In My Skin

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I’ve come here to live in my skin. Not to hide away from life, but to shimmy right up to this ever-so-thin layer of dermis so I can truly touch and be touched.

I’ve come here to live in my skin. To relate to life, caressed by breeze, by sun, by dew.

I’ve come here to live in my skin. It’s the only thing that separates what I sometimes believe is me from what I sometimes believe is not me. It’s a tender line, isn’t it? This thin skin – a membrane so thin it defies rationality.

I’ve come here to live in my skin. A soft wrapping around the tender-most flesh, it gifts me with what many only speak of in hushed tones – one of the most joyous experiences of life – that of being touched, deeply, reverently consciously.

I’ve come here to live in my skin. To know the true intimacy of life is to know the sublime interaction that happens here. It is so simple, yet so profoundly mysterious. We can describe these bodies in scientific, physiological terms. We can say, “Oh yes, I know how it works.” But when we touch another with our whole being, our whole awareness, at the point of connection there are no words to describe it. Nothing we can say can capture this moment of exquisite intimacy.

I’ve come here to live in my skin. To be alive, fully and vulnerably, is to offer this skin to the world. To do so is to allow yourself to be touched by what greets you.

I’ve come here to live in my skin, yet along the way I learned so well how not to live in my skin. Each of us has moments when what we experienced was too much, too painful, or too frightening to feel the immensity of the sensations of those experiences.

Over these past many years, I’ve been taking this long journey back into the body. Along with many things, one thing I’ve discovered is that sometimes what I long to say can only be said through my body. Sometimes, there is no way to say with words what the body longs to say. It must be said with touch, with movement, with song or dance.

Maybe that’s our journey, to come back into the skin. We are here in bodies.  We are alive in these bodies, in this skin that was created to know the sublimity of touch and sensation and life.

Why are we alive if not to fully live in this skin?

 

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Shedding Skin

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A year or so ago, I had a dream.

I dreamed I was standing in a grove of wide-branched, thick-leafed trees. It was nighttime. Between the dark of night and the thick of the trees, I stood in darkness. No moonlight or starlight made its way through to my eyes. The darkness was deep, yet not at all frightening. Rather, it seemed to hold me in a kind of embrace not possible in daylight. Perhaps in the darkness all is allowed to simply be what it is. Perhaps.

As I stood in this darkness, my eyes fell to the ground and I saw that I was standing amidst a sea of white snakeskins. They were scattered all around me. The whiteness of the skin was seemingly brilliantly white against the beautiful darkness all around me.

I’m normally afraid of snakes – an old phobia that’s gotten much better through my life, yet still remains to a lesser degree. But, as I gazed upon the skins, I felt no fear even though I wondered where all the snakes were.

::

Just this past month, I co-facilitated a retreat at Feathered Pipe Ranch called Waking the Inner Teacher. One of my co-facilitators was Michael Lennox, an expert in dreams. I shared the dream with him and in response Michael suggested I see the skins as coming from one snake, and that this one snake was me. I was the snake shedding all these beautiful white skins, and I was doing so by coming to trust in the darkest of the dark places within.

Over these past few months, especially since returning from my time in Montana, I’ve been in the throes of another shedding. I don’t really know exactly how snakes shed their skins, but I sense it isn’t an entirely comfortable process. I know the shedding I’ve been going through hasn’t been comfortable or easy. Yet, something deep in the soul pushes and prods – gropes to find its way through the darkness out into the light.

::

I’ve written about The Project, how we all have one, and how when we take it off and set it down, we can breathe in a way we’ve never breathed before, and we feel a kind of freedom we’ve longed for. The Project is made up of all the beliefs you’ve taken on about who you are supposed to be, how you are supposed to live and look, even what work you are supposed to do in the world in order to be successful and conform to familial and cultural expectations.

I liken The Project to those protective aprons the dentist places on you when you have X-rays. It’s heavy and protective against rays being projected onto you, and when they take it off, you feel light again.

As I shed what feels like a deep layer of old outworn identity, I feel this lightness, and a kind of joy. It feels simple. It feels unencumbered by the heaviness I’ve carried around me almost all of my life. I now see why that heaviness was there. Like the X-ray apron, this heaviness was a form of protection, but it was also a reflection of the world in which I was raised. I’ve seen how I took on the look and feel of the world in which I grew up, thinking that’s what the whole world was like – because as a little one, that was my whole world. I was a child of the late-fifties and sixties and there was a lot of heaviness not only in my family but in the world at large.

So much of the hard and stern ways of the structure we live in were actively engaged during those times, ways we are seeing pronounced today in the rigidity of our political and corporate structures. Conditioned masculine and feminine ways of being kept, and keep, many people trapped in suffocating gender roles.

Children are very impressionable and the daily impressions of their world become set in the psyche as the way things are…until the soul pushes and wriggles and finds its way out of those old impressions. This is what I’ve come to see so clearly over the last few weeks. And even though I knew this intellectually for a long time, until I could be with everything that was stored in my body – impressions, emotions, events, beliefs, energies – and allow them to be revealed and move in the ways they needed to in order to be free, I couldn’t come to know this new skin. Or maybe it’s more an original skin that was covered up. It feels that way.

