Reclaiming Our Power

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a hundred million times:: We live in a culture that hates women.

Our culture hates white women. It hates brown women. It hates black women. It hates trans women.

It hates women. Period.

And.

Our culture is smart, it’s learned through the years how to truly keep us leashed and under its thumb.

It pits us against each other.

It dangles carrots for us so that we think we will rise up to the top of the heap, but only if we betray all other women.

It tells us over and over again that the ideal female (who is still hated by the way) is white, young, and thin.

Our culture turns us against our grandmothers, disregarding their wisdom, mocking their age and “dementia,” and frailty.

Our culture turns us against our daughters, having us teach them to not be seen or heard, to be polite, to be nice, to not speak, to keep their emotions and opinions to themselves.

Our culture turns us against our mothers, these women on their way to becoming the grandmothers, these women who have done what they needed to do to survive and by extension for their daughters to survive.

Our culture turns us against our sisters, not trusting them, not believing them, gaslighting them, telling them their emotions and experiences aren’t valid, that they are to blame for all that has happened to them, including the things they actually didn’t have any control over.

Our culture lies to us, telling us how other women are the problem, how we ourselves are the problem. It tells us we are worthless, weak, and powerless.

And perhaps that is the greatest lie. Because love, we are powerful beyond measure.

We make up half of the world’s population. We are the ones who birth babies. We are the ones, despite how much our culture tries to hold us down, who rise up, again and again, demanding to be seen, to be heard, to be respected, to be treated as equals.

We are powerful forces of nature, us women. Together we could move mountains. Together we could burn all this shit down. Together we could create a world where all are truly equal.

The thing is, we need to come together first.

We need to break the leash of our patriarchal training and culture.

We need to stop believing the lies that other women are the problem, that we ourselves are the problem. We need to stop gaslighting each other, stop judging each other, stop shoving each other down so we ourselves can rise up.

We need to claim our power. The power that lives within each of us and the power of our collective womanhood. The power that is being deeply connected to our Whole Self: body, mind, spirit, soul, shadow, light, feminine, masculine. The power of being deeply connected to each other.

Until all of us are free and equal, none of us are free or equal.

It is time to rise up. It is time to burn this all down. It is time to embrace our world-wide sisterhood. It is time to stop betraying our own.

They think they took away our power. We think they took away our power.

They didn’t.

It is here living inside of us, waiting for us to allow it to rise up.

It is time to embrace the Unleashed Woman who lives within each of us, whether we think we are ready for her or not.

Join me?

(Below is a 20-minute video of me talking even more about this idea of reclaiming our strength. 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 power, 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 second 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 (this post)

Reclaiming our daring

Reclaiming our light

October 18, 2016October 27, 2016

Reclaiming Our Strength

I’ve been writing about our patriarchal training for a while now, how it holds us down, keeps us small. I gave names to the wounds our culture gives us as women (Leashed Woman) and to the feeling of freedom once we have begun our journey of healing and breaking the binds our of training (Unleashed Woman). The training that we receive is real, and the wounds we inherit and receive for this training are also real. And the truth that we can break free, is absolutely real too.

We have been told as women we are the “weaker sex.” We are, supposedly, weaker physically, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually. We are taught that our bodies are places of sin and evil, as are our minds and spirits and souls. We are taught that we are unable to do for ourselves. We are trained that we need others in authority, usually (white) men, to explain our bodies or our minds or our connection to the Divine to us. We are feeble. We are delicate flowers. We need others to help us get through even the most basic of functions and duties.

Fuck that.

We are strong. We women carry within us the strength to create life. Just stop and think about that for one moment – whether you’ve actually had children or not isn’t relevant – we have in our very being, our DNA, our essence, the strength to not only carry and grow another living being within our womb, allowing it to expand us in all the ways possible, we also have the strength to PUSH THEM OUT a hole that is half the size of the head we are pushing through.

And yes, there are those of us who experience infertility. And there are those of us who choose not to have children. And yes, there are those who required emergency cesarean sections to birth your babes.

AND NONE of that changes the fact that your body contains the strength to do this thing of creating and birthing life.

That you are STRONG. And that not only are we physically strong as women, we are emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually strong too.

