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Woman’s Song

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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. 

 

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

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Body and Moon, Cycles and Rhythms

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At the bottom of this post, I ask questions of you that I’d really love to hear your wisdom on. I hope you’ll share.

::

In our current faced-paced, and growing faster each day, culture, for the most part we ignore nature’s cycles and rhythms. Most of the rhythms we do follow are man-made: our current-day calendar, 9 to 5, Monday thru Friday, and school to work to retirement, to name a few.

Yet, life moves in rhythms and cycles that are tuned in to each other. The tides follow the moon, birds sing wildly (like they are doing outside my living room window right now) each spring, and women’s bodies for much of one’s life have a cycle that allows it to be a receptive home to new life coming into being.

Painting by my Great-Grandmother from 1899

Somewhere, sometime a while back, I considered how my monthly cycle was tied to the moon. I’m not sure where I read it. I know I didn’t learn it from my mother or in school. And, after my surgically induced menopause at the age of 29,

I never considered, nor was I counseled to consider in my process of recovery, that as I no longer had a cycle, I could follow the moon’s phases instead. I wish I’d known this. Looking back over the past 27 years since my surgery, I can see how I’ve floated a bit, meaning I haven’t really been grounded in a rhythm.

Why is that important? Because as a woman, I am deeply in tune with the earth and with life, and when my own cycle ended with that big long incision, my deeper relationship with life and the earth was cut, too.

Of course, we don’t have to have everything removed to lose touch with our own connection to our body, and in response the connection between our body and the earth. Just living in a culture that no longer thinks of the earth as a living, breathing being causes us to not consider such things.

::

Just yesterday, as part of Sara Avant Stover’s “I Heart My Moon Cycle” month, she shared a video I shot while I was on Molokai. For these 28 days, Sara is sharing stories from 28 women about their moon cycles. I wondered about participating, since I don’t have a cycle…technically, that is. But Sara encouraged me to share, wanting to have stories from women who are in all of the phases of life.

Last week, after years of knowing each other online, I got to spend time with Sara in the flesh. We took a leasurely walk, along with my dear friend, Tara Mohr, into the Presidio land, here in San Francisco. We talked of many things. What I loved, though, was getting to know her presence, getting to feel how she moves through the world grounded in her body. And, we talked about what it means to move with the cycles of the moon when a woman no longer has her own internal cycle. Thank you, Sara, for opening me to consider how my life might be more supported by moving with the cycles of the moon.

Since that day last week, I’ve been contemplating this for my life – what it would mean to move with the cycles of the moon. And, since Sara released my video, I’ve received inquires from other women on how I know when to rest if my body no longer has a cycle. And the answer is, I haven’t know when to rest. I keep moving through my days, as if there is no cycle.

What this brings up for me is wonder about how many ways are we tied to the earth and the moon even if we don’t know it. How are our bodies interacting with the cycles of life, even if and when we continue to move with the culturally constructed rhythms that most likely do not support our full health, full creativity, and full happiness?

I know that simply by being, we can feel our connection to all of life. Our bodies can guide us to remember and re-member. I know how important this is for me as I get older, to listen to the rhythms so that I don’t get so overtired from constantly moving, and just as importantly so that I fully embody the gifts of womanhood, gifts that I am hungering for, and that the world itself is hungering for.

The rhythms and cycles are important to my creativity and what I desire for my work in the world, as well as to the creativity of our world at large.

So my questions of you are:

How do you move with the cycles and rhythms of your body, and the bodies of nature?

If you are in menopause, what cycles speak to you?

If you had a hysterectomy and are not yet in age-related menopause, what have you discovered? I really want to know.

I want to hear your wisdom. I know it will help me to listen to mine.

 ::

I hope you’ll take a look at the stories that women are sharing on Sara’s site. And, I hope you take a few moments to listen to mine. I share a few intimate stories. And, if you listen closely, you’ll be able to hear the birdsong of the island all around me.

image: This image is part of a painting done by my great-grandmother, Clarissa Ruh. I sense she was in touch with the moon.

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Creation and the Bedroom

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Today, Wild Writing took me here. The poem that ignited this piece was ‘Domestic’ by Deborah Landau. Catalyst phrases from the poem by Deborah Landau are in pink.

::

I like the bedroom man.
Take me to the door.
Take me.

