Lisa Marie Rankin [00:00:00]:

In today's episode, we're exploring the Lover archetype as a devotional path. I talk about what it really means to become a courtesan to the divine. That's really how do we have an embodied relationship to the divine. I'll go into how desire, beauty, and pleasure have historically been gateways to spiritual awakening and why so many traditions from tantra to Christian mysticism understood that Eros and the sacred were never meant to be separate. We'll touch on figures like the Hindu goddess Radha, the goddess of longing and spiritual devotion, as well as the Christian mystic Teresa of Ávila, as examples of embodied divine relationships. This is a conversation about longing, about devotion, and about becoming available to love, not just in your mortal encounters, but with the divine itself. So take a breath, get comfortable, and let's dive in. Hello, beautiful ones, and welcome back to the Goddess School Podcast.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:01:13]:

About 2 weeks ago, I did an episode on the Lover archetype. It was episode 73. This week I wanna go even deeper and look at the Lover as a courtesan to the Divine and show you how you can deepen your connection to the Divine through your Eros, your desire. Today's episode is an invitation to look at your relationship with the Divine in your spiritual practice in a whole new way, not something pious, or disciplined, but romantic, and maybe even a little erotic. We'll look at the Lover archetype and some specific examples like the Hindu goddess Radha and the Catholic mystic Teresa of Ávila to provide us with a model of how we can direct our Eros towards the divine. So take a breath, let your shoulders soften, And let's dive in. Often when we think of the Lover archetype, we think of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, beauty, and pleasure. And for many of us, especially those shaped by hustle culture, achievement, and trying to measure our worth through external benchmarks of success, we might assume that her qualities such as love, beauty, pleasure, longing— that they're nice, but they're not essential, and they might not be as important as other qualities like strength, justice, discipline, and equanimity.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:02:54]:

But I wanna suggest something, maybe it's a little radical, that the Lover is not secondary. She's actually the whole point. She's where we want to get to, so we can also just begin there. And ironically, in a world that's obsessed with productivity— seems like outrage— optimization and control, the Goddess of Love has pretty much disappeared, which is tragic because she is precisely who we need to preserve our humanity. So today we'll explore the Lover archetype, not as a facade or as an aesthetic. Sometimes we might look to call in the Lover if we are trying to attract a mate, but I wanna look at her as a courtesan to the divine, as a way to deepen our spiritual practice and begin an embodied relationship with the divine. So before we go any further, just take a moment to consider this, and you can consider it gently, playfully, without forcing it. Forcing anything, what would it feel like to be in a romantic relationship with God, Goddess, Christ, the beloved of your choosing? Not metaphorically or intellectually, but embodied, like you were in an actual romantic relationship with the Divine.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:04:27]:

I know, probably hard to consider, right? But how would you express your love? Would you whisper a prayer before lunch? Read scripture with your morning coffee? Sing to God in the car on your way to work? Just like we often feel uplifted and alive at the beginning of a new relationship, you know, we kind of feel like we're walking on air. Maybe you would also notice a bit more spring in your step if you were in an embodied relationship with the Divine. Let me give you an example of what I mean. When I was younger, like many women, whenever a new man would enter my life, it's almost like everything else stopped. Everything rearranged itself around him. That was my attention, my schedule, sometimes even my hobbies. He was the most important thing to me. And of course, as we get older, you know, we get get a little bit more balanced in our approach to love.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:05:27]:

So, but I don't say this without judgment. I say it because eros is powerful and maybe you've experienced something similar like that in your life. Now imagine this. What if that same eros, that same, like, focus, devotion, longing, and delight was turned toward cultivating a relationship with the dis— What if we allowed ourselves to be filled with this pulsating energy of life all of the time, not just at the beginning of a romantic relationship with a mere mortal? In the yogic tradition, there is a path called bhakti. Bhakti is the yoga of devotion. This is the path where love itself becomes a vehicle of awakening. It's practiced through song, Poetry, dance, desire, tears. And one of the most exquisite embodiments of this path is Radha, the Hindu goddess of longing, love, and spiritual devotion.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:06:35]:

Radha is madly in love with the god Krishna. And she's not his wife, and she's not proper or even socially sanctioned. She's his teenage girlfriend, a cowherd girl who is completely undone by her love for the god. Her devotion is so total that it is said Krishna only exists fully through Radha's love. And she doesn't try to meditate to transcend desire, she meditates on it. Desire is her path, desire is what awakens K a. Her longing isn't a distraction from God, it's the way that God is known. So think about that for a moment because it's pretty different than what it is that we're often taught.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:07:26]:

So consider that the divine doesn't want spectators, the divine wants lovers. God becomes alive through our devotion. And I really encourage you to learn more about Rādhā and her and K a's love story. Within my Substack community, we just finished reading Awakening Shakti, which is a really terrific book by author and tantrika Sally Kempton that goes through all of these beautiful Hindu goddesses. And the chapter on Radha is really one of my favorites because I do believe that our spirituality should be alive and erotic, and that we can have more of an embodied relationship. So Radha's myth, her qualities, her characteristics are really a beautiful way to go deeper into exactly what we're talking about here. And this path is not exclusive to the East. We also see it in early Christianity, and especially in the mystical and the gnostic streams, we find something strikingly similar.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:08:32]:

