Posted on

Can we listen to Mother Earth, open heart to the ground? Are we willing to feel what we discover?

Share

Today is Earth Day.

 

When we say, Happy Earth Day!, what are we really saying? We seem to be able to commoditize anything here in the West, especially the US, so the question seems very important.

Are we wishing each other a great day of celebration? A day to celebrate that we live on this amazing planet?

Are we attempting to remember the Earth in a way that brings awareness to our Mother’s plight?

Are we wanting to begin to live more in harmony with Her, attempting to be more conscious of how we treat Her, of how we see Her, of what we do to Her?

Is it just about us, to help us feel better because we, as a human whole, really don’t give Her much thought nor appreciate just how reliant we are on Her for our lives?

Is it for a Happy Earth? If so, maybe we need every day to be Earth Day for a long time, ’cause I’m feeling our Mother is not so happy.

::

About seven years ago, I was hiking on Mount Shasta with my partner. We’d had one of the most beautiful days of hiking I think I’ve ever experienced. If you’ve never been to Mount Shasta, it is a remarkable mountain. I know I am not the only one to feel or experience the ability to feel Mother Earth when you are on this mountain.

As we were headed back from our hike, we walked into Panther Meadow. Suddenly, I could feel the pain of the Earth. I could ‘hear’ her song and it wasn’t a song of lightness. It was a song of pain. I began to weep and I could not stop for quite a while. My partner just held me. He completely understood the depth of my feeling, even if he wasn’t feeling it himself. The feeling of grief seared my body, for it is through my body that I feel Her body.

::

If we stop and pay attention, if we really feel and listen, if we open our heart to Mother Earth, what will we feel?

What will we come to see?

How will we be touched?

How might it change our relationship to Her?

It is our relationship to Her that matters so much right now. We humans have threatened OUR existence as a species. It can be easy to brush this off because we’ve lived our whole lives on Mother Earth and it can feel like we, and future generations, will always live life here, especially a life where the majority of people have their needs met.

But if we keep going the way we are going, if we do not stop to really pay attention to Her, it seems pretty clear that we’ve already altered how we are living, as well as the kind of life that future generations of human beings will live. And, we don’t have to look far to see how we humans have altered life for other species.

::

What does it mean to be in relationship with Mother Earth?

In many, many ways, especially for women, it can be likened to how we are in relationship to our own bodies. For Mother Earth is where our bodies come from. She is where we receive our sustenance and nourishment. She offers us her waters and oxygen. She is where we will return to when we die.

I know, personally, how difficult it can be to remember to pay attention to Her and what is being done to Her in my day-to-day life, making ends meet, taking care of my needs and those of my family. I know how easy it is to take Her for granted, just as I take my body for granted and the wonder that it is.

Our love affair with thinking and logic and reason keeps us up and away from a conscious, feeling relationship with matter. We’ve made reason and science and logic our Holy Grail. And, we’re told God is the one who sits on high, away from Earth. But, that just isn’t so. The divine is in everything, including matter. And, yes, the word matter and Mother have the same root, linguistically.

::

We can begin to remember Her every day, when we begin to touch our own bodies with attention, our full awareness. We can deepen our relationship with Her when we deepen it with our body. 

Can we come down fully into the body, fully into our cells with awareness?

Can we know we belong here in these bodies, here on this planet?

Can we feel ourselves holding ourselves with great affection and compassion?

Can we just be willing to feel, period?

Can we listen to Mother Earth, open heart to the ground? Are we willing to feel what we discover?

I have a sense that we don’t realize just how deeply Her pain affects us. How could it not? She is our Mother.

::

A few years ago, I wrote this post for Earth Day in which I shared a wonderful practice to help bring you and your body in closer relationship to Mother Earth. I hope you’ll take a moment to try it.

Happy Earth Day!

Share
Posted on

A Living Goodbye; A Living Hello

Share
Life is: Life relating to itself, Knowing itself through relating.

 

Eighteen years ago, today, my husband died suddenly before my eyes. It was quick and shocking.

The grief journey it took me on was anything but quick.

A friend on Facebook just now asked, “How does one say goodbye and go on?”

How do we live a goodbye and grief? How do we live hello and joy? They go together, goodbye and go on. They go together, hello and go on.

For me, I’ve found it’s a living goodbye, and a living hello. It’s all tangled together, in a beautiful, and sometimes not so easy, dance.

Gary’s death was a doorway into awakening to the depth and beauty, the light and dark, the sacred and mundane. It was a doorway into a true relationship with life, because we can’t be in relationship with life if we are not in relationship with death.

