Gwynn Raimondi, MA

Ancestral Stories

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Last week I guided over a hundred women in exploring our power and strength, connecting to our bodies, excavating our stories and digging into who we truly are. It was an intense week and fast paced and rich with ways to dive into our depths. And even with this being true, I have been left feeling like we barely skimmed the surface of this work, that we barely dipped our toes is. That there is so much richness  in this work of power and strength for us all to uncover, to become curious about.

During our week we touched on the stories of our mothers. We spent one day of thinking about and connecting to what our mothers brought to us. That day is still lingering within me, simmering. This digging into their stories reminds me again how the more we each know of our own history the more we can make sense of our Self. We can’t ignore the past. The women and men who came before us made us, both metaphorically and literally. Pretending that what they lived has no impact on us only puts up another block for us to overcome to get to our own core and true, whole Self.

Sometimes though we don’t have a way to learn the stories; the people who held them had died or we aren’t in contact or they simply don’t want to share them. And it feels like then the stories are lost, and a part of our Self is lost with them. How can we know the experience of our great-great-great-great-grandmother? How can we know how her children felt? How she felt about motherhood? What her internal struggles were with loving and being loved?

We can begin with our own stories. The ones that live in our heads, real and imagined. We can begin with our own struggles and how motherhood affects us or our relationship with our own mother. We can begin with how we embrace or avoid loving and being loved.

Because all those stories that we have, they didn’t start with us. Our struggles with living and loving and being didn’t begin with our birth. They all began a long time ago, with women we never met and yet are as much a part of us as we are part of our children. We are made of their DNA and with that comes the stories and struggles and sadness and joy of their lived experiences.

So we begin understanding our ancestral stories by beginning to understand our own. By acknowledging the stories we hold. By exploring all those shoulds and have-tos and fears. By examining our daily struggles and getting curious about them. By knowing that we are not the first or the last in our line to experience life as we do, our trials and strife are our threads to our past, to understanding, to embracing our own embodied knowing.

We may never know the specific literal details of the lives of the women who came before us. And we can imagine their internal experiences, the stories that swirled within them, by understanding our own internal stories.

How will you connect with your stories? With the gifts and non-gifts the women before you handed down? Are you ready to dig into who you are, what you are made of, literally and figuratively? Are you ready to grow your mermaid tail and dive to your own depths?

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Snow, roots and getting cozy

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It snowed today. It rarely snows here in the greater Seattle area, maybe once or twice a year and it sticks even less often than that–maybe every couple years. But it snowed today, big fluffy flakes that slowly fell down to the earth, where they melted and continued their journey down, down, down, into the grass and dirt and asphalt.

I have been pining away for snow. Growing up in eastern Washington we had snow every winter, tons of snow. So much snow that by the time I left my hometown at 18 I truly was done with snow and never wanted to live in it again. Now here I am at 44 aching for the snow, it’s brightness, it’s sparkle, it’s still crispness. I got a taste when we went over the mountains for Christmas, and now here I am, back on the west side of the state, looking at these big fluffy flakes falling down and disappearing and longing even more to the quietness that envelopes a city with a fresh fallen snow.

Looking back at those early years of my life I believe I spent the whole time plotting how I would leave that town of my birth. I felt trapped there, a wild animal caged, and the day I left for college couldn’t come fast enough. When I was five, yes five, I told my mother that I would live in Seattle when I grew up and once I arrived here I assumed that this is where I would spend the end of the my days. This town has fit me like a second skin for over twenty years. I grew up here in so many ways, spending my 20s and 30s here. My entire courtship with my husband was here. The births of our two children were here. I have met most of my best-adult friends here (and many of them have already moved away). I have drunk too much and danced so hard and pushed my life to its fullest in this town. I have lived, and learned to live fully, here.

And sometimes the things we think will be our second skins our entire lives become uncomfortable. Ill fitting. Scratchy. What was once exactly as it should be suddenly feels out of place and all wrong.

This is true for many of us. We live in our stories and they fit so well, for so long, and then suddenly they don’t. This can sometimes leave us feeling lost and discombobulated. We feel the discomfort of ill-fitting skin and yet we aren’t quite sure we are ready to shed it, to allow the next layer to come forward. Yet, eventually, sometimes with a little or a lot of work, it does.

Every year I look back and see how far I have come. How my friends and family have grown. How life shifts and sifts. I am not the person today I was a year ago and that person is different from the one the year before that. I can see my own unfolding, as we all can, looking back and find comfort in the knowing that we won’t always be where we are in this moment.

