Body as Altar

I awoke the other morning with the knowing that this woman’s body is an altar.

My body is an altar, as are all bodies. As is the Earth.

How might your life be different if you knew this to be true, knew it deep down in the marrow of your bones, deep in the bowl of your belly, deep in the layers of your skin?

How might you wash your face?

How might you brew your tea?

How might you be with yourself? with others? with Life?

How might your sense of Love change?

What would it take for you to know this, throughout the cells of your being?

::

365 Altars

365 Altars - cloth and image by Jeanne

An altar is a place you go to reclaim your woman’s intuition. This place says to the busy, rational mind, “Quiet down—let the deeper, wiser woman within you speak!” Over time your view of yourself and your place in the world shifts. The altar becomes a sacred space because you place symbols of your true self on it. As you sit before the altar, these symbols act as mirrors reflecting your deeper self. You see yourself differently while looking in the mirror, and, in time, you find the courage to be this authentic self more frequently in the world. The peace you’ve invested in your altar now radiates back to you. ~ Denise Geddes

Jeanne Hewell-Chambers, my friend and writing partner, has a new creation called 365 Altars. From her inaugural post,

“There are so many things I’ve wanted to do, things I’ve longed to investigate, things I’ve wanted to at least try, I can’t help but wonder how my life might be differently now had I silenced those nay-saying Committee of Jeanne members advocating abandonment and moved forward, following the interest, the hobby, the question, the idea without regard to return on investment and such.

…

Every day – every single day – I will stop, drop, and honor my deepest sumptuous self in one way or another. Every single day, I will commit one single creative act – maybe more. I’d love to have you join me as and if and when you will.”

Waking up to the knowing of my body as an altar was born directly out of Jeanne’s creation. As I read her deepest desire to honor the sacredness in herself and to offer a way and community in which to do so, I could feel the rekindling of a deep, deep longing to honor Self in this way.

Jeanne is a woman who knows deep things. She sees things others don’t. Her deepest sumptuous self honors women in a way we must come to embody if we are to survive.

The Earth as Altar

Honoring Self is honoring the sacred, the divine, the Life that moves through all of existence.

Remembering the sacred in the body is awakening to the sacredness at the heart in every cell of Life, and when we do it within our own selves, we also do it for the Earth, a glorious being who is needing our love, our reflection, and a remembrance of the sacredness that she is.

There is no separation between your body and the Earth. We’re made of her clay. Our fluid is her fluid. Our breath is her breath. Our sacred substance is her sacred substance.

Find someway to honor your Self, your creativity, your divinity. And, share it with another.

Light

Today is Christmas.

Merry Christmas, dear one.

We’ve just celebrated Solstice, the beginning of the return of the light, and this morning the sunrise over the city is brilliantly painted with glorious colors of existence.

Last night I attended a late-night service at the Swedenborgian church. Much of the service was focused on the birth of Jesus, celebrating this day as a birthday, not only for Jesus, but for us all.

I was wonderfully surprised when the pastor spoke words from multiple faiths, including words from Krishna and about Buddha. And then we spoke this prayer:

“O God, place light in my heart, light in my tongue, light in my hearing, light in my sight, light behind me, light in front of me, light on my right, light on my left, light above me and light below me; place light in my nerves, in my flesh, in my blood, in my hair and in my skin; place light in my soul and make light abundant for me; make me light and grant me light.”

(which is very close to one attributed to Muhammad).

And then there is this Navajo prayer, which I find evokes the same feeling in me:

“Beauty is before me, and beauty behind me, above me and below me, hovers the beautiful. I am surrounded by it, I am immersed in it. In my youth, I am aware of it, and in old age I shall walk quietly the beautiful trail. In beauty it is begun. In beauty it is ended.”

Light, love, beauty… all words that point to something that no word could begin to capture…

At the end of the service we each lit our candle and carried them outside back into the world. It was moving.

I felt the thread of Oneness of all religions, the love and the light.

Perhaps some might feel this mixing of religions to be upsetting. Perhaps, though, this coming together of ways of seeing God and ourselves is exactly right-timing.

Isn’t the realization of our Oneness what we must come to know to survive?

Isn’t the very-real lived experience of the love and light we truly are what will help us to lay down our separateness?

Isn’t that what we all really want? To be loved. To be loved simply as we are. To know the light within us, and the light that surrounds us, as our true nature.

May you know the great love that you are.

May you be filled with the Light of this great love.

May you radiate this Light, simply as an expression of your true nature.

Cuero by Saguayo

This body that lies within my soul

and this heart that connects me to the Divine

were created

to listen,

to feel,

to touch,

to hear,

to taste

to know…

to receive and respond.

A generous inhale infuses spirit into these cells.

A full exhale releases love back into the whole.

I was created to be

a vessel of deep receptivity.

::

some rights reserver under cc2.0 – by saguayo

The first few days of November hold deeply meaningful things for me.

November 1st is the date I was due with my first child, Jackie.
She came eleven days later, on November 11, but for some reason I always remember the 1st, too, as if the day I was due to deliver also marked the crossing of a threshold.

Perhaps it was because for eight months this date stretched out in front of me as the day I would become a mother. I remember the feeling of this date being etched in my heart before I knew how my heart would break open to the unconditional love I felt when I first held each of my daughters.

