Often, when we enter into this work of self-awareness, of unraveling our internalized misogyny and patriarchal training, of stepping into our power and voice and being, we feel lonely and in a place of seeking our people. This loneliness is part of our culture, it is part of how we are trained to be quiet and docile, to hide who we are, to not speak out and up, to be small and unseen and unheard.
Because if we aren’t speaking, if we only wear a mask, no one can see or hear us.
This training is by design. The system knows that if we were to find each other, to link arms, to band together, that we would fight and we would win. With the support of our sisters and brothers we can tear this all down and create change. With our kindreds will know what it is to be loved and supported and know what it is to love and support others without expectations or conditions.
And.
It can be terrifying to speak up. To be seen. To be heard. Because when we are, we open ourselves up to criticism.
And make no mistake, there will always be people ready to jump in and criticize. To try to push us back down. To silence us. To keep us small.
And.
We will only find our people, our kindred flames, if we allow our own spark to shine. If we allow that glow to push through so we can be seen and found and known.
We will only form a choir of roars if each one of us opens our own throats and let our own voices be heard. Because silence is deafening and isolating and without the siren call our people won’t know where to look, to find us.
We will only know what it is to be loved and accepted for who we are if we show who we are to the world. If we only wear our masks, we cannot be seen or loved, only our facade will be. How can we expect someone to love who we are, at our core, if we refuse to show her to them?
I invite to you take the risk. To take that first step. To set that boundary and hold it. To speak your Truth and stand behind. To be you, unapologeticly and wholly, you.
Self-awareness is our first step in fighting our oppressive patriarchal culture. As we become aware of our Self, connect to our body, understand our triggers, allow ourselves to feel our emotions, and experience the ways our culture has wounded us, we are also able to begin to see how we had not only bought into the stories our culture feeds us, but also see the ways we propagated those stories and caused pain and harm to others. As we become aware of how we have caused harm, we then open the doors to both making amends and finding new ways of being and doing in the world.
Self-awareness is a never ending process. As we become more and more aware we unearth deeper and deeper layers of our unconscious. We connect with our Shadow and learn how to dance with her. We allow fear to be present, but don’t let it be in control. We excavate deeper levels of who we are compared with who and what we have been told we are or can be.
As we become more and more self-aware, we also become more and more intentional and conscious. Mindless habits either become intentional rituals or they fall away all together. We also become more aware of our boundaries and our personal limits, and we learn to honor both.
In my own journey to deeper levels of self-awareness I stumbled a lot along my way. I was so eager to dig deep, to know myself, that I signed up for course after course and program after program without considering if I had the time, energy or even finances to give to the work. What this ended up looking like is emails not being opened with the intention of “catching up” later; not creating the connections within the online groups I had hoped for because I wasn’t spending time each week checking in and participating; and basically spending money we really didn’t have to spend on something that I wasn’t using or utilizing.
Eventually I figured it out and I learned to have some very serious talks with myself before I signed up for anything, even free classes. I would ask myself some basic questions like what was drawing me to a particular class, could I realistically make the time commitment for both my own individual work and to connect with and participate in the group, and could our family truly afford the financial commitment. This allowed me to be fully conscious and intentional in my choices to sign up for a class or not. It allowed me to be mindful and respectful of my limited resources of time, energy and money. It gave me breathing room because I wasn’t signing up for every single thing out there.
It also gave me the space to figure out exactly why I wanted to participate in a class and to examine if it was because I was being triggered by marketing or if it was something I was truly interested in.
This journey of mine is what has lead me to having an application process for my longer circles, particularly the ones that run for a full year, like Wild Woman Within. The intention is to give women who are interested in the circle the time and space to consciously and mindfully decide if the circle is for them. The work we do is deep and requires a commitment of not only finances, but also of time, energy, and a willing and open heart for transformation. I do not want anyone to join the circle because they feel triggered, I want it to be a conscious and intentional decision and for you to make a mindful commitment to your Self and to the other women in the circle.
