Loving Your Femaleness is a Radical Act

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Loving yourself as a woman is vital. Loving your femaleness in a system and culture that is hell bent on conditioning you to hate and fear your femaleness, is truly a radical act.

Yes, hating and fearing femaleness is at the heart of misogyny, and misogyny is at the heart of patriarchy.

In his incredibly revealing book, The Gender Knot, Allan Johnson writes:

“Misogyny plays a complex role in patriarchy. It fuels men’s sense of superiority, justifies male aggression against women, and works to keep women on the defensive and in their place. Misogyny is especially powerful in encouraging women to hate their own femaleness, an example of internalized oppression. The more women internalize misogynist images and attitudes, the harder it is to challenge male privilege or patriarchy as a system. In fact,women won’t tend to see patriarchy as even problematic since the essence of self-hatred is to focus on the self as the sole cause of misery, including the self-hatred.”  (italics mine) (pg 39)

It has taken me some time to understand and see that so much of my own self-loathing doesn’t come from me. It’s learned, and it’s reinforced over and over with the hate and fear filled images and sound bites that circulate each day.

I don’t buy magazines, nor do I have a television. I haven’t for some years. And, I can’t escape these images. Just the other day, I was driving behind a San Francisco city bus, and all across the end of the bus was an advertisement that was misogynistic at its core. Who makes the decisions in San Francisco to plaster the buses with images that continue to pass along these messages that hurt us all, women and men?

Before I proceed, I want to make it clear that Johnson, throughout the book keeps coming back to the point that Patriarchy is not men, but rather the system in which we live, the system that we’ve all inherited. Just using the word patriarchy can be divisive, yet when we all, women and men, begin to see how entangled we are within its web of beliefs and admonitions, we can begin to unravel this knot that causes us all to distrust each other, and most especially ourselves.

Patriarchy is hierarchy where men (fathers) are at the top, and the rest of life, women and children included, are beneath men. Within this structure, we cannot ever see each other on equal ground because the entire thing teaches us there is no equality. By definition, a hierarchy is a system where people and things are ranked, one above another. Wonder why we still don’t have parity after decades? We can’t and we won’t as long as we believe in and buy into this system.

Coming to love our femaleness…

The journey to know one’s true self, to know the soul, is a journey into the dark places where we’ve hidden the things we don’t want to feel or know, and for women, much of what we find here is this fear and hatred of our femaleness. Much of what we discover is that we’ve been taught to hate and fear this, and that others who also have been taught the same project this fear and hatred onto us. And, of course, we discover that we project this onto each other.

But what is waiting for us on the other side of these feelings that have been stuffed into the dark, is a light that knows differently. It is a light that is both beyond this world and at the very center of this world. It is the light of truth, the light of the sacred. But the only way out is through. The only way to the light is through the body, for the body is where we’ve stored all these messages and feelings that together create our internalized oppression.

As we go deeper into the body, we discover that what we are is not even gendered, and that what we are sees the body with the softest eyes of love, the most tender caress of compassion.

Some of my most healing moments have come through clearly seeing, hearing, and feeling the painful messages of my own internalized misogyny railing against the beautiful deep-feeling and sensual aspects of my womanhood. When I began to feel the pain I’ve caused myself, something cracked open. And with each time I can do this, my heart opens wider to my own beauty and worth.

As we go into the body and feel the things we haven’t wanted to feel, more of the soul can come down into the body. More of the light of the soul can enter the cells of this physical aspect of our being. Much like the tree trunk above that is hollow through its center, we, too, begin to feel new shoots of life spring forth form the rich soil of our own creative center. As we clear out, we breath deeper. With each in-breath, the soul comes in to vitalize our cells, and for a split second, with a body full of breath, we know the joy of the soul. And it is here we can feel the love return for our femaleness.

“In your deepest center, you are the stillpoint. You are the rhythm beyond stillness, the feeling beyond compassion, the sexual energy beyond celibacy, the life force beyond death, the vibration beyond inspiration. The moving center is within you.” ~ Gabrielle Roth

And, I would add, you are the life beyond gender. What you truly are is non-gendered, and when we know this deepest center, we behold the body with love, and hold it in love. We hold both men and women in love.

It can be through the body that we come to see that the seemingly intractable nature of patriarchy is nothing more than something we’ve inherited and taught well to uphold.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We are all in this together and we have the creativity and capacity to change this. We humans can create a world so much more whole and loving than the culture in which we currently swim.

We can’t do this for each other, and we can’t even really know what each others experiences are like, but what we can do is walk this together, is hold each other with respect and compassion as we move into a new way of being in the world.

When we see the system for what it is, our relationship with it changes. We can stop participating in our own degradation and oppression.

At the end of all of this it is about relationship – with ourselves, and with each other. It is about connection and vulnerability. It is about seeing each other, and each gender, with these eyes of love.

