Today is Rally for Girls’ Sports Day! Across the web, bloggers, tweeters and Facebook users are raising their voices in celebration of the far-reaching benefits of athletics participation for girls. My post today is in support of this initiative by National Women’s Law Center’s Rally for Girls’ Sports: She’ll Win More Than a Game campaign.
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My Sports Background
I have a diverse sports background. In school, at least until my high school years, I played both organized sports at school, and was a figure skater during after-school hours. I experienced both team sports and the individual sport of figure skating. Both are so important to a girl’s development.
In team sports, I loved the feeling of camaraderie that came from being on a team that had to work well together. I especially loved field hockey. I learned to trust that if I failed, someone would pick me up, and if someone else failed, I could pick them up; and even that failure wasn’t ever really failure.
Figure Skating was a completely different experience. There were long hours of practice alongside others, but very much focused internally. My favorite part was doing figures. Figures are no longer part of the compulsory events, but when I was young they were. I never grew bored doing figure eights over and over and over. I loved the intense focus and precision, and learning to control the movements of my body on skates so well that I could create a figure eight that looked like I had been around only one time…at least in some places around the eight.
Sports taught me perseverance, resilience, healthy conditioning, self-reliance, teamwork, and most importantly, the love of being active.
Being a Whole Individual
All that being said, I think one of the most important things being involved in sports gives to girls (boys, too) is the realization of how important the body is to being a whole individual. Rather than walking around like a lollipop, where so much importance is placed on thinking and the mind, being involved in sports can give girls a lifetime love of exercise and appreciating one’s body in a good healthy way.
As an adult, I’ve found my love of sports has evolved into dance and yoga, with some weight-lifting to keep my bones in good health. I know my early experiences feeling healthy and strong in sports have stayed with me. I treasure feeling strong and having a healthy woman’s body.
I’ve found in working intimately with women to help them regain a sense of self-respect and worth, while deepening the connection with body wisdom, the relationship with the body holds the key. While experiences around the body in sports can be both positive and negative (mostly depending on how the adults involved relay body image), learning to appreciate one’s body and what it is capable of, is invaluable to girls and women everywhere.
Reverb10 Day 03 Prompt: Moment. Pick one moment during which you felt most alive this year. Describe it in vivid detail (texture, smells, voices, noises, colors).
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I really like this prompt. Just reading it takes me back through so many experiences of 2010. As I do, I discover that, in general, I feel alive much of the time…much more than I used to before certain experiences awakened me to a different way to be in life.
Feeling most alive isn’t always the same as feeling good. For me, it’s not about peak experiences.
That being said, as I went back through the year to pick one moment, my mind went to peak experiences (it’s hard to teach an old dog…):
Today, the teacher asked if we had any requests for class (something she does when the class is small). A number of requests were voiced. Then she mentioned that usually when she asks that question, someone pipes up with ‘Power Yoga’. I realized that’s what I wanted today…to sweat hard and to push the boundaries of what my body can do. So I raised my hand to make it clear that’s what I wanted.
She laughed.
She obliged.
She seemed to fill all our requests taking us from intense twists, to shoulder openers, to hip flexor stretches, to optional Chaturanga, and even a one-legged Chaturanga for me, the one that wanted power yoga.
Then she led us into pigeon pose. And here in the intense opening of pigeon pose, I remembered the prompt for today. I sat with the question of what it is to feel fully alive as my entire pelvic girdle was responding to the invitation to open.
I could feel the tightness of those muscles hanging on as if to say, “It’s up to us to keep things under control.”. And, balanced with that tightness, I could feel my skeleton resting on the ground, responding to the muscles saying, “It’s okay. I’ve got it. You can let go.”
Alongside this conversation between the muscles and the bones, there was another conversation. I noticed that feeling of something deeper, what I can only call deep awareness, holding my mind as it flitted about, trying to manage the perceived pain of the stretch in which the body was engaged. This deeper place, this place of serenity and constancy simply invited me to let go, to drop in. I found myself dancing between simply being this place of invitation and being the mind with it’s manic need to manage the experience.
