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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.

  1. Come into your inner world. Deepen your awareness of what this world is and what your inner voice is saying. Listen.
  2. 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.
  3. Discern if what you’ve brought into form wants to indeed be shared with others. Does it need to be spoken into the world?
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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-affirming 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.

sweetpeaswscriptspring2017This 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. 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?

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Mother Tongue, Part 2: Speaking Without Translating

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 Lucy Burns, American suffragist and women’s rights advocate.

This is part 2 of a five-part series on rediscovering, and speaking in, our mother tongue.

 

In part 1, Has Your Mother Tongue Been Lost in Translation?, I wrote about how women often translate, or code-switch, from our native way of saying things into a language that the masculinized culture will hear and accept so that we will be ‘taken seriously’, or to be not too ‘threatening’, which ultimately means ‘be accepted’.

In this series, Mother Tongue, I am specifically speaking to women, specifically asking the question:

What wisdom and creativity are we losing because women’s ways of speaking, a feminized expression, is seen as inferior to masculinized expression?

I make this distinction between the difference of female and male because we are different. Yes, men and women both have masculine and feminine traits and energies. That is so. And, we can’t express our creativity without it coming directly through the body, a gendered body. This directly impacts our creativity, our leadership, and our wisdom. To deny this, is to once again attempt to deny the validity and value of feminized expression.

 

Why do we translate?

If I reflect on my own experience over the many decades of my life, I can see where I’ve consciously chosen, many times, to choose my words carefully, to leave certain words out and to replace them with words that would be less challenging and provocative to those I knew would hear them. It’s startling, in looking back, to see how quickly I could size up a situation and then decide how best to ‘navigate’ that situation.

I’ve translated for many reasons. Sometimes, it was merely to figure out how to best communicate to the people I was conversing with. If I wanted them to understand, I could change the words, tone, and content in order to help achieve one-half of that understanding – the other half being their responsibility. I have known for a long time that I can’t make someone understand me, nor can I make anyone even really hear me. But, I can be proactive in helping to make the conversation be more productive for both of us.

Other times, I’ve translated because I feared that what I would say would be provocative, would cause me to feel scorned and/or shamed. Sometimes, though, when I’ve been just plain excited to share something, I haven’t been ‘careful’. Instead, I’ve just expressed myself without switching certain words and stories for other ones that would be more digestible – or at least what I thought would be more digestible.

As women, our tendency to translate begins pretty early in. We translate, or code-switch, much earlier than when we first enter a masculine-centric world of business, though. We begin when we enter the masculine-centric world of education. And even before that, many times it begins when we become aware of language within what can be a masculine-centric culture of the nuclear family.

 

One story

One particular story stands out for me, and it stands out because of the shame I felt when I did not translate.

I attended Stanford University as a non-traditional undergraduate, transferring from a community college as a junior at the age of 42. While I was there, I decided to write an undergraduate honor’s thesis. I had a hard time deciding on the topic. The question swirled around me for months, because I was contemplating a very unusual topic, something that seemed to me to be very unorthodox. I didn’t know if I could find the words to speak about, and write about, what I was seeing, so I was nervous to make this choice.

Finally, the words came in a true ‘AHA’ moment – Spirituality and the Internet. I felt so much excitement as I thought about designing and writing the thesis, yet I was also nervous about bringing my spiritual side into my studies. I feared being ridiculed for having this ‘crazy’ topic (yes, my inner judge was working overtime). Keep in mind this was in 2000. The web hadn’t yet been more widely used for very long at this point. Despite my fears, my advisors knew me well, and all four of them responded with nothing but encouragement. With this encouragement, my confidence grew a bit.

Near the end of the quarter, those of us who had honor theses were asked to share our topics at a celebration dinner where our advisors were also in attendance. I was nervous to speak because I anticipated the other professors might not receive such a ‘different’ topic as kindly. I’d been at Stanford for three years, and I’d found both my age and my way-of-being ‘non-traditional’. For a split second, before I stood up, I wondered how I should phrase what I was going to say. I wondered if I should use the words Spirituality and the Internet. I wondered if I should try to coat them with something less ‘woo-woo’. I feared how I would be received. As I rose to speak, I could feel this inner voice saying to me, just speak the truth because you know this is a really incredible thing you are doing. So I did. I spoke the truth. I said,

“My topic is on Spirituality and the Internet. I am creating a spiritual experience online, and then testing users to see how they experience the space.”