The last day of October and first few days of November also mark a time when the veil between life here and life beyond is thin – then enough to feel and sense life on the other side. Life almost seems to have a magical quality to it during these hours and days.

In these days, I feel a strong desire to go inward, to begin the descent into the darker months of late autumn and winter. This desire to go inward sits awkwardly with the warm sunny days we have here in the Bay Area during this same time.

Yesterday, I spent a part of my day co-working with a few fellow coaches and writers. At the suggestion of Tara Mohr, we began to meet one day a month to work together, to enjoy community, and I’ve come to look forward to simply being with these lovely women.

As I sat in Rachel‘s kitchen, the sun shined so brightly into the room that I could have sworn it was late July. While the heat felt like summer, the warm cozy colors of her home deepened the urge I feel to settle indoors, making a warm cozy space in which to write.

Andrea and her son joined us as we took time out from work to eat. I felt so at peace simply being with friends, eating good food and talking about everyday things. I tend to be a loner, and I’ve been consciously trying to spend more time with others.

The way of women is to come together, and for some reason I learned habits that conditioned me to spend so much time alone. I am learning to come together with women. It hasn’t been easy. And, I long for it.

I’ve had the pleasure

of getting to know another woman, a woman I first met at the World Domination Summit in June. We met in an unexpected way. The doors of the hotel elevator opened and lo and behold, Jamie Ridler, who I had only known through social media, stood there right in front of my eyes. I witnessed her divine smile in real time.

Just a few weeks ago, Jamie invited me to be a guest on her podcast series. Let me tell you, speaking with Jamie was one of the most ease-filled times I’ve ever experienced. As you’ll notice on the podcast, our conversation was so fluid and effortless.

In this podcast, Jamie also shares some of her own wisdom. And then, further into the recording, Jamie and I speak of creativity and the Feminine, what it means to be creative as a woman.

I’m excited to share this talk with you. I hope you enjoy it, and I’d love to hear what it sparks for you.

Living, Dying, Grieving

This post isn’t full of the beautiful…at least not the surface beautiful. But stick with me…

This is my edge…

We’re all living, we’re all dying, we’re all grieving, we’re all transforming. It’s life’s nature, death’s nature.

Life as Mirror

Life is always dying and being reborn. To grasp this truth, to live in this truth is to be fully alive. To never take this life for granted. It’s beauty, it’s power, the fact that none of us know. Can we embrace this? Live it? Touch death as we live life? Touch life as we die? Be with each other in whatever stage we are in? Really be with each other…

I don’t know have any answers. None. No flowery words. No insights.

But what I want to do is share what some beautiful women are writing about grief, dying, illness, death and life… and how reading their words is impacting my heart.

Unconscious to the edge…

The fact is we are alive and we are dying. Some of us are closer to death. Some of us are dead while we live, unconscious to the edge we exist on. Who’s to say what it is to be fully alive?

Joseph Campbell wrote,

“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonance within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. That’s what it’s all finally about.”

In one of his segments with Bill Moyers, Campbell shared,

Eternity isn’t some later time. Eternity isn’t a long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of here and now which thinking and time cuts out. This is it. And if you don’t get it here, you won’t get it anywhere. And the experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life.

There’s a wonderful formula that the Buddhists have for the Bodhisattva, the one whose being (sattva) is illumination (bodhi), who realizes his identity with eternity and at the same time his participation in time. And the attitude is not to withdraw from the world when you realize how horrible it is, but to realize that this horror is simply the foreground of a wonder and to come back and participate in it.

“…not to withdraw from the world when you realize how horrible it is, but to realize that this horror is simply the foreground of a wonder and to come back and participate in it.”

I write this post as a somewhat ‘healthy’ person, so I am seeing and writing through the eyes of someone who unconsciously, and perhaps somewhat consciously, tells herself she still has a fairly ‘long’ time to live. In reality, this is BS. I do not know how long I have to live. Even writing these words and saying them aloud to myself doesn’t even begin to cut through the normal denial that is here about death.

I do experience the absence of time, the eternity of which Campbell writes.

Where I have difficulty is in being with the ‘horrible’ nature of life, what my mind wants to fix, eliminate and avoid.

Campbell’s words “that this horror is simply the foreground of a wonder” catch me.

Horror as a foreground of wonder.

My mind goes a little crazy wondering how you square this, square the horrors of this world with the mind’s concept of wonder. I notice that I write ‘wondering’ in the same sentence. To wonder…

In writing this, my mind fears it will sound as if I am romanticizing horror in some way, even wonders whether it is wise to include the word rapture and horror in the same post…

I recoil from the horrors of the world. I want to fix them. I want to save others. In reality, I don’t want to be with the horror itself. I don’t want to open to it.

As Campbell reminds me, the horror is the foreground to the real wonder of life, the awe-inducing wonder…

And yet, in those moments of life when the horrible knocked on my door, I did open the door. I opened to the horror, as much as I could. And in opening to it, I caught a glimpse of this wonder… the beauty in the darkness, the love in the horrible, the peace and silence that is always present all around this foreground of horror.

I do know Holy Is All There Is, yet my life, at least right now, is filled with days full of so much love and light. I can be content to sit in this ease, content to not open my heart to the horror…and it is here that I skim the shallow waters of life. Can I open to the rest of the wonder of life willingly, not just when it knocks, but now, of my own accord…

Krishnamurti said:

There must be no escape from it of any kind, no intellectual or explanatory justification – see the difficulty of this, for the mind is so cunning, so sharp to escape, because it does not know what to do with its violence. It is not capable of dealing with it – or it thinks it is not capable – therefore it escapes. Every form of escape, distraction, of movement away, sustains violence. If one realizes this, then the mind is confronted with the fact of `what is’ and nothing else.