And then it happened. I let go. The muscles gave it over to the bones. The mind let go into the heart. The heart dropped into the body. Something deeper just held it all. And in this moment, I felt the physical palpable opening of the hips, where groin crease relaxed into thigh, and bones settled into the mat. Hot sweat dripped, while pain settled into sensation. Struggling to hold on let go. Cranial fluid softly pulsed. Joy surfaced on the waves of breath.
It all became simple. Personality acceded to Self.
In this moment, I could feel muscles held by the bones, and bones held by the earth. I could feel the mind held by the heart, and the heart held by the body.
One let go into the next, and before I knew it I felt deeply alive. Human. Open. Trusting.
When I found this video of Lucille Clifton reading her poem, Homage to my Hips, I must have watched it five times in a row, drinking in the sheer audacity of her words. Yes, audacity. She makes no apologies for taking up space with her big hips.
What a glorious thing – a woman’s body that moves and dances and sings of its own wild lusciousness.
She makes no apologies for being big, strong, and tremendously tantalizing.
Her hips go where they want to go and do what they want to do.
Oh to take up space with these hips, my hips, to know they belong here, to let them loose to sing hallelujah as they move and sashay with each and every step I take.
I could learn a thing or two from Lucille Clifton.
“God is voluptuous and delicious.” Meister Eckhart
On my recent trip to Ireland, this understanding became more and more clear…that God is indeed voluptuous, delicious, fertile, fecund, and oh so full.
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The beauty of Connemara brought me to tears. The skies are wide open. The colors of the land entranced me. The sheer magnitude of the spirit of creation seeped into my cells, showing me the sheer magnitude of what I really am.
Connemara SkiesConnemara Colors
The Beauty of the Elements
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The Burren is stark land, and yet in its own way, also delicious. God and Goddess do not discriminate in their fullness.
The BurrenThe Burren Close-upBurren Wildflowers
The ephemeral grows alongside the enduring.
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Look at these ancient symbols of the Goddess we saw at the Celtic and Prehistoric Museum on the Dingle Peninsula. This museum was amazing in the artifacts it houses, as well as the sheer humor and delight of the owner, Harris Moore. He dated these artifacts at around 6,000 years old.
The Goddess, according to some, was the way for ancient people to have some kind of understanding of this fecund, voluptuous nature of the creation they lived in.
Ancient Carvings of the Goddess
Many of us learned of God as something more severe, judging and stern. Open your eyes to the voluptuousness of God and Goddess. You don’t have to be in the wild western land of Ireland to experience this aspect of the Divine.
You are this voluptuousness, this deliciousness, this divinity, living and breathing in your female body.
“Grace is always falling like rain. We just have to be open to receive it.” ~Amma
Grace is Everywhere
Tenderness, Power and Grace
This is the third post in a series of three: Tenderness, Power and Grace. All three posts are deeply intertwined. They’ve been born from the deepest, most raw feelings I experienced as I let the images of Sakineh Mohammadie Ashtiani (and the intense feelings of hatred and violence towards women and girls that seem to be so evident in our global community) wash over me.
I sometimes paint with Chris Zydel. It’s process painting, where the process – what happens during the process of painting – is the focus rather than the finished painting itself. On a Thursday, just after learning about Sakineh, I painted this painting, titled Grace is Everywhere. That was three weeks ago. Since then, I have been writing about what I experienced through the process of painting that day: tenderness, power and grace.
For whatever reason (maybe no reason at all), I waited until this last post to include the painting process. In this last post, I’m going back to the beginning. I’m taking us back full circle.
I had been filled with these intense emotions after reading and writing about Ashtiani. At that time, I wrote a post about the power we women have to create change…how the power of our coming together can change things. And, even though I know there’s power in circles and that we can effect change, I also felt powerless to do something myself, something to free this woman from the hands of tyrannical forces that hold such misogynistic views of women, and on a deeper level, powerless to change the way women are disrespected, oppressed and hated, the way children are of such seemingly insignificant worth in a society that seems to value greed, consumption and violence. Power and powerlessness.
The more I sat with these feelings, the more anger, frustration, and futility I felt at a world that seems to not be able to see, really see just how much unresolved distrust and fear there is simmering under the surface between the genders.
The Process…
And so, when I arrived to paint, the process took over as I selected colors for my palette…or, rather the colors picked me: blood red, black, yellow, purple, and gold.
