Posted on

International Women’s Day – Coming Home to Soul

Share

 

 

As we celebrate International Women’s Day, 2013, let us reclaim what it is to be a whole women. There are aspects of womanhood that have been dormant during these times of patriarchal ways, yet we are now in times of remembering these ways. Let us guide each other back into living the wholeness of womanhood.

::

Silver Waterfall 

::

We’ve all (men and women) been well trained in the ways of the masculine mind. It’s the basis for our school systems. We’ve been trained to believe in, and be good at, black and white thinking, linear problem solving, and rational decision-making. We’ve been taught to value bullet points over poetic imagery, clear thinking over murky emotions, and rugged individuality over interconnectedness. While helpful in some areas of life, in reality, as a way to live life, this training hurts us all, and it especially hurts women.

 

The linear, rational mind that’s been conditioned to believe it has all the answers, can control and dominate life, and should be the master over feeling and mystery, is not very good at navigating life.

 

Life is inherently messy.

Life is unknowable.

Life is full of a multitude of experiences.

Life is always changing.

 

When the conditioned mind believes it is omnipotent, we make decisions (really important decisions) based on ‘hard facts’ – numbers, data, and rational reasoning. We forget we have hearts and bodies. We forget we have souls. We forget we are connected to the web of life. We forget we have an intuitive capacity that is far more intelligent and capable of living life and than our rational capacity could ever hope to be.

We begin to believe we are our thinking patterns and emotional tailspins.

As a young girl, I was wildly energetic and vivaciously in love with color and creation. I remember how it felt – so much beauty, so much feeling, and so much joy. But as I got older, it became clear that the logical, rational mind was king, and everything not logical was to be distrusted. And as I got older, our home became more chaotic, with a deep sense of impending doom. As life became crazy, I longed to have something to gauge things by. Good grades, following rules, being polite became important ways to feel in control and good about myself.

 

So women’s consciousness can hold many things in relationship all the time. But what happened in the last centuries is that as women became educated in schools and colleges designed by men to teach men how to think in a masculine way, they absorbed this masculine consciousness. They overlaid their feminine relationship understanding with a masculine mind. And because they wanted to succeed in a man’s world, they focused their energy on this masculine way of thinking. But it doesn’t fully work for them – it is not in harmony with their real nature…

~Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, The Return of the Feminine and the World Soul

 

Goodness in this culture is evaluated in a hierarchical, black and white way…the very essence of the conditioned masculine mind. I learned that wildness and abandon were at the bottom of the scale, ways of being to push away, while a good grasp of math and science was near the top, with obedience to rules (for girls and women) at the very top.

The chaos I felt as a child became manageable if I could find something to hold me, something rigid and knowable, something that felt like structure, and so following the rules gave me a sense of rigidity that allowed me to let go and breathe. Well, not really – it actually caused me to be tight and only breath down to my neck, but then the mind is good at making up fibs…big fat fibs.

 

When the nuclear family isn’t so nuclear, we long to feel something is holding us. And when we grow up in a culture that only values the nuclear family, we find we don’t have a village to hold us, and we don’t have an understanding of interconnectedness or how this interconnectedness might already be available to us through life itself.

 

To a certain extent, most of us in the west have been trained to not trust these things, so we neither create them, nor do we look for them. We’ve been taught to believe the earth is dead, so we feel no sense of belonging to something larger than this culture that is hell-bent on women following the rules.

Hence, I internalized a hunter, a predator. This hunter would track down anything too wild, too out there, and too far from the top of the chart of goodness and kill it, and then toss it into the shadow regions to decay. In the wild girl’s place, a good girl was born that was rigid, had to be right, and most importantly had to be polite and nice – although those things don’t really go together do they? Having to be right isn’t really truly nice, is it? It’s funny how none of this is logical at all.

 

I don’t know about you, but I do know that everything I’ve been taught about the ‘way things are’ is being blown apart by the very clear recognition that nothing is the way it seems to be.

 

Over the past two decades, I’ve been breaking free from this internal hunter – the one that learned that safety comes from figuring things out, from knowing what is good vs. bad, from being nice and polite and hiding all the juicy, delectable parts of that wild child. This breaking apart has come in chunks, sometimes it comes in big chunks that leave me a bit lost and befuddled.