The mind does not know what to do with its own violence…

This is my edge. This is the edge I recoil from…

I share words…

So I share others’ words, words that open me to this edge, words that help to open my eyes and heart…

In Pema‘s series, “Memory to Light“, she shares her experiences with grief, death, violence and life, leading up to the 10th anniversary of 9/11.

Benita‘s new blog, The Useless Uterus or Chemo Brain Musings (she’s not yet sure what to call it) recounts her life as she moves through her days of chemo and healing.

Rhonda, a woman of 42 years who is dying from MS, is sharing her writing as she dies. Her writing is brilliant. Her words cut to the chase. And in responding, or attempting to respond by way of commenting, I found myself ‘trying’ to write to her, not quite sure how to share how her words have touched me. Perhaps it’s a mixture of things: partly that she is in the active stages of dying as I read her words, and perhaps because I don’t really know her. There’s an element of feeling like a watcher, reading her experience from this place of one who is ‘alive’ and not dying. My dear friend, Jeanne, is hosting these writings, offering a place for us to bear witness to Rhonda experiences and our own opening to how to be with…

And as we near this 10th anniversary of 9/11, Meg Worden shares her experience of 9/11, a day that was book-ended by her getting sober the day before, and conceiving her child two days after.

I do know…

What is true, what makes tears come, what causes my heart to open is the raw desire to serve life, to know the sacredness of life, to honor it…and I must admit, I don’t know how to do this… and I know there is no how.

I am this life, both the horror and the wonder. When I cut myself off from one, I can’t know the other. When I cut myself off from one, I can’t know the totality of what I am…I can’t feel this totality…

And, you?

Happy Beach Feet

The Big 55

My time in Hana was a gift. A big, beautiful birthday gift to me. I turned 55. That makes it sound sort of like my odometer rolled over (do you watch yours when it nears repeated digits, too?).

I guess my odometer did roll over. I’ve traveled a lot of miles in my life.

Or maybe it’s a pedometer. You know, the kind that measures your mileage on foot. That would make more sense, since I have two of those.

Muddy

On Saturday, I hiked the two miles up the side of Haleakala, the dormant volcano on Maui, to Waimoku falls, which fall from 400 ft above.

Waimoku Falls

(insert cool waterfall shot)

Saturday morning was rainy on and off. The following evening we’d had a long steady rain, so the trail was exceedingly wet…and muddy. I forgot to bring my tennis shoes, so I was wearing my thongs. As I trudged up the hill, I could feel things getting more slippery along the way. I found myself trying to stay ‘clean’. Big smile, because after the fact, I can now see how futile this was!

At the top, just prior to the falls, you have to cross two parts of the creek/river. This didn’t sound like fun in thongs, so I took them off and proceeded barefoot, making sure to put the thongs back on across the way.

On my way back down the hill, I was still trying to walk in my thongs, but it was more slippery by now because the rain had been falling for a bit. Just as I was feeling frustrated with myself and the mud, a group of people going up the hill came into view. One of them was a teenaged girl. She was barefoot. She took one look at me and said, with a smile, “Why don’t you just take them off? I did.” I looked down at her feet and, sure enough, bare feet covered in mud.

muddy feet

I thought about it for a moment, and realized I’d been not fully present to everything around me because I was afraid of slipping and gettingdirty. Here I was in this glorious place and my attention was more on walking than on my surroundings. So I took them off and walked barefoot. The mud was warm and squishy. Why had I been avoiding this?

I felt connected. I was aware. I enjoyed it so much more. I had a deeper sensual experience through my feet.

It was so freeing because by taking off my shoes, I stepped right into what I had been trying to avoid…getting dirty. Suddenly there was nothing to avoid anymore. Why was I trying so hard to avoid the mud?

A similar thing had happened back in January as I hiked in Tilden park. The paths get very muddy there in the winter and spring months, and I would try to keep my running shoes from getting muddy. One day in particular, I was trying to get through a patch of mud and slipped right into it. Once I was dirty, it didn’t matter anymore. I felt lighter, more free and enjoyed the walk much more.

Wet

I had realized the same thing on my first full day in Hana. I was swimming at Hamoa beach. My towel and bag were on the sand. It began to rain quite hard. I noticed many of the people there rushing out of the water to get their things and carry them to a dryer place under the trees. I decided to get out and attempt to do the same. We were all trying to keep our stuff dry.

When the rain subsided, we went  back to the beach, laid it all out again and went back in the water. Sure enough, back came the rain. Here I was in the water all wet, and I was worried about keeping my stuff dry. I thought about it and realized there was nothing in my stuff that couldn’t get wet. So I gave up trying. I continued to swim and it was quite an amazing experience being in the warm pouring rain while swimming in the warm ocean.

Water, water everywhere.

When I did decide to return to my bungalow, I gathered my things and put on my hat and it began to rain again. My hat was dripping wet, my cover up was dripping wet. My towel was dripping wet. I was dripping wet. Everything was wet. There was no longer anything to keep dry, and it was incredibly liberating. Nothing was getting hurt by getting wet.

