unabashedly female

Yesterday was the one-year anniversary of my Mother’s death.  It’s so hard to believe it’s been one year. I remember I couldn’t write for a while after she died. It was as if things needed to settle inside me. No, settle isn’t quite right. Things needed to move around, push their way out, burrow deep inside, get all mixed around, catywampus-sideways…everything just had to be left alone to be inside me. One thing I have become all-too-familiar with is the need for grief to be welcomed and befriended. It is an intelligent process, grief. I have experienced that when you open to it, don’t rush it, don’t fight it, even befriend it by giving in to it and entering the darkness of it with trust, it will move you, it will shake you, it will bring you somewhere out the other side of the darkness, somewhere new that you never expected.

Mom’s death was a lesson in letting go on so many levels. Letting go of my longing for her to be cured of her cancer, letting go of her being open to talking about her death, letting go of being able to say good-bye in the way I wanted to, letting go of wanting to be by her side at the moment she passed, letting go of all the things I thought I still needed from her as my mother. One big-time letting go.

And now it’s one year later. I find I am still letting go. I am letting go of our culture’s taboo on discussing death and sharing grief. I am letting go of the expectations that we are only supposed to grieve for a set period of time and then if we don’t move on we’re ‘not normal’. I’m letting go of the culture’s obsession with the objectification of a woman’s body, as if it existed solely for sexual gratification. And, I am letting go of the societal voices that ‘honor’ mothers on the surface, and treat mothers with disdain and women with second-class status.

As I wrote in a post last year, as my mother died, I felt a deep painful tearing in my body, right at the core. It felt as though my connection with my mother (the most primal connection I had) was being severed as she prepared to die. The pain seared in my core, down deep at the base of my body. It was as if I could feel her leaving by way of the pain in my own body.

Then, after she died, I sat with her body for a long time. I felt awe in the presence of her body, the body that nourished me and delivered me into this world. I felt gratitude for all she did in her life to provide for me, to keep me safe, to usher me into adulthood. I felt compassion for her foibles and humanness, a humanness that I had once expected to be perfection. Yet, there in the moments following her death, I was captivated by the ephemeral nature of this imperfect humanness for I knew, with her life force no longer there, her body was already beginning its way to non-existence.

Over this past year, I have come to know a strong connection between my mother and my own body. This connection lies at the heart of being human. We are fed by our mother, both inside her and once we are born. Her body is the vessel that holds us as we grow from being a few cells to a baby big enough to make our way into the world. She sustains us. During this time in the womb, she is all that we know.

This connection is primal. It is a connection to more than just mother. It’s a connection to the Universal Mother and to the Earth. This Earth is the vessel that sustains us as we move throughout our life. She provides for us. She nourishes us. While life can be harsh, without the Earth, we would not be.

We lose our connection because we are conditioned to believe we must let go of mother to be strong, independent individuals in our western culture. We also learn to blame mother for most everything that wasn’t right in our childhood. Mothers take the brunt of blame. Mothers are taken for granted. Mothers learn to internalize this blame.

It’s not about believing that mothers can do no wrong. Rather, despite the ways in which you don’t see eye-to-eye with mom, and regardless of whatever story you tell about your mother, can you find and feel your heart’s deepest gratitude to your mother for carrying you and birthing you? Because, that Mother, the mother that nourished and sustained you, is the same Mother that sustains all of life. The substance that fuels a mother’s capacity to nourish a baby into existence is the same substance that fuels all of existence.

What conscious grieving of my mother’s death has taught me is the profound, yet basic connection between awe and gratitude for my mother and the gift of life she gave me. It has strengthened my connection to my own body and to the Earth, and to all of life. And, it has brought me to the wisdom that comes from knowing this same substance is within me as a woman.

This substance allows for a beautiful and mysterious connection between women. We don’t have to be mothers to know this connection. It just is. This substance connects us with the Earth, with nature, and with the sacredness of life itself.

I don’t know what sharing this with you will bring, I only know that now knowing this has awakened reverence and awe for my mother, my daughters, my sisters, my nieces, and all women; my grandchildren and all children; my father, my partner Jeff, my sons-in-law, my nephews, and all men; and all of life. That’s been the gift for me that lies in knowing the fullness of my mother’s humanness, as well as the sacred nature of her female creativity.

