“Give voice to what you know to be true, and do not be afraid of being disliked or exiled.” – Eve Ensler
For some time now, I have seen a vision of where women must go if we are to discover the true depth of our capacities as women.
I know we’ve been under the shadow of men for a long time, and I know we must step out from under this shadow if we are to discover our nature as women, and bring the beautiful gifts of this nature to our world, a world that is thirsty for it…and the feminine.
When I speak of this, it is sometimes misunderstood as being under the thumb of men, but that’s not what I mean.
Stepping out from under the shadow has more than one layer of meaning.
Under the shadow, we can’t see who we are. We see ourselves in a masculine light, like there is no other way to be than like a man, or to be liked by a man.
Under the shadow, we take on the shadow side of the collective, seeing ourselves as the shadow of the culture, you know, the whole Eve complex, that women are responsible for the fall (and I don’t mean Eve Ensler).
Under the shadow, we don’t see our own light…we simply see the reflection of the masculine, or we see the masculine’s light and believe it is ours, too.
The second wave of feminism helped open the doors so we could discover our place in the world, discover our abilities to make it in a masculine world, and we’ve done that. We’ve proven we can lead alongside men. We’ve also come to see that many of us have had to ‘do it all’ in order to succeed in the ways we’ve wanted. Many of us also see we had to put away something, we had to put away our true nature, our womanliness.
Using words such as womanliness has its risks. To be honest, I don’t know what womanliness is. I know what I’ve been told it is. I know what I experience as a woman, but to know a nature not in relation to men is to relearn what it is to be woman. In some ways we can only know something by way of something else. But when we see our womanliness in response to men, or the masculine, it gets obscured by conditioning, and conditioned responses.
If we’ve put that away, what is it we take back out? What did we hide away?
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Today I came across this quote by Llewellyn Vaughn-Lee, a Sufi Sheik. I’ve seen him speak many times. He is an extraordinary mystic who sees what can’t be seen, and speaks to us of what we need to know.
Many women are unknowingly caught in a collective conditioning in which the feminine is made subservient to masculine, rational values. The feminine qualities of relating, listening, waiting are repressed in favor of rational thought and goal-oriented drives. American culture may appear to give freedom to women, but there is a collective pattern that denies the real nature of the feminine. As one woman said to me, “In this culture a woman can be anything she wants, as long as it is masculine.†Yet many spiritual qualities needed for the path, such as creating a sacred inner space, belong to the feminine. Often our spiritual nature lies buried under collective taboos, and requires courage and commitment to be rediscovered and lived. Love is a Fire: The Sufi’s Mystical Journey Home, page 52
“Our spiritual nature, buried under collective taboos.”
“A collective pattern that denies the real nature of the feminine.”
As Vaughn-Lee shares, the feminine is a both/and: the feminine principle (that which is in both women and men), as well as the embodiment of the sacred feminine that is inherent in women.
We women can’t see our true reflection by looking into the cultural pool, for it is laced with ideas, taboos, fears and beliefs that hide the true nature of the feminine.
The cultural shadow is built upon those taboos. The shadow is what we repress, what we put away into the dark, what we learned at a young age we couldn’t be if we were to remain ‘good girls’ living in the collective.
The real nature of the feminine lies buried under the shadow. We can’t know ourselves at the core, until we’re willing to look into the darkest places. We can’t come into balance within, balance between our feminine and masculine natures, until we aren’t obscured by this collective taboo-ridden shadow. And, we won’t come into right relationship with men, until we know ourselves fully as women.
It takes courage and commitment, and I add, a community of like-minded women committed to the journey
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sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
~Galway Kinnell
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To relearn through touch, through words, through connection: the real nature of the feminine can only flower from within.
So we begin with self-blessing: blessing self as woman, blessing self as sacred, blessing self as lovely.
