I so respect Sandra Fluke
for her courage,Â
integrity &
willingness
to share her voice.
I stand with her.
Leaping Into the Feminine
Leap Day happens every four years.
The purpose behind it? To balance the calendar.
And, according to an Irish Legend, St. Brigid negotiated with St. Patrick to allow women to propose to men every 4 years on Leap Day. Some believe this may have been a way to bring into ‘balance’ the traditional roles of men and women.Ha. One day every four years?Balance?Â
Thank goodness we’ve come a long way since the days of negotiating one day every four years.
The feminine is indeed rising and women are leaping into a whole new conscious awareness.
What does it mean to be unabashedly you, to share yourself with the world without apology?Â
A Leap Day call to discover
Join me on an hour-long call on Leap Day to discover how we can leap into the experience of being Unabashedly Female.Â
We’ll also take a moment to celebrate the release of my eBook, The Best of Unabashedly Female with a special gift I have for you. And, I’ll be giving away a copy of the book on the call.
We’ll chat about:
- discovering what is true about our experiences as women
- the rising feminine
- sharing our voices
- the value of being seen
- and…I’ll be giving away a copy of my eBook.Â
The call will be recorded, too, so if you can’t make it you can still join in on the fun.
For call details and to register, click on the invitation.
The eBook will be available for sale after the call is done. In the feedback I’ve received, many have found the eBook to be something that helps them sit back and consider what it means to be a woman and to be a sacred being.
I hope you’ll join me for the call!
Silence Thickens
I sit in silence, open, waiting, still
I whisper, Yes.
Love comes.
Love reveals itself,
Offers itself, over and over.
Waves of love
Crashing onto the shoreline of my heart.
The world is not as I think it is.
This ocean of love,
infinitely vast and deep
calls me to its shoreline
and asks me to enter in.
I don’t know what to do with this much love,
Except be still and receive.
Tears fall.
Body fills.
Silence thickens and stills.
I tremble as love finds its way into me.
It makes its way along the edges I’ve used to define myself,
And in its wake the edges fray and soften.
Lines blur.
Definition grows watery.
All dissolves.
::
Image by Rudy A on Flickr Some rights reserved
Everything’s Full of Life
“For within living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, our feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets.†~Audre Lorde
Yes, we have survived.
We are poets in this linear culture of reason and rationality.
Poets of feeling.
Poets of beauty.
Poets that long to nurture and nourish life.
We feel deeply.
But, what if our feelings no longer kneeled to thought?
What if the feminine in all of us, in women and in men, no longer kneeled to the masculine but danced in right relationship with it.
What if we didn’t hide our feelings, and instead realized the gift they are?
What if we allowed our own hearts to break open, to feel deeply what is here right now?
Would we finally wake up enough to feel what we have done to the Earth? to the animals? to the world’s children? to each other?
Would we begin to let in the stark possibility that the world we leave to our grandchildren will be far from what we have known?
Would we reawaken to the sacredness of life?
Would we finally feel the grief that is so close at hand?
Photo by by Arianna_M(busy) on Flickr 
 Some rights reserved
The ABC’s of Self-Love: R is for Release
This post is part of The ABCs of Fierce Love, by Stratejoy. When Molly suggested I write about Release, I knew exactly what wanted to be written. I’m honored to be one of 26 writers sharing wisdom about fierce love.Â
First, a story…
Over the first ten days of February, I attended a silent retreat with Adyashanti, an American-born teacher of awakening. For each full day, along with 231 other people, I was silent. We meditated much of each day. This isn’t the first time I’ve done a silent retreat, but it is the longest one I’ve done…and it was the most profound.
Adya shared with us that the Divine is constantly and continually revealing itself to us in every moment. And everything it reveals to us is exactly what we need, when we need it, for our liberation…liberation from our own minds.
There were many ups and downs during these days. Just like in life, there were moments when I was confused as hell, moments when profound insights would come, and moments when nothing much seemed to be happening at all.
One moment in particular, though, speaks to the word release. I was sitting in the dining room drinking my chai, nibbling on my breakfast, and staring out a window that overlooked a green meadow and the pacific ocean. It was a beautiful morning.  I’d just finished the morning meditation, but nothing in particular was up for me. I was feeling very open.
