unabashedly female

Capable of Greatness Even in Our Darkest Moments

by Julie on March 18, 2013 · 4 comments

This morning I read about the Steubenville rape case. I read that Jane Doe, the woman who was raped, was receiving death threats. My heart broke.

I then went to Wild Writing where we write using certain phrases from poems that Laurie shares as prompts. The first poem read was “Prayer in My Boot“, by Naomi Shihab Nye. The following is what poured out of me. And as I read it aloud, I could feel waves of grief roll through me.

The phrase from the poem is in teal. The lines that begin with ‘For’ are the elements of my Prayer. May it be so.

Pray it is universally applicable, because it is. How could Delhi be any different from Stuebenville, India from the United States?

Rape is rape. It tears us all apart.

We are no different here in the US, except we seem to think we are, seem to be really good at turning away, pretending it has nothing to do with us, pretending we aren’t like them. We’re more civilized, more under control, more egalitarian. Everything swept under the rug. Pretending Jane Doe deserved it because she drank too much and tweeted questionable things. Pretending the two boys lives are ruined because they’ve been convicted of a crime that somehow wasn’t of ‘their’ doing.

I pray we see that it is universally applicable because it is and the more we don’t see, the more we refuse to look toward, the more this darkness festers in each and every one of us – Indian and American, woman and man.

For this is our doorway into healing.

For those moments last year in Steubenville when choices were made that led to this.

For that night in Delhi when she boarded the bus with her boyfriend, never suspecting what was about to take place.

For the man in Delhi who suggested she was a whore because she was out at night and suggested her sweetheart was at fault because he didn’t protect her.

For the boys in Steubenville, raised in a culture where we avoid talking about these things, avoid looking right at this rape culture we seem to continue to cling to.

For the girl in Steubenville who woke up the next morning not knowing what had happened to her.

For all the mothers and fathers of these children and young people who in some way tried their best and succeeded, and in other ways failed.

For every young boy and girl, including my four grandchildren, who are learning every day what they must do to belong in a culture that expects certain behavior from all of us so that we fit in and don’t bring attention to our society’s darkest secrets.

For these young girls and boys who still catch glimpses of their souls who know the truth about life, that it has the capacity to be filled with compassion and love, tenderness and integrity.

For all of us who know deep in our hearts that this is not who we are as a species, that we are capable of greatness even in our darkest moments.

I pray that we come to know that this it is universally applicable, because when we know this as a species we will know peace.

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Women as Noble Beings

by Julie on March 13, 2013 · 2 comments

I was born in the ‘50s, and grew up in the 60’s and 70’s. I remember shows like Donna Reed and Father Knows Best, where the Mother was always wearing an apron and being sweet and kind, and the Father was the breadwinner and the wise one. By the end of each show, everyone was happy, all problems were resolved, and everyone knew their place. On the surface, so many families seemed to be the same; yet, underneath, most were not even close.

In this kind of ‘pretend’ environment, my parents divorced in 1964. I remember how hard it was for my mother when she became a single mother with three little girls, trying to make ends meet to put enough food on the table and keep the roof over our heads. I remember how afraid she was, how alone she felt, and how judged single mothers were at that time.

I remember the feminist movement. I remember people (not only men) totally trashing the women who were speaking out. These women were speaking out to effect real change so that women, like my mother, could get better jobs, earn more money, and have a modicum of respect in the culture. We were trying to break free from the chains and bindings that had kept women contained. I remember how these women who led the women’s liberation movement were called horrible and ugly names for speaking out.

At my young age, I remember how much I feared being cast-out like that, cast-out for speaking out with power about the truth of how things really were…and are. I am not saying all feminists were right and righteous, and those who opposed them bad; what I am saying is that the cultural paradigm of patriarchy rose up fast and hard to put these women back in their place. It wasn’t pretty.

I remember the not-so-easy discourse around the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). I remember wondering why on earth we needed the ERA. I had learned in school that we were all equal under the constitution. I was beginning to see that real life did not reflect our founding documents or what we saw on television. In growing up, I was beginning to clearly see the truth of the world I was becoming an adult in.

I remember being amazed that the ERA did not get ratified in all fifty states. It is still only in effect in twenty-one states. I remember wondering why people would not want women to have equal rights? What was that about?

In hindsight, I see how the women’s liberation movement had to push hard against a societal construct that was trying to keep women controlled and dominated – in the kitchen, or if they were working, making much less pay with a whole lot less options; how it seemed like the only way out was to prove that we could do what men did just as well as they did it; and how ‘traditional women’s work’ was not the only thing we could do.

I sit here remembering so many ways in which women have been undervalued for far too long. I sit here remembering how hard women, and some men, have worked for equality for women.

It took decades of women fighting for the right to vote to finally win what in hindsight seems only right and natural. Why?

Now in my fifties, a grandmother to four beautiful children, I see this world as it is right now in 2013. I see how little heart is in the institutions of our current culture. I see, still, how little our culture values traditionally ‘feminine’ things such as caring for the poor, teaching the young, honoring the elderly, valuing wisdom, taking care of the planet, and making sure all people have access to basic human needs.

I see that somewhere back in the history of humans, caring for children, caring for others, and caring for the home became something less than, something looked down upon, something not of value. I see how women still are not valued, how feminine traits are denigrated, while masculine ones continue to be praised and admired.

What has this devaluation of the feminine done to our world? When we don’t value, deeply value, that which is at the root of relieving suffering in human lives and the human heart, valuing the very planet on which our lives (and the future lives of generations to come) depend, and seeing the beauty and sacredness of life itself, what do our lives boil down to?