Part of the strength of our body is all of the emotions it holds within it. The bottled rage of generations. The bottled grief. A weak body, a weak person, could not hold these emotions within. Nor could a weak person choose to connect with these emotions, to explore them, to embrace them, to process them, to heal them. A weak person could not feel these emotions and survive.

It takes strength. Of character, of stamina, of body to hold and connect and heal these emotions we carry, from our own lived experience and what has been passed down to us by our ancestors.

We are strong of mind and intellect. Despite the fact that boys are favored in classrooms. Despite the fact that we are talked over in meetings or at social gatherings. Despite the fact that those of us with young children are so sleep deprived and just plain mentally exhausted from care taking that we can barely see straight. Despite the fact that we have to punch and push and tear our way into male-dominated professions to be even invited to be in the room, let alone to a seat at the table. Despite the fact that we are physically and mentally drained from all our unpaid physical, psychological and emotional labor.

Despite all that, we are writers and scientists and entrepreneurs. Despite all that we are activists, politicians, and professors. Despite all that we are lawyers, speech writers, and Supreme Court judges. Despite all that, one of us is about to become President of the United States. Despite all that, several of us have been Prime Ministers throughout the world.

We have strong minds. We must to be able to see and unravel the insidious training our culture gives us. We must to be able to speak out, coherently, against this culture and its training, despite how it stacks the odds against us. We must to be able to tear this shit down, brick by brick (ha! first typo started “prick by prick”!) and to create new spaces and a new world for ourselves, our daughters and nieces, and our grand-daughters and grand-nieces as well as our sons, grandsons, nephews and grand-nephews.

We are spiritually strong. When we connect to our bodies, when we allow ourselves to be grounded and rooted in our physical self, we feel and see and know how deeply connected we are to all life and to all that is of us and beyond us. Our monthly cycles connect us to the moon, to our planet, to the ebb and flow of life and death. We know, in our bones and being, the truth of our greater connection to our planet and all the people and living beings on it. We hold ourselves, and others, accountable and we know that by connecting to Spirit (or the Divine or God or Goddess or the Unified Theory or whatever you personally call it) we are able to understand and feel deep compassion and unconditional love.

Women are beyond strong. We are a force of nature. We are fierce. We have within us all the strength we need to tear down these systems that oppress us, that try to keep us isolated and small.

Let’s take off the leashes and binds and chains that are keeping us small, that are convincing us we are weak and unimportant. Let’s stop believing the lies.

Let’s become Unleashed Woman.

xoxo

(Below is an 17-minute video of me talking even more about this idea of reclaiming our strength. 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 learning how to deeply connect to your own inner strength, your own Unleashed Woman who lives within you? 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 first in a four-part series of essays and videos. Want to see the rest? You can find them here:

Reclaiming our strength (this post)

Reclaiming our power

Reclaiming our daring

Reclaiming our light

October 13, 2016November 14, 2016

Social Justice, Awareness and Change

the-in-betweens-5

When I was in high school in the mid-late eighties, I was pretty socially aware. Well, I thought I was at least. I mean, I knew about the “secret” wars in Central America and about homelessness. I knew that racism existed, though as a white girl who lived in a white community it was all theoretical and not something I thought I ever witnessed or experienced. I was a little punk rocker with my black hair and black clothes and leather jacket and I would argue about how horrible Reagan was and how he and Bush Sr. would destroy the world. I was in high school when the Berlin Wall was torn down. This means in middle school that horrifying scare-tactic show The Day After was aired on prime time (my dad wouldn’t let me watch it, or the movie Red Dawn when it came to the theaters) and my freshman year of high school we had “air raid” and “The Bomb” drills where we would all congregate and sit against the walls of our middle school, and in the words of my poetic English teacher, kiss our young asses good-bye. There was a lot of anti-communism propaganda and a lot of looking out to the outer world and all the evils there.

The evils were never at home. They weren’t in my home town. They weren’t in my family. My family wasn’t racist. The women in my family weren’t oppressed or silenced. Feminism was something that happened in the 1960s and 70s and wasn’t a thing of a modern 80s girl like me.

I assumed the history I was taught in school was true and accurate and complete. I assumed the world was safe and that thanks to my mother’s generation I could do and be anyone or anything I wanted. I didn’t have a clue what a glass ceiling was. Women’s “power suits” with the huge shoulders were ugly, but I simply saw them as part of that whole being an adult and working thing that people do, not as a costume women had to wear to try to “fit in” and be taken seriously in the corporate world.

