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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.Â
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.
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Image is white ribbons on Flickr under Creative Commons 2.0
Thank you for this. I am reminded of two things
” To laugh is to risk appearing the fool. To weep is to risk appearing sentimental. To place ideas and dreams before a crowd is to risk their loss. To love is to risk being loved in return. To try is to risk failure. To live is to risk dying. But risks must be taken for the person who risks nothing in life asks nothing, does nothing, is nothing. They may ward suffering and sorrow but they cannot grow, change, love, live. Only the person who risks is free. ” – Leo Buscaglia (quoted as I remember, perhaps inaccurately)
As a singing teacher of people who think they can’t or shouldn’t sing, I often tell my students that they are the only ones in the whole history of everything who can sing with their voice: the laryngeal apparatus is unique, the resonance chambers of the face and body are unique, and of course the soul and spirit is unique. If they do not sing with their voice, no one else will. No one else can. It is a sacred charge to sing your song.
“My life flows on in endless song above earth’s lamentation…If love is lord of heaven and earth, how can I keep from singing.”
Glad to have found your blog.
Beautiful! There is so much pressure to offer our voice in a way that is packaged, shiny, and in the end, marketable (even if we are not selling anything!) Your insight takes the pressure to perform and composts it.
As each of us move in this direction, the world begins to feel as if we as women might actually belong, as if our voices are not “other”, but a natural and needed expression of the whole.
Good medicine. Thank you Julie.
I am the one that pushes and almost assume a defensive position from the start in conversations which therefor often becomes about the conflict rather than the issue. My father always interrupted me while yelling at me if I interrupted at him. Later in life, I had just started public speaking and lifecoaching, receiving much praise when I was silenced by an old professor doing my Master’s thesis by flunking even though he at the same time told me “I wrote too good” which ignited a continous struggle over power and authority which I am now trying to recover from. I am going to speak again.
Aloha,
/Alexandra
oh……………..wow……… (my words, I hear them).
“sacred creativity is birthing the new consciousness.” (your words, oh, I hear them.)
thank you, Julie
truth be told………….
Beautiful peace of writing. The timing was perfect. I know what I have to do now, and I will. Thank you very much! xxx
I stumbled upon your post from another blog, and am mesmerized. What you have said here is so true, and just the words I need to read this day.
When you grow up in a culture that tells you that the man knows best, you learn early on that your words may not matter to anyone. This is a terrible thing to be told and takes a lifetime to overcome…at least that is my experience.
This post encourages me to speak my mind, speak my truth, speak up and hear what my voice has to say. Seems such a simple thing to do…but I think it will take practice.