“I know the anger lies inside of me like I know the beat of my heart and the taste of my spit. It is easier to be furious than to be yearning. Easier to crucify myself in you than to take on the threatening universe of whiteness by admitting that we are worth wanting each other.” ~ Audre Lorde (Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches)

You may have noticed that I’ve begun each post of this series with a quote from Audre Lorde. The depth of her insights astounds me. In her life, she was an African-American, lesbian woman. I share that because I am aware that I have no idea, no sense at all, of the major amount of oppression she must have faced in her life.

Her words cut my heart open. Wide.

My anger, my rage has been hidden most of my life. Hidden way down. She knew her anger like the beat of her heart and the taste of her spit.

When I read these lines, my heart stopped at ‘the threatening universe of whiteness’.

It would be really easy for me to write something here about Lorde’s quote and how it affected me. I could leave it at that, but I can’t.

Let me take a moment to share something else.

In the comments

of part one of this series, a woman named Kierra D. Foster-Ba shared this:

Both a scratch and a gaping wound share some commonalities. This does not mean they are the same or that the only difference is the degree or severity. This is how I feel when people of privilege talk about oppression. Yes, everyone experiences being treated unfairly but this does not mean that they are oppressed. There are various statistics that reveal that white women have overwhelmingly (at least statistically) benefited from affirmative action, something that people of color have been demonized for. So while, I would not challenge your feelings, your feelings are yours. I think in 2011 oppression is a strong word for a middle class, educated white woman to use. To me oppression is when 97% of the images of people you share several identity groups with (race; gender; complexion; body size; shape) are buffoons; belligerent; and unbelievable ignorant. A recent commercial for bounce comes to mind. It is a series about different people and the way they use bounce. The large black woman announces “Ah put em…Ah put em in my shoes; Ah put in my drawers….Ah put em; Ah bin put em for years.” This is oppression. These images of the angry; unattractive; ignorant and large black woman have not changed from the antebellum period to now, but the images of priveledged white women have changed from fainting women too fragile to work to smart; competative; atheletic women who are equal to men.

When I first read Kierra’s comment, I was taken aback. In my experience, the oppression I have suffered has been very painful. And, I don’t think it helps to judge who’s pain is more.

Yet,

Kierra’s comment has stayed with me. I’ve promised myself to really be ruthless with my own bullshit. Her words pull at me, telling me to stop, listen, feel.

Just before I posted part two of this series, my article, The Courage to Sin, was unexpectedly posted on the Huffington Post. I didn’t expect this, because I submitted the post a while ago, and the post is long. The team at HP told me it was too long. They asked me to cut it down and I chose not to. Suddenly, as I found myself knee-deep in this series, it appeared, and I received this comment:

Well,

I guess it depends on who’s doing the ‘sinning’, since all women aren’t held to the same standard.
For example, myself being black,for me and a white woman to commit the same ‘sin’ isn’t the same. I will always be looked at and judged more harshly, and the worst motives will always be attributed to my actions. It’s not fun, free or innocent when I do it, it’s seen as evidence of an inherent lowliness.

Her words, “inherent lowliness” caused my heart to hurt, again. Those words are a direct hit to the hierarchical bigotry of patriarchy.

I responded saying none of this is fun, free or innocent for me, either…AND, “I hear the pain in your words. I want to know your story.”

I know of my own experience, of friend’s and client’s experiences with oppression. There are experiences of personal oppression, group oppression, systemic oppression and god knows what other kinds. Yes, there are degrees of oppression. And, there are very loud and obvious forms, and there are some very silent, very hidden forms.

I do know, after 54 years of living on this planet, that I will never really know your experience, or Kierra’s, or this other woman who courageously shared herself. I can only know mine. And, I do know that I want to hear their stories, hear your story, while at the same time have you hear mine.

Somewhere it could be easy to slip into silence again, a silence that comes from believing my story shouldn’t be told aloud because I was born white. No one has said that. I just know me, the old me. A while ago, I did believe that. I didn’t speak of it. As I read these words of women of color and their experiences, I know all our stories hold something another woman needs to hear.

The privilege I have enjoyed,

has given me things other women have not had. Some who have read this series have wondered if I’m attempting to speak of privilege as something to feel guilt about. I’m not. What I am wanting to share, here, is my process of investigating into the story I tell myself about silence, privilege and oppression in my life.

I truly want to know where I am not telling myself the truth, where I keep myself separate, where my own consciousness is stuck, holding on to something that I think is serving, but that really is not.

Guilt isn’t going to help anyone. Ruthless truth-telling will. Compassion for myself and my fellow sisters will. A genuine hunger to know what will break the barriers of separation with my sisters, so we can join hands to voice our collective “Enough is enough!” will.

Going back to Audre Lorde’s quote, I was shaken by the realization that an extremely intelligent, insightful, beautiful woman saw whiteness as a “threatening universe”. I am of this universe. I am a part of this threatening universe. I am of this whiteness.

When I read this, “It is easier to be furious than to be yearning. Easier to crucify myself in you than to take on the threatening universe of whiteness by admitting that we are worth wanting each other.” my eyes light on the words, “worth wanting each other”. I don’t know the exact context that led to Lorde’s words, yet I am deeply touched by the depth of her heart. I do know that when I read them, I realized all women, no matter what complexion, race, socio-economic background, religion, nationality, age, sexual orientation, are worth wanting.

I know I am worth you wanting me, and I know you are worth my wanting you.

I now so clearly see that one of the most important ways I give up my power when I continue the deceit of privilege, is the power of connected women. When I speak of power, here, it’s not power over, but power with, and I know I am most powerful when my voice is joined in Sisterhood.

