power of speaking – unabashedly female

August 23, 2017

To discover great faith in yourself is a profound turning point.

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Through you, life is constantly being born anew. You are an instrument of love. If you want a different world, you must give birth to it. You must come to know what is in your heart. You have a powerful knowing to give voice to and we need your voice – we need all voices to find their true Source – that source within. You do this by going within – by consciously turning and going within to listen deeply and bring forth what you come to know and hear.

Speaking what is true can be a challenge. Oftentimes, the space and time between what you truly long to say and what you end up saying can be very short – meaning, there is something inside of you that you long to say, yet the more ‘programmed’ voice will speak over it almost immediately.

But notice I wrote ‘almost’.

There IS a space between what you long to say and what you often do say and it is this space we adventure into in Writing Raw.

What you long for is longing for you.

What you long to say lies within you, in the deeper layers of your being, often as deep as your bones. To come into contact with this inner voice before it is silenced, you need to come into the inner territory with reverence, awareness, and a true desire to hear.

Your true voice is accessible. It really is.

“IÂ feel so strongly that what you have created in writing raw has this potent link of turning us – leading us – inviting each of us into our own selves. not calling it anything but ourselves, words hinting here and there of naming, but to be ourselves and have faith in that is a great great great gift that is given in that circle.” ~Â Barbara Heile

The Inner Realms

When the initial glimmer of Writing Raw first came to me, I knew it would be a way to rediscover within oneself the sacred, sensuous realm that most of us have come to believe does not exist within us. After three years and many women, this is exactly what Writing Raw is – a threshold into your sacred, sensuous nature; a threshold into feminine community; and many thresholds into your deep imagination and ways of bringing this forth into words.

We write together. In community. In circle. In reverence and love.

We learn to listen to ourselves and to each other, and eventually to the vast space of what has not yet come into form. For we are that which can bring formlessness into form.

I can tell you this realm exists within you. It is deep and glorious, and it longs to come into a direct relationship with your conscious self.

To discover great faith in yourself – in who you truly are – is a profound turning point.Â

It isn’t complicated. It is truly simple in many ways. But it does take a desire to hear what is underneath the predictable and safe.Â No one can tell you what youÂ will find within but you can be guided to find your way. I am one of those guides and it is what I love to do.Â

Why Writing?

Writing is the vehicle that we use to reawaken our conscious awareness of soul and deep imagination. It’s what we use to ‘realize into form’ our innate creativity. And it’s what we use to remember what is true about women – that we naturally and innately know how to weave ourselves into a sacred tapestry of communal expression.

Few of us enter into this kind of exploration without fears or anxiety. But what I know is that alongside this fear is a deep longing to reawaken, realize, and remember… This is the call of soul.

This is what matters now in these times. No healing or evolution will come without accessing the realm of soul.

I’d love to have you join us.

We begin Sept 5th.

You can find out more and register here.

March 13, 2017

Becoming An Agent of Change

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We are creating our world with our actions. Our actions affect the whole. And, our words (or other actions) can be powerful catalysts if we source them from within and will write or speak them into the world.

When some people have more power than others because their voice is heard by more people and they are in positions of authority, those people have more power to shape the story of this world and how it unfolds. And when those who have little to no power have no voice, little to no authority, the powerful keep their stranglehold on the cultural narrative.

So what do we do? How do we change this?

There are many of us who have more power than we think. We’ve learned in many ways that we are powerless, but we are not. We might not be in traditional positions of power, but many of us have access to the world wide web, which is part of creating this new culture. And we all have the power to create community and to be part of many communities.

If you are reading my words, you have this access. You, too, have this power to create our culture. Your voice matters. Your creations matter.

So what keeps you from being a part of this new creation?

What keeps your voice quiet?

What keeps your words unknown, perhaps even to you?

How might you become an agent of change in a way that is grounded in Soul?

I see this as a process.

Come into your inner world. Deepen your awareness of what this world is and what your inner voice is saying. Listen.
Find some method or practice to bring what you find/hear in your inner world into this outer world, even if it is simply for yourself. You can do this through writing or art-making or even dance. But find some practice that puts into form what you find within.
Discern if what you’ve brought into form wants to indeed be shared with others. Does it need to be spoken into the world?
Realize that you are the authority of what comes through you. And you are the authority of whether or not you get to say what you need to say, share what you need to share. No one else can give you this authority. No one else can tell you whether or not what you have to share is worthy of being shared. This is a crucial piece of the creative process – to no longer judge yourself and your own inner voice and knowing. To no longer stuff it down inside you. It can be simply a decision you make. And, this can take some deeper internal transformational work to shift your beliefs, something I do as a coach.
To become an agent of your own voice, to find agency within yourself. Agency – the ability to take action, the impulse to move and express – comes out of an internal kind of thrusting, just like the seed cracks and thrusts out of the soil and into the world. What is the source of this power? It comes out of Source itself, out of Eros, the impulse to live, to express fully, to know oneself fully.I have found that personal agency comes out of the transformation of our stuck emotional leftovers, by doing the inner work that allows the energy itself to transform into the essential qualities of who you are – especially anger. When anger is thwarted, our agency is, too. Even if we are one who expresses a lot of anger, it still isn’t our essential strength. Essential qualities lie under the emotions we use to navigate the world. When I worked with anger and rage, what I found access to were essential strength, will, and power.It is normal to feel anger. It is a sign that something is off, wrong. When it stays stuck, which it does when we are young because more often than not children are taught to stuff their anger down, we have little to no access to our sacred strength, will, and power. Instead, we push and strive which is tiring. Sacred, essential energies flow naturally once we do the work to transform these stuck energies.
Take action that is aligned with your own unique expression in this world, action that aligns with what you value. There is great power in no longer simply being against something, but rather being for the birthing of something new.

This is how we each become an agent of change – through our own internal agency. If what we are acting upon is this inner voice, this inner knowing, this is power from within.

It is power with others. It doesn’t seek to deny others of power. Rather, it is generative power. It is life-affirmingÂ because the inner voice is the greater intelligence that is at the heart of life.

On Saturday morning, I popped onto Facebook Live to share what was really burning inside of me. Basically, I followed these steps. This is what I shared. Please feel free to share it with others if you feel it would be helpful.

Toward the end, I mention that I think it is helpful to find a place where you can practice these steps – where you can get comfortable going into the inner world, listening for what is there, writing the words down, and then speaking them out loud. There is great power in connecting the inner voice and the physical voice. Many of us as women have been silenced from a young age, oftentimes by our mothers or other women who want to help us stay safe. But now we must speak if we are to be agents of change – if we are to come to embody both authority and agency.

This is one of the main reasons I started Writing Raw almost three years ago – to give women exactly this experience. The writing is secondary. What matters is that you come to express the vast creative voice of your inner world out here into the external world.

Writing Raw begins tomorrow, March 14th.Â You can join anytime this first week.

Please join us if you feel this is a necessary next step in your evolution as an agent of change. We are all in this together and isn’t it wonderful to be together?

April 7, 2013April 8, 2013

Woman’s Song

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 truthÂ to ourselves,Â 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.Â

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.

Image isÂ white ribbonsÂ on Flickr under Creative Commons 2.0