I am not romanticizing it. It’s not been easy, nor was it easy for my daughters and family members who grieved Gary’s death. It hasn’t easy for the hundreds of 9/11 family members I worked with, or the hundreds of clients and students I’ve taught and coached. And, I am certain, it’s not easy for you. We all know grief.

If we are looking for easy, we won’t find it in grief, and we won’t find it in life.

Yet, we can find ease. We can find softness and grace. Life is filled with grace if we open our arms to be held in love. Not romantic love, but the love that carries us through it all, even the very painful things we are now witnessing in our world. I write this two days after the Boston bombings. I write this as other  bombings are taking, and will take, place in our world.

Today, I celebrate Gary, our daughters, our four grandchildren, our life together, and the years since that have, I hope, made me a more real and loving woman.

Today, I celebrate you, your grief, your journey, and the way you grace this world.

Today, I celebrate our humanity. In light of all the tragedies we face, the love that we are is greater, by far, than any hateful and violent acts we do to each other.

This I know.

Share
Posted on

Shame: A Deadly Hot Potato

Share

 

Shame.

It’s a killer. Of self-confidence. Of self-love. Of creativity. Of life. Of young women. And, ultimately of us all.

It’s not even ours. Not the kind of shame I’m talking about. At least not to begin with.

Shame is passed around like a hot potato. For many of us, when we are young we’re shamed repeatedly until we become to believe we are shame itself. Our parents probably didn’t even know they were passing it on. I know I didn’t know I was passing it on to my children.

It’s an epidemic. Shaming. We do it in many, many small ways, in many small moments. And, some of us do it in big ways, in big life-altering moments. We pass it on because it is too hot to hold and too much to bear. For the most part, this isn’t done consciously. But it’s done. All the time.

Shame is one of the stickiest tools of the Patriarchy. Shame the woman to quiet her. Shame her to get her to keep her beautiful sexual sacred self down. Shame her so she continues to hold Eve’s shame as her own. Shame her so she won’t remember how powerful she really is.

In the last few days, two stories of the deepest shame and humiliation have come to light. Shame so strong it caused two young women to take their lives. Of course, there are many more, but for now most of those are unknown to us. Shame keeps things quiet. When we feel shame, we keep secrets because the last thing a person who’s been shamed wants if for others to see them.

Just a few days ago in Northern California, three teenage boys were arrested and accused of sexually assaulting Audrie Pott. The accusations also include taking pictures as they assaulted Audrie, then sharing them around with classmates and others. Audrie hanged herself eight days after the assault. According to those who knew her, Audrie was shamed, bullied, propositioned, embarrassed, and humiliated.

Rehtaeh Parsons died on April 7th in Nova Scotia. She was 17 years old. She attempted to take her own life, many many months after struggling to live with shame. Her parents had to take her off of life support. Rehtaeh had been gang raped. As her father wrote, “They took photos of it. They posted it on their Facebook walls. They emailed it to God knows who. They shared it with the world as if it was a funny animation.”

Rehtaeh and Audrie had so much shame and humiliation poured on them they gave up on life. They aren’t the only girls, or women, to know this shame and humiliation.

How could we turn around and shame and blame these young women when they were the ones abused so savagely? I say we, because it is we. Rehtaeh and Audrie are our children. The boys accussed of these crimes are our children. The boys and girls who passed around these pictures, thereby heaping on the pain and suffering, are our children.

As a culture, our shame is deep and thick. It is toxic. It runs underground through us all, deep in the dark recesses of our shadow. And when the hot potato gets too hot to hold, we pass it on to others so we don’t have to know it within our own psyches.

But, this shame stops here. Now.

It is time for each of us to look within at our own internalized shame. It is time to stop passing it around because we don’t want to feel it. It is time to begin to look at how we the adults are raising children who do these things to each other.

Our internalized shame began as somebody else’s shame. And once we’ve internalized it, it is ours to deal with. It is ours to feel. It is ours to heal.

We live in a rape culture. We live in a shame culture. We live in a culture that pretends all is well, that our culture is the best, that we have no demons. The longer we pretend the problem is not ours the more vicious the acts will become.

When we are willing to stand tall to our darkest demons, we find that the dark holds our most sacred and beautiful jewels…sacred because we come to see our own humanity. And, this takes a willingness to step out of denial, and to stop believing in the illusion of some perfect self that is incapable of hurting and destroying others.

Shame. It can take your breath away. Literally. It can try to steal your life. It can keep you holed up like a monastic, far away from eyes that might see that shame and equate it with you.

Shame is handed down, generation to generation. It is passed around man to woman, woman to man, adult to child. I don’t know anyone who’s never been touched by shame.

