I walk into the forest of me. Before I am very far in, I begin to lose my bearings, those bearings that have held the powerful sense of self I’ve had in place for most of my life.
The forest floor is soft and thick with a build-up of old-life-dying. My feet are bare as is the rest of me. Here in the forest of me, everything is shed. There are no illusions about who I make myself to be. They all fall away as I proceed further in. Except the red nail polish on my toes seems to still be here. Maybe it’s the power of the chemicals that keeps it in place, or maybe it’s the power of the red to remind me of something more alive than the old-life-dying beneath my feet.
The red stands out starkly against the decaying matter.Â
Old skin, old beliefs, old stories. Old and dead. Shedding, sloughing, falling down to become part of the old-life-dying.
But my feet feel vibrant and alive. The toes spread out so that each one can feel the earth, can sense and grip and connect. As if they remember being part of paws feeling the vibrations ricocheting through the decaying matter, the soil, and the bedrock. Losing bearings and old skin can also be a finding again. Maybe of something new. Maybe something old. Maybe something outside of time and space. A place where I can taste the earth in my own body so clearly that I know I am from this earth, of this earth, will go back to this earth, and never can ever leave this earth. She and I are tied together, and not just through toes.
I find a place to lie down amidst this old-life-dying. It feels awfully comfortable. Soft and thick, and my bare bones sink into it as if to say, “We, too, will go one day. Go back into you, dear earth, marrow meeting molten core.”
Even now, alive with marrow, these bones taste the earth and know home.
My bare soft flesh fills the space between the bones and the old-life-dying. Flesh feels so freshly alive, and somehow also dead when I don’t want to feel it. When I believe I am only the flesh, I fear the old-life-dying. The flesh of my life, the things I call mine, fill the space around me so I can’t feel the bones meet the earth.
The bones are the bedrock. They know things. They hold me up, give me alignment and integrity, and teach me about laws such as gravity, laws that are always true, unlike some of the laws that exist out there, outside the forest of me. The flesh is sweet, yet too much and I can’t feel, too little and I don’t know home.
I found the opening into the forest of me when I really turned to look. Half-looking never works. Half-seeing doesn’t either.
It grows dark, here, yet the red is strong. Like blood. Alive. I follow the red. AÂ light begins to shine. Like the sun at the center of everything.
When I know I am the flesh AND the light that illuminates this flesh, then I am home.Â
A few weeks ago, as I was walking down the main street of my neighborhood business district, I came upon a scene with men in suits, men in hard hats, and men with chain saws. They were watching and talking, gesticulating and sawing. This big old wild and lovely tree had grown too big for her ‘place’, her roots uprooting the concrete sidewalk that had been placed all around her when she was young and still manageable, not her full-grown, wild-self nature.
As I stopped to watch, I heard one of the men in suits talking about the tree say, “It just became too much for the street here, too much to contain. We had to cut it down. We’ll dig up the roots, cut them out, and pave over the hole. It will be much cleaner.”
She couldn’t and wouldn’t be contained in that too-small spot she was given, decorating the fancy-shopped street along with a few other chosen trees, spaced neatly and orderly along the way. She was trying to shake the concrete off, trying to grow into her full potential, following the seed’s instructions that were at the heart of her becoming.
Now, enough days have passed by that all signs of the tree are gone, except for the sidewalk squares that are obviously new concrete, sitting right up against the old. There won’t be any more ‘growing things’ in that spot. We must maintain a controlled-enoughness at all times.
Pave Paradise
Now, I’m sitting, waiting for my Darshan with Amma. Â Amma is the Indian saint who’s travelled the earth hugging others with unconditional love. I’ve been graced with her hugs many, many times, and each time is different.
The temple is filled with Shakti. My body is filled with fire.
As I wait, I hear a voice inside, an insistent voice, a fiery voice that is clear about what she wants. Shake it off. Shake everything off that is not true. Strip me bare of everything that hides my nature, that hides who I really am, like concrete laid out in large archaic patches across Mother Earth, keeping her bound, her bosoms unable to rise and fall with those magnificent in-breaths and out-breaths she takes as she prepares meals for her children.
As I see this almost-furious voice laying claim to what is true, I see that I am this strong core with deep roots, a core that is unshakable and roots that hold me steadfast to the earth.
I’ve been paved over. I was wrapped with concrete, laced with rebar that holds the paving in place, maintains a strict form, and certainly doesn’t allow any big bosom breaths to shake up the status quo.
You know that old Joni Mitchell song that croons, “We paved paradise and put in a parking lot”? Yeah, that one. Sometimes, that’s what this body of mine feels like – like paradise, a flesh and blood paradise, a conscious, aware, breathing, desiring paradise that’s been paved, made into a parking lot full of concrete, straight lines, and all sorts of rules as to who owns it.