And whatever other words I decided to share quickly became lost in the bodily sensations of shame as I began to hear laughter and snickering, and saw odd looks on the older, educated, mostly-male faces. As I finished, one professor in particular said,

“What are you going to do? Play mood music and have virtual incense?”

 

Ashamed of my own creativity and wisdom

His words brought more snickering. And with that, I could feel my face turn bright red and I sat down. Believe me, I’d had to face some pretty awkward moments as a woman undergrad twice the ‘normal’ age. But this moment was hard. I felt so much shame for something that was actually a really brilliant, and forward-thinking idea, based on my work in the computer science human-computer interaction courses I’d taken. From that point on, while I finished the topic, I chose my words very carefully, and I carried a kind of shame about what I was doing.

I obviously didn’t have much confidence in myself, and at this point was still allowing others’ ideas of me influence me way too much. Perhaps this might not have bothered many others, but it shut me down. I realize I shut me down. I allowed others’ words to shut me down. Some might say they were only teasing, that their words showed their own discomfort, or that a few words shouldn’t sting so much. That isn’t the point. The point is what I did with my wonderful idea. In that moment, I felt the joy go out of it because I began to judge it even more harshly. Even as I created it, somewhere inside the good ‘translator’ reigned it in.

I’m sharing this long story because it gets to the heart of what I am writing about, and I am writing about it because I have experienced it so often in my many years on this planet. I’ve experienced shame and humiliation because how I see the world and how I speak about what I see is not considered to be sentimental, too deep, not practical enough, too spiritual.

Ultimately it was me, and is me, shaming me. AND…I survived. Feeling these feelings did not kill me. Others face far worse in this world. 

This fear of judgment can cause us to go silent; to keep our amazing creativity and ideas to ourselves. Whether it was ‘kind’ or not, it really didn’t have to impact me, nor silence me, if I was confident in my own language, my mother tongue as a woman.

 

This really was about my mother tongue.

This topic, Spirituality and the Internet, came through me. It was my creation. It was coming through this soul, with this internal language, and this wisdom. It wasn’t that my words were unrecognizable. It was that they were foreign to these men in the format I was sharing them. But the nature of this thesis and work was very much coming out of my own mother tongue as a woman, a language that speaks of connection, of wholeness, of relationship, and of healing. It was coming out of my own experience with the divine and knowing that on some level the Internet is a source of light that can bring us together and can heal us as a species.

But these ideas are very feminine in nature. They are about healing and love, about a God that isn’t masculine, nor sits on high, but a God that is Oneness, that is both masculine and feminine in nature, a divinity that isn’t about religion at all, but about life. And these ideas are threatening to many.

My story is just ONE story. I know you must have many stories. How is your creativity and wisdom is being lost every day because you shy away from sharing what your soul must share?

 

Gender Bi-lingual 

Soraya Chemali, in her post, ’10 Ways Society Can Close the Confidence Gap’, shares ways we can begin to help close the confidence gap for women, one of which is to:

“Stop promoting the idea that masculinized expression is superior and that women have to emulate it to be successful. The expectation that women be gender bi-lingual, or code switch, is a function of being part of a muted group. The kind of confidence that many people advocate just means a woman has to work very hard to overcome sexist gender incongruities to succeed.

Women learned to be gender bi-lingual in order to be successful. If we are gender bi-lingual, we have learned to be because we, at some point, came to the realization that our native language was not the language to speak if we wanted to succeed in the world. We learned this, and then we learned to speak the male language. We learned how to translate, and then at some point we forgot our own mother tongue, at least on the surface of things.

