Creativity

“What is the source of our first suffering?
It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak.
It was born the moment we accumulated silent things within us.”
~Gaston Bachelard

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I’ve been a creativity catalyst now for seven years. At least, that is, professionally.

What’s a creativity catalyst, you ask? A sparker. An illuminator. A mirror. A container. A lover.

For my entire life, I’ve been creative. I’m not talking artistic. I’m talking creative. I’m talking the most basic ability of every living being – the ability to express the impulse that is life itself.  It’s just nature. Like the seed as it grows into what it is destined to become. The ability to express the unfathomable mystery into being. This is creativity. We all have it. We all are it. It’s our nature. It’s our design.

You are creative. It is your nature. Somewhere, within, a voice is sparking you on to grow, to express, to love, to risk, to voice.

Sometimes when people have been silent for too long, their inner plumbing is stopped up. Junk is in the pipes. The junk that adheres around those silent things we accumulate when we don’t trust our own impulse to express.

When expression begins to flow again, it can come out in fits and starts, belching and coughing along as the pipes are cleaned of all that was used to stop them up. You know what I’m talking about? All the crap you and I internalized about our inability to be ‘properly’ creative. To properly speak. To be proper in the act of creation. To NOT express what simply wanted to be said, done, written, painted, danced, loved. AND, to NOT express our own anger, sadness, sense of rejection, sense of futility, insert your feelings here ___________________, because we were told we must plug up the pipes.

So when we first begin to trust our impulse to express, the sludge just might come out first. And the flow might be bumpy and rocky, sort of like when the water is shut off for a bit, then turned back on. The pipes rattle. The water spits. Until the flow returns. The little self, the ego, wants to control the flow, so it can be very careful about what first appears out of the faucet (faucet being mouth, hands, feet, head, body) – all the parts of the body that the divine mystery uses to express through.

One little very important thing here – the sludge is an important part in turning on the flow again. It’s important to allow it through. You don’t have to stop to examine it in minute detail. You don’t have to create and sing another Hallelujah chorus in its name (save that for the Mystery). You don’t have to judge it as it appears. But, if you do, that’s part of the flow, too. You just might do all these things, ’cause you might just be really curious about the sludge, about what’s stopped up your pipes for so long.

I’m writing this today, because over the past few weeks, a number of women have approached me feeling ’something’ within them wanting to express what’s inside. Specifically, they are wanting to blog with vulnerability. They want to begin to write from a more personal point of view, and at the same time, fear being too personal and vulnerable with their potential audience. They fear expressing their own unique expression.

If this reminds you of YOU, remember what Gaston Bachelard said, that our suffering comes from our hesitation to speak.

When I first began to write my websites and newsletters over eight years ago, each word I typed was so carefully crafted. I opened the pipes just a tiny, tiny bit. Maybe a trickle. Even though I created art, words that went into the cyberworld were very carefully crafted. And then, I began to find my voice. Oh, it’s been a long time coming. Not because my voice wasn’t ready. More because I thought I couldn’t find it. The pipes were rattling. The water was spitting. I kept putting my hand over the end of the hose, causing the water (voice) to spray all over, to go all cattywampus. All the while, that ’something’ inside pushed to get out. That urge to sprout, to grow, to become was still doing its thing.

I know, deep in the marrow of my bones, this urge knows exactly what it’s doing. Trust it. It’s a lot more intelligent than the small self gives it credit for. It knows the imprint at the center of your seed. It just wants to become what it’s meant to grow into.

Oh, and by the way, I found a juciy bit-o-sludge just yesterday. I did check it out for a bit. Couldn’t resist.

Best of 2009 Blog Challenge: Day 21: Project. What did you start this year that you’re proud of?

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This year, I began again to write the book I stopped writing five years ago. I stopped writing it when I realized I still had to live much of what the book was to be about. I put it down. It was not time.

Since then, many things have transpired. Life has been full of many twists and turns. My mother was diagnosed with cancer. After a two-year journey with cancer, she passed away last year. My two daughters have given birth to two new grandchildren. And, as I look back, I now can see I have lived into the book. The book is so ready to be born.

This is my project. And, the funny thing is, part of the book has to do with realizing that we must, as women, put down ‘the project’ – that project that keeps us on the never-ending treadmill of trying to be better, more beautiful, sexier, younger, thinner, more perfect, more successful, more fill-in-the-blank if we are to discover who and what we really are underneath all the beliefs that we aren’t enough. I call it ‘the project’. So, when I read Gwen’s prompt, I chuckled at the irony, at least for me.