This image, Diana, was taken by gAbY on Flickr, shared under CC2.0 license
In every advanced mammalian species that survives and thrives, a common anthropological characteristic is the fierce behavior of the adult female of the species when she senses a threat to her cubs. The lioness, the tigress and the mama bear are all examples. The fact that the adult human female is so relatively complacent before the collective threats to the young of our species bespeaks a lack of proactive intention for the human race to survive.
Yet how things have been has no inherent bearing on how things have to be, and I think we’re living at a time when Western womanhood is just a moment away from emerging into the light of our collective possibility.
While we humans are clearly intelligent beings, over time, our intelligence has separated from our wisdom, dividing our smart brains from the wisdom of our hearts and bodies. We’ve marched forward over hundreds of years as if we are separate from the rest of life, as if we hold some lofty privilege that other forms of life are not worthy of. We’ve also separated from each other, from a sense of connectedness that can help us survive in tough times.
It is characteristic of the female of many mammalian species to be protective of her cubs, to fight for the life of the species, to covet life above all else, and to do whatever it takes to keep life going.
Marianne Williamson calls to us to remember this nature of the female, and calls us forth to action, an action that stems from this natural desire to protect. I don’t think I’ve heard anyone else do this better, until now.
Anita:
Another woman, just barely into her womanhood, is also calling us forward. Her name is Anita and she lives in India. Listen to her story here. The video is short, but it is powerful. She blew me away with her directness and her beautiful audacity, the audacity to ask us, you and me, to do something to support the 600 million girls living in the developing world.
Anita refuses to be a victim of a system that would keep her from her dreams. And, she takes her power one step further. She in turn asks us, those who can do something about the 600 million girls who can’t do anything for themselves, to get off of our duffs and do something, because, in Anita’s words, “what’s happening isn’t working.”
Now it might be easy to respond to her plea by saying, “I don’t have any power.” or “It’s not up to me to fix something that is broken in your country.” or even, “You’re not my child. I have my own problems.” And of course, we have the choice to see things from those perspectives. Or, if Anita’s call has roused you at all, we can shift how we see things. We can look through a different lens.
Let’s call this other lens, The Girl Effect Lens.
The Girl Effect Lens:
The Girl Effect – n.
The unique potential of 600 million adolescent girls to end poverty for themselves and the world.
The Girl Effect shows us that when we change the lives of girls for the better, we change the world for the better. Why is this? Because girls are different than boys, as women are different than men. Neither is better than the other, but the diversity we bring to the world has always been important, and at this critical time, is even more important. According to statistics, when girls are empowered, they are more likely to reinvest their resources back into their families.
Fact: When women and girls earn income, they reinvest 90 percent of it into their families, as compared to only 30 to 40 percent for a man. (Chris Fortson, “Women’s Rights Vital for Developing World,†Yale News Daily 2003.)
Less than two cents of every international aid dollar spent in the developing world is earmarked for girls. And yet when a girl has resources, she will reinvest them in her community at a much higher rate than a boy would. If the goal is health, wealth, and stability for all, a girl is the best investment. (source, The Girl Effect)
Because many girls grow up to be mothers, investing in their education is more than simply providing them with the means to get a good job. It also keeps them safe during adolescent years when they are more prone to sexual assault and way-too-early marriage, while providing a firm foundation for them to stand on when they become mothers and begin to raise their own children.
Fact: Research in developing countries has shown a consistent relationship between better infant and child health and higher levels of schooling among mothers. (George T. Bicego and J. Ties Boerma, “Maternal Education and Child Survival: A Comparative Study of Survey Data from 17 Countries,†Social Science and Medicine 36 (9) [May 1993]: 1207–27.)
If the 600 million adolescent girls in the developing world today follow the path of school drop-out, early marriage and early childbirth, and vulnerability to sexual violence and HIV/AIDS, then cycles of poverty will only continue. (source, the Girl Effect)
Girls know they’re facing discrimination and injustice. They have dreams and hopes for their lives just like boys. They see the inequities.