This is not to say that life doesn’t happen and that sometimes we need to step away from our commitments because of unforeseen circumstances. I am not asking anyone to foretell the future. When events occur that pull our attention away from the work we make space for this, because even these breaks or “set backs” are part of our work together: it is in the accepting of the ebb and flow of life, our energies, and our attentions and having deep compassion for our Self and others when Life happens. And life will happen.
This is also not to say that we won’t meet with our own internal resistance to this work. This too is part of the work. The unraveling and understanding of where our fears live, the stories of how we must be silent and avoid particular parts of our story and our Self. It is intricate work, this unraveling of the tightly woven web of stories our culture, our families and even we our selves, have told us. There will be ebb and flow. Ahas will happen at times quickly and loudly and at other times slowly and subtly.
This work of connecting to our whole Self, of becoming deeply self-aware, or unraveling all we have be taught by our patriarchal culture, is intense. It is messy. It is not glamorous. And I want those who join my circles to be aware and to make the conscious decision to join, because it is the right thing for you at this moment in time, because this is the next step in your journey – and not because it seems like a fun or “cool” thing to do or you feel pressured to do it.
This application process is the very first “homework” for our time together. It is the beginning of our journey. It is the next step on your path to you.
xoxo
I talk more about the application process and go over some of the questions on the application this video below. It’s about twenty-five minutes long, so go ahead and get yourself a cup of tea or a glass of wine and settle in.
In all my circles I have three guidelines. They are both basic and complex, easy to understand and hard to understand, easy to abide by and hard to follow.
They are hard for us because they go against our training in this patriarchal culture of ours. They go against what we have been taught about how to be and how to allow others to be in this world. In fact, they are about allowing us to be and not do. To hold sacred space and bear witness. To safely allow ourselves to been seen and not criticized or minimized.
They are hard because they allow for true vulnerability, of both the witness and the person sharing. They are hard because they require that we break a life-time habit of following the rules of patriarchal culture. They are hard because while we know in our bodies this is how sacred space is held, we don’t quite trust our knowing and are still on our paths to trust, vulnerability and being.
These are guidelines that I also try to live by. They are not only for my online or in-person circles. They are not only for my 1:1 clients. They are a way of being for me. A way I intent to be with every encounter and relationship. Do I fail? Of course. And when I do, I apologize and dig deeper into that next layer of my own unraveling and do different next time.
These guidelines provide opportunities for every person I encounter to learn a different way of being in the world. They allow us to start to make small and large shifts in our own ways of being and have ripple effects far beyond our Self. I feel these guidelines, if they are the only way we each change in how we interact with others, are one way we can have significant impact on changing our culture and creating a world where all people are truly heard, valued, and respected.
What are these guidelines, you ask?
Let me tell you.
Confidentiality. This means that anything that is shared on our calls or in our private Facebook group is not to be shared or discussed outside the group. This is with the caveat that I don’t own Facebook and anything that is shared in the online group is the property of Facebook to do with as they will. This guideline is perhaps the easiest one for everyone to follow. There has never been a question of gossiping or talking about each other outside of the group. I am both lucky and honored that the people who come to my circles fully and easily embrace this guideline.
No advice giving, unless specifically requested. This guideline is important to help build a space of trust and safety. When we jump in to give advice to another person we are doing several things. The first is we are telling them they are incompetent of figuring out how to solve their own life issues. Another is we start to place shoulds all over a person (as in you should do this or you should have done that). When we rush in to fix another person’s problem we are also telling them they need fixing. And most importantly we are silencing the other person – telling them they do not have the right to express their frustration or pain or grief or anger. We jump in with advice because these emotions are uncomfortable and perhaps more altruistically because we don’t like to see others in pain. However it is important that we allow for discomfort. It is vital that we create space for others to share their hurts and sorrows and frustrations. It is necessary that there is space for each person and the full spectrum of their emotions and lived experience.
