Cate Montana: Spirituality, Sexual Desire and Ageing

Inspirationals for the Goddess News https://www.joannakujawa.com/goddess-news/

Spiritual Blog by Dr Joanna Kujawa

If you want to be spiritual, ask uncomfortable questions,’ Goddess News, Spiritual Blog, Divine Feminine,

Dr Joanna Kujawa

Spiritual Detective

It is a rare opportunity to find a book that speaks with great courage and vulnerability about sexual desire, ageing and spirituality and this is exactly what Cate Montana did with her new book, Apollo and Me.  With great pleasure I would love to introduce a new goddess to Inspirationals (a branch of our Goddess News Blog) Cate and her exploration of Sexual Desire, Spirituality and Ageing.

CATE MONTANA BIO

A dauntless explorer of inner and outer worlds, Cate has worked
with plant medicines with shamans in the Amazon jungles of Peru, the Andes in
Ecuador and the deserts of New Mexico, studied yoga in India, explored ancient
South African ruins on horseback, hiked solo through England’s sacred sites,
shot raging rivers by kayak, camped alone across the US and Canada, lived in
isolated cabins in the wilderness, spent over 20,000 hours “meditating her ass
off,” raised wolves and trained Thoroughbred horses, married and divorced … and
well, lots more. She is the author of the mind-bending spiritual love
story Apollo & Me, and several
non-fiction titles including, Unearthing Venus: My Search for the Woman Within and The E Word: Ego,
Enlightenment & Other Essentials. She lives on
the farthest piece of land from any landmass in the world, Hawaii.

Goddess News Blog Questions

1. Goddess News Blog: Tell us how you got interested in spirituality and how you included the Feminine in your spiritual search.

Cate Montana: I followed society’s success formula for the first 30 years of my life—got a good education, developed a great career in network television, married the right man in the right socioeconomic bracket, had the right house with a swimming pool. I even had a great dog. None of it added up to happiness. The only thing left was to turn within.

I spent the first 15 years of my spiritual
journey taking a highly masculine approach to finding God … I meditated, I
contemplated, I tried to be mindful, I read books about quantum physics and
mysticism while living as a celibate vegetarian in the woods in a one room
cabin in the North Georgia mountains. All of this in an attempt to find
“enlightenment.”

I had many amazing experiences doing this —
days of oceanic oneness, lots of bliss with my eyes closed. I even levitated
once. But I wasn’t living life. I was
avoiding life, because that’s what you’re supposed to do when you’re spiritual.
Right? Not get sucked into daily drama.

it wasn’t until I was 48, working as the
Northwest bureau chief for the national Native American paper Indian Country Today that I interviewed
a Brazilian shaman who, in the course of our conversation, introduced me to the
unpalatable realization that I was NOT a liberated woman.

I had been liberated to emulate men. I grew
up in a masculine education system preparing to enter a masculine economic
system and vote in a masculine political system. I was encouraged to be
sexually active and aggressive and basically approach sex like a man.

It occurred to me how ridiculous it was, striving
to find God when I didn’t even know what a woman was.  That started me on a search to understand my
female nature. In 2013 my first book, a memoir titled Unearthing Venus: My Search For The Woman Within, was published,
detailing my understanding up until that point.

I could talk for hours about how feminine qualities
are basically absent from both Western society and the Western spirituality movement. Speaking for myself, I paid
a lot of lip service to the “goddess” over the years without
understanding what She even is, all the while uttering such phrases as “Everything
is spirit. There isn’t anything that isn’t spirit/God.” And then I would
judge my sexuality and my emotional nature as I continued my meditative efforts
to get out of my body and get “out there” to God.

My spirituality mirrored thousands of years of patriarchal religious programming that says basically, “body bad/God good, emotions bad/intellect good, dark bad/light good.” And, of course, what is classic yin territory? The body, the Earth, darkness, the cosmic void of Creation (the womb), intuitive emotional expression.

The goddess is all about embodiment. The feminine is the face of God  — it’s what we can see and touch and taste and smell and enjoy. Without physicality, without the feminine expression we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

Ever since I had the vision of Apollo at
Delphi in 2015 and wrote the book Apollo
& Me, I have been whole hog into investigating what lies in the body … which
is fundamentally everything. Finding God has stopped being an exclusive
external search and become an inclusive internal discovery.

2. Goddess News Blog: Could you share with us how you merge the polarities of the Feminine and Masculine in your life?

Cate Montana: It’s not so much a merging of polarities as it is an expansion into whole-brain function. How do you “merge polarities?” If you’ve ever tried to shove two opposite ends of a magnet together you know merging is not possible. They “click” together. But they don’t “merge.” Inclusivity and expansion is the ticket.