Girls find themselves at the intersection of age and gender discrimination. While girls do not often refer to their own rights, they express a sense of injustice in many areas of their lives. From expressing frustration at what their brothers get to do to anger about their parents’ lack of support to hopelessness at their experiences of sexual violence, they consistently appeal to a sense of fairness and the violation of that sense. As adolescent girls living in a slum in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, lamented, “Rights exist on paper, but in reality they aren’t put into practice.†(source, Girls Count | The Coalition for Adolescent Girls)
This blog is about rediscovering what it is to be female. I would venture to say many young girls know what it is, because they haven’t yet grown up to forget their instincts and their nature. They show it to us if we are willing to see, if we are willing to open our eyes to what is here. They live it directly, by taking care of their families once they are educated because their parents took care of them.Even when parents try to push them into a life that’s not based on their hopes and dreams, many of the girls come back – as did Anita – to take care of their parents. Anita now has her own business; she’s repaired her family’s house; and she pays their medical bills
This is what the world looks like through the Girl Effect Lens.
I would say this is the same natural response that is in all women. And (this is the key part) it is the same natural response that is needed right now in response to ‘the collective threats to the young of our species’.
These girls are showing us what is dormant in us. They are showing us what life looks like through the Girl Effect Lens.
Anita went so far as to go on a hunger strike for her dream. I can only imagine the obstacles she faced, and the strength and courage she found within. We each have that same resiliency within us.
For me, the problems we face as a global community can seem insurmountable, enough so that I feel like nothing I could do would make a difference. But looking through the Girl Effect Lens helps me here, too. Anita doesn’t have to fix everyone’s home or pay everyone’s medical bills. She is simply giving back to her family. She shared her story, a story that guides us to see things differently. And, she listened to that voice inside, that inner voice that told her to do whatever it took to follow her dream.
That’s all that is being asked of us. To trust the inner voice, to speak out about what is true, to give back, to be proactive members of the global community. The Girl Effect website asks us to Join the Conversation:
Your support, your voice and your action – that’s what it’s going to take to wake up the world and make a real difference. Make yourself part of the Girl Effect revolution. Given the chance 600 million adolescent girls in developing countries can unleash the world’s greatest untapped solution to poverty. This is the Girl Effect. If we can release girls living in poverty, they will do the rest.
Girls Are Not Little Women:
Girls are not little women. They deserve to have their girlhood and their adolescence. They deserve an education, and the choice to marry or not, and at an age of their choosing. They deserve to be free from the very real threat of sexual violence and all the psychological and health issues that come from that violence.
We are women, and we have experienced girlhood. We know how it felt to stand on the brink of adolescence, stand at the doorway to womanhood, and wonder what life would hold. Most of us reading this right now never faced the kinds of injustices and lack of choices that these girls face. Yet, we were girls in a cultural structure where women don’t experience the same equality as men, even if it looks like we do ‘on paper’. Remember what the girls in Brazil said, “Rights exist on paper, but in reality they aren’t put into practice.â€
I invite you to go back to the time when you were twelve.
How did you sense the world and your place in it?
What dreams did you have?
Were you given the opportunity to bring those dreams into reality? If not, what got in the way?
How did you see girls and women treated?
What injustices did you see as a girl?
What part of yourself, if any, did you put away in order to fit into a society where age and gender discrimination are believed to be simply ‘the way things are’?
What privileges did you have, simply because of the family you were born into did you, and do you continue to, enjoy?
As a woman now in this age that is calling us forth, as both Anita and Marianne do, what have you been blessed with, over the course of your lifetime, that is needed right now to make a difference in these girls lives, a difference that we will all benefit from?
When you look through the Girl Effect Lens, how do you see yourself? What gifts do you possess? What can you do to make a difference so that those 600 million girls might say, “Wow. Thank you. What you are dong IS working.”?”