And not the kind of feral flesh that old ‘parking lot attendant’, the one who believes he knows the ‘lay of the land’ and the rules about who gets to use this used-to-be-paradise, would want you to believe. No, not at all.
THIS. This body, this feral flesh – feral as in completely and utterly in tune with the seed of her becoming – flesh as completely and utterly part of this existence we call life, matter infused with the love and vitality, inspiration and creativity, vibrancy and expectancy that anything completely alive knows – this feral flesh, this desiring paradise, still remembers, still feels, still knows it is good and whole and necessary.
The Soul can only know what it is to be fully alive in this life by way of this body. A paved over body cuts the tree down, uproots the roots – at least in our psyche. Our doing this causes great pain to the Soul. But when we turn back to Soul, when we show we are ready to let the Soul lead, the Soul returns, shaking concrete off of roots, untwisting rebar, unveiling her nature, the trunk and roots begin to emerge.
As Amma takes me into her arms and I feel her presence, I can tell she’s heard my Soul’s request. She hugs me with a force I’ve not felt before, her jackhammer of love hitting against those thick slabs of forgetfulness and severed connection. She’s tearing away the untruths just as this fiery voice requests.
These two wildly alive and fiery loving Divine Beings seem to have a direct line to each other. It is my job to get out of the way and let Nature do its work.
You don’t have to be in Amma’s presence for Nature to help shake off the concrete. Nature is ready and willing.
::
Experience Becoming a Force of Nature!
I’m offering my course, Becoming a Force of Nature, over the summer, running from June 2nd through September 3rd, 2014. Our first call is on June 4th, with the first module being released on the 2nd, to give you time to go over the material.
This time, I’m offering the first module and call (June 4th) to EVERYONE, free of charge!
Sign-up here to receive the module so you can experience the course. I know you will learn a great deal just from Module One.
Today is Susannah Conway’s 41st birthday. She’s a friend. She’s a creative soul. And she asked fellow friends and bloggers to help her celebrate growing older by writing on the truth about getting older.Â
***
Update 2/20/14 – You can now download the collected posts that celebrate aging. It’s a beautiful eBook.
***
I’m a bit older than Susannah. I’ve been here on this earth for 57 eventful years…and they have been EVENTFUL. But life is, is it not? Life is full of events we have no idea will take place before they happen. It’s a mystery. The whole beautiful, frightening, glorious thing is a complete mystery.
I pondered what to write about since Susannah first asked. I realized I could write about how…
… grateful I am to be alive after my beloved husband died so young, never to walk his daughters down the aisle, and never to hold his grandchildren. I could because it is incredibly true for me. Each year as I turn a year older, the first thing that comes to mind is this – how grateful I am for another year.
… lovely it is to grow older, that beauty awaits at every turn. I could because it does. Growing older has helped me redefine beauty, because the traditional definition, glaringly short-sighted, would have us believe beauty makes a fast getaway as we age. It doesn’t. Rather, I’ve found that the ageless heart begins to make itself known and speaks of beauty in an eternal tongue.
… we are each so damn lucky to be here, to be walking on this earth, to be given life, not only once at birth, but with every breath. I could because we are.
… our bodies age into luminescence, into a kind of translucency that begins to reveal our true nature: Light, wisdom, agelessness from behind the veil. I don’t really know what it is about the aging process that brings translucency, but it does. I do know that I feel more revealed, more humbled, and less like I am pushing against and more like I am moving with. The body grows old and wrinkles.  The skin thins, as does the hair, but the eyes glow and the silence within grows. There’s less and less color and vibrancy on the outside – hair, skin, energy – yet more and more light on the inside and all around…if we let ourselves be revealed.Â
All of these are true. As I grow older, more and more each day I feel a sense of deep gratitude for this experience. A full and rich sense of gratitude that I get to be here, to come to know the sacred by living in this female body, this beautiful, aging, wrinkling, joyful, erotic body.
This wild passionate sensual life is just that – erotic. Sprouting. Leafing. Blooming. Fruiting. We are tender tiny shoots who are growing into wise old beings with full blooms and fully-globed fruitflesh hanging from every branch.
Yes, there are days when the joints hurt. Yes, the hair turns gray (and we can choose whether or not to let the gray show without having to feel like it’s some moral dilemma). Yes, the closer we get to death the more we face our mortality. But none of these things have to take away from the opportunity we have to reclaim our erotic nature for the life-giving force that it is, to live life in the female body with passion and desire, with a fully blossomed sensuality and sexuality that opens to everything out of love.
