After a long, long week of wonderfully internal time, slow quiet mornings and a few days of being really sick, I’m re-entering this new year with less.
Yes, less.
A little less weight from being sick, but also less looking, less sense of internal chaos, less wanting.
A great load has been lifted from how I experience life. And, with the lifting of this load, there is a marked experience of less veiling, less pushing, and less of a need to search for something that never was attainable.
None of this was necessarily a beautiful spiritual experience. Ha. I suppose there is such a thing. Yes, I suppose I have had them. But I don’t want to make it sound like this was all grace and light and beauty. It was painful. And that pain was beautiful, is beautiful. It was real. I felt things I had stuffed for eons, things I didn’t want to feel, but finally came to realize there was no avoiding it if I wanted to know peace…and be free.
I saw things about myself that aren’t pretty, ways I can be, ways I have been with others, ways I hold myself back: self-righteousness, jealousy, wanting to be special, wanting to be wanted, and how damn careful I can be…
In being with these parts of myself, really being with them with love, I came to see that at the heart of each of these unskillful habits is a pearl, a little gem of goodness and truth that was the seed of what grew into behavior was absolutely necessary at the time and saved my little psyche. AND, as an adult this behavior certainly wasn’t helpful in my relationships with others or with myself.
Shedding, unfurling, letting go…all beautiful acts of both persistence and grace.
Speaking of Unfurling
I’d love for you to take a look at this interview I did with Amy Kessel, ACC, a coach and simply a beautiful woman. Video is not my favorite form of communicating, but with Amy it was a lot of fun. She has a gracious presence that drew me in from the moment I first met her by Skype.
Her question of me and other women is, How are you unfurling? A lovely question. I think it’s a great one for all of us to ask ourselves.
“I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.†~ Audre Lorde
Hello beautiful!
I wanted to share something exciting with you.
I’m going to be holding a teleclass for Sherold Barr’s Women Heal the World community titled,
“Exploring the Realm of Womanhood & the Rising Sacred Feminine.”
On the call, we’ll explore the rising of the sacred feminine principle and awakening to the sacredness of womanhood. Sound interesting? I hope so. It’s what I feel compelled to speak and share.
I met Sherold online and then spent some time in person with her at the World Domination Summit last June in Portland. Sherold is a dynamic woman doing wonderful healing work in the world. We’ve had some wonderful engaging conversations like this one…
I sense our conversation next Tuesday is going to be the same.
If you can’t make the call, no worries. The teleclass will be recorded and you will receive and MP3 audio recording.
Consider joining Women Heal the World. There is no cost to do so, and you’ll be connected to women around the world who want to Make Peace, not War.
I’d love to have you join us on Tuesday! See you there.
2) Click “JOIN TEAM†or login if you’re already on the team
3) Click “FIND A LOAN†(there are options on the left side to narrow your search)
4) Choose who YOU want to loan $25 to and click “LEND $25“and then click “CHECK OUTâ€
5) You will notice a $3.75 “Optional Donation to Kiva’s Operation Costs.†You may click on “EDIT†and change or remove that amount if you like.
I’ve been a little stuck lately – wanting to step out more fully into the world, fully embodying the Work I am here to do, yet meandering in a place of trying to figure the Work thing out. Business is really good right now, and…
I can see snippets of what that Work is. Although my work with people, mostly women, to help them move toward their vision has found great success already, there’s a place where I have felt somewhat stuck.
Just today, in researching for this post about Margaret Wheatley (who will be speaking in Oakland this Saturday), I came across words she wrote some time ago that seem to directly speak to the place inside of me where a sense of stuckness has been living.
“What if we could offer our work as a gift so lightly, and with so much love, that that’s really the source of fearlessness? We don’t need it to be accepted in any one way. We don’t need it to create any certain outcome. We don’t need it to be any one thing. It is in the way we offer it, that the work transforms us. It is in the way we offer our work as a gift to those we love, to those we care about, to the issues we care about. It is in the way we offer the work that we find fearlessness. Beyond hope and fear, I think, is the possibility of love.”