My first week of college was an eye opener. Hell, it was mind blowing and boggling for me. And it shut me down from the enormity of the evils in this world, because if I continued to think about it all, it may have quite literally killed me.

There was an exhibit in one of the galleries on campus of the atrocities committed by Christopher Columbus and his crews. I remember looking at the images and reading the descriptions and the history and being in total disbelief. I honestly could not believe that these things were true or had happened. I had chosen the college I attended (big shout out to the Evergreen State College) because it was a liberal arts college. But that first week, as I was standing there staring at horrifying images and reading even more horrifying descriptions I started to wonder if perhaps I had chosen too liberal of a school to attend.

At 18 I had never heard of the atrocities Europeans had committed against the Native Americans. I didn’t know about Columbus or the pilgrims. I didn’t know about missionaries stealing children in the name of God. I was in a state of shock that first week and month and probably year.

In high school I wanted to be as socially aware as possible – I wanted to change the world and right all the wrongs. After that first week of college I stopped watching and reading any news and buried myself in partying and socializing and doing the bare minimum I had to do in my performing arts program. The enormity of the lie I grew up with was too huge. “Privilege” wasn’t a thing that was discussed in the early 90s and it certainly wasn’t a thing I was ready to examine or admit to. I had to run and hide from the horror of it all—my young and clearly innocent mind couldn’t grasp it at that time. I needed space to breathe and changing the world would be put off for others to worry about. My world was just fine as it was, thank you very much, no need for me to stir the pot so to speak.

For the next twenty years I would not be terribly socially aware. I knew things happened and I heard the news, but it didn’t affect me and it happened in far enough away places that I could hold my view that it was either rare or something special to that particular location on a map. It didn’t affect me or the people I knew or loved.

I’m not sure what has happened in the last five or six years to help bring my head out of the sand. Graduate school helped. Having friends who had a social justice bend to them helped. No longer being a lonely female in a male dominated profession just trying to survive and climb that corporate ladder helped. I have gained perspective and can look at the system I had been entrenched in and start to see some of the double standards and the glass ceilings and mixed messages.

Something has changed and shifted in me in the last handful of years.. I feel like I can see things clearly for the first time in my life. It may be age and perspective which contributes to a willingness to learn and to want different for my own kids and for all children that is feeding this awareness. It could be the simple practice of being aware of my Self has the side-effect of becoming more aware of the experiences of others.

Regardless of the whys, here I am. Forty-four and a half years old and being willing to claim feminism as mine for the first time. There’s a long list of whys to this, and what is most important to me right now, is the work I had done for myself, and for others, in becoming self-aware and understanding all the shame and guilt and stories of too much and not enough and how they eat at us and tear us down and realizing, having that a-fucking-ha moment of where all these damn stories come from.

These stories of how we are too much or not enough didn’t start with our mothers. It didn’t start with how they raised us or didn’t raise us. It didn’t start with how they shamed us for being too loud or too quiet or not dressing “appropriately” (whatever that means). These stories have been being passed down for millennia.

These stories are how we survived. These stories have, in some ways, kept some of us safe. We bought into the stories as a sort of bargaining chip so we could actually go out into the world. The long list of shoulds (how we should act, dress, talk; how our homes, children, and lives should look) we internalized because if we did then we’d be okay; we’d be accepted; we’d be lovable; we’d be allowed to live.

Our mothers bought the stories (and their mothers, and their mothers) and they passed them down. How “good girls” dress and act. How if we only did x, y, or z then we wouldn’t be raped or murdered. How we need to be silent so as not to anger a man into beating us. How if we act just so and do just right, we’ll get to live to a ripe old age.

We were taught, they were taught, all of us were taught, to close our throats and stuff our rage and bit our tongues. We were told over and over how we aren’t worthy or deserving. How we don’t matter. How we need to try harder and be different. How shameful our very being is. How we cause sin and depravity in men. How we can’t play the same game as men without being called a bitch or a slut. How if we don’t play the same game we will be trampled and ignored and dismissed.

Closing our throats, stuffing our rage and biting our tongues is one way to survive. It is one way to get by in a world that is truly stacked against us. Yes, it will eat away at us and we will be miserable in so many ways, but we will live and have babies and pass down the same lessons to our children and the system will continue to feed off our terror and tears.