We are erotic creatures, just like the rest of Nature. Every thing dies, but before life dies it is ALIVE without questioning what is happening to it. When we open to everything because the love within is SO alive and fragrant, we live the fullness of the seed from which we came.
THIS is the work we women, especially we who are so blessed, privileged, educated, and aware, get to, and must, do. As Anne Baring writes,
“Each woman who gives birth to herself and responds to what life is asking her to accomplish, contributes to the survival of our species and the diminishment of human suffering.”
I’ve found that while my mind has tried to figure out how I can ‘help’ the world, my body simply wants to love what it loves, and my soul longs to sing the song only she can sing. My body still loves what it loves, wrinkles and all.Â
As women, living our erotic, sexual, wild nature brings something back into the world that has long been missing. How could we women live our joy when we believed there was something deeply wrong, flawed, and perhaps even ‘sinful’ about our nature? What has it cost us as a species to forget that life itself is an erotic, joyful, sensual mystery?
Joy, eros, fragrance, passion bring forth life in ourselves and in the world. At the core of our female bodies is a deep seated love of pleasure. I’ve found when my body is joyful and knows pleasure, my creativity shoots out of me like sprouts out of the soil, reaching for the light, impulsed by the erotic goddess.
So what if not nearly as many find me ‘attractive’? So what? It’s damn freeing, I’ve found. Damn freeing to not try to be living up to that attractiveness scale. I can’t possibly live up to it – not using that scale. But when I sense myself as a fully alive, sensual, sexual creature? I feel the attraction impulses firing within my own being, protons and neutrons held together by the strong force, neurons firing away.
How much more alive might you be? Might we be? Can we women be?
Happy Birthday, Susannah!
May we give birth to our sacred, alive, erotic nature and live what life is asking of us.
I woke up this morning feeling a deep, throbbing ‘NO’, deep in the belly, deep in the instinctual flesh.
The voice inside would not stop. It had finally found it’s way out.
My solar plexus pulsed.
Power center coming back online.
I got up and made tea, and then sat in the early morning hours slowly drinking it, slowly taking it in, down my throat.
I sat down on the cushion for a short meditation…that stretched into an hour.
The throbbing continued.
The solar plexus pulsed…hard.
Power center coming back online. I didn’t know there was this much power to be found in this body.
Â
This NO was going NOwhere. It had come home and had NO intention of leaving.
It grew louder, more insistent. Growling. Gutteral. Very Ujjayi.
Throat breathing straight up from the belly.
Power center coming back online.
Sitting in not-so-quiet repose, on the cushion, wired like one of those power stations you see way out in the desert, far, far away from civilization.
A power center too hot and too dangerous for the ‘civilized world’.
Thank God.
Â
I’ve been…
Too silent.
Too civilized.
I’ve swallowed too many NOs.
Wide-eyed and feral-hearted instinct repeatedly drowned in an ocean of acquiescence.
But wide-eyed, feral-hearted instinct can’t be silenced forever. That’s not how life moves. Death brings rebirth. Eventually, everything comes full circle.
Soul will  shake the concrete off, breathe the cobwebs out, tear the windpipes loose.
Deep-knowing, dignified bones eventually rattle themselves free…Â
The innermost layers of a woman’s flesh hold stories whose endings can emerge as the most beautiful tales of redemption and liberation.
Redeeming flesh is not easy; yet it is holy work.
~~~
This is a vulnerable post. I won’t tell you details, but I’ll tell you I’ve been weeping – you know that kind of crying where the tears just run out your eyes and down your cheeks? It’s as if the tears have a life of their own. They just flow. You aren’t completely sure why they are flowing, but it is clear the tears know. They flow out from these innermost layers of flesh, places and pockets where pain from long, long ago were secreted away.
There’ve been many little moments this week that seem to be bringing forth these tears – moments where I can feel love wants to move through me, guiding me, yet I feel frozen because of fear. While the culture, and of course my own ego, would tell me I am right to trust my fear, my heart just breaks when I do…when I choose fear over love and offering myself to the moment at hand. These are real life moments, with people I do not know. Love wants me to move toward them in moments that might very well be unsafe. Yet, I can feel the love, and I can feel the grief when I do not move with love.
This week, though, rather than getting upset with myself for my responses, probably because I’ve been softened inside and out these past two weeks, I find these tears flowing from the heartbreak of seeing just how painfully, and beautifully, human I am. And, yes, it is painful when I see myself choosing between ‘staying safe’ and offering myself to an unknown I can’t know.
And there’s been a big moment, an experience that’s really accelerated this ‘undoing’, something that has me feeling into these deep places and pockets where I long ago secreted away experiences too painful to feel at such a tender age.  In the dark, stories of rejection and abandonment grow into what seem like beasts too fierce for reacquainting.