The Girl Effect website is an incredible resource to find out more about the situation we face in our global community with respect to these 600 million girls. Take some time to watch the videos, read the fact sheets and downloads to understand what’s happening. Pass the videos and links around on Facebook and Twitter.
Thirty-seven years ago today, 11/11, I held her in my arms for the first time. She came into life, I became a mother. It was a day that changed me forever.
Holding her in my arms for the first time, I knew a love I’d never even comprehended prior to that moment. A love completely unconditional. A love that would deepen over the years as she grew into womanhood, left home, married, became a mother, and handled life’s challenges and graces with such strength and courage.
Sitting here writing this post, I can’t begin to put into words the depth of this love for my daughters, I have two, and their children. It is completely unconditional. While in my day-to-day life I may do things in very conditional ways, not always showing up in the moment in a way that reflects this unconditional love, the limitless depth of the love in my heart is always here.
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Four years ago, I was sitting in an ashram in India. Amma’s ashram. I was sitting in meditation while Amma gave darshan. Long lines of people would show up every day she was at home in her ashram, when she wasn’t touring the world giving hugs. Sitting in her love-filled temple, I was profoundly moved. My eyes came upon an Indian woman and her small child. They were sitting across from me, on the other side of the temple. She was holding him in her arms while he slept. She looked like the Madonna with child. A beautiful light surrounded them, a light not visible with my eyes, but wholly visible with my heart.
In that moment, this memory of the moments I became a mother, and the love that filled my heart for my babies, once again flooded my consciousness. This time, though, it wasn’t inside me, it surrounded me. It held me. It was me, and I was it. This love was so deep, so full, so rich that everything in my awareness was bathed in love.
Sitting here, writing this post, I feel it once again. This love. This universal motherhood consciousness that Amma speaks of. It is in us all. We are all bathed in it. Women and men, whether parents or not, are all universal mothers to all the world’s children.
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Thirty-seven years ago, I was seventeen. I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I was meant to give birth to this child. I knew it in a place within me that was ancient and wise, a place that knows what I am here to do. As a young mother, I drew upon a strength and wisdom that flowed from this ancient place, a fountain of wisdom and love. I drew upon the sacred feminine consciousness within me, within my body, within my heart.
I certainly was far from a perfect mother. Far from it. Yet, something deeper flowed through my imperfect actions. Something unconditional infused my ways of loving conditionally.
This female intelligence, this wisdom, strength and knowing, runs through all women. We know what is right for our souls. We know what is right for our bodies. We know what is right for our children. When we are in touch with this wisdom, we know.
I knew this was right for me, for my soul and the soul of my daughter from some deep place within me. No one else could make this choice but me. It was the right choice for me, and that says nothing about what is right for any other woman.
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So much that has been done through the structure and paradigm of patriarchy has clouded and obscured our female intelligence, our feminine ways of knowing. We’ve been cut off from the sacred feminine. We’ve been led to believe She is not here, that we can’t trust our own knowing and wisdom. She has been kept down in the dark. Yet, don’t let that fool you for a moment. This female intelligence has always been here. She is now rising into the light, up into consciousness.
She is living and breathing inside you right now. Somewhere you know this, even if you can’t quite yet trust Her.
Open to Her. Receive Her. Remember Her in your cells. Let Her bring forth your tears of grief for having lost touch with Her. Let Her bring forth this universal wisdom within you, so that you may shower your own heart and body with Her love. For Her love is your love, Her wisdom is your wisdom, Her ferocity is your ferocity.
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Happy Birthday, beautiful daughter, wise woman.
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And, you?
I’d love to hear about your female intelligence. What you know. What you see. What you feel. We all learn by knowing what another woman knows of her own experience.
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.
I can’t tell if they really aren’t there, or if I am straining too much to find them, causing me to miss them entirely.
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Sometimes, when I sit to write, my fingers can’t wait to share what they know is coming.