The old way is of hierarchy, the new way is not yet known.

And, the way of the Feminine is connectedness, relationship, weaving and circles. I can’t stand together with other women when I hold onto privilege out of fear of what might come if I lose it.

These past days of living this series of posts have brought many moments of synchronicity. I know, when we are doing what we’re here to do, symbols and offerings show up directly in one’s lived experience. I discovered this poem on Louise Rooney’s blog. The poem speaks to what is happening right now in our world. It speaks to the power that privilege and silence robs us of, the power of women united, voices rising and heard.

This World (by Rose Flint)

In Sudan, a Muslim woman journalist

faces 40 lashes for wearing trousers in a restaurant.

In Afghanistan, the family of Nadia the Poet

who wrote of love and beauty, said she shamed them -

she may have died with her scholar husband’s hands

around her throat. Sometimes lipstick is a crime

And Shakespeare, maths, and the desire to dance.

And still a woman’s unbound hair incites a man

to sexual violence – she must be covered up

in darkness, top to toe, to keep her safe.

So. In America, loving mothers give their daughters

breast implants for graduation. Thirty-two thousand

women seek breast surgery every month.

And in Africa, mothers, grandmothers, take the little girls

to the rusty knives of genital mutilation.

All this is fear and desperation,

the last acts of Old Order who is dying on his feet

and punching blind. This is when it changes.

The Goddess wakes. Everywhere, there are women

finding courage, taking action, speaking out, risking

their own lives for other women, refusing to collude.

This is Feminism now: becoming Sisterhood -

politician, priestess and protester working together,

sharing what it means to be Woman, everywhere.

Our linked hands and strong hearts are a power;

the Goddess is returning through each one of us

and we are bringing deep changes. We are dreaming in

a future that gives hope to the World, we are

women’s voices rising: strident, beautiful – and heard.

(c) Rose Flint 2009, published in We’Moon Diary 2011

This post is written in honor of International Women’s Day, 2011. I would love to know your reactions, experiences, insights or anything else you feel you would like to share.

I want to know your story.

::

This post is part of Heather Plett’s 100 Years :: 100 People :: 100 Changes project. Today, she is offering a free ebook, Sophia Rising, with contributions of 20 people from all over the world. I am honored to be a contributor to Heather’s book.

::

This post is the third in a series of posts on Silence, Privilege and Oppression. You’ll find part one and part two an important prelude to this post.

“My liberation as a man is tied to your liberation as a woman.” ~Tony Porter

::

But the beginning of things, of a world especially, is necessarily vague, tangled, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing. ~Kate Chopin

…

The other day, surfing across the web in no particularly linear or rational way (I guess that’s what surfing is), I came across this quote from Rush Limbaugh:

“Will this country want to actually watch a woman get older before their eyes on a daily basis?”

It was 2008. A long time ago. He was referring to Hillary Clinton. With a masterful stroke of the mouth, he attempted to dis-empower this woman by using one of the patriarchy’s greatest weapons, the deeply held belief that age makes women ugly, worthless and powerless.

…

I remember hearing it then and it made my blood boil. Yesterday, when I saw it again, I wondered about it. About Rush. About men. About women. About being a woman and growing old. About why watching a woman grow old scares the hell out of people. His statement is still a powerful window into how women who are growing older are perceived in our culture.

I am reminded of my mother as she grew fail towards her death. She showed such dignity. Even when she could hardly stand up, she wanted her hair combed, her lipstick on. She didn’t want anyone, including her children, to see her use the commode. She walked towards her death with grace.

…

I thought of Robbie Kaye and the amazing work she is doing with women and aging at Beauty of Wisdom. Robbie takes photographs of women getting their hair done; beautiful, proud women.

Doris, 76 - Long Island, NY

Photo by Robbie Kaye, all rights reserved

I wonder about how Rush felt watching his mother grow old, how he feels watching the women in his life that he loves growing older. How do we feel when we fear the crone out there, and in here, while we are in relationship with our mothers, grandmothers, aunts, great-aunts, and wise old women friends? While we are in relationship with ourselves and our own aging bodies?

And, (this is a ‘big’ and) somewhere a part of me is fully capable of saying something just as hurtful. If I push that away in him, I push it away in myself. I’ve grown up ingesting this patriarchal pabulum every day of my life. I’ve adopted the fears and beliefs and admonitions of a culture steeped in ageism, sexism, racism, and any other ism that has been the foundation of this patriarchal thought structure. It takes a deepening awareness and an opening consciousness to begin to see what I project onto others, how I push others away, how I say stupid things because of my own conditioning.

The structure of patriarchy is insidious. It causes men to oppress all women, because it is ‘linked to a cultural devaluing of femaleness itself.” (Allan G. Johnson, Gender Knot: Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy)  It causes men to oppress even the women in their own lives that they dearly love, for you can’t uphold a structure of beliefs, and act within that structure everyday, and somehow not inflict that pain on some women and not others.

Johnson writes:

“One of the deepest reasons for denying the reality of women’s oppression is that we don’t want to admit that a real basis for conflict exists between men and women. We don’t want to admit it because, unlike other groups involved in social oppression, such as white and blacks, female and males really need each other, if only as parents and children.” (emphasis mine)

Think about it: men and women are inextricably linked. We can’t not engage with each other. If we no longer engaged, life wouldn’t continue. That’s what makes it so hard to look at patriarchy and the oppression of the feminine. And yet, we need the reemergence of the feminine to heal ourselves and to heal the earth. We need the nurturing, nourishing, wise and instinctual, wildly creative, and fiercely unconditionally loving feminine to heal ourselves from our ways of destruction and domination. We need this reemergence in women and we need it in men. We need to find balance within ourselves, the balance between the masculine and feminine.