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“Woman is the radiance of God; she is not your beloved. She is the Creator —you could say that she is not created.” ~Rumi

When we put down that project of not being enough, something that has always been within begins to move and stir and reawaken.

I am excited to birth this book, and to begin to teach the course that is directly intertwined with it. It has to do with women’s creativity, with the life-giving mystery that is within you, and within every woman, and how you and I and all women can awaken, and step into, this natural power, a power that is serves all of life.

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I come from a long line of female artists. My mother, her mother, and her mother, were all painters. I used to paint, many years ago. Now, mostly I write. And dance.

Coming from this maternal lineage of artists, I have always highly valued create expression of any form. I guess that’s why I eventually left the tech world and settled into work that revolves around creativity and coaching.

Up until this year, only one of my mother’s paintings was hanging in my own home. It was a gift for my birthday a few years back.

That changed when mom died last year. By the end of 2008, we had gone through 52 years of layered treasures as we sorted through her belongings. She had lived in the same home for all of those 52 years. It was a many-month, river-of-tears, process to sort through everything she left behind. Sifting through the layers, we discovered more of her paintings, as well as those done by my grandmother and great-grandmother. We sold the house in the last few days of 2008 to a family that promised to love and care for the house my sisters and I grew up in.

Once we sold her house, I these treasured pieces home. I didn’t hang them immediately. I guess I wasn’t quite ready.

Then, one day in March, I decided to hang them. One was my mom’s favorite. Another one, I found out in her shed (I guess it wasn’t her favorite). The third was a water color that my great-grandmother painted almost 100 years ago. My home changed after these paintings were hung. Each day, I stop to appreciate them.

Just yesterday, as I was preparing to write this post, I found out from an old neighbor that mom’s house had been demolished. Bulldozed. The house, the garden, the brick walks she had lovingly created, destroyed in order to build a McMansion in a primo part of Silicon Valley. Mom, and her house, are gone. I know life moves on. This is now their new home to build.

I know that destruction is creation’s handmaiden. There can’t be one without the other. How easy it is to celebrate creation. How difficult I find it is to stomach destruction.

I wish I could end this post happy. I can’t. Right now, I’m grieving yet again.

This post is part of Gwen Bell’s Best of 2009 Blog Challenge
Day 13: What’s the best change you made to the place you live?

“All beauty contains darkness.” ~ Daniel Odier

Learning to see, and then act, outside of the current patriarchal structure has been a journey of ever widening circles, much like a spiral. It is the journey of living the feminine, a way of life that is very different than that which I was taught to know. It means trusting what is revealed in each moment of present awareness, and feeling for what is ripe with the promise of birth. I go in and out of living this way, but as the circles of understanding grow, I find myself opening to the darkness of the feminine to receive Her guidance.

When this guidance is revealed, the only thing that lies ahead is darkness, the darkness of the unknown. The only thing known is that one choice, the one thing that is the most obvious choice. My mind struggles with the darkness, wanting desperately to know what lies ahead, and yet I also know in my heart that this darkness, this unknown, is the mystery of life waiting to be revealed. The divine mystery is the new, is this darkness from which all emerges.

What I am learning to trust in is the strong pull of this knowing. You might call this intuition, but for me, as I live deeper into the cells of my own body, it is knowing.

I found, what I guess you could call the ‘best’ book of 2009, this way. I saw it on a friend’s desk and knew I must read it. The pull was unavoidable. A friend had given him the book, for reasons he couldn’t understand. He had no intention of reading it, but for some reason had not yet given it away.

I would call this book a gift. A gift given and gratefully, and voraciously, received. Not all of the book kept my rapt attention, but the parts that did carried me deeper into the darkness, deeper into the parts of myself that were thirsting for light. I was yearning for gnosis. Through a marriage of the wisdom of this book and my own willingness to allow a new kind of knowing to emerge from within, I began to deepen my trust in this darkness.

The book that has so many dog ears, cracks in the spine, lines underlined, recommendations to others, is Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness. The authors are Marion Woodman and Elinor Dickson. In my knowing, this book can be a guide book for the journey into darkness that we all, and most especially women, must take. As Woodman states, “The evolutionary imperative within the collective unconscious is pushing us toward a new level of consciousness.” We must learn to stand alone, in our own wholeness, if we are going to survive. And, learning to stand alone means diving into the darkness, to come to know ourselves again in a whole new way.