Suddenly soft tears began to fall as I felt what seemed to be gentle waves begin to wash over me. At first, I felt some resistance to what was happening, but then my eyes instinctively closed as these waves grew stronger and caused me to turn within. The waves became deeper, and so I drew even more deeply inside, letting go into the waves. These were waves of love….sweet, silent, pulsing waves of love. It was as if an ocean of love was rhythmically washing over me, just as waves kiss the shore.
I’ve never been loved so deeply, so softly, so generously, so undeniably. Love washed over me, into me, around me and through me. I was immersed in an ocean of love…all in the midst of a silent yet bustling dining hall. This beautiful moment lasted close to 45 minutes, and at the end I knew I had been released into love.
It was a two-way love affair. The more I trusted what was being offered, the more I began to open to this love. The beloved loving the lover. The lover basking in the beloved’s love.
What keeps us bound up from this love?
Now, I imagine many of you have experienced what I did in some form. You don’t have to be silent or at a retreat or even thinking of love to experience such love. There is not necessarily any rhyme or reason to how, why or when such experiences show up.
We are always being loved. The divine is always offering itself up to you. Always. Always showing itself. Always revealing itself.
Which brings me to release, and you, and the Divine.
If this is so, what keeps us from knowing this love?
What keeps us from releasing ourselves into this great love?
While on the surface our reasons may seem different and unique, I imagine at the root they are pretty much the same. I know for me, what kept me from knowing this love as an experience were my deepest fears that who and what I am was somehow other than this divine love…that my basic nature was not love, that it was somehow broken, dark and not worthy of this divine love.
I imagine somewhere deep inside, you have similar fears.
Just for a moment, imagine this…
Imagine being set free, completely and utterly free to be you: the you you know you really are;Â the you you hear calling to you, the you your rational mind can’t begin to fathom exists.
When I ask you this, does it cause tears to fall and your heart to quiver? Or, perhaps there is an immediate response inside that this doesn’t pertain to you?
I know that so many of us are kept in bondage by beliefs and fears that who and what we really are is somehow not enough or okay or … fill in the blank. I also know that there is a deep instinctive drive to wake up to who we are. As the years of our lives pass by, this drive to wake up becomes stronger, while the bondage becomes more painful.
The drive you feel inside to reveal and release yourself is a natural, sacred, organic drive to heal into wholeness, to be the soul you truly are, to live a life of truth. The drive you feel inside is to know this Love, this sacred Love, as who and what you are.
No matter what, you are Loved
No matter what has happened to you in your life, your innocence and basic goodness have not been, and cannot be, diminished.Â
No matter how your body has been treated, by you or by others, you are loved.
You are beautiful because the core of who you are is beauty itself.
All of you is loved, even those parts of yourself you’ve told yourself could never be loved. You are loved in your softness and your hardness. You are loved in your shyness and your ferocity. You are loved in all the ways you are.
Even if it feels like it will, your heart will not break if you feel all that you’ve feared feeling. The bindings that have grown around your heart will break, causing your heart to break open…and that is a good, good thing. This love that abides in all that is will open your heart. All you have to do is say, “Yes”.
What keeps the real you bound? Whatever it is, it is no match for Love.
What would it take to release you? Again, it is love.
Love such as this is always, always being given to you. You need not fear it, because that’s what the real you is… you are love. You are fierce love. You are soft love. You are the truth at the heart of love.
Longing
I’m not saying it will be easy. It has not been easy for me. Not one bit. It takes a burning desire to know this love. It takes a willingness to feel all that you have not wanted to feel.
The thing is, we are wired for this. It is only our minds, and the products of all of our minds, that constantly tell us differently. But, we are wired for this.
You don’t have to believe in God. You don’t have to believe in a doctrine. In fact, let go of any beliefs you have. Let go of how you think it should and will be.
Your doorway in is your longing…the longing to know love, to be loved, to be love; a longing to return home, a longing to no longer hide yourself.
Touch into your longing. Touch into your knowing. Touch into your own heart.
Reach out to the Divine and ask for what you long for.
Open to the realization that you can trust… in life, in love, in yourself so that you may receive what the Divine is offering.
