Just yesterday, this best friend sent me a picture. She has been scanning old pictures and came across this one. I am on the left. Just seeing this image brought back a flood of feelings and memories of a time in my life when I felt so connected to the world around me, especially nature through all the time I spent outdoors. As I thought back to this time, I realized how important these years are. It’s during these times that we have a glimpse into our deeper nature and a sense of our place in the world. Once we grow up and move out into the world, and into making a living, most of us lose contact with our own internal knowing, because we believe we have to conform to our culture and society to make it. And, we believe that conformity requires letting go of who we really are and what we truly want to do with our lives. It’s not that we consciously choose to go against our authenticity, but rather we are conditioned to do so.

Seeing this picture and remembering that time in my life, with all the friends and experiences it held, re-affirmed who I am and what compels me to action today in my life. I know that my work with women to awaken our connection to the Earth and our connection to each other is exactly what I knew somewhere deep within me when this picture was taken.

Think back to your youth, those years when you wondered what your life would hold. What did you envision. Who did you see yourself to be? Are you honoring that deepest place within you, that place that speaks to you quietly, but insistently?

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.

Sometimes we catch glimpses of this amazingness of women: a look here, a touch there, words of wisdom spoken with eloquence, strength and grace.

I see this femaleness in my friends, my sisters, my daughters. I see it in strangers as they are with their children, or interact in business, or even simply walking down the street.

I feel this femaleness within my own self, deep within my body. It is my life force and the source of my creativity. When I don’t allow this truth of who I am to be seen, I can feel resentful, but it is only me that can allow it out.

When I coach my female clients to reclaim this femaleness, this vibrancy that is the source of the juice of life, I get to feel the exquisite expression of life dancing as woman. On some level, we are all, men and women, looking to reclaim this vibrancy, this life force that is ever present within. Perhaps we simply need to be the encourager to each other, to radiate another’s beauty so that they may see it themselves. The wonderful part of this assignment is that this is how we will truly come to know our own radiance.

Can you be the encouragement of Light that Hafiz speaks of for another woman? Find one very special woman and be the encouragement of light against her being. See what you find in doing so.

It Felt Love

How

Did the rose

Ever open its heart

And give to this world

All its

Beauty?

It felt the encouragement of light

Against its

Being,

Otherwise,

We all remain

Too

Frightened.

~Hafiz

photo by dragonflysky on flickr

Creation

I looked forward to my time today with a group we have named Creative Playground. My wonderful friend, and fellow coach, Jennifer Lee brought us all together a few months ago, sensing that magic might occur with us all in one room. Magic did, and continues to, happen.

The thread that runs through our group is one of delight in making art and exploring our creativity. Today we spent the afternoon at Laura’s house, where she introduced us to mandalas. While I use mandala creation in the courses I teach, Laura brought an entirely new way of looking at them by introducing us to them through a wonderful visualization. She taught us that the center of the mandala is the Bindu, the centerpoint of all of creation. In the visualization, we turned inward to experience our own center and all that it holds.

As I visualized, I sensed a pulsing energy, as if all of my life force radiated out from one center point deep in my hara, near the sacrum…the very center of my body. I could see an image emerge, one of a powerful cell that holds all of creation. As I explore the Sacred Feminine and my own experience of being female, I find myself continually brought back to the experience of bringing life forth and giving birth. Even though my own daughters are grown, I sense my connection to the Earth through something mysterious, that essence that is inherent in all women, that allows us to nurture life and bring it to term.

We then dove into creating our first mandala, and the result is the mandala above, titled ‘Creation’. I started with the outer layers, which felt like the lining of the womb as I drew them. Then, I created the center and followed it with the concentric circles radiating outward. Bringing more awareness to my own center core allowed me to put what I experienced out onto the paper. It was another way to sense into who and what I am.

The Earth held by Flowering Hands.

My next mandala was much more free form. I began with the leaves at the edge, and then moved in to the flowers. After we completed our work, I traveled to babysit my grandson Lucas for a bit, and Lucas decided he wanted this one for his art collection in his room. Standing back from it and looking at it one more time, I realized it looks like the Earth being held by loving, living flowering hands. It is an image that makes me smile.

Mandalas are an ancient form from the Hindu religion. The word mandala is Sanskrit and loosely translated means “circle”. But it is much more than simply the circle shape. It symbolizes wholeness and the infinite nature of life. The Bindu is the ‘infinite point’ within which everything is contained.

Gather a group of women together and enter into your own mandala mystery. Focus on your body, and on your interior experience. Allow your experience to guide your creation. Once created, you can then take a fresh look at your mandala and see within it an entirely new view into who and what you are. It is a representation of all that you are, and all that is.

We are living in a time of deep change. Wisdom beyond our individual knowing is calling us forth to remember what we are and to discover a whole new truth of what it means to be female. This new truth will come from our own experience, from a remembering of the past and the archetypal images of the fullness of the Feminine, and by allowing our wholeness to return, a wholeness that embraces those parts of ourselves that have seemed to dark to allow into the light. But all of what we hide from ourselves must be brought forth if we are to know the truth of our being. We can know the simple elegance that we are.

As Rilke wrote many years ago in Letters to a Young Poet, “Someday there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but something in itself, something that makes one think not of any complement or limit, but only of life and reality: the female human being.”

This is an invitation for us as women to dive into a discovery of who and what we are, to live into the question, “What it is to be Female?” and to come together so that we recognize (re-cognize) what we know deep within.

photo courtesy of Pandiyan