Woman in a barley field, Ladakh, India.

Tenderness of the heart and tending the hearth are not inconsequential offerings. Both literally and metaphorically, our world is hungering for these.

It is inhumane to expect people to continually pull themselves up by their own ‘bootstraps’ without needing anything from anyone. That is what’s expected in a hyper-masculine culture where being needy for anything or anyone is weak, and holding emotions in is strong and righteous. It is inhuman and inhumane.

What is human is the way of the heart, of connection and relationship. We do need each other. It’s a very human thing to need each other. Being human is a vulnerable proposition. To think otherwise, is to pretend we are separate from each other, or that we are machines of some kind.

I remember, somewhere deep within me, a time when I knew life differently as a woman, a time when women walked as noble beings. We can walk again as noble beings, knowing we embody the Feminine and are sacred vessels for life. We can walk again as noble beings, knowing the earth, too, is a sacred vessel for life. It is a deeply sacred relationship women’s bodies have with the earth body.To bring the heart back into life, it is time we women value our femaleness: our power to nurture and nourish, our ability to feel deeply, our wisdom that fills our bones, our vibrant and sacred creativity, our vital life force that fuels our sexuality, our powerful voices, and our capacity for fierce, fierce love. This is not in place of our ability to get things done in the world – we know how to do this. Rather, it is bringing this awareness, this value, and this knowing back into our daily lives.

In valuing these things, we bring ourselves back into balance, a balance of the masculine and feminine within. As we do this, as we embody our femaleness, aware of the sacredness of our bodies, we model what it is to respect the feminine in a world that has forgotten how to do so. And as we do this, we hold out our hands and hearts to the men in our lives, inviting them to do the same – to respect the feminine within us and to embody the feminine within themselves.

May we all, women and men, walk on the earth with feet of love. May we all become conscious of the immense gift of life, and allow this knowing to wake us up to the joyful responsibility we have to be engaged, creative, and giving members of this world village.

O riginally posted at Roots of She.

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International Women’s Day – Coming Home to Soul

by Julie on March 8, 2013 · 3 comments

As we celebrate International Women’s Day, 2013, let us reclaim what it is to be a whole women. There are aspects of womanhood that have been dormant during these times of patriarchal ways, yet we are now in times of remembering these ways. Let us guide each other back into living the wholeness of womanhood.

Silver Waterfall

We’ve all (men and women) been well trained in the ways of the masculine mind. It’s the basis for our school systems. We’ve been trained to believe in, and be good at, black and white thinking, linear problem solving, and rational decision-making. We’ve been taught to value bullet points over poetic imagery, clear thinking over murky emotions, and rugged individuality over interconnectedness. While helpful in some areas of life, in reality, as a way to live life, this training hurts us all, and it especially hurts women.

The linear, rational mind that’s been conditioned to believe it has all the answers, can control and dominate life, and should be the master over feeling and mystery, is not very good at navigating life.

Life is inherently messy.

Life is unknowable.

Life is full of a multitude of experiences.

Life is always changing.

When the conditioned mind believes it is omnipotent, we make decisions (really important decisions) based on ‘hard facts’ – numbers, data, and rational reasoning. We forget we have hearts and bodies. We forget we have souls. We forget we are connected to the web of life. We forget we have an intuitive capacity that is far more intelligent and capable of living life and than our rational capacity could ever hope to be.

We begin to believe we are our thinking patterns and emotional tailspins.

As a young girl, I was wildly energetic and vivaciously in love with color and creation. I remember how it felt – so much beauty, so much feeling, and so much joy. But as I got older, it became clear that the logical, rational mind was king, and everything not logical was to be distrusted. And as I got older, our home became more chaotic, with a deep sense of impending doom. As life became crazy, I longed to have something to gauge things by. Good grades, following rules, being polite became important ways to feel in control and good about myself.

So women’s consciousness can hold many things in relationship all the time. But what happened in the last centuries is that as women became educated in schools and colleges designed by men to teach men how to think in a masculine way, they absorbed this masculine consciousness. They overlaid their feminine relationship understanding with a masculine mind. And because they wanted to succeed in a man’s world, they focused their energy on this masculine way of thinking. But it doesn’t fully work for them – it is not in harmony with their real nature…

~Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, The Return of the Feminine and the World Soul

Goodness in this culture is evaluated in a hierarchical, black and white way…the very essence of the conditioned masculine mind. I learned that wildness and abandon were at the bottom of the scale, ways of being to push away, while a good grasp of math and science was near the top, with obedience to rules (for girls and women) at the very top.

The chaos I felt as a child became manageable if I could find something to hold me, something rigid and knowable, something that felt like structure, and so following the rules gave me a sense of rigidity that allowed me to let go and breathe. Well, not really – it actually caused me to be tight and only breath down to my neck, but then the mind is good at making up fibs…big fat fibs.

When the nuclear family isn’t so nuclear, we long to feel something is holding us. And when we grow up in a culture that only values the nuclear family, we find we don’t have a village to hold us, and we don’t have an understanding of interconnectedness or how this interconnectedness might already be available to us through life itself.

To a certain extent, most of us in the west have been trained to not trust these things, so we neither create them, nor do we look for them. We’ve been taught to believe the earth is dead, so we feel no sense of belonging to something larger than this culture that is hell-bent on women following the rules.

Hence, I internalized a hunter, a predator. This hunter would track down anything too wild, too out there, and too far from the top of the chart of goodness and kill it, and then toss it into the shadow regions to decay. In the wild girl’s place, a good girl was born that was rigid, had to be right, and most importantly had to be polite and nice – although those things don’t really go together do they? Having to be right isn’t really truly nice, is it? It’s funny how none of this is logical at all.