Sometimes we grow weary of the snow and the cold. And then, at other points in our lives, it is all we want. This is more than the wanting of what we do not have, it is speaking of how we grow and change as do our tastes and priorities. As we do the work of shedding our skins, our layers, of getting to the core of who we truly are and truly want to be, we find we are able to go back to our roots, whole.

And maybe that is the point. Going home, for so many, is about going where we need to wear masks, where we can’t allow our Self to be seen, where we feel unacceptable and unlovable. But that’s not what home is supposed to be, is it? Home is supposed to be safe, where we are loved unconditionally, where we feel cozy and good and whole in our own skin.

Maybe I haven’t been able to feel at home in the town I was born in because I didn’t feel at home with my Self. And as that has shifted and sifted, the calling to go back to my roots is strong and necessary and wanted.

What does it feel like for you to go back to your roots? To visit the place or the people you grew up with? Do you feel uncomfortable, unable to be you? And if so, how is this true when you aren’t “back home”? How can you find ways to be comfortable in your own skin, even when you go back to your roots?

My own journey has been long and windy, as most life journeys are. And part of coming home to me, to getting cozy and comfortable in my own skin, has been in exploring all the stories that are floating in my blood and muscles and mind. The stories about worth and value and lovable-ness. The stories of who I should be and how I should act and how “young ladies” are to be in the world and who I can be when I grow up. The stories of powerlessness and victimhood and smiling and nodding and grinning and bearing it. All those shoulds and have-tos, floating around in each of us, passed down to from our mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers and on up the line. The same shoulds and have-tos that we pass down to our daughters and granddaughters and nieces if we don’t bring them into our awareness and consciously and mindfully expose them and change them.

This work started before the conception of my daughter, and yet her existence, while even still in my womb, brought this work to the forefront. I wanted different for her. And I still do. And now, I want different for me too. And for the young boy I am raising. And for my friends. And for all of us.

I want us each to shed all these “shoulds” and “have-tos” and get into the truth of who we are and how we want to be in this world. I want all of us to feel comfortable in our own skin. To be able to enjoy the snow again. To feel safe and lovable and at home when we visit our roots.

This is my New Years wish for the world, for my family, for me. What is yours?

 

shedding shoulds 2016
Join me for 30-days of diving deep into all those stories that hold you back from being the person you were born to be. For more details and to register go to http://gwynnraimondi.com/shedding-shoulds or click on the Shedding Shoulds tab at the top of the page.

Dancing with the old stories

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There is an ebb and flow to this work of undoing all the myths and stories that were overtly pounded or slyly snuck into our heads as we grew up in the world. It is a dance of coming together and holding the stories close while learning not to let them have a hold on you. It is whispering to the old stories that we, us and the story, have transformed while they scream at us.

Sometimes we feel the shift happening. We notice our dissonance and discomfort as a story is about to transform, be re-written, reborn. We are ill at ease and sometimes this comes through as anxiety and sometimes it comes through as physical illness and sometimes is comes through as just not feeling right in our skin, sensing that it is about to shed.

Stories of our worthiness are common. Or rather, our unworthiness. Stories of how we have nothing to offer this world. Stories of how we are terrible mothers or wives or friends. Stories of how we are ungrateful daughters or students. Stories of how we have no real value in this world.

I believe we dance with these stories. I know I do.

These stories stop us from caring for ourselves. From loving ourselves. From honoring ourselves.

These stories allow us to give and give and give to others, trying so desperately to prove our own worth and value, to the outside world, but mostly to our Self. We discount our work as unimportant. We undervalue our gifts. We make self denigrate ourselves when another person recognizes our gifts or thanks us for being in the world.

These stories can be re-written. We do not need to live in a world where we are not valued, not honored, not respected.

We start re-writing by learning to honor, value and respect our Self. We start taking the lead in the dance by making the space to love ourselves even during our busiest times.

These are things I have learned and relearned. My own dance with many of my old stories has become more refined, smoother. I am in the lead and can hold some of my old stories as they cry and scream, like I would hold my own toddler as he is sharing his big emotions with me. I can thank many of my old stories for what they did or tried to do to protect me and then lovingly tell them it is time for them to change, that they can’t bite or kick or hit me anymore.

I can tell them that they have changed, that I have changed. And then I move out of that dance and  into another, another layer ready to be revealed and shed. As I love myself up a little bit more, as I recognize my own value and gifts for this world, for my Self.

