Finding comfort

In my bed with with flannel sheets and big heavy and fluffy blankets and many pillows.

In a cup of chocolate hazelnut milk.

Sometimes in a bag of potato chips. Crinkle cut with lots of sea salt.

In a cup of warm herbal tea with some medicinal syrup of one kind or another.

In a cold cup of coffee that has been sitting most of the day because of all the doing and no chance to sit and drink it hot.

In his arms. Always. My head to his chest hearing his heart and its irregular rhythms and knowing despite it all he is here now and I can’t worry about whether he will be here tomorrow.

With them in my arms or lying on my chest and sometimes even crawling all over me.

With her and her and her and her and the telling of our truths and wisdom and knowing that the miles don’t hurt our friendships and sisterhoods.

With her and her bff and the knowing that there generation will have something so much different than ours.

In her office and the telling and revealing of the stories and the dislodging and healing the trauma of my own lived experience that lives in my body.

In her office and circles where the ancestral and culture healing occurs.

In the words. Always the words I come back to and write and write and write.

In the writing of the words and stories and the truths.

In the liminal spaces, the unknown, the uncontrollable.

These are some of the places I find comfort.

And while all of this is true, I now find my greatest comfort in my body. In her knowing. In all she has done for me. In all she has endured. In feeling her, my, heartbeat and in noticing her, my, breath and in her, my, ability to pick him up and soothe his toddler tears and to wrap her, my, arms around her turning-into-a-woman-body and comforting her frustrations and pre-teen tears and giving her me as a place to come home and find comfort.

I find comfort in the knowing that it wasn’t always like this and that my relationship with my body, with me, has been hard won.

And yet, it has been won.

The battle to feeling at home in my body, finding comfort in her was not easy. And it was a battle. A battle of healing and resistance and fear. A battle with exhaustion and wounds and getting up the next day anyhow. A battle, that at times, was slow and peaceful (can a battle be such a thing?) and at other times tumultuous, frenzied, and chaotic.

Getting to this place of feeling at home in my body, of finding comfort there, was and is filled with discomfort. With tears. With acknowledging things I may not want to. With feeling things that I may not like. With learning things about my self and life and history I may wish I didn’t know.

These battles have been the work of reclaiming my body. Remembering her. Connecting to her through breath, through yoga, through various body-centered mindfulness exercises. Getting to know her by learning to feel her quiet whispers and rumblings. Trusting her stories and wisdom.

Reclaiming her. As mine. Mine to decide who touches me and who doesn’t. Mine to heal and nourish in the ways I see fit. Mine to love and honor and be angry with, as I need. Mine. Mine. MINE.

We live in a culture that does not like women laying claim to their own bodies. We live in a culture that thinks consent is not relevant to any conversation or transaction. We live in a culture where women’s bodies are still not considered their own, as the right to choose hangs in the balance on this election day, as at least three women today will be raped, as at least three women today will be physically assaulted, as three more women today will be murdered by their intimate partner.

Yes, I find comfort in my body. Yes, I feel at home in her. And what this looks like is acknowledging the very real fear I feel having this body. This female form. Knowing that my confidence in her could be taken as some sort of comment on some other person’s being. Knowing that my confidence in her, my using her voice. my daring to stand in my strength, my power my light could get my physically attacked.

Yes, I feel at home in my body. And I am fully aware of how truly risky that is. How risky it was for my mother and grandmother and all my grandmothers back a couple thousand years. Feeling at home in my body also means feeling at home in the trauma and discomfort and dis-ease that she, that I, carry in my blood, my bones, my DNA.

Feeling at home in my body, finding comfort in her, is not all flowers and sausages.

Yet I would have it no other way. It is through the discomfort and dis-ease that I learn more about my Self. About my own power and strength and daring. About consent and where it that lives within me. About how our culture doesn’t want any of us to claim our bodies or minds or spirits as ours.

I find comfort in my body. Because she holds the stories. She holds my history. And with her, I am learning to be and do different in this world, so my daughter and granddaughters will have a different world. A world where they truly feel safe. A where where they truly are safe.

xoxo

Did you enjoy reading this? If so, I invite you to subscribe to my weekly love letter right over here.

