Category: being & becoming

Life is funny sometimes.

We see people who we think are more successful than we are. Who have more clients, more friends, more followers. Whose words flow more fluidly, whose bodies move more gracefully, whose voices sound more harmonious.

We see these people and we want what they have, what ever It is. We want to be them. So we play with mimicking them, we try to do things just like them.

And then after a while we can’t really remember what our own voice sounds like. Or why we do this thing we do. Or what it means to be and be satisfied with our Self and our own way of being in the world.

Here’s the thing. The thing I’m learning over and over, again and again. The thing that I feel is finally sticking this time.

We can’t be anybody else.

We can only be who we are.

And maybe our words aren’t as fluid and maybe our bodies aren’t as graceful. Maybe we don’ t have as many friends or clients. Maybe our life isn’t as glamorous as theirs is.

This is all okay. Because that person who seems to have it all, they don’t. And there are people who look at you and think you have it all, and you don’t.

Everything always looks better from the outside, when we aren’t living it.

I don’t always have flowy words for you. And sometimes I do. And regardless my words are always true to who and where I am in that moment.

My roar is loud and to some grating. Except when my roar is soft and some can’t even hear it.

But it’s my roar. Mine. And it shouldn’t sound like some one else. It should only every sound like me, and who I am in that moment.

You don’t have to be like anyone else to be a success. You get to define what success is.

For me, today, success is having eight clients who always sign up for my circles. It is having seven women accepting my invitation to give their voice to my next circle. It is receiving love notes and comments of gratitude for my offerings, free and paid. Success this moment is knowing that my work is making a difference in a small number of lives.

Today success is having the privilege to homeschool my children and spend most of our days together. It is having food on our table and a roof over our head. It is having the most amazing best friends in the world who I can connect with at any time – even after not talking for months. It is having a partner who is faithful and supportive and loving, to me and our children.

Success isn’t about having a fancy car or designer clothes or even a spotless house.

Success, to me, is about connection.

Connecting to my family. Connecting to my friends. Making new friends. Re-connecting to old ones.

It is about connecting to me. My voice. My roar.

It is about being comfortable in my own skin. And knowing I don’t have to be like someone else. In fact I shouldn’t be. I should only be like me.

And you should only be like you.

(And this is the only should I will ever give you. I promise.)

Because there is no one else like you in the world.

And the world needs you, not a copy of some other person.

You.

Your voice.

Your beauty.

Your roar.

Let yourself be you. Let the messy and the clumsy and tone-deaf be okay. Let the jarring and jolting and grating be okay.

Because my guess is there are going to be lots of people who don’t see you as messy or clumsy or jarring or grating. They see you as amazing.

And they want to be like you.

And that’s okay. They’ll figure it out.

You just keep being you.

I’ll just keep being me.

And we’ll keep stumbling along as we figure all this out. As we let out our howls and wails and roars. As we dance and skip and run. As we hold each other close and give each other space.

As we do this thing we do. To connect. To be community. To be individuals and sisters.

Let’s just remember, to be us. Who we are. Because that’s what we need. That’s what the world needs.

Let’s not have any more fucks to give. And let’s give all the fucks to the important things:: our loves, our communities, our Roar.

Because that is where the fucks need to be given. Not to the petty or judgmental. Not the those who relish in shaming or condemning. Our fucks need to be given in love to the things that deserve them.

Let’s make a pact, explore an experiment, play with an idea, you and I :: I’ll stop giving all the fucks away to the people and things that don’t deserve them. And you do that same. And let’s see what happens. Let’s see where our roars end up, where our power is directed and where our strengths are most helpful, when we only give our fucks to the things that matter, when we only give our fucks in the name of love, or righteous anger, or to allow our Self to be (seen, heard, known… to others and to us).

Sound good? Okay. Let’s do this thing. xoxo

…

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I have been thinking a lot about the women who came before me, specifically my maternal grandmother, my mother and the women who came before them. As I wonder and wander about their lives I also think about myself and my relationship with my daughter. The more I mother the more I both understand and don’t understand these women who came before me, who shaped me, who created me. The more I look back the more I understand my Self and have stronger convictions to want to do something different, to create a different life for my daughter and our family.

I remember the last few times I saw my grandmother before she died. She was so sad. She seemed so small, this woman who once seemed so tall and great and strong. I sensed there were words she wanted to say and couldn’t for her own reasons. And I felt the deepest sense of love radiate from her to me, my sister and our mother. When she looked at my mother in those last few months of her life there was such sadness there, and I felt the sadness for the first time wasn’t directed at my mother, but at her self. Thinking back and remembering her face now I wonder if she was grieving all she didn’t do with her own daughter, all the time she wasted, all the kind and loving words she didn’t say. Watching her look at her grown child I felt the grief, though I didn’t understand it yet. It would only be years after her death that my own daughter was born and the complexity of mother-daughter relationships would become so heart-breakingly clear to me.