At some point, these stories wake up and begin to make noise. They don’t like being caged. Like everything else in this world, they long to be free.
I can feel love behind these tears, right behind them, trying to make its way in on the tail of my tears. The tears soften my flesh and love rushes in.
It feelings like a river of undoing, like the river that is rushing is wearing away my resistance to love. I can feel that to choose love is to let go of a kind of ‘forced certainty’ I can hold onto when I stay insulated. It is forced because I am forcing it. I get that.
The river is rapid and insistent. Love is that way.
It is in these moments of choice that I come right up against my flaws and learned separation, and the habit of responding from fear. The stories the flesh holds about letting love in to these darker places put up some strong resistance. And I see how deeply the pain and shame of past hurts is burrowed into the innermost flesh in my body.
And the flesh holds stories about power and instincts, about unleashing and unchaining, and all the things that could happen. So many damn stories about this power within me
I remember it as a young girl – this instinctive connection to all of life.
I remember the power dancing with instinct as if they’d known each other forever.
But now, I sometimes feel like a lioness that has lost her footing. Her power is there, but the instincts aren’t fully conscious, so her big furry paws step guardedly rather than assuredly.
I sense this is why there is fear in some of my choices. When the instincts have been deemed too much or too powerful or inappropriate, they get caged where they can’t roam free. Instincts need to touch ground, feel the wind and sun, and be nourished with breath. They need to be fed and loved. They need to feel the earth.
Four paws that are in divine relationship with the earth know where to take that next step, can feel into the next step, and can sense direction and speed and gait. Four paws that are bound know little of these necessities.
The deep love a woman has for life, and her ability to hold the space for it, needs her instincts to ground it. We need this instinctual self to sniff and taste and hear and feel what is so. This love, this power, these instincts – they are all part of our aliveness, our vital life force. They are part of our creativity, and redeeming them out of the stories in our flesh is our necessary work, necessary for our own emancipation and the emancipation of our planet.
The process of reclaiming flesh is intelligent. Tears falling shows us something, especially when they fall of their own accord, as if flushed out of flesh ready to be free again.
Reclaiming flesh is holy work. Your tears can lead you across the threshold into these secreted places. And even though the stories were created in a time when it felt like true love was nowhere to be found, a river of love is riding on the tail of each tear, ready and waiting to inscribe ‘The End’ at the end of each story.
~~~
Update May 18th, 2015:
If you are curious about the journey of embodiment and coming to know again this sacred creativity, join me for my new course, Becoming a Force of Nature. We’ll be walking on four paws, feeling our instinctual way through a magnificent journey together. You can read more, here. The Early-bird price ends Sunday, May 24th at Midnight PDT.
I was all out of sorts yesterday. Something was (g)rumbling around inside me. I couldn’t write. I felt off. I felt as if something wanted to break loose, to make itself known and I had no idea (on the surface at least) what it was. The full moon was working me and I didn’t know it…until a friend reminded me.
Then he shared this,
“I lived in a place once, where the women would go out at sunset and build a fire and wait for the moon. They would each get cornmeal to pray with and eventually to offer to the fire. Once the moon started to show up in the East, they would “sing up the moon†with a certain song till it was fully up. The men would stay inside and just gather someplace, and drink coffee, talk, play cards and just chill. The full moon was women’s business; it was their night. It was always really cool to hear them singing.“
It is women’s business. We can ‘sing up the moon’.Â
This is what we know as women, what we know in our female bones.
There is a difference between men and women in how our biology responds to life moving through and around us.
What would it be like if we’d grown up with this wisdom, grown up being shown how this wisdom is an integral part of womanhood?
We’ve forgotten so much wisdom because of our disconnection from our true home, the natural world. Not everyone has forgotten. There are sources of wisdom available to us. For me, one source is this beautiful friend from high school who shares so wisely his culture’s wisdom. I’ve only reconnected with him since Facebook brought so many of our class back together. There are so many other sources of wisdom if we have the humility to ask and the desire to know.Â
Much of our socialization has been to see this wisdom as something less than: less than science, less than logic, less than reasonable; yet, it is such hubris to believe this is so. We are in the state we are in right now because we have lost touch with wisdom inherent in life itself, with a knowing of things other than rationality and logic.
::
As the movement and pull of this big bold beautiful full moon worked on me, I felt pushed and pulled toward something that wasn’t very comfortable. I could feel a kind of push-pull happening inside me where much of me wanted to run from what I was feeling and being pulled toward, while at the same time part of me was willing to dive right in. I’ve found these ‘storms’ to be thresholds to big changes and shifting, many times brought on by more momentous astrological markers. I never used to give astrology much credence (part of my conditioning), but I’ve discovered that it’s actually very practical, especially when you can feel the pushes and pulls happening in your own body.