Or.

We can connect to that rage, open our throats and let out of roars. We can allow the anger and frustration and sadness to be our fuel to make change in this culture instead of doing what we have to in order to get by.

We can connect to our body. To feel her. To hear her. To know her wisdom. We can become aware of what is bubbling and brewing and boiling inside us. What was passed down and what is ours. What is history and what is our own lived experience.

We can speak out. We can tell our experience and listen to the experience of others. We can walk and march and stumble alongside others who are also oppressed, held back, tied down. We can fight with them and create change, slowly and quickly, tearing down this culture that feeds off our shame, brick by brick.

We can honor the truth that not everyone is in a place to stand up and open her throat yet. We can hold space for the very real fear and terror that courses through her blood and bones. We can let her know she is not alone, she is okay just as she is, and we will be here to help when she wants it :: we will not add to her torment by forcing her into the world she is unprepared to be a part of.

We can stop feeding the stories of too much and not enough by stopping our own judging and condemning of other women and our self. We can learn empathy. We can STOP FEEDING THE SHAME BEAST. As we stop feeding these stories, this deep shame, they will die. Slowly, and sometimes quickly, in fits and starts as we each find our way to allowing our Self to be.

And the walls will come tumbling down. They will shake and begin to crumble with our roars. And as we each, one by one, add our roars to the chorus, more will find their own ways of awareness and will join us.

And we will be the change we want to see in the world.

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

October 11, 2016October 2, 2016

(Re)Claiming our birthrights

Stories.

We each have our own unique stories and scars. We could sit around the breakfast table or coffee table or camp fire swapping stories of pains caused by other women. Many of these stories would start in early childhood as we entered elementary school. There are the stories of betrayal from middle school. And let us not forget the stories of distrust and competition from our high school and college years. The stories continue on as we enter the workforce and motherhood: judging, snide and hurtful comments, more competition, and longing… always the longing to be accepted, to be enough, to not be too much.

We have our stories of how our mothers shamed us and our grandmothers silenced us.

We each have stories of the best girlfriends who broke our hearts in a million pieces with their cruelty, flippancy and apparent lack of caring.

We have so many stories of never feeling quite good enough. Of always needing to try harder, do better, prove and be more.

We each have the stories of being too much :: too loud, too quiet, too smart, too dumb, too fat, too thin, too ugly, too pretty, too sexual, too frigid… this list of seemingly contradicting too muchness could go on and on and on.

These are the stories of our wounding, of our mother wounds. These are the stories of pain passed down, generation after generation, mother to child, over and over again. These are the stories of being a woman in a patriarchal world.

I have written before, in this letter, on my blog, on Facebook, about these wounds. How shame seeps in and feeds these ideas. How we each carry within us a hatred, yes hatred, of the feminine and female. A hatred that was trained into us by our culture and bred into us by our ancestors. This internalized misogyny needs our shame to survive. It needs these stories of being too much and not enough to grow and take hold and be strong in our psyches and hearts and bodies.

This shame needs us isolated. Separate. Judging other women as we refuse to acknowledge our own Shadows and shortcomings.

This shame needs us silenced. And in our being silenced we are compelled to silence others. Our own voices and truths so stuck in our wombs and throats we can’t bear to hear the truth or voice of others.

This shame needs us doubting. We are gaslighted, over and over. And not only by our “frenemies” – we are gaslighted by our Selves and by those in our innermost circles.

This shame needs us hating our very being. To be disconnected from our bodies. To be disconnected from our spirit. To be stuck in our stories in our mind and to never, ever question or wonder or explore.

To melt this shame away, to battle it, to dance with it, we need each other. To gather together in circle. To witness and be witnessed. To be heard and seen and to open our hearts and minds to hear and see others.

To melt this shame away, we need to step out of isolation. To learn to stop trying to fix. To learn to allow others, and our Self, to be. To learn to stop comparing and judging.

To melt this shame away, we need to find our own voice. Our howls. Our wails. Our moans. Our growls. And to let them out, to give them breath.

To melt this shame away, we need to learn to know and trust Our Truth. To know and accept our experience as real. To no longer allow others to tell us what happened or didn’t happen to us or how to feel or think or act or be.