As Odier shares, there is beauty in darkness. It is the rich soil from where all of life emerges.

Today’s post is Day 4 (best book) of Gwen Bells’ Best of 2009 Blog Challenge.

Photo Credit

I was watching PopTech online this morning, and lo and behold there was a talk about creativity that perked up my female ears and heart. I had never heard of PopTech (hard to imagine as a woman with a tech/design/creativity degree). This morning though, I came across mention of PopTech from @PatriciaMartin on Twitter. While she mentioned she couldn’t be there because she is packing to move, I thought I would log on.

I watched a talk by Kyna Leski from RISD. She was speaking about creativity. This is my love in life, and my work here in the world through Creative Wellspring and Wildly Creative Women. Creativity is the Spirit within you, your true nature.

Kyna explained that matrix (derived from the word for mother, and later used to refer to womb) is where pattern and material are married. She then went on to say that pattern (derived from the word for father) and material (derived from the word for Mother) are married in the womb in the creative process.

We all are creative beings. All people are creative. When I teach my ten-week course (in courses for women and men, and also for women only) I love the moment when students experience their creativity, when they really ‘get’ that they are creative beings. It’s like seeing each one remember, in the moment, their true nature and true potential.

We all live our creative process, this marrying of pattern to matter in the matrix, many, many moments in each day of our lives. And, in my work with women, and in my own life, I know that women are created with a womb that brings forth life, brings life into being, brings the mystery into manifestation. Yes, we have a physical womb, but more importantly we embody the creative capacity of the divine feminine. As Rumi said, “Woman is the radiance of God; she is not your beloved. She is the Creator —you could say that she is not created.“ We can create babies, and we can create so much more. We are mothers to life.

Men, too, are just as creative. The source of creativity is non-gendered. The source is life re-creating itself in its never ending unfolding – Shiva and the cycle of creation and destruction. I am divinely curious about how our design as women and as men is naturally intelligent, and what it would be like and look like if we, both men and women, began to trust and have faith in our deepest creative potential, that expression that flows through our gendered body.

This marrying of the mother and the father takes place within us, and in this marriage we bring forth our deepest creative capacity, a new consciousness and intelligence far greater than what any one of us can try to ‘think’ into creation.

It is my deepest hope that if we, as women, can own our divine feminine creative capacity, that men can then relax into their own natural creative nature, and we can, side-by-side, walk into a future that allows for our unique humanity to flower.

So, I know my opportunity is to no longer attempt to exist in the image of the masculine, which is defined by all the ways I was taught to be in the world. The opportunity is to open to being fully female, to honor and trust my own creative process, my design as woman. I don’t yet know how this will evolve. How can I? But, I can trust in this design, trusting in the deeper intelligence that life is. I welcome this marriage of pattern and mattter within me. And, something that is just as exciting, I get to trust in man’s design. I look forward to discovering what shows up between us.

“When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.” ~Jimi Hendrix

Jimi was pretty wise. Life is Love and Love is Life. There is no difference. The force that creates is love, it is life force, and it is nothing like the pretty picture we humans have been painted. It is powerful beyond measure, and it scares the hell out of us.

All we know of power in our minds is what we’ve been conditioned to believe. This conditioning is what we have been ‘taught’ by others, by their actions and how they have treated us. We, in turn, have ingested this conditioned worldview about what power is and the effects of power.

When I speak of power to women, of stepping into our power, of becoming more powerful, many women immediately resist the idea of owning their own power. When they speak of the reasons why, it is because they see power as a bad thing. They see power as something that oppresses, degrades, imprisons and destroys. They speak of the way power has been used in their lifetimes to maintain a status quo that keeps an elite group of people powerful, while denying vital life-sustaining resources to others. They cringe at the thought of being powerful if it means they must be like those they have witnessed wielding power.

For us to step into our power as women, we must look to something else to know what true power is, and that something is Life, a power that flows out from within.

When I think of life force, the first thing that comes to mind is a seedling growing out of the ground. Imagine what force it takes for the tiny seedling to push its way through the dirt, through everything that stands in its way of reaching the light. The force that fuels the seedling to reach for the sun is Life finding its way.

Life finding its way is power, power from within, power rising up out of the dark, the power of life exploding into existence.