The playfulness and lightness that are here feel pure and innocent, while at the same time there is a new sense of maturity, a sense that holds a kind of responsibility that feels right and good.

This new and supple skin seems to delight in the simple (yet entirely magical and mysterious) experience of being alive.

While dancing last night, I was taken by a sense of awe at the ability my body has to move in the ways it does, by the way small white lights looked lining the walls of the room we danced in, and by the way each of us dancing seemed to find our own unique movement and expression while listening to the same music. All very simple everyday things lit brightly by eyes that have been opened to the blessing that it is to be here, alive, in this body.

I know that the whole world is in a big transition. Both our individual and our collective skins are being shed and its not at all comfortable. But something in us knows we’ve outgrown this old way of seeing the world through eyes of separation, distrust, and sternness. Much of our societal tendencies reflect a belief that play and pleasure, softness and compassion, creativity and giving, are weak values to live. Yet, these very places of tenderness that we’ve tried to protect by hanging onto our old skins are what we must embrace again if we are to know our wholeness and humanness, and we are to truly understand (even the slightest bit) the gift it is to be human and to live our lives as an offering to life itself.

We women hold a way of being the world hungers for. It is what we are when we stop trying to be what we are not. We are not men.Our bodies hold offerings we must now live if we are to survive as a species.

 

Photo : AttributionNoncommercialNo Derivative Works Some rights reserved by rustman on Flickr

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Earth: Before I was named I belonged to you.

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I’ve been on the road for ten days, now. First Anchorage, Alaska; now Helena, Montana. Both new places to me. Both places that have offered windows into the sacredness of this Earth we call home.

In Alaska, I had the fortunate opportunity to fly around Mt. McKinley, and Denali National Park…and even to land on a glacier. I mountain biked around a teal blue lake. The land there is powerful. Big mountains. Open sky. It is beautiful. And, the almost-endless light caused me to crave the dark.Darkness never really came. Still light out at midnight went against everything I’d ever experienced about day and night and how they are ‘supposed to’ weave together. I couldn’t ever really get a good night’s sleep. All of the light is a lot of energy to take in. A lot of masculine energy: big light, big mountains, big contrast.


In Helena, it is different. Very different. Immediately upon arrival, I felt a softness. Before being shown to my room, I walked into the garden and just sat for a few moments. I took in the purple iris, the bleeding hearts, and the lilac. One by one, three cats came to greet me. Each one found a spot in the sunshine to stretch out into. The aspen were quaking in the breeze. Everything felt soft and welcoming.

Here in Helena, at the Feathered Pipe Ranch, the power of the land has called to me since I was first asked to teach here about seven weeks ago. I could feel the land calling. I sensed there would be a deep connection. There is.

Each place has its song. Each place has its scent. Each place calls to us in its own tongue.

What an experience to feel the big contrast between these two places. Lately in my life, I’ve experienced so many new places. It’s as if I am being invited to witness the uniqueness of our Mother, how she offers something so astoundingly different depending on where you sit. And, how she, and the brightness of the sun and sky, dance together within this experience.

Some of this can be known by the mind as data and fact and details. Most of it can only be known by feeling our relationship with the land, and by being willing to listen deeply to what is here.

Consider this: everything you receive in order to live comes from Her, from life. Your food. Your water. Your air. Your life. You came from Her and you will return to Her.

I came across this poem, by way of Filiz Telek. Oh how it spoke to me as I stood on that glacier. Oh how it rumbles through me as I sit witnessing Mother Robin feeding her young with their mouths gaping wide, waiting to be filled. In fact, as I watched, one little one sat so long with its beak wide-open, that its head dropped down over the nest into a sound sleep.

::

Earth, isn’t this what you want? To arise in us, invisible?
Is it not your dream, to enter us so wholly
there’s nothing left outside us to see?
What, if not transformation,
is your deepest purpose? Earth, my love,
I want it too. Believe me,
no more of your springtimes are needed
to win me over—even one flower
is more than enough. Before I was named
I belonged to you. I see no other law
but yours, and know I can trust
the death you will bring.
See, I live. On what?
Childhood and future are equally present.
Sheer abundance of being
floods my heart.

Rainer Marie Rilke
From the Ninth Duino Elegy

Soon I’ll be sharing much of the richness and beauty I am experiencing here at Feathered Pipe. Stay tuned.

With love, Julie

 

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Wise Woman Wednesday – Lone Mørch

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Wise Woman Wednesday

Occasionally, I share windows into wise women I know. There is no criteria, per se; rather, every now and then I feel called to share something that seems relevant, beautiful, fun, and of course, wise. We women have the opportunity to amplify each other’s voices, to connect women to each other, to share our stories with each other, and it’s something we must do if women are to come into their wholeness and fullness. Plus, it’s just fun to honor and amplify women.

The wise woman: Lone Mørch

I’ve known Lone for about eight years now. We dance regularly together, and we’ve sat and chatted, many times, sipping chai and eating Indian food as we’ve discussed feminism, the sacred feminine and masculine, and how much we’ve learned on this inward journey to wholeness.