I don’t know about you, but I do know that everything I’ve been taught about the ‘way things are’ is being blown apart by the very clear recognition that nothing is the way it seems to be.

Over the past two decades, I’ve been breaking free from this internal hunter – the one that learned that safety comes from figuring things out, from knowing what is good vs. bad, from being nice and polite and hiding all the juicy, delectable parts of that wild child. This breaking apart has come in chunks, sometimes it comes in big chunks that leave me a bit lost and befuddled.

Deconstruction of the mind is a funny thing. The more it deconstructs, the more I see and know the lack of any kind of solid structure. Yet, what I have found is the heart, the heart and soul that are so beautiful at living a life that is mysterious by nature. While the conditioned mind loves rigidity and structure, the heart knows something the mind could never know – it knows truth, and it knows the soul, which also knows wildness and abandon.

The soul calls us home, and like a wild animal, it leaves a scent as it moves through the brush. But this scent is not a scent the hunter can find. The soul is wily this way.

No, the hunter has no business in this soul brush, so the soul leaves a scent that only the wild child can find. I’ve had to get down on all fours, nose to the earth to discover it. I’ve had to walk barefoot through the mud again; I’ve had to dance until the sweat pours off me and then dance some more; I’ve had to paint large swaths of yellow paint across the paper to remember what this wild child loved; and, I’ve had to leave relationships that I used as structures of seeming safety rather than openings to soul.

I’ve had to come to see that there is no safety, not the kind I longed to know as a child.

What there is instead, now that this child is older and wiser, is a deep belonging to the earth, a belonging that cannot be denied by political positioning, nor laws that don’t honor this woman’s body.

I’ve come to know an autonomy that can only be found within the realm of the soul. I’ve come home to a longing for the divine that can only be traversed through the deepest, most interior chambers of the heart.

Coming home to the soul is the coming home we’ve longed for our entire lives. May we come to remember that we are held by the earth and by the web of life, and may we remember our responsibility to the children, to this earth and all of her creatures, and to each other, women and men.

This post was originally written for and posted at Roots of She.

image “Silver Waterfall” By onlynick : Some rights reserved

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Body and Moon, Cycles and Rhythms

by Julie on March 4, 2013 · 6 comments

At the bottom of this post, I ask questions of you that I’d really love to hear your wisdom on. I hope you’ll share.

In our current faced-paced, and growing faster each day, culture, for the most part we ignore nature’s cycles and rhythms. Most of the rhythms we do follow are man-made: our current-day calendar, 9 to 5, Monday thru Friday, and school to work to retirement, to name a few.

Yet, life moves in rhythms and cycles that are tuned in to each other. The tides follow the moon, birds sing wildly (like they are doing outside my living room window right now) each spring, and women’s bodies for much of one’s life have a cycle that allows it to be a receptive home to new life coming into being.

Painting by my Great-Grandmother from 1899

Somewhere, sometime a while back, I considered how my monthly cycle was tied to the moon. I’m not sure where I read it. I know I didn’t learn it from my mother or in school. And, after my surgically induced menopause at the age of 29,

I never considered, nor was I counseled to consider in my process of recovery, that as I no longer had a cycle, I could follow the moon’s phases instead. I wish I’d known this. Looking back over the past 27 years since my surgery, I can see how I’ve floated a bit, meaning I haven’t really been grounded in a rhythm.

Why is that important? Because as a woman, I am deeply in tune with the earth and with life, and when my own cycle ended with that big long incision, my deeper relationship with life and the earth was cut, too.

Of course, we don’t have to have everything removed to lose touch with our own connection to our body, and in response the connection between our body and the earth. Just living in a culture that no longer thinks of the earth as a living, breathing being causes us to not consider such things.

Just yesterday, as part of Sara Avant Stover’s “I Heart My Moon Cycle” month, she shared a video I shot while I was on Molokai. For these 28 days, Sara is sharing stories from 28 women about their moon cycles. I wondered about participating, since I don’t have a cycle…technically, that is. But Sara encouraged me to share, wanting to have stories from women who are in all of the phases of life.

Last week, after years of knowing each other online, I got to spend time with Sara in the flesh. We took a leasurely walk, along with my dear friend, Tara Mohr, into the Presidio land, here in San Francisco. We talked of many things. What I loved, though, was getting to know her presence, getting to feel how she moves through the world grounded in her body. And, we talked about what it means to move with the cycles of the moon when a woman no longer has her own internal cycle. Thank you, Sara, for opening me to consider how my life might be more supported by moving with the cycles of the moon.

Since that day last week, I’ve been contemplating this for my life – what it would mean to move with the cycles of the moon. And, since Sara released my video, I’ve received inquires from other women on how I know when to rest if my body no longer has a cycle. And the answer is, I haven’t know when to rest. I keep moving through my days, as if there is no cycle.

What this brings up for me is wonder about how many ways are we tied to the earth and the moon even if we don’t know it. How are our bodies interacting with the cycles of life, even if and when we continue to move with the culturally constructed rhythms that most likely do not support our full health, full creativity, and full happiness?

I know that simply by being, we can feel our connection to all of life. Our bodies can guide us to remember and re-member. I know how important this is for me as I get older, to listen to the rhythms so that I don’t get so overtired from constantly moving, and just as importantly so that I fully embody the gifts of womanhood, gifts that I am hungering for, and that the world itself is hungering for.

The rhythms and cycles are important to my creativity and what I desire for my work in the world, as well as to the creativity of our world at large.

