Authenticity

I’ve been thinking a lot about Voice…as a metaphor, as an act, as a unique expression of oneself.

Every time I sit down to write, my voice sounds different as the words fly from my fingers. While I sense my voice is different, I imagine those of you reading my posts on any regular basis feel I have a ‘voice’ you recognize as different from any other…or maybe not. As I consider that, I wonder if it matters. What does really matter when it comes to speaking that which must be said?

Just yesterday, my dear friend Jeanne wrote, in her blog the barefoot heart, about voice and her experiences finding hers. I love Jeanne’s voice. It is unmistakeably hers.. Jeanne writes that she wonders what her ‘right sound’ is:

“do i forget funny and stick to serious, reflective tones? do i keep trying the funny, knowing that writing humor is different from doing humor? do i do both ’cause i am both?”

Jeanne’s words struck a chord within me. I am becoming more confident in my writing. Same as with Jeanne, much of that confidence I owe to the women I have met on Twitter that have embraced me and my Voice with such love and support.  I notice that my voice can change from serious, spiritual, funny, loving, and sometimes powerful and intuitive. Sometimes I write sludge (feels and sounds a lot like internal processing on the page, something the roommate in the head likes to sell) …sometimes clarity and truth.

Writing is an interesting practice. And I know I don’t even know what will come out when I sit down to write. I can try to force things, but that never feels right.

Writing from my body helps. My body speaks truth, as do all bodies. If I remember to drop down into the body, truth flows.

And there’s still fear present when I write.

What’s the fear about?

For me, the fear is not so much if others don’t like my style or writing abilities. The fear is about the repercussions I might face if I write what is deepest in my heart, some of which is:

• the beauty and sacredness of the female gender and the sacredness of our sexuality and female bodies
• the possibility for women to discover that they are the sacred feminine, and for men to discover they are the sacred masculine
• the devaluation of women and girls and the violence perpetrated on the female gender
• the constant bombardment of demoralizng images, messages, interactions that women and girls face in their day-to-day lives, meant to keep us dis-empowered and depressed
• the pain that men feel as the dominant gender where the effects of patriarchy still hold sway
• the absolute importance and necessity of healing our mother wounds, and the wounding of the Big Mother, our divine planet
• AND the vision I see of the way things could be if we realize, before its too late, that we are all really divine in human clothing.

And the fear comes from simply speaking out as an act in itself. As Miriam Greenspan writes in Healing Through The Dark Emotions:

Fear for women is not an enemy to be conquered but a warning track that says: Go no further. It is the demarcation line that points to the bounds of possibility and permissible female behavior. If you’re a woman and you don’t use fear to limit yourself, there is an implicit threat of violence.”

I came across another post yesterday by Brené Brown titled, ” I’m Pretty. Pissed.”

In her post, Brené writes about two friends and how they were attacked after writing opinion pieces in public forums. She offers up 8 points of advice to women who are speaking out, in hopes we can avoid the kind of attack her two friends encountered.  Make sure to read her full post to reap the benefits of her great advice.

“In my own decade-long research on authenticity and shame, I found that speaking out is a major shame trigger for women.

I can see Brené’s words clearly in my own conditioning and know these powerful forms of conditioned control have played a part in my journey to becoming a writer that can and will speak that which has to be spoken.

The main reason I’ve posted this today, is to speak to what I think is an important community of collaboration and support for the feminine voice to be heard: social media networks – Twitter, Facebook and whatever else you might find that helps you connect to other women that are heading the call to stand up and speak out in these times when it is critical for women’s voices to be heard.

Creating community to speak and listen, is imperative. To have a vehicle for women’s stories to be spoken and heard is critical. Women speaking out is what is being called for right now. Women supporting other women is what is being asked of us right now.

As Jeanne wrote yesterday,

“see, usually i’m a little too tentative, too scared of smackdown to post anything i feel like isn’t going to be well received. but since being on twitter, i’ve met women who make me feel comfortable enough, safe enough to mash “send” because i know they’ll be patient and accepting…”

When I read Jeanne’s words, I felt this connection, this witnessing of story, of voice, of truth by one woman to another. This is where we find power. I saw myself in Jeanne, saw my own struggle to stand up, to speak out, and to know, while doing so, that I am part of a family of women.

One small point here that is of utmost importance: Not all women are supportive of this. Many men are. Brené comments on this, too, saying: “Don’t blame men. Men are as likely to be offended by cruelty as women, and women are as likely to perpetrate it as men.” I have found so many deeply honoring and supportive men on Twitter and Facebook, men who write to me expressing joy and respect for the words I write. And, I’ve had women deride me for the same words.

This point is important, AND there is something that needs to happen by women coming together, to tell their stories aloud, to witness and honor, to hold each other in reverence and awe, to see the sacred face of the divine in each other’s femaleness, wisdom and pain.