None of us are unscathed by a system that ranks beings by worth and value, that doles out privilege as if it is inherently true. Deep at the heart of it all, and deep in our own hearts, we know that life itself does not measure, rate, and objectify.

 

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Tonight I Danced and Came Alive

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I am feeling a bit shaky, or perhaps a better way to describe it is tender, open, and feeling a multitude of things. There is a shaky quality to it, a quality of hovering in the moment where things feel raw and shaken up.

I began dancing ten years ago this month. I found the 5Rhythms and my life began to change. It was something that was difficult for me…difficult to stay on the dance floor when so much inside of me screamed, “Get me the hell out of here.” For months this battle went on inside. I don’t think anyone I shared the dance floor with could see the battle being waged on my insides. We’re pretty good at hiding our internal battles. Or, maybe that’s not true. Maybe on the dance floor (and in life) these battles show up in how our bodies move: tightness, rigidity, disconnection…all signs that there is something moving inside of us that wants to fight reality, wants to fight the dance.

When I heard that Gabrielle (the creator of 5Rhythms) was moving toward her death, I felt such fullness in my heart. I was walking down the sidewalk late at night, last night, as my friend told me, and the feeling in my heart was so strong. It wasn’t really sadness in a way I might feel for a family member or close friend for I don’t really know Gabrielle closely, having only danced with her a handful of times. What it was, and continues to be, is this immense gratitude and acknowledgment of the gifts my soul has received from her and her artistry; from the courage she has shown to bring something so new into a world where many still don’t understand what this work is about.

Doing this, deep birthing work of things that are new and counter-culture, can be frightening. I am not saying it was for her. I don’t know what it was for her. For me, though, birthing my work has been frightening. Living unabashedly female is a challenge to the status quo. Living the truth of what we are in a world (both external and internal) that is doing everything it can to keep that truth down is an act of courage in and of itself. There are so many quotes that seem to stay in constant social media orbit that speak to this very thing – it’s obviously the human journey to wake up to what we truly are. And this is where I treasure the dance…that in emptying out on the dance floor, what I truly am makes itself known… stillness, emptiness, rhythm, sweat, pure existence, bones, flesh, muscle and heart.

Tonight I Danced

[audio:https://unabashedlyfemale.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Tonight-I-Danced.mp3|titles=Tonight I Danced]

I honor the dance because it has been such an avenue to healing, to trusting something vast and eternal and infinite, to trusting that the very same vastness and eternity is what moves this body and all our earthly, heavenly bodies.

Gabrielle sent this message out just a short bit ago:

‘i’m still here connected to all of you. the channel is open — send me your love and energy.’

May we send her this love and energy.

May we send the earth this love and energy.

May we send each other and all beings this love and energy.

Om Namah Shivaya

 

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Are You Breathing?

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::

I am in class, on the dance floor. Stacey, the teacher, begins to weave her magic and invites us to, “Move from the breath.” I instantly breath more deeply. How simple yet powerful is the reminder to breath.

I move.

And, I move.

And, as I move from the breath my movement deepens, my body opens, a simple joy makes itself known.

The breath carries me into the wave: a wave of rhythm, a wave of pleasure, a wave of release, a wave of not knowing…

My body begins to feel like liquid – liquid breath, liquid love, liquid life – and then I soften, open and receive. I receive everything I need to keep moving, for as long as the Spirit moves me.

::

It isn’t always so simple…or at least I tell myself that is so. But if I’ve learned one thing from dancing the 5Rhythms, it is to always come back to the breath.

When life feels hard, come back to the breath.

When I don’t know anything at all, come back to the breath.

When I’m scared shitless, come back to the breath.

When I’m ungrounded, spinning, and caught in one of those circles of drama, come back to the breath.

When I’m joyously alive and feeling on top of the world, come back to the breath.

When I hate what is happening, come back to the breath.

When I’m flowing, come back to the breath.

When I am mad as hell, come back to the breath.

When I have no idea what to do next, come back to the breath.

Whenever, whatever, wherever, whomever, however… come back to the breath.

I’ve found breathing is a supremely sensuous experience.

I am breathing.

I am moving.

I am dancing.

I am alive…and for this, I am grateful.

::

Photo by bloody marty mix on Flickr | Some rights reserved

5Rhythms is the work of Gabrielle Roth.

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Solitary Impulse

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Creative Impulse.

This phrase kept running through my awareness as I danced on Sunday morning. Many of you know, since I write about it fairly frequently, that I dance every week, and have for over eight years. My practice is 5Rhythms, and on Sunday mornings 150 of us faithful practitioners come together to ‘Sweat Our Prayers’.

5Rhythms is a moving meditation where you dance the 5 rhythms that Gabrielle Roth discovered are at the heart of being human. In the practice, the mind is invited to let go as the body is invited to move on its own, without the normal constrictions the mind and thoughts place on it.

