Author: gwynn

Over the last several weeks I’m been feeling and hearing and thinking about the women who came before me. Their rumbles. Their roars. Their knowing. Their wounds.

I’ve been seeing how the wounding was passed down, generation after generation. Sometimes a little less, sometimes a little more. And always present. These mother-wounds run deep, deep into our ancestors. This wounding didn’t start with our mothers or grandmothers. This wounding started long before, when the world first started to fear our power, our embodied knowing, our innate magic. This wounding started when that fear slowly (or quickly) and insidiously had us turn against each other; against our mothers and our daughters, our sisters and our sisterhood. This wounding started at a time our minds do not consciously remember and our bodies deeply know.

Shame is at the base of these wounds. Feeling shame in who we are and what we do. Who we aren’t and what we don’t do. Shame of how we look or dress. Shame of how much money we make or don’t make. Shame of wanting to be with our children and shame of wanting careers outside the home. Shame of having children and shame of not. Shame of being thin and being curvy. Shame of having a college degree and not. Shame of loving our mothers and shame of hating them. Shame of our existence in this world.

Along with the shame, we have unexpressed grief. Grief of the loved ones who have died and the relationships left unhealed. Grief of the life that could have been. Grief for the life that is.

Often I find our culture so focused on what I consider the light and fluffly and the “at leasts.” I believe in gratitude, and a practice of gratitude, and right alongside our gratitude practice we need to allow our anger and sadness and frustration for the life we have or deeply wanted but don’t have. None of us have perfect lives. When we get stuck in the idea of “at least” (at least I have my health, my family, a roof over my head, etc) and disallow space for the frustrations of not having unlimited resources (time, money, patience or any number of other things), we are stuffing and re-wounding our Self over and over again while continuing pass these wounds down to the next generations.

We need to take time to grieve.

We need to take time to heal.

We need to allow what is to be. To not try and fix it for our Self or for others.

We need to learn to witness, to hear, to let others have and share their experience.

We need to learn to share our stories, the good ones and the ugly ones, to allow our own Self to be witnessed, heard and seen.

We need to stop trying to paint life with a rosy hue, because life isn’t all flowers and sausages. Life is messy and dirty and gross and painfully beautiful. That is an authentic experience of life.

When we start to acknowledge our own shame, when we start to allow our life to be the mess that it is, the painful, heart-breaking, soul-fulfilling mess that it is; when we allow our Self to grieve for the past and the now and the future that will not be; when we see this wounding didn’t start with us or our mothers or even our grandmothers, then… then we can start to heal. Then we can start to feel. Then we can break the patterns and the chains and truly start to do things differently, for our Self and the generations of women to come.

We can heal the generations, forward and back. And it starts with acknowledging the shame we hold within, grieving the hurts and could-have-beens and if-onlys, and seeing our mother-wounds for what they are: another way for us to be disempowered and isolated.

We cannot pretend the past didn’t happened or has no affect us on. We cannot change the facts or the pain of what has already occurred. And we can heal the wounds and pain from that past. We can stop it from being passed down to the next generation.

It is an awesome and amazing and terrifying and beautiful opportunity we each have to heal our wounding. An opportunity, and in my opinion, a responsibility.

Take the next step in this journey. Join your community, come out of isolation and begin healing the generations old wounds.

And if you like, sign up for my weekly love letter, where I share ways to connect and heal. You can subscribe right here. xoxo

Did you enjoy reading this? Then I invite you to subscribe to my weekly love letter. It comes out every Saturday and is filled with goodie. You can sign up for it right here. 

Rising up in me is the woman on the right, with her arm resting on the ledge. My maternal grandmother. The woman who made her daughter and granddaughters never feel good enough. The woman who taught me about place settings and napkin folding and the importance of appearances. The woman who never felt good enough herself, coming from small, poor yet deep roots. The woman who’s first child died in childbirth. The woman who loved me and my sister and our mother so fiercely and wanted so much more for us. The woman who wanted us to fit in and not feel like imposters. I feel the roar she never released, the howl she held back. Rising in me are the lessons of where she succumbed to the expectations and ideals of others and left who she was behind in the name of love and motherhood and acceptance. I feel her pleading within me to do it differently. To bare my skin. To wail and howl and moan. To hug and hold and squeeze so tightly they almost can’t breathe. To be the mama and woman and wife she so desperately wanted to be and couldn’t because of time and circumstance and history. She is rising within and soon the world will feel her roar.

Those are the words that came out, stream of conscious, on Instagram this week (thank you to Liberated Lines for the writing prompt). I’ve been feeling this woman rumbling within in. This women who created and birthed half of my DNA. This woman who talked proudly, though so rarely, of our Native American ancestor (her grandmother or great-grandmother I can’t remember which).  I wonder why she would talk of this woman with such pride (and in hushed, conspiritoral tones)  when it was just “us girls” and never mentioned her once (that I recall) around my grandfather.

It has left me wondering what other pieces of her Self she kept hidden. Her secret prides and sorrows. Was she ever allowed to grieve the son she gave birth to who died before he could take his first breath? How did she dress him for his funeral? Did her husband blame her for his death? Did she blame herself?

Who was her first husband? Did he go on to marry and have children with another woman? Though he is no blood relation of mine, he lives in me too as he was part of her, part of what made her who she was by the time I was born nearly a half a century later.

It is a tangled path, a labyrinth in and out and around and around, this wandering wondering of our ancestors. They all, each one, live in us physically in our DNA and in our mind and spirit. They are a part of what makes up our very ways of being. My sister and I have been told over and over that we have our mother’s laugh, which begs the question of where did she get it? Not from our grandmother, who I only ever heard politely chuckle, nor my grandfather who had a soft heart and hard exterior who rarely laughed at all. Perhaps her laugh came from that Native American woman who left (or was stolen from) her tribe generations ago.