So my questions of you are:

How do you move with the cycles and rhythms of your body, and the bodies of nature?

If you are in menopause, what cycles speak to you?

If you had a hysterectomy and are not yet in age-related menopause, what have you discovered? I really want to know.

I want to hear your wisdom. I know it will help me to listen to mine.

I hope you’ll take a look at the stories that women are sharing on Sara’s site. And, I hope you take a few moments to listen to mine. I share a few intimate stories. And, if you listen closely, you’ll be able to hear the birdsong of the island all around me.

image: This image is part of a painting done by my great-grandmother, Clarissa Ruh. I sense she was in touch with the moon.

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Bone Knowing : Wisdom is Real

by Julie on February 28, 2013 · 9 comments

Set the Night on Fire

The bones know. There is such a thing as bone knowing.

Not too long ago, I went to listen to a man give a talk on awakening and living truth. He’s wise and vibrantly alive. He spoke of not knowing, about how there is so much we really don’t know if we just allow ourselves to be honest with ourselves.

I’ve come to realize that what I’d been holding onto as truth was really just a belief system to help me manage the unknown. Not knowing can generate so much fear. We unwittingly develop a worldview stuffed with beliefs to manage the fear. Yet, when we feel into the nature of the unknown, really feel into it, it’s not so frightening. It’s actually really pregnant with possibility, with aliveness, with the divine. It is spacious and vibrant, a pulsing sea of love without conditions.

It’s funny how we want to put conditions on it, even though we crave and thirst for unconditional love!

During this man’s talk, and then follow-up question and answer session, as he spoke of not knowing, others began to speak to the feeling that they realize they don’t know anything. That’s not quite right – what I heard, was the recognition of a similar understanding, yet what I also heard was a disowning of things we do know. My ears perked up, because in my experience, while I do know this pregnant sea of possibility and silence, I also know that there are things I know, really know, deep in my bones. I could feel myself squirming as the discussion of not knowing kept going – in particular, when I heard this one woman speaking of not knowing and how she didn’t know what to trust.

Something in me had to speak. I had to speak about the wisdom of the bones. Something pushed me to speak.

So, I did. I raised my hand and said, “Yes, yes, I understand about the not-knowing. If I am truthful with myself, there is so much I don’t know. I really don’t know what is going to happen in the next minute, or in the next, or the next. My rational mind thinks it can know, and I can see it’s my mind’s way of thinking into the unknown. I get this.”

“And, there are some things I DO know, some things I know so deeply in my bones, things I just can feel and when I speak of them I feel the knowing so deep that it feels like it’s in the marrow. It’s the feminine knowing, the wisdom of Sophia. It’s a kind of knowing that runs so deep below the surface of things it could be easy to miss, and is easy to miss if I am not in my body. This river of knowing winds its way through my body – through the cells, the flesh, the blood and the bones. My bones know. They know. I know this. I know this wisdom. It is real and alive.”

Then, I asked him, “Can you speak to that?” I was asking him to expand on this idea with his wisdom. He looked at me and said, “I don’t need to. You just did.”

I realized, my bones had spoken. I knew this. I didn’t need anyone to help me understand what I already knew. He knew I knew. He honored this. He didn’t need to say anything. So lovely.

In my spiritual life and the experiences I have searched out in a almost-rabid attempt to ‘wake-up’, I’ve spent many hours, sometimes days, even weeks, attempting to lose myself in the attempt to know the numinous. Looking back, I know none of it has been in vain. In fact, questioning the worth of it is a bit silly, because it is what I’ve done and where I’ve been.

One thing I’ve discovered, though, is that no matter how often or much I experience this transcendent quality of the divine, I still end up back here, alive in this body called Julie. It’s taken me some time to want to be here. It used to be that so much of what I felt in my body was painful. There were so many old fears, wounds, and raw experiences that I just didn’t want to feel or remember. But, something in my life was missing, too. The everyday, seemingly mundane, things were calling to me. Life was calling to me to come back home to here, to the body, to the senses.

There is this Oneness, this vast emptiness and fullness, the transcendent. And, within this Oneness there is this real, human life. There is the spirit and there is matter. Bones know. Wisdom is real.

A woman’s spirituality is really centered in this humanness, this expression of humanity that is at the heart of a woman’s experience. It is of the body, the earth, the bones, and flesh and blood. To know this realm of wisdom, we have to come down into the cells that make up the body; we have to come down into the cells and feel.

Yes, we may find things we don’t want to feel, things that caused us to go up into the head to begin with. Yes, it isn’t just wonderful and light and flowers, but even the things we don’t want to feel are part of this very real gift that is life.

This is the doorway to healing. This is the door to the sacred. This is the doorway to the soul, to the wisdom of the bones. This is the doorway to joy, the joy of an embodied life. This is the doorway to living the numinous right here on earth, right here in these bones that know.

These bones are not separate from the numinous, luminous spirit. The sacred is bone. The sacred is blood. The sacred is flesh. The sacred is woman – all of her beautiful wild self, including the fire, including the fierce, including the, “Hell no, this is not okay and I won’t stand for it anymore.”

Trust the bones for very practical reasons. The bones will guide you as you maneuver through your day. They’ll guide you as you raise your children or birth your creations. They’ll help you navigate your relationship with your honey and make major life decisions. Yes, your rational mind has a purpose; and, when you bring it into right relationship with your bones, you’ll find it’s a powerful combination to guide you through life. It’s a good balance between your own masculine and feminine.

Trust this. Trust you. Trust the body. Trust your voice. Trust the bones as you speak your voice. In fact, let your bones speak. You’ll be amazed at what they know and share.