…

The old woman was once revered, when people revered the Great Mother, when they saw the beauty of birth, death and rebirth, the power of transformation. Now, we sit around and pretend we don’t get old and we don’t die. We feel the shift happening and we dig our heels in and pretend we can’t be touched.

As I’ve aged, I’ve felt invisibility creep in. The older I get the more invisible I become, in a culture where youth and external beauty reign. All the while, I’ve become more beautiful to myself, because I am embracing and honoring the wisdom that my life experiences have brought, and the kindness, compassion and tenderness that grief and loss have engendered. It takes a certain amount of awareness and effort to keep coming back to what is real, what is true. It isn’t easy at all. Yet, there comes a time when no other way is palatable. I can feel the energy of the crone. I feel her power. I feel her fierce love.

It’s not that I don’t have moments of grief and sadness around aging. Some of those moments come when I get caught up in the never-ending bombardment of the advertising blitz.  I notice my body growing a little stiffer, I am aware of the years passing, and I know death is always a breath away. But, so is life. Life is always a breath away.

…

Women’s power in the patriarchy is youth, physical beauty, a sexy toned body, the ability to become more like a man than a woman, so how we act and what we do will move us up the ladder of what this culture deems is successful.

But in an entirely different way, we women are powerful beings, especially as we age. Not powerful in the patriarchal paradigm, but powerful in the sense that we are more authentic, more real, more truthful and more beautiful. And, powerful as the crone. The wise woman, the woman that embodies crone energy. The crone is the woman who no longer sees herself only in relation to others, but as a woman unto herself, a woman who stands alone in the center of her own beingness, in the center of her own truth, and from this center relates to the people in her life from what is real for her.

The patriarchy fears the crone. She is truthful, she is powerfully creative, she is intuitive and instinctual, and she loves fiercely. The patriarchy does everything it can to deny this, even to denigrate this and the women who embody it, because old women are wise women are powerful women. They have gifts to share, gifts that this world desperately needs.

…

What if we could be with ourselves in such a way that we no longer projected our deepest fears onto an entire portion of the earth’s population, a group of people that has gifts to share with the world right now, gifts of wisdom, grace and beauty?

What if we could be with ourselves in such a way that we no longer projected our deepest fears onto each other, woman to man, man to woman?

Being with ourselves is the first step.

Being with the misogynistic and misandrist thoughts that ramble around our own minds and consciousness, and questioning if they are true, do we know them to be 100% fact.

Being with our hardened hearts, with the walls we’ve built around them that allow us to engage in such a way where we are just as complicit in this fear and rejection of the wise old woman, and wondering if our hearts really feel this way.

Being with ourselves, with the feelings we don’t want to feel, the feelings we numb ourselves to, day in and day out.

Being with.

Being with the beginning of something, a beginning of a world where we honor and respect each other as men and women.

As Kate Chopin reminds us, the beginning of things, of a world especially, is necessarily vague, tangled, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing.

A world where patriarchy is a distant memory begins with the chaotic, the vague, with the tangled mess of people willing to engage differently, even when we don’t yet know how to do it or what it might look like.

It may feel exceedingly disturbing, but then don’t the happenings in our world right now disturb you greatly?

My last two posts have been about gender healing, feminism, and what it means to come into balance within and without. Balance between the feminine and the masculine. The coming together of two aspects of ourselves, and of life.

I don’t yet know where these issues will take me, us, or our world. There is so much more to come, I can tell.

For the past week, I’ve been struggling a bit with writer’s block. Nothing is flowing. So, I thought I would share with you this poem I wrote to my love, way back when we were first finding our way with each other. As I read it anew, it seems so fitting to our conversation about women, men and healing.

…

The Messiness of Human Love

Lying here beside you,
I feel you struggling with the weight of this.
I hear your words and feel their harshness,
and experience them as unforgiving of the messiness of your own love.

As I lie beside you,
Your body says something else.
It speaks in a muffled voice of the freedom it longs for
To simply let go and weep.
It speaks of its most earnest yearning
To let go its armor
So it can reveal the supple fragrance of your true existence.

How I long to know you this way,
And long to show you my own supple fragrance.
Supple body to supple body,
Fragrant heart to fragrant heart
Pressed up against each other,
Close enough to catch the fleeting opportunity to become One;
Feeling and felt, sense and sensed, observer and observed.

In these imagined moments,
We are free to explore each other in the ripeness of the present
Where the touch of our souls
Explodes every particle of the Universe
Just as Love intends.

What is the illusion that lies within,
Telling us fibs about our true identity?
What is this illusion that hangs between us,
Stopping us from knowing each other,
In this most sacred way?

My own rigidity flares when I experience
the clear outline of your boundaries,
But I choose to challenge my own harshness,
For something from within you calls me forward.

Feeling my way along your ridges,
I look for an opening, some entrance into that
Sweet, sweet spot I see so clearly
On my heart’s radar screen.
I know there is a way in.

My fear of rejection suddenly voices its objections,
“Not too fast, not too hard.
Be careful.
We’re walking the line between invitation and invasion.”

I sense the opening I know is close at hand.
What greeting do I speak to let you know
I am here at your doorstep?
What is my heart’s invitation to your heart,
One that I know will find the center of softness longing to accept?

We are like two bumbling fools,
Crashing through the dark,
Feeling our way towards something that is already here in our company.
It waits for us to forgive ourselves the messiness of human love.