As I wrestled with these feelings, I remembered these words spoken by the photographer, Diane Arbus:
“You must learn not to be careful.”
These words are kindling for my soul. They take hold of my soul’s spark and feed it into flame. They move me toward the wisdom of the instinctual self within, the divine wild, the soul.
Too careful and cautious come about when we lose the scent and impulse of our own instinctual nature. When I am in touch, I am like a tracker, someone who tracks animals by listening and looking, sensing and feeling. There’s a coming to know how life moves, how instincts flow, and how responses maneuver, whether it be within oneself or in the flow of life (which really aren’t two separate things).
We are taught and trained to be careful. I wonder if women are more careful than men? Or vice-versa? Or is that not even relevant? I know I am too careful. And, I usually don’t even know I am being such…until I feel it in my body. I think I run in cycles and spells – of carefulness.
I am too careful, yet, in some ways I am way too impetuous. A funny thing about us humans is that we push pull much of the time, coming toward and moving against, rather than trusting in the flow of life itself, both the open spacious awareness of spirit and the entirely instinctual nature of soul.
This something within us that isn’t careful at all, isn’t so neat and tidy, doesn’t care at all what others think. It’s instinct. It’s raw. It’s chaos at its core. It’s animal. It’s divine.
::
The past two weeks of travel, to both Alaska and Montana, have been beautiful and challenging. I’ve learned what matters deeply to me, what I must have in the work I do. I’ve learned what it means to stay with myself, and to hold fast to my integrity. I’ve learned more about what it means to collaborate, to trust people I didn’t yet know because I could sense into their integrity and willingness to work for the whole. There were things I didn’t do particularly well, while at the same time I had moments of genius and insight – pretty normal human stuff.
I participated in ceremony and ritual to honor and give thanks to Pachamama. I sweated in a sweat lodge. I danced and breathed and created from the Soul. I honored this divine wildness within me.
Coming to trust that this wild is within us, and that it is wholly divine, is part of journey in remembering and embodying the emergent feminine. She is the divine wild humanity of our being. She comes to us all, both women and men, as the soul pushes to come back into consciousness.
What I’ve found works for me is to keep saying yes. I ask myself if I want to follow the rich call of the soul, and I always answer yes, even if there is a part that fears these instincts and where they might take me. It has never worked for me to push past the fear. Instead, I acknowledge it is here, truly listen to it like I would a frightened child, and then asking myself if I want to stay in this place of fear. The response is immediately and abundantly clear.
With nose to the air and ear to the ground, She, this wild divine soul, leads me, insistently and lovingly.
I share this with you, because if you, too, feel this pull, know you are not alone. Many of us are being drawn to the pull of Soul, to wake up to our instinctual nature.Â
It is key for women to live this instinctual nature. I know it can be frightening, and I know it helps when we share with each other what we are seeing, hearing, and sensing. We are awakening together. We are women and we are one woman.
I’d love to know what you’ve experienced, how the moon pulls you.
I took my usual morning walk today, ambling (yup, I only amble on these walks) down to the business section of my neighborhood to get something hot to drink. I like to sit on the bench in front of my favorite place and simply take in the morning smells and light and sounds. It’s my favorite time of day. These spring days here in San Francisco have been amazingly, so this morning was really warm.
As I sat, I could smell a faint odor of smoke, like something was burning. It was very faint, as if perhaps there was some kind of fire in the distance. As I smelled it, I found myself taken back to mornings in India…mostly in Delhi and Varanasi…during my travels there. The smoky haziness guided me back to the vibrancy of those city streets, where there tends to be small street fires, along with very hazy air.
In some of my work with clients (and of course with myself!), I’ve encountered how we are with chaos and wildishness…how it’s all around us, and how in some places we seem to pretend to keep a pretty good  lid on it all.
I thought about the streets I had just ambled down, streets that have some of the finest homes in San Francisco and beautifully manicured yards with streets routinely swept clean of debris. I thought about how around these parts the wildish is kept at bay. I’m not saying I don’t love living here, nor am I saying that I don’t feel blessed to be living this life. What I am saying is that something inside me felt that familiar longing for the wildish nature that I experienced in India, brought on by the smell. I felt the very palpable longing for the vibrancy and aliveness that come when things aren’t so contained and controlled. Smells are strong reminders for us of past experiences.
