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

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This is the part 3 of a five-part series on rediscovering, and speaking in, our mother tongue.

How many languages do we ‘speak’ as women?

What streams of wisdom do we have access to?

What is our true mother tongue?

::

Finding the Mother Tongue

Our mother tongue is a  native tongue we rarely hear women use because it lies underground, under the cultural language we’ve been taught to listen to and trust.

To find it, we must come home – to the soul, the body, and the earth. This is where we find our mother tongue – where we feel our instincts, where we play and know joy, where we sit with heart break, or hearts full of life; with friends, close to the earth, laughing, playing, finding the wildish places within. Even dressed in the cultural garb, we can still go ‘outside’ the norm, find some green grass, lie down, listen to the earth and to our own heartbeat, and begin to listen to the mother tongue – the language of soul.

In this series, I am not attempting to tell you what your mother tongue is. (You must find that for yourself, and in the next and last posts I’ll explore ways to do that.) Rather, I am simply sharing what I have noticed and discovered by listening to women speak, by paying attention to my own experience, and by listening deeply to the words that bubble up through dreams, meditations, deep writing, and asking questions.

This is all in service to discovering, and uncovering, the creativity and wisdom our world does not have access to because women translate in places and ways they may not realize, and because many places, and people (men and women both) in our world value a masculinized expression over the expression of the feminine voice and language.

This does not mean men do not translate or feel their voices stifled. Nor does it mean men don’t have a mother tongue. This is about uncovering the latent mother tongue in women because women have been silenced, and are still silenced in so many places around the world.

The wisdom and creativity of women is vital in the recovery of the feminine principal. We must step outside of the current masculinized models to discover what our souls long to live through these female bodies.

 

Reconnecting with Soul

There are times when we feel we must translate for our words and contribution to be understood, valued, and accepted. This can be critical to how we are received in the workplace when our livelihood depends upon it. It can also be seen to be critical for our personal relationships when we are trying hard to make a relationship work. I understand this. I have so much compassion for this. 

Some of us, myself included, have had the luxury to remove ourselves, in some ways, from the ever present stress of the way this culture keeps pulling us to be what it tells us we must be. Sometimes, we have to step away, out of the culture, in order to come to remember that we have a soul, and that if we want to live from soul, we must learn to follow its voice. Many of us are feeling called to do this in some way.

Even physically removed in many ways, though, I have still had a hard time listening more deeply to what this mother tongue is saying. I do know it comes out of my body, by way of my flesh and blood, hair and bones. I do know that when I listen inside myself, and listen in a way that really wants to hear, I begin to speak in this tongue – even if simply to myself. And…

Speaking to self in the mother tongue begins to replenish our own well of dignity.

We are wired to long for connection, to be heard and seen, to be understood. To be seen for who we truly are is food to the soul. It would make sense, then, that we would try to find the way to ensure these would happen – to be understood, to be valued, to be heard and seen.

But if we translate, and lose truth and self in the translation, we aren’t truly being heard or understood, because we aren’t truly being ourselves.

Our own conditioning keeps us from trusting the words that wait – on the tongue, in the throat, in the deep recesses of our heart, in the belly? Our fear keeps our true words silent even from ourselves.

 

Important questions to ask:

Am I lost in translation?

Is the vibrancy and truth of what I am trying to express lost by changing what I say and how I say it?

Does this matter to me?

It boils down to trust – a trust in the validity, the wisdom, and the value of our own soul’s expression.

 

Beginning to Write

I began to feel this deep need to write, not too long after leaving Stanford. And when I say write, I mean ‘really write’…from deep inside me, from a voice that had been so long forsaken – perhaps since early childhood, and maybe even before this lifetime.

At first, all that came out was the kind of writing that performs well in academia. I tended to always feel the need to substantiate what I was saying with ‘proof’ of some sort, whether it be a quote form someone else, or a valid article or book. I would feel it necessary to try to explain myself, to get the reader to ‘understand’ what I was saying. And, if my writing got a little too ‘carefree’, I would begin to feel as if it wasn’t weighty enough. Of course, I didn’t see these things then…but I do see them now, for sure.