Deconstruction of the mind is a funny thing. The more it deconstructs, the more I see and know the lack of any kind of solid structure. Yet, what I have found is the heart, the heart and soul that are so beautiful at living a life that is mysterious by nature. While the conditioned mind loves rigidity and structure, the heart knows something the mind could never know – it knows truth, and it knows the soul, which also knows wildness and abandon.

 

The soul calls us home, and like a wild animal, it leaves a scent as it moves through the brush. But this scent is not a scent the hunter can find. The soul is wily this way.

No, the hunter has no business in this soul brush, so the soul leaves a scent that only the wild child can find. I’ve had to get down on all fours, nose to the earth to discover it. I’ve had to walk barefoot through the mud again; I’ve had to dance until the sweat pours off me and then dance some more; I’ve had to paint large swaths of yellow paint across the paper to remember what this wild child loved; and, I’ve had to leave relationships that I used as structures of seeming safety rather than openings to soul.

I’ve had to come to see that there is no safety, not the kind I longed to know as a child.

 

What there is instead, now that this child is older and wiser, is a deep belonging to the earth, a belonging that cannot be denied by political positioning, nor laws that don’t honor this woman’s body.

I’ve come to know an autonomy that can only be found within the realm of the soul. I’ve come home to a longing for the divine that can only be traversed through the deepest, most interior chambers of the heart.

Coming home to the soul is the coming home we’ve longed for our entire lives. May we come to remember that we are held by the earth and by the web of life, and may we remember our responsibility to the children, to this earth and all of her creatures, and to each other, women and men.

::

This post was originally written for and posted at Roots of She.

image “Silver Waterfall” By onlynick : Attribution Some rights reserved

Share
Posted on

Body and Moon, Cycles and Rhythms

Share

 

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.

Share
Posted on

Loving Your Femaleness is a Radical Act

Share

Loving yourself as a woman is vital. Loving your femaleness in a system and culture that is hell bent on conditioning you to hate and fear your femaleness, is truly a radical act.

Yes, hating and fearing femaleness is at the heart of misogyny, and misogyny is at the heart of patriarchy.

In his incredibly revealing book, The Gender Knot, Allan Johnson writes:

“Misogyny plays a complex role in patriarchy. It fuels men’s sense of superiority, justifies male aggression against women, and works to keep women on the defensive and in their place. Misogyny is especially powerful in encouraging women to hate their own femaleness, an example of internalized oppression. The more women internalize misogynist images and attitudes, the harder it is to challenge male privilege or patriarchy as a system. In fact,women won’t tend to see patriarchy as even problematic since the essence of self-hatred is to focus on the self as the sole cause of misery, including the self-hatred.”  (italics mine) (pg 39)

It has taken me some time to understand and see that so much of my own self-loathing doesn’t come from me. It’s learned, and it’s reinforced over and over with the hate and fear filled images and sound bites that circulate each day.

I don’t buy magazines, nor do I have a television. I haven’t for some years. And, I can’t escape these images. Just the other day, I was driving behind a San Francisco city bus, and all across the end of the bus was an advertisement that was misogynistic at its core. Who makes the decisions in San Francisco to plaster the buses with images that continue to pass along these messages that hurt us all, women and men?

Before I proceed, I want to make it clear that Johnson, throughout the book keeps coming back to the point that Patriarchy is not men, but rather the system in which we live, the system that we’ve all inherited. Just using the word patriarchy can be divisive, yet when we all, women and men, begin to see how entangled we are within its web of beliefs and admonitions, we can begin to unravel this knot that causes us all to distrust each other, and most especially ourselves.

Patriarchy is hierarchy where men (fathers) are at the top, and the rest of life, women and children included, are beneath men. Within this structure, we cannot ever see each other on equal ground because the entire thing teaches us there is no equality. By definition, a hierarchy is a system where people and things are ranked, one above another. Wonder why we still don’t have parity after decades? We can’t and we won’t as long as we believe in and buy into this system.

Coming to love our femaleness…

The journey to know one’s true self, to know the soul, is a journey into the dark places where we’ve hidden the things we don’t want to feel or know, and for women, much of what we find here is this fear and hatred of our femaleness. Much of what we discover is that we’ve been taught to hate and fear this, and that others who also have been taught the same project this fear and hatred onto us. And, of course, we discover that we project this onto each other.