This post inspired by Isabel Abbott and Bronwyn Petry‘s The Body Contains Multitudes. If you have a chance to participate in either of their offerings, I encourage you to jump at the chance. xoxo

November 3, 2016November 1, 2016

The wild one behind closed doors

In the Being & Becoming Alumna group we are reading a chapter a month of Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ Women Who Run With The Wolves. It is deep reading and I find myself wanting to underline every single sentence in the book (yes, I’m one of those people). Every sentence speaks volumes beyond the limited numbers of words that are within it and stirs and nourishes so much within me.

The book echoes the work we have been doing in the Being & Becoming and (Un)Becoming circles, and will do in Awakening Our Womanline :: connecting deeply to our Feminine Self, our Feminine Source, our own embodied knowing. It is the work that many women find themselves craving and needing to do as they grow older, seeking their identity as a female in a patriarchal culture and trying to understand our values, our roles, our truth.

I mentioned in an Instagram post recently that I have recently uncovered another layer of my own internalized misogyny. Using the words internalized misogyny is part of my tearing away of that layer. Looking at yet another way women play small and don’t stand in our own strength and power.

Something that many of us do is to dumb our Self down: we play small, we say we aren’t smart, we act as if we don’t understand. We allow others to use the big words and we downplay our degrees, or we say because we don’t have the degrees that means we aren’t intelligent or our writing isn’t good enough or whatever the long list of things we are told that we have internalized.

The Truth is, My Truth is, this is bullshit. The women who gather in my circles, the women who read this weekly love letter, the women who I surround myself with in my day-to-day life are beautiful, highly intelligent, competent, and worthy people. If they weren’t, if you weren’t, you wouldn’t be called to do this depth work into your Self, into your own knowing.

And so I dance with another Shadow and I face her and we smile at each other and we hold hands and I thank her for letting me see her, and she thanks me for seeing her. And now that she is seen and known, I can hold her close and take the lead and allow another part of my Light to shine brighter. As I play with this new found aspect of my Shadow, I may start using “big words” and sometimes may sound more academic than poetic.

I also may write more about feminism, the patriarchy, oppression. Or rather, I will continue talking and writing about those concepts, and may start naming them instead of dancing around their names.

This has been part of embracing my (mother’s & grandmothers) roars. Realizing how deeply ingrained it can be in us to not let the world see or hear us, to “play nice,” to not speak out, to not use what my grandfathers called “fifty-cent words.” The truth is, I am smart, as were my mother and grandmothers. I have intelligence and I don’t need to hide it to make others feel comfortable. Yes, I can be a bit vague and ditsy at times too, and I don’t need to play those moments up in order to play down my vocabulary, my knowledge, or my “book smarts.” And neither do you.

Throughout history smart women who utilize their voices has threatened the status-quo. These women have changed history. They have also been subjects of torture, rape, oppression and murder. Historically, and even currently, there has been and is a risk to using our voice and showing our intelligence. =These traumas and realities live in our very cells, in our DNA. These stories live in our bones, our blood, our wombs.

The experiences of the women who came before us are alive in us. We have the choice and opportunity (and in my opinion, responsibility) to listen to those stories, to connect to these women, to heal these wounds and traumas and to let out our own roars, to gather the all the strength and power within us and to create the world we want to live in by making change happen.

Will you join me?

Did you enjoy this? It’s from a love letter I sent out in March 2016. If you’d like to receive future love letters from me, you can subscribe right over here.

November 1, 2016November 1, 2016

Where I live

I live in the in-betweens, those back alleys that aren’t really a place of their own but clearly have who we were at one end and who we will become on the other. While looking back everything is relatively clear, distinct, sharp, looking forward is often filled with fog, hazy, not clear.

I live, physically, in a small apartment with my kids and husband. It too is an in-between space, where we landed as we figured out our next steps. Now we are here, waiting and doing what we need to move onto our next planned step, not knowing what will come our way to change our course and seeing clearly all the choices we made and didn’t make that brought us to this space now.