Chaos is ushering us into a whole new level of creative thinking that comes from deep within our intuitive, instinctive resources. ~Gabrielle Roth

This is wild creativity, a creativity that comes from deep within our bodies and hearts. In her article on the dancing path, Gabrielle Roth so beautifully expresses what is at the core of wild creativity. It is a creative ‘thinking’ that doesn’t come from thought. Rather, it comes from deep within the resources that are always available to us when we are open to our deeper nature. Wild, intuitive and instinctive, this creativity is chaotic and feral. It must be undomesticated, set loose from the dogma and ideology that keeps us tied to the old outdated, outworn system of the last few thousand years.

No longer can we simply engage with creativity as artistic talent or an intellectual premise that we begrudgingly entertain so that we’ll continue to build a better mousetrap so we can keep the shareholders happy.

In facilitating creativity courses over many years, my work has been with groups and individuals that range from top corporate 50 clients to families affected directly by 9/11, from students at Stanford University to individuals from all walks of life. All of my clients and students were looking to find some way to navigate times of great ambiguity and change.

Within their business structures, corporate clients were facing new initiatives that required radically new ways of approach, because the systems they had created no longer worked with what they were being required to do. They were being called to rely on something else, something that allowed them to navigate new waters that they were completely unfamiliar with.

Family members who had lost loved ones in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, were thrown into a new life they neither asked for nor wanted. Yet, they had to move forward, most of them new single mothers with children devastated by what had happened.

The Stanford students were of two kinds. One group was non-traditional undergraduates, who had transferred from other schools and were of a non-traditional age. Their situation required that they find their bearings in an intensely academic setting where the vast majority of students had followed the traditional trajectory that students of elite schools must do. These non-traditional students had to merge with the population, while coming to understand that the gifts they brought were of benefit to all they would meet. It wasn’t about losing themselves or their history; it was about claiming their originality and uniqueness, which is the essence of ones personal creativity.

The other group of students have been part of the Creativity and Leadership course I teach every fall at Stanford Continuing Education. These students come from all different cultures and countries. They work by day and learn at night. And, they are fully engaged in learning how to tap into this creative resource within, knowing that right now, in these times, what is needed is a new way to engage in business.

And, the individuals I have worked with all came to me because something was calling them to step out into a new direction, a direction that did not logically follow from where they had been.
All of these people were seeking something that could guide them in these times of change, times of what we might call chaos. And, more and more people are finding these times chaotic.

Things are shifting on a grand level. No longer do the old ways of doing things work. If we try to use the old ways in these new times, it’s like trying to dance with your feet shackled to the floor.

In these times of change, it can be helpful to remember or discover what it is we trust in. Now this isn’t trust as in a belief we hold or a dogma we learned, this is a trust that is with us always, one that we know from experience. When we are moving in the flux and flow of life, what we trust in must come from within us, or else, when we try to move, whatever we are trusting in outside of ourselves, will not be where we now find ourselves.

This that we trust from within is the very thing that has helped us navigate times of change, times that we have experienced throughout our entire lives, for we have always been in change. What is this? It is our personal internal creativity. This is the nature we humans are, the process we naturally move with when our minds don’t know how to manage the change.

This creative process is so natural and ordinary that most of the time we don’t even realize we are utilizing it. It can be a knowing that comes out of the blue. It can be an intuitive hit that registers in our gut. It can be as simple as pure instinct. The important thing to realize is that it is our nature, for when you realize this, you realize you are creative by birth, it is your birthright and it is always available to you.

As the current societal paradigm continues to dissolve, it is becoming more and more important that we each awaken to this creative nature within. We are being invited to fully awaken to and get comfortable with this creative nature.

I’d love to know your thoughts, so please leave a comment…

Julie

If you are interested in reading more, a new ebook is forthcoming on the topic of wild creativity. Contact me if you are interested in receiving it when it becomes available.
juliedaley (at) gmail.com

 ”Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” — Rumi

This is the first of a series of posts on this topic of Rumi, Women’s Leadership & Love.

To be a leader, one must truly feel what others are feeling. To be a leader, one must be able to truly love those she leads. How do we learn this most necessary trait? By feeling, deeply, the depth of our own experience. By allowing our own hearts to break. Many spiritual teachers speak of the necessity of allowing one’s heart to break open. It’s not that the heart will break. It cannot break. It must, however, break open, meaning that all the bindings that have grown around one’s heart must give way so that the heart can thrive in its natural expansiveness. When one’s heart is free to be, it is as large, and as expansive, as the whole of the Universe.

Feeling the depths of shame and humiliation from our own experience of being marginalized, disrespected and humiliated generationally is key to women waking up to our fullness and wholeness. Both our lightness and our darkness must be brought back into consciousness if we are to be wholly female and embody the sacred feminine that we are.