I usually see insights…meaning, I see images that show me something I’ve not known. In these images that have come to me, I see myself offering this work in love, from a deep place of love that is far beyond me or anything my rational mind could conjure up.
Work as Offering
Perhaps like you, I’ve been taught and conditioned to look for results, to see success in my work as something results-oriented. In our current paradigm, that’s how success is measured. Even streams of thought that teach us that success is not based on dollar figures still hold a sense that success is about a certain outcome.
When I read Margaret’s words, “We don’t need it to be any one thing. It is in the way we offer it, that the work transforms us.”, my mind relaxes. I can feel how its been caught up in ‘understanding’ what the ‘one thing’ is that my work must be.
When I read, “It is in the way we offer our work as a gift…”, “It is in the way we offer the work that we find fearlessness.”, I can see my focus has been on the how, on what I am getting done (or not), rather than on the way I offer it and how I hold the work itself.
I sense the how comes out of the offering, the next step comes when I am let go into the love that is there for “those I love, to those I care about, to the issues I care about…”
A love so vast
In the short video on fearlessness I’ve shared with you below, Margaret shares this quote:
“Fearlessness is not being afraid of who you are.” ~ Chogyam Trungpa
When I heard these words, I saw that being tied to the ‘what’ of my Work keeps me stuck.
When I feel the love I have for those I am here to serve, I feel a letting go happen on its own.
Simply offering what is here without any attachment is having to ‘be with’, really ‘be with’ the vast unknown that is at the heart of this love.
It’s a vastness that is terrifying yet in some strange way reassuring because it is the only thing that never changes. It is that which has always been here, unchanging, yet from which change seems to be born from.
I have a sense that who I really am is a love so vast that it scares the begeebus out of me. I’ve had glimpses of this love and I literally can’t hold the glimpse, can’t stay with it because it is too much contain.
Latent Powers
I have to laugh at these words as they appear on the page. Of course I can’t contain it. The small “I” seems to think it can do this. This small “I” sees it all as impossible, because the small “I” is not the power behind one’s life-task…
“Our proper life-task must necessarily appear impossible to us, for only then can we be certain that all our latent powers will be brought into play.†~ C. G. Jung, Letters vol. 1, p. 94
I can see that what I sense lies ahead appears impossible, and reading Jung’s words helps me have a sense of why that is. These latent powers within us can come forth when we get out of our own way, in a sense a kind of ‘bowing down’ to the real you that you are, the one you are afraid of. In my experience, it doesn’t have anything to do with the small “I”, or me, that is attached to the outcomes, does want success, or longs to have it be seen or received in a certain way.
That part will always try to control, and it is this control that is creating a sense of stuckness within.
A Call to Fearlessness
I have dined on Margaret Wheatley’s wisdom many times in my life. I first saw her speak in person in 2005 at one of the Thought Leaders Gathering in the Bay Area. Her wisdom, as she shares in this short video, always opens something new in me…
Hosted by Bay Area Coaches, this is going to be an event to open your heart to doing work in the world in an entirely different way. Even if you don’t live in the Bay Area, you can still attend via simulcast.
And, if you buy one ticket to attend in person, you can purchase a second ticket for a friend at half price – either in person or via simulcast.
Take a moment right now to taste more of Margaret Wheatley’s wisdom in this article on Eight Fearless Questions. I promise, you’ll come away with an entirely new take on what it means to be fearless.
We’re already having stormy weather here in Northern California. The rain pounded so hard against my window last night, I thought it was going to pour through the glass. Very unusual weather for this time.
“Writing this post has been an illuminating process. From the outside, it seems like a fairly straightforward idea…how I make time for what matters. But, as I sat with the question of what really matters to me, I realized, over time, that what matters isn’t anything I do, it is who I am being, and how I relate to life when I do whatever it is I do.
Below are qualities of being that bring me peace and a resonance with life as it unfolds.”
I’d love to know which qualities of being allow life to unfold with more ease for you.