This is self love: Self loving self.
Release is just a ‘Yes’ away.
 ::
You can find out more about Molly’s ‘The ABC’s of Self Love Blog Crawl + Treasure Hunt’ here.
image by massdistraction 
 Some rights reserved
The Wildest Place
I am, at once, both a wild being and a soft open vessel.
I rise to meet you and I shy away from being seen.
Wildness does not necessarily mean big and loud and fierce. Sometimes it is the wildest place in me that is the most shy, most hidden in the shadow, most afraid of being caught.
‎Jeanette Winterson writes
“What should I do about the wild and the tame? The wild heart that wants to be free,
and the tame heart that wants to come home. I want to be held. I don’t want you to come too close. I want you to scoop me up and bring me home at nights. I don’t want to tell you where I am. I want to keep a place among the rocks where no one can find me. I want to be with you.”
There is a wild nature in women. Of course it is so. The deepest darkest mysteries of creation dance their dance in a woman’s womb. Blood flows; milk pours forth; a woman’s body is creation made manifest.
And, I know that womanhood is a vulnerable experience…especially where so many images, sound bites, and representations all would have us believe women’s bodies are simply objects to be dominated and controlled. How do we come down into the power and heart inherent in this female body, when there are subtle, and not so subtle, messages that our bodies are not our own, that our sensuality is for others, that our deepest nature is suspect?
I am no longer interested in being held by one who does not, and cannot, honor the entirety of this female nature.
I am no longer interested in being seduced by those who offer love only if I hand over my personal power.
It no longer interests me to be with someone if I must shut down, turn off, trade in the very nature that is at the heart of the wild feminine.
I know now that I will no longer turn away from either the wild or the tame, or anything in between in me. I know that it is I that can no longer seduce myself into handing over my personal power, or holding myself in a way that does not honor the entirety of this female nature.
I will no longer turn away from this vast dance that repeatedly calls me to enter.
The cauldron of the vast space of creativity pulls me down into it, into a force both fiercely loving and infinitely empty. In this dark place, I am becoming. I turn and turn again in this becoming. I am destroyed and created. I am torn apart and perhaps I will be born anew.
I have tried to avoid this. I’ve tried for years to avoid the inevitable. In the words of a brilliant teacher, “Resistance is futile”. Â At some point, this becomes perfectly clear. And as he also offers, resistance is the doorway in. Go directly into that which you most resist, and go with an open hand willing to receive what that resistance offers.
I’ve loved and I’ve been loved, and I am learning that love is not what I believed it to be. I am learning to listen to the poets, the mystics, and the teachers who, over and over, point to a love that is an infinite ocean, wild and chaotic. Rumi, Oliver, O’Donohue, and Adyashanti all speak of a love that our minds cannot even begin to fathom.
To me this is one of the hardest questions to live: Can I open to real love, not the projection-filled romantic love we’ve been conditioned to think will fill the hole inside, but true love, a love that is asking to pull me into its vast ocean without a life preserver, because it has no desire to preserve the false self that fights it.
In the end, the deepest places in the heart answer to no one except the One who weaves the threads of our existence.
::
wild@heart by mademoiselle louise on flickr Some rights reserved
Cycles. Seasons. Rhythms. Life.
“I can’t stop pointing to the beauty.” ~ Rumi
I went for a walk yesterday. As I turned a corner on my usual route, I was stopped by the beauty blazing before me: a flowering plum in full bloom. I didn’t expect to see a tree in full bloom. Winter is still here.
I looked closely at this tree: soft, tender flower flesh budding directly out of hard, seemingly rigid gray branches; clusters of blossoms blooming together, some barely nubs, others completely open and ready to fall; each moving to its own rhythm, even though they are all danced by the force that is the tree’s true nature.
I realized, once again, how much is happening, under the surface, away from our eyes and senses. This tree is always transforming, growing, shedding, dying, and being reborn.
Cycles. Seasons. Rhythms. Life.
And, I realized how, when I am focused on things, I can miss what is happening right in front of me.
Just like the flowering plum, so much is happening within me, away from eyes and senses. We are always moving in cycles, seasons and rhythms, shedding layers, buds opening, leaves falling.