Sometimes, it takes hindsight to see how far we’ve come, or how much we’ve begun to relax into our own knowingness.

Believe me – I am grateful that I can write well under those circumstances. Knowing how to write in that way has served me well; but, it’s not the whole picture. We are many things, we human beings, and for some of us that includes being students. But we are also much, much more.

As I dove into this new world of writing, something that surprised me was the poetry that would seemingly pop out of thin air. I’d never written poetry, nor had I ever even remotely enjoyed reading it. In full disclosure, I hadn’t really become acquainted with Mary Oliver yet, nor had I read David Whyte. And, I hadn’t known Rumi for long. I did know Hafiz.

Maybe opening the poetry door, opened me to my mother tongue. I do know that Soul speaks in symbols.

 

Mother Tongue as Guide, or Cicerone…

A Cicerone is a guide who gives information about antiquities and places of interest… and this seems so fitting. In writing, I discovered that what was being written was my own guidebook.

A little way into my deeper writing journey, this poem popped out. It just came out, and after it did, I went into the bathroom and threw up. I didn’t understand that I didn’t have to be sick for my body to expel things that were making it a different kind of sick. Eventually, I came to see that this act of writing was liberating something from my body that had been stuck in there for a long, long time.

This poem, in particular, turned out to be a vivid guide for reconnecting with my soul.

ripe with love

You see me here, strong and soft, eager and afraid,
my heart racing with desire
to be seen and heard,
to be held and to hold.

I am here,
emerging
from this bondage placed on me long ago,
from this cage of sin, fault, and fear.

I found the key
to my release when
I saw myself
in the reflection of your rejection.

My open heart was
both weakness and threat, lover and enemy.
You saw me seeing you
and you shut the door on my escape.

But freedom is funny,
it was mine to find all along.
Redemption came
when I filled my emptiness, with the fullness of me.

The dive was deep, the way was dark.
On the surface I had only seen,
how I never quite matched up
with everything I was expected to be.

But as I dove deeper into the depths of my being,
A glorious Light began to emerge.
It came from a time long ago,
It called me home in a language I had long forgotten.

There, deep inside me, I found the seed
Planted long ago, at the beginning of time.
My deepest Self, my truest Truth
My inner being in perpetual Spring.

I am ripe with love,
Ripe with the nectar of passionate presence
I am here to hold you,
within the folds of my velvet petals.

Fall down, deep down, into the depths of my being.
For I blossom in time to break your fall
As you land with a thundering whisper,
“Catch me, please catch me.”

Open yourself to the center of me.
Drink deeply the love that has been waiting for you,
waiting with timeless patience,
knowing what has always been, will be again.

Let me lay side-by-side with you.
Let me feel again how perfect the fit is,
if we only allow ourselves to relax
into the shape we already are.

Remember the rightness of this fit.
Don’t fight what you know to be true.
I can love side by side again,
Knowing the love comes through me to you.

You see me here,
soft and strong, knowing and sure.
My heart is filled with the truest Truth and the brightest Light
See your Self reflected in my love.

~ Julie Daley

 

Neither Forgotten nor Forsaken

This poem was a forecast of what was to come in my journey. I couldn’t know that at the time, but the words had a profound impact on me. They were so deeply alive as they came through and my body responded to them so clearly and unequivocally.

My soul was telling me the way through would be deep and dark…

The dive was deep, the way was dark.
On the surface I had only seen,
how I never quite matched up
with everything I was expected to be.

My soul was telling me there was a language to remember…

But as I dove deeper into the depths of my being,
A glorious Light began to emerge.
It came from a time long ago,
It called me home in a language I had long forgotten.

 

The beautiful thing is, this long forgotten language had not forgotten, nor had it forsaken, me.

And, it has not forgotten, nor has it forsaken, you.