To melt this shame away, we need to learn to love. Our Self. Our body – her physicality and her wisdom. To connect to our spirit and the spiritual. To be curious and question and explore and rebel.

As I sink into my preparation for this next circle I come back again to the ideas of rebellion and revolution. To saying Fuck You to the status quo. To looking our culture square in the eye and yelling at the top of our lungs and depths of our wombs: WE ARE NOT FOLLOWING YOUR RULES ANY MORE. To connecting, deeply and truly, with other women. To connecting, wholly and sacredly, to our Self. To reclaiming our birthrights of power and sisterhood. To owning our strength and shadows and experiences and stories. To finding our voices, opening our throats, and letting our our roars and all the roars of all the generations that have been stuffed down and built up inside of us OUT.

This shame is insidious. It is tricky. It’s good at spinning stories. It takes mindfulness and intention to unravel these stories. It takes curiosity and a willingness to be wrong and imperfect. It takes an open heart and open mind. It takes connection and acceptance and love.

We each stumble on our journey to Self. We hit roadblocks and resistance. We dive in deep and then jump out of the water, needing to rest on the beach or the dock for a while. Not a one of us is perfect. And that is our beauty, it is our strength, it is one of our many our connecting threads.

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

October 6, 2016October 28, 2016

Leashed Woman and Unleashed Woman

I’ve been exploring and examining the wounding we receive from growing up as a female in our (misogynist) patriarchal culture. I’ve been tying together several of pieces I have been exploring with you and within myself over the last couple years, seeing connections and patterns. I had a whispering, a knowing, that there is not just a pattern, but also something that is universal, something that deeply speaks to our experience as women and girls in this culture and how it expects us to act, and how we comply to all the rules given to us about what it means to be a woman.

I’ve uncovered five common threads, and of course each thread has a few of its own sub-threads to it. Together these threads describe an aspect of all of us, of our experience and our psyche, a female archetype, if you will.

What’s been interesting to observe as I tie all these threads together, as I connect the dots, is how this archetype, and each of its components, has shown itself in my own psyche and body and being. I am sure I will write more about this, but today I wanted to share what I have uncovered with you.

The five prominent pieces of this female archetype are:

• She allows others to have authority over her

• She doesn’t claim her space in the world, physically, emotionally, psychologically or spiritually

• Shame is her greatest motivator

• She is isolated and has a deep sense of loneliness, of not fitting in

• She is disconnected from most aspects of her Self (feminine/masculine; shadow/light; body, mind, spirit, soul)

I call her, the Leashed Woman.

Leashed Woman doesn’t speak up or out. She won’t acknowledge, let alone claim, her voice. She lets others speak for her.

Leashed Woman is a nice girl and rule follower. She may go to church, but because that is what she should do, not because she is spiritually called. She stuffs her emotions, especially anger and grief, in part because she doesn’t want to “hurt someone else’s feelings” and in part because these emotions scare her.

Leashed Woman is constantly striving. She feels she are not enough or too much, or both. She sees herself as broken and in desperate need of fixing. She is ashamed of her body, her laugh, her intelligence. She feels she can do nothing right in this world. She seeks others approval and validation.

Leashed Woman has few, if any, deep relationships. She keeps everything at surface level out of fear of anyone truly knowing her and then not liking or loving her. She chases after conditional love. She sees other women as competition and threats.

Leashed Woman doesn’t feel comfortable in her own skin. She lives outside her body. She rejects the feminine and womanly parts of herself as either “gross” or “sinful” or as a pain or hassle. She hides from her Shadow, and because of this is unable to step into her Light. She doesn’t understand or feel what it is to be deeply spiritual and connected to other living beings and the ebb and flow of the universe.

And the truth is, we are all Leashed Woman in one way or another or in all the ways or some of the ways.

But we don’t have to be.

We have been trained by our culture. We received this training from our families, our teachers, our mentors, our bosses, our friends, and strangers on the street. We have been told over and over and over again how we are not enough as we are, how we take up too much space no matter how small we are, how we are unworthy and undeserving.

We live in fear. Fear of being raped, beaten, murdered.

We carry within our very DNA the pain and trauma of our ancestors. Their rapes. Their torture. Their feelings of being less than and the dissonance and rage and grief they each had.

We are anxious and depressed. We experience symptoms of post-traumatic stress.