As I began to paint, the feelings spread out onto the paper: grief, anger and rage, powerlessness and power, hope and futility. They flooded the page through the paint.
Big, wide brushstrokes of blood red: stoning, death, power over the powerless.
Bright brushstrokes of yellow: the brightness of hope.
Swaths of black, deep dark black, so heavy they flooded the bottom of the picture: mourning and grief that could only be expressed with a black that was void of all light.
As I painted, I stayed with the feelings that appeared.
Tenderness that is Grace
Then, something else showed up. I felt a tenderness come through, a tenderness that wanted to be expressed differently – through my fingers rather than the brush. Quivering tenderness.
I put the brush down and submerged my fingers in the paint. The black paint along with this beautiful gold paint, a gold that flowed directly from the tenderness quivering in my fingertips. Black for grief and mourning in the immediate presence of the gold of tenderness.
As I painted, I could feel the word grace come forth as the gold began to make itself known on the paper alongside the black. Grace in the middle of death and grief. Then my fingers chose red and gold – grace appearing with power and powerlessness. As my fingers scooped up the yellow of hope, grace came along, too.
Grace appeared with everything I was feeling. It had a distinct ‘feel’ and color to it, as did all the other feelings; but the thing that stood out so starkly to me, was the deep wisdom that arose about the absolute necessity of feeling everything with conscious awareness, without pushing away any difficult emotions or aspects of the experience. Grace was not there in place of the dark emotions, it was there with them, alongside them, intermingling with them.
Grace made itself known through the direct and conscious willingness to feel the entirety of everything, and the depth of it all; this willingness was cradled by the process of painting itself.
Visceral and Palpable
The grace was visceral and palpable, and made me keenly aware of the possibility of knowing such grace in the middle of the darkest of our experiences. Even when things seem most without hope, grace is always present, falling like rain. Grace’s presence is not a question – it is always here; rather, it’s our willingness to be vulnerable in the most raw and uncomfortable places, a vulnerability that opens us like a flower, so that we can receive grace’s shower.
This willingness to see things just as they are, to feel the immensity of feelings associated with all that is happening to our planet, to the human race, to all living creatures can open us to receive the tenderness and wisdom of transformation. This grace brings the sweetest tenderness, palpable in the body and heart, a tenderness that is much more powerful than the tyranny we see today, because it is kissed with the rain of grace.
This willingness to see things just as they are opens us to see ourselves with tenderness, to see the creativity and love that resides deep in the folds of our divine robes of feminine flesh, and to know we are sacred beings with a sacred creativity to be shared. This is the soft power that we are here to bring forth at this time on the planet.
Just as the painting process held this process of revealing, so can any process of expression provide a container with which to know something greater than ourselves. Whether it’s painting, dancing, writing or any of the myriad ways we can express what’s within, whatever we choose can be the container that helps us welcome out what is wanting to unfold. It is being with all that arises, feeling it deep in the body, and allowing its wisdom to teach us a new way.
It helps me to know that grace is with me when I open to seeing what is happening here on our earth, in these places that feel too painful to look. When I know that grace is here, too, even in these places of darkness, I know I am not alone. And, I know the power of transformation grace offers. What if this life force, that is held in these darkest places could transform into light? into the light of awareness and awakeness? In this time of global shift, it is exactly this awareness we must learn to bring to even the hardest things to be with.
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And, what about Ashtiani? What about grace for her, for others who are in imminent danger, others who are oppressed and victimized? I do know that if we’re willing to see directly into these horrors happening right now, if we don’t turn away, we can act in some way that can help change things. If they can’t act, we must. They may have no power, but we do, and our power lies in circles of people coming together.
Perhaps, grace is telling us that things can be different, but it will take us coming our of our own complacency to help change things for Ashtiani and others. Perhaps, this is the message within that quivering tenderness, that our power is in coming together to help support us all, as a global village to change things through a revolution fo tenderness.
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And, you?
This is simply my experience with grace and the dark emotions.
I’d love to know how you’ve experienced these dark emotions, and their power and vast potential to transform.
How do you experience Grace? What wisdom does it bring?
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This is the last post in a series of three on tenderness, power and grace. All three posts are part of the Summer of Love Invitational, where the lovely Mahala Mazerov has invited bloggers to write about loving kindness.