Something longs inside me. Or is it something calls to me from inside? A longing that is sensuous in its flavor.

When I follow, I land down somewhere in my sacral bowl, sacral for sacred because it is so. The landing is clear and simple, but the way to getting there is anything but.

Down in this bowl where darkness reigns, there is a sweet intoxication, lover and beloved wrapped around each other, not even close to the clump of matter I used to think existed in this place inside my body.

Dakrness as in creation, not as in the many ways we sometimes see this place in a woman’s body.
Creation. A bowl. Ingredients stirred. Something grows.

Banana blossom

* I’m thinking about the orchard, how each morning I’d take my basket and wind my way down to the first tree along the path. Bright yellow bumpy lemons. Not once did She drop one for me to gather. I shook her, yet there was no letting go. Next, avocado and mangos. After the wild winds, the avocados, bigger than my two fists together, would lie waiting for me, sometimes with rat gnashes all around one end. Bananas. Papayas. Nonis.

The citrus trees showed me something. I will never forget. Limes, lemons, grapefruits, and oranges of all sizes and shapes, colors and textures; except for the limes, it was hard to tell what was what. And even then, the limes weren’t always green.

One grapefruit in particular taught me how we can be so many colors and not one at all. Pink, green, orange, yellow, and red spread out around its weighty sphere. I relished how She paints the canvas of her creation. I cried at how she holds on until we are ready to be birthed, picked up, appreciated, held, then eaten and enjoyed. Such intricate and supremely intelligent beauty She creates.

* A few hours later, after my harvest in the orchard, just on the edge of town, I drive by the uber-uniformed rows of corn plants, so closely planted there is no room for the wild wind to shake them.

Exactly the same height.
Exactly the same width.
Exactly the same.
Places please.

A cold shiver runs through me as I witness the raping of Mother Nature.

There is no surprise, no collage of color, no bumpy skin, no gangley, gnarly diversity.

There is only same.

Uniformed acquiescence created by the man who knows nothing of the bedroom.

I weep. We are out of order but not broken.

::

 * My first shared words from my recent time on Molokai.

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Your Voice is Calling

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Since this is about Voice, I thought it would be fun to speak it: [audio:https://unabashedlyfemale.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/YourVoiceIsCalling1.mp3|titles=Your Voice is Calling]

“Doubt yourself and you doubt everything you see. Judge yourself and you see judges everywhere. But if you listen to the sound of your own voice, you can rise above doubt and judgment. And you can see forever.” ~ Nancy Lopez

Listen to the sound of your own voice.

When I first read these words from Nancy Lopez, I read them literally… Listen to the sound of your own voice.

I thought of the moment when I first really heard my voice – when I felt the vibration of my own voice reverberating through my body. It was on a day when I’d done some really deep, intensive emotional healing work. I’d released a great deal of old emotional ‘stuff’ that I’d held in my body for most of my life, and as I heard my voice, I felt resonance, alignment, and the truth of what I was speaking. It felt as if there was no separation between what I was saying, the vibration of my voice, and who I really am.

There was a settled quality to it, and a really straight up and down sense of voice…I guess that would be like a linearity to it. And it reverberated throughout my body. I could feel it. There was a flow to it.

I’m trying to find words to describe an experience, which can be hard.

I’ve noticed that as my practice of dance now heads into an eleventh year, I am beginning to spontaneously sing to the music. While the dance practice is silent, meaning you can’t talk, sometimes we vocalize in the dance. Sometimes, it isn’t singing that comes but grunting, crying, or even clucking…what I call voice-making.

Embodiment is what happens when more and more of the energy of your soul inhabits the cells of your physical body. (That’s how I describe it right now. I don’t know how spiritual masters would define it, but that’s what it feels like to me.) As we become more embodied, we become more awake, more full of light, more vibrant with the Goddess in each cell of our being.

Voice and the throat area are closely tied to creativity and the womb area. I’ve found that when we are immersed in the creative process of different creative outlets, we can spontaneously sing and vocalize. And this is important, because as Nancy shares, as we listen to our own voices, we rise above the Voice of Judgment, we begin to see clearly what we are here to create.

I know that the fear of judgment and criticism has been one of my biggest blocks to sharing my voice in the world. Perhaps that’s why Nancy’s words speak so deeply to me.