Seeing Red

Lone recently published her first book, a memoir titled Seeing Red. In Lone’s words,

“Seeing Red: A Women’s Quest for Truth, Power and the Sacred is an Intimate memoir about a woman’s search for personal power, a journey of climbing inner and outer mountains that takes her to the holy Mt. Kailas in Tibet, through a seven-year marriage, and into the arms of the fierce goddess Kali, where she discovers her powerful feminine self. As much a memoir about coming into one’s own as it is a love affair with the Himalayas, Seeing Red takes the reader on an unforgettable journey of creation and destruction.

This is the story of Denmark native Lone Mørch’s transformation–a story of love and passion, and also a story of self-betrayal. This is every woman’s story because it’s a dispassionate tale of one woman who knowingly gives up on herself, and who has to fight tooth and nail to reclaim herself. In the end, the efforts are worth it, but she has to strip herself bare, lose everything she’s held dear, and strip away everything she’s ever built in order to see the truth.”

 

I loved Seeing Red. It’s fascinating, funny, and moving. It’s Lone’s journey, yet at the same time, in a very universal way, it is every woman’s journey.

The Interview

Lone and I sat down to talk about Seeing Red, but also about how we find our way by being on the journey, not by waiting until we are ready for it. It’s the journey that seasons us with wisdom and healing.

There are many things Lone and I talked about that I feel are universal for us as we reclaim the deep beauty of the feminine. During our chat, Lone revealed, “The story that lived in my belly was the story of power.” Power in the belly…sound familiar?

Over time, what really compelled me to dive more deeply into Lone’s rich experience is what she discovered in her work photographing women through her company, Lolo’s Boudoir. As she worked with more and more women, she discovered she was doing exactly what she needed to do to see what she, herself, was up against in her desire to affirm her own beauty and sexuality. She was seeing and hearing the same beliefs and messages from each woman she photographed that she heard coming from within herself.

During the interview, Lone shared that she was always looking for beauty,for a space for women to be beautiful. As she was starting to step into a deeper sense of sovereignty, she wanted that for the women, too. As she did so, she discovered she could no longer play along with the “slightly superficial boudoir, be sexy” kind of exploration and experience for women.

“The accumulated stories of all these women and their difficulty in accepting their bodies and their difficultures around sensuality and sexuality were piling up. I was starting to be drained and frustrated.”

Lone could clearly see the underbelly of this society, “how it is image driven and how our bodies and our sexuality have been commodified. We become estranged-from-our-essential nature as women.” She didn’t feel in integrity anymore and began to ask herself, “Can I undo stereotypical images of sexy as I create more images?”

Some of Lone’s words of wisdom from her work photographing women:

“Most women end up being naked and feel the most powerful and the most free.”

“I had to allow myself to be more naked and real and put up the front that I’ve got it going on and perfect. It has taught me how to see. It has taught me that I have to fall in love with each person…”

“It healed my mistrust of women; taught me how no matter the age and stage we are at we end up dealing with the same questions.” 

And, as you’ll hear, Lone learned to trust more deeply in her own creative process. She used to be a planner and now she sees she functions really well in the intimate moment. This is so much of what reclaiming the feminine is…learning to trust our deep creative nature and the feminine nature of the creative process, that of the unknown, the fecund, the emergent.

Listen to our chat here. It’s 35 minutes, so you might also want to download it and listen to it on a walk out in the woods…urban or not.

You can buy Seeing Red here, and discover more about Lone’s work here on her ‘Divinely Furious’ blog.

:::

Lone Mørch, in her words:

I’m an award-winning author, photographer, speaker 
and creative facilitator, driven by a deep sense 
of curiosity, freedom and social justice.
 
I am an advocate for women’s visibility, voice and value in the world. For more than a decade, as a photographer, I’ve witnessed thousands of women heal and transform their body-image and self- perception. I’ve learned that the sovereign path, living from inside out, is the only path to self-liberation. Together, I see us break the chain of invisibility and free our voices. As the patriarchy is falling apart around us, we have the glorious opportunity to re-imagine ourselves and our world in a more feminine, honest and harmonious way. This is the conversation I want to invite you into.
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You can’t think your way to Blossoming

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The work of reverence:
to solve our darkness by blossoming and to solve our loneliness by loving everything.
~ Mark Nepo, Seven Thousand Ways to Listen

 

I’ve been in a bit of a writing slump. When my mind goes crazy on itself, trying to figure out the unfigureoutable, I find I drift away from writing, caught up in some illusional world about solving and understanding.

When I write regularly, I tend to not get into this thinking cyclone. Today, though, the pain of too many thoughts hit my body like an overdose of chocolate sundae. Did you know that, from the Chinese medicine perspective, thoughts have to be digested, just like food? Yes. That is so. And, when I overindulge on thinking, I begin to feel way too full.

One method I’ve found to help digest the thoughts is a really good intense cardio workout. I’m not sure this is technically true from anyone’s expert perspective, but it is certainly true from my experience. When I have to breath really hard, breathing all the way down into my pelvis, I begin to feel settled and clear as the tonage of thoughts falls away from my head, my shoulders, my chest and my stomach. It’s as if all the weight I’ve been carrying around my brain falls off of me as the oxygen brings me back into my body.

Sometime a long time ago, I learned that I could handle the stress of living in a stressful childhood by trying to figure everything out. There were many dark times, scary times for a little one, and thought I could keep the darkness at bay by figuring ‘something’ out.