You see, I could have picked any one of my village of women – Jeanne just happened to write something yesterday that sparked something in me. I was so taken by her words, by what was happening inside her, and I value being witness to the stories she writes about her heart, her life and her wisdom, just as I value these very things that are born from all women. This is one of the most creative aspects of having a village. We are connected. We witness. Our hearts can break open by empathizing with the other as she unfolds her sacredness onto the page.

::

So, here are some ideas to hold as you speak up and out.

1. Just start. Write. To yourself, to others, on a blog, in a journal, by letter, anywhere you can write, just write. Let the fire in you find its way out onto the page.
2. Write and speak from the body. It doesn’t lie. write/speak from your instincts. your intuition.. (check out the book, Writing From the Body, if you want to know more about this.)
3. Trust that your voice will emerge if you just write the words that want to be written. Know that your voice will change, will flow, will find its own way. Your genius will emerge. It wants to be heard.
4. Know that not everyone will agree, and not everyone will find your words meaningful.
5. Find your village of women to support you. Search the social media halls for women who have a penchant for topics your voice likes. Reach out to them. Read their words, and if they truly resonate with you, comment, friend and follow them.
6. Know that you don’t always have to agree with your village in order to support their work. What if we women stood by each other, in solidarity, simply because we know and understand how hard this process is and how important it is each woman be heard. We’ve all been conditioned to the hilt. What if we stopped judging each other’s conditiong, and held each other as the powerful woman we know she is?
7. Hold the paradox of being in community and learning the ‘way of surrender is about remaining vulnerable and finding the power of no-protection” (Miriam Greenspan). At some point, we all must find the place of balance between the two, somewhere on the continuum that works for you.

I share from my own experience. I’d love to know what has helped you.

As I open to this paradox, of knowing I have my village of women, and knowing the power of no-protection, I find truth finding its way.

Best of 2009 Blog Challenge:  Day 24 Learning experience. What was a lesson you learned this year that changed you?

Real safety is your willingness to not run away from yourself. ~Pema Chodron

To let go.

To let go of fighting against.

To let go of how I think things should be.

To let go of my need to control others with whom I am in relationship with.

To let go of trying to always figure things out with my crazy-making mind.

To let go of the insane way I am so hard on myself.

To let go of trying to evade the only one who is here. Me.

So here I am with me. Just me.

For a while, now, I have sat with the discomfort of being with me. All the pieces of me I didn’t want to see showed up. I invited them in. They weren’t the best companions. It took all I could do to not run away from those parts of me I had tried to hide away. As we become better roommates, new ones show up, ones that have been down in the deepest recesses of the shadow.

And, when I let go, something quiet, yet strong, was there. All along it had been holding me, just waiting until I let go and turned to look within.

This quiet, compassionate presence is always here. When I turn to look within, it is all that is there. It is the only safety there is.

The moment a woman comes home to herself, the moment she knows she has become a person of influence, an artist of her life, a sculptor of her universe, a person with rights and responsibilities who is respected and recognized, the resurrection of the world begins. ~Sister Chittister

As I pondered today’s prompt, “A word or phrase that encapsulates your year”, a flurry of words swirled into my awareness.

Autonomy

Sovereignty

Personhood

Responsibility

Inner-Authority

Value

Self-worth

None of these captured this year – they merely helped point to a feeling of how the turning of the days of 2009 have shifted my consciousness. They brought me to here, this moment, while helping me to distill and encapsulate the unfolding of my life over these 365 days.

Looking back, I can now see how this year has been about learning the power of choice. All these words point to the opportunity that exists in each moment to choose what the still voice within asks of me, rather than succumb to the status quo, the conventional ‘wisdom’ of our culture, that right now, doesn’t look so wise at all.

I have come to understand just how seductive this status quo is. But over the days of this year, this voice within has become louder and more insistent. At times, I have wanted to run away from this voice within, but there is no peace out there. The only peace I am finding is not really peace at all. The peace is in surrendering to this that compels me with insistence, burning, and longing. It is here that I must jump. Jump into the blackness that is the unknown depths of my heart. My body. My soul. That is all that is here.

Truth, my word for 2009.

This post is part of Gwen Bell’s Best of 2009 Blog Challenge
Day 17? Word or phrase. A word that encapsulates your year. “2009 was _____.”

One of the things near to my heart is gender healing. I see gender healing as the foundation to healing the human predicament. So, when I came across this song, I wept. Dar Williams has gifted us with a beautiful song that so poignantly speaks to what happens to both boys and girls when we become conditioned out of our natural balance of both masculine and feminine qualities.

What if we had grown up believing we are both a boy and a girl? ‘Cause we are.

WHEN I WAS A BOY

I won’t forget when Peter Pan came to my house, took my hand
I said I was a boy; I’m glad he didn’t check.
I learned to fly, I learned to fight
I lived a whole life in one night
We saved each other’s lives out on the pirate’s deck.