If you look at the dictionary definitions, there are a ton of definitions for the word power. Words can only point to something, and when we try to use words with each other, more often than not what a word points to for me might be very (or even slightly) different for you. In addition, many words hold memories of our experiences that we attached to the word, and with a loaded word like power, this is especially true.

If we, as women, step into our power, we must first be wise and conscious of our intentions and of the source of our power. We could simply imitate what we’ve seen in this male-centric world, but then we would simply be creating more of what we already have.

Power over others, the way we have been conditioned to see power used, serves to sustain separation and suffering. Utilizing power to keep others powerless ultimately keeps us all powerless and separate. Just look at our world today. The world of human beings is filled with separation, loneliness, and violence. This is the kind of power that keeps many women from wanting to be powerful, or even believing they can be powerful.

Instead, let’s engage our wisdom to tap into what we instinctively and intuitively know about power. When we consciously look at what we know to be true in our experience, we bring this knowing into wisdom, and that sources generative power from within.

Women have been the power source and creative agents of the continuation of the human species from the beginning. Without a womb, humans would not exist.

I have had the glorious opportunity to witness the birth of two of my grandchildren. I have two daughters and they are both now mothers. To witness labor and birth is to witness true power, the power of Life giving birth to itself.

In labor, a woman surrenders to the powerful forces of Life finding its way into life, into light from out of the dark. If you have given birth or have witnessed it, you know what I mean. If the mother-to-be surrenders and works with the powerful forces that are working within her, Life will do what it does so well…bring the new baby into existence. If she struggles with the process, something we humans do on a daily basis, the process can be more painful, but the process continues anyway, in spite of her struggling.

Life force is always flowing, finding its way. If we don’t align with it, life still flows but we find it much more painful, in so many ways.

When we align with the force of life, we are no longer trying to resist our soul’s natural expression. This life force is our creativity. When we express it, without resistance, what we express is beautiful and powerful beyond measure.

This power frightens us because our rational mind is not in control of it. We want to control it but we can’t. When we try to control it by resisting it, we only make ourselves sick. Consider how painful childbirth could be if the mother-to-be actively resisted the baby coming into being.

The really important piece here is to learn to trust this power, this expression, this creative life force. To have faith in it is to surrender to the natural expression of power, a power that sustains all of life.

If you have never birthed a baby, please don’t listen to the cultural forces that tell you you’re not a mother, and you can’t be fulfilled without being a mother. When I use this example in courses I teach, it can be emotionally difficult for women who have not birthed a child. We, as women, must come to honor the fact that we are all mothers. Women can birth so much more than babies, and we do it all the time. We can mother more than just our own physical babies, and the ability to truly love all of life unconditionally is the power that flows out from within.

I have used the example of childbirth purposely here, because women’s bodies know this process. A woman’s body, regardless of whether or not she ever physically gives birth to a child, contains the intelligent substance and process to create and grow new life and to bring it into being. This powerful process is completely mysterious to our rational minds. Our minds will never figure out how this works…hence the mystery. But, when we honor our bodies, and the intelligent mystery within, we align with the life force that engages this mysterious creative process inherently available to women.

Knowing this and experiencing it within brings wisdom, wisdom that is needed NOW.

By aligning with the power within, by this mysterious life force that is our creativity, we are capable of growing and birthing that which wants to be created, that life force that is finding its way. This is the power we must step into as women. This is the power of life-sustaining creativity. It’s generative in that it supports life, nurtures the mystery that is life, that is love, that is the most powerful force because it is existence itself.

Can you imagine how things might shift if we realized this power within that is yearning to flow out into the world?

Can you imagine what might be created if we held all the world in the center of our hearts, hearts that are aligned with this creativity?

Chaos is ushering us into a whole new level of creative thinking that comes from deep within our intuitive, instinctive resources. ~Gabrielle Roth

This is wild creativity, a creativity that comes from deep within our bodies and hearts. In her article on the dancing path, Gabrielle Roth so beautifully expresses what is at the core of wild creativity. It is a creative ‘thinking’ that doesn’t come from thought. Rather, it comes from deep within the resources that are always available to us when we are open to our deeper nature. Wild, intuitive and instinctive, this creativity is chaotic and feral. It must be undomesticated, set loose from the dogma and ideology that keeps us tied to the old outdated, outworn system of the last few thousand years.

No longer can we simply engage with creativity as artistic talent or an intellectual premise that we begrudgingly entertain so that we’ll continue to build a better mousetrap so we can keep the shareholders happy.

