Shaken to the Core

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Today is the first day of the new year, 2013.

It is the Year of the Rising of the Feminine principle – a rising that is occurring in us all, in both women and men.

These past few weeks have been intense days of transformation.

On the Solstice, this past 21st of December, Terry Tempest Williams wrote,

“Today is the last day of the world”, so say the Mayans. I believe them. The world as we know it is ending. What has been peripheral will become central. What has been tolerable will be intolerable. And our own gifts held close, must now be freely given. May we meet the future’s penetrating gaze with honesty, courage, and a redefinition of love.”

These past few weeks have brought us events that I would say have focused the future’s penetrating gaze quite piercingly.

 

Shaken to the core

We’ve all been shaken to the core by the deaths of the children and their teachers in Newtown, and the death of the young woman from Delhi, so violently gang-raped. These are not singular occurrences. Intensely tragic, senseless, painful violence such as this continues to happen all over the world.

At the same time, it’s as if a part of us refuses to really look at what is happening. It can be painful to take in the details. It can feel like it will weaken us to sit down with each other, to listen, to open our hearts. It can make us feel as if we are weak, and that to ignore this makes us strong.

Right now, Canada’s Prime Minister Harper is unwilling to sit down with Chief Pence as she continues on her hunger strike. She is asking to be heard, to be listened to, and for her people and their treaties to be honored and respected. And right here in my own country, in the US, so many citizens are coming to feel that the only thing that gets our leaders’ attention is money and power.

Have these things and these ways been with us for a long time? Yes. Have they grown more intense? Seems so. Is the future’s gaze growing more penetrating? Resoundingly, Yes!

Are we paying attention? Are we listening? Are we looking? Are we stopping to feel, to really feel the depth of the grief and suffering that our actions as a species have caused?

We are witnessing the effects of our lives lived through the patriarchy, through cultural and societal institutions and structures that have hardened hearts, taught lessons of separation and domination, supported greed, and fostered fear and fundamentalism.

 

No longer tolerable

For whatever reason, and there are many, we’ve not only tolerated this, as a people we’ve continued to uphold it…until now.

Now, a way of future life is being shown to us and it is not pretty.

And, now, we are at a juncture. Something has shifted. Planets have aligned. Hearts have been opened. Perhaps, blinders have been removed. I know mine have.

We can face what we are seeing with fear, by arming ourselves, literally, or we can face it with, honesty, courage and love. 

We can sit down with those that are asking to be heard, those with wisdom, those who might have something wise to offer. We can realize there are many people suffering, people who perhaps have no way to cope with their loneliness, or people who’ve been so conditioned out of their capacity to feel that they don’t know what to do with the intensity of this world we now find ourselves in.

 

Redefinition of Love

Tempest Williams words ‘redefinition of love’ are crucial.

Love as we have known it has been fashioned by way of romanticisim. This love isn’t real love. It’s taken me a long, long time to discover this for myself. Love isn’t niceness and sweetness. Love isn’t trading something so that in exchange we will have safety and security.

What is love, truly?

What does true love do in the face of Newtown?

How does true love hold what happened in Delhi?

How might true love respond to the wars being waged?

How do we come to know this redefinition of love?

 

Jeff Foster recently shared,

“Waking up means clearly seeing beyond belief
It means fearlessly meeting life without protection
It means sinking into the deep acceptance inherent in the moment
It means letting go of all ideas of ourselves
Including the idea that we are ‘finished’ in some way.

We are never finished
and we are only ever Now.
This is the great knife edge of awakening.

It is easy to fall. I fell many times myself. I have seen many others fall. And I see them falling now.

There is great humility in realising
that we never knew a damn thing.

And that awakening was never about “me”.

 

Meeting life without protection

Some would say this is unwise. Some are advocating for more protection, more supposed security, more rigidity. And, what will this bring us? If I am the last one standing, have I won anything? What will I have saved myself from?

We are here. Somehow, we have gotten to this point. To know love, to redefine it, means none of this is about the ‘me’, the fearful part of each of us that fears connection, that feels separate, that wants to control to manage this fear. The ‘me’ wants the promise of safety, security, a promise that no amount of fire power or political maneuvering can ever bring.

We are all deeply, deeply hurt – more than we seem to understand – by what is happening in our world. I feel we now know just how intolerable what used to seem tolerable has become. The pain of what we are witnessing has become far greater than the pain of denial.

There is something greater than each of us alone. There is a deeper intelligence that runs through life itself. When we are afraid, when we are trying to figure it all out, we can’t hear this intelligence, we can’t feel it move us. But, when we stop to listen, when we sink ‘into the deep acceptance inherent in this moment’, love is here, love that is this intelligence.

 

Giving our Gifts

It is time to giving our gifts alongside our sisters and brothers. We do not have to, nor can we, do this alone. Many movements are springing up in response to these latest tragedies. People are coming together. And, whenever two or more are gathered…there is love.

Tempest Williams offers that ‘And our own gifts held close, must now be freely given.’

And my friend, Filiz Telek from Brave New World, writes,

“I invite you to consider this: Whether we give or hold back our gifts unconditionally now is a matter of life or death for future generations. If it resonates, dig deeper. Begin today.”

For this is life was never about the ‘me’. It is about life. It is not my life, or your life, it is life.

This is the feminine in real life. This is the feminine principle waking up in us all, men and women.

 

And for you, dear woman,

 

Your femaleness is a gift in itself, and loving it is a radical act.

Loving yourself as a woman, loving your femaleness is vital.

Let yourself be shaken to the core. Let your heart break open. Let life in. Take yourself into life.

We are stronger than we think. Our hearts long to feel, to give, to serve. Our bodies know how to heal.

We must do this so that we reclaim love, so that we come to know the healing powers of the female body, so that we once again become lovers of life, givers of our gifts, a species that walks the earth with gratitude and wisdom. We must do this for all the world’s children.

 

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7 Replies to “Shaken to the Core”

  1. Thank you so much for this post. Your words touch me deeply and profoundly! I am so inspired by your words and will stay tuned to future blogposts 🙂

  2. Beautiful and resoundingly true, Julie. Your posts always bring the reminder that it’s only through embracing our whole experience that we can heal. Thank you, as always.

  3. Thank you for your impassioned plea, Julie. Your voice is added to the chorus that has been awakened through these heinous crimes and is building to levels we’ve never experienced before. Thankfully these atrocities are brought to the fore through technology, this web, that connects us to every horrific event happening on this planet in the moment it happens. Never before have we experienced this Oneness with our Darkness. Never before have we come face to face with what it is to be Human under patriarchal rule… in all its good, bad, and horrifically ugly.

    When we open to it as you and the others you mention suggest… open to it rather than become apathetic… and thus be energized by it to ACT through our individual genius… we fuel the change. The change is inevitable. It IS happening. And… due to the extreme levels of woundedness held in our humanity, it will not be made right overnight. May we all have the endurance to see this allllllll the way through. We must never give up. It will be a lifelong effort.

  4. Simply Beautiful… I couldn’t have said this better myself. Thank you for your willingess to speak true wisdom and empowerment in honor and protection of women around the world. We need a lot more of this 🙂

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