I hear the music of my worth. And I change the steps to the dance.

 

On Grief, Mother-Wounds, and Self-Love

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It’s Halloween morning.  As I sit down to write this, the rest of the family is still in bed, sleeping peacefully. My coffee has brewed and I have finished my first cup, along with a couple of peanut-butter Snickers (oh so good!). The wind is blowing like mad and the rain is coming down in ways it doesn’t usually here in Seattle: hard, heavy, filled with sadness and melancholy and grief.

We have been talking about the Mother-Wound in the (Un)Becoming circle, and the grief work that is involved in this healing. The grief of not having the mother we wanted or deserved. The grief of our mothers not having the mother they wanted or deserved. The grief of our grandmothers and our daughters. We have been talking of healing and empathy and finding ways to repair our Self.

It is heavy work. I feel the weight of the grief of the circle as surely as I feel my own. My grief of not having the mother I needed or deserved as a young child. The grief of just when our relationship was becoming what I had always dreamed of, she died. The grief of not always being able to be the mother my daughter (or son) need and deserve. The grief of being human and therefor flawed, imperfect.

In this healing, we learn that our flaws are yes, what make us human, but they do not make us unworthy. They do not make us undeserving of love or nurturing. They do not make us tainted or valueless.

These flaws simply make us human. Just like our mothers, and grandmothers, and sisters and best friends. Just like our husbands and bosses and teachers. Just like our children. We each do things we may not be proud of at times. We each have the capacity for cruelty, even when not intentional. And we each have the capacity for deep love and vulnerability.

I told the circle in my video this week that sometimes I think our fear of love is what makes us do crazy things. It was in reference to the truth that our mothers have to had, or have to currently, love us with the same fire we love our own children, they simply may not be able to show it in healthy ways, in ways we can feel it. I shared a bit of my experience as a mother when my daughter was very young, and the absolute terror I felt at the love I felt for her. My love for her, and hers for me, terrified me to my core. It was too raw, too pure, too unconditional. I was unable to feel or process this love and so in my own ways I distanced myself from her, from us.

Eventually I was able to come back, do the work I needed so that I could be closer to the mother she needed, the mother I needed and wanted to be. This is a slow and ever evolving process. I have my own wounds to heal, as each of us do, and I know she will have hers to heal one day too.

We each have days of not being the people we hope to be, for ourselves or for our children. We each have times of too much yelling, too much distancing. The vulnerability of the love we feel for our children, and they for us, can be overwhelming even in the best of times. And so we screw up and we come back and repair as best we can and we move on to the next moment and the next and sooner or later we will screw up again and come back and repair again. It is the truth of our human experience. It is what makes us human.  It is also what makes us divine, sacred, holy and yes, magical.

In the repair is where our magic lies, where the holy lives. When we are able to come back to another we have knowingly hurt and say “I am sorry. I will try to do better next time” — that is where the sacred comes through. When we are able to admit our own humanity, and show others that it is okay to be human, this is when the Divine flows through us and into the world.

When we are able to not only repair with our children, spouses, and friends, but can also come to our Self and say “I’m sorry, I will do better next time” that is healing. When we can look to our own mothers and grandmothers and on down the line and recognize they were only doing the best they could with what they had — not excusing their behaviors, not saying it didn’t or doesn’t hurt— simply acknowledging their experience, the wounds are able to be cleaned. In this acknowledging the humanity of others around us, in finding our empathy for them and their experience, we start to have empathy for ourselves. We can start to see how while we are flawed, we are worthy of love, of nurturing, of respect.

And here’s where the magic comes in: We start to love, nurture and respect our Self. We start to do the little things each day that allow us to show our Self that we love her. We start to breathe a bit easier. We start to feel the ground beneath us. We start to sense the sacred, holy and Divine within us. This is self-love. This is healing. This is magic.

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Sacred in the Everyday

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I’ve been thinking a lot about what it is to be a Sacred being. What does it mean to connect with the Sacred and Divine, both within and outside? What does it look like to touch the Holy that lives inside as well as outside of this body? There was a quote on a tea bag for my daughter the other day that said “Your soul is your highest self.” And while I nodded to this truth I also wondered, what the heck does that even mean?  Then on another day my tea gave me this wisdom: “The voice of your soul is breath.” This truth I felt deep within.