These in-between spaces are my life. The older I become the more I know, deep in my bones that these in-betweens, these back alleys that lead us into our next ways of being, our next iterations, our next phases of life, are life itself. Those unseen destinations ahead of us are often mirages that shape-shift with our whims and choices and non-choices and with the wind and with things far beyond our knowing or control.

These liminal spaces were once terrifying to me. My need for plans, for knowing, for having the false sense of control and safety was strong. I lacked resilience and would fall to pieces if the slightest thing went seemingly off track. It would take days or weeks for me to recover and even in the recovery of the disappointment or frustration there lived a deep resentment and deeper fear of the fallout of things not having gone “my way.”

In time I learned the value in having fall back plans. This brought comfort in that if Plan A didn’t work out exactly I still had plans B-ZZZZZ to work through. These fall back plans were my safety nets. They both helped me learn to build resilience and also stunted my resilience. I still needed control. I still feared the unknown. I still could not bear the dissonance of the in-between spaces.

I’m not entirely sure I can pinpoint when it all changed. When these in-between spaces, when these gates into the Underworld, began to feel like home. When my resilience grew back wholly and completely. I can not tell you the date or the exact steps I took to land here. I know part of it was coming into my body. I know part of it was seeing an amazing therapist (or three). I know part of it was becoming a mother and wanting more and better and different for my child. I know part of it was the reading of All The Books and getting my own degree in psychology. I know part of it is simply growing older and no longer having any fucks to give.

Here I am. I have been walking with Inanna for years now, going down into the Underworld, learning to sit in the discomfort of my own grief and trauma, learning to hold space for others to do the same. With each descent and ascent more layers come off and I leave more of my masks and armor and distracting baubles behind.

I live in my body. In her very real liminal space, moving from motherhood into cronehood. Shifting and softening. Creaking and popping more than in years past, and even with the pains and aches that are new to me now, I feel more comfortable and at home in her than ever before. The anger and resentment and sense of betrayal that I once had for her feels like a distant memory and I almost question if I ever hated my body at all.

Almost question. Because I know. I know I hated her. I hated her softness and curves. I hated how she drew attention from some people but not from others. I hated how she felt weak and defenseless against the world, against men who only wanted to take her and use and then discard her like a piece of trash.

I know I resented her. I resented all her limitations. I resented how she “turned on” me, how she wouldn’t bend or sway or stand or leap or run or punch or kick in the ways other bodies did. I resented how she was built and what all that meant. I resented her nature and naturalness. I resented how she was a target for pain and beatings from those who were supposed to love me. I resented how she just kept taking it, kept going on, wouldn’t stop. I resented my body’s resilience with all my mind. I resented her because I could not understand her need to survive or keep going or keep living, even in the worst and most torturous of circumstances.

I know I felt betrayed by her. Again and again. Becoming pregnant when I didn’t want her to and then becoming infertile when I desperately wanted another child. I felt betrayed by her “unspecified” diagnosis and how there was no clear or straight path to fix her, according to the myriad of doctors who poked and prodded and cut and then sewed her back up. I felt betrayed again by her curves and the attention they received, both “positive” and less “positive.” I felt betrayed by her sicknesses. I felt betrayed that she wouldn’t do exactly what I wanted her to do when I wanted her to do it.

I lived in that space for a long time. The hatred and resentment and betrayal almost ate me alive.

And here I am. From where I am now that all feels so very long ago. Though I know it wasn’t.

Here I am now. Now, I love my body. I revere and respect her. I am honored and humbled and so deeply grateful that despite me she kept going. I am amazed at all she has endured and grateful that she has held these stories and truths about the experiences that made me in a safe space until I was ready to know them.

I am at home in her. At home in the pleasures and pains of her. At home in the discomforts and comforts. At home in what she is right now. At home with the aging body she is becoming.

This is where I live. In my body.

In this amazing body that has endured tortures and pleasures. In this amazing body that keeps going despite all my past attempts to stop her. In this amazing body that has given me two beautiful living children. In this amazing body that is shifting and moving in her own ways. In this amazing body that holds both my stories and the stories of my ancestors. In this amazing body that knows.