Just today, as my mind began to race once again, I was present enough to see where I was headed. Hooray for the mind. Truly hooray. It was as if the mind, seeing itself caught in the circular wasteland, realized to itself that there was no way out. It literally could see there was no way out. It could see it was checkmated.

And, the beautiful thing was that it could feel the silence all around and through. It felt held. It could feel its relationship with life, knowing on some level that it’s functionality was no match for the intelligence of life.

And in this moment, it stopped.

And, I just sat here breathing as the tears flowed.

The mind got that it cannot do it. It cannot figure out life. And it is so damn tired of trying.

And so, this darkness I learned to try to solve, this unknown I needed to somehow manage, cannot be solved nor managed. I only thought life was dark. Instead, what I thought was dark was the unknown. In some ways, it can feel that way. And this is where I came to the work of reverence, the work of blossoming and loving.

I could sense a bit of reverence in my awareness as my mind stopped in the realization that it was fruitless to keep going, because I could sense everything was holding the mind, holding the thoughts that were circling into over-thinking gluttony. Perhaps we don’t solve our darkness by blossoming. For me, it feels like blossoming requires trusting in something else, the urge to blossom.

I cannot think my way into blossoming. All I can do is blossom, and that requires feeling, and trusting. Feeling the urge to blossom means feeling that urge which moves up through me, up from the sacrum (or the holy bone).

It’s so funny, because when I coach, my mind is quiet and I listen into the deepest levels of the darkness of possibility. I am there completely for my client. I hold them. I know what that feels like so clearly. Yet, it has been certain places in my personal life that have triggered the over-indulgent appetite of mind. places that take me so quickly back to those early years.

The mind just wants to be held, and in this vast universe of love it is held. In every single moment, it is held.

So, I decided to share this beautiful meditation with you. The meditation grew from my own experience of being with the pain of the over-indulgent mind. I recently shared it with my newsletter subscribers as a gift. Today, I want to share it with you. I know it has been a beautiful meditation for me, and on some level know that it helped guide me to today, to this moment of the mind letting go.

Download The Holding Meditation

Please share it with your friends and family, people you think might benefit from it. I hope it helps ease minds and helps you know you are held, deeply held.

With love,

Julie


 

 

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Embraced: A Grandmother’s Perspective

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This post is for my friend, Tara Mohr’s Grandmother Power blogging campaign. 

::

I began my journey to grandmotherhood when I became a mother at 17, and had my second daughter at 21.

I became a grandmother at 45 when I witnessed my older daughter’s incredible strength and resilience through labor and birth, and what was (unbeknownst to us) to come. I was there, alongside my son-in-law, as my grandson emerged. I was there, alongside the three of them, as my grandson faced numerous surgeries in the first few weeks of life. He was at Children’s Hospital where there were many beautiful newborns in the ICU whose parents were equally as strong and resilient. Many of those babies died. All of the parents (and grandparents) I met within those walls grieved something so deep and profound.

During my first few days of Grandmotherhood, my relationship to life, and death, deepened. For months, my grandson was critical. Tubes and bandages covered most of his tiny body. The first time my daughter was able to hold him, more than three weeks after his birth, it took the nurses over one and a half hours to move him from the bed he was on into her lap, even though she sat just a foot from the bed.

It was new to me, this being so closely tethered to this baby, yet not his parent. I wasn’t his mother, yet was intricately intertwined. I would have given anything to change things, but I couldn’t. From my vantage point, I could see how much my grandson was suffering, how much my daughter and son-in-law were suffering.

I watched my daughter and son-in-law try to be with the terror that was happening. I felt completely helpless. There was nothing I could ‘do’ to fix things. Nothing. I remember how hard it was to just witness and to be with.

And then I came to understand how powerful it is to just witness and be with…and to hold it all in love. I didn’t become saintly; I just stopped fighting what was so, and instead began to respond.

My grandson faced trauma after trauma, yet he finally came home. He is a gorgeous boy, now…all of twelve.

::

The day we buried my mother, my younger daughter was very pregnant with her first child. I stood there, aware of the shift in my matriline. My mother was gone and now I was the elder woman in my lineage. For a moment in time, I saw back through the matriline, back to my mother, her mother and her mother, and so on. I saw forward to my daughters, my grandson, and the baby not yet born that would come to be my granddaughter. I stood there aware of both life and death, birth and burial, very aware that there can be no life without death, and no death without life.

When my daughter gave birth to her daughter, on my mother’s birthday just eight weeks after mom’s death, I was there during labor and delivery. I was so blessed…so, so blessed, to be there to witness, once again, how life follows death, just as death follows life, and to witness the profound strength of my daughter and the profound power of birth and motherhood.

To witness birth and the sacred as it moves through this process is intense in the way it can wake us up out of our dream that life is mundane, even if just for a moment – a priceless window into the sacred.

Again, with my granddaughter’s birth, I was taken deeper into the sense of what being a grandmother holds. No longer was I the immediate parent; at least not in the same way. My place in the world shifted, and I now saw myself from a different perspective. I was the mother of a mother. And, with the birth of my granddaughter, just weeks after my mother died, I became the oldest woman in my living matriline. When this happened, I could feel it. I not only knew it as a fact, I could feel it in my bones.