I’m extremely logical and intellectual, but
I’m also extremely psychic and intuitive and emotional. My neurological wiring
crosses the corpus callosum. I’m equally comfortable in both camps. This wasn’t
always the case, of course. Our society so heavily favors left brain masculine
functioning, it’s taken decades for me to become comfortable expressing my
intuitive and emotional nature publicly. But if I’m to be authentically female,
authentically me, I have to!

To this day I’m learning to move ever deeper into feminine territory — by which I mean surrendering into the arms of life, relaxing into trust, knowing that what I am expressing moment to moment emotionally/intellectually … what I’m feeling moment to moment is inevitably creating my reality. I can trust life processes. I know that now.

15 years ago? Not so much.

I’m consciously more receptive … I wait a lot. Instead of always aggressively doing stuff in pursuit of my goals  (the masculine lean in game) I do what needs doing in the moment and then I stop doing. I consciously wait for the right moment, the right cue from life to show up. I wait for life to show me what the next door is, the next opportunity, the right person to align with etc. When that becomes clear, I move into action once again.

Whole brain operation is a dance and a fun one! Being able to be all of me — dear God I’ve yearned to be in this place my whole life. I think the reason depression, anxiety, suicide, and drug addiction in US women is skyrocketing is because we’re not allowed to be our whole selves. On top of that, the half were allowed to be is not our native territory.

I mean, how depressing is it to work your whole life to break through the glass ceiling and finally get elected as the CEO of some major corporation and then not be able to use your power in ways that will help humanity and the planet? To keep the position you’ve clawed your way into you’ve got to continue to compete, gouge the other guy, put those workers out of their jobs, automate and elevate profits for shareholders, go in and bulldoze another 100,000 acres of Amazon rainforest in order to harvest palm oil. And if you don’t keep running that corporation the way the guys have always run it, then you’re out on your ass.

Sorry, don’t get me started. The point I’m
trying to make is, we will never move into whole brain function until we
resurrect all the qualities of the feminine nature and elevate them to the same
status as masculine qualities and have both
sets of characteristics in our toolkit. That
is equality. Anything else is just women imitating men trying to beat them at
their own game on the masculine playing field.

3. Goddess News Blog: Your recent book, Apollo and Me, beautifully and passionately discusses the desire for a deeply soulful and sexual union with the Masculine as well as sexual expression at an older age. Your heroine is 60 and Apollo is 35 (in looks!) Could you tell us why you chose to explore this very important topic?

Cate Montana: It’s what’s up for me. (To this day I’m unclear how much of Apollo & Me is information from another dimension, the Greek god Apollo, something claiming to be Apollo, or me channeling me. Of course, if we truly ascribe to the understanding that all is One, then it doesn’t make much difference. But anyway … )

Union is such a funny thing. It can occur
as the coming together of opposites within oneself. Or it can happen on the
outside when two sexually polarized beings come together. And I’m not limiting
that to male-female relationships.

We all yearn for something greater … to experience something greater … to be greater. To be human, apparently isolated by a skin boundary from the rest of existence, is by its very nature lonely. The external path of looking for a mate to complete one … well, that’s been the commonplace path to union for eons. The inner spiritual path to completion, to wholeness, is traditionally a lonely path and thus not so popular.

The book revealed my own desire. I’ve walked the lonely path and rarely been lonely. I’ve come to wholeness. I don’t need a mate. But by God, it would be an extraordinary experience to have another whole being — in the form of a man — come into my life to dance with.

It says a lot about my own self opinion (or
my opinion about most men or both) that I had to bring a God into my life (even
just a literary one) to satisfy that desire. But seriously, as with so much
else about the book, the whole age discrepancy, sexual attractiveness issue
just sort of happened. It showed up because it’s part of my psyche AND a part
of our culture. I’m in my 60s and have always been rather vain about my body.
For that reason it’s difficult getting older. But the simply ENORMOUS issue my
issue points towards is the radical importance our Western society places on
physical attractiveness and sexuality.

Women nowadays are supposed to be sexy,
juicy, and always wanting it into their 70s and 80s—the time, traditionally,
where both men and women were getting their house in order spiritually,
preparing for their next incarnation. Now we’re all buying prescriptions of
Viagra, worried about being able to get it up.

That said, just because you’re in your 60s, 70s or 80s doesn’t mean you don’t desire sexual union. Thing is, I had hang ups about my body in my 30s when it looked great. Can I resolve this at 68?  We’ll see. I’d like to get the opportunity to try!

We would love to hear from you through your comments on these important and hot topics.

Much Love,

Dr Joanna Kujawa

Goddess News Blog

To buy Cate’s new book, Apollo and Me, please click on the image below:

©Joanna Kujawa