In many ways I will never know the answers to all my questions. In many ways this doesn’t matter at all. In many ways the facts are irrelevant because I am here today and I am who I am and knowing each detail of every day of every ancestor’s life wouldn’t change any of that.

And yet there is a need to connect to the feminine lineage I sprang from. Knowing names and birthdays isn’t important, and connecting to the core of who they were, and what I am made of, is.

In the Unbecoming Quest, during our second module, I provided a walking meditation called Walking Your Womanline (I also sent it out in my most recent newsletter). It is an incredibly powerful meditation, connecting us back through time to our Source Feminine, meeting each woman and gathering and passing on gifts from each as we move back and forward again through time.

And that is the answer. The facts sometimes aren’t relevant for our own personal and spiritual growth. Yes, all the pain and trauma has been passed down through the generations, and all the strengths and power have too.

As I consider my own womanline, and allow the details of my newest circle to emerge, I keep coming back to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the episode(s) where she connects with the First Slayer. Buffy is as much a part of my womanline as my blood relatives, as are Wonder Woman, Black Widow and even Mary Tyler Moore and the Gilmore Girls. They each formed me culturally and socially and they are each archetypes that live within me (and all of us).

How we relate to these fictional characters parallels how we relate to our own ancestors and to our Self. We see pieces of Us in Them. We see their strength and power and wit and intelligence and it resonates deep within us, the same traits that we have been passed down through the generations. Wonder Woman’s need to always get her self unbound is a story of women’s lives in general: how we must break free from the chains and ropes of the patriarchy, of our misogynistic culture, of our own family history. We must break free of it yes, and yet we must also dance with it (as Wonder Woman is tied up again and again). Buffy must always fight demons in the night, and if this is not a prime example of dancing with our (Jungian) Shadow self (every night, over and over) I’m not sure what is.

We see our history, our “real” history in these fictional characters. And these characters live in us, and our ancestors.

To find the connection between the two, to know our roots, to feel our connection to our womanline and the Feminine Divine, to heal the generations of mother-wounds that have encouraged us over and over to forsake the feminine and our feminine self… That is where my work is going, that is what is rumbling within, that is the roar of my grandmother that will shake the world.

Would you like to join us?

Part of my work with women involves encouraging them to be seen. There is Glow Friday  in my Facebook groups and on Instagram, where each Friday I invite my tribe to post selfies and share just where each of them are in their day or week or life. It has been both an amazing way for the women to connect with each other and to step forward into their own vulnerability and be seen and witnessed and accepted right where they are. The Glow Friday posts aren’t always glowing or happy; we’ve shared our grief and frustration and fear in those posts – and it is in these posts that I am most proud of the circles that have gathered around my work. These posts where my tribe shares their darker sides are the ones that pull the rest of the women forward – support and love is showered and there are always “me toos” and as each woman allows parts of her Shadow side to be seen, she learns, in her bones, in her very being, how not alone she is.

I model this vulnerability for my tribe, too. My Glow Friday posts aren’t always sunshine and sausages. I don’t save this vulnerability for Fridays either; most mornings I write a stream of conscious instagram post (ala Liberated Lines), sharing where I am in those first moments (or the first moments I can sit and write more than three words) of my day. It’s often an image of my coffee or the house or one of the kids, and in sharing these different images of my life and mornings, the world gets to see just how messy things can be for me. Sometimes these posts are filled with love and joy and sometimes they are not. And sometimes they start in a tired or frustrated tone and then by the end I have found my breath and my center and can come from a more positive space.

It can be challenging to be constantly “putting myself out there.” I’m an introvert. A very social introvert, and an introvert all the same. I need quiet and space to energize myself and when I share parts of my life or my soul (and let’s be honest, my work is both) with the world I can feel awkward and needing to retreat. I’ve learned my own dance of showing my face and then hiding it and it has become smoother through the years and through my own work. Along with this has been learning to set boundaries, to say no, to say yes, to schedule quiet. I love connecting to people and sharing our stories and afterward I need the time to let it all settle into me.

Many of my tribe are like this also.

One woman asked me if I ever felt scared sharing myself or my work (I’m paraphrasing). I told her of course I do. And this is my work. If I am to guide others to standing in their own light, to setting their own boundaries, to shedding masks and shame and being seen for who they truly are – then I damn well need to do the same.  It does get easier with time and practice. And still there are days when the Shadows come out and want to dance and so we dance and I soothe my Self, my shadow and my light.

This is what I guide women to. To being comfortable in our own skin. To not apologizing for who we are. To no longer feeling shame. To feeling bold and proud and wild and to a large degree not caring what others think (and to realizing that really, most people don’t think about us and our shenanigans at all).

I love my work. It challenges and pushes me. This year is about expansion, and I am doing that. Expanding my comfort zone by constantly stepping outside of it. And to do this, I must be brave and vulnerable and dance with my shadows and fears. I must care for and nourish my whole self: body, mind and spirit. What I want for my tribe I make sure I give to myself. And so with each day, because of my work, I too grow and shift and sift and transform and learn more about being in the here and  now, in my body, in my spirit.

 

If you have not signed up for my weekly newsletter yet, I invite you to do so now. In it I share my thoughts on different parts of my work as well as offer a guided meditation link, stream of conscious writing prompts, links to articles I found interesting and to my latest blog posts. I am also offering a free mini-course, A Gift, for signing up. A Gift will give you a taste of the work I do both in groups and 1:1. You can receive it by filling out this short form. xoxo.

[wysija_form id=”6″]