No Longer Spitting in the Face of God

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woman with a basket of mandarins

What is woman?

She is woman.
She is not an imitation of man.
She is not made from man.
She is unique unto herself.
She isn’t perfect, yet she is sacred.
She is the vessel from which life is born.
She isn’t superior to man, nor is she inferior.
She is the female human being.

::

To denigrate women is to spit in the face of God. ~ Desmond Tutu

We live in a culture that has, for centuries, maybe millennium, denigrated the Feminine…and as walking embodiments of the Feminine, women and girls are living, breathing targets of this fear and hatred of the Feminine – also known as misogyny.

Allan G. Johnson writes in The Gender Knot:

“Misogyny plays a complex role in patriarchy. It fuels men’s sense of superiority, justifies male aggression against women, and works to keep women on the defensive and in their place. Misogyny is especially powerful in encouraging women to hate their own femaleness, an example of internalized oppression. The more women internalize misogynist images and attitudes, the harder it is to challenge male privilege or patriarchy as a system. In fact, women won’t tend to see patriarchy as even problematic since the essence of self-hatred is to focus on the self as the sole cause of misery, including the self-hatred.”  (italics mine)

 

Allan Johnson also writes,

…patriarchy is not simply another way of saying “men.” Patriarchy is a kind of society, and a society is more than a collection of people. It also involves as one of its key aspects the oppression of women.”

 

Patriarchy is NOT men. It’s a system. It’s a system we are born into. It’s a system we all hold up, and continue to breath life into, when we don’t question the assumptions we hold about men, women, and power, and about how we are in the world with each other.

It’s a system we give power to when we don’t question how we value ourselves as women, and how we value womanhood.

It’s a system we help to keep in place when we ‘hate our own femaleness’.

It’s a system that continues to control how we view ourselves when we don’t question these internalized misogynist images.

 

This isn’t about men vs. women.

Not at all. We often think when one attempts to have a conversation about this subject matter that we are blaming men, but if you read further into Johnson’s book (which I hope you will!), you will see that attempts to subvert these discussions are ways to keep this kind of system alive and well.

And if we focus on the self-hate, we are doing exactly what Johnson mentions – not seeing the mechanism of patriarchy at work.

 

This post IS about…

…the images we, women and men, carry around within ourselves of the Feminine, women, and the value of women.

This post IS about…

…the places within us that are outside of the realm of patriarchy.

 

We are all, men and women, given images when we are young of what a woman is and what a man is. In a world (for the most part – some indigenous cultures do not do this) that has denigrated the Feminine for centuries, it would make sense that our images of the Feminine would be less than helpful at best, and downright misogynist at worst; and our images of men would be championed (although as we’ve explored coming to terms with equality for women over the past decades, there’s been a lot of mud slinging both ways.)

Of course, as I’ve been writing this over the past few days, the writing has been working on me. What initially began as a more cerebral exploration and post, soon became very personal and emotional for me. As I sat with, something I try to do when I am writing a post, these images that I hold of myself, these misogynistic images I’ve ingested over my lifetime, I began to truly grasp the depth of this programming by a system that is misogynistic to its core.

Some of the images I see in my own psyche about myself are deeply misogynistic. Of course they are. I’ve been swimming in this system my entire life. I’ve been ingesting these images from the time I began to be conscious of what was around me. We wonder why it is so hard for women to love themselves. We don’t have to look far. We just have to be willing to look inside, into the depths of what we’ve come to believe, and feel, about our womanhood, and about our female bodies.

And, men do not escape the pain of this culture. Not at all. The Feminine is within them. And, their mothers, sisters, daughters, friends are women. When they hold these misogynistic images within their psyches, they must deaden the pain of knowing that the women they love deeply are walking, breathing, embodiments of this Feminine that is so feared and so hated.

 

Instead, if we are willing…

What we can is come to know the images of what it is to be female that lay outside the realm of patriarchal conditioning. These images come to us as we honestly, and wholly, ask the question, “What is it to be female?”

We can question what we’ve believed to be true. We can look directly at the images we hold of ourselves as women, of other women, and of the Feminine itself.