But what is waiting for us on the other side of these feelings that have been stuffed into the dark, is a light that knows differently. It is a light that is both beyond this world and at the very center of this world. It is the light of truth, the light of the sacred. But the only way out is through. The only way to the light is through the body, for the body is where we’ve stored all these messages and feelings that together create our internalized oppression.

As we go deeper into the body, we discover that what we are is not even gendered, and that what we are sees the body with the softest eyes of love, the most tender caress of compassion.

Some of my most healing moments have come through clearly seeing, hearing, and feeling the painful messages of my own internalized misogyny railing against the beautiful deep-feeling and sensual aspects of my womanhood. When I began to feel the pain I’ve caused myself, something cracked open. And with each time I can do this, my heart opens wider to my own beauty and worth.

As we go into the body and feel the things we haven’t wanted to feel, more of the soul can come down into the body. More of the light of the soul can enter the cells of this physical aspect of our being. Much like the tree trunk above that is hollow through its center, we, too, begin to feel new shoots of life spring forth form the rich soil of our own creative center. As we clear out, we breath deeper. With each in-breath, the soul comes in to vitalize our cells, and for a split second, with a body full of breath, we know the joy of the soul. And it is here we can feel the love return for our femaleness.

“In your deepest center, you are the stillpoint. You are the rhythm beyond stillness, the feeling beyond compassion, the sexual energy beyond celibacy, the life force beyond death, the vibration beyond inspiration. The moving center is within you.” ~ Gabrielle Roth

And, I would add, you are the life beyond gender. What you truly are is non-gendered, and when we know this deepest center, we behold the body with love, and hold it in love. We hold both men and women in love.

It can be through the body that we come to see that the seemingly intractable nature of patriarchy is nothing more than something we’ve inherited and taught well to uphold.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We are all in this together and we have the creativity and capacity to change this. We humans can create a world so much more whole and loving than the culture in which we currently swim.

We can’t do this for each other, and we can’t even really know what each others experiences are like, but what we can do is walk this together, is hold each other with respect and compassion as we move into a new way of being in the world.

When we see the system for what it is, our relationship with it changes. We can stop participating in our own degradation and oppression.

At the end of all of this it is about relationship – with ourselves, and with each other. It is about connection and vulnerability. It is about seeing each other, and each gender, with these eyes of love.

None of us are unscathed by a system that ranks beings by worth and value, that doles out privilege as if it is inherently true. Deep at the heart of it all, and deep in our own hearts, we know that life itself does not measure, rate, and objectify.

 

Share
Posted on

All of Life is this Wild Eros, Including You

Share

Today is International Women’s Day.

I’ve been not quite sure what to write. I have mixed feelings about this day.

On one hand, so many women need to know, in a real and grounded everyday way, that being a woman is a beautiful thing, and that they gifts we women offer to the world are worthy and sorely needed – gifts that we offer when we are being wholly who we are as women.

On the other hand, around the world, women still are far from sharing equal rights with men. Here in the United States, we’re seeing how much fear and distrust of women still lurks in the shadows, and sometimes stands in broad daylight. Having a day where we celebrate women can feel so shallow in the light of the atrocities happening each and every day around the world. Sometimes, it feels like we’ve been thrown a bone when in reality those who hold the strings of power have no intention of really offering women equal rights.

Speaking of strings of power,

have you ever noticed that women will most likely never have equal rights in this cultural paradigm? I mean, let’s look at the present day situation. In a cultural construct based on heirerarchy and patriarchy, with a system set up to keep this heirarchy in place, maybe it’s only possible if the actual structures crumble…

Everything eventually dies, including structures and cultural constructs. I see the structure of patriarchy most certainly is dying.

The structures that we currently see in the world as we know it, at least most of the world, are structures that were created with a mindset that the feminine is something to be feared and distrusted…the feminine in women, the feminine in men, and the feminine in the world – basically all of nature. So much of what we see in our human constructs were built on this.

And, if you’ve ever given birth, been witness to earthquakes and tornadoes, the feminine is most certainly powerful. I have birthed two babies, and watched each of my daughters give birth, and the power of the feminine is something to behold, something that brings forth complete awe in me.

The feminine is powerful and awe-inducing.

These structures based on fear of the feminine don’t just exist out there, they also exist within each of us. We’ve internalized them. And, we’ve probably internalized some kind of fear and distrust of the masculine as well, the masculine in us all. And, these internal structures are dying, too. Can you feel this inside you?