And when we put these two little tea quotes together, they are telling us that our soul speaks to us through our breath, and that we can know where our “highest self” is by checking in with our breath. Following this train of thought our highest self speaks to us through our breath, our breathing (or lack of breathing). And then, we can connect to our soul, our Divine, our Sacred, by connecting to our breath. And the deeper we can connect to our breath the deeper we can connect with the Divine.

Simply following a train of logic. Yet still I am left  in this place of, okay, so what does that mean?

I begin every program and workshop with focusing on our breath. It has been a part of my own journey to mindfully and consciously be aware of and connect to my breath for several years, and I truly believe, have believed, this is where our work begins. This exercise has always been for me and my work, a way to guide others to connect more with their body, to find a way to ground and center and be fully present. It is where we can start, easily without needing any thing but our self.

To date, I have not brought the Sacred or Divine into this breath worth, not consciously at least.

Yet these little tea bags are telling me that perhaps I have been inviting and connecting to the Divine in this work all along, without realizing. That perhaps connecting to the body is a way to find connection with the Divine. That the Divine lives within us as well as outside of us and it can talk to us through our own breath and body and being.

In the (Un)Becoming Circle we are about to dive into some of the deep work of healing our Feminine wounds, our mother wounds. Part of this healing is finding connection with the Divine, the Sacred, the Holy; connecting to the Divine Feminine within us and outside of us. And as I told the women in today’s video, this work scares the shit out of me.

The idea of connecting to something that is both greater than the Self and also part of the Self is intense. For some the idea that the Divine is within is where they find resistance. For others it is the idea of the Divine outside of the self that is bothersome. We each were raised with stories of what is Sacred and Holy and what the Divine is or isn’t. More importantly, many of us were raised with stories of how we are unworthy of receiving the Divine within, that it is separate and we do not deserve to be touched by it.

These stories of unworthiness run deep. Deep in our bones, our psyches, our souls. In my work I guide others to dig into those stories, to find their value, to recognize and acknowledge that their own value and beauty. I start tackling these stories of unworthiness by guiding others, and myself, to connect to their breath, to start to fully breath. To stop holding their breath, and to let it out so that fresh breath can come in. To allow the breath to completely fill every part of the body.

The beauty of breath work is that you can do it anytime, anywhere. Connecting to your breath when you are feeling anxious or depressed or just not quite right, is something you can do right now. Or in ten minutes. Or while you are making dinner. Or right before you start to scream at the kids to get their damn shoes on (because you’ve only asked them to do it a dozen times already). Or even right after you have screamed at them so you can take the time to repair as needed.

Breath work can happen at any time.

And if we follow the logic up above, guided by quotes on tea bags, we can also connect to our soul, to the Divine at anytime.

Anytime. Not only at church. Or in the middle of the forest. Or by the edge of the ocean. But right now, sitting at this screen. We can each take in and release a breath, connecting to our body, to our Self, and holycrow, to the Divine too.

sacred self boardAbout a week ago I created the intuitive collage board for my Sacred Self program. When I sit down to create these collages, I just clear my head of all other thoughts except the program or project I want to focus on. Creating these boards helps me to find the core of what the program is to be about, helps to birth the program into the world, to make it something of substance instead of just something that is swirling around in my head. I sit down with magazines and scissors and thumb tacks and tear out and cut the images and phrases that speak most to me while I am thinking of the work to be done. I always feel a bit of a thrill as the images come together and the phrases start to take shape and the feel of the workshop or retreat is birthed into this world, on this bulletin board in front of me. Until recently I have never considered this to be the Divine speaking through me, but perhaps it is.

Perhaps there is more of the Divine and Sacred in the everyday than we realize. My daughter has been asking me about mermaids a lot lately. She’s at that age now where she tells me she wants to know The Truth and I see her fantastical world of fairies and dragons and Santa Claus starting to slip away. She asked me if mermaids were real. And I told her that no, they are not real. She responded with: “But the ocean is vast and deep and we haven’t explored most of it. So mermaids could very well be real and live in the parts of the ocean we haven’t explored yet.” I can’t argue with her logic.

Perhaps my daughter’s mother needs to remember it is okay to have faith in the unknown. Perhaps all of us could take a lesson in not needing everything to be cold facts and figures and to allow for a little magic, a little fairy dust, to enter back into our psyches. Perhaps we can open ourselves to the unknown and not shut it out because of fear.

Perhaps, everything is Sacred and part of the Divine. The budding flower. The falling leaf. The sunrise and sunset.

Maybe even those things we can’t see, like fairies hiding in the trees.  Like mermaids living in the ocean depths.

 

 

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