::

I now have four beautiful grandchildren. I love them fiercely. It is a powerful love, one that doesn’t have the day-to-day responsibilities and disctractions that are so much a part of parenting.

I am now closer to my death than I am to my birth. Instead of seeing my life stretched out ahead of me with the endpoint so far off it doesn’t seem to exist, I am well aware of the fact that I have much less life (in years) to live than I have lived. As I see the timeline of my life in my mind’s eye, where I am along it has radically changed, and as I look out toward death, I see the continuation of life that came through me, but continues on after I am gone.

It’s a strange thing to see. And for me, from my vantage point, the grandmother power in me has to do with all of this…it has to do with my relationship to birth and death, and to the life in between. It has to do with my relationship to grief, to joy, to gratitude. It has to do with my relationship to flesh and blood. It has to do with my relationship to the sacred. And, it has to do with the beauty of humanity.

It is true that I am so much more than simply a mother and grandmother. Yet, the richness and beauty of who I am in my life, in all the areas of my life, come out of the lush, full, pregnant knowing that is at the heart and soul of womanhood.

The experience of birth, both with myself and with my daughters, and death (of my husband and mother) have been powerful, powerful teachers.  The ultimate lesson? That the beauty, power, and ultimately the mystery of life is sacred, and that everything that is given is a gift.

I know how profoundly important this awareness of life’s sacredness is to the continuation of humanity on this planet. The mystery of creation as it comes into being as a human being, can only  grow in a woman’s body.

When I take in the bone-chilling treatment of women and women’s bodies (this vessel of creation) across our planet, my heart breaks open, over and over and over. I see it as the same bone-chilling degradation and devastation being enacted to our beautiful planet earth.

There is a force in our world that seems to want to harm the very vessel that brought each of us into being. What is this force? And how do we come to face this force?

Why do we fear this mystery and power with so much determination that we are willing to destroy ourselves?

What will turn us to see the sacredness within it, opening our hearts to a different relationship with life?

The power of a woman’s body is the same power that is at the heart of the mystery of life. As women, can we come to see that the lies we have been told about our worth are just that – lies to try to quiet and shame and ultimately control something that cannot be controlled?

Can we come to peace with the power that lies within our bodies, knowing that to live this power will not be like the power that’s been used over us?

We women see the connections. We see the relationships. We come to know how intricately connected life is, how everything relies on everything else for health and well-being, and when we don’t – we find ourselves unhealthy and not so well. Women know this. This is grandmother power. It’s about the web of life…about the fact that everything we do to life we do to ourselves. And the web has been vastly damaged.

This isn’t about quarterly earnings or market share or GNP. 

NO. This is about the continuation of life here on earth, and about helping to ensure that every being has the best quality of life they can.

That’s how important women’s voices are.

That’s how important it is that each and every woman comes to know how intricately connected she is to life and how much her singular life matters.

That’s how important it is that she finds and sings her song.

That’s how important it is for woman to get in touch with her deep, deep desire to remember something she knows way down within.

::

What is Grandmother Power?

Grandmother power is not only in women who are grandmothers physically. All women hold grandmother power. And, Grandmother power isn’t just in women, although some aspects are available to us through the female body. The heart of Grandmother power is part of life, and as such it is in all of life.

Grandmother power is the power of the broken-open heart. It is the power of feeling how deeply and intricately we are all connected to each other. And how when one part of this big beautiful web becomes sick, the whole becomes sick. It’s the power of being able to feel what is happening for the whole, to witness the pain of the world, and then to speak and act from this broken-open-heartedness.

Motherhood is so close to the child, but Grandmother power holds the larger family. It’s the whole family that is in your lineage, both individually and collectively.  With Grandmother power, we see ourselves as part of a the global family – not just humans, but all of life. There is a sense of sovereignty that comes from Grandmother power. There is a reason the Iroquois nation would not go to war unless the wise older women decided it to be so. Grandmothers hold a wider view.

From the grandmother’s seat, we know how powerful we are held within the matriline of all women. When a mother is pregnant with her daughter, the baby already holds the eggs that will become her children, should she decide to have them. There is strength and the power of the continuation of life in this line.

When we see life from the eyes of Grandmother, we know that the cycle of life, death and rebirth are an integral part of what Life is. There cannot be life without death. There cannot be death without life. We honor the wholeness and live the cycles.

Grandmother power isn’t something we do, it is what we are. It is our nature. It doesn’t move from a place of martyrdom, but rather from love. It moves from being deep in our female body. When we know Grandmother power, we do what we do with the great love that we are.

Grandmother power knows the sacredness of the flesh and bones, of  the soil and water, of the moon and sun. It’s a power that is rooted in the earth, not distant in some transcendent place. It holds the sanctity of life and honors it by way of choices made.

“Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

These things I have listed as qualities of power are not seen by many in our world as powerful things. That’s how out of  balance we are. When we come to know power in these ways, our world will be a different place. The time for that is now.

 

I’d love to know what qualities you see that Grandmother power holds. I invite you to share them with us in the comments.

 

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Shame: A Deadly Hot Potato

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Shame.