Can you feel a new feminine consciousness within yourself?

Why is this important today, on International Women’s Day?

A few months back, I met Marianne Williamson at an intimate gathering. She asked what I do, and I told her the varied things that fill my workday. She seemed to take interest in the course I teach on Creativity and Leadership in Business, and asked me what I would say to women about what they need to know around business.

My response? Two things:

“We are not men.” & “There is a different way to do business than what we see operating in our world today.”

We are not men.

We are not men. Even though most everything in the culture looks at the world through men’s eyes, we are not men. Thank goodness there are men, and thank goodness there are women. We all are here to be what we really are.

I am interested in you knowing this, not because I’ve written it, nor because it seems to be an obvious physiological conclusion. I’m interested in it because the new world coming depends on you knowing it.

Let me say that again…

The new world coming into being depends on you knowing who you are and expressing it through the female body you live in.

What I am interested in today is you knowing you, knowing who you are, knowing what delights your heart, knowing what it is to be fully alive in this world in your female body. Alive and erotic just like the cherry tree, just like the ocean, just like Mother Earth.

All of life is this wild eros, including you.

And, we could most certainly all use a shot of wild eros, don’t you think?

In our personal lives, our relationships, and even in our businesses.

Passionate Business

Business budding with blossoms, business giving birth, business erupting and shaking and crashing its waves upon the shores. Business that neither fears the feminine nor the masculine, but works in tandem with all of life…including the earth.

So many times I see women thinking they have to make a mark on the world that is big and audacious. Nothing wrong with that, and that may be how your mark shows up…and, in reality, we affect the world in many small beautiful ways each day. And, sometimes what happens is those many small ways eventually move into big changes along the way.

In a day-to-day, personal way, my friend, Renae Cobb, sees International Women’s Day from her personal vantage point as a mother to two daughters. She writes of not really knowing what this day is about, yet going on to share just how important an impact she has.

On an international level, the Christian Science Monitor writes of Twelve Innovations that are Lifting Women Out of Poverty.

Women are changing the world, everyday. There are many ways to do womanhood. And many ways to do manhood.

What if we found the courage to put down the project of who we believe we are supposed to be, so we can be who we really are, fully alive, powerfully real, wildly erotic in the fullest sense of the word…unabashedly female.

Part of this being truly you is discovering the rich love women have for each other. I’ve just written about it here.

::

I’d love to know what ways you are living womanhood. Consider sharing in the comments. We feast on each other’s wisdom.

 

I’ve recently released my new collection of posts, poetry and audio into a sensual immersive experience, The Best of Unabashedly Female. I’d love for you to take a look to see if it might be of interest to you.

 

Share
Posted on

Women’s Love

Share
Magnolia Flame

Women loving women.

Women trusting women.

Women healing women.

Learning to trust and love women has been a long journey for me. I’ve fought it and I’ve longed for it. Along the way, I have been a lot of things…sometimes kind, sometimes not; sometimes forgiving and deeply caring, sometimes jealous, undermining and a whole host of things part of me would rather not acknowledge, but nonetheless are true.

Learning to really love means meeting ourselves in places we’ve hidden away. I am grateful for the friends who’ve been straight with me about my behavior, both light and dark.

Through all of these experiences, I have come to know this:

There is a unique love that women have for each other. Opening to and embodying this love will change your world, which in turn will heal our world.

When I speak of this love to the women in my life, they acknowledge this love. They know this love, yet it’s seldom spoken about in the culture. It’s a powerful force. When women come together in love, we recognize our power together. When women come together in love, life heals. When women come together in love, we are no longer so easily shamed and or see ourselves as powerless.

It is high time we come together in love. Life beckons us to this love, to heal that which keep us from knowing it.

Leap Day call

The other day, just last week, I hosted a leap day call. On the call, I spoke of how each of us is sacred…every cell, every atom is sacred. And, I spoke of really seeing each other, how doing this is so healing for us all.

When I, a woman, truly and deeply see you, another woman, this love pours forth; love for ourselves and our womanhood, and love for each other. This love then flows out to all of life.

I held the call on Wednesday afternoon. When it was done, I was elated. I felt like I had shared something that really wanted to move through me. I reflected on the comments of the women on the call. They shared both pain and joy, fear and inspiration.