…

What if we could just let it be messy?
What if we let go into the unknown, so we might find the place where we can stand side by side, two equals, yet different in our own uniqueness?

It seems as though my last post, Listening Into Liberation, resonated with many of you. The comments you left were insightful posts unto themselves. They touched me deeply.

::

“The future of humanity will be decided not by relations between nations, but by relations between men and women. ” D.H. Lawrence

::

I realize that I know very little, if anything, about the answers to how liberation into wholeness can unfold. And at the same time, I absolutely know that wholeness is our inheritance, and that our true nature is already whole.

I know that consciousness is seeking to know itself, to awaken fully into wholeness.

I know that my rational mind can’t understand it, even if it thinks it can.

I know that I have a deep longing to heal into wholeness, and to be liberated from these ties and snares that keep me falling back into the false beliefs of our culture, that:

• women are secondary to men,
• the feminine is something to fear,
• the masculine is bad
• women have to apologize, constantly, for something not quite known
• men must be taken care of
• men and women can’t trust each other
• women are inherently jealous of, and hostile to, each other
• I, as a woman, will be more safe and secure in my relationships, and in the world at large, if I ‘pretend’ to be good, compliant, selfless, small…in short, something I am not.

These are just a few of the notions I (and others I know) have believed in the past, or continue to believe right now. Is there anything else you might want to throw in here?

::

“…re-examine all you have been told at school or church, or in any books, and dismiss whatever insults your soul.” ~ Walt Whitman

::

We’re told many things about women, about men, and about our worth, our value, how we should be with each other. We’ve been conditioned by parents, by our schooling, by the church, by the culture, by the media…

I can see the most necessary and important thing I can do to begin, is to question all of my beliefs. Period. Even my most treasured beliefs, the ones I cling to that give me a sense of righteousness, or a sense of safety and security. This is really about questioning the small, yet sometimes very loud and insistent, roommate in my head that wants me to believe these things so I will stay ‘in the tribe’.

I know liberation into wholeness will not come by hanging onto my beliefs. It will not come if I hang on to anything I have to believe in, because if I believe in something, it means I don’t really know the truth of it. If I did, I wouldn’t need the belief.

…

All of Life is Sacred

One thing I know is that all of life is sacred. I know this. I don’t have to believe it, because I experience it. I witness the sacred looking out your eyes. I hear the sacred in your voice. I feel the sacred in your touch. I taste the sacred in your kiss. Everything is alive with the sacred. Everything.

We are breathed, we are fed, we are loved, and we are held by the sacred. All is infused with the sacred. When we don’t see this sacredness, it’s because we believe the conditioning that tells us differently.

Patriarchal conditioning teaches us to fear matter, to fear that which is here right under our noses. Patriarchal conditioning is about fearing the feminine in us all, but most especially in women, because we embody the sacredness of the feminine life principle. Patriarchal conditioning tells us to transcend rather than embody. Yet, it is through the body that I experience, that I enter into relationship with you, with woman, with man, with life.

I know I begin here, with my own experience that all of life is sacred. Somehow it’s easy to see this sacredness in children. I see their innocence. Yet, this same innocence is alive in us all.

I begin with this innocence, this wonder and amazement that are naturally a part of being alive and aware. The only thing I can know, truly know, is what my experience shows me.

I long to know you, to listen to woman, to listen to man.

Wholeness is about Oneness, about no longer experiencing division within and division without. I have to begin here, where I am, seemingly still ensnared by beliefs, but willing to look to see what is here, what is true, what is so. And, then acting on that knowing, to move with truth, rather than shrink away from it.

The roommate believes it won’t be easy. Yet, the longing is much stronger than the roommate’s resistance.

…

And, you?

I’d love to be in conversation with you.

Yesterday, I met a man – one man of many.

He was smart, educated, friendly. He was young. He asked what I do for a living, as we were in a somewhat business setting.

I told him I am working to empower women, that I coach and teach courses about creativity, and that I’m writing a book about women, creativity, sensuality, pleasure and power.

He smiled back and seemed interested. He then asked why the book wasn’t for men, too. He said, “You’re losing half your audience if you leave men out.” or something to that effect. I smiled and thought about that for a moment. Yes, that would be half the population. It could be half my audience if the book spoke to both genders.

I asked him to elaborate. I asked him to share what he meant.

He then told me that when he first heard me speak about what I am doing, his first thought was that this was about Feminism and he felt himself recoil, feeling that he didn’t want to hear it. But, he stayed with me.

At first, I was so surprised that he felt this. I told him so. I felt into what I had said, looking for where I might have interjected any sort of rejection. I couldn’t find anything, but then so much can be unconscious.

I then spoke to him about how I see things. That feminism isn’t about rejection. It is about honoring.

…

Feminism is  about women being recognized, witnessed, honored, respected, and treated as full human beings by all. It does not reject, it honors.

He then said something to the effect of, “You know, I ‘d love to talk to you more about this. I have a group of friends, men, that would love to talk about this.”

We continued to talk about women and men, and about how things can be generational – how women and men from different generations see this all differently. Makes total sense. And then our conversation ended.

::

My Heart Knows

As the day came to an end, I continued to consider our exchange. I became very curious about this sense of recoiling, rejecting, ‘othering’ that happens between many men and women, even women and women, when we speak of feminism.

How do we work to end the institutionalized forms of discrimination in the world that so inhumanely treat women and children when there are so many tender feelings that get triggered between us?

I’ve been working to separate out my anger at how things are from the desire of the mind to reject, to separate, to make wrong. Anger can be a fiery force that fuels change. It’s not bad. If anger is here, it must be felt so it moves through. And as it moves through, it can fuel my work to make things better. But anger projected onto others just pushes away. It rejects. I know it because I’ve done it over and over and over. It doesn’t feel good.