About Britt:
“I’m a blogger, podcaster, and blog coach for artists, writers, entrepreneurs and do-gooders. I’m also a big vision consultant who loves to help people find and express their calling. When I’m not blogging, I love to cook, collage, write letters, interview big visionaries, and bring groups of people together, online and offline. I offer the Juicy Blogging e-course four times a year. You can learn more my work at www.brittbravo.com, and connect with me on Twitter at @BBravo.”
I’m busy preparing to teach the first evening of my new course, The Whole Woman, at The Teahouse Studio in Berkeley tomorrow evening, October 6th. If you live in the Bay Area or know women who do, there’s still time to register and join us.
I’m excited about the course.
If you’ve been feeling a nudge to look inside, wondering who you are and what you’re here for, this course is for you.
If you have a challenge in front of you, or a big decision to make, then the tools we’ll be covering will help support you in this time.
If you know you’re not living your truth, yet don’t know what that truth is, or even how to begin to shift how you’re living, come join us.
Many women are finding themselves being called to let go of who they’ve thought they were, in order to discover the truth of their being. It is time for us all to discover what is real and to live it with love and compassion for ourselves.
You may sense the course is right for you, but may be afraid to dive in – if so, don’t worry, you won’t be alone. We all feel a certain amount of fear about change, especially when we step into it willingly.
I’ve discovered complexity just doesn’t feel good. Running in circles, worrying about having too much to do, jumping from one task to another, is hard on the body and soul.
I’ve sat with this feeling that comes when I spend too much time on the computer. I feel tight and wound-up. When I feel this way, I long for simplicity, and for doing activities that bring me back to the body, to breath, to life.
Simple moments.
Simple choices.
Simple ways.
Simple.
All I can do is do one thing at a time. Yes, in reality, all any of us can do is one thing at a time, even though we like to believe we are getting more done when we multitask, we aren’t.
Rhythms
I notice when my head starts to swirl with everything I’ve got to do, or everything I must remember, I begin to feel a sense of overwhelm, and a corresponding reaction in my body where my chest tightens and my breath becomes shallow. When I spend too much time using the computer, the same thing happens: the body tightens and I get too little oxygen in my cells.
I know, now, there is no such thing as time. The sun rises and sets. The moon moves from a sliver of translucent white to a fully white orb, and back again. Days come and go. Seasons pass. I grow older. Yet, time is just a construct that we use to get along together in the world.
We’ve made time King, when in reality rhythm is what restores my sanity – the rhythm of my breath, my heartbeat; of sleep and awakeness; of hunger and thirst; of life and death.
The rhythm of the creative process – fallow when fallow, fruitful when fruitful.
Life is about rhythm, not time.
Life itself, is a complex system, and we humans have added a complexity to life, especially here in the west, that is driving us crazy.
The only way I’ve found to be in this complexity and stay somewhat sane is to remember – remember what I love, remember who in my life really matters to me, remember that taking care of this body is a beautiful act, and remember to be aware of what I have to offer to others that might lighten their load. At it’s most basic, this remembrance is of a very basic, yet very real knowing that life itself is sacred.
I am by no means implying I have it all together, but rather, that I’m learning to slow down, to live more simply, to ask for help and to honor the very simple fact that I am alive and this life is precious.
What is it to listen, deeply, to the voice of another speak something that must be spoken?
What is it to not flinch when hearing the truth that flows from another’s heart and soul?
Many, many women are writing their stores. And, many women are reading these stories. We are bearing witness to each other, to our lives, and yes, even our deaths.
“Rhonda is now in hospice, and though she doesn’t fear death, she does dread it a bit because she still has so much she wants to say. And there’s so much we need to hear. “Jeanne, they tell me to rest,†she said in a recent phone call with a tone that’s as close to whining as I’ve ever heard come from her lips. “Fuck that,†I said. “You can rest later. Now you write. And write. And write.—
As I writer, I know how it feels when I must write. And as a writer, I know how it is to have my words witnessed, read, and considered.