This post was originally shared here as part of the Fall Tribe, ’12, for Roots of She.

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Creation and the Bedroom

by Julie on February 19, 2013 · 3 comments

Today, Wild Writing took me here. The poem that ignited this piece was ‘Domestic’ by Deborah Landau. Catalyst phrases from the poem by Deborah Landau are in pink.

I like the bedroom man.
Take me to the door.
Take me.

Something longs inside me. Or is it something calls to me from inside? A longing that is sensuous in its flavor.

When I follow, I land down somewhere in my sacral bowl, sacral for sacred because it is so. The landing is clear and simple, but the way to getting there is anything but.

Down in this bowl where darkness reigns, there is a sweet intoxication, lover and beloved wrapped around each other, not even close to the clump of matter I used to think existed in this place inside my body.

Dakrness as in creation, not as in the many ways we sometimes see this place in a woman’s body.
Creation. A bowl. Ingredients stirred. Something grows.

Banana blossom

* I’m thinking about the orchard, how each morning I’d take my basket and wind my way down to the first tree along the path. Bright yellow bumpy lemons. Not once did She drop one for me to gather. I shook her, yet there was no letting go. Next, avocado and mangos. After the wild winds, the avocados, bigger than my two fists together, would lie waiting for me, sometimes with rat gnashes all around one end. Bananas. Papayas. Nonis.

The citrus trees showed me something. I will never forget. Limes, lemons, grapefruits, and oranges of all sizes and shapes, colors and textures; except for the limes, it was hard to tell what was what. And even then, the limes weren’t always green.

One grapefruit in particular taught me how we can be so many colors and not one at all. Pink, green, orange, yellow, and red spread out around its weighty sphere. I relished how She paints the canvas of her creation. I cried at how she holds on until we are ready to be birthed, picked up, appreciated, held, then eaten and enjoyed. Such intricate and supremely intelligent beauty She creates.

* A few hours later, after my harvest in the orchard, just on the edge of town, I drive by the uber-uniformed rows of corn plants, so closely planted there is no room for the wild wind to shake them.

Exactly the same height.
Exactly the same width.
Exactly the same.
Places please.

A cold shiver runs through me as I witness the raping of Mother Nature.

There is no surprise, no collage of color, no bumpy skin, no gangley, gnarly diversity.

There is only same.

Uniformed acquiescence created by the man who knows nothing of the bedroom.

I weep. We are out of order but not broken.

* My first shared words from my recent time on Molokai.

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Patriarchy vs Love: Time for Men to RISE

by Julie on February 16, 2013 · 2 comments

I came across this post today and my heart broke open. I began to cry. I read them again, and I began to weep. I was taken aback by the intensity of feeling. I had no idea I would feel so seen, so understood, so hopeful upon hearing words such as these for the first time in my life from men I’d never met. The chains are breaking.

What I love about this post, is that it happened spontaneously, on the street, between two men who were strangers. And, as they spoke of what was happening, they expressed such grief and love, and wondered how they could change it. Then, they went on their way.

I wrote to the author, Dan Mahle, and asked if I could share the post here with you. He said, Yes.

This post was originally published at Change From Within, by Jamie Utt, Dan’s friend. Here we go…

Dan Mahle at the 1 Billion Rising event in Seattle, WA

This week’s post comes from a dear friend.

Dan Mahle is a program coordinator, facilitator, and community builder living in Seattle, WA. He received his B.A. in Peace and Global Studies from Earlham College in 2008. He has been involved in a variety of non-profit organizations since then, including several youth programs that he helped to launch. His personal mission is to support people in uniting across lines of difference to identify common values & goals, build culture & community resilience, and share powerful stories through creative expression. When he’s not working, he can be found running, hiking, writing music, and eating tasty bowls of cereal late at night.

——————

One Conversation: A Call to Men

I had an incredible conversation with a complete stranger today. He was an older guy who happened to stop by the 1 Billion Rising local event that took place in downtown Seattle. As I was walking toward the small crowd of mostly women who were holding signs and dancing, he stopped me with a loud, “Hey, what is this ‘1 Billion Rising’ thing?”

When I told him that it was a global movement to end violence against women, launched by Vagina Monologues playwright, Eve Ensler, his voice softened and his eyes darted away.

He started telling me about how violence had affected so many of the women in his life. He began tearing up as he shared that most of the women he loves have been victims of sexual assault and/or abuse. He recalled spending 15 years with his ex-wife who, despite endless medications, could not overcome the depression she felt ever since the day she was sexually assaulted. I could see the hurt and sadness in his face as he told me that he couldn’t find any way to help her. His mother, he said, had also been a survivor.

Suddenly staring firmly at me, he said, “Women shouldn’t be treated this way. They are the life-givers; we owe everything to them.” He was visibly shaken.

I looked back at him and asked, “So what can we, as men, do to begin to transform this culture of violence against women?”

We talked about how important it would be for more men to have honest conversations about patriarchy and its countless negative impacts on us and on the women in our lives. Both of us acknowledged, though, that these kinds of safe spaces for male emotional expression are few and far between.

I gave him a hug and he said, “I love you, man.” We had met just 5 minutes before, but the moment of solidarity and healing that we shared in that short space was profound.

It got me thinking: Why don’t we, as men, seek out more spaces for truthful sharing about our feelings and our experiences with patriarchy? Why don’t we talk about violence against women, about sexism, and about rape culture? The ‘1 Billion Rising’ movement is based on a single, chilling statistic: One in three women on the planet will be raped or beaten in her lifetime.

