Author(ity)

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Reverb10 Day 17

Prompt: Lesson Learned What was the best thing you learned about yourself this past year? And how will you apply that lesson going forward?

Authority.

I realized how much I am not conscious of my own authority. I realize how well trained I have been to give it away. I realize how rarely it seems possible to challenge authority, to speak out, and act out, against something that goes so against everything I stand for, everything that feels true in my being.

It’s one of those lessons that keeps coming back in ever widening circles, like a spiral dive into ever opening consciousness. Sometimes, make that pretty often, I have to keep being reminded, over and over, of my unconscious beliefs.

The etymology of the word ‘authority’

It’s funny how the meaning of words changes over time, reflecting how beliefs and societies change.

authority Look up authority at Dictionary.com
early 13c., autorite “book or quotation that settles an argument,” from O.Fr. auctorité (12c.; Mod.Fr. autorité), from L. auctoritatem (nom. auctoritas) “invention, advice, opinion, influence, command,” from auctor “master, leader, author” (see author). Usually spelled with a -c- in English till 16c., when it was dropped, in imitation of the French. Meaning “power to enforce obedience” is from late 14c.; meaning “people in authority” is from 1610s. Authorities “those in charge, those with police powers” is recorded from mid-19c.

Notice how, in the early part of the 13th century, the word pointed to a book or quotation that served as something to solve a dispute.

And, notice how the words changes over the centuries, to “power to enforce obedience” in the late 14th century, to “people in authority” in the 1610s to “those in charge, those with police powers, a recorded definition from the mid 19th century.

What a big leap from author to those with the power to enforce obedience.

The word authority has always had such a strong correlation with power, domination and aggression in my consciousness. No wonder.

From another source, the origin is shown as:

[Middle English auctorite, from Old French autorite, from Latin auctrits, auctritt-, from auctor, creator; see author.]

Creator. Author. (sounds vaguely familiar with #11 of my 11 things for 2011).

author Look up author at Dictionary.com
c.1300, autorfather,” from O.Fr. auctor, from L. auctorem (nom. auctor) “enlarger, founder, master, leader,” lit. “one who causes to grow,” agent noun from auctus, pp. of augere “to increase” (see augment). Meaning “one who sets forth written statements” is from late 14c.

Father.

How this beautiful masculine energy of father has been perverted to mean domination and power over.

One of the biggest things that has kept me from owning my own authority, in my life, my work and my writing, is the ingrained belief that someone else out there has more authority than me, authority over me; someone else, out there, is the expert; someone else, out there, will take care of things.

It’s such a place of powerlessness and victimhood. It’s a place of lethargy and resignation. It’s a place of adolescent comfort.

Authority as Author

How different things look when I see authority from the place of author.

Author of my own life. Author of works that share with the world the beauty and wisdom that move through me. Author of creative expression that includes the powerful parts of me I’ve been well trained to hide and keep down in a society where it is ‘taught’ that women don’t have power or authority.

The masculine energies in me have scared me. I’ve seen what power looks like out there. I’ve seen authority dominate others who are seen as, and believe they are, less powerful. This authority keeps in place an infrastructure that holds this perverted sense of authority in place.

And, I don’t know what will happen if I stand up to that authority out there that seems to have so much power.

The Fierce Face of the Feminine.

In an incredibly powerful TEDx talk, Chameli Ardagh eloquently speaks of the ‘Fierce Face of the Feminine’.

She shares numerous stories about her own childhood and training to suppress emotion, but also an instructive story of Kali and Shiva. It is in this story that I discovered a simple, yet powerful, understanding of how to express this fierceness with presence.

Shiva is the masculine counterpart to Kali. Shiva is presence. As I discovered the father/masculine aspect of author and authority, I could see the masculine presence necessary to hold the expression of fierce anger and rage.

A disowned masculine makes it very difficult to stand in one’s authority. Knowing a positive masculine, a loving presence, is within me is a more healthy internal infrastructure from which to express the author within, the author that writes about both love and rage, an author that doesn’t leave out important parts of the ‘story’.

This video is long for our short attention spans, but every moment of it is well worth your time.

Something shifts dramatically when I:

  • remember that the word authority (and all words) carries much more than simply a definition. It carries experiences, images, beliefs, a young girl’s impressions of the world and what happens when one pushes against authority.
  • hear a powerful story about the nature of the masculine and feminine and how they can be together to help balance expression, both internally and externally, and individually and collectively.
  • realize (in an ever-deepening way) the power of unconscious thoughts and beliefs and how they keep a lid on my expression as a female human being.
  • understand the power of words and the power of the story we tell ourselves about what is acceptable and what is not, about what is loving and what is not, about what is possible and what is not.
  • reclaim the power of a fully integrated and balanced awareness, that includes the full range of human feelings and expression.
  • accept that there are many powers, all about us, conspiring to be of service to the present awakening to love, to power that loves rather than dominates.

We all have authority, the ability to author our own lives. And, the infrastructure currently at work, both externally, and internally in our own minds, was not created to support this. It is shifting. We are shifting. We are waking up to the power within.

I now can so clearly see that nothing is stopping me from writing what I need to write, as a woman here to write her life, as creatrix standing in her own stead.

And, you?

How do you see your own authority? Where do you give it expression? Where do you not? How might your life be different if you became the author of your own life?