In both cases, I let go and relaxed more deeply and immediately into my surroundings. I was more in tune with the sensual nature of the experience itself, and not surprisingly, with my own sensual nature. Without the worrying brain spinning fast, I was available to notice and feel what was immediately present…and the most noticeable thing was freedom, with a gentle joy following closely behind freedom’s feet.

Messy

I’ve been contemplating this in my life and wondered how often I hold back on doing things completely for fear of getting wet or muddy (either literally or metaphorically).

Where do I fear jumping in because it might get messy?

How much less awareness is available when much of my awareness is focused on my worry or fears?

I can now feel how liberating it would be to let go this way in everyday life.

Most of our fears are not really fears of immediate danger. They’re more like fears of avoiding things we’ve been conditioned to fear experiencing…like getting too muddy or getting our things wet, lost, broken, stolen, etc.

Avoiding messiness is avoiding life.

The joy I felt when I let go into what I was already immersed in was so much more real than what I had feared.

Life is in the mud, in the wet, in the full-on contact with all that we’re swimming in. When I am in avoidance, I am not living.

Yes, a good pair of pants might get stained. Or not. But,

rediscovering this place of joy is priceless.

p.s.

the mud washed off.

my pants cleaned up.

i dried out.

pedicure is still mighty fine.

I am changed by it all.

…

and, you?

I’d love to know about a time when you let it all go, when you realized it was futile to keep avoiding what you were obviously swimming in…

Touch

To touch hearts. To touch skin. To touch the moment with breath.

I love touch and I miss being touched. Just having left my relationship of seven years, I miss that day-to-day connection of the skin and heart: the morning kiss, the spontaneous sharing of a moment in the day, climbing into bed together at night, and the sudden swell of sweetness that arises from brushing my body against his in the wee hours as the night moved toward morning.

Touch is such a beautiful sense. In a most intimate way, through touch we can lose that sense of solidness and separateness that we so often think we experience inhabiting these human bodies. Through touch, we can begin to let go of the need ‘to other’ and realize we aren’t separate at all.

I recently wrote about longing for a deep and reverent kindness, a touch from my lover that transmits an aware, divine conscious seeing of self as self. Some of the most awake moments of my life have been in the midst of touching the body of another, whether it be lover, child, or friend.

WDS

with Desiree Adaway, someone I've looked forward to hugging.

I also recently attended a summit (of sorts) in Portland – The World Domination Summit (WDS) with Chris Guillebeau. I’m not a fan of the word domination, and I don’t know why the summit was titled this because my experience was far from what this might imply. My experience was one of connection, creativity, action, and joy. I was able to touch, physically touch, many of the people I’ve met and come to know online. When I arrived in Portland, I had no expectations for the weekend other than to see and hug my (up until then) virtual friends.

with Jen Louden

As the weekend unfolded, I became acutely aware of how important it is to be immersed in life, not virtual life but real life, and real life with friends and colleagues. It is so easy to forget this when I spend so many hours of my day on the phone with clients and on the computer writing and socializing through social media. I have never been fond of networking, but now I’m realizing an entirely different way to network, by way of touch – touching heart, and touching soul.

The first speaker of the weekend was Pam Slim, who spoke of roots, the power in greeting another with the Navajo greeting: Ya’at’eeh (everything in the universe is beautiful), and the understanding that a mother’s role is to prepare her children to be independent,

‘Giving them the feeling of no matter what happens, I have the capacity to get through it’.

Pam’s talk was beautiful, inspiring and heart opening. And, it was practical, in that she offered very real ways of rooting ourselves in life, in knowing our capacity to get through whatever comes. We touch another deeply when we know and acknowledge their beauty. In doing so, we also acknowledge our own beauty, and the beauty inherent in life as it unfolds.

Slithering

For me, the most experiential presentation of the entire weekend was offered up by Andrea Scher and Jen Lemen, co-creators of Mondo Beyondo, a wildly successful e-course. Drawing upon foundational coaching expertise, Andrea and Jen brought the house down with their ability to connect through the heart. They had us work with a partner to re-experience a peak experience. As a CTI trained coach, I’ve done this exercise many times in the past; yet, this time, the experience was very different.

In the past, when it comes to peak experiences, I’ve always considered things I had done that were successful, moments when I felt on top of the world, or had reached a dream I had longed for…some of the languaging that can be used in setting this experience up.

This time, however, it was different, perhaps because my awareness was on simply being with the very real sensations of connection and touch. As I shared with my partner, the peak experience was actually three combined. They were very similar in feel and sensation, and all involved touch, stillness, warmth, water, sun, skin, love, connection and the body.

As I relived these experiences, and then shared them with my partner, what showed up was nothing about success and achievement, but was all about being completely and utterly immersed in the erotic field of life, where sensuality and sexuality are part of the beautiful dance of being conscious in a human body.

At the end of the exercise, our partner spoke some of the key phrases or words that we had said aloud back to us. Then, we were to pick one of those and write it somewhere on the body. My word?

SLITHERING.

Yes, slithering.

Slithering doesn’t have to be about snakes, yet this is what I, and many others first think of when we hear this word. Seeing as how I have quite a fear of snakes, not nearly as bad as it used to be, but still near phobic proportions, I felt a tinge of ‘yuck’ when I considered writing this word on my body.