Part of advice giving is also telling another how they should feel. For example when a person expresses that they feel like they are a loser and we jump in and say “you shouldn’t feel that way, you are fabulous” we are again negating their lived experience and silencing them by unintentionally saying “I don’t want to hear it”. We each have a right to our feelings and sometimes hearing another’s pain is also painful to us. Instead of silencing each other I invite us all to use “I” statements – if someone expresses that they think they are a loser, for example, a great response could be : “I hear that you feel like you are a loser and I feel the pain of that statement. I don’t see you as a loser.” This allows the other person to have their experience of themselves validated, to be heard and also to allow for feedback from others in the circle of how they view the person. This is not telling a person how they should feel. It is expressing how we feel about the person.
No comparing of life experiences. We compare life experiences to that of others in two ways: either they have it worse than us or they have it better. When we think others have it worse we are invalidating our own lived experience, and often send ourselves the message to “buck up” or stop complaining or moping. As we invalidate our own experience and emotions we lose the capacity for empathy for our self and for others.
When we judge that someone else has it better than us, we then invalidate their lived experience. This can sometimes look like when a person tells us something that happened in their life and we respond with something to the tune of “Oh you think that’s bad, let me tell you about me/my Aunt Sally/my best friend’s brother’s wife.” This not only invalidates the other’s experience it also silences them and gives the not so subtle message to buck up and that their emotions and perspectives don’t matter.
These are not only guidelines for my circles, as I said above, they are my personal guidelines for living. I’m not perfect and there have been times I mess them up. I sometimes, unthinkingly, jump to give unsolicited advice and there have been occasions when I compare my life to how I perceive the life of someone else. When I do screw up, I do my best to make amends when necessary. And then I get up the next day and do my best to live by these guidelines again.
How would your life shift if you lived by these guidelines? If others did? How would you feel about yourself if others didn’t jump in to give you un-asked for advice?
Let’s all work to create a world where we can trust others, where we feel safe to express ourselves and that our lived experiences are believed and validated.
xoxo
I talk more about these three guidelines in this video below. It’s about twenty-one minutes long, so go ahead and get yourself a cup of tea or a glass of wine and settle in.
We all have our own rituals in our day. Even if we don’t call them that, it is what they are.
My morning ritual often looks like getting up, doing a couple yoga poses to come into my body, hopping in the shower, and then making my first cup of coffee. Some mornings this flows one thing into the next without interruption. Most mornings though one or both of the children wake up somewhere in there and need my attention and focus and so my morning ritual gets put aside for a few moments or hours so we can go through their rituals.
Throughout the day there little things I do also. While making meals or folding laundry or washing dishes, I allow myself to daydream or do a little meditation or focus on my breath. Four nights a week my daughter and I watch a show on Netflix together while eating a bedtime snack and cuddling. Many evenings I curl up to watch a show by myself before I go to sleep.
These are all things I do that bring me a sense of centering and grounding.
These daily practices are one form of ritual.
I was raised Catholic, and certainly the Catholic mass, or really any religious cerebration, is full of ritual or really is one giant ritual with many smaller rituals within it.
These high holy celebrations are another form of ritual.
Celebrating birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays, are both rituals in and of themselves and contain within them many smaller rituals.
We can use ritual to celebrate. To honor. To mark time. To notice who we are now and who we were before.
We use ritual to come home to our Self.
We use ritual to connect. To our body, mind or spirit. To our community. To our ancestors. Ritual is all about the being of connection.
Yes, there are a thousand different things you can do for ritual, and yet, if they don’t have meaning for you, if you aren’t somehow connecting in some way, then all you are doing is doing and if all you are doing is doing, that is a habit (more on this below).
None of us need more doing in our lives.
All of us need more connecting. More being. More feeling at home in our own skin.
That, to me, is the point of ritual.
Rituals can be sacred without being religious. I consider my morning ritual sacred, it guides me into my day and being and even when interrupted I am still always able to connect to my body, mind and spirit during that time.
Rituals can be time that is specifically set aside to do a certain thing (like my morning yoga or going to mass) or they can be found in the in-between time. For example, while waiting for something to finish on the stove, intentionally stopping for a glass of water and counting your breath for a moment, voila: a mini-ritual of connecting to your Self.
Habits, on the other hand, can look a whole lot like rituals to an outsider. The difference is subtle and sometimes we aren’t even aware ourselves when a ritual has crossed over into a habit.