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Sometimes, when I sit to write, fingers on the keyboard, poised to go, I feel into what’s here. I sit with the silence that hovers between the key and my finger ready to strike. I wait. I notice the emptiness, the stillness from which all comes. Then a smile seems to form on this face, and something moves within me. The keys begin to tap and words are formed. I don’t know why, or what or even how. I just know it’s time to write, because I am writing. I am writing from my body, from that which knows.
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I do know there is much that wants to be said in words, by way of these hands and this blog. There is much to be discovered and shared about being female; what it’s like to consciously live in a female body within a culture that doesn’t really celebrate, respect or honor female bodies or the feminine, even though it likes to think it does.
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I do know the power of living a question, especially the one I offer up here, “What is it to be Female?” With so many images bombarding us, notions filling our brains, judgments piercing our hearts, how do we discover our own experience of being a woman in this culture at this time?
We live the question, as Rilke suggested.
We become aware of the unfolding of our own lived wisdom.
We ask our bodies to share what they experience as robes of feminine flesh, which provide the spirit a home in this world.
We offer our ears and hearts to other women when they yearn to speak of their experiences and can no longer hold them within.
We open to holding each woman as sacred, even when we see eye-to-eye on absolutely nothing, knowing that the sacred feminine within her is the same within me.
We learn to honor what longs to be known through this body, this spirit, this expression of the sacred feminine in female form.
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Many ask me why I focus on being female, since the feminine is within men, too, and within all of life.
Firstly, it’s what I am compelled to do. Somewhere there is no reason for it, other than the question compels me.
Secondly, I know, absolutely know, from lived experience, that there is something divinely important about women coming to know the sacred creativity they are imbued with.
Thirdly, while I believe we are still a long way from equality for both genders, equality doesn’t mean sameness. There is richness in discovering the diverse natures that women and men have – discovery that leads to embodiment and expression rather than that which becomes rigid roles to act out of.
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How might what we discover, as women, in our own unfolding be brought to a world that is yearning for truth, for love, and for balance of the feminine and masculine within and without?
What do women have to offer that is uniquely female? I will be exploring more of this in the days to come. As the Dalai Lama recently said,
“The world will be saved by the western woman.”
If we are to bring our gifts to this world that is crying out for balance, we must know in our hearts what this gift is.
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And, you?
I’d love to know what you’ve discovered about being female. Yes, you were taught what it is supposed to mean, but if you toss that out, what is your direct lived experience of being a woman?
Please share what you come to see here. I am listening with both ears and an open heart.
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This post is part of Bindu Wiles2.15.800 Blog Challenge.
I’ve become enamored with the idea of what can be created when we bring people, ideas and creations together, combining creative impulses, drawing upon each other’s spark. This is the first of two posts to explore this idea. Who knows, maybe there will be more!
In the past few days, I’ve stumbled upon two brilliant creative pieces. I loved them so much, I thought I would bring them together.
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The first is this incredibly vibrant painting by Holly Friesen titled, “Dancing in the Flames”. When I asked Holly for permission to use her creation, she readily accepted. When I told her I had selected this one, she shared that it is ‘in process’. I’ve followed Holly on Twitter (@Holly59) for a while and love dropping in every now and then to see what she is working on.
I find Dancing in the Flames a stunning piece. It is full of so much feral, wild moon energy. Her body is strong and vibrant. She is open to life. As I sat with this image and read the second piece, a poem by Lisa Citore titled, “If You Want to Change the World…Love a Woman.”, I could feel the energy of both rising up to meet each other.
This poem spoke to me in a deeply profound way. It brought tears of recognition of something sacred that is possible when we realize, men and women, the immense sacred mystery that is woman. What might shift if we all came to love a woman, deeply, in this way. To realize woman as the gateway to life, to know we have all come into the world by way of a woman can completely shift how we see ourselves as women, how we see each other, and how we might more deeply honor and respect the mystery of life and the mystery of woman.
I contacted Lisa to see if I could put her poem her on Unabashedly Female. She, too, agreed!