And I remember that night
When I’m leaving a late night with some friends
And I hear somebody tell me it’s not safe,
someone should help me
I need to find a nice man to walk me home.

When I was a boy, I scared the pants off of my mom,
Climbed what I could climb upon
And I don’t know how I survived,
I guess I knew the tricks that all boys knew.

And you can walk me home, but I was a boy, too.

I was a kid that you would like, just a small boy on her bike
Riding topless, yeah, I never cared who saw.
My neighbor come outside to say, “Get your shirt,”
I said “No way, it’s the last time I’m not breaking any law.”

And now I’m in this clothing store, and the signs say less is more
More that’s tight means more to see, more for them, not more for me
That can’t help me climb a tree in ten seconds flat

When I was a boy, See that picture? That was me
Grass-stained shirt and dusty knees
And I know things have gotta change,
They got pills to sell, they’ve got implants to put in,
they’ve got implants to remove

But I am not forgetting…that I was a boy too

And like the woods where I would creep, it’s a secret I can keep
Except when I’m tired, ‘cept when I’m being caught off guard
And I’ve had a lonesome awful day, the conversation finds its way
To catching fire-flies out in the backyard.

And so I tell the man I’m with about the other life I lived
And I say, “Now you’re top gun, I have lost and you have won”
And he says, “Oh no, no, can’t you see

When I was a girl, my mom and I we always talked
And I picked flowers everywhere that I walked.
And I could always cry, now even when I’m alone I seldom do
And I have lost some kindness
But I was a girl too.
And you were just like me, and I was just like you”

Dar Williams’ music is the music that rocked my world in 2009.

This post is part of The Best of 2009 Blog Challenge (by blogger Gwen Bell):
Day 10 Album of the year. What’s rocking your world?

“Horses Sweat, Men Perspire, Women Glisten” ~ Grandma

Yes, this is what my grandmother would say to me when I was young. You see, I was one of these kids who would go outside to play, and within 10 minutes my coat would be off and I would have a line of sweat all the way across my upper lip. I loved to play and I loved to play hard! There was no doing things half-way for this girl.  Of course, you can imagine what my grandmother thought of that. She was a product of her times. I am sure she was told that women ‘glisten’ by her mother (or come to think of it, maybe her father).

Most of us women learn at some point that it isn’t lady-like to sweat, regardless of what name we give it. But, there’s nothing like a GOOD SWEAT. I was engaged in a delightful email conversation with my good friend Ellie this morning, and we shared what a great sweat we had just enjoyed. She’s a runner and mentioned that she had a wonderful run this morning that was “delicious…fresh air, orange sky & lots of sweat — the stuff that makes me happy most mornings”. I responded to her about my extraordinarily sweaty dance yesterday morning where, once again, I played hard…or I should say danced hard. I ended the two-plus hours of straight dancing INCREDIBLY SWEATY, and I felt absolutely and utterly clean and light from the inside out for the rest of the day.

I dance the 5Rhythms (developed by Gabrielle Roth), and on Sunday mornings I dance with 149 other beautiful souls in a two-hour silent practice called Sweat Your Prayers…and we do. We sweat. I do seem to sweat more than most of the others… something I guess I am used to since childhood, but I notice I sweat a LOT MORE than the other women. This used to bother me, until I realized I was holding myself back from fully diving into my practice.

As I dive deeper into the practice, I realize I am dancing much more deeply grounded, deep down in my legs, pelvis and core. And when I do, I sweat unabashedly. Heat gets generated, toxins are released, and I feel clean and light.

My friend Ellie says, “Isn’t sweating the BEST? It’s so under-appreciated. One of the main reasons I love running is the sweat factor…major cleansing from the inside out!. Funny, I use to sweat a lot during Bikram, but it wasn’t as satisfying a sweat.”

I concur! In my almost two-years of doing Bikram, I loved the sweating, but it wasn’t as satisfying. I wonder if that’s because when I dance, I am generating all the heat from within my body, dancing from deep within my core. The room certainly isn’t heated, although with 149 other people dancing in close proximity, there’s a lot of heat being generated.

So are you wondering yet, why I’m writing about SWEAT on Unabashedly Female? In corresponding with Ellie, I realized how much women are taught, at least in my day, that sweating wasn’t ‘lady-like’. I can STILL hear my grandmother (and mother’s) words.

But, I know how healthy and satisfying a GOOD SWEAT can be; AND, I wasn’t being me, wasn’t really dancing MY dance when I was holding back because of any old leftover worries about being TOO SWEATY. When I dance deeply, I invite others to do the same. When I sweat, I am IN MY BODY, loving the experience.

To sweat IS to glisten!

Being unabashedly sweaty is running/dancing/yogaing/etc. with full-on engagement. It’s about loving life and learning to love ourselves enough to embrace the gift of a GOOD SWEATY GLISTEN.

 ”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.

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!

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