Rituals are practiced intentionally, mindfully. We are aware we are doing them. We are aware of our Self while we are practicing them. We are connecting, either to our Self or to others during ritual.
Habits are mindless. We do them without much thought or awareness. We often do them because that’s just what we’ve always done. We don’t think about them and we don’t really get much of anything from them. They are about doing. Keeping us busy, filling up space, not paying attention.
A ritual can become a habit when we find we are doing something rote, on pure muscle memory, without thinking. A ritual becomes a habit when it stops being about connection (to our Self, to our ancestors, to our community) and becomes just about the doing.
Ritual = mindfulness, connection and being
Habit = mindlessness, disconnection and doing
When we notice that a ritual has become a habit, we have choices. We can reconnect with the ritual, become mindful of it again. Or we can decide that its time has passed and it is no longer part of who we are or what we need. We can stop the doing and allow the space for a new, intentional, and meaningful ritual to come into being.
I invite you look at your own habits and rituals. Examine them and intentionally decide what you want to keep and make time for your life and what you can let go of. Imagine letting go of all the habits that don’t fill you up, that don’t bring connection into your life, and how much space that would create for new, meaningful, rituals to enter.
xoxo
I talk more about ritual in this video below. It’s just over 20 minutes long, so go ahead and make yourself a cup of tea or pour a glass of wine and settle in.
To feel whole. To be connected to our feminine and masculine, our shadow and light, our power and powerlessness, our strength and our weakness. To embrace and accept all these aspects of our Self.
We are each complex beings. We each have unique histories of both lived experience and that of our ancestors. And while we are each unique, there are many, many common threads that tie us together.
Part of our healing is learning to come together. To share our stories. To show our shadows. To have our powerlessness and weakness witnessed. To be celebrated, seen, and heard as the truly amazing and complex person we each are.
We all have a shadow. We all are driven by unconscious forces. We all cause unintentional harm to others. As we bring our shadows into the light, as we bring our unconscious stories into our consciousness, healing begins.
Self-awareness is the necessary first step of our healing process. Self awareness is bringing our unconscious into consciousness, our Shadow into the Light.
Becoming self aware can look like many things. For me, and my work, it begins with connecting to our breath, to our body, to our physical sensations. It begins with coming into our body and learning to listen to her. As we do this work we become more and more aware of the stories that live within us, where they came from, and how we act out from them.
As we become aware, and only once we are aware, we can start to change the patterns and behaviors that are not representative of our true deeper Self. Once we are aware, we can begin to shift and sift and make repairs where necessary. As we become aware, we can do and be different in the world, in our own being.
Healing into wholeness is a process. It does not happen in a week, or a month, or even in a year. It begins slowly at first, in fits and starts. After a little while you start to notice subtle shifts and changes. You start to notice that you are speaking out more, or you start doing something creative that you love again, or you express yourself more in the way you dress, or you simply feel a little lighter, that you that breathe a little easier, that you are standing a little taller.
With more time and more work, a snowball effect starts to happen. More and more you find yourself speaking up and out. More and more you notice how you are expressing who you are in subtle and obvious ways. More and more you realize you have fewer and fewer fucks to give. More and more you begin to feel comfortable and at home in your own skin.
Then one day you notice that things that once triggered you and threw you completely off for days or weeks or even months no longer seem to phase you in the least.
These are not signs that our work is done. We have millennium worth of training, shaming, and disconnecting to unravel and heal. They are however signs that we have been doing the work, and that we are in a place to pass on healing to others in ways that feel good and right. And as we are in the place to guide others to their own healing, and look at the ways we have caused harm and make repairs, we each continue to do our own deeper work.
And so this work grows and grows. So healing grows and grows. So our world shifts and sifts and morphs.
This is how we dismantle the systems that oppress. This is how we create true equality. Do our own inner work, and make the shifts in our outer work that need to occur. Make amends where necessary and possible. Find ways to help others in their own healing.
Repeat until our last breath.
xoxo
I talk more about healing into wholeness in this video below. It’s just over 20 minutes long, so go ahead and make yourself a cup of tea or pour a glass of wine and settle in.