So I hope you enjoy both of these works of art. What a gift each of us has to bring to this world, whatever medium we choose to create in.
On her website, Magdalene Women, Lisa writes about how the poem came into being:
“When a fairly spiritual male friend of mine who had finally found and was deepening into committed relationship with his soul mate confided in me he was thinking of being single again, and in the next breath expressed his latest idea for raising consciousness worldwide, I wrote this poem.â€
If you want to change the world… love a woman-really love her.
Find the one who calls to your soul, who doesn’t make sense.
Throw away your check list and put your ear to her heart and listen.
Hear the names, the prayers, the songs of every living thing-
every winged one, every furry and scaled one,
every underground and underwater one, every green and flowering one,
every not yet born and dying one…
Hear their melancholy praises back to the One who gave them life.
If you haven’t heard your own name yet, you haven’t listened long enough.
If your eyes aren’t filled with tears, if you aren’t bowing at her feet,
you haven’t ever grieved having almost lost her.
If you want to change the world… love a woman-one woman
beyond yourself, beyond desire and reason,
beyond your male preferences for youth, beauty and variety
and all your superficial concepts of freedom.
We have given ourselves so many choices
we have forgotten that true liberation
comes from standing in the middle of the soul’s fire
and burning through our resistance to Love.
There is only one Goddess.
Look into Her eyes and see-really see
if she is the one to bring the axe to your head.
If not, walk away. Right now.
Don’t waste time “trying.â€
Know that your decision has nothing to do with her
because ultimately it’s not with who,
but when we choose to surrender.
If you want to change the world… love a woman.
Love her for life-beyond your fear of death,
beyond your fear of being manipulated
by the Mother inside your head.
Don’t tell her you’re willing to die for her.
Say you’re willing to LIVE with her,
plant trees with her and watch them grow.
Be her hero by telling her how beautiful she is in her vulnerable majesty,
by helping her to remember every day that she IS Goddess
through your adoration and devotion.
If you want to change the world… love a woman
in all her faces, through all her seasons
and she will heal you of your schizophrenia-
your double-mindedness and half-heartedness
which keeps your Spirit and body separate-
which keeps you alone and always looking outside your Self
for something to make your life worth living.
There will always be another woman.
Soon the new shiny one will become the old dull one
and you’ll grow restless again, trading in women like cars,
trading in the Goddess for the latest object of your desire.
Man doesn’t need any more choices.
What man needs is Woman, the Way of the Feminine,
of Patience and Compassion, non-seeking, non-doing,
of breathing in one place and sinking deep intertwining roots
strong enough to hold the Earth together
while she shakes off the cement and steel from her skin.
If you want to change the world… love a woman, just one woman .
Love and protect her as if she is the last holy vessel.
Love her through her fear of abandonment
which she has been holding for all of humanity.
No, the wound is not hers to heal alone.
No, she is not weak in her codependence.
If you want to change the world… love a woman
all the way through
until she believes you,
until her instincts, her visions, her voice, her art, her passion,
her wildness have returned to her-
until she is a force of love more powerful
than all the political media demons who seek to devalue and destroy her.
If you want to change the world,
lay down your causes, your guns and protest signs.
Lay down your inner war, your righteous anger
and love a woman…
beyond all of your striving for greatness,
beyond your tenacious quest for enlightenment.
The holy grail stands before you
if you would only take her in your arms
and let go of searching for something beyond this intimacy.
What if peace is a dream which can only be re-membered
through the heart of Woman?
What if a man’s love for Woman, the Way of the Feminine
is the key to opening Her heart?
If you want to change the world…love a woman
to the depths of your shadow,
to the highest reaches of your Being,
back to the Garden where you first met her,
to the gateway of the rainbow realm
where you walk through together as Light as One,
to the point of no return,
to the ends and the beginning of a new Earth.
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.