In facilitating creativity courses over many years, my work has been with groups and individuals that range from top corporate 50 clients to families affected directly by 9/11, from students at Stanford University to individuals from all walks of life. All of my clients and students were looking to find some way to navigate times of great ambiguity and change.

Within their business structures, corporate clients were facing new initiatives that required radically new ways of approach, because the systems they had created no longer worked with what they were being required to do. They were being called to rely on something else, something that allowed them to navigate new waters that they were completely unfamiliar with.

Family members who had lost loved ones in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, were thrown into a new life they neither asked for nor wanted. Yet, they had to move forward, most of them new single mothers with children devastated by what had happened.

The Stanford students were of two kinds. One group was non-traditional undergraduates, who had transferred from other schools and were of a non-traditional age. Their situation required that they find their bearings in an intensely academic setting where the vast majority of students had followed the traditional trajectory that students of elite schools must do. These non-traditional students had to merge with the population, while coming to understand that the gifts they brought were of benefit to all they would meet. It wasn’t about losing themselves or their history; it was about claiming their originality and uniqueness, which is the essence of ones personal creativity.

The other group of students have been part of the Creativity and Leadership course I teach every fall at Stanford Continuing Education. These students come from all different cultures and countries. They work by day and learn at night. And, they are fully engaged in learning how to tap into this creative resource within, knowing that right now, in these times, what is needed is a new way to engage in business.

And, the individuals I have worked with all came to me because something was calling them to step out into a new direction, a direction that did not logically follow from where they had been.
All of these people were seeking something that could guide them in these times of change, times of what we might call chaos. And, more and more people are finding these times chaotic.

Things are shifting on a grand level. No longer do the old ways of doing things work. If we try to use the old ways in these new times, it’s like trying to dance with your feet shackled to the floor.

In these times of change, it can be helpful to remember or discover what it is we trust in. Now this isn’t trust as in a belief we hold or a dogma we learned, this is a trust that is with us always, one that we know from experience. When we are moving in the flux and flow of life, what we trust in must come from within us, or else, when we try to move, whatever we are trusting in outside of ourselves, will not be where we now find ourselves.

This that we trust from within is the very thing that has helped us navigate times of change, times that we have experienced throughout our entire lives, for we have always been in change. What is this? It is our personal internal creativity. This is the nature we humans are, the process we naturally move with when our minds don’t know how to manage the change.

This creative process is so natural and ordinary that most of the time we don’t even realize we are utilizing it. It can be a knowing that comes out of the blue. It can be an intuitive hit that registers in our gut. It can be as simple as pure instinct. The important thing to realize is that it is our nature, for when you realize this, you realize you are creative by birth, it is your birthright and it is always available to you.

As the current societal paradigm continues to dissolve, it is becoming more and more important that we each awaken to this creative nature within. We are being invited to fully awaken to and get comfortable with this creative nature.

I’d love to know your thoughts, so please leave a comment…

Julie

If you are interested in reading more, a new ebook is forthcoming on the topic of wild creativity. Contact me if you are interested in receiving it when it becomes available.
juliedaley (at) gmail.com

On Wednesday evening, I had the pleasure of attending San Francisco Coaches Holiday Party. I was looking forward to attending simply because I love these people, my friends who also happen to coach. From the moment I walked in the door of my first meeting, I felt welcomed and part of something bigger than just me coaching my clients.

The party was intimate and engaging. The guest speaker was Harriet Simon Salinger, one of the founders of SF Coaches. The first meetings were held in Harriet’s home over ten years ago.

This was my first opportunity to meet Harriet, and I found her intelligent, witty and completely accessible. Her talk was centered around holding two questions, a very ‘coach-like’ thing to do. The questions were, “Where do old coaches go?”, which brought quite a round of laughter around the room, and “What is the Soul of Coaching?”. The second question we entertained with our table mates before bringing the discussion back to the room at large.

I found this discussion fascinating. What is the Soul of Coaching? We had numerous ideas and thoughts, just sitting with them all and not trying to actually answer the question. I found this question still intriguing me last night while I worked out. Some fresh insights then entered my realization.

I could feel, at a deep and profound level, that the Soul of Coaching is the immense capacity for human beings to consciously experience the depth and breadth of who and what we are, and in this experiencing and conscious reflection of our experiences, we awaken the parts of ourselves that have been repressed, hurt, or believed to be not good enough. In this awakening through conscious action, we not only create our lives from choices based on that inner compelling pull, but return to the wholeness that always has been present within.