Something healed right then and there on the call. I could feel a healing within myself from participating in the call, from sharing my wisdom. I could feel a healing within myself from taking in the wisdom of other women, and from taking in the collective field that formed because we came together with open hearts.

Then…

The next day, I felt grief rise up, a grief of both fearing and desiring to open my heart fully in relationship. When I was with my late husband, I wasn’t as aware and conscious. I opened my heart at the level I could, and he was deeply respectful and loving.

As I’ve become more conscious, and now know the love that is inherent in a woman, I long to be partnered with someone I can open to in this way; someone whose touch is reverent; someone who wants to love the fullness and power of womanhood, not a muted form of it.

This grief was raw, not reasonable nor rational. It lasted through the evening and into the early morning hours. And then, as it moved through, I could see the innermost space of the heart is only for the divine. It is a place that is solely for the divine, a place that when I honor its sanctity, I feel more tenderness and love for myself. When I honor the inner sanctity of the heart, I open to myself with love, and in turn, open to another.

Knowing this sanctity, I have the full power and awareness to say, “No”, to any touch that is irreverent…including my own touch to myself.

I climbed out of bed and felt serenity and a kind of deep peace with everything as it was and is. I took a walk in the sun, a long walk. I was out longer than expected. As I headed toward home, knowing I would immediately hop on a two-hour call when I walked in the door, I checked my email by phone to check-in to anything I needed to respond to.

A Gift

There in my email was this gift: a comment left on the blog about the leap day call and what followed from listening to it.

“I listened to your wonderful Leap Day call last night, and I wanted to share the beautiful spontaneous loving experience I had. Just shortly before starting the call, I had put warm grapeseed oil, on my hair. I’ve been using pure grapeseed oil as a body moisturizer, after the shower. It’s quite lovely. As I was listening to the call, I was massaging the oil into my hair and scalp, which then turned into massaging my neck, and my face. It felt so wonderful, that before long, I retreived the bottle of grapeseed oil, and was massaging oil onto all of my body. It was such a beautiful experience. Sitting here, in the candlelight, listening to your beautiful voice, and feeling energetically connected to all women, and loving my own body, so tenderly and compassionately. What a beautiful gift.

Something has been shifting in me lately. For a long long time, I have felt that it is unsafe to be female…to be a woman. And so I have been hiding my femininity…my beauty. I had become hard, because it felt like the only way to survive. But lately, after much hard work and soul-searching, I have been feeling a softening happening, along with the wisdom that I now know how to keep myself safe. I have been allowing my femininity to re-surface, and it is such a glorious feeling.

The loving self massage was yet, another turning point, in me accepting myself, and my feminine nature. And a powerful message revealed itself to me. I have been craving physical touch lately. Not just any physical touch, but the wondrous touch of another who adores me, and sees my inherent beauty. It has been a long time, since I felt the tender touch of a lover’s hand on my skin, and I’m quite certain that I’ve never felt it, in the way that I deserve to. This need has been an ever-present companion, in my thoughts, and yet, it felt like there was still a wall between me and receiving this loving touch. There was. It was me. I was not treating myself, and my body, in a way that expressed love and tenderness…and yet, I wanted another to do just that. I was expecting someone else to do what I wasn’t willing to do….to love myself, love my body, love all of me, just as I am. To adore and nurture, treasure and cherish me.”

Synchronicity

I was struck by the synchronicity of our experiences. She was listening to the recording, which opened her to a powerful revelation about her own self worth and healing. She was learning to touch herself with love and reverence.

During that same evening, I was opening to the sanctity of my own heart, and of my connection to the divine, also desiring to be loved and touched again with reverence.

Women healing women healing women…all being healed by the flow of the divine creation that flows through women.

There is something powerfully healing in women that is needed in our world. It is this love. It is this creativity. It is this vulnerability and willingness to share with the world.

This is how we create.

When we offer ourselves and our creations to the world, trusting that each one is exactly what the wisdom of life is pulsing to share with the world, healing happens. Love happens. Connection happens. Relationship happens.

How powerful it is to align with this wise, sacred creative force.

So, I want to know.

What creation wants to be born through you?

What might it take to trust deeply enough in yourself and in the life moving through you to create it?

I know there are voices that tell you differently – both inside you and outside of you. I know this.