That’s 1 billion women worldwide. How can we say that we love the women in our lives, even as we are perpetuating (consciously or unconsciously) a culture of violence against them?” Every day that we are silent, the cycle of violence continues.

The Cost of Patriarchy

This is where shame often comes in. I’ve known it by many names: frustration, defensiveness, anger, aggression, rage, a need for control, etc. But it all comes back to shame. It all comes back to some deep-seated feeling of unworthiness that keeps us from meeting our most fundamental human need: the need to feel loved.

While women in our society are taught that their worth depends on their physical beauty, men are taught that our worth depends upon our performance, our control, our accomplishments. At some point, like so many women, many of us realize that we will never be able to fulfil the expectations placed on us. But instead of questioning the patriarchal culture that has burdened us with these perverse and insatiable demands, we come to believe that who we are is not good enough.

In an effort to avoid feelings of vulnerability, we methodically replace emotional expression with emotional numbness. And so, in our disconnection from self and others, we unlearn what it means to truly love.

As bell hooks puts it in her book, The Will To Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, “The reality is that men are hurting and that the whole culture responds to them by saying, ‘Please do not tell us what you feel.’”

When we forget what it means to love, we often desperately search for cheap replacements: we work long hours at work in an attempt to receive praise and recognition; we watch porn or buy prostitutes in a distorted attempt to feel loved and sexually fulfilled; we buy an endless number of things in an attempt to fill the painful void of loneliness within. Until we, as men, face our fear of vulnerability and begin telling each other what we feel, nothing will change.

Right now, there is a powerful, growing movement of women who are rising up all around the world to demand an end to violence. This movement is a struggle for equality, but it is also a call back to love. It is an invitation to all people to transform the dominant culture from a culture of violence to a culture of love, starting from within our own hearts. We owe it to all women to stand beside them as they say “enough is enough!” We owe it to ourselves to finally invite love, in all of its fullness, back into our lives.

Learn more about 1 Billion Rising here.

“This movement is a struggle for equality, but it is also a call back to love.”

Blessings to you, Dan. I bow.

{ 2 comments }

A tsunami doesn’t just stop when the clock strikes midnight!

by Julie on February 15, 2013 · 6 comments

Now what?

One Billion Rising is over. And, it has just begun.

I first joined One Billion Rising about a year ago. The day, Feb 14, 2013, seemed so far off. Yet, the vision pulled me in. One Billion women rising. I wondered how that would shift things. I wondered how that would change the feeling on the planet, in our cities, in our hearts.

Altar by Stacey Butcher

Last night, I co-led a beautiful event with Stacey Butcher, a teacher of 5Rhythms. Stacey created a gorgeous dance wave and she led us through it with love and grace. Kim Rosen, a well known spoken-word artist, and a personal friend of Eve Ensler’s, shared two spoken-word treasures that lit a fire in us before we moved into the dance. And, for the last song of the wave, Christine Hodil sang a beautiful song that we all joined in on at the end. Our hearts were opened, moved, fired-up, and lullabied. We were the one billion, and we danced for the one billion. And, there were so many men present, who danced alongside of us, who danced for the women they love, and for the women they don’t even know who continue to face abuse, violence, and harassment.

It is jarring to be in a beautiful event such as this, to open our hearts, to invite in the possibility for a world that is different, and then to step back into what seems to be the same old world.

What I do know, now, after witnessing so many women and men across the planet rising and dancing by way of live-streaming and the internet, is that this is no longer the same old world. While on the outside it may look that way, on the inside we are changed. We’ve cracked open the cage. We know something different now. We’ve experienced the fire and joy and creativity that comes when we dance, and come together, and rise.

One Billion Rising IS a new way of life. It’s a new way of being. It’s living unabashedly the fullness of our womanhood.

In practical terms? It’s about allowing out all the parts of ourselves we keep hidden for fear of being abused and harassed.

Our patriarchal conditioning keeps an essential aspect of us locked up in an internal prison…the aspect that is the most powerful and enlivening for our souls. This aspect is nourishing and healing. It is our instinctual, sexual self, that when expressed brings forth playfulness, joy, passion, creativity, and a good dose of fire. It is not easily controllable, meaning our own internal conditioning has to work really hard to control it. It gets exhausting.

You know what I’m talking about, don’t you!?

We’ve internalized the oppressor, so we continue the oppression against ourselves, along with the fear of oppression from outside. Eve Ensler so wisely saw that we have to break the chains ourselves, we have to break out of the cage we keep ourselves in, and dancing is a beautiful way to free this instinctive erotic nature that is both organic to our souls and a sacred aspect of life.

Before I go any further, I want to reiterate, that the erotic as it is understood in the current paradigm, is simply a small thin slice of what it truly is. When I shared my thoughts with one man I know and used the word erotic, his response? “That’s porn.” This is what we’ve been conditioned to think eros and the erotic are.

Yet, what the erotic is is a beautiful aspect of life, this aspect that is at the heart of our creative, sensual, sexual, joyful, and loving natures. And because it is at the heart of creativity and embodied love, it is also the channel that will bring about lasting change, and deep nourishment to a world that has been out of balance for far too long.

And, it is exactly what our world hungers for just as it is what we hunger for. How could it be otherwise?

Life is wholeness. When we pretend we aren’t whole, we aren’t really fully living.

To dance is to unleash joy.

To dance is to step back into the flow, to move that which has been stuck.

To dance is also to reawaken our natural relationship to the body, to music, to rhythm, and to the beat of the drum, the beat of our blood pressure, the beat of our hearts.