What is it to really listen to our own voice? Not just the physical voice, but the words, the resonance, the heart in it, and the love in it?

Yes, love. Your voice has love in it, love for you. It is speaking to you, calling you back into your own heart, back into your womb, back into your own soul. Listen. Listen deeply. Drink it up. Drink it in. Drink in the medicine of your own voice so it can heal and bring light back into your cells.

As Thich Nat Hanh shares, “To be beautiful means to be yourself. You don’t need to be accepted by others. You need to accept yourself.”

Your voice is calling, calling you home to you.

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Birthing isn’t logical or reasonable, nor is it necessarily practical.

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I am sharing something that I am excited about, and something vitally important to me, with someone I know.

He listens. Then, he says, “What you are saying is so abstract.” “What does this mean?” “What are the practical implications of this?” “How do we do this?”

None of his questions are wrong. He is seeing what I am saying from a practical viewpoint, a viewpoint that is about putting things into action. Yet, alongside his questions comes a feeling of frustration within me. I know this feeling well. His words take me back decades, back to when I was very young…

I am excited and want to share what I’m excited about with my parents. I try to say it in words. I try to share what I see and feel, and the complete joy of it all. And when I do, I am met with a look of tightness and almost a kind of disapproval. I can see they want me to calm down. They want me to package all of this joy into words and sentences that ‘make sense’, ways that are logical.

Then I hear these words, “That’s not logical.” and my heart drops to the ground.

The effect of these words on this little psyche is profound: the little voice dries up, the throat quivers, and the tongue becomes tied in knots. I’ve shut myself up tight and there’s no getting me to say another word. I go silent. There is a giving up that happens, a giving up because it feels, emphasis on feels, impossible to take this young one’s heart and soul’s fire and put it into logical words that adult people will get.

 

It is amazing how we can be taken back to old times so quickly, how the stories stuck in our bodies are coded with the time and place where the story unfolded.

As I sit with his questions, an ages-old fear comes up that there is someone on the other side of what I am going to share and they do not get it. They want me to put what I am saying in terms they understand, terms that are about doing, about how, about it being practical. They want me to take this abstract and make it practical. It feels like I come up against this hard wall on the other side, a very literal, very rational mind that doesn’t get it.

It’s like there is this big beautiful fullness and I fear that I don’t know how to get people to understand. Just feeling this makes me go mute and want to turn away.

I see images and visions. I see them often. They are beautiful. Beautiful images, and deeply intense feelings fill my heart. And yet, this world seems to have this logical, rational mindset that wants me to fit all of ‘this’ into a ‘how to do it in 10 easy steps’ world. And then I see it…

 

Kapow.

Bammo.

Hell yes.

The rational mind cannot fathom the irrational. It cannot understand that which is beyond the scope of what cannot be explained with reason and logic. It is like trying to fit the vastness of the heart into the tight structure of the rational mind. It cannot be done. The mind tries to know in the only terms it can grasp. It does this all the time, especially with the vastness that is the divine.

 

And, I see my own internal struggle with this same translation process. The heart is vast. It sees and feels things that cannot be proven, and cannot be put into words without losing the qualities of what we experience. I see the relationship. I see the richness on one side, then the strict structure on the other – the desire to take something multi-layered and condense it down to one.

The feminine, or yin, is multi-layered. It is feeling and knowing. It is rich and mysterious, dark and watery. It is intuitive. The masculine, or yang, relative to yin is straight and clearly defined. It is angular. It is logical. It is linear.

These are actually distinctions to try to help the rational mind understand the relationship between yin and yang…because it’s always about relationship. We can’t know one without the other. Something is only mysterious in relation to something that is clearly known and defined.

 

As I write this, I can feel, literally feel, life pulsing through my cells, images and visions in my mind’s eye, and emotions fluttering through me. None of this can be put into words without losing richness, texture, and fullness.

Words themselves are definitive. They define.

As a young one, I learned to shut down the feminine mystery, the vast symbolic realm where so many layers exist that it can only be represented through images, poetry, and symbols. I shut my own voice down. I knew the spigot well, and when things got tough, when I felt that old familiar feeling that I must turn something so profoundly beautiful into something logical and practical, I felt this familiar frustration and shut the spigot off. I became quiet. I squelched my voice. And, I gave up trying to paint when it became clear from teachers that they wanted something representational. They wanted things to look like ‘real life’ – whatever that is.