It has been my experience, in teaching about creativity and leadership, that most men do not even realize that women translate. It would help if they did, and yet this is not about them giving us permission to not translate. It is about bringing forth our own language, our own mother tongue, in a way that honors and values it.

 

Valuing our expression – our Mother Tongue

Why would non-masculinized expression be any less valuable or honorable? Only because someone, somewhere decided it was so…and we’ve adopted that belief.

If we’ve been educated and conditioned in a masculine-centric world, then what is our mother tongue as women? What I’ve come to discover is that it lies outside of this masculine-centric conditioning – and because it does, it holds a source of wisdom, creativity, and power that could bring about a radical shift in our culture. 

Perhaps this is why the Dalai Lama said that Western women would save the world – because there is a deep, untapped well of creativity and wisdom waiting to be expressed through women.

In part three, we’ll explore what flows through women – this mother tongue. You can read part one, here.

I look forward to having you join me for the series as it unfolds. Other posts in the series are:

Mother Tongue Part 1: Has Your Mother Tongue Been Lost in Translation?

Mother Tongue, Part 2: Speaking Without Translating

Mother Tongue, Part 3: Calling You Home in a Language Long Forgotten

Mother Tongue, Part 4: She Doesn’t Pay Lip Service

Mother Tongue, Part 5: Eyes and Instincts, Knowing and Soul

We will discover much together. Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

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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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Your Voice is Calling

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Since this is about Voice, I thought it would be fun to speak it: [audio:https://unabashedlyfemale.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/YourVoiceIsCalling1.mp3|titles=Your Voice is Calling]

“Doubt yourself and you doubt everything you see. Judge yourself and you see judges everywhere. But if you listen to the sound of your own voice, you can rise above doubt and judgment. And you can see forever.” ~ Nancy Lopez

Listen to the sound of your own voice.

When I first read these words from Nancy Lopez, I read them literally… Listen to the sound of your own voice.

I thought of the moment when I first really heard my voice – when I felt the vibration of my own voice reverberating through my body. It was on a day when I’d done some really deep, intensive emotional healing work. I’d released a great deal of old emotional ‘stuff’ that I’d held in my body for most of my life, and as I heard my voice, I felt resonance, alignment, and the truth of what I was speaking. It felt as if there was no separation between what I was saying, the vibration of my voice, and who I really am.

There was a settled quality to it, and a really straight up and down sense of voice…I guess that would be like a linearity to it. And it reverberated throughout my body. I could feel it. There was a flow to it.

I’m trying to find words to describe an experience, which can be hard.

I’ve noticed that as my practice of dance now heads into an eleventh year, I am beginning to spontaneously sing to the music. While the dance practice is silent, meaning you can’t talk, sometimes we vocalize in the dance. Sometimes, it isn’t singing that comes but grunting, crying, or even clucking…what I call voice-making.

Embodiment is what happens when more and more of the energy of your soul inhabits the cells of your physical body. (That’s how I describe it right now. I don’t know how spiritual masters would define it, but that’s what it feels like to me.) As we become more embodied, we become more awake, more full of light, more vibrant with the Goddess in each cell of our being.

Voice and the throat area are closely tied to creativity and the womb area. I’ve found that when we are immersed in the creative process of different creative outlets, we can spontaneously sing and vocalize. And this is important, because as Nancy shares, as we listen to our own voices, we rise above the Voice of Judgment, we begin to see clearly what we are here to create.

I know that the fear of judgment and criticism has been one of my biggest blocks to sharing my voice in the world. Perhaps that’s why Nancy’s words speak so deeply to me.

What is it to really listen to our own voice? Not just the physical voice, but the words, the resonance, the heart in it, and the love in it?

Yes, love. Your voice has love in it, love for you. It is speaking to you, calling you back into your own heart, back into your womb, back into your own soul. Listen. Listen deeply. Drink it up. Drink it in. Drink in the medicine of your own voice so it can heal and bring light back into your cells.

As Thich Nat Hanh shares, “To be beautiful means to be yourself. You don’t need to be accepted by others. You need to accept yourself.”

Your voice is calling, calling you home to you.

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