It’s a killer. Of self-confidence. Of self-love. Of creativity. Of life. Of young women. And, ultimately of us all.

It’s not even ours. Not the kind of shame I’m talking about. At least not to begin with.

Shame is passed around like a hot potato. For many of us, when we are young we’re shamed repeatedly until we become to believe we are shame itself. Our parents probably didn’t even know they were passing it on. I know I didn’t know I was passing it on to my children.

It’s an epidemic. Shaming. We do it in many, many small ways, in many small moments. And, some of us do it in big ways, in big life-altering moments. We pass it on because it is too hot to hold and too much to bear. For the most part, this isn’t done consciously. But it’s done. All the time.

Shame is one of the stickiest tools of the Patriarchy. Shame the woman to quiet her. Shame her to get her to keep her beautiful sexual sacred self down. Shame her so she continues to hold Eve’s shame as her own. Shame her so she won’t remember how powerful she really is.

In the last few days, two stories of the deepest shame and humiliation have come to light. Shame so strong it caused two young women to take their lives. Of course, there are many more, but for now most of those are unknown to us. Shame keeps things quiet. When we feel shame, we keep secrets because the last thing a person who’s been shamed wants if for others to see them.

Just a few days ago in Northern California, three teenage boys were arrested and accused of sexually assaulting Audrie Pott. The accusations also include taking pictures as they assaulted Audrie, then sharing them around with classmates and others. Audrie hanged herself eight days after the assault. According to those who knew her, Audrie was shamed, bullied, propositioned, embarrassed, and humiliated.

Rehtaeh Parsons died on April 7th in Nova Scotia. She was 17 years old. She attempted to take her own life, many many months after struggling to live with shame. Her parents had to take her off of life support. Rehtaeh had been gang raped. As her father wrote, “They took photos of it. They posted it on their Facebook walls. They emailed it to God knows who. They shared it with the world as if it was a funny animation.”

Rehtaeh and Audrie had so much shame and humiliation poured on them they gave up on life. They aren’t the only girls, or women, to know this shame and humiliation.

How could we turn around and shame and blame these young women when they were the ones abused so savagely? I say we, because it is we. Rehtaeh and Audrie are our children. The boys accussed of these crimes are our children. The boys and girls who passed around these pictures, thereby heaping on the pain and suffering, are our children.

As a culture, our shame is deep and thick. It is toxic. It runs underground through us all, deep in the dark recesses of our shadow. And when the hot potato gets too hot to hold, we pass it on to others so we don’t have to know it within our own psyches.

But, this shame stops here. Now.

It is time for each of us to look within at our own internalized shame. It is time to stop passing it around because we don’t want to feel it. It is time to begin to look at how we the adults are raising children who do these things to each other.

Our internalized shame began as somebody else’s shame. And once we’ve internalized it, it is ours to deal with. It is ours to feel. It is ours to heal.

We live in a rape culture. We live in a shame culture. We live in a culture that pretends all is well, that our culture is the best, that we have no demons. The longer we pretend the problem is not ours the more vicious the acts will become.

When we are willing to stand tall to our darkest demons, we find that the dark holds our most sacred and beautiful jewels…sacred because we come to see our own humanity. And, this takes a willingness to step out of denial, and to stop believing in the illusion of some perfect self that is incapable of hurting and destroying others.

Shame. It can take your breath away. Literally. It can try to steal your life. It can keep you holed up like a monastic, far away from eyes that might see that shame and equate it with you.

Shame is handed down, generation to generation. It is passed around man to woman, woman to man, adult to child. I don’t know anyone who’s never been touched by shame.

 

It is time for us to see the rape and shame culture we live in.

 

It is time for men to begin to speak out against rape and rape culture, too.

 

For so long women have carried this shame.

Shame is the darkest weapon that patriarchy uses against women…against the feminine.

Shame is the darkest weapon I use against myself. Ugh.

And, ultimately it is a weapon killing us all, women and men, and the children we love so dearly. 

 

 

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Woman’s Song

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On my unexpected walk yesterday morning (car battery died and I walked home from the mechanic), I was suddenly moved by an insight. Unexpected circumstances can do that…bring insights. These times can be our most creative moments, because we’re taken out of our normal routine, which can wake us up to the newness we are always really living in.

The insight? That it’s not so much what we speak as women, but that we speak…that we liberate the female soul’s song.

The feminine was silenced. Our mothers were silenced, as were their mothers, and their mothers, and so on. And, we are continually encouraged to (many times through shame, shunning, threat, and humiliation) stay silent.

I know I silence myself. I learned to do this at a very young age. I watched what was going on, listened to what was expected of me, and learned to manipulate my behavior accordingly. I know others who did the opposite – pushed back with every fiber against being silenced. Pushing back, though, is still a kind of silencing, because being completely free means you simply speak what is true and many times when we push back, we are more caught up in the conflict than being free to simply express what is within. Not always, but many times.

Unlearning silencing isn’t such an easy task. Patterns of silencing are insidious. The patterns are within our psyches. They are in the culture. Everyday on the internet, you can read something powerful posted by a woman who is speaking her mind. And, you don’t have to look far to see the comments that immediately surface attempting to silence her through intimidation and threats of violence and harm.