I’m leaving today for a ten-day silent retreat. I’ve craved the silence. And, while in my head the retreat begins today and I’ve been busy getting things done so I can be away, under the surface part of me is already there, already moving within. Even as I’ve busied myself getting ready, part of me is already slowing down. This isn’t visible to anyone else, and surprisingly, just barely to me. In hindsight, I see how things are getting stirred up inside, telling me that on some level my psyche knows what’s coming.
Sitting in silence for many days brings much of your stuff up to the surface where it can be seen, and if you’re willing to sit with patience and compassion, liberated.
So much of what we believe is real and true is simply illusion. I’ve found that sitting in meditation, or dancing, which is my moving meditation, allows me to see through the imagined stories that have me believing the conditioning we swim in.
As Eckhart Tolle says, “‎~ If you can recognize illusion as illusion…it dissolves.
In seeing the flowering plum, I woke up out of the illusion that spring is far off, that life is static, that death is simply death. I remembered that life is erotic.
Life is a stream of change happening in both visible and invisible ways. We are each moving to our own rhythm, while we are danced by the force that is our true nature.
And, you?
What is happening within you that is just barely beginning to show itself, just beginning to bud?
What is dying during this winter within?
How is the erotic nature of life moving within you?
How is this nature whispering to you to move?
What is life asking of you?
::
While I am silent, this blog will be silent.
I’ll see you in ten days.
Pink Flowering Plums by Karl S Johnson | Some rights reserved
You Chose For You
Put it down.
Put it all down.
Stop fighting.
Feel.
It is the way it is.
You did it.
You were scared shitless and you did it.
Breathe.
Breathe, again.
You are here.
You’ve survived…and you’re not diminished one damn bit.
While the voices in your head tell you otherwise,
You chose for you.
Never believe again, even for one second, that you are powerless.
While the voices out there would love for you to believe that you are,
they are wrong.
Be with your self.
Trust your heart.
Let it all go.
Be with,
Stay with,
You.
::
“heart-shaped candlelight” by Zolivier. Some rights reserved
Are You Breathing?
::
I am in class, on the dance floor. Stacey, the teacher, begins to weave her magic and invites us to, “Move from the breath.” I instantly breath more deeply. How simple yet powerful is the reminder to breath.
I move.
And, I move.
And, as I move from the breath my movement deepens, my body opens, a simple joy makes itself known.
The breath carries me into the wave: a wave of rhythm, a wave of pleasure, a wave of release, a wave of not knowing…
My body begins to feel like liquid – liquid breath, liquid love, liquid life – and then I soften, open and receive. I receive everything I need to keep moving, for as long as the Spirit moves me.
::
It isn’t always so simple…or at least I tell myself that is so. But if I’ve learned one thing from dancing the 5Rhythms, it is to always come back to the breath.
When life feels hard, come back to the breath.
When I don’t know anything at all, come back to the breath.
When I’m scared shitless, come back to the breath.
When I’m ungrounded, spinning, and caught in one of those circles of drama, come back to the breath.
When I’m joyously alive and feeling on top of the world, come back to the breath.
When I hate what is happening, come back to the breath.
When I’m flowing, come back to the breath.
When I am mad as hell, come back to the breath.
When I have no idea what to do next, come back to the breath.
Whenever, whatever, wherever, whomever, however… come back to the breath.
I’ve found breathing is a supremely sensuous experience.
I am breathing.
I am moving.
I am dancing.
I am alive…and for this, I am grateful.
::
Photo by bloody marty mix on Flickr | Some rights reserved
5Rhythms is the work of Gabrielle Roth.
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Open to Love
Somewhere in Noe Valley,
a little neighborly part of San Francisco,
is this wish tree.
All decorated up,
it’s covered with tags filled with people’s wishes.
I came across it this morning and had to stop to read:
“Wishing for your inner light to shine bright.”
“I wish for my teenage daughter and I to get along better.”
“I wish for justice and peace for economic equality.”
“Peace within and in the world.”
“That I have a healthy baby and that this is a healthy and happy pregnancy!”
“I wish to just feel myself again – centered, happy and whole.”
All beautiful wishes.
And then this,
This is my wish, too.
You?