::
Take a moment to read Rhonda’s stories and, as Jeanne writes, “join me as we bear witness to her words, to her life.”
As Rhonda writes, “I write only truth.”
I imagine that when it comes time to die, one’s patience for anything that is not truth grows thin.
“There are many fierce moments in any one life span: times of turmoil, upheaval, challenge, and change. These fierce moments of grace are in many ways the most spiritually important moments of our lives.”
~ Adyashanti
Wood Line, a work of art by Andy Goldsworthy; photo by Julie Daley
Fierce times.
I’m personally in one of these fierce times.
I’ve left a relationship with a really lovely man. A man I love. I’ve left my home with him and moved into a new city, a city I’ve longed to live in for quite a while now.
Many have told me I’m courageous. I’m suppose there is some of that. And, to be honest, I simply could no longer stand the pain of avoiding what I knew was true in my heart.
It’s painful to avoid what gnaws at you during the night.
It’s painful to keep lying to yourself about yourself.
It’s painful to continue a relationship with someone you love, deeply love, when you get clear that it is no longer where you want to be.
Don’t get me wrong. Not all of me wanted to leave. A part of me was happy because I love him and I felt safe and secure with him. But that was only a part of it.
I also felt hemmed in by my own unwillingness to be true to myself…the real self.
And, I felt pain in my heart. The heart always knows.
This is where freedom really is…where there is no safety. I’m learning this. Not all of me believes it yet, but enough of me does to have brought me to this place.
The way does not reveal itself.
It doesn’t have to. It’s the way.
It doesn’t show up as a brightly lit, four-lane boulevard. Rather, it feels like the image above.
As I would lie awake at night, torn by this sense of needing to leave and a sweet love for the man lying next to me, I could feel the wild trees all around me, so thick I couldn’t see. It felt as if they were hiding the way, wrapping me in a darkness that felt frightening.
I was surrounded by the unknown, with just a small sliver of light and path ahead. Only a bit of the way was shown, and now, in hindsight, that bit was plenty. Always enough.
Somewhere in the midst of this wild forest of life is my wood line. The way is made from life itself, the wild forest giving over her bits of wood to be laid down end to end. A long curving line that snakes through the wildness of life.
Even the wild trees, the wild forest serves. I know without conflict, tension, friction, there can be no creativity. It’s in those sticky places where the desire for safety and the desire to be free rub up against each other. It is here where we can come to know the most humbling feeling of being the wild eye of infinite spirit living life through the limited reality of a human body.
As in the outer world, so in the inner world, so in the collective world.
This meandering path of Wood Line, forged by the death of cypress trees in a grove of eucalyptus, shows the way to a new life in a new world. The snake winds through me, too, beckoning me on to somewhere I can’t yet see, or that (as Marjory writes) “hasn’t been revealed to me yet.â€
This week I was on a call with Meg Wheatley. We spoke of her idea of hopelessness as a necessary way for these times.
In sitting with this sense, hopelessness is an invitation to let go of the ways I hold on to my old life. If this new life is to be truly new, letting go of hope means really letting go of my need for safety and security, of the ways I’ve known these things in the past. It means being with the shittiest of feelings that I have tried to avoid. It means beginning to trust in nothing but the ground that gives rise to existence itself.
And it is so in our collective world. The cypress trees of the old way, where greed, separation, and a wanton disregard for the earth were once cornerstones of how to be in the world, are taking their last gasps. As they die, the ground will again be visible.
“These fierce moments of grace are in many ways the most spiritually important moments of our lives.”
i’ve come home
a new home, an old home
home where body lives
body where soul lives
i’ve moved into a new life
a life that has beckoned for years
a life that has yet to be shaped and hardened
with my need to feel in control
life has its own course
and I meet it willingly,
with an open heart,
or not, because that happens, too
right now, in this unshaped place,
i know that I don’t know
and I know that shapes and lines and the falling away of newness
can create the illusion of knowing
get settled
feel your self in this new place
of solitude and coming
know yourself anew
you will know when you know
until then, just breathe
and go about your day
meeting life as it comes
“The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.”