I believed that silence would keep me safe. When I learned to do it, it did. But silence keeps none of us safe, and in these times we are living, silence keeps us from creating something new in our world that is life-affirming and fueled by the deepest love that is life expressing itself anew in each moment.

This insight was really beautiful…and simple.

I can see that it really doesn’t matter the form we say things in, but that what we say must be true in our hearts, to our souls.

We don’t have to come up with something amazingly wise and transformational. What I see is that the very act of speaking will heal. Speaking the truth in our everyday lives will heal. It opens the channel, and when the channel is open creativity begins to pour forth…a creativity that is rooted in the sacred creativity that women embody. It is this sacred creativity within our beings that is birthing the new consciousness. Speaking opens the channel. It reconnects our awareness with what is true deep within. Speaking can be a metaphor here, yet I also can see that vocalizing, the act of making sound through the body is incredibly powerful.

Speaking begins to end the silencing that has happened to the feminine, and to women. The act of speaking opens channels in the body and soul.

Hearing one’s own voice saying words that have been swallowed too many times to count reawakens a knowing of self that is necessary for healing.

Speaking truth in everyday life is an extremely powerful act…powerful and healing.

In working with women, and in my own experience, I’ve come to see that we can get caught up in the belief that we have to come up with wise words, and even more have to put them into some ‘form’ like a blog, or a book, or a speaking engagement, or you name it. But the insight showed that it is much more simple than what we think.

Imagine millions of women around the world, women who have the freedom to do so, speaking the truth to ourselves, to our families, our lovers, our co-workers, our bosses. Speaking for ourselves and on behalf of those who can’t, who aren’t free to do so.

Hearing our own voice with our own ears. It’s a reclamation of the power that lies within to give voice to the soul.

I don’t know the esoteric details of what happens when a woman speaks truth aloud, but I can see something shifts. When a woman listens to what is happening and feels for resonance and responds with truth, responds in a way that honors life, not only within herself but within all of life, silence is broken, healing happens, and something new is born.

 

We can support and encourage each other to do this.

What if each of us actively reached out to three other women we know and asked them to speak aloud the words that have been swallowed back down over and over and over?

What if we reached out and invited them to tell us their truth?

What if we saw this opportunity to hear, really hear, another woman’s truth as a sacred act and we listened accordingly?

Will you do this?

Will you offer this gift of inviting out woman’s song?

 

A good place to begin is with yourself, to hear your own words with your own ears, and to feel them rise up out of your body into the light of day. Really listen for the words to be spoken. Listen then speak. Keep speaking because sometimes those words take a while to reach. Feel the words rise and move and flow as they are offered up.

This IS a sacred act.

 

John O’Donohue wrote, “All holiness is about learning to hear the voice of your own soul. 

 

Doing so calls back a power that was buried when we went silent.

Doing so reconnects you with you.

Doing so liberates woman’s song.

 

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Image is white ribbons on Flickr under Creative Commons 2.0

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Capable of Greatness Even in Our Darkest Moments

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This morning I read about the Steubenville rape case. I read that Jane Doe, the woman who was raped, was receiving death threats. My heart broke.

I then went to Wild Writing where we write using certain phrases from poems that Laurie shares as prompts. The first poem read was “Prayer in My Boot“, by Naomi Shihab Nye. The following is what poured out of me. And as I read it aloud, I could feel waves of grief roll through me.

The phrase from the poem is in teal. The lines that begin with ‘For’ are the elements of my Prayer. May it be so.

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Pray it is universally applicable, because it is. How could Delhi be any different from Stuebenville, India from the United States?

Rape is rape. It tears us all apart.

We are no different here in the US, except we seem to think we are, seem to be really good at turning away, pretending it has nothing to do with us, pretending we aren’t like them. We’re more civilized, more under control, more egalitarian. Everything swept under the rug. Pretending Jane Doe deserved it because she drank too much and tweeted questionable things. Pretending the two boys lives are ruined because they’ve been convicted of a crime that somehow wasn’t of ‘their’ doing.

I pray we see that it is universally applicable because it is and the more we don’t see, the more we refuse to look toward, the more this darkness festers in each and every one of us – Indian and American, woman and man.

For this is our doorway into healing.

For those moments last year in Steubenville when choices were made that led to this.

For that night in Delhi when she boarded the bus with her boyfriend, never suspecting what was about to take place.

For the man in Delhi who suggested she was a whore because she was out at night and suggested her sweetheart was at fault because he didn’t protect her.

For the boys in Steubenville, raised in a culture where we avoid talking about these things, avoid looking right at this rape culture we seem to continue to cling to.

For the girl in Steubenville who woke up the next morning not knowing what had happened to her.

For all the mothers and fathers of these children and young people who in some way tried their best and succeeded, and in other ways failed.

For every young boy and girl, including my four grandchildren, who are learning every day what they must do to belong in a culture that expects certain behavior from all of us so that we fit in and don’t bring attention to our society’s darkest secrets.

For these young girls and boys who still catch glimpses of their souls who know the truth about life, that it has the capacity to be filled with compassion and love, tenderness and integrity.

For all of us who know deep in our hearts that this is not who we are as a species, that we are capable of greatness even in our darkest moments.

