new year – unabashedly female

Life is a mystery – Â a big, bold, beautiful, pregnant, gracious, infinite, and sacred mystery.

Life isn’t a logical process. It’s not a machine that we can make run smooth and efficiently. It’s not controllable. It doesn’t bend to our wants. It doesn’t take commands.

Who decided it was a good idea to put the analytical, logical, reasonable thinking mind in charge of trying to navigate life?

Poor logical mind. No wonder it gets so stressed out, so burned out, so controlling and fearful. It’s trying to do a job it just cannot do. How can you possibly use logic and reason to live the mystery and stay sane? It’s learned ways to cope with this job (we all have our ingrained coping mechanisms that really aren’t so great at doing what they are intended to do!), but coping and hanging on just isn’t living, is it?!

No wonder we keep thinking up the same old ideas, creating the same old stuff, digging ourselves as a species deeper into our own worn-out, status-quo ruts. The thinking mind is very good at perpetuating its ruts and stories, dragging out its outdated ideas and beliefs. It’s not good an honoring the mystery because it just doesn’t ‘get it’. It’s not designed to ‘get it’. It’s designed to handle the places where rationality and logic are needed…and there are many places…but it’s not designed to birth what is completely and utterly new. The thinking, logical mind can help midwife the new, but it can’t get pregnant. Pregnancy is for womb’s, the source of the mystery, the source of Life itself.

If we want to birth the new, we must listen to Life and what is trying to be born. If we want to be loving midwifes to what can be, we must feel for new life stirring, feel for the first heartbeats, and be willing to support this new life into being.

Like deep rich soil, like a teeming ocean, the place of gestation shimmers with a wordless, graceful essence we will never fully know; yet, we can know what is emerging from this wordless, graceful ocean as it emerges…as it is born. To do so, we must learn to listen and open, to be ready to bring forth, to be used as vessels for this Love that is Life.

Our bodies know the way. Our hearts will guide. Our minds can rest and when they are needed they can be ready to serve. Every part has a sacred part to play in this mysterious dance, and when they play their natural parts, the really do play.

Find what feels like play – to your body, your heart, and your mind. Find what brings that quiet joy, that aliveness that causes a whole-body smile. Put your ear to the big womb and listen for the heartbeat of life and find the place in yourself where you long to midwife it into being.

This is where the new world, a new way, will emerge…from the dark that we all can once again learn to trust. It isn’t the enemy…it is Life teeming with Life.

And, this is where the old world, the old way, will die back into – the dark that we all can once again learn to trust. It isn’t the enemy…it is Life receiving into itself what has lived its course.

We really do love the New – it’s why we get so excited for these New things like New Years Day. The real beauty is that it is only an illusion that this New Year will lose its newness. Life never loses its newness, just as it never stops letting go into death. They are bedfellows – the New and the Dying. If you feel into this, you’ll feel the whole arc of Life, this shimmering graceful essence.

May this New Year – a construct of the logical mind that need dates, times, goals – be a turning point for us all to become lovers and midwives of the New, the fresh, the playful innocence of Life wanting to know itself anew – and lovers and midwives of the dying.

May you hold your womb with just as much love, respect, and kindness as you hold your logical, rational mind.

May we love all. May we love well.

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Womb Update!

I’ll be co-leading a day-long retreat with my friend, Simone de Winter, this January 25th in West Marin County. It’s all about ‘A Woman’s Belly!’. It will be the perfect way to bring more health, strength, and creativity to your life by way of your Womb!

Take a look here. If you aren’t in the Bay Area, but know a woman who is, please pass this along.

It’s 10:35 pm on New Year’s Eve, 2010.

It’s almost 2011.

This is supposed to mean something. The end of a year and the beginning of another. But for some reason, this year the movement from one year to another doesn’t seem so clear to me. Life feels much more fluid than what the clock and calendar might indicate. The systems we humans have created to structure this world seem so obviously contrived.

I’ve been noticing lately just how much is made up in our world.

Take today, for instance. I was sitting with Jeff outside on the veranda at the Inn at Spanish Bay. We were having lunch in front of the fire pit, gazing out at the ocean. Just then, a family came walking out of the hotel and sat down near us. They were all jabbering away in a language I couldn’t understand. I think it was a Slavic language. I had NO clue what they were saying. Suddenly it struck me just how much it’s all made up. It’s arbitrary. I mean here were these people speaking a language they obviously understood, but the words meant nothing to me. Nothing.

I looked around at the surrounding scenery and thought to myself, “The birds and trees and ocean don’t have a clue either. Life is just happening, regardless of what language is being spoken, regardless of what day it is, regardless of whether it its 2010 or 2011. It’s only us human beings that seem to care about dates and languages and all.

And then I realized that I am moving more to the rhythm of things than to the calendar. I’m moving more to the rhythm of the seasons and the moon. I’m listening to something deeper within me, something that’s telling me when it’s time, and that doesn’t seemed to be aligned with the calendar right now.

Sometimes this throws me off, because I feel out of sync with the ‘culture’. And I feel in sync with something else. I can’t tell you with clear words what it is. I just know it is a felt sense, a rhythm of the seasons, an intuition, a palpable intelligence that doesn’t pay attention to the calendar.

In some loose way the calendar follows this intelligence, following the flow of the months. But the end of the year is arbitrary, is it not?

It feels as though moving between these two is important. The feminine is about symbols and signs, rhythms and moons, and flow. The masculine is linear, structured and staccato. Coming into balance means bringing these two together. Learning to listen to my internal rhythms, to what I sense in the unseen, to what I know as wisdom, and bringing that into a focused and clear intention and direction in life.

I know that even in the first days of this new year, we will still be in the dark days of winter, still spending time within ourselves. The days are still short and the nights long. While we are moving towards spring, winter has really just begun. There is newness, and yet much of what is happening is happening down in the dark where light has not yet shone.

What feels important in these moments is to remember that while we humans have created this world of structure, of language, of calendars and deadlines, there is another world from which we came, and in which we still live. It doesn’t follow these delineated lines. It doesn’t speak in words. It communicates in a completely different language, a language in which we all can understand each other, even if we have no clue what each others’ words mean.

As I witnessed this family today, the family whose language I could not understand, I watched their interactions. At one point, the little boy began to whine when his older brother was mean to him. Then his Mother began to comfort him, taking her head and holding it close to his. His sounds changed from whining to a kind of cooing as she whispered in his ear. This language was clear. I understood what was happening, even if I didn’t know their words.

There is a commonality we all have, even in the midst of our diversity. We come from one family, and we are still this one family. This world from which we came still weaves itself amidst the tight and contracted world we interact in on a day-to-day basis.

May we all remember this world, finding our way again to this place where we are not tethered to a clock, nor chained to some abstract ladder of worth. May we find our own rhythm and hear our internal wisdom.

Happy New Year. Happy New Way.

Tag: new year

May you hold your womb with just as much love, respect, and kindness as you hold your logical, rational mind.

Another World From Which We Came