Each individual woman’s body demands to be accepted on its own terms. – Gloria Steinem
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This body, this female body, is divinity all dressed up in robes of feminine flesh.
Too often, way too often, this beautiful garment has been shamed and humiliated, objectified and used, scorned and belittled – the most hurtful damage done by the very one who wears it.
I now experience something different. I know that I, the one that sees all this, is not the one who scorns. The one that scorns is the only self I used to be aware of…the false self that mimics all she ingested and ingests, heard and hears, saw and sees.
The true self, the self that sees this all with such love and compassion knows I am dressed in the finest of flesh.
Yes, flesh. Flesh is divine. This feminine flesh is divine. It robes a home where Spirit and matter are brought together in a miraculous way. Creation has made this humble home for life to come into being by way of this womanly body.
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I used to apologize for myself over and over. It was simply a habit borne of some belief that I couldn’t take up space in the world. Somewhere I learned that I didn’t belong to this world that seemed to be a man’s world. A world run by men, where men called the shots. Men belonged. Boys became men, but girls seemed to stay girls in this world. At least that’s what I learned by way of listening and watching as grown men and women would refer to men as men and women as girls, even women who were old and wise and beautiful.
I rarely apologize for myself any longer, but I am still too polite. It’s a hard habit to break. Politeness has its place, but politeness can also be another form of apologizing.
I see women apologizing for themselves over and over. I hear them say such harsh words about themselves. I want to just hold them and tell them what divine and sacred beings they are, just as I longed to be held, while having these loving words whispered into my ear.
When I feel the old familiar pangs of not belonging to this world, I find the nearest tree, flower, furry being or baby…something that reminds me of the immense variety of beauty there is in this world. Something that reminds me of the innocence that is at the heart of life. Something that reminds me that the world is owned by no one and that because it is owned by no one, we all belong to this place. Every living thing belongs to this place. We all reside in this “house of belonging“.
When I remember this, I remember what I am. A sacred being. A woman. A creation created to bring sacred life into being in infinite ways.
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This being female is delicious. I’ve migrated down from my head to my heart to my belly to my womb. I feel the earth here. I feel my weightedness, the weightedness that connects me to the earth, the feminine to the feminine. It’s as if I am ripe with love, and the juiciness of the fruit weighs me down in a grounding, sensual way.
There is a fierceness here in this womb. A fierce love that protects life at all costs. A fierceness that ensures the life entrusted to this womb will be fed, nurtured, warmed and loved.
I’ve witnessed this fierce love in my daughters as they birthed their babies. Birthing is fierce love in action. Fierceness on the part of life as it charts its own course of labor and delivery, a course the mother has no say in. Fierceness on the part of the mother as she opens herself to the most vulnerable, tender and terrifying unknown she might ever experience. Fierceness on the part of the baby as it travels the short distance from womb to the world, but a distance that can take hours and days to navigate. It is all born from love, from the deep love of life wanting to birth itself anew in an infinite variety of forms and ways.
I’ve witnessed this fierceness in my daughters as they care for their babies in the day-to-day, doing whatever it takes to make sure their children feel safe, loved and cared for.
I’ve witnessed this fierce love in my mother, as she did whatever it took to raise her three daughters. I witnessed this fierce love in my mother as she fought to stay alive, to stay connected to those she loved even into the last hours before her death.
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From this place, from this womb that is a microcosm of the big womb that is in constant creation, I know that the most important ‘job’ I am here to do is to protect and nurture life, all of life, all babies, all children, all men and women, all furry beings, and all the other myriad life forms. It is to live with this awareness, consciously infusing all that I create with this fierce love.
The awareness that I’ve found deep in my womb has brought me into the stark realization of all the ways I haven’t nurtured life, the ways I have added to the pain that earth, this home I belong to, is experiencing. This awareness has shown me that all my choices affect how the human race will continue to evolve, or not, and just how much power we humans have come to posess; power to love and power to destroy.
I don’t have some fancy big job. It’s insignificant and yet completely significant. Each of us has this capacity to bring forth this fierce love into being at this time. The ways in which we bring this fierce love for life into the world may seem small and insignificant, but when we all realize the capacity we have for fierce love, something can shift.
