hormones- as not only primary but also as sacred. She began to experience her female body as not a burden but a holy gift that had been left unrecognized for far too long.

She went on to develop a miraculous cure to all of her symptoms through a food-based protocol that she now teaches and writes about through the wellness center she founded in New York City, Flo Living.

Out of all the many spiritual practices and traditions Alisa experimented with to encounter the divine, she came to realize that, “by practicing daily cycle care, I was really practicing a form of feminine based spirituality.  I was in fact, reclaiming my body as an expression of the Divine Feminine.”

She discovered that by honoring and caring for her “lady parts,” as she so affectionately refers to her reproductive system, all of the old mental conditionings of her menses being a burden, and the belief that she must somehow navigate through her career, relationships, and daily routine from the neck up were exposed as limiting and unhealthy beliefs.

The root of her imbalance came from the fact that she had believed the socially accepted assumption that women must not mention or in any way show that their bodies are messy, unruly, or wild. She had cut herself off from her own deepest source of wisdom, power, and energy. She had cut herself off from her embodied feminine self.

Women come from all over the country to seek Alisa’s expertise. They come for varying reasons: to clear up long standing menstrual disturbances, to help with infertility, and/or to address fatigue and low sex drive issues.

Regardless of the specific health issue, once the realization is made- that the female body must be acknowledged and addressed not ignored, abhorred, and silenced- the journey to health is breathtaking and nothing less than what Alisa considers “a radical spiritual awakening.”

The healing comes from the miraculous fact that a women’s endocrine system can restore it's own hormonal balance using food as medicine, but also because of that monumental shift in a woman’s own relationship with her body and her cycle. There is often long-standing mistrust, hate, and even fear that stands in the way for many women in their process of becoming more intimate with their bodies.

This is where Alisa has gotten her salacious moniker, the vagina whisperer. Through her counseling, her true love for the work she does for women, and through the model she has set in her own practice of tending to her body as a spiritual practice, Alisa serves as a powerful exemplar of the healing potential women have when they transform a “curse” into a cure.

This option Alisa offers for women to begin to reclaim the body as sacred is about owning our red. The entire sacred cycle of women's bodies, the beauty, the power, and the broken open states it puts us in: from menstruation, to birth, to menopause, it’s time to revere the messy, human, intensity of the color red in women's lives.

Red is a woman who has won back her body. Red is love, the kind of love that infuses us with a holy fire to never dim or tone down our own power or light.

Red is a color that refuses waiting. Red asks us right now to unveil our self and to REVEAL our bodies as sacred. Red is the color of women daring to exist intensely.

For more information visit Alisa's web site at www.floliving.com.

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REVEAL spiritually empowers women to lead from the soul-voice inside them. When women claim the authentic voice of their soul, they are empowered to change themselves and the world around them. Feminine spirituality recognizes the body as sacred, encourages us to go within to connect to the unconditional love and wisdom we each contain, and inspires us to become soul-led agents of change. REVEAL creates transformational events for women to experience the fiery and fierce voices of the next generation of feminine spirituality. REVEAL is an unprecedented chance to come together with other soul-led women of all ages to be inspired to follow the courageous and audacious voice of your soul.