This past Sunday, I moved. I sweated. I let go. And in the space of these two hours of dance, this phrase kept repeating itself.

Creative Impulse.

Creative Impulse.

Impulse.

Impulse.

As I danced,

I was consciously aware of the impulse that came from somewhere deep within my body.

The impulse came up from the dark space within. When followed, the impulse guided me in a fluid movement, where there was no mover, just movement, just expression.

Deeply dropped in the body, I was aware of the impulse as a free and alive movement of energy, a never-ending stream of pulsation coming into being, then flowing out into expression and falling away into nothingness.

I was aware of the impulse…until I was more aware of my mind. Thinking. Judging. Comparing. Deciding it didn’t like the way I was moving. Deciding I looked clumsy. Deciding it didn’t like the music, or how others danced. Judging, comparing, deciding. Stopping the flow. Stumble. Stepping on my own toe. Ouch.

And what did I do then? I began to move again. Dropped back into the beat. Felt the impulse. Moved.

I’ve danced long enough to know this. But what was important this time, was a really bright awareness of this process of stopping, stumbling, being clumsy.

I came home and

considered what had happened and how it translates to life, because right now I’m stopping myself from allowing this impulse to move through me as it wishes. On the dance floor, I feel safe and comfortable to express, except for those moments when the thoughts come in.

In my life, I don’t feel that safety, even though, in reality, I am just as safe. I mean, who knows what people are thinking of me as I dance. Who knows what judgments are flying, what stories they make up about me? Who knows? I certainly don’t. But I feel free there, free to move, to listen, to express.

I know this creative impulse is always here. It’s always moving up and out of the deep darkness of the inner place. When I write I can feel it. And, when I write I can feel the sudden move of the mind behind the impulse that stops it.

As I am known to do,

I looked at the word impulse, because for me an impulse feels like it sounds. It is a pulse that moves out of me, one after another, but so closely together it is fluid.

As I looked up the word in the thesaurus, these other words showed up as synonyms:

Desire.

Drive.

Pulse.

Pulsation.

Thrust.

Beat.

Signal.

Stimulus.

Urge.

Force.

Pressure.

Impetus.

Whim.

Wish.

Itch.

Inclination.

Yen.

Bent.

Spur.

In simply reading them, I feel the impulse. Try it. Read them again, and feel how they feel in your body. Feel the words move through you. What do you discover?

For me, there is a resonance with the feeling of spring, of emergence, of a pushing up through soil, of a seed emerging into the light. There is also a sense of body function, inspiration, breath, pulse, desire…all pointing to a wide open sense of eroticism, of creation at its core giving birth in each moment to a new moment.

The practical side of this,

is seeing of how many ways I stop the flow with minuscule thoughts, tiny aberrations in the fluid movement of time and creation, where I attempt to stop what is happening, where I clog up the pipes, sit back and think rather than stay in the fluid motion of action that comes from within.

The flow stops when I don’t feel safe, for whatever reason. Sometimes, I’m still amazed at how important safety is for the ego, how it looks for that at all costs.

Not that we must be in motion all of the time.

In the dance, there are many moments where the impulse moves in tiny, tiny ways, even to a point of pure stillness, where what is moving is simply respiration, sweat dripping, maybe even a muscle trembling ever so slightly, a finger with a tender pulse, a ever-so-slight movement of the eye.

These moments happen all the time in life, where there is a pause, a breath, maybe even a languishing time of being still, silent, inward-turning.

This impulse is intelligent and wise.

It is the same impulse that moves through us all, yet how it expresses through each of us is different. And, how it expresses through women is different than men, for the female body is different than a man’s body.

This impulse knows something our minds can’t know. And right now, this impulse is guiding us to truthful action if we are willing to trust it to move through us.

I know this is happening in my life. I’m making choices that aren’t comfortable, aren’t cozy, aren’t safe. And in doing so, I find myself stumbling, hesitating, maybe even stepping on my own toes, missing the beat of the music, bumping into others I love and care about.

What is it I trust in

as I move out in directions I don’t know? There is a footing inside, a place that never changes, something I know is there. I don’t have a word for it, really, but Rilke does:

“But your solitude will be a support
and a home for you,
even in the midst of very
unfamiliar circumstances,
and from it you will find all your paths.”
My solitude. That place of aloneness. Only I can feel the impulse, can know its movement, can taste its insistence, can bow to its fortitude. Only I can give breath to it, can trust the pulse inherent in it, can allow it to inspire me forward.
As it is for you. Only you can know this in yourself. It is a place of great aloneness, yet we dance together all the same.

That’s okay. All that matters is that we keep dancing, keep breathing, keep moving our feet, letting the impulse move us, trusting that our own solitude is exactly the footing we are standing on, even when there is nothing underneath our feet.

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To Sweat IS to Glisten

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To sweat IS to glisten!

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

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Chaos, Creativity & Leadership

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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

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