I am one of those older women now. I am not a girl, but a wise woman, a woman that knows she is more powerful than the culture would have me believe. I am a woman robed in feminine flesh. It is part of what it means to live and love in this ‘house of belonging’.
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And, you?
Tell me about your finest garment. I’d love to know what it is to be robed in your divine flesh.
The female human being is being born anew. She is coming into existence and we are midwifing her birth. Our ways of wisdom and powers of mystery were hidden well. They’ve been buried treasure for centuries. Now, it is time to listen, to remember, to recognize, to join together the vast humanity of woman. It is time to listen to the sacred sound that is uttered when we remember as the One that we are.
Rilke spoke of this new female human being. He spoke of the humanity of woman in letter seven of Letters To A Young Poet.
“This humanity of woman, carried in her womb through all her suffering and humiliation, will come to light when she has stripped off the conventions of mere femaleness in the transformations of her outward status, and those men who do not yet feel it approaching will be astonished by it.”
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I love to bring the brilliant work of many women together, in one place, to be savored, allowing the flavors to enhance each other, the poignancy to fill our hearts and wake us up.
I discovered the beautiful work of art above on Twitter. The artist is Patti Agapi. When I saw Patti’s drawing, I cried. I know this feeling, well, the feeling that Roots inspires. Head down on the warm Earth. So much a part of her that there is no distinction between where I end and where she begins. Held by her. Listening to her. Knowing there is no difference between the divinity in her and the divinity in me.
When I listen to her, I hear her anguish. And I feel her love. I feel myself as part of the Big Mother, and the home she offers up in every moment.
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My last post, Life is Erotic, was met with so many lovely, rich comments. Your comments meant so much to me as that post came from such a tender place within me. One comment in particular, by Holly Friesen, spoke to this connection between the earth’s body and our bodies:
“The more deeply I feel the earth’s body, the more I realize my own body’s deep connection to her…we are one and the same being, both pulsing with a rhythmic life force that is flooded with eros. It is only when we strip away all this beautiful entangled life force that we are left with a trivial, vulgar view of eros. Eros in her full beauty is entwined throughout ALL of life; the flowers, the buds, the rivers, the rocks and our own bodies. It is only when the deep rift between sexuality and spirituality can be reunited that we will be fully whole. We feel this beautiful flow of life force most fully in the spring when the cyclical awakening and birthing is in full force!! Ah, what the spring does for the cherry trees is a joy and a miracle to behold!”
We are one and the same with the earth. The same divinity that looks out your eyes flows through her rivers. The same divinity that hears the birdsong in the early morning light flaps its wings to ride the waves of the wind. The same divinity that longs to remember its own wholeness opens its petals to receive sunshine, rain and the bee’s love.
The beautiful blue planet, our mother, our sister.
She moves with 200 miles per second, yet imperceptible; she moves with the quiet of the lakes and the
rushing of her rivers, the vast expanse of her oceans, the echoes of her mountains.
This is God, children… listen up well.
Lift your eyes to the heavens, and you behold her sisters, the stars, and her cousins the suns and nebulas, and fill your senses with her infinite beauty.
This is God, children… and she has made no other heaven but the heavens where you already reside, and she has made no hell except the one you insist to create for yourself.
Here is paradise. Here is destiny. Here is infinite grace. This is God.
When you seek her she is beneath your feet.
When you seek her, she is food in your mouth.
When you seek her she is love in your heart, pleasure in your body.
You share her heartbeat.
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Earth Day is upon us in a few days. But rather than seeing earth as something we celebrate once a year, perhaps we might open to what she offers to us in each and every moment, meet her with reverence, listen to what she is saying.
Her wounds are our wounds. Her delights are our delights. Her ability to regenerate is our ability to regenerate. How we feel about our bodies and what we say to them, she ingests. How we treat her, we ingest.
I have spent a lifetime saying very mean things to this body, my body that provides me with life. I have spent a lifetime worrying about how I look, with occasional silent wishes to slice some flesh off here and there, hoping to achieve some ideal that I can’t achieve. I am no different than any other human being, I suppose…at least any other woman that grows up in this culture of female objectification. And I know men don’t escape the pain of this either.