One Billion Rising is “unleashing a feminist tsunami, an energetic rearrangement of our universal chemistry. the biggest volunteer action maybe ever of women across the planet, a seismic collective remembering of who we are, a calling back of our authenticity, a world dance shaking up our original energy and wisdom.” ~ Eve Ensler

So what do I now know that I didn’t know before yesterday, V-Day 2013?

I know that we can come together as women to reawaken our wisdom and nature.

I know that we are hungering to rekindle the fire of our erotic nature.

I know that many men all around us want us to do this. They know they cannot. And they know that it is in all of our best interests to do so.

I know that many women fear this aspect, along with many men. And, I know we have the courage to dance through this fear for the sake of life itself.

I know that dance is sacred, that our bodies are sacred, and that it is up to us to embody this truth.

I know that women have something important to do in this new era that men cannot do and it is time we do it.

I know we’ve stepped through a threshold and we cannot turn back.

I know that women across this planet can come together to rise in service to each other, and to all of life.

I know this. We’ve witnessed it. I felt it last night. I feel it today. I feel it right now.

Margaret Mead wrote, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

If a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world, just imagine what a feminist tsunami of a billion women and men dancing can do. Imagine it. Feel it in your bones. Pray it. Dance it. Paint it. Sing it.

A tsunami doesn’t just stop when the clock strikes midnight!

Take your sisters and brothers by hand and step across the threshold into this new land. And, keep dancing. We must be committed to dancing. We are in this together. Isn’t that a wonderful thing to know!

I’m putting together the pieces I read last night, along with a little something else, into a complimentary ebook for my newsletter subscribers. If you’d like to receive it, be sure to sign up for my newsletter in the top right corner of the page. When it is ready, I’ll send it your way.

Here’s the One Billion Rising video from San Francisco. It’s hard to see me, but I’m there. I love seeing myself dancing. I’m so serious here, so passionate. It’s a lovely thing when you FINALLY accept your intensity is a beautiful thing.

{ 6 comments }

Dance to Break the Chain

by Julie on February 4, 2013 · 2 comments

On Sat Jan 26, I participated in a flash mob for One Billion Rising. If you don’t yet know what this is, take a peek here. Short version – it’s Eve Ensler’s vision to have one billion women strike, dance, and rise to end global violence against women. One in three women on this earth will be sexually abused or beaten in her lifetime. One in three. Think about the women in your life. Out of every three, one will have to endure this violence. And, you might even be that one in three. I am.

At this time, 190 out of the world’s 193 countries plan to participate.

You probably all know what a flash mob is. This was not really a flash, but still a mob…about three hundred of us. We gathered downtown, across the street from the Ferry building, and right near San Francisco’s financial district. We were there to perform the dance that Debby Allen choreographed for One Billion Rising to the song, Break the Chain.

Many women and men volunteered their time to help teach, to organize, to set-up, and to ultimately help to put on this day, as well as the other four performances to be held in the next month or so around the San Francisco bay area.

On V-Day, always held on Feb 14, VDay, we will gather again, this time at the Civic Center in San Francisco to do the same dance, and in the evening in Fairfax to dance a 5Rhythms wave – all to strike, dance and rise, in support of ending global violence against women.

On this day, though, I was deeply moved by what I experienced dancing to rise up, in solidarity, to this violence, and to the complacency so many of us seem to have to the kind of culture that breeds it. I’m a dancer. I love the dance. I’ve been dancing for over ten years, now, and lately many of my friends from the coaching world have begun dancing, too. Friends I have known for these ten years danced alongside me.

On this day, the dance was holy – holy moments of dancing with 300 other women and men; holy moments literally dancing to Break the Chain, as well as metaphorically to break the chain; holy moments dancing with my whole body and whole heart for everyone who cannot dance, everyone who is not free.

My friend, Amrit Rai, and her husband Larry came to the city to watch the dance. They are both part of my dance community. I spoke with Amrit after the dance, and she shared her experience of watching. She spoke of the depth of feeling that she witnessed as we danced. Her words pointed to something very similar to what I felt dancing, yet she wasn’t dancing. I asked her to share them here:

“When Larry and I first arrived I felt immediately uplifted as the collective field that was forming was one of inclusion and joy. The thought of witnessing a herstoric, dancing event in the financial district environment had me curious. On getting there we were immediately whisked onto the stairs by a couple of women in the crowd. We had the perfect view overlooking the center area where the dancers were starting to gather.

The most moving thing to me was seeing so many familiar faces from the dance community and to see a united moving body– moving together on behalf of women’s rights and freedom.

The dancers and group energy field was infused with heart — I couldn’t help from clapping and singing in solidarity.

I noticed that the dancers were the most moved of everyone in the crowd. Tears, expressions of awe and reverence were visible in their faces and palpable.

My sense of it was that it is important to be a direct participant in such a movement– that the actual embodiment itself makes a deeper commitment to what it is we are standing for, or rather dancing for – being a participant is at the core of the change.

I am happy that the collective WE is bringing light to such basic issues using such potent healing modalities, LOVE and UNITY– so much more energetically potent than protesting, and the embodiment piece is brilliant– wisdom in action!

Resonance informed transformation. Infectious and unifying! I loved it!

I left there with true hope in my belly for a loving and humane world. One in which life is celebrated and every being feels a deep sense of belonging.

When we act from our deepest desires, and from our own internal knowing, a powerful force is unleashed.
When our action is grounded in something we truly love, as it is here in the dance for me and for so many of the people in the dance community I am so lucky to be a part of, joy is also released, joy married with a desire to serve healing and life.