Every midwife knows
that not until a mother’s womb
softens from the pain of labour
will a way unfold
and the infant find that opening to be born.
Oh friend!
There is treasure in your heart, it is heavy with child.
Listen.
All the awakened ones, like trusted midwives are saying,
welcome this pain.
It opens the dark passage of Grace.

~Rumi

Opening to the pain of our experience as women, individually and collectively, is our passage to Grace. It is paramount that we open ourselves to feel, deeply feel, that which has been projected onto us over the centuries of oppression. There are many layers to this feeling. How much of our anger, shame and disowned power can accumulate before the dam breaks? We can use this pain as the way into Grace, the way into the opened heart, the way into the depths of our humanity. This humanity has become ripe and fragrant with our own capacity to walk side by side men, no longer simply a complement or accessory, but rejoicing in our sovereignty and self respect.

When we are able to feel the depths of what has been internalized within our own beings through the generational oppression, our hearts will move into an awakened state of love for ourselves, for other women, for men, for all of life. And, when we come to embody this love fully, for ourselves, and for others, every cell of our being will be filled with Grace.

To all women, to all men, and to all of Life, I offer you the original Mother’s Day proclamation of 1870 by Julia Ward Howe. Read it and let is wash over you. Take it in and see what comes from it.

I shared this on Facebook, and received many wonderful responses. One response was from my Aunt, a strong vibrant woman. She recognized her own voice in Howe’s and could see this voice in all women; and, she also feels gratitude for all the men in her life that have served when called.

I mention this because I feel both are true. Neither sentiment negates the other. We live in a world of paradox. While we can hold firmly to the knowing that we can have a world in which peace truly exists, we also can honor those who have fought for freedom and justice. There is only one answer to it all - Love, unconditional love.

Sometimes that love is soft, sometimes it is fierce, but hopefully we can all find a way to the love that is unconditional, for all that is, for all of life, for the depth and breadth of how Life reveals itself. If it is all One, then Love means to love it all, unconditionally, while allowing your own being to move towards that which you know from deep within your self is True in every cell of your being.
Arise then…women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!

Say firmly:
“We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

From the voice of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says: “Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”
Blood does not wipe our dishonor,
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil
At the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace…
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God -

In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.

thanks to Jonathan Klate, of Amherst, MA, for sharing this.

WOESER, a Tibetan poet and blogger, is struggling for visibility. In today’s New York Times This Saturday Profile, Woeser (going by a single name as is tradition in Tibet) is highlighted as a Chinese woman of Tibetan ancestry who discovered her roots and moved back to Tibet. She began to research the history between Tibet and China and began blogging and writing about what she saw was happening. In 2003, her first book, Notes on Tibet, was published and quickly sold it. But before the second run could be printed, the Chinese government banned the book.

Needless to say, the Chinese government has gone to great lengths to silence her. They have blocked her blogs and her travels to Tibet are scrutinized.

From the Times, ‘Despite her relatively high profile both inside and outside China, she is well aware that her liberty is fragile. Since 2004 she has been waiting for a passport, which would allow her to travel and speak abroad.

“I feel so insecure inside,” she said. “I feel like I’m sitting on the edge of a cliff and I could fall down at any moment.”’

I feel great respect for Woeser for her willingness to write the truth as she sees it, regardless of the dangers she faces in direct response of her doing so. She is honoring what she knows to be true from within her, finding the courage to keep going in the face of strong condemnation from the Chinese government.

More and more women are finding the courage to step forth and speak out. I feel it is of utmost importance that we support these women in solidarity…all of us, both women and men. Women such as Woeser are exhibiting leadership of a new kind, leadership that comes from listening to what one knows to be true deep within and having the courage to express it from the heart.

What can we do to support Woeser in her vision to travel and speak in other parts of the world? I welcome your comments.

A friend posted this quote on FaceBook this morning, and I just had to share it here.

“Why are you trying to fit in when you were born to stand out?” ~ From the movie, What A Girl Wants  

I like to think of standing out as simply being what you are, the truth of what you really are. The ego is all about hiding or ‘being seen’, but there is another alternative…simply being true to your own being, without worrying about what others think of you.

A teacher of mine, Aydahshanti, says freedom only comes when we allow others to have their own opinion of us, without worrying about changing it or controlling it. This leaves us free to simply be. The tulip above, one of many I had in the house over Easter, is a great example of this. It is standing out, being itself, being beautiful and vibrantly colorful. It is simply being what it is.