::

This is part 3 in a five-part series. You’ll find the other parts here:

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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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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Love, Value, Desire and Truth

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poppy in prayer

What do you want?

What do you really want? That is what you will get. Not what you think you want. What you really, really, really want. If you really want what is true, it’s its own protection. ~Adyashanti

I listened to these words last night as I was working. I like to listen to Adya’s satsangs, just taking in his words and the transmission that comes through them.

I have a sense these words wove their way through me last night as I was sleeping, because in meditation this morning, I could see how deeply ingrained my thinking is to choose something that will please others, get their approval. It is fairly unconscious still…until now. I could clearly see it this morning.

And so as I noticed this, I wondered, “Do I even know what it is to choose what I want? Do I know what I want? Do I really know what is true for me? Am I willing to look, to know for myself? Am I willing to ask the hard questions?”

This comes down to being able to tune into this self, this being. This ego has been all about pleasing others (and of course the equal and opposite force of rebellion against that pleasing, but then that’s much more under the surface, but not as under as it used to be).

This coming into oneself, trusting the organic flow from within, trusting one’s own desires, is key to being an alive, creative being. And, it really doesn’t care about pleasing. It doesn’t know pleasing. It just is.

This flow doesn’t push or fight to be known; yet it is always here. When my fingers type on the keyboard with tenderness, I know the heart is open and what is coming onto the page is coming with love. Sometimes when I write, there’s a kind of forcing, or making things happen. And, of course, this comes out in the writing; even if the words don’t say it, it can be felt.

It takes courage…

It takes courage to be wholly oneself in a world so quick to want to judge, control and dominate. Yet, there is no other way to live a life of integrity. At the end of life, I want to have been an intimate and reverent lover of Life…all of Life.

Perhaps, it takes love. A love, though, that is unlike the love we’ve been conditioned to believe is love.

Subtle degrees of domination and servitude are what you know as love but love is different; it arrives complete just there like the moon in the window… ~Rumi

Courage comes from the heart, as does love. There is a root in common to both.

And saying yes to Life is what is needed, right now. There are many forces that want to control and dominate this creative life within us, our hearts and even our bodies…forces inside of us and forces outside of us.

There are forces choosing money over life, when they don’t have to be at odds.

Just this morning, a friend posted this:

…just heard from a project I have worked with in the past for women with mental health issues – they do such vital and beautiful work and all their funding is being pulled – so so sad and will lead to bigger problems in the long run – offering them beautiful art things to nourish them through this loss ….I don’t want to live in a society that pulls the money right from under the most vulnerable – these are mums and it will have a knock on effect on their children.

What we value…

Yesterday, as I sat and enjoyed a cup of coffee at my local café, I looked out the window at the morning as it was unfolding. There was a man bringing out a hose to wash the sidewalk down in front of the swanky restaurant directly across the street from me. As he washed the sidewalk down, he consciously and graciously kept making sure he wasn’t getting water on anyone passing by. He smiled the whole time he did his work.

For some reason, as I watched him, I thought of how we judge people by what they do. On most lists this man with a job washing the sidewalks would ‘rank’ fairly low on how valuable he is to society in terms of what he offers the world in his work. Yet, when I watched him he was diligent at what he does.

I thought about value and how deeply conditioned we all are to value certain things as better than others. I thought about what I really value, not what I’ve been taught to value, but what I REALLY value.

I value life. I value love. I value beauty, tenderness, and the truth. I value children and mothers and fathers. I value the heart and soul of each person. I value autonomy and community. I value doing work that comes from my soul. And, I value speaking up and out that which I’ve not wanted to speak.

These are what I choose to fill my life with, and what I choose to fill my work in the world. And I get to ask myself, how much am I honoring what I value? How willing am I to live what is true? How willing am I to know this love that arrives complete, just there like the moon in the window?

And, you?

What is true for you? What do you deeply value? Do you know what it is you desire that has nothing to do with pleasing or pushing against others? I’d love to know.

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