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Your Experience as a Woman

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I have found some wonderful new books, which focus on the transformation of consciousness in which we are smack in the middle of. Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness, by Marion Woodman, has opened a flood of light deep within my cells. Woodman is an incredible prophet of the sacred feminine consciousness rising in women and men.

I’ll write more about her book in the next few posts, but right now I want to share another great book, Women of Wisdom, by Tsultrim Allione. Allione was a Buddhist Nun, but she renounced her vows because she felt the pull to become a mother. Her life has been extraordinary, and she shares so much of her experience in the newly revised edition of Women of Wisdom.

Within the pages of Women of Wisdom, Allione speaks to the reason I created this blog, Unabashedly Female. In my own experience, I could see that what was, and is, happening to me as part of consciousness awakening was reflected nowhere in the cultural stories of the world I live in. Everything we see, the stories we hear, are all part of a culture that is male-centric and still highly patriarchal. The structures and systems in place were designed with men in mind to fill their needs. We, as women, are inundated with messages that, at their core, come from these systems and structures.

Allione writes, “We try to relate our experiences to the stories of others and thereby edit our perceptions according to what fits.” (Women of Wisdom, pg. 83) Allione then quotes from Womenspirit Rising:

Women have lived in the interstices between inchoate experience and the shaping given to experience by the stories of men. In a very real sense, women have not experienced their own experience. There is a dialectic between stories and experience, Stories shape experience; experience shapes stories. Womenspirit Rising, pg. 228

If the stories we swim in reflect male systems and experience, then we never really become conscious to our own experience, what is happening to us if we continue to look to these systems for reflection. This, coupled with the understanding that the ONLY thing we can truly know is our own experience, is mana for our souls, for when we become aware of what keeps us circling in our own illusion, we can begin to wake up from it. 

For the sacred feminine to awake and rise within our own consciousness, we must wake up to the stories we have believed and aligned ourselves with, and realize they are not our stories. The truth is what is happening to us in our own experience, both individually and collectively. Part of what we do as humans is try to make sense of our experience, and if we hold it up against our conditioned world view, then we make links and assumptions that lead us to conclusions that can never be true, at least in an absolute sense.

Being Unabashedly Female is allowing ourselves to really look within at our own experience and trust that it is true. Being Unabashedly Female is about trusting ourselves, trusting our experience and opening to the transforming energies that are within our physical beings, that primal matrix of creation that resides within women. Being Unabashedly Female is also about coming together as women to share our stories and experiences so that we may develop a deeper understanding of what is happening within and without.

Unabashedly Female is ultimately about aligning with the awakening sacred feminine within all of life, and supporting a newfound respect for women and men to live together as balanced beings in our own right, knowing that our own truth can only come from within. As beloved Amma said in a talk over six years ago, “men and women must bow down to each other.”

And, we must bow down to Life, to all of Life. We CAN live into a way of life where we honor and serve the sacredness in each other, and in all of Life.

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Connecting Women

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pacificgroveforblog.jpgThis weekend, my partner Jeff and I took a few days off and traveled down to Pacific Grove, a quaint town nestled between Monterey and Carmel. We needed some time to just be. We walked along the beach, slept, ate, walked, talked, read, and watched Harry Potter movies (a first for me!). We had a beautiful time together.

Whenever I take the time to simply slow down and rest, I find that playful place inside me that seems to get little time in my day-to-day life. It’s one of the things I want to bring more fully into the day-to-day, that playful side that.

Yesterday, after deliciously sleeping in, we stopped by a little coffee/book house on the main street of Pacific Grove, Lighthouse Avenue. I was wearing my Kali Yantra , a silver necklace Jeff gave me to wear on my trip to India last year. As we entered the coffee house, two women caught my eye. They were deep in conversation, but something about them spoke to me. I didn’t know what it was at the time, but I could feel a connection with them.

I purchased my tea, and as I walked away from the coffee bar, one of the women and I caught a shared glance and we smiled. She then spoke first and mentioned my necklace, noting that she was wearing a pair of earrings that matched. I went over to them and we began a conversation. She asked me the name of the Goddess that the yantra represented, and I responded by telling her of Kali: that Kali is the Goddess of creation and destruction, and that in images she is shown with a necklace of skulls around her neck, and that she is misunderstood. She isn’t about death, but about the death of the ego, of the beauty of people finding who and what they are. “Her perpetual dance of cosmic bliss plays out through the eons as the creation and dissolution of worlds within worlds. Yet God, in the feminine form of the Mother – as the Absolute made Immanent – is ready to shower Her love and affection on any who care to turn their gaze toward Her fiery heart.” (source)

As I spoke of this divine symbol of love, the other woman said something about how important this was for her to remember. She then began to cry sweet, soft tears that ran down her cheeks. She was beautiful in this moment of recognition of something deeply important for her. The beauty was in the flash of truth that she felt. Something spoke to her deep within. What exactly we said didn’t really matter. What I witnessed, and treasure, is the flash of knowing that can come to us at any second if we are open to what might meet us.

I had just written the prior post about the amazingness of women, and I once again thought of this idea, that there is such beauty, strength and pure love in women that is ripe for us to once again reclaim. This flash of recognition came to the three of us because we were open to each other and to discovering what it was that drew us to each other.

We shared a few more words about women and how we need to acknowledge the tears of truth in ourselves and in each other. And then I said goodbye. I thought of these two beautiful women all day, and felt such gratitude for what they shared and what I witnessed.

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