What if you were to allow yourself to be unabashedly you? and, of course, unabashedly female!

“How different it would be if we looked at the earth as our mother. Do you treat the planet with the same love, care, respect and honor that you treat your mother?”— Peter Walsh, from his Oprah Radio show

I came across this quote yesterday and it stopped me in my tracks. Perhaps it’s because I’ve been thinking a great deal about the atrocities that are committed to women and girls every day all over the world and realizing that women are the recipients of the things we hold in the darkest part of our shadow complex.

How many people really do treat their mother with love, care, respect and honor? How many of us treat the role of mother with respect and honor? How many of us treat the female body with care and respect?

I don’t doubt for a moment that Peter Walsh loves his mother and this really isn’t about him. I think most of us love our mother, but do we even for a moment really know what it means to love our mother? Do we dare to look deeper at how we treat her, how we hold her and how much we respect the sacredness of the female body and its ability to bring life into life? I feel the real question is not how we treat our mother, something we pay homage to on Mother’s Day, or the glorified Madonna archetype that many times carries with it the corresponding archetype of whore.

The real question is how to we treat the physical manifestation of Mother, the female body and her ability to support and nurture life into being? How do we treat women and their bodies? Do we honor the female body with love and respect? Do we care for female bodies? Do you care for your own? Do you respect the sacredness and the divinity that it is? And, do we respect all bodies, those of men and boys as well?

For the correspondence between one’s Mother and the planet is about the life-giving ability that women offer. Our planet is alive. The Mother is all of matter. Everything that is alive is the Mother. It is all sacred. We are all sacred.

When we no longer see a distinction between all living things, and we honor all of life, then maybe we’ll wake up to Life as it truly is, not as something to rape and use to satisfy our insatiable appetite for more and more. Look around you and see how we treat the female body.

Look into your own experience with open eyes, but more importantly an open heart. What would it be to love, with all your heart, your mother, yourself, your body, the Earth and all of Life?

I have found some wonderful new books, which focus on the transformation of consciousness in which we are smack in the middle of. Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness, by Marion Woodman, has opened a flood of light deep within my cells. Woodman is an incredible prophet of the sacred feminine consciousness rising in women and men.

I’ll write more about her book in the next few posts, but right now I want to share another great book, Women of Wisdom, by Tsultrim Allione. Allione was a Buddhist Nun, but she renounced her vows because she felt the pull to become a mother. Her life has been extraordinary, and she shares so much of her experience in the newly revised edition of Women of Wisdom.

Within the pages of Women of Wisdom, Allione speaks to the reason I created this blog, Unabashedly Female. In my own experience, I could see that what was, and is, happening to me as part of consciousness awakening was reflected nowhere in the cultural stories of the world I live in. Everything we see, the stories we hear, are all part of a culture that is male-centric and still highly patriarchal. The structures and systems in place were designed with men in mind to fill their needs. We, as women, are inundated with messages that, at their core, come from these systems and structures.

Allione writes, “We try to relate our experiences to the stories of others and thereby edit our perceptions according to what fits.” (Women of Wisdom, pg. 83) Allione then quotes from Womenspirit Rising:

Women have lived in the interstices between inchoate experience and the shaping given to experience by the stories of men. In a very real sense, women have not experienced their own experience. There is a dialectic between stories and experience, Stories shape experience; experience shapes stories. Womenspirit Rising, pg. 228

If the stories we swim in reflect male systems and experience, then we never really become conscious to our own experience, what is happening to us if we continue to look to these systems for reflection. This, coupled with the understanding that the ONLY thing we can truly know is our own experience, is mana for our souls, for when we become aware of what keeps us circling in our own illusion, we can begin to wake up from it. 

For the sacred feminine to awake and rise within our own consciousness, we must wake up to the stories we have believed and aligned ourselves with, and realize they are not our stories. The truth is what is happening to us in our own experience, both individually and collectively. Part of what we do as humans is try to make sense of our experience, and if we hold it up against our conditioned world view, then we make links and assumptions that lead us to conclusions that can never be true, at least in an absolute sense.

Being Unabashedly Female is allowing ourselves to really look within at our own experience and trust that it is true. Being Unabashedly Female is about trusting ourselves, trusting our experience and opening to the transforming energies that are within our physical beings, that primal matrix of creation that resides within women. Being Unabashedly Female is also about coming together as women to share our stories and experiences so that we may develop a deeper understanding of what is happening within and without.