My heart certainly doesn’t reject. My heart knows this is about wholeness, about the basic goodness of all beings. My heart doesn’t fear. It longs to connect, to heal, to create something new where all are honored. My heart knows this fiery force of anger can be a positive force, bringing forth a creative power from within.

My mind tends to ‘other’…meaning, it sees other people as something separate. When it fears, it wants to compare pain, compare injustices, compare anything just so it feels separate and better, and therefore safe.

…

Finding balance within ourselves

I looked in this man’s eyes and saw such a willingness to listen, to hear, to consider, to talk. He came back into the conversation, after feeling the quick pangs of wanting to reject. What a beautiful moment that was.

I know our hearts were listening to each other. Somewhere inside we actively chose to stay in it, to listen, to hear, to witness. And in this moment, my mind softened into my heart. I could see the humanness in him and his desire to know and understand, and his desire to be heard.

Somewhere inside of me, I reject my own masculine qualities. And, I reject that I am capable of heinous acts as well. Somewhere inside, I don’t want to see. This man’s gift to me was just this…he didn’t reject me. And in this act, something inside me was healed. I can’t speak for him, but I hope he felt a similar sense of acceptance and experienced being heard, witnessed, honored and respected.

…

Listening into Liberation

I’m going to take him up on his offer to meet with me, to hold conversation, to listen without separating and rejecting, to hear with an open heart.

Somewhere within, I know, we women must make the move to liberation – a liberation that begins from within, disentangling ourselves from the beliefs we hold that keep us snared and entangled in the old thought structures and paradigms that required the word feminism to come into being in the first place.

The real question is, how can we move toward this liberation, reclaiming the feminine inside and the feminine out there,  without rejecting the masculine out there and the masculine within?

Your joy is my joy. Your sorrow is my sorrow. Your success is my success. There is no separation. There is just One.

Some day there will be girls and women whose name will no longer signify merely an opposite of the masculine, but something in itself, something that makes one think, not of any complement and limit, but of life and existence: the female human being.

—– This advance will (at first much against the will of the men who have been outstripped) change the experiencing of love, which is now full of error, will alter it from the ground up, reshape it into a relation that is meant to be of one human being to another, no longer of man to woman. And this more human love (that will fulfil itself, infinitely considerate and gentle, and good and clear in binding and releasing) will resemble that which we are with struggle and endeavour preparing, the love that consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.” ~Rilke

::

For me, the hope of all this work is for woman to become that which she naturally is: sacredly creative, wildly passionate, compassionately loving, innately life sustaining, and vibrantly alive.

This natural being flowers when she is not keeping herself small, apologizing for her existence, silencing the words she knows must be spoken, and dismissing her own value.

This woman values what she loves, deeply and reverently.

This woman sustains life, in whatever way she must, because that is her life currency.

When woman realizes she is already this woman, the world will change.

And in turn, for man to know himself as he naturally is, by his inherent design. Fully loving, protective of life, all of life. Naturally honoring, respectful, and vibrantly alive.

Ultimately, for me, the goal is for woman and man to bow down to the sacredness in each other, to stand alongside each other, each in their own fullness and independence, each honoring the natural design of the other, in order to provide a loving world for every child, for every animal, for every being we share this amazing earth we call home.

And this more human love (that will fulfill itself, infinitely considerate and gentle, and good and clear in binding and releasing) will resemble that which we are with struggle and endeavor preparing, the love that consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.” ~Rilke

What other goal could there be other than to become what we are capable of becoming ?

Being a girl is so powerful that we’ve had to train everyone not to be that. ~Eve Ensler

By now, many of you have probably watched Eve Ensler’s TED India talk of November, 2009, “Embrace Your Inner Girl”. If not, I’ve provided it here. I just found it and was blown away by her ability to use language that is inclusive of both men and women. It’s one of the things I loved about the talk.

In attempting to speak about a subject that is charged for so many of us, she has come up with a metaphor, the Girl Cell, that speaks to a part of greater consciousness that exists in us all, men and women. By doing so, she is able to speak about the feminine part of all of us that has been suppressed in the Patriarchy.

She also weaves this idea of the feminine within each of us together with the understanding that there is something positive and life-affirming that girls and women have to offer our world that has been untapped. It’s a both/and perspective: that we all, men and women, can embrace our girl cell, and we can honor what women have to offer as well.

That being said, Eve doesn’t speak in this talk about the boy cell or what men have to offer. That doesn’t mean she doesn’t value those things. Who knows why she doesn’t. The reason I bring this up shows up in the comments that follow the video on the TED site. The context we are all conditioned in, the patriarchy, has created an atmosphere where there is much distrust of the feminine in us all, and much violence towards women. From a contextual point of view, much of what she brings forward must be understood in a new light. I would also say we need to understand, in a new light, what it would look like for men and woman to embrace their boy cell, those positive aspects that come from owning the masculine qualities that uphold and protect life itself.

As I read the comments, I feel so much compassion for all of us as we navigate these churning waters of not only external gender healing, but the internal healing we are all experiencing between our own girl cells and boy cells, our inner masculine and feminine parts. I wonder about how we can talk to each other, woman to man, woman to woman, man to man, about this. Some men were obviously put off by her talk, along with some women. Some men totally were not, along with some women.

In the end, this inner balance between our masculine and feminine, and the balance between these two parts in the external world, is what needs to happen for us all to heal, and for our planet to heal.