I see this as the Soul of coaching, because it lies at the very foundation of our practice. We hold our clients as whole, and we hold that they have their own answers, and we hold that their awakening to wholeness is a natural and ‘given’ expression of the very nature that they are, that humans are deep at our core. As I coach, I know that every client has their own seed of wisdom that when watered and fed, and loved unconditionally, will express their unique nature.

While coaching started out with an accomplishment and success mindset, I see that goal is still valid. What has changed is what accomplishment and success mean. For me, over the past five plus years I have been coaching, my own notion of what coaching really is has changed and morphed. My work with clients has honed my skills and my vision for what coaching is and can be, and for what I know I am uniquely skilled to offer those clients that are meant to work with me.

What does this have to do with being Unabashedly Female? Everything. I see the wholeness that you are. I see the unique beauty and power that is inherent in women and men. I see the critically important need for all of us, both men and women, to live our unique gifts and to express them in the world. Life is intelligent by design, and each of us has a role to play in this design. If any one of us is living from beliefs that what and who we are is not enough or is bad somewhere deep within, then we are hiding our gifts away, gifts that must be shared for our world to be balanced and in harmony.

Women have been conditioned to believe that we are bad simply by design. That somewhere our design as women is sinful and dirty. I can’t tell you how many women I have spoken with that feel this deep within, but don’t have the consciousness to express it until we work together or at least talk about it. And, many men have spoken of the unconscious beliefs they hold about women, too. These beliefs hurt us all. They hurt both men and women. They are part of the shadow of our culture and world, and are played out every day in violent and degrading scenarios. And it all stems from conditioning. None of it is really true.

The Soul of Coaching is about holding us all as the vibrant, creative deeply loving beings we are by nature. When a coach holds you this way, you begin to hold yourself this way. When a coach calls you forth to be this nature in the world, you begin to express this nature. When you learn effective tools and practices that help you to live this nature, then you begin to live the life you were created to live.

If you are intrigued at all by what this post shares, please contact me at juliedaley at gmail.com. I would love to begin a conversation with you about how to step into this magnificence that you are.

I have been intrigued by creativity since I was young, and now it is what I do for a living. Pretty cool. I wanted to share these thoughts with you. Perhaps they will trigger something you know already about who and what you are. Perhaps they will be an invitation to begin turning back to yourself to inquire into your own nature. Perhaps they won’t intrigue you at all. Take a look and see what you feel…

By design, you are creative.

By design, you are, and always have been, whole.

By design, you are unique, yet One with everything in existence.

By design, you are Essence experiencing and expressing through a human body that has a gender.

By design, you are part of the Great Intelligence that creates and destroys, that moves through all of existence that is the creatrix and the created.

As concepts you know this, but do you know this as experience?

Do you trust the uniqueness and intelligence of your design as a creative being?

Do you have faith in your own raw, unmediated experience and expression?

When you trust in your creativity, and unbind your heart and body, a faith in your full expression emerges. Faith in this expression opens up a whole new world to you, a world in which you trust yourself to meet life as it comes to you. Give it a whirl!

I recently read a post on the PeaceXPeace blog WeekXWeek and the accompanying comments. One comment was written by a woman who labeled herself a “difference” feminist. She went on to explain that she sees and celebrates the differences between men and women in her feminist world view, as opposed to what is traditionally considered to be a feminist approach where women were trying to take on men’s attributes. There is so much to say and write about this topic, but what I want to address here is how this perspective of differences underscores what Unabashedly Female is all about. Men and women are different. This is something to celebrate. If there wasn’t an organic reason for this difference, there would only be one gender here on earth.

For decades, women have been trying to be more like men in order to succeed and be a powerful force in the world. What we are now seeing in so many circles is a shift in realization that our power lies in being authentically ourselves, authentically female. It is important to live into our differences in gender, for when we do we are living into the natural intelligence that underlies all of Life.

One organization celebrating differences and working towards bringing out the change that can come from supporting girls and women is the Nike Foundation. And, rooted in the work of the Nike Foundation is girleffect.org. Girleffect.org has a great video to watch that explains their work, as well as a fact sheet that beautifully speaks to why we should pay attention to girls.

Think about girls and women in your life that could use your love, support and encouragement. Check out the Nike Foundation and girleffect.org. See how you can make a difference in a girl’s life.