 

It is time for us to see the rape and shame culture we live in.

 

It is time for men to begin to speak out against rape and rape culture, too.

 

For so long women have carried this shame.

Shame is the darkest weapon that patriarchy uses against women…against the feminine.

Shame is the darkest weapon I use against myself. Ugh.

And, ultimately it is a weapon killing us all, women and men, and the children we love so dearly. 

 

 

Share
Posted on

Woman’s Song

Share

::

On my unexpected walk yesterday morning (car battery died and I walked home from the mechanic), I was suddenly moved by an insight. Unexpected circumstances can do that…bring insights. These times can be our most creative moments, because we’re taken out of our normal routine, which can wake us up to the newness we are always really living in.

The insight? That it’s not so much what we speak as women, but that we speak…that we liberate the female soul’s song.

The feminine was silenced. Our mothers were silenced, as were their mothers, and their mothers, and so on. And, we are continually encouraged to (many times through shame, shunning, threat, and humiliation) stay silent.

I know I silence myself. I learned to do this at a very young age. I watched what was going on, listened to what was expected of me, and learned to manipulate my behavior accordingly. I know others who did the opposite – pushed back with every fiber against being silenced. Pushing back, though, is still a kind of silencing, because being completely free means you simply speak what is true and many times when we push back, we are more caught up in the conflict than being free to simply express what is within. Not always, but many times.

Unlearning silencing isn’t such an easy task. Patterns of silencing are insidious. The patterns are within our psyches. They are in the culture. Everyday on the internet, you can read something powerful posted by a woman who is speaking her mind. And, you don’t have to look far to see the comments that immediately surface attempting to silence her through intimidation and threats of violence and harm.

I believed that silence would keep me safe. When I learned to do it, it did. But silence keeps none of us safe, and in these times we are living, silence keeps us from creating something new in our world that is life-affirming and fueled by the deepest love that is life expressing itself anew in each moment.

This insight was really beautiful…and simple.

I can see that it really doesn’t matter the form we say things in, but that what we say must be true in our hearts, to our souls.

We don’t have to come up with something amazingly wise and transformational. What I see is that the very act of speaking will heal. Speaking the truth in our everyday lives will heal. It opens the channel, and when the channel is open creativity begins to pour forth…a creativity that is rooted in the sacred creativity that women embody. It is this sacred creativity within our beings that is birthing the new consciousness. Speaking opens the channel. It reconnects our awareness with what is true deep within. Speaking can be a metaphor here, yet I also can see that vocalizing, the act of making sound through the body is incredibly powerful.

Speaking begins to end the silencing that has happened to the feminine, and to women. The act of speaking opens channels in the body and soul.

Hearing one’s own voice saying words that have been swallowed too many times to count reawakens a knowing of self that is necessary for healing.

Speaking truth in everyday life is an extremely powerful act…powerful and healing.

In working with women, and in my own experience, I’ve come to see that we can get caught up in the belief that we have to come up with wise words, and even more have to put them into some ‘form’ like a blog, or a book, or a speaking engagement, or you name it. But the insight showed that it is much more simple than what we think.

Imagine millions of women around the world, women who have the freedom to do so, speaking the truth to ourselves, to our families, our lovers, our co-workers, our bosses. Speaking for ourselves and on behalf of those who can’t, who aren’t free to do so.

Hearing our own voice with our own ears. It’s a reclamation of the power that lies within to give voice to the soul.

I don’t know the esoteric details of what happens when a woman speaks truth aloud, but I can see something shifts. When a woman listens to what is happening and feels for resonance and responds with truth, responds in a way that honors life, not only within herself but within all of life, silence is broken, healing happens, and something new is born.

 

We can support and encourage each other to do this.

What if each of us actively reached out to three other women we know and asked them to speak aloud the words that have been swallowed back down over and over and over?

What if we reached out and invited them to tell us their truth?

What if we saw this opportunity to hear, really hear, another woman’s truth as a sacred act and we listened accordingly?

Will you do this?

Will you offer this gift of inviting out woman’s song?

 

A good place to begin is with yourself, to hear your own words with your own ears, and to feel them rise up out of your body into the light of day. Really listen for the words to be spoken. Listen then speak. Keep speaking because sometimes those words take a while to reach. Feel the words rise and move and flow as they are offered up.

This IS a sacred act.

 

John O’Donohue wrote, “All holiness is about learning to hear the voice of your own soul. 

 

Doing so calls back a power that was buried when we went silent.

Doing so reconnects you with you.

Doing so liberates woman’s song.

 

::

Image is white ribbons on Flickr under Creative Commons 2.0

Blog Widget by LinkWithin
Share