“We are the only species on earth capable of preventing our own flowering.” – david whyte
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This quote floated across the Twittersphere yesterday, and grabbed my attention. When I posted it as my status on FaceBook, a lovely male friend commented in response, “Yet we are drawn to flowering. Such a juicy existence.”, causing me to pause and consider the dynamic tug of war between closing and opening, concealing and revealing, preventing and surrendering.
So many ways we fight what is. Human beings that is. Only human beings. At least as far as I can see, human beings are the only ones who try oh so hard not to be what we are.
Then, I thought of how much energy it would take for a plant to keep itself from blooming. Oh my. Can you imagine if a bud could keep itself from blooming? I can just see it trying to scrunch everything in, holding itself back and in as if holding its breath, trying so hard not to be what it is meant to be.
Or at the other end of the spectrum, if the plant desires to blossom, gets to the height of its bloom and then tries really hard, incredibly hard, to keep the bloom beautiful. forever. without a flaw. without losing its perkiness. without fading.
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Fighting one’s design is exhausting. I know. I’ve done it all my life. Especially my design as a woman.
I’ve hid my deeply sensual nature. I’ve kept myself small. I’ve taken on others’ shame as my own. I’ve apologized over and over and over simply for taking up space, for being in the way, for reasons I didn’t even know, even as I was in the midst of doing it.
I’ve been really, really nice, keeping the anger and rage down inside where it won’t be seen so I won’t be seen as threatening or angry or a bitch.
As far as I know, flowers can’t choose. They do what they do because their intrinsic design is to do that. But people, we get to choose. We get to self-reflect. We get to do this dance between ego and soul, a dance between pretending and being.
Fighting one’s design is the never ending staircase, the infinite treadmill, the highway to hell, but you never get to hell, because no matter how hard you pedal, you end up exactly where you started. I call it ‘the project’.
Preventing flowering IS hell.
As I let myself feel my exhaustion, when I stop and allow the full force of my dance with the illusion of my not-enoughness to flow over me, something else makes itself known. It is always there. It’s just doesn’t clamor for my attention. It doesn’t have to. It’s just what is.
It’s the wake up call to remembrance.
It’s the quiet, yet insistent, push to bloom, to flower, to be the one I know I really am. The one I allow myself to see in rare fleeting glimpses. The one that flashes across my face sometimes when I’m caught off guard looking in the mirror. The one that scares the hell out of me because of its persistence. The one that scares the hell out of me because of its beauty.
You know the one I’m talking about… the you that takes your own breath away.
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My project has exhausted me for years. And, it shape-shifts. Just when I think I am being real and truthful and risky, I can feel the oh so familiar tightness and constriction of the project taking over again.
Let me make something really clear. The project is NOT bad. It is a ingenious survival strategy to stay safe when young. It’s filled with well-meaning parts that will do whatever it takes to keep safe. The only thing is, if the urge to bloom is there, then the project is standing in the way of blossoming. And, hence, creating exhaustion.
It can feel really risky to be the you that takes your breath away. But, in my experience, it hurts like hell to keep hiding it. The body suffers. The soul suffers. Hiding this you is fighting your design as a soul, as a human being, as a woman.
Beauty appears when something is completely & absolutely & openly itself. ~Deena Metzger
Beauty is something being what it is – completely. Sometimes this learning to allow beauty it is messy. Sometimes I don’t feel beautiful, but then I remember THAT beauty was the beauty I was taught to believe in…not the beauty of something being real. messy. powerful. strong. This is the beauty that pushes the seedling up to the light, the bud to open, the petals to fall, the flower to die.
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Right now, there is a force calling us forth to be beautiful, to be completely and absolutely and openly ourselves. Yes, it is very persistent and fierce force, like truth always is, because, as Andrew Harvey says,
“Everything is at stake, and everything is possible.”
This force is compelling women to blossom. Fully. In all our feminine majesty. It is time.
Girls know they’re facing discrimination and injustice. They have dreams and hopes for their lives just like boys. They see the inequities.