Inquire into the images of the Feminine that YOU are carrying around within you. Look inside. What images are YOU holding of woman? What images do you believe to be true about you and your femaleness?

This is what matters, because when we hold images, and we all do, they are the images we offer to others about ourselves. They are the images we give to others, mostly unconsciously, that tell others about who we believe ourselves to be, how much worth we believe we have, and how the people in our lives should treat us.

The images of self and gender we hold that speak to self-hatred are not natural. They are not native to us.

Images of self-hatred are not native to us. Images of self-hatred are not native to that place within us that has never been under the control of patriarchal thought and conditioning. 

We are love.  And, we can be fierce love. When we begin to hold images of ourselves as women worthy of dignity, respect, and love, we begin to view ourselves differently. I’m not talking band-aid images – I’m talking a real and true transformation of the images we hold about ourselves, other women, and the Feminine. When we find these places of dignity, respect, and love within ourselves, we begin to know something new, something real, something sacredly creative.

Anne Baring writes,

“The recovery of the feminine principle is the key to the transformation of our world culture from decay and disintegration and progressive regression into uniformity, banality and brutality, into something longed for and extraordinary.

Woman’s own awakening to the realisation of her value is part of the recovery of the feminine principle. It is as if a momentous birth is taking place in the collective psyche of woman. This birth may be experienced as something that is deeply perplexing and difficult as well as something exciting and challenging. As woman gives birth to herself, to her unique individuality, to the emerging awareness of her value as woman (not an imitation of man), the feminine principle will also emerge in the consciousness of humanity which for so long has suffered from its repression and rejection.

Woman, whose essential nature is to respond to suffering and need, is now responding to life’s own need and is experiencing herself as the vessel of transformation in which a new consciousness is being born.”

 

A woman is reborn as she gives birth “to her unique individuality, to the emerging awareness of her value as woman (not an imitation of man).

We are reborn when we ask the question (with a longing to listen so we truly hear the answer), What is it to be female? We are reborn in the space from which we listen. This isn’t woman as imitation of man, or woman born from man’s rib. This is, as Rilke wrote, “the female human being.”

 

 As Woman

When I come to know myself as Woman,
as sacredly female outside of patriarchal control,
I am held in the lap of Love,
I am back in the garden of Earth,
I breathe in the fragrance of Life,
I eat of the fruit of Wisdom,
I am no longer a stranger in the holy land,
the only land in which I am truly alive,
the land of my own body,
the realm of my own Soul.

::

image from Flickr Commons: Woman with a basket of mandarins, 1920-1930,
Photographer: Unidentified, Location: Queensland, Australia; No known copyright restrictions

 

 

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I’ll Meet You There

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A Woman - Bangkok
A Woman - Bangkok

::

Born of her mother, giving birth to her daughter who would, in turn, become the carrier and custodian of life, she could feel connected to an immemorial past of mothers, and an immemorial future of daughters, each a transmitter of the life process, each surrendering to an experience more mysterious and powerful and demanding than any other, requiring as it were, her submission to an instinctual process which, ineluctably, as the vehicle of life, she served. ~Anne Baring

::

I know all human beings are creative. I teach this. Every time I teach, over the period of ten weeks, my students go from believing they are anywhere from not creative, to mildly creative, to somewhat creative – to knowing and trusting in their personal, internal creative process. Period.

All human beings are creative. Yet, I find the ‘creativity = artistic’ beliefs in this culture, on the whole, to be frustratingly entrenched.

When you think of creativity, does it have to do with painting? writing? art in some way?

Do you believe you are creative? If not, when did you lose touch with your creativity. If you do, how did you hang on to it? Or when did you reclaim it?

Just wondering. ‘Cause I have something really important I want women to realize within themselves.

“surrendering to an experience more mysterious and powerful and demanding than any other…”

Women are powerfully creative. We are born with the capacity to bring life into being. To birth life into life. Requiring our “submission to an instinctual process” that we cannot, the least bit, control.

I submit that women’s creativity is mysterious and powerful enough that anything and everything has been done to get us to forget the power of this process that is intrinsic to our gender.