Objectification of any sort just keeps us believing in the dream of separation, the dream that is at the heart of the pain we all experience. And what is waiting for us when we awaken out of the dream of separation?
Here is paradise. Here is destiny. Here is infinite grace. This is God.
The body like earth. A land unto itself. Vulnerable. Overbuilt, overmined, cut off, carved into parcels. Shorn of its power. Wild women. Breasts. Feeling and feeding.
Ahhhhh. Back in the land of the wild.
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My mind went back thirty years to motherhood, to the times when I nursed my two babies. Such wondrous moments those were. I loved being a mother to babies. I loved nursing. I can still remember the feeling of the milk letting down when my babies cried. The connection between cry and breast, hunger and milk. All on its own, my body responded to my little ones’ cries for nourishment. The wisdom of the body, especially the female body that can bring life into life, can hold it while it grows, and can then birth it into being, is a mystery. It is sacred.
But even if we never feed our children from our breasts, or never have children, they are still wonderful parts with which to feel. Yes, our lovers can enjoy them; but we get to feel life through our breasts, sensations that let us know we are sensual creatures, that we love what we love.
When we are no longer focused on being the object of desire, but rather the subject, we can enjoy our bodies as the wild woman, the woman that knows her instincts, feelings and body from the inside out.
Desire, pleasure, feeling, aliveness. The body brings us into direct experience with life, back to our senses.
There is no ‘supposed to be’ in bodies. The question is not size of shape or years of age, or even having two of everything, for some do not. But the wild issue is, does this body feel, does it have right connection to pleasure, to heart, to soul, to the wild? Does it have happiness, joy? Can it in its own way move, dance, jiggle, sway, thrust? Nothing else matters.
These words go right to my soul.
When we see the body as an object to be manipulated and controlled, we are cut off from our wildness, from our instincts and intuition, from our power as women.
When we know our bodies as sacred flesh and bones, blood and heart, we open to how we can experience life through this body. Each cell can awaken to its divinity when we are willing to begin the descent, from our heads where we’ve been taught to live, back into the body, the only place where aliveness dwells.
It is through right connection to our own pleasure, through honoring the sacred within us, through embracing our design as women, that we find right connection to the wild and step into our power. Yes, others can enjoy our bodies, and their enjoyment will be so much greater, when we first are the subject of our own desire, when we hold ourselves as sacred, for we are the sacred feminine in physical form.
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And, you?
Does your body have happiness? Does it know joy?
How do you experience right connection to pleasure, heart, soul and the wild?
A fruit is not afraid of its own weight. It grows into its skin fully. It is whole, each part of its body equally alive. ~Gayle Brandeis from Fruitflesh
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Since my last post on despair, my body has been heavy with feeling. Heavy not in a bad way, but simply full, like ripe fruit. Full of the life blood that comes with feeling deeply, down into the body. Not thinking about feeling, but feeling. Not running from the emotions, but rather allowing them to mingle with one another as they move from coming to going.
Sometimes these emotions are ripe for the picking, ready to share their succulent wisdom if one is open to eating the fruit. For me, grief is like the bushel basket that holds the ripe emotions that are being offered up for tasting.
I realized, when I allowed despair to dance, that grief had brought it to my doorstep. Grief is such an intelligent, wise process. It knows what we need to become more alive, more real, more human, more awake. Grief opens the door to feeling fully alive, the raw place where nothing escapes our awareness.
Over the past few days, I came to see that I’m grieving the loss of the way things used to be. It seems so clear to me that life as I knew it has changed. The times of believing life can be one full long sumptuous banquet of eating whatever you want, as much as you want, whenever you want has come to an end. Our culture’s mentality of no-end-in-sight growth, a kind of westward expansion towards a never-ending horizon, had taught me so many things that were lodged in my psyche. When I opened the door to despair, they came tumbling out.
It’s not that I hadn’t seen this before. Heaven knows others have been telling us this all along. This was different though. What came in on the other side of grief is the realization that this banquet I had been taught to enjoy, in many ways had provided little sustenance.
All through the illusion of having my way, getting what I want, a laziness to change my habits, the real riches of life have been offering themselves up to me. Only I was too focused on consuming, acquiring, devouring things in order to feel safe, in control, full. I was too focused on thinking, trying to figure it all out, so I could feel in charge, powerful, again, in control.