But, I also knew how clearly this word articulated something very important to me, because it is more about a way of being in life. There’s a sense of flow, of ease of movement, of softness and groundedness, and of feeling one with life, with the ground, with the sensuous nature of being alive…

moving

in undulating

curves

and rhythms

out of the water and

up onto the

sun-warmed sand

confidently and tenderly

loving life.

A snake doesn’t move with stiffness or rigidity. It moves with the land, propelling its body in connection to the earth.

A snake is powerful and has all sorts of baggage attached to it, especially with regard to women and apples.

As I moved throughout my day, wearing this word on my skin reminded me of those moments when I felt so at home in my body, so fed by the earth, water and sun, so close to my lover. It reminded me of touch, and of slow, delicious movement.

Eros

As WDS drew to a close, the last speaker, Jonathan Fields, asked us all to take what we’d learned over the course of the summit and put it into action. Yes, this is important; and, for me that action is important because of touch – how we touch others’ lives, and how we allow ourselves to be touched by people who are not different from us at all.

In my 2001 thesis on Spirituality and the Internet, I concluded with the understanding that even though the Internet would become such fertile soil for connection that couldn’t be made in the physical realm because of the limitations of space and time, the connections we make in the virtual world must ultimately serve to deepen the gifts we are here to give in the real world.

We can be touched online in very real ways. Our hearts can be opened.

Our souls can be seen.

Our consciousness can become more aware. And, our physical bodies still need physical interactions with other beings.

Biting into VooDoo Donuts, with Marjory, Tanya and Kate

I can get complacent about showing up in the real world, yet what I experienced that weekend in Portland by coming together in flesh and blood incited a joy in me that I only experience in the physical world. Looking directly into eyes, smelling personal scents, feeling skin to skin, hearing the sound of voices I’d never heard before, and even sharing VooDoo Doughnuts with Marjory Mejia, Tanya Geisler and Kate Northrup Moller are all experiences that come out of this erotic field in which we live.

Eros is so much more than the slim sense of eroticism our culture focuses on. Underneath the surface of speakers, break-out sessions and events, there was a field of connection and intimacy that underscored the WDS experience. Eros was sublimely present at WDS, and is in each moment of existence.

Serendipity was a big part of my experience at WDS.

On the evening of the first event, my friend Marjory and I were leaving the hotel to head over to WDS. As the elevator door opened, we were suddenly face-to-face with Jamie Ridler and her sister, Shannon Ridler. I’ve wanted to meet Jamie for some time now, and voila, there she was!

On the bus that would take us to the after-party, I met Veena Kumar, a kind Pediatrician from the east coast. We introduced ourselves and shared a little bit about what we do.

I told Veena the name of my site, Unabashedly Female. I asked her what the name brought to mind for her and she responded by pulling out a piece of paper. It was the post-it note from Andrea and Jen’s talk. They had put over 500 post-its with messages for each of us under our chairs. Under Veena chair was this note.

She said unabashedly female makes her think of the freedom to be yourself without fear.

This is exactly it: finding the true freedom that comes from being yourself fully, femaleness and all, without apology; enjoying the sensuality of a life lived in a human body, connecting with others without hiding your true nature; touching life fully in each moment.

“I was going to die, sooner or later, whether or not I had even spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you….

What are the words you do not yet have? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language.”
~ Audre Lorde

::

Everything around me shouts out that I should be afraid. My body feels it.

A part of me wants to believe it, because it is what I know and its a formidable opponent…especially when everything we see in our socialized world seems to thrive on fear, stimulating it through repeated application.

When I first created my Internet presence, I felt so much fear. I couldn’t quite find the words to say what I wanted to say. Yet, I persevered.

Something in me needed, and continues to need, to find the language that will free me to express the beauty I see, the injustices that break my heart open, the truth I know in my bones.

Something pushes me to write about topics that aren’t comfortable or easy, that invite controversy, that challenge how I see myself and others.

I crave the language that will help me express the inexpressible, that will help you to know what it is that matters to me.

I long to see the connections between things I know and things I do not yet see, and I know that in writing, when I really let go into the fertile unknown, places can be illuminated if I am willing to write truth.

I hunger to know you, to know that place in you that is the same in me.

I yearn to connect women with the deep feminine within, for I know that when women finally make peace with their own womanhood, reconnect with our power that is present already, and come together in service of all of life we will know the sacred that is present in all things earthly and earthy.

Beautiful Epidemic

I notice how many women are writing, now. It seems to be an epidemic, a wild and contagiously beautiful epidemic.

For many of us, after a lifetime of being afraid to speak, words are now tumbling out onto the page and into the invisible connections that the Internet affords.

I see this wildly beautiful epidemic, and the sacred connections of the internet and social media, as a divine plan to bring our voices together into a beautiful chorus of remembering.

Sometimes, the tyrannies shout so loudly I can’t find the words I don’t yet know. All around my heart, I feel the walls that were erected, walls upon which those tyrannies were written. Sometimes, I long for enough room, enough space, enough solitude, enough of my own internal landscape so that I can alight on those words I do not yet know and tear down those walls I built so long ago.

Privilege

One of the ugliest tyrannies I have swallowed in my experience in this culture as a white, educated, woman of the middle-class is institutionalized privilege.

I’ve wondered what privilege actually is, and so have you.