I live at home. In this body. In the liminal spaces of life. In this tiny apartment that keeps us warm and safe and dry.

I live at home. In my freedom and unapologeticness and strength and power and daring and light and wholeness and knowing.

I live at home in my being and becoming the Unleashed Woman who my body held and nurtured and kept safe and brave through all our years.

I live at home in me.

xoxo

Did you enjoy this? If so, I invite you to subscribe to my weekly love letter right over here.

Today’s post was inspired by two different writing and exploration courses. One by Jena Schwartz and the other by Isabel Abbott and Bronwyn Petry. I encourage you to explore their work and see if any of their future offerings are right for you. xoox

October 27, 2016October 21, 2016

Reclaiming Our Light

What does it mean to step into our light? To claim our light? To embrace our light?

It is about reclaiming our brilliance, our fire, our spark.

It is about embracing the truth that we women are forces of nature.

It is all about being an Unleashed Woman.

It means claiming authority over our own life and claims and confidently sharing our knowledge, education, and experience.

It means claiming space: physically by not trying to shrink our body; emotionally by allowing our emotions to be felt and processed; psychologically by speaking up when something doesn’t work for us; spiritually by having practices that feel right for us in connecting to the greater world, to nature, to the cosmic energy of the universe.

It means embracing and loving our Whole Self, unconditionally and unapologetically.

It means connecting deeply with others, especially other women.

It means being self-aware, trusting our intuition, feeling good in our own skin, and acknowledging and accepting the ebb and flow of life.

Stepping into our light, becoming the Unleashed Woman is about making and breaking our own rules. It is about living life on our own terms and not compromising who we are to make others feel safe or comfortable.

Claiming our light, becoming our own Unleashed Woman is about taking up space in our homes, our work spaces, our entire world. It is about using our voice, daring to be heard and seen, embracing our power, all without apology.

Connecting to our light and the Unleashed Woman within us is about accepting our “flaws” and imperfections. It is about not pretending to “know it all” or “have it all together.” It is about us making mistakes, but not beating ourselves up for it; instead apologizing and making amends when necessary and learning and then doing differently in the future.

Embracing our light, our power, our strength and daring is being an Unleashed Woman and seeing other women as comrades, as sisters.

It is about knowing who we are. Analyzing ourselves, our emotions, our actions and looking for deeper meaning for our reactions to things. It is about trusting our intuition and listening to our body. It is about allowing ourselves to feel the bad times as well as the good, knowing that in time, regardless, this too shall pass.

And.

Reclaiming our light is also about stepping up and correcting the injustices we see in this world. It is about standing beside those who have been wronged and fighting with them to bring about justice and equality.

It is speaking out against our culture, not only in our being – also in our doing. This could look like going to protests or marches. It could look like donating money and or time to causes that call to us. It could look like raising our children to aware of the injustices in the world and showing the injustices in our history. It could look like listening and hearing and believing someone when they tell you of their own lived experience. It could look like voting from someone who you may not like, but know in the greater picture will be the better option for the oppressed, including you, in this country. It could look like calling out and in family and friends when they make a racist or ablist or misogynist comment or joke.

It could look like a million different things. And each of these things matter. Each of these are ways that we both step into our own light and create the space for others to step into theirs.

Because while this work is about us, it is also about our greater world community. It is about tearing down the oppressive systems we live under and building anew so everyone is free. It is about not only surviving, but thriving, both individually and collectively.

Because the truth is we cannot do this work alone, in a vacuum. The truth is not a one of us by ourselves can change the entire world. The truth is we need to do this work in community.

Together.

You and me and our all our brothers and sisters. Together.

Let’s do this thing.

(Below is a 20-minute video of me talking even more about this idea of reclaiming our light. I hope you enjoy it.)

(Did you enjoy this? Then I invite you to subscribe to my weekly love letter right over here.)