And, I’m not just talking about birthing babies. I’m talking about an internal power we hold, as women, that could rock this world if we really got how powerful we are. And, if we could come together, as a gender, to honor, revere and support each other, fully, to wake up to this power within, the world would never be the same.

::

Today, Marianne Williamson wrote an open letter to Sarah Palin. I was deeply moved by the grace and eloquence that Marianne showed in both her willingness to bridge the gap between her and Sarah, but also in her ability to articulate her way through what could be rough waters. In my opinion, Marianne was able to offer an invitation to enter into conversation with Sarah, a conversation between two women of faith.

What I loved about this most, though, is the example Marianne set of how to begin to come together as women, in a way that can begin to engage our powerful creative abilities, together as a community of women, especially when we might hold such polar opposite political views.

Each of us women is “…a transmitter of the life process…” whether or not we birth babies. Each of us is the microcosm of the glorious macrocosm that is the Big Womb of Life.

It’s time we find a way to come together to honor, revere and reflect this mysterious and glorious creativity we all embody. Somehow, someway we can realize we’ve all been conditioned to the hilt; we’ve all found some way to survive in this culture that does what it does to suppress women because it is terrified of this natural, most mysterious female power.

We can find solidarity, even when we hold such differing views. I know we can. I sincerely hope Sarah is willing to meet Marianne in this conversation. I sincerely hope they both can hold this space. I ardently hope I can find the grace and eloquence that Marianne showed today, so that I, too, can somehow begin to help bridge whatever chasms lie between all the women of the world, the carriers and custodians of life, regardless of our conditioning or our political points of view.

::

Whatever it takes to ensure there is a future worth living for all the world’s children is worth it. Whatever it takes to reclaim this power as women, we must do it. I don’t know how we will do it, but I know this deep mystery that is our female creativity does know.

It is time for our awakening to our instincts, letting go of our judgments, and setting free our deep river of love for each other as women.

::
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other” doesn’t make any sense.

~ rumi

image by Ronn ashore : creative commons license 2.0


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A Valentine to You, Dear Woman, Dear Friend

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ayearofgreatpromiseshilohmccloud

A Year of Great Promise, (C) Shiloh Sophia McCloud

There is a Hassidic saying which goes: “When the moon shall shine as bright as the sun, the Messiah will come.”

Woman through her struggle to understand herself and to articulate the highest values of the feminine principle, could begin to make the moon shine so that it softens the sun-brightness of our present consciousness. In accepting her depression, her suffering, her loneliness, her longing to outgrow the inarticulateness and powerlessness of her past existence, she may accomplish something truly heroic and extraordinary for life, something which humanity in centuries to come will recognise and cherish. Each woman who gives birth to herself and responds to what life is asking her to accomplish, contributes to the survival of our species and the diminishment of human suffering.

~Anne Baring

::

Over the past week, I have written about despair and grief, emotions that are far from the flowers and chocolates of Valentine’s Day. And, many of my friends are experiencing a depth of emotion, similar to what I have written.

Deep emotions are part of our experience as women – and, perhaps, it is becoming so every day that passes. Why so, you ask?

As Anne Baring writes on her site, at this time in history, women are birthing a new kind of consciousness. They are vessels for the shift that is occurring

Women share a different kind of love, one that isn’t always reflected out there in the culture. When you know, and feel, this love, it changes your life. May you always know this love is here, as a deep well to draw from, especially in times when you are polishing the moon within you.

::

So, this is a valentine to you, dear woman, dear friend.

May you know the beauty of your own soul.

May you give birth to the radiant You that has been there all along guiding you to this day.

May you trust in Her voice as she calls you to listen to your own deepest wisdom.

May you come to know that you are part of a long history of women who love life and will do anything to nourish and encourage its growth and emergence.

May you see yourself as a Mother, through and through, whether or not you have ever given birth to babies, and may you call forth this Ancient Motherhood within, to love yourself wholly and deeply, first, so you have the energy and strength to share your love with others.

May you always shower yourself with love and compassion, trusting that you are wholly, and holy, female, just as you are.

::

Image courtesy of Shiloh Sophia McCloud. Her paintings are remarkable, as is her work in the world.

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