In the comments to part one, Judith wrote,

“From my perspective, privilege is the freedom from having to think about your impact on another. Before I lost my hearing, I never really considered how important acoustic accessibility is to those who are hard of hearing. I didn’t have to think about it because it didn’t affect me. Now, however, it’s in the forefront of my consciousness all of the time. When I can extend my empathy and compassion to others who experience the world differently than I do, when I imagine how it might be for them and take action to rectify the inequity that I am causing people, the world will start to look a lot different to me and to those people known and unknown to me with whom I’m in constant relationship.”

Jeanie wrote,

This morning, I’m stunned by how “silence earns me privilege and costs me power….” and I’m thinking about how I need to take a good, long and bold look at that. What is privilege, anyway? Is it privilege or protection? And is privilege or protection based on distortions and out-right wrongs and maybe even evil really authentic privilege or protection, or just cover-ups and body bags, zipped around the parts of ourselves that are afraid to live loud and naked and real?

The cost of my silence is exacted from my autonomy and personal authority — and the price I pay for it is extracted from my body. Is it worth it to speak up? And how and where and with whom do I speak up so that my words and my effort matter and are not just lost in the quicksand pits of “the way it’s always been”?

I know privilege is defined as:

A special advantage, immunity, permission, right, or benefit granted to or enjoyed by an individual, class, or caste. Such an advantage, immunity, or right exercised to the exclusion or detriment of others.

It’s hard for me to look at. Yes, I was born into it. It wasn’t my fault. And, at least for me, I know that once I become aware of it, to continue to enjoy it at someone else’s expense will kill my heart.

It feels to me that privilege can only be found at the expense of someone else. That’s the dirty little secret I never quite saw before, as naive as that sounds. There is always some way to justify our own specialness. I know I have.

Privilege pits one against another. It holds one above and the other below. It makes one more valuable, the other less.

I have experienced painful, painful things as a woman. You can call it oppression or not. I do. I have experienced this oppression, and I have enjoyed a place of specialness, too. In this culture, my place as a white woman is literally crazy-making. That’s the best way I can explain it. I am at a loss for words when I try to describe the way it feels to know I am an oppressed citizen because of my gender and a privileged citizen because of my race.

Through a great amount of inner work, I’ve reached the place where I no longer want to hang on to my grievances with those people in my life who caused me pain in the past.

I can see I still have grievances against the system, against a system that continues to cause so much suffering. Yet, this system isn’t a thing. It is held up by each one of us who lives and breaths its structure into the choices we make.

It’s taken me some time to figure out when I fight the system, I only strengthen it.

What if, instead, I come together with you, meeting somewhere where we hold each other as women who no longer desire to give life to that which keeps us separate, whether it be comparison of pain, guilt for participating in a system that privileges one over another, or any other way we’ve been socialized to keep the hierarchy in place?

What if we walk in love, together, doing what we do with great love, not only for each other, but for life itself?

What would it take to trust in your own womanhood, so deeply, that you see that womanhood in another and know her as yourself?

Liberation

Freedom doesn’t come when I think I have to help you because I am privileged.

Freedom doesn’t come when I shrink away because I feel guilty about my privilege.

Freedom will come when we see that none of us are free until we are all free and, as a wise Aborigine woman said,

“If you are coming to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you are coming because your liberation is bound with mine, then let us work together.”

Commenting on part three, Rupa wrote:

“I understand, to the degree I can, the pain you’ve felt in birthing this series, Julie. Privilege, class and race as they relate to womanhood is such a charged subject, and I respect you for your courage to explore it with a wide open heart. Thank you.

My hope is that the conversation you’ve begun will bring us closer in our shared experience of being women, not so much in our pain as in our power.”

Our Power As Women

Our power will come when we come out from under the shadow of this system into the light of our true selves, connected by our ‘shared experience of being women, not so much in our pain as in our power’.

I do know it means we must come to know ourselves new, to know ourselves as autonomous souls, not in relation to any other. While that may seem difficult at first glance, we can begin with telling the truth, somewhere in our lives. Yes, it can feel risky, yet:

“What’s the worst that could happen to me if I tell this truth?” Unlike women in other countries, our breaking silence is unlikely to have us jailed, “disappeared” or run off the road at night. Our speaking out will irritate some people, get us called bitchy or hypersensitive and disrupt some dinner parties. And then our speaking out will permit other women to speak, until laws are changed and lives are saved and the world is altered forever.

Next time, ask: What’s the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare. Once you start to speak, people will yell at you. They will interrupt you, put you down and suggest it’s personal. And the world won’t end.

And the speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don’t miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you. And you will still flirt and paint your nails, dress up and party, because, as I think Emma Goldman said, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” And at last you’ll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.” ~ Audre Lorde:

::

This post is the fifth in a series of posts on Silence, Privilege and Oppression. You’ll find part one, part two, part three and part four to be important preludes to this post, as well as this interlude a beautiful expression of how powerful it is to voice what is dying to be said.

]]> http://www.unabashedlyfemale.com/2011/03/19/so-many-silences-part-five/feed/ 8 http://www.unabashedlyfemale.com/2011/03/11/so-many-silences-part-four/ http://www.unabashedlyfemale.com/2011/03/11/so-many-silences-part-four/#comments Fri, 11 Mar 2011 19:13:37 +0000 Julie http://www.unabashedlyfemale.com/?p=3308

“If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.” ~ Audre Lorde

I’m beginning to understand something that I wanted to understand when I began this journey.