 

What is so remarkable about this moment, though, is feeling the spigot in my throat, feeling the place where I shut down because I’m feeling a sense that it’s not in terms the man will understand. I haven’t felt this so clearly before. I feel frustration at having to translate to get him to understand what I am saying and fear he will not understand.

In going back to this early experience, I see something clearly. I see old patterns, old beliefs, old messages that tell me I must make things ‘make sense’, must take the vastness that is my heart, take the multi-layered awareness that is my soul, and pare it all down to logical steps.

The struggle I feel within myself is the same struggle I see in the outer world. This finding our way to balance, a balance that brings the masculine tendencies so woven into our cultural institutions together with the under-represented feminine nature I share above, isn’t easy. What we struggle with within our own psyches, are the same things we struggle with as a collective.

 

Then I realize that perhaps that is why I am feeling such an urge to reclaim the artist in me. Sometimes things must be created with something other than words, with media that lends itself to many layers, rich textures, feeling states and mystery. So many people I know are trying to reclaim the artist within.

I have a sense many of us are seeing things in symbols and images, visions of a new way of being in the world, and perhaps even visions of a new world.

A new way is coming into being. It is being born, and many of us can see images of this new way. Many of us can feel this new way. Many of us know something in our bones that is not at all, or at least not yet, linear or logical.

Birthing isn’t logical or reasonable, nor is it necessarily practical.

 

It is time to fully re-member the artist within, to share what we see and feel, in whatever way we can. Yes, others may question it, but I also know that we all long to know the mystery, we all long to feel the depth of our humanity, and on some level perhaps we don’t want ten steps to this, or five reasons why.

Perhaps we just create and speak what we know, regardless of whether anyone listens or understands. Perhaps creation simply wants to happen, perhaps it is simply trusting the vision and putting it into form, regardless of the reception it receives.

So many women are writing, writing, and writing. So many are painting and dancing. So many are expressing their voices in ways that aren’t even close to logical and practical.

New worlds come into being through creative acts. The tender shoots of the new world come up through dark rich soil that’s been tilled and fed. Creation rises up out of the void in the belly. Creation comes into form by way of a dark, moist birth canal. It comes in contractions – messy contractions.

It is good for me to remember this when my voice feels tight, when I shy away from speaking because I don’t quite know how it will come out. Something does know what is longing to be created and voiced.

Maybe we say to each other, “Show me what you see. I am listening.”

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Genius – Yes, You Are One and Have One!

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Genius

I’ve been thinking of genius and how we all have it and are it. So many of us never actualize it. And what is this ‘it’, this genius? We are all filled with Spirit, the same Spirit, the same breath. Yet, there is a uniqueness to each of us and that is our genius.

There are ways we can discover more about our genius, and sometimes simply noticing what we love and what is a natural talent are sign posts to that genius. I love taking pictures of flowers (in cased you hadn’t noticed). And friends have mentioned that my pictures seem to evoke something, a kind of beauty that they wouldn’t have seen themselves. Maybe then, genius is our unique window on life, the unique way we see the world through the heart and soul.

Love Reign O’er Me

You may know this rendition of the Who song, “Love Reign O’er Me”, by Bettye Lavette. I’d never heard it until Tuesday night. I had the sublime opportunity to dance to this song. The experience was utterly amazing. Something in the combination of the music, my dance and exactly how I was in that moment (not filled with happiness, but rather an intense anger) all came together in what felt like a pure, organic, and unique expression of my soul.

I was captivated by the beauty of what I experienced. It felt true and alive. The passion was intense, and felt like it was almost too much to take in, but when I was moving to it, the passion in my body totally took it all in and moved every inch of it in a sweaty, intense dance.

Just listen to Bettye’s pure genius.

Sometimes I wonder what this world would be like if we all were liberated into our full genius. Can you imagine?

Alexandra Nechita

Here’s another woman who is living her genius. She’s young, articulate and wise, and she’ll tell you exactly what is most toxic and what gets in the way.

So, what’s your genius?

Yes, you. Just like these two women, you have a genius that when unleashed will bring a sense of ease and lightness, and along with that the feeling of rightness…that you are in flow, and in alignment with your own soul’s seed.