(Interested in reclaiming your own Light, your own Unleashed Woman who lives within you with a community of other women? Then I invite you to join us for my next six-month circle, Exploring our Light::(Re)Connecting to our Strength, Power, and Daring, that begins November 1. You can learn more and register right over here. )

This is the fourth in a four-part series of essays and videos. Want to see the rest? You can find them here:

Reclaiming our strength

Reclaiming our power

Reclaiming our daring

Reclaiming our light (this post)

October 25, 2016October 27, 2016

Reclaiming Our Daring

It is both an act of rebellion and an act of bravery to move against our (racist, misogynist, all the -ists) patriarchal culture. It is an act of daring to show the world who we truly are, to break the rules of compliance and complicity, to speak and shout and scream out against injustice.

Our culture wants us quiet, or rather, silent. Our culture wants us to look the way. Our culture wants us to follow the rules (you know, the ones that are ever changing and are different rules than the men need to follow). To be nice girls. To be polite.

Our culture wants us pitted against other women. Our culture wants us isolated, lonely.

Our culture wants us constantly striving. For better. For more. To never be satisfied with who we are or what we have. And in this striving we are to stomp on any other woman who gets in our way.

Our culture wants us buying into the stories of how we are too much and not enough. It wants us nearly immobilized by our shame.

Fuck our culture.

This is a culture that allows us to be raped, beaten and murdered. For the perpetrators to either not be punished at all, or get such lenient sentences that it’s laughable. And at the same time, we –the actual victims– are blamed. You know all the stories, she was in the wrong place at the wrong time, well with what she was wearing what did she expect, she should have taken self-defense classes, she should have never talked to/dated/married him in the first place. Maybe you have even told some of these stories yourself.

Because we think if we hold up the lies of our culture, that somehow we will be safe.

But see, that right there, that is another lie our culture tells us.

We are not safe. We haven’t been for millennium.

Knowing this, it takes a great strength, it takes all our power, it requires every ounce of daring we have, to stand up against our culture.

To dare to speak out.

To dare to speak up.

To dare to speak at all.

It takes a great strength, it takes all our power, it requires every ounce of daring we have, to declare that we are perfectly fine as we are, that we do not need fixing, thank you very much, and by the way, neither do our sisters.

To dare letting go of the stories of how we are too much.

To dare letting go of the stories of how we are not enough.

To dare feeling comfortable in our own skin.

It takes a great strength, it takes all our power, it requires every ounce of daring we have, to find and connect to and embrace our sisters, both by blood and by community.

To dare to show ourselves to the world so our sisters can find us.

To dare being honest and vulnerable.

To dare to acknowledge when we make mistakes, when we unintentionally harm others and to make the repairs necessary and do different the next time.

And here’s a thing: We have daring in our very being as women.

We dare to get up each day and try again, no matter how many times we have been shoved down.

We dare to fight for our children, their rights and well-being.

We dare to do things differently from our mother’s generation.

We dare to find ways to connect to our Whole Self, and embrace her as she is.

We dare to say fuck you to a culture that says we don’t matter.

We dare to claim our worth.

We dare to claim our value.

We dare to claim our bodies.

We dare to claim our experience.

We dare to claim our existence.

And it’s not easy. It’s messy and hard and frustrating and sometimes lonely. Particularly when we are in that in-between space of shifting from Leashed Woman to Unleashed Woman.

Daring to become the Unleashed Woman within requires fortitude, bravery, resilience. It requires us to be deeply connected to our own individual strength and power and the strength and power of the collective. It requires us to be able to sit in the discomfort of being rebellious, being a rule breaker.

I invite you to embrace your own daring, in all the big and small ways. To step into the discomfort of doing and being different. To join us in burning all this shit down and building up new.

Will you accept the invitation?

(Below is a 20-minute video of me talking even more about this idea of reclaiming our daring. I hope you enjoy it.)

(Did you enjoy this? Then I invite you to subscribe to my weekly love letter right over here.)

(Interested in deeply connecting to your own daring, your own Unleashed Woman who lives within you with a community of other women? Then I invite you to join us for my next six-month circle, Exploring our Light::(Re)Connecting to our Strength, Power, and Daring, that begins November 1. You can learn more and register right over here. )

This is the third in a four-part series of essays and videos. Want to see the rest? You can find them here:

Reclaiming our strength

Reclaiming our power

Reclaiming our daring (this post)

Reclaiming our light