I remember the last eight months of my mother’s life. Her trip to Seattle at Christmas time to meet with an oncologist. I remember how she held my daughter, only eight months old, and how there was such hope in her eyes as she gazed down at her. I remember catching glimpses of how she looked at me and my baby girl and the longing that lived within her as she watched us in our little bubble.  I can only now guess that she too was grieving all that hadn’t been for her and me, all the time that was lost and wasted.

I remember seeing her the weekend of my daughter’s first birthday. I remember her saying to my girl “I may not be here for all your birthdays, and I wouldn’t miss your first for anything in the world.” How prophetic those words would be.

I remember seeing her four months later and my girl playing her cat’s toys as if they were the best in the world. I remember seeing the physical pain within her, how she was trying to hold herself together. How she held my daughter for the last time. How I hugged her, not tight enough, not long enough, for the last time.

I remember seeing her dead body on the hospital bed in the ICU. She died 45 minutes before we arrived from our trip across the state. I remember feeling all the years of abandonment come crashing forth. I remember being somewhat numb and moving into get things done mode and making decisions about where to send her body. I remember my sister wanting me to sit in the room with that dead body and me just wanting it gone, to not touch it or look at it for another second.

I remember the ends of their lives so clearly. I was there, not as they took their final breaths, but as they both came to terms with what never was and what never would be. It is only years later that I understand this more fully now, consciously aware of what they lost or never had and how it has impacted my own ways of being with my girl.

I don’t want to be at the end of my days, looking longingly at my daughter as she holds her own child. I want to be remembering our own bubble, how she and I were the only living beings in our universe.  I want to feel proud of the relationship she and I created and not shame for all that I could have or should have done.

I want different.

It is important to remember why I want different. To learn from the past. To not only remember my own pain growing up with these women, the wounds they gave me in this life and to know how it feels to be a young girl at the mercy of the adults. But to also remember as a mother now, and know deep in my bones their own longing and grief for what never was, what never could have been.

And so this spring, I travel down that path into the past, seeking them and the women before them who I never knew. Healing wounds and unearthing strengths. Learning more about who I am, connecting more deeply to my Self and becoming more fully the woman I long to be while accepting and loving the woman I am now.

Join me. xoxo

 

**Today's blog post inspired by a writing prompt from She of the Wild xoxo **

Frayed, rough, hidden.

The edges of who I am live deep within. All along and inside and outside these edges live other women, their lived experience, their pains and pleasures, their knowing, their secrets.

I have been deep in the wondering and wandering who these other women were, who they are, how they live in me. I have been hearing their words and voices in my own: the sharpness, the sadness, the wanting. I have been feeling the wails and roars and yearning and pleading. All of them rumbling and stomping and dancing within me as I try to make sense of who I am and what I want and how I am to be in this world.

Am I their happy ending? Am I the end to this long line of disconnecting from our daughters? Does the self-hatred and doubt end with me?

Probably not.

Maybe.

Most definitely yes.

All of the above.

The coldness. The frigid. The crispness.

The stoicism. The always in control. The tamed.

How to shake it off? To shake it out? To loosen those super glued edges and allow them to fray and unravel?

Looking in and out and around. Spiraling, always spiraling, never a straight line or direct path.

All these words swirling. They are nonsense and all sense. How do we put concrete words to ethereal sensations?

*She says:

If you own this story, you get to write the ending.

Yes. Own the stories. All of them. The ones that are theirs and the ones that are mine.  The ones that are true and ones that aren’t. The ones that are facts and the ones that are fantasies. When I own they become mine and then… then they can be shared. Then the generations of isolation can come to an end. The the centuries of secrets and the unspeakable will be spoken. Then…

At the edges. Where words aren’t enough and are too much. There is no definition and it is so clearly defined, no finite and also no infinite. Where there is struggle to stay held together and to let it all go and the battle rages on.

Expanding out to the edges. Learning the stories that live within, hearing them, allowing them to be witnessed. Sharing them. Moving them out, giving them breath and birth and life and death. Letting the secrets be told and the shame be shifted. Allowing love, light, peace. Allowing wildness, fun, unencumbered dancing and flailing and howling.

Always coming back to the howls. Back to the wails. Back to the grief.

Back to it and not staying there. Allowing it, embracing it and then changing dance partners. Trying out silly and loose ends and untamed being.

Pruning the dead ends, the numb limbs.  Creating space for regrowth, rebirth, (un)becoming.

Opening my throat, reminding you to open yours, and letting those howls, those wails, those roars out. At last. Again. For the first time. Always.

And so we begin again. We dip our toes into our wildness and feel what is beyond. (join us). We dive into our untamed being and experience our embodied knowing. (join us). The circles forming, expanding, growing. The roars and howls and wails rising up and demanding to be heard.

*She = Brene Brown

This post inspired by In Her Skin :: the sexuality session.

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?