As a woman, I loved Eve’s talk. I loved that she spoke to the pain that men have had to endure, too. And, one day, I hope we have a video to watch that speaks of the boy cell and how we all can call this forward within ourselves.

I believe we will create a harmonious and peaceful world ONLY when we come to a place of true gender respect, where we’ve all seen through the rampant misogyny (contempt, fear of, hatred of women) and misandry (contempt, fear of, hatred of men) that exist today. Many are doing powerful work in the world to make this happen. Part of our individual work to heal is to become aware of the places inside ourselves where we fear, have contempt for, and even hate our own inner woman and man. That inner hate shows up in the outer world.

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And, you?

Now that you’ve watched it, what do you think? How did her language of this issue impact you?

If you read some of the comments, how were you impacted?

How do you feel about the current state of affairs between the genders, and within your own being?

What pearls of wisdom do you have to share?

I’d love to know.

What is it to be a woman, in the fullest sense?

I’ve been sitting with this question now since January 5th, the day I read that Mary Daly had died.

It’s not that I hadn’t thought of this before, doing the work I do. Coaching is all about this. And, Unabashedly Female? This blog reflects my experience in living this question, What is it to be female?

But, a quote I read, penned by Mary, in one of the columns celebrating (make that celebrating/vilifying) Mary resonated so deeply. Right away my mind (that lovely roommate I live with) said, “Yes. OMG, she’s a genius. Mary Daly brought it.”

You see, I hadn’t heard of her until last year. For anyone who has read the scholarly works of the feminist movement, Mary Daly is well-known. But, even though I reached womanhood in the seventies, and even though I personally witnessed the way the feminists of the second-wave were vilified, something that still haunts me to this day, I didn’t really read feminist scholarly works. When I first read some of what Daly wrote last year, albeit the tamer bits, I was blown away by the ideas she brought to the table.

Here’s the quote that got me:

“Ever since childhood, I have been honing my skills for living the life of a Radical Feminist Pirate and cultivating the Courage to Sin,” she wrote in the opening of “Sin Big,” her New Yorker piece. “The word ‘sin’ is derived from the Indo-European root ‘es-,’ meaning ‘to be.’ When I discovered this etymology, I intuitively understood that for a woman trapped in patriarchy, which is the religion of the entire planet, ‘to be’ in the fullest sense is ‘to sin.’ “~ Mary Daly (from Jan 5, ’10 Boston.com article, “Mary Daly, pioneering feminist who tussled with BC, dies at 81.)

“For a woman trapped in patriarchy, which is the religion of the entire planet, ‘to be’ in the fullest sense is ‘to sin.’”, is a bold, bold statement.

“For a woman … ‘to be’ in the fullest sense is ‘to sin’.

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Mary Daly was one courageous woman. For many, she was way too out there in her feminist radical philosophy. She was confrontational. She pushed the limits of what it means to be a feminist, hard. She set the parameters. She was willing to go toe-to-toe with the deeply held principles of patriarchy, the structure that espouses, and enforces, domination as a way of life. Many found her to be just as oppressive as those she was confronting.

As I searched the Internet in these last few days since her death, I have found a very wide spectrum of opinion about Daly, her philosophy, her manner, her life, and pretty much everything else you could think of.

Mark Vernon of the guardian.co.uk wrote, “She was an audaciously creative spirit; an awkwardly witty, deadly serious writer. She arguably did more to stretch what is possible to think in contemporary feminist theology than any other.”

At the end of Vernon’s post, the comments created a stream of back and forth banter that, in itself, was telling of the spectrum of opinion on feminism, and the still very-much-present gender upheaval, that exists in the world. Even after her death, controversy still surrounds Mary Daly.

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But back to my question, What is it to be a woman, in the fullest sense?

As I consider the ramifications of Daly’s statement, that to be fully this female that I am is ‘to sin’, it points to the most basic premise that we, as women, are already sinners simply by being, by breathing, by existing. Basically, this is the whole Eve complex. Our fall from grace. The idea that we women are responsible for sin.

It then follows that if we do something to minimize our fullness, meaning we learn how ‘to be’ in the ‘not-fullest sense’, then we mitigate our sinning potential, so to speak. We minimize how much of a sinner we are.

I have to admit, when I am really honest with myself, much of my 53 years here on this earth have been filled with an underlying, nauseating sense of something being wrong with me, solely because I am a woman. And, I know I have minimized myself in order to not feel this sickening sense of sinfulness.

If I could somehow be ‘less womanly’, ‘less seen’, heck, just ‘less’, then I would feel less, meaning I wouldn’t have to ‘feel’ being a woman.

To see it in this raw form, though, to see it so bluntly equated, woman=sin, felt sickeningly true, not intellectually, but somewhere in my psyche. Some part of me believes this. Hmmmmmmmm….. But, where did this come from? Where did I learn this?

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One of my teachers, Adyashanti, speaks of the word sin and its meaning, which in his words means ‘to miss the mark’. Upon researching this, I discovered this explanation:

Sin & Evil: In the Aramaic Language and culture that Jesus taught in, the terms for “sin” and “evil” were archery terms. When the archer shot at the target and missed the scorekeeper yelled the Aramaic word for sin. It meant that you were off the mark, take another shot. The concept of sin was to be positive mental feedback. Sin is when you are operating from inaccurate information and thus a perceptual mis-take. When you become conscious and aware if the results of your inaccuracy you have the option to reconsider what you have learned and do as they do in Hollywood, “do another take.” By the way, where the arrow fell when it missed the target was referred to as evil.

So, this derivation of sin would have been about the time of Jesus.