AND, the creation wants to be born anyway, does it not?

Can you feel it?

Can you give way to your creation and allow it to flow through you into a world that is so hungry for this sacred, wise love?

I know what flows through you has a direct effect on me, on the world, on life.

At the heart of it all, this power is creation itself.

Do whatever you need to do in your life to honor what wants to be born and give birth to it.

I am, right now, taking in a spoonful of this medicine. I have something very important that is dying to be born. I’ve allowed it to languish and I can no longer allow this.

I know the power of giving and receiving, and the power of knowing the sanctity of my own heart.

Never has there been a more important time than now to be what you are: a sacred creative being expressing through a woman’s body.

Never has there been a more important time than now to be Unabashedly Female. click to tweet this…

::

If you’re inspired to listen to the call, I’ve decided to keep the registration open for a few more days so you can have access to the recording. You can sign-up here.

Share
Posted on

Leaping Into the Feminine

Share

Leap Day happens every four years.

The purpose behind it? To balance the calendar.

 

And, according to an Irish Legend, St. Brigid negotiated with St. Patrick to allow women to propose to men every 4 years on Leap Day. Some believe this may have been a way to bring into ‘balance’ the traditional roles of men and women.Ha. One day every four years?Balance? 

Thank goodness we’ve come a long way since the days of negotiating one day every four years.

The feminine is indeed rising and women are leaping into a whole new conscious awareness.

 

What does it mean to be unabashedly you, to share yourself with the world without apology? 

A Leap Day call to discover

Join me on an hour-long call on Leap Day to discover how we can leap into the experience of being Unabashedly Female. 

We’ll also take a moment to celebrate the release of my eBook, The Best of Unabashedly Female with a special gift I have for you. And, I’ll be giving away a copy of the book on the call.

We’ll chat about:

  • discovering what is true about our experiences as women
  • the rising feminine
  • sharing our voices
  • the value of being seen
  • and…I’ll be giving away a copy of my eBook. 
The call will be recorded, too, so if you can’t make it you can still join in on the fun.
For call details and to register, click on the invitation.

The eBook will be available for sale after the call is done. In the feedback I’ve received, many have found the eBook to be something that helps them sit back and consider what it means to be a woman and to be a sacred being.
I hope you’ll join me for the call!
Share
Posted on

It Is Going To Be Led By Women

Share

This is Larry Merculieff. He speaks  on indigenous elder wisdom and modern day personal to global challenges.

I feel this is one of the most important videos of this time. It is over fourteen minutes long, and it is worth watching many, many times. From this talk:

“Most men and women, and even many spiritual leaders, have forgotten why women were considered sacred. Because, like a hologram inside of their bodies is the direct and exact sacred condition as the womb in the center of the universe, that is physically manifested in their womb.”

“Women, now, are being called to restore their own center of power, because even with all of this violence that has been done to women for thousands of years, you still hold this sacredness in your bodies…in the womb.”

“There is a sacred vibrational field inside of the woman that we have forgotten to honor that is the place of all the things born. Nothing new can be birthed without woman.”

“There is a way out of this and it is going to be led by women.”

“Without restoring the sacred feminine, nothing new is going to occur in this world. Nothing. We can’t think ourselves out of these problems.”

::

Please share with me how this video moves you, as a woman, as a man.

And, please share this with others.

Share
Posted on

Begs the Question – part two

Share
Orchid

So Beautiful. So, so beautiful. And yet…

Why don’t we feel this way about our own beautiful, sexual female bodies?

About the same time I took this picture, I came across this article by Eve Ensler, Over it. If you haven’t read it, do. And, after reading that post by Eve, I came across this one, and these words jumped out at me:

“Vagina is the most terrifying word, the most threatening word, in any language of any country I have ever been to. Even when the vagina is worshiped in theory, as the yoni is in India, it is denigrated in practice. It is more reviled and feared than words like plutonium, genocide and starvation. In many countries the word for female genitalia is so derogatory or disgusting, it cannot be spoken in public. In a few places, there is no word in the language for vagina at all.”

A Big Fat Lie

There is a big fat lie of a story in our world, a story that says the feminine is evil, bad, not to be trusted.

We could ask, “Why?”, for the rest of our lives. As Durga points out, dwelling in the negative robs us of our power:

I had secretly followed the “Goddess of Negativity” into her empire. She is a goddess of illusion, seducing us to complain about our life circumstances. She walks into our nights and grows in our dreams of worries and fear. She rules the space. She is a master of pretending to be something different.