I’m beginning to know why I am silent about so many things and about why I am silent about what is happening to our world.

It is giving me even more clarity about why men might be silent, one of the impetuses for this exploration.

Glimmering clarity.

Lest I get too ahead of myself, I also know there is still much that is hidden.

What is hidden keeps me stuck. Stuck consciousness. Stuck life force. Stuck power. Power in a good, strong, vital way. Power that is life-affirming, like the power the cherry tree outside our house is showing me, right now, as the buds of soon-to-be blossoms begin to take form.

You can get a sense of the power that is released when we speak up and out with truth from these powerful and courageous posts by Jeanne and Angela.

It is the raw power that fuels all of life, the power of truth not wielded over others, but truth spoken form the core of one’s being, in service to freeing consciousness, which in turn frees us all. I can feel it in the words and it is beautiful.

What has become clear,

are some of the limiting beliefs and feelings of shame that keep us silent. I know we all feel shame of some sort.

When I read this,

“The parts of (the child) that were not white…” everything just stopped. Stopped.

Then, pop.

Wait a minute, I thought. Parts of me that were not white. Parts of me that are not white. It sounded so foreign, yet so true.

So true, because I can feel, have been able to feel, those parts in my psyche that aren’t white, that never identified that way, that were put to sleep, way down inside.

Such a funny feeling. That gap = those parts and places inside that I have denied of my own wholeness.

Then, the remembering that there is no such thing as race. No such thing as race. I remember when I first learned that race is only a concept with no genetic validity. It’s a social construct (destruct?) created at some point to differentiate, to separate, to categorize, to stratify.

You know how it feels when something hits you that wakes you up? Wakes up a place that has been asleep for a long time? That’s what happened. Something big that had been stuck was now free.

Something important has been seen through.

I take it a step further from what I shared here of Thandeka’s words.

We all have all parts within us. Everything is within. The entire Universe, is inside each and everyone of us. The Universe is holographic, meaning the entire Universe is within. We each have all parts. Girl and boy; white, black, brown, yellow and red; straight and gay; dark and light; joyful and rageful. We all have these parts within us.

“The parts of (the child) that were not [insert quality not mirrored in family, community, country] had to be set aside as unloved and therefore unlovable.”

This very clear articulation of me having to disown those parts of myself that aren’t white fits. I know this somewhere deep inside. I feel joy in seeing this. There are parts of me that don’t feel ‘white’ at all.

For me, remembering these parts and knowing they didn’t die, is the key. I killed them in my consciousness, because that is how I created my ‘identity’. But, what is whole is whole. My unwhite parts, my gay parts, my indigenous parts, my rageful and bitchy parts, are still very much available to me and I celebrate this, because it means I am not so different than anyone else who has been classified as ‘other’.

Hallelujah.

We are much more alike

than we believe ourselves to be. And this is good news, for in releasing the illusion of separation, we find out that we are indeed one consciousness robed as billions of separate human beings.

Just this realization has released even more life force, more stuck consciousness, more remembering of my whole self.

My knowing I am more like you does not mean I know your pain, your experience, your oppression, your privilege, or your lack of any of these things. Rather, it has created an opening of desire to connect, to hear, to listen, to know and to love. It has opened my eyes and my heart ever more widely to my true nature, while also giving me a greater capacity to embody all these parts of myself that I thought I had cast away so long ago.

Many of you have written

about why you don’t speak up, why you silence yourself.

“I don’t dare speak up because i am not worthy. I am white. I am middle class. I am not worthy.”

“Thank you for this post. It made me accept that I need to remain part of the conversation. Sometimes I think I have no right.”

“My voice doesn’t matter. How dare i say anything? Me, who’s had it so easy.”

These words ring in my ears. “Sometimes I think I have no right.”

How many of us believe we have no right to speak up? No right to be in the conversation? No right to speak up for ourselves, the earth, all those who can’t speak, for all the world’s children that are, right now, suffering greatly?

How many of us hear a shrill internal voice, harshly berating us with, “Who do you think you are?”

I ask you

to think about this, something my good friend, Judith Cohen, shared in her comment on part one:

A thought just passed through my mind thinking about oppression and comparing oppressions. I wonder if comparison is just another way the patriarchy tricks us into believing that there is not enough heart and compassion to go around. Patriarchy is so much about hierarchy and power. Certainly, it’s convenient and an energy saver not to have to consider those whose experiences fall lower in the hierarchy. But hierarchy doesn’t exist in support of love. It lives to support a small number of people wielding power over others. We’ve “democratized” hierarchy by letting more diverse people in at the top but hierarchy is still a system that says “NO!” to most people. It continues to poison all of our relationships by asserting that some of us are better than others or that some type of pain is more worthwhile than another.

to feel what Niki Andre shared as a comment on part three:

I’m frustrated by the divisive undercurrents of guilt and blame that distract us
From getting down to the crux:

It is necessary for us
To dispell the silence as One.

Love.
This us and them mentality,
Their divide and conquer legacy…
This is it isn’t it?
This is what keeps us
Aching separately.
Achingly separate.
Alienated.
Alienating.
Too factioned and fragmented to effectively rise up;
Conditioned for infighting,
We are easily quieted or confounded to remain stuck;
The silenced majority remains

Underprivileged.