— Audre Lorde
Privilege
Privilege, handed out at birth.
White privilege: Yes.
Gender privilege: No.
Born into color. Born into gender. Born into a system.
I am white. I am a woman. In reality, I am neither of these things. Yet, I live in a system, a system full of institutions that are insidiously laced with privilege, domination and oppression.
I don’t know…
what to do with this. I know I’ve been handed privilege. I know I’ve used this privilege and enjoyed its benefits. I know part of me would rather not talk about it.
Yet, I must.
Why must I? Because, not talking about it keeps me in a silence that needs to be broken.
Not talking about it keeps me from seeing my own humanity, keeps me tangled up in a fog of complicity and complacency that go against the nature of what I really am.
Not talking about keeps me from fully waking up to the light that is at the heart of every cell of matter.
Not talking about it keeps us from solidarity, soulful human connection that can help to break apart this system that we all uphold, both consciously and unconsciously. And I no longer want to uphold this system.
Once,
a woman told me this story. She was talking with her boyfriend about gender oppression, about what it’s like living in this culture as a woman. He replied to her that she couldn’t know oppression because she is white. He told her she couldn’t be gender oppressed because she was privileged by her skin color. He negated her experience of gender oppression because he determined that her whiteness denied her the very real and direct experience of gender oppression.
I once had a man, a white man, tell me that my whiteness automatically made me an oppressor. The first time I heard this, I was stopped short with surprise. Then anger. Then confusion.
I asked myself,
“What do I do with this?â€
So, I sat with it. It churned. There were no clear answers, no short and sweet snippets of wisdom. And then I forgot about it.
Until now. Until my deep, deep desire to see men break the silence about gender privilege invited me to break my silence about what I’ve been privileged with – racial privilege mainly, as well as financial privilege, class privilege, etc.
As a white woman, I know both privilege and oppression. And, yes, I know I experience both, that one does not negate the other.
We were all born into a system that oppresses. We didn’t’ choose it, yet it is our responsibility to see it for what it is. And, for the sake of our children and grandchildren we must come to terms with the insidious ways it keeps us doing things that I know are antithetical to our true nature.
We’ve been born into it through no choice of our own. AND, we have a choice as to whether or not we continue to uphold it, because the system doesn’t do it to us. It works through us. The system is just a collection of beliefs that we internalized. Everything that we create from these beliefs continues the system. Everything that we create from knowing that we are simply many expressions of the One source of all of life will create a new infrastructure based on the love that is this One source.
I no longer want to know separation, because I know I am you and you are me. I know this. I see this, and it is only my internalized idea of the way the world is, and my habitual response pattern to these ideas, that keep me upholding something so painful.
I am angry about what has been done, and continues to be done, to women and children, to the earth. I am angry about the continued degradation of the feminine.
I am outraged at my own complacency.
My love for life, for this beauteous wonder that moves through me, calls me to live something greater than my habitual fear and confusion.
Am I willing to look here? Yes, I am willing to look. And, I hope you’ll look with me.
…
This post is part one of a series on privilege and oppression, and compliance and complacency. I don’t yet know how many parts there will be, or how and where it will end.
I hope you’ll inquire with me and leave rich comments here. Let’s begin a discussion. Let’s find a way through the fog of not wanting to see and know, so that one day we will meet in the place where there is no ‘other’.
Prompt: Lesson Learned What was the best thing you learned about yourself this past year? And how will you apply that lesson going forward?
Authority.
I realized how much I am not conscious of my own authority. I realize how well trained I have been to give it away. I realize how rarely it seems possible to challenge authority, to speak out, and act out, against something that goes so against everything I stand for, everything that feels true in my being.
It’s one of those lessons that keeps coming back in ever widening circles, like a spiral dive into ever opening consciousness. Sometimes, make that pretty often, I have to keep being reminded, over and over, of my unconscious beliefs.
The etymology of the word ‘authority’
It’s funny how the meaning of words changes over time, reflecting how beliefs and societies change.