I’ve felt the wildish in so many places in the world, and even do feel it in the grove of trees in the nearby Presidio. Â This wildish I am referring to is a kind of chaos, a kind of dance that is always happening in life. It’s always happening inside of us, in our bodies, in our souls. When we try to keep it at bay, we have to stuff it down somewhere where we don’t think about it, and perhaps become unconscious to it. We pretend that there isn’t this wildish in our own selves.
This wildish nature is our nature…We know it, even if we don’t let ourselves know we know it.
And, there’s a hankering inside us to allow this nature out, to live it. It is primal. It is creative. And, it is an aspect of life that doesn’t just go away because we pretend it does. I know I have feared it in myself. Yet, when I’ve been with it, when I’ve invited it out, it isn’t what I expected it to be.
When we come into the body, we begin to come back in touch with the wildish.
I know during the short five weeks I spent in India, something vibrant came alive in me. Seeing a world so full of life, and death, reminded me of parts of myself that don’t get much reflection here where I live – these wildlish parts within.
This wildish within – it’s in all of us. Not just women, of course. And, it manifests differently because of the nature of our bodies. For us women, it’s absolutely necessary for us to get in touch with this elemental energy within because as Dr. Christine Page writes,
“A woman’s body is an alchemical vessel that possesses the power, wisdom, and knowledge to bring about transformation and enlightenment. For far too long we have submitted to patriarchal thinking and rejected our body’s seeming imperfections, illogical rhythms, and chaotic expressions. Yet when we stop fighting our body and allow it to do its work, we find ourselves embodying its mysteries and becoming a formidable force that refuses to be hidden or suppressed any longer…”Â
So…
Do you long to know this wildish within?
How do you feel it? How does it call to you?
What does it cost for you to keep the wildish at bay? How much energy? How much disconnection?
How much joy, love, and creativity are kept in the shadow when you keep the wildish at bay?
Come join me on Retreat! Awaken the Inner Teacher
I’ve written on embodiment for a while now, especially as I’ve been on this long journey from the head to the heart.
And, now I’ll be a guide, alongside two remarkable wisdom guides, Michael Lennox, PhD and Karen Chrappa, on how to awaken the inner teacher.
I will be guiding this awakening through movement and visualization. We’ll be inviting out the wildish, waking up the wisdom of the body, this ‘alchemical vessel. This opportunity is for women and men, held at Feathered Pipe Ranch in Montana.
*** Retreat Informational Call
Want to know more? Ask questions? Hear what will be happening?
Wed, May 8th, 7:30 edt, 4:30 pdt. Register here for your call-in number and PIN.
And, if you’re wondering, the wildish within is sacred. It’s not separate from the divine. It is the mystery that is life, the mystery that is you.
One Billion Rising is over. And, it has just begun.
I first joined One Billion Rising about a year ago. The day, Feb 14, 2013, seemed so far off. Yet, the vision pulled me in. One Billion women rising. I wondered how that would shift things. I wondered how that would change the feeling on the planet, in our cities, in our hearts.
Altar by Stacey Butcher
Last night, I co-led a beautiful event with Stacey Butcher, a teacher of 5Rhythms. Stacey created a gorgeous dance wave and she led us through it with love and grace. Kim Rosen, a well known spoken-word artist, and a personal friend of Eve Ensler’s, shared two spoken-word treasures that lit a fire in us before we moved into the dance. And, for the last song of the wave, Christine Hodil sang a beautiful song that we all joined in on at the end. Our hearts were opened, moved, fired-up, and lullabied. We were the one billion, and we danced for the one billion. And, there were so many men present, who danced alongside of us, who danced for the women they love, and for the women they don’t even know who continue to face abuse, violence, and harassment.
It is jarring to be in a beautiful event such as this, to open our hearts, to invite in the possibility for a world that is different, and then to step back into what seems to be the same old world.
What I do know, now, after witnessing so many women and men across the planet rising and dancing by way of live-streaming and the internet, is that this is no longer the same old world. While on the outside it may look that way, on the inside we are changed. We’ve cracked open the cage. We know something different now. We’ve experienced the fire and joy and creativity that comes when we dance, and come together, and rise.
One Billion Rising IS a new way of life. It’s a new way of being. It’s living unabashedly the fullness of our womanhood.
In practical terms? It’s about allowing out all the parts of ourselves we keep hidden for fear of being abused and harassed.
Our patriarchal conditioning keeps an essential aspect of us locked up in an internal prison…the aspect that is the most powerful and enlivening for our souls. This aspect is nourishing and healing. It is our instinctual, sexual self, that when expressed brings forth playfulness, joy, passion, creativity, and a good dose of fire. It is not easily controllable, meaning our own internal conditioning has to work really hard to control it. It gets exhausting.
You know what I’m talking about, don’t you!?
