Did You know the meaning of Yoni?
The vagina, the entry to the womb, is most often represented in todays world in
dry, schematic biomedical parlance, or in gross, often exploitative pornography.
Increasingly women are reclaiming this part of our bodies in terms of our own pleasure
and fertility. Here we offer imagings of the opening from which babies emerge.
The root of yoni is the Sanskrit word yuj meaning to unite. The yoni is the
crucible where things are combined (male and female, mother and fetus)where creation
and re-creation takes place. Where the unseen (not perceptible to the senses) world
takes material form.
The yoni is also the place where each menstruating woman, may within her body, experience
the cosmic cycles of creation sustenance and destruction. Each month the egg is
released by the ovary, finds its way through the fallopian tube, and may or may
not be fertilized, the birth, life and death of an egg cell.
Yoni signifies both vagina and womb. In the traditional cosmo-vision it is where
the spirit world (or the unborn, the ancestors) meet the flesh-and-blood reality
of the material world.
That which is invisible, unseizable, without lineage,
Without colour, without eye or ear, without hands or feet,
Eternal, pervading, omnipresent, very subtle
That is the unfailing, that the wise see as the source (yoni) or all beings.
The Mandukya Upanishad (c700 BC)