Diving further into the etymology of the word, I found this explanation of the word sin, one that comes from more recent times:

Etymology: Middle English sinne, from Old English synn; akin to Old High German sunta sin and probably to Latin sont-, sons guilty, est is —

Date: before 12th century

1 a : an offense against religious or moral law b : an action that is or is felt to be highly reprehensible <it’s a sin to waste food> c : an often serious shortcoming : fault
2 a : transgression of the law of God b : a vitiated state of human nature in which the self is estranged from God

This is the etymology that Mary Daly quoted, a derivation of the root that means ‘to be’.

If we move forward in time, forward to where the patriarchy as world paradigm has become firmly entrenched, in most of the world it is believed, either overtly, or covertly, that women are the lesser gender. It is here, within this worldview of male supremacy, that sin has moved from missing the mark to simply being human, to simply being a woman.

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Now, granted, we can toss this whole thing out if we don’t believe in this most strict sense of what it means ‘to sin’. Or can we? We learn to make meaning through what we are taught. We are taught with words and we are taught through behavior. We are taught through culture. We learn to make meaning within the culture we swim in.

Things have changed greatly in how women perceive the idea of sin and sinning. Or have they?

Perhaps on the surface of life, in this culture, much has changed. And, intellectually this just doesn’t make sense. But what do we believe, somewhere down in the shadow?

And, what about emotionally? What about our deepest conditioning? What about the stories we made up as young girls? Not so much the stories about what we could grow up to be or do, but the stories about our core worth? Stories we began to tell ourselves about our nature as girls, and as time progressed, as women? What about the feeling of being a girl, then a woman, in a culture that is based on domination?

I know that, until recently, I have lived my life with the unshakable sense that there is something less valuable about me, simply because I was born in a female body. While intellectually I knew this wasn’t so, somewhere in the recesses of my psyche lay hidden beliefs and fears that this body is sinful, that my womanhood was somehow dirty and bad. I see it reflected in the media, in quasi-pornographic programming showing women being beaten and tortured, raped and abused. I see it reflected daily in the myriad ways women are objectified, repeatedly, to sell everything from hamburgers to beer to cars to razors.

It is my experience, and in the experience of many of the women I have worked with to awaken to the divine feminine within, that we swim in this notion that to be a woman in the fullest sense is to sin. We swim in the cultural sea, and we swim in our own internalized pool of it. It’s a deep and dark pool that lies in the shadow, far from the light of Spirit, far from the light of the Goddess, far from the light of the God I know. We carry this pool around inside us. That’s the kicker. If we hold conditioned beliefs, that are unconscious, we swim in our own little pool of perceived sin.

This pool is the only pool that really matters, for it feeds the negative, compulsive, shadow thoughts that keep the inner-patriarchy in place. And, it’s the only pool one can change. But, when we do clean our own pool, the big pool becomes a little clearer and cleaner.

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Sitting with Mary Daly’s statement, I have read it and re-read it. Writing this post has been like a long labor. I’ve written, and re-written, until I could wind my way around to something I already knew, but needed to see in a simpler form, for anything true is really, really simple at its core.

“For a woman … ‘to be’ in the fullest sense is ‘to sin’, when she is trapped in patriarchy.

“For a woman … ‘to be’ in the fullest sense is ‘to sin’, when she is trapped in patriarchy, which is the religion of the entire planet.

And, when she’s not trapped in patriarchy?

Ah, woman ≠ sin.

As you can see, I’m a lover of logic and math. But, I’m even greater lover of the Mystery, which is the Mother of math. This Mother is the heart of existence. This Mother holds us all in her womb, the womb of truth. If we’re willing to hang out here, the truth will be revealed.

As I sat in the Mystery with Mary’s wisdom, this oh, so, young part of my psyche cried out with very familiar mantra:

‘be small and silent and agreeable = be safe and loved and wanted’.

Here was the part that keeps me believing, even when I know on so many levels this is crap.

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I know this. I know it is only the stories I tell myself. But, when the stories are woven into the fabric of the culture, into the belief systems that keep the patriarchy in place, it can be so hard to step back far enough to see the obvious. I had to see the equation woman = sin, I had to feel it, I had to sit with it, I had to open my heart to the part of me that believes this seductive lie.

It is seductive. It seduces us with its promise of safety. It beguiles us with the promise that if we give ourselves away, we will be wanted. In believing this lie, I can settle down into the oh so sickeningly comfortable familiar arms of, ‘I will safe’.

Of course, the equation is different at different times for different women.

Sometimes, it looks like:

‘be like a man = be safe and loved and wanted’

or

‘be asexual = be safe and loved and wanted’

or

‘be youthful, sexy, and beautiful as hell so every man will want me = be safe and loved and wanted’

or simply

be silent = be safe.

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I have done a ton of work to disengage from this cultural story. It’s not only cultural, it’s familial. We, all women and men, learn our story of illusion at a young, young age, from parents who also were taught these seductive lies.

Much of what I’ve done has allowed my mind to once again trust my heart and my body.

When I drop down into this sensuous female body I exist in, I can feel the dark richness of the feminine, the dark loveliness. This is oh so different than the darkness of the shadow.

From my own experience, I know that this is the place from which my own internal power flows forth. This place within the depths of my body and my heart, is the place where I am the fullest in every sense.  It is the place where I feel wholly holy female.

Here, in this wholly holy female place, I am no longer ‘trapped in patriarchy’. It has no power. It does not exist.

In reality, the only thing that is real is what is here, now.

The patriarchy is an illusion, a story, albeit a powerful one because so many minds have agreed to uphold it, thereby granting it power.