I’ve tasted grief many, many times, as have we all. After times of great loss, always, always grief has created room in my heart – if I am willing to invite grief in, to allow it to soak me in its wisdom, to allow it to be my mid-wife, as I birth myself anew. It leaves me able to know more of life’s riches, those riches that can’t be seen, but can certainly be touched and tasted by the heart.
This fullness that is here is not the same as the false fullness of having stuff. It is a weighted down feeling, like a mother heavy with child, like a pear so juicy, the juice almost seeps through the skin, while its mother branch bends deeply to hold it until it no longer can.
Something opens in me – I should say a deeper opening – into the realm of the fullness of life itself. I feel the fullness in the air, in my breath, in my belly. It’s as if I can touch this fullness with my eyes, as I gaze out at the life I swim in. I can hear the fullness. As I listen, it speaks to me, in silence, of its love. It wraps me in its blanket of existence. It pulsates. It throbs. It vibrates and quivers. It’s the fullest, ripest emptiness I could ever imagine.
This fullness is right here, right now. Always here, always now. I’ve come to see it as that which holds me as I dance in the unknown spaces that seem dark and pulse with life. This is what I can trust in when I don’t know, which is only every moment of existence.
The Great Mother is here. Her way is not the way of visibility. Her way is dark and deep, down in the darkness where life gestates, where life springs forth from the primal belly.
I first became conscious of Her presence a number of years ago. It felt as if someone was pulling me down, way down into my body, into the depths of the darkness that the descent illuminates. I could feel Her pull, and I knew, instinctively, I was being called to feel, in their most raw elements, all the dark emotions I had been avoiding all my life.
I can’t say I was excited by her invitation. Quite the opposite. All of my spiritual learnings had taught me about transcendence, guiding me to find the Light of Spirit, the masculine aspect of God. This invitation was not about Light, at least that’s what I first thought. It was about darkness, and Her pull was relentless, yet also loving.
It’s easy to want to avoid this dance with the dark. The mind thinks of so many logical reasons why I should’t follow her down. I can’t see Her. And, where is down? Where is this darkness? There is nothing on the outside that would indicate She is calling. It is inside that I hear Her call. It is in the interior of my own experience, that I know it is Her. It is in my body that I know what I know. It is in my heart that I feel Her love for all of life.
I’ve come to know this rich inner life quite well. I’m the only one that knows this interiority; and, you are the only one that can know your own interiority. But, there’s something we have in common. If we are to bring forth ourselves, we women must leave the known outer life, the conditioning that has taught us well how not to trust our own knowing, the conditioning that has caused us to know ourselves only in relationship to others.
If we are to find our own voice, our own inner authority, we must turn inward and begin to listen to our own self. Of course, we are always at choice. That is, until we aren’t, because at some point, it may become more painful to ignore Her call than to heed it.
One of the most important things we can offer each other, as women, is a reverence and respect for this inward journey of women. Perhaps, as we become aware of our own inner life, and all the tugs and pulls and longings we feel to know who we truly are, we can begin to realize that other women we know are also feeling a similar calling. Perhaps, when we each treat the other with reverence, knowing the Great Mother is calling her, too, then a bond of strength and power will begin to nourish our connection to each other, supporting us all in bringing the sacred feminine forth into consciousness.
I can’t say I know for sure why She is asking this of us (although I have my own ideas); yet, she is asking. Don’t take my word for it – or Judith Duerk’s word. Get quiet and take a moment to ask yourself if you hear, in your own world within, Her calling to you.
I do know one thing. As I become more at home in these beautiful depths, I fall more deeply in love with women and all they offer to this world. We are the gestators of life. Whether or not a woman gives birth to babies, she is always a mother, designed in the image of the Great Mother. As Rumi says, “Woman is the radiance of God; she is not your beloved. She is the Creator —you could say that she is not created.†It is time we come to know our own radiant feminine selves, and see it reflected in all of life.
And, you?
What have you experienced in your inner life? What do you know of the sacred feminine in your own experience? How have you shared this interiority with others? How might you begin to trust this knowing even more deeply? I’d love to know what you’ve experienced.