I’m not sure what mine is, but it has something to do with the body, dance, love, sensuality, art, words and flowers filled with light. It has to do with creativity and love. And, it has to do with justice.

The bottom line is love…doing what you absolutely love, beyond a shadow of a doubt love… So, let Love Reign O’er You, let it mix with the marrow of your bones, let it pour out of your skin, let it penetrate every cell of your body. And, don’t worry what others think. Really. When you’re alive with Life, what others think doesn’t even seem to matter. You really can have that much joy. When the time comes for anger or sadness or grief, they will come…on their own. But then you know this. You’ve lived enough life to know that everything comes and everything goes.

 

Love Reign O’er Me, The Who

Only love

Can make it rain
The way the beach is kissed by the sea.
Only love
Can make it rain
Like the sweat of lovers’
Laying in the fields.

Love, reign o’er me.
Love, reign o’er me, rain on me.

Only love
Can bring the rain
That makes you yearn to the sky.
Only love
Can bring the rain
That falls like tears from on high.

Love Reign O’er me.

On the dry and dusty road
The nights we spend apart alone
I need to get back home to cool cool rain.
The nights are hot and black as ink
I can’t sleep and I lay and I think
Oh God, I need a drink of cool cool rain.

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When words become Word

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Instinctual Pursuit

It’s an odd thing to be on this journey looking for something, following the scent, almost instinctual, toward that which you’re longing to discover and know, only to realize that what you’ve been looking for can’t be known, or understood, or figured out in the way the part of you that’s been searching is fixated on.

This instinctual pursuit feels like the deepest longing for something. It feels like something I remember, a taste of something once tasted, a scent or touch or sound of something I was once with. I’ve come to know that I can’t know this thing that I’ve been trying to understand. I can’t grasp it. I can’t get it. I can’t even see it clearly. I have a sense of it. I have an inner vision of a large vast void out of which things come – like a big womb.

When I relax into this force of creation, like when I dance and thinking stops, instinct takes over and joy flies in every direction that leg, foot, arm, hand, head, hair can travel. All that exists is the dance. The dancer is gone, having fallen into the vast void of the dance.

Relationship

What seems to matter most is the relationship I (or you) have with Creation, where the I is the part of me that has to put stuff out into the world (the part that worries about how I will make a living, the part that cares about the human pieces and parts of life). In this relationship, Creation is that which I can never know but which I clearly experience with every inhale and exhale.

On the dance floor, this relationship between creator and creation has become almost easy. Creator gives way to creation and all that’s left is motion, and in its wake is form, the form of a dancer that’s been danced. I know this. It’s been ten years and I now know and trust this relationship.

The dance floor holds it all.

As I dive more deeply into my writing, my mind has struggled with form, with finished product. After a deep dance last night, I wondered how writing is really dance in disguise, dance in just another form. Can these words be the dance that grace the page? Can they fly out of the void, in any direction they desire, landing in some form that ultimately is meaningful? Does it matter if it has meaning?

Is this when words become Word?

Is Creation like a big dance floor?

Can we know it holds us?

What is your dance floor?

What is your relationship with Creation?

Is there trust? Is there hesitancy?

Is there a willingness to put all four paws on the ground and follow the scent so you can dine on that which you are ravenous for and drink from the infinite source?

::

And speaking of all four paws, have you met your four-footed self? Do you long to and at the same time fear her just a little or a lot?

Come join Lianne Raymond and me for the inaugural session of The WildSoul Book Club. We’d love to have you join us for this instinctual journey to that which you hunger for – the Wild Soul.

Take a moment to hear what wise women you know discovered reading our book – Women Who Run With the Wolves. We’ll be sharing interviews with lots of wonderful wise women.

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How will you be in your Womanhood?

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Womanhood. The Sacred Feminine incarnate.

For so long, a story of womanhood as less-than has been told, repeatedly, in almost every language. Tongues of both genders have spoken words of feminine degradation. These stories have been woven into the institutions we have to interact with on a daily basis.

They are stories that have been told for many centuries. And yet, that doesn’t make them true.

In life, there is no better-than or less-than, there is only what is…what shines out from the depths of your eyes, what loves from deep in the center of your heart, what moves in the belly of your soul. It is only our minds that want to compare and judge.