I pray that we come to know that this it is universally applicable, because when we know this as a species we will know peace.

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Women as Noble Beings

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I was born in the ‘50s, and grew up in the 60’s and 70’s. I remember shows like Donna Reed and Father Knows Best, where the Mother was always wearing an apron and being sweet and kind, and the Father was the breadwinner and the wise one. By the end of each show, everyone was happy, all problems were resolved, and everyone knew their place. On the surface, so many families seemed to be the same; yet, underneath, most were not even close.

In this kind of ‘pretend’ environment, my parents divorced in 1964. I remember how hard it was for my mother when she became a single mother with three little girls, trying to make ends meet to put enough food on the table and keep the roof over our heads. I remember how afraid she was, how alone she felt, and how judged single mothers were at that time.

I remember the feminist movement. I remember people (not only men) totally trashing the women who were speaking out. These women were speaking out to effect real change so that women, like my mother, could get better jobs, earn more money, and have a modicum of respect in the culture. We were trying to break free from the chains and bindings that had kept women contained. I remember how these women who led the women’s liberation movement were called horrible and ugly names for speaking out.

At my young age, I remember how much I feared being cast-out like that, cast-out for speaking out with power about the truth of how things really were…and are. I am not saying all feminists were right and righteous, and those who opposed them bad; what I am saying is that the cultural paradigm of patriarchy rose up fast and hard to put these women back in their place. It wasn’t pretty.

I remember the not-so-easy discourse around the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). I remember wondering why on earth we needed the ERA. I had learned in school that we were all equal under the constitution. I was beginning to see that real life did not reflect our founding documents or what we saw on television. In growing up, I was beginning to clearly see the truth of the world I was becoming an adult in.

I remember being amazed that the ERA did not get ratified in all fifty states. It is still only in effect in twenty-one states. I remember wondering why people would not want women to have equal rights? What was that about?

In hindsight, I see how the women’s liberation movement had to push hard against a societal construct that was trying to keep women controlled and dominated – in the kitchen, or if they were working, making much less pay with a whole lot less options; how it seemed like the only way out was to prove that we could do what men did just as well as they did it; and how ‘traditional women’s work’ was not the only thing we could do.

I sit here remembering so many ways in which women have been undervalued for far too long. I sit here remembering how hard women, and some men, have worked for equality for women.

It took decades of women fighting for the right to vote to finally win what in hindsight seems only right and natural. Why?

Now in my fifties, a grandmother to four beautiful children, I see this world as it is right now in 2013. I see how little heart is in the institutions of our current culture. I see, still, how little our culture values traditionally ‘feminine’ things such as caring for the poor, teaching the young, honoring the elderly, valuing wisdom, taking care of the planet, and making sure all people have access to basic human needs.

I see that somewhere back in the history of humans, caring for children, caring for others, and caring for the home became something less than, something looked down upon, something not of value. I see how women still are not valued, how feminine traits are denigrated, while masculine ones continue to be praised and admired.

What has this devaluation of the feminine done to our world? When we don’t value, deeply value, that which is at the root of relieving suffering in human lives and the human heart, valuing the very planet on which our lives (and the future lives of generations to come) depend, and seeing the beauty and sacredness of life itself, what do our lives boil down to?

Woman in a barley field, Ladakh, India.

Tenderness of the heart and tending the hearth are not inconsequential offerings. Both literally and metaphorically, our world is hungering for these.

It is inhumane to expect people to continually pull themselves up by their own ‘bootstraps’ without needing anything from anyone. That is what’s expected in a hyper-masculine culture where being needy for anything or anyone is weak, and holding emotions in is strong and righteous. It is inhuman and inhumane.

What is human is the way of the heart, of connection and relationship. We do need each other. It’s a very human thing to need each other. Being human is a vulnerable proposition. To think otherwise, is to pretend we are separate from each other, or that we are machines of some kind.

I remember, somewhere deep within me, a time when I knew life differently as a woman, a time when women walked as noble beings. We can walk again as noble beings, knowing we embody the Feminine and are sacred vessels for life. We can walk again as noble beings, knowing the earth, too, is a sacred vessel for life. It is a deeply sacred relationship women’s bodies have with the earth body.To bring the heart back into life, it is time we women value our femaleness: our power to nurture and nourish, our ability to feel deeply, our wisdom that fills our bones, our vibrant and sacred creativity, our vital life force that fuels our sexuality, our powerful voices, and our capacity for fierce, fierce love. This is not in place of our ability to get things done in the world – we know how to do this. Rather, it is bringing this awareness, this value, and this knowing back into our daily lives.

In valuing these things, we bring ourselves back into balance, a balance of the masculine and feminine within. As we do this, as we embody our femaleness, aware of the sacredness of our bodies, we model what it is to respect the feminine in a world that has forgotten how to do so. And as we do this, we hold out our hands and hearts to the men in our lives, inviting them to do the same – to respect the feminine within us and to embody the feminine within themselves.

May we all, women and men, walk on the earth with feet of love. May we all become conscious of the immense gift of life, and allow this knowing to wake us up to the joyful responsibility we have to be engaged, creative, and giving members of this world village.

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Originally posted at Roots of She.

 

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