Notice how, in the early part of the 13th century, the word pointed to a book or quotation that served as something to solve a dispute.
And, notice how the words changes over the centuries, to “power to enforce obedience” in the late 14th century, to “people in authority” in the 1610s to “those in charge, those with police powers, a recorded definition from the mid 19th century.
What a big leap from author to those with the power to enforce obedience.
The word authority has always had such a strong correlation with power, domination and aggression in my consciousness. No wonder.
From another source, the origin is shown as:
[Middle English auctorite, from Old French autorite, from Latin auctrits, auctritt-, from auctor, creator; see author.]
Creator. Author. (sounds vaguely familiar with #11 of my 11 things for 2011).
c.1300, autor “father,” from O.Fr. auctor, from L. auctorem (nom. auctor) “enlarger, founder, master, leader,” lit. “one who causes to grow,” agent noun from auctus, pp. of augere “to increase” (see augment). Meaning “one who sets forth written statements” is from late 14c.
Father.
How this beautiful masculine energy of father has been perverted to mean domination and power over.
One of the biggest things that has kept me from owning my own authority, in my life, my work and my writing, is the ingrained belief that someone else out there has more authority than me, authority over me; someone else, out there, is the expert; someone else, out there, will take care of things.
It’s such a place of powerlessness and victimhood. It’s a place of lethargy and resignation. It’s a place of adolescent comfort.
Authority as Author
How different things look when I see authority from the place of author.
Author of my own life. Author of works that share with the world the beauty and wisdom that move through me. Author of creative expression that includes the powerful parts of me I’ve been well trained to hide and keep down in a society where it is ‘taught’ that women don’t have power or authority.
The masculine energies in me have scared me. I’ve seen what power looks like out there. I’ve seen authority dominate others who are seen as, and believe they are, less powerful. This authority keeps in place an infrastructure that holds this perverted sense of authority in place.
And, I don’t know what will happen if I stand up to that authority out there that seems to have so much power.
The Fierce Face of the Feminine.
In an incredibly powerful TEDx talk, Chameli Ardagh eloquently speaks of the ‘Fierce Face of the Feminine’.
She shares numerous stories about her own childhood and training to suppress emotion, but also an instructive story of Kali and Shiva. It is in this story that I discovered a simple, yet powerful, understanding of how to express this fierceness with presence.
Shiva is the masculine counterpart to Kali. Shiva is presence. As I discovered the father/masculine aspect of author and authority, I could see the masculine presence necessary to hold the expression of fierce anger and rage.
A disowned masculine makes it very difficult to stand in one’s authority. Knowing a positive masculine, a loving presence, is within me is a more healthy internal infrastructure from which to express the author within, the author that writes about both love and rage, an author that doesn’t leave out important parts of the ‘story’.
This video is long for our short attention spans, but every moment of it is well worth your time.
Something shifts dramatically when I:
remember that the word authority (and all words) carries much more than simply a definition. It carries experiences, images, beliefs, a young girl’s impressions of the world and what happens when one pushes against authority.
hear a powerful story about the nature of the masculine and feminine and how they can be together to help balance expression, both internally and externally, and individually and collectively.
realize (in an ever-deepening way) the power of unconscious thoughts and beliefs and how they keep a lid on my expression as a female human being.
understand the power of words and the power of the story we tell ourselves about what is acceptable and what is not, about what is loving and what is not, about what is possible and what is not.
reclaim the power of a fully integrated and balanced awareness, that includes the full range of human feelings and expression.
accept that there are many powers, all about us, conspiring to be of service to the present awakening to love, to power that loves rather than dominates.
We all have authority, the ability to author our own lives. And, the infrastructure currently at work, both externally, and internally in our own minds, was not created to support this. It is shifting. We are shifting. We are waking up to the power within.
I now can so clearly see that nothing is stopping me from writing what I need to write, as a woman here to write her life, as creatrix standing in her own stead.
And, you?
How do you see your own authority? Where do you give it expression? Where do you not? How might your life be different if you became the author of your own life?
rit
s, auct