We’ve internalized the oppressor, so we continue the oppression against ourselves, along with the fear of oppression from outside. Eve Ensler so wisely saw that we have to break the chains ourselves, we have to break out of the cage we keep ourselves in, and dancing is a beautiful way to free this instinctive erotic nature that is both organic to our souls and a sacred aspect of life.
Before I go any further, I want to reiterate, that the erotic as it is understood in the current paradigm, is simply a small thin slice of what it truly is. When I shared my thoughts with one man I know and used the word erotic, his response? “That’s porn.†This is what we’ve been conditioned to think eros and the erotic are.
Yet, what the erotic is is a beautiful aspect of life, this aspect that is at the heart of our creative, sensual, sexual, joyful, and loving natures. And because it is at the heart of creativity and embodied love, it is also the channel that will bring about lasting change, and deep nourishment to a world that has been out of balance for far too long.
And, it is exactly what our world hungers for just as it is what we hunger for. How could it be otherwise?
Life is wholeness. When we pretend we aren’t whole, we aren’t really fully living.Â
To dance is to unleash joy.
To dance is to step back into the flow, to move that which has been stuck.Â
To dance is also to reawaken our natural relationship to the body, to music, to rhythm, and to the beat of the drum, the beat of our blood pressure, the beat of our hearts.
One Billion Rising is “unleashing a feminist tsunami, an energetic rearrangement of our universal chemistry. the biggest volunteer action maybe ever of women across the planet, a seismic collective remembering of who we are, a calling back of our authenticity, a world dance shaking up our original energy and wisdom.” ~ Eve Ensler
So what do I now know that I didn’t know before yesterday, V-Day 2013?
I know that we can come together as women to reawaken our wisdom and nature.
I know that we are hungering to rekindle the fire of our erotic nature.
I know that many men all around us want us to do this. They know they cannot. And they know that it is in all of our best interests to do so.
I know that many women fear this aspect, along with many men. And, I know we have the courage to dance through this fear for the sake of life itself.
I know that dance is sacred, that our bodies are sacred, and that it is up to us to embody this truth.
I know that women have something important to do in this new era that men cannot do and it is time we do it.
I know we’ve stepped through a threshold and we cannot turn back.
I know that women across this planet can come together to rise in service to each other, and to all of life.
I know this. We’ve witnessed it. I felt it last night. I feel it today. I feel it right now.
Margaret Mead wrote, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.â€
If a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world, just imagine what a feminist tsunami of a billion women and men dancing can do. Imagine it. Feel it in your bones. Pray it. Dance it. Paint it. Sing it.
A tsunami doesn’t just stop when the clock strikes midnight!
Take your sisters and brothers by hand and step across the threshold into this new land. And, keep dancing. We must be committed to dancing. We are in this together. Isn’t that a wonderful thing to know!Â
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I’m putting together the pieces I read last night, along with a little something else, into a complimentary ebook for my newsletter subscribers. If you’d like to receive it, be sure to sign up for my newsletter in the top right corner of the page. When it is ready, I’ll send it your way.
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Here’s the One Billion Rising video from San Francisco. It’s hard to see me, but I’m there. I love seeing myself dancing. I’m so serious here, so passionate. It’s a lovely thing when you FINALLY accept your intensity is a beautiful thing.
“We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.” -Thornton Wilder
Conscious of our treasures
The other day, I unexpectedly took care of my four-year old granddaughter for the day. The first thing we did after she arrived at my place was to put on our raincoats and head outside for a walk. The rain had just about finished, and as it was moving on out, left in its wake were beauty marks scattered across places in my neighborhood.
Just outside my place, the neighbor’s staircase always holds an organic display of bougainvillea blossoms that have fallen from the vine. The bright magenta color grabbed my granddaughter’s attention and her little hands just naturally reached out to pick a couple up. I noticed that after she looked at them, she tucked them into her raincoat pocket.
Just about two blocks into our walk, we came upon these gorgeous eucalyptus leaves dotted with raindrops. As I knelt down to take a picture or two, my granddaughter’s little fingers gravitated toward these really big water drops.
She began to play with one in particular and as she noticed the way it moved about but didn’t break and fall apart, she began to giggle. She found this fascinating as she kept playing with the water. When we decided to move on, again I noticed her put a few leaves into her pocket.
We headed on down to my favorite cafe to have breakfast and green juice. Once we arrived, she immediately looked around for the place she most wanted to sit. We were the only ones there, so she had her pick of the place. She picked these high stools that faced a fairly tall counter. And before we ordered, she told me she needed to put her ‘treasures’ on the counter. She carefully reached into her pocket and brought out these bits and pieces she’d discovered on our way there. She handled them with such care, almost reverence. After all, they were treasures. They were each given their own spot along the counter, laid out with what seemed to be great intentionality. Once she was done, we could go order our food.