This system of patriarchy doesn’t live on its own. It can’t. Patriarchy is not a thing. It is not men. It lives in people and in the things people create out of patriarchal beliefs. We breathe life into it when we act from the beliefs and thoughts that habitually feed our choices.

Our internalized patriarch tricks us into making many choices the heart would never choose.

We are all very underprivileged when we allow ourselves to be silenced.

Who do you think you are?

Who do I know I am?

A woman infused with life, infused with the sacred light of love, infused with a basic goodness, living and breathing the sacred feminine. A woman who can, and must, choose in each moment to bring her full self to the conversation for the sake of what is being born.

::

This post is the fourth in a series of posts on Silence, Privilege and Oppression. You’ll find part one, part two, and part three important preludes to this post, as well as this interlude a beautiful expression of how powerful it is to voice what is dying to be said.

Waking dream synchronicities & natural collaborations, by Sandilee Hart

Sandilee Hart is an artist. Her Brighid’s Dawn graces my last post, Fire and Soil, where she shared this comment:

And in another very synchronistic moment–

This morning, as I was quickly getting ready to launch out the door & a busy day, I was still thinking of your posts, the birth of seeds, Brighid’s realm, the new moon…. I was giving a quick wipe of the sink-drain, and out came a little seed- sprout with a green heart leaf and a spiral end-root. I could not have been more surprised & delighted to see symbols that are special to me. Their very presence switched everything into waking dream mode.

Even though I knew the origin of the sprout had to be from rinsing out the cockatiel’s water dish with a stray seed there, it was still a marvel to me of symbolism and impeccable timing. Sometimes, things like this just put me in the most wonderful alignment and help me tune in & pay attention. Sure enough, the day was full of remarkable symbols-messages, spirit nourishment, laughter, and loving connectedness with others.

This morning,

a man I loved and admired passed away. Emmett Murphy was 89. He lived a long, long life. He had been a POW in WWII. I can feel myself not wanting to let go.

Imminent death and precious new life have been on my mind since Sunday. Upheaval. Seeds. What is dying. What is being born? What is birthing?

Tuesday,

February 1st, was St. Brigid’s day. Another lovely reader, Kelly, posted a comment in Fire and Soil:

My mom always used to say that St Brigid was the seed-planter – the saint we all needed to rely on for rebirth, hope, and warmth.

I didn’t know, until Kelly shared it, that St. Brigid was the seed-planter. The more I researched St. Brigid, the more synchronicity I’ve discovered.

Brigid the Weaver

According to Mary Condren on IrishTimes.com, Brigid was also known as Brigid the Weaver:

Before mass media and travel, and great political rallies, societies were held together by fragile threads, and weaving tools signified a key responsibility: that of weaving the precious webs of life and tending the bonds of community.

She goes on to say:

Like community activists and nurturers, Brigit wove the fragile threads of life into webs of community. She invented a shriek alarm for vulnerable women travelling alone, she secured women’s property rights when Sencha, the judge, threatened to abolish them and she freed a slave-trafficked woman. Above all, her bountiful nature (23 out of 32 stories in one of her Lives concern generosity) ensured that the neart (life force) was kept moving for the benefit of all and was not stagnated by greed.

Neart

Brigid’s “bountiful nature … ensured that the neart was kept moving for the benefit of all and not stagnated by greed”.

This morning, when I saw Sandilee’s heart seedling, I could see that new life is always sprouting, just as death is always coming.

The neart is always moving, especially when not stagnated by greed, by holding tightly to that which is not ours to hold. Brigit’s generosity is a symbol of the flow of life.

One of the most difficult lessons for me in this life has been to let go of what I wanted to hang on to. Over and over in life, we are all asked to let go of those things we don’t want to let go of. Even when they go, I’ve found I am still hanging onto them somewhere within, through some thread, some grappling hook, some way of staying connected, even if it is a sense of guilt, grief, or loss. When I’ve felt the grief, when I’ve allowed it to work its mysterious healing, I begin to move again along the current of life.

We’re all greedy for things in our own way.

The web of life and its interconnectedness is all around us. Like Brigid,  women are weavers, and when we live the way of the feminine, we know this. We see the symbols in the everyday, we notice the synchronicities, and, like the earth, our nature is bountiful.

In upheaval, there is leaving and there is becoming. The changes in these days at hand can feel so big, so violent, so new, especially when we don’t know what lies just past this very moment.

Perhaps it is the fragile weaving we each must do, those webs of community that need tending, the neighbor that could use our shoulder to cry on, or the business step that awaits to ensure that the person that most needs your service has access to it.

Maybe we’re looking to be the savior to many when the next thing that awaits us is to simply notice what is wanting to be tended to.

In these past few posts, I’ve written about what has showed up, and in doing so, many threads of the web have become obvious. In fact, perhaps it is all simple one big net…Indra’s net, which “symbolizes a universe where infinitely repeated mutual relations exist between all members of the universe“.

Seed of Life

More than any other post I’ve written, this one has woven itself through my fingers. I’m even a little bit lost in the web of it all. I can see it, yet it is too big for me to know the whole.

Sri Aurobindo, the visionary of modern India, said:

‘It is only the woman who can link the new world with the old.’

Somewhere we know this, and somewhere we already know now. It’s in our bodies. It’s in the web of life. It may take retraining ourselves to come back to our instinctual knowing and wisdom. It’s not another way we have to try to be perfect, but rather it is a knowing that is already within us, a seed of life simply waiting for us to remember.