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In remembering Mary Daly, perhaps we can focus on truth, your truth as a woman. This truth stands alone from academic philosophy and theology, cultural conditioning, and gender differences. This truth is free to question. This truth is to know, and to be, you in the fullest sense.

Thank you, Mary, for your fierceness and your courage. You certainly weren’t perfect. You were controversial. You didn’t ever shy away from stating your beliefs, wholeheartedly. You stirred things up. You pissed people off. But, you blew the conversation wide open. You shined not just a light, but a high-beam on the shadow of this culture, a shadow that only harms women, men, children and everything that is living.

Who knows how history will hold you and your ideas, but I do know that you have added to the conversation, a conversation of possibility where all women and girls might one day know, relish and celebrate the fullness of what it is to be female, while also coming to know their healthy masculine side, and where all men and boys might discover the beauty of their feminine side, so that we all might live in true gender respect and harmony.

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This post has been the most difficult I have written. It felt as if I was giving birth to something so much larger than my own understanding, and I was. I have been giving birth to the raw courage to sin by being fully a woman in all my fullness in THIS paradigm we swim in, the paradigm of patriarchy.

We don’t live in the time of Jesus, when sin meant to miss the mark. We live in the patriarchy, where women are seen, way down deep in the shadow, as being sinful, simply by their nature.

To me, having the courage to sin does not mean to spew anger and hate at those that hold power. It means to do the work it will take to come to know myself through experience, not by way of what I have been told it means. It means to question what I have made up about myself, my worth, the world itself and my relationship with it.

It means to be fully female, to embody the divine feminine, to disentangle one’s being from the powerful structures that keep us believing in our own powerlessness. It means being that which we are, divinely female, embodying the life principle that, by design, created us to bring life into life.

It means to step into this power, to stand and speak, and to give my whole-heart support to other women and men who are willing to stand, speak and step into their own personal power.

As it turns out, it is only my own knowing, my own courage I can birth, but by sharing this knowing, I hope to help crack apart the tightly held beliefs about the prevailing structure we hold so tightly to.

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Look out your eyes onto the world.

There is nothing written on it.

There are no words.

There is no etymology.

For women and men, the beliefs we hold and the meaning we place on it, is simply in our minds, in how we think we see the world.

The world itself is empty of all meaning and all belief.

It is empty of all that we attempt to make of it.

It is here, in this emptiness, that the mind can rest.

It is here, in this emptiness, that we can know the simple elegance that we are.

It is here, in this emptiness, that we can know our divine inheritance.

It is here, in this emptiness, that we can know the goddess, not as story or image

but as the coming and going, the birth and death, the dance of light here in the world of matter.

It is here, we are safe, loved and holy whole, simply as we are.

Best of 2009 Blog Challenge: Day 20: New person. She came into your life and turned it upside down. He went out of his way to provide incredible customer service. Who is your unsung hero of 2009?

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The answer to this question is so clear. My unsung hero(s) for 2009 are men who respect women, value women and know that women have much to offer that is not being utilized because women are still oppressed. Yes, even here in the US, women are still oppressed. So much of the shadow aspects of our culture are still projected onto women. This post, though, is not to speak to this oppression, but rather to celebrate men who deeply desire to see women empowered.

In 2009, I began to receive emails and facebook messages from men who have discovered my writing, see that I work with women to wake them up to their wild creative nature, and want to share with me how much they love strong women. They wonder how my work is going, because they long to see women step into their power and share leadership with men, not only here in the US, but all over the world.

These men have written to express their sadness at the treatment of women. They write about their frustration with laws that punish women who are victims of men’s transgressions. This excerpt comes from one such letter:

“My opinions on the treatment of women have some loose origins, and are derived from numerous sources, not least of which are my own male frame of reference, and general observations over the years. Frankly, I love intelligent women.  I much prefer their company and conversation to men.  They are a fascinating creature and I have always thought a woman’s perspective on most matters is more thoughtful and reasonable than men.  There is a distinct spark and vitality in women that men lack. Women are altogether interesting and have a far more illuminating take on the human spirit than men; generally speaking.

…The subjugation of women in [this scheme] has mixed motives.  In many tenets the origins are to protect women and children.  Men write the laws, and men know what men do – the strict Islamic laws and western church sensibilities are a direct response to the sexual weakness of men – who desire what they see in a woman.  Rather than put the onus on the man to manage and control his urges, we subjugate women with rules for their behavior. 40 lashes for wearing a pants suit.  Stoning for being raped.  It’s all ludicrous and so very stone age.  Its depressing really.  For all our progress in civilization, the progress of equality for the woman is painfully slow.

We are missing out on the great wisdom and nurturing characteristics of women in leadership in the world.  I am certain that letting a woman lead would circumvent much of the evil in the world.”

On various sites where women’s issues are raised, especially sites working to raise women’s consciousness, there have been recent references to, and quotes from, men who have stepped forward to apologize for how women have been, and continue to be, treated throughout the world. Reading these heartfelt apologies brings me to tears. To know there are men who see through their conditioning so clearly and are willing to take responsibility for their gender’s ongoing subjugation of women brings hope that someday soon there will be an end to the worldwide mistreatment of women and children.

I know this is not about men vs. women. There are many women who are against equal rights for women, while there are many men working to bring about gender equality and healing.

I thank Gwen Bell and her challenge for prompting me to sit and consider more deeply how much these men have inspired me to commit completely to my work. And, I want to, again, thank all the men who are my unsung heroes. I look forward to knowing more of you in 2010.

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This post is part of Gwen Bell’s Best of 2009 Blog Challenge
Day 20 New person. She came into your life and turned it upside down. He went out of his way to provide incredible customer service. Who is your unsung hero of 2009?