In watching her, I was captivated by the intensity of her focus, and by the way she was in relationship with these ‘treasures’. As we ate breakfast, she kept admiring her treasures. And, I found as I ate breakfast, I kept admiring her.
Life choosing Life
As a child, I, too, had treasures. Certain things always caught my eye. Certain things caused me to feel great joy and excitement. Certain things found their way into my pockets. And, when I take a look, I notice that those same things are still my treasures. What fills the soul with wonder and delight seems to remain so through our years. Each soul is drawn to certain things and experiences that remind it of its nature, of the qualities that it loves about existence and life.
Oriah Mountain Dreamer wrote,
Beauty is the truth of this moment’s fullness, it “is what pulls us toward life. It is what calls to us when we are in despair, seduces us into opening again and again to the possibility of love and laughter. It is the physical manifestation of the Mystery- God, Spirit, the divine- that surrounds and beckons to us every day of our lives. It is life choosing life.
We can try to make ourselves love what we’ve been taught to love, but ultimately if it isn’t a true treasure of the heart, it cannot bring us alive like our true loves.
We handle our true treasures with reverence. Somehow, we cannot do otherwise without causing great sorrow and pain to the soul. We can pretend, but we always know somewhere inside that we are pretending.
Children can teach us how to be alive again.
I noticed what called to my granddaughter, what delighted her, what she chose to be treasures. Life choosing life.
You are no different. You are life choosing life. Some things call to you, things that might not call to me.
How are you with this?
Do you honor that call?
Do you choose those expressions of life that your soul is reaching for?
Or do you tell yourself there are other treasures you ‘should’ be wanting?
There is nothing even close to the feeling you feel when you honor your soul’s treasures, or when you notice the beauty marks left as an offering at your feet.
There is a ‘rightness’ that is not at all about it being right, but everything about aliveness, pure aliveness. It is what is pulling you toward life, seducing you to open again and again.
Beauty marks us, seducing us to open so it can leave the heart conscious of what it loves.
“Life is your art. An open, aware heart is your camera. A oneness with your world is your film.” ~ Ansel Adams
The other day I had to pick up a new headset for my iPhone. I was down in Palo Alto, so I headed over to the Stanford Shopping Center. This is one of the most beautiful outdoor malls ever created…mainly for the flowers planted all around the center.
I hadn’t realized just how out-of-sorts I was feeling until I saw these Dahlias. As I stopped to really look at them, I realized just how much joy seeing the beauty in flowers brings me. They bring me home. I begin to breathe more deeply. I being to smile a soft smile. I feel joy, that soft easy joy that is such a field of contentment. This joy is the joy of an open aware heart that meets life without expectations.
Returning Home
In Women Who Run with the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes about the periodic need of women to go home, to return to the soul. Sometimes, we need to really get away to some place earthy and enchanted to remember the depth of what we are, and sometimes we can find a mini-retreat of sorts to reconnect to the soul.
As I continued to meander through the mall looking at flowers, I found this one. From the front, it is gorgeous in its openness. It’s not at all symmetrical. It has its own unique arrangement of petals. I loved that about it. Then, (and I don’t know what possesssed me to do this!) I looked behind it, at the back of it, and lo and behold! – there were these beautiful little curls that you see in the top image. I think she invited me in…
Seeing the coiled flares of delight she’s got going on behind her, sort of like under her skirts, caused me to wonder (I love the word wonder) what flares and curls and pink petals I’ve got stashed away, just waiting for a moment when the light shines upon them calling to them to come out of hiding. I know it’s something to do with bawdiness and laughter, delight and belly-shaking glee.
I know I’m shaking off the voices that have caused me to continue to believe that logic and reason reign supreme over delight and wonder, that having things figure out is much more important than settling down into the utter delight of not knowing a damn thing and being open to the delight of discovery, that clarity of argument will always win out over the powerful peace that comes when something is just what it is without the need to get anyone to understand. Ha…how totally devoid of delight, glee, and eros these voices were that I came to internalize!
How about you?
What coiled tendrils and flares are you keeping to yourself? What would others see if you were to give us access to those parts of you you’ve yet to unfurl, that you long to unfurl? Notice the uniqueness in this beauty. Where, and in what, does your uniqueness just wait to be invited out?
Where is that bawdiness in you, the place where delight, desire, and a good belly laugh are all that’s needed?
What mini-retreat might you have at your fingertips just waiting to take you home, back into the arms and lap of the goddess who delights in those little flares of soul?