She brings up stories and secretly turns optimism into negative magnets. She is a possessed collector of experiences we refuse to consciously digest. Instead we pin them on a fame wall inside a forgotten room of ourselves, and then we leave forever, leaving it alone and unprotected. Negativity knows these rooms and turns our secrets into fearful memories. And because we have left this room to her, she owns our power.

Staying in the place of wondering why keeps us locked in undigested places where we don’t know why we are stuck…

I know I’ve stayed in this place of “Why” for a long, long time. And, remarkably, I don’t move forward when I wait for an answer. The only part that would want to know is the part that does take it personally, because it is the part that believes it is separate from the whole of life and wants to stay separate.

This part doesn’t consciously want to stay separate. And, it’s desire to continue to stay in the illusion of the big fat lie comes from wanting it to change, wanting others out there, most certainly men, to acknowledge it isn’t true. Yet, they can’t tell me what is true. That’s just giving power away, again.

If someone else could tell me how worthy I am, then that same someone else could also take that worthiness away by simply stating something else. I no longer have any willingness to give another person permission to tell me what I am worth.

The only truth is the truth of life, known by way of my experience.

Only I can know what is true, and I can only know that by living what I want to know. By being it, by paying attention, by realizing I am not simply an object but a soul with a female body.

I am unlearning the lies I was fed, by paying attention to my experience, and by feeling the wisdom shared by others to see if it resonates with me. I can no longer take others’ words as truth, and I can feel for resonance with their words, as I did with Eve and Durga’s words.

The Power of Creation

The only truth is the truth of life, known by way of my experience.

Only I can know what is true, and I can only know that by living what I want to know. By being it, by paying attention, by realizing I am not simply an object but a soul with a female body.

Can I settle down into my body and begin to be aware in these cells that are the vagina?

Can I come to know myself without this story of evil and disgust?

How long will I continue to tell this story? It is buried deep within where I don’t have to feel its effects on my body, my heart, my psyche.

In reality, this place within my woman’s body isn’t even really a vagina. It is simply life.

The word itself carries so much.

Can we reclaim the word and not get lost in the word?

Can we be in the body, really BE in the body?

Beingness is love. Simply being in the body, is being the great love that we are in this female body, without the big fat lie.

This female body holds a great power. It is time to once again know this power, love this power and live this power, for it is not power over another, it is the power of creation and life.

::

I’d love to know your feelings and thoughts. Please share them here in the comments.

This post is part two of a three-part series titled, “Begs the Question. You can read part one here.

Share
Posted on

Begs the Question

Share
Orchid

I take pictures of flowers. I can’t help myself. Something in me is completely drawn to a flower in the midst of opening to life, it’s soft petals so vulnerable in a what can be a harsh world.

I have this gorgeous orchid in my home. It was a gift and is now in bloom again. As I walked past it the other day, the sun was shining through its translucent petals. The luminosity drew me to it like a moth to flame. In much the same way, when I get too close to such beauty, something in me dies to this beauty.

I posted another shot of this luminous flower online and received a number of comments.

Absolutely gorgeous.

Stunning.

Oh my goodness. Made my heart jump.

Very vaginal in the best way ever.

It was clear that this orchid looks like a woman’s sexual anatomy – vagina, vulva, clitoris, etc.

It seems as though we respond to this flower as something breathtakingly beautiful.

And this begs the question,

Why don’t we feel this way about our own beautiful, sexual female bodies?

::

This post is part one of a three-part series. I’d love to know how you feel…

Share
Posted on

Flowering Darkness

Share

Profound words for the Grandmother in each of us…

Surrounded by my shields, am I:

Surrounded by my children, am I:

I am the void.

I am the womb of remembrance.

I am the flowering darkness.

I am the flower, first flesh.

. . . In this darkness, I am

Turning, turning toward a birth:

My own – a newborn grandmother

Am I, suckling light . . .

I am spiraling, I am spinning,

I am singing this Grandmother’s Song.

I am remembering forever, here we

Belong.

~”Song of the Self: The Grandmother”, by  Alma Luz Villanueva

image  by Flickmor, shared under cc2.0

Blog Widget by LinkWithin
Share