Our denial can be great; I know mine is. For me, denial is a many-layered thing. Denial creates a fog that makes it easy to continue functioning in the day-to-day, all the while underneath it we know we are not listening to our hearts, and we are not taking responsibility for the wellbeing of life. When we get into the body and feel, we can no longer deny what is true. The body moves toward life, toward love. The body moves toward healing.

On Feb 14th, VDay, we all can rise. Just think of the shift on our planet when One Billion women (and the men who will take the step forward to dance alongside of us, knowing that violence against women is not just a women’s problem) dance for liberation, dance for the end of the status quo, dance for freedom from violence for everyone, the entire planet will feel it. Think of the joy we will release through our feet, feet that connect with the earth. The earth needs to know joy, too.

Amrit is right: To embody this movement of rising, this movement of solidarity between women and men, this movement of love is an incredible experience. To feel it in your cells, to engage the body in dance, in music and joy, is to bring one’s whole self to stand for change.

What I noticed was that I wasn’t fighting against, but rather I was dancing for a new dawn, a new day. Dancing with my dancing friends, with such beautiful music and moves, for freedom from violence amidst the tall buildings of San Francisco’s financial district was surreal. It was as if two worlds were colliding for me. Dance is something that I do where most of the rest of the world doesn’t see it. To bring so much love and passion out into the street taught me something. It taught me that dance must no longer stay separate form the rest of my life. What I experience on the dance floor is holy. And what I experience dancing out in Justin Herman Plaza was holy. Dance is holy joy.

In the evening of Feb 14th, on V-day, Stacey Butcher and I will be hosting a 5Rhythms wave in Fairfax, a small town in Marin. Kim Rosen, a poet, will also join us sharing some of her spoken word poetry. It will be a joyous rising up, a striking for justice and love. If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, please join us. You can sign-up here.

Silence is no longer an option.

Break the Chain Lyrics

Lyrics by Tena Clark
Music by Tena Clark/Tim Heintz

I raise my arms to the sky
On my knees I pray
I’m not afraid anymore
I will walk through that door
Walk, dance, rise
Walk, dance, rise

I can see a world where we all live
Safe and free from all oppression
No more rape or incest, or abuse
Women are not a possession

You’ve never owned me, don’t even know me
I’m not invisible, I’m simply wonderful
I feel my heart for the first time racing
I feel alive, I feel so amazing

I dance cause I love
Dance cause I dream
Dance cause I’ve had enough
Dance to stop the screams
Dance to break the rules
Dance to stop the pain
Dance to turn it upside down
Its time to break the chain, oh yeah
Break the Chain
Dance, rise
Dance, rise

In the middle of this madness, we will stand I know there is a better world
Take your sisters & your brothers by the hand
Reach out to every woman & girl
This is my body, my body’s holy
No more excuses, no more abuses
We are mothers, we are teachers,
We are beautiful, beautiful creatures

I dance cause I love
Dance cause I dream
Dance cause I’ve had enough
Dance to stop the screams
Dance to break the rules
Dance to stop the pain
Dance to turn it upside down
It’s time to break the chain, oh yeah
Break the Chain, oh yeah
Break the Chain

Dance Break Inst.

Dance, rise
Dance, rise

Sister won’t you help me, sister won’t you rise x4

Dance, rise
Dance, rise

Sister won’t you help me, sister won’t you rise x4

This is my body, my body’s holy
No more excuses, no more abuses
We are mothers, we are teachers,
We are beautiful, beautiful creatures

Strike | Dance | Rise

{ 2 comments }

Hope

by Julie on January 25, 2013 · 6 comments

These words are from my friend, RC.

She wanted to share them, knowing they are intended for more ears and eyes and hearts than just hers; yet, she felt they would not be honored in her own circle.

I know, deep in my bones, how important it is for us to bring what is held deep inside out into the light. I know how important it is to tell each other our stories, and to listen to those stories with our hearts, because the heart does not judge. We need each other to simply hold space for the healing that yearns to happen within each of us.

Standing in front of the mirror, unadorned and unashamed, I remember in my breasts and my belly, in my shoulders and my thighs the freedom she must have felt in the garden. I know the joy of being surrounded by succulent fruit and the caress of perfumed air. I sense the wonder he felt, watching her, adoring her with his eyes, the pleasure he took – and gave – his hands full of her flesh while the divine moved in their midst.

But when I cover myself with my modern fig leaves, the shame pours in, filling my lungs and threatening to drown me.

How can it be that knowing gets twisted, turned back in on itself, split again and again until the truth no longer exists? Starting with that first juicy bite, she has been blamed. And her daughters have borne the burden with every child they carried. Pendulous breasts and widening hips no longer worshipped but feared. Feet that danced now bound. Mutilated, humiliated, beaten and burned – for what sins? The sin of being, of becoming?

Layers of shame interwoven with layers of soil, each aeon invents brutal new methods of pain. And now, we rape the earth and her daughters with equal impunity. Nothing sacred, nothing safe. No elders have to hold us down for mutilation to ensure desire, we submit to the knife so willingly, impossible images of desire carved out of our flesh. We consume but find no satisfaction. We look for the divine behind men enthroned on the altars of religion and government, but she’s not there, and she no longer moves in our midst.

The garden entrance stands guarded by flaming swords, no hope of return. But the images shimmer just on the horizon. Freedom still beckons, reflected in the morning light. I hear the whisper of the divine still moving.

Hope hangs around my neck – a string of perfect pearls.

~ rc

{ 6 comments }

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women's wildly creative leadership emerging from within

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Body and Moon, Cycles and Rhythms

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Patriarchy vs Love: Time for Men to RISE

A tsunami doesn’t just stop when the clock strikes midnight!

Dance to Break the Chain

Hope

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