Unabashedly Female is ultimately about aligning with the awakening sacred feminine within all of life, and supporting a newfound respect for women and men to live together as balanced beings in our own right, knowing that our own truth can only come from within. As beloved Amma said in a talk over six years ago, “men and women must bow down to each other.”

And, we must bow down to Life, to all of Life. We CAN live into a way of life where we honor and serve the sacredness in each other, and in all of Life.

If ever the world sees a time when women shall come together
purely and simply for the benefit of mankind,
it will be a power such as the world has never known.
~Matthew Arnold

What will it take for women to come together in such a way? It’s already happening all over the world. In small ways, and in some very major undertakings, women are listening to the voice that is calling them forth to speak truth and to say, “Enough is Enough”. What if we were all to speak up and speak out, and come together “purely and simply for the benefit of mankind? What do you have to say? Who can you bring together? When will you do it?

What is the source of our first suffering?
It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak.
It was born the moment we accumulated silent things within us.
~Gaston Bachelard

On Wednesday evening, I had the pleasure of attending San Francisco Coaches Holiday Party. I was looking forward to attending simply because I love these people, my friends who also happen to coach. From the moment I walked in the door of my first meeting, I felt welcomed and part of something bigger than just me coaching my clients.

The party was intimate and engaging. The guest speaker was Harriet Simon Salinger, one of the founders of SF Coaches. The first meetings were held in Harriet’s home over ten years ago.

This was my first opportunity to meet Harriet, and I found her intelligent, witty and completely accessible. Her talk was centered around holding two questions, a very ‘coach-like’ thing to do. The questions were, “Where do old coaches go?”, which brought quite a round of laughter around the room, and “What is the Soul of Coaching?”. The second question we entertained with our table mates before bringing the discussion back to the room at large.

I found this discussion fascinating. What is the Soul of Coaching? We had numerous ideas and thoughts, just sitting with them all and not trying to actually answer the question. I found this question still intriguing me last night while I worked out. Some fresh insights then entered my realization.

I could feel, at a deep and profound level, that the Soul of Coaching is the immense capacity for human beings to consciously experience the depth and breadth of who and what we are, and in this experiencing and conscious reflection of our experiences, we awaken the parts of ourselves that have been repressed, hurt, or believed to be not good enough. In this awakening through conscious action, we not only create our lives from choices based on that inner compelling pull, but return to the wholeness that always has been present within.

I see this as the Soul of coaching, because it lies at the very foundation of our practice. We hold our clients as whole, and we hold that they have their own answers, and we hold that their awakening to wholeness is a natural and ‘given’ expression of the very nature that they are, that humans are deep at our core. As I coach, I know that every client has their own seed of wisdom that when watered and fed, and loved unconditionally, will express their unique nature.

While coaching started out with an accomplishment and success mindset, I see that goal is still valid. What has changed is what accomplishment and success mean. For me, over the past five plus years I have been coaching, my own notion of what coaching really is has changed and morphed. My work with clients has honed my skills and my vision for what coaching is and can be, and for what I know I am uniquely skilled to offer those clients that are meant to work with me.

What does this have to do with being Unabashedly Female? Everything. I see the wholeness that you are. I see the unique beauty and power that is inherent in women and men. I see the critically important need for all of us, both men and women, to live our unique gifts and to express them in the world. Life is intelligent by design, and each of us has a role to play in this design. If any one of us is living from beliefs that what and who we are is not enough or is bad somewhere deep within, then we are hiding our gifts away, gifts that must be shared for our world to be balanced and in harmony.

Women have been conditioned to believe that we are bad simply by design. That somewhere our design as women is sinful and dirty. I can’t tell you how many women I have spoken with that feel this deep within, but don’t have the consciousness to express it until we work together or at least talk about it. And, many men have spoken of the unconscious beliefs they hold about women, too. These beliefs hurt us all. They hurt both men and women. They are part of the shadow of our culture and world, and are played out every day in violent and degrading scenarios. And it all stems from conditioning. None of it is really true.

The Soul of Coaching is about holding us all as the vibrant, creative deeply loving beings we are by nature. When a coach holds you this way, you begin to hold yourself this way. When a coach calls you forth to be this nature in the world, you begin to express this nature. When you learn effective tools and practices that help you to live this nature, then you begin to live the life you were created to live.

If you are intrigued at all by what this post shares, please contact me at juliedaley at gmail.com. I would love to begin a conversation with you about how to step into this magnificence that you are.