The mystery that is creation, will always be a mystery, no matter how doggedly man pursues the ultimate unveiling of creation by way of rational reason. At the heart of the heart, is a sacred mystery, at the center of the womb, a divine purity.

What if the very thing you hide, or try to deny, or apologize for, about being a woman is what ultimately will free you to be all that you already are?

What if the embodied awareness of this pure mystery in every woman on the planet is what is needed for our very survival?

What if?

How would you be with your womanhood?

How WILL you be in your womanhood?

I’d love to know your thoughts to these questions by having you share them in the comments. I feel we all benefit from knowing what is going on deep inside of women. It is time we share.

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The Whole World is Alive in Play

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“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” ~ Buckminster Fuller

And so it seems fighting the structure that is patriarchy is not where to put our energy. Fighting something only keeps us attached to it, and there seems to be enough fighting going on in this world already.

Instead, what is this new model? Bucky Fuller was into building things. The old model that is dying was built up during the Industrial Revolution. It’s been about mechanization, about thought, and about a large serving of the masculine.

Birthing

What is coming, though, is very different. What is new is not about mechanization and won’t come about by building it. It will come about through birthing. Yes, that’s right. BIRTHING.

We are giving birth to the new consciousness. Women hold that archetype, whether or not we birth babies. And this new consciousness is being born by women who are rebirthing themselves into a conscious knowing of the sacred feminine.

This new consciousness is not about women taking over, it’s about coming into balance, about healing the earth and realizing our roles as stewards of life. It’s about realizing the sacredness of life, in all of life.

What will it take for us to relax into the delivery? Anyone who has either given birth, or who has witnessed a baby being birthed, knows the mother basically has to surrender to the birth process.

Hanging on makes birth, and life, painful and intense. And letting go, receiving the birth, brings a little more ease. Maybe. Either way, birth brings transformation.

Play

I remember how I transformed after having each child. Birth transformed me in completely unexpected ways. The birth of any creation through us transforms us. We leave the old behind. There’s a kind of death, and from that death the new is born. The whole world is alive in play. Why would we be any different?

I’ve noticed that one of the hardest things for me to relax into is this sense of play; a sense of flow and ease, of not having to have a label for everything. I have been in a place of in-between for some time, now, and it isn’t so easy to navigate. I make it hard. I try to put solidity to flow, firmness to malleability, exact labels to what it is I will be doing, and perhaps it is as simple as I am doing what I am doing, whatever name I give it, whatever I call myself.

And then I see that we know what we know. If we are really truthful with ourselves, we know. Can we trust ourselves and this knowing? This is the question, because the answer is crucial to birthing something new.

I’ve shared some words about trusting yourself… you know what you know… over on Andrea Olson’s site, A Multitude of Things. Please read on…I think it will speak to you.

And you?

As always, I’d love to know what you think, what’s happening in your life and how you’re experiencing this process of birth and re-birth. I hope you’ll share them here in the comments.

With love, Julie

 

 

 

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I Write and the Words Weave Beauty

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There is an impetus in creativity that is of the creation itself.

Creation is life.

Creations are alive.

I am finally putting together the chapters of my book that I’ve written so far…printing them out on paper. Touching them in real life. In reading the words, they weave beauty back into my heart.

I read the words I’ve written about the life I have lived and I am touched by the beauty woven through the words…and through my life. I am touched by the life in the creation itself.

It’s been hard to reconnect with this book that has languished on my hard drive, yet in printing the pages out and reading the words, I can now see that the work has a life of its own. Of course it does…how could I have ever thought this was my book, my work?

I write and the words weave beauty. The words themselves weave a tapestry of something greater than my mind and will.

Perhaps the most important ‘thing’ I could share in all my years of facilitating creativity is exactly this:

The creation is alive. We are simply the stewards, the gardners, the midwives of the creation. Tap into the life inherent in the creation. Feel it in your bones. It will infuse you with the love needed to midwife it into reality.

Every creation is alive.

Feel the aliveness in the creation that is you. Follow that aliveness. Give breath to it. Give expression to it. This is why you are here.

::

This song and these images move me deeply. They sing to me of the life that is inherent in our creative urges. Feel the life in this creation – these words, this music, these images. Know that this same creative force is within you.

 

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