Teresa of Ávila, a 16th century Spanish mystic, wrote openly about her ecstatic embodied encounters with Jesus, Her descriptions are unapologetically physical. She speaks of being pierced by divine love, of trembling, moaning, surrendering. This wasn't a metaphor, it was her actual experience. And while later institutions try to tame or reinterpret her language, Teresa herself was clear: union with God was felt in the body. We'll also be reading, as a side note, Teresa of Ávila's Interior Castle in my private Substack community. So if you're interested in really exploring this paradigm-shifting work, you can join us on the inside. The link is in the show notes. So we have these examples of Radha, of Teresa of Ávila, and yet many of us have inherited a version of spirituality that insists the divine is more distant.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:09:34]:

Pious, abstract, and purely mental. But that's not how sacred texts describe it. And I'm not talking about New Age texts, I'm talking about old, ancient sacred texts that we wouldn't necessarily think would describe such a real and physical experience with the divine. We can look at the Bible, Old Testament and New, and the Gnostic Gospels. They're all filled with these relational encounters with the divine. We see God walking around in gardens. He's showing up at houses. He calls, he responds.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:10:14]:

The Song of Songs, which is one of the most surprising books, I believe, that's in the Bible— it's in the Old Testament— is an erotic love poem to God. It reads, "Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for your love is more delightful than wine." This is scripture, and long before Christianity, ancient Sumerian traditions honored erotic devotion as sacred. In the myth of Inanna and Dumuzi, we see that their lovemaking ensured the fertility of the land. Sex wasn't just a personal indulgence, it was cosmic maintenance. Their union held the world together. In the ancient poem, The Courtship of Inanna and Dumuzi, we read: Dumuzi says, "Great lady, I will plow your vulva. I, Dumuzi the king, will plow your vulva." And Inanna responds, "Then plow my vulva, man of my heart. Plow my vulva." So ask yourself, with these examples, is spirituality and desire really meant to be separate? When we reclaim The Lover archetype as a courtesan to the divine, as someone who courts and flirts and plays with the divine, who shows her devotion to the divine.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:11:38]:

We are restoring a gateway. So beauty, receptivity, pleasure, they're not luxuries or nice to haves. They're actual portals. They're how we can connect with the divine. They're how we can deepen our spiritual practice. So we can have a more embodied experience. So how do we live this? Not just as an idea, because maybe it sounds nice, but you might be like, okay, but what do I actually need to do? I wanted to share some very gentle ways to begin. The first is just clean, declutter, and beautify your home because of course the Divine dwells in beauty.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:12:25]:

Fill your space with plants, flowers, candles, and objects that spark delight. Care for your appearance, not to impress others, because you were created in the image of the Divine. Prioritize spiritual practices like meditation, prayer, or reading sacred text. Even if you have to steal a few quiet moments to yourself, Just like you were stealing some time to meet with your lover. Make love with presence, devotion, and care, remembering your partner's innate divinity. Make love as an offering to the god, to the goddess, and contemplate what it means to surrender to the divine, to be penetrated by the divine, and allowing that energy to shape how you move through the world. I suspect you might notice you start to walk a little differently, maybe with a bit more confidence. Your eyes start to soften and the world begins to feel a little more luminous.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:13:35]:

I've been talking a lot about this lately, but I wanted to reiterate it as well. Our spiritual practice isn't a "what's in it for me" type of practice, and I feel like that's the way that it's been presented in our culture, particularly the last couple of years. Where, you know, there's like meditations for 10K months or calling in the perfect partner. We don't practice because we want to get something. We practice so that we can become a vessel, so that the divine can move through us, so we are open for divine will. That doesn't mean we can't have what we want. I believe that it just so happens when we become a vessel for the divine, we start to notice that things start to fall into place. Life becomes more blissful.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:14:25]:

We also might become more resilient to weather the inevitable ups and downs, but we start to feel more alive, more animated, more connected with this divine intelligence, creative life force. So I want to leave you with these words from Rumi, the Sufi mystic poet. He writes, "The way you make love is the way God will be with you." So, my dear ones, may you love wildly and sacredly. And until next time, remember, you are not just seeking the divine, you are also being sought. If this episode stirred something inside of you, I invite you to join me on my Substack, This Enchanted Life. I just released a new active imagination to connect with your inner lover and to experience this embodied sensation of connecting to the divine. And also this month we're reading Wuthering Heights through a yin-yang lens, exploring what happens when desire is suppressed rather than consciously lived. You can learn more through the links in the show notes.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:15:38]:

Many blessings, beautiful ones. Until next time. Thank you for joining me for this episode of the Goddess School Podcast. I hope it sparked your imagination and excite— expanded your vision for what's possible. If you're ready to explore these concepts more deeply, reclaim your personal myth, and live with greater creativity and enchantment, I invite you to join me inside Enlivened, my Divine Feminine Mystery School and sacred community, where we bring these teachings to life through ritual, story, coaching, and of course, real-world action. You can find the link to learn more in the show notes. And remember, the Goddess isn't a deity outside of yourself. She's an aspect of your highest self.

Lisa Marie Rankin [00:16:25]:

You are the Goddess. Until next time.