And even with all of this being true, we have the power, and frankly the responsibility, to turn this all around.

For ourselves.

For our daughters and nieces and granddaughters and grand-nieces.

For our mothers and grandmothers and great-great-great-great-grandmothers.

For our sisters, in blood and in community.

For our world.

Because if there is a Leashed Woman, there is most definitely an Unleashed Woman.

The Unleashed Woman:

• Claims authority over her own life and claims and shares confidently her knowledge, education, and experience.

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

• Embraces and loves her Whole Self, unconditionally.

• Connects deeply with others, especially other women.

• Is self-aware, trusts her intuition, feels good in her own skin, and acknowledges and accepts the ebb and flow of life.

Unleashed Woman makes and breaks the rules. She lives life on her own terms and doesn’t compromise who she is to make others feel safe or comfortable.

Unleashed Woman takes up space in her home, her work space, her entire world. She uses her voice, dares to be heard and seen. She stands in her light and power without apology.

Unleashed Woman accepts her flaws and imperfections. She doesn’t pretend to “know it all” or “have it all together.” She makes mistakes, but she doesn’t beat herself up for it; instead she apologizes and make amends when necessary and learns and then does differently in the future.

Unleashed Woman sees other women as comrades, as sisters.

Unleashed Woman knows who she is. She analyzes herself, her emotions, her actions and looks for deeper meaning for her reactions to things. She trusts her intuition and listens to her body. She allows herself to feel the bad times as well as the good, knowing that in time, regardless, this too shall pass.

We all, each and every one of us, have our own Unleashed Woman within us, just waiting to be seen, heard and let out.

The question is, How do we unearth her, connect with her, embrace her?

I firmly and wholly believe our first steps towards becoming unleashed are connecting to our body: her physicality, her boundaries, her wisdom, her Truth. Through body-centered mindfulness, we come back down into our being, into our core; we become grounded, centered.

As we become more mindful, more connected, more grounded we also become more aware: aware of our body, our emotions, the stories that run through our minds and live in our bones and muscles and blood and soul. We start to examine our stories of being too much and not enough and to see exactly where all this shame we carry is really coming from.

We begin to see the double binds and double standards that are part of daily life as a woman in our culture. We start to question the rules and the rule makers.

We begin to see the lies for what they are.

And then…

We begin the deep work of unraveling and dismantling all the lies and stories and un-truths that we have been told and taught and believed to be true and internalized.

We learn to see and then dance with our Shadows.

We start to use our voice. To find and connect to our sisterhoods and female lineage, both biological and cultural.

We begin to step in our power, in small ways at first, and then more and more and more.

We honor and respect our boundaries and expect others to do the same. And when they don’t, we defend our boundaries as sacred and holy. Because frankly, they are.

We see how we are all connected. How all oppression intersects. How all beings are interdependent. How nature nourishes and heals us. How, whether we believe in a god or goddess (or multiple gods and goddesses) or not, we know the power the collective and the importance of spirituality and ritual to healing ourselves and the world.

It is a process, shifting from leashed to unleashed. It doesn’t happen over night. Or in a month. Or really even in a year. We peel the layers and in time begin to notice little and big changes within us and outside of us.

And always, as we do our inner work, we also do the work in the world to bring about greater change and freedom for all.

This work that we are doing, this unraveling and dismantling, this shifting from being Leashed Women to becoming Unleashed Women, will be the work of the rest of our lives. It is work that has piled up on us for millennium. It won’t all shift and change in a moment.

We will become frustrated and discouraged. With ourselves and with the world. And we will learn compassion and patience and to have faith and trust. And we will find each other and be there to witness and support each other through the rough times and cheer each other on when we get in our stride.

In time, perhaps our daughters and nieces generation or our granddaughters and grandnieces, we will all be Unleashed Women and the idea of the Leashed Woman will be one of history and myth and fairy tales.

Until then, we all have our work to do.

(Did you enjoy this? Then sign up for my weekly love letter to get more of it. xoxo)

Want to unearth and embrace your own Unleashed Woman in community? Then I invite you to join us in Exploring our Light::Reconnecting to our strength, power and daring, a six month online circle where we will unearth, examine and embrace our power and strength, our deep inner knowing and our daring to show the world who we truly are. To learn more and register, click right here.