Patriarchal wounds and boundaries (and why I won’t use the term “Mother Wound”)

patriarchal-wounds-and-boundaries Boundaries and our ancestors and patriarchal wounds. These things are so intertwined.

At some point in our human history, we, especially us women, lost sight of our boundaries. We lost sight of the separation between us and others. We lost sight of our needs and wants. We lost sight of us.

I believe there was a time in our history when we were deeply connected to our Self. A time when we lived in an egalitarian culture. Then something happened or likely many things happened and over time patriarchy arose and with it came all the wounding: shame, misogyny, no longer defending our boundaries, or speaking up or out, or breaking any rules, for fear of torture or death. (Anthropology seems to back me up in this.)

We, women, did what we needed to survive. We still do. We play the game, we follow the rules as best we can, until we just can’t any longer. Some of us never reach that breaking point. Many of us do.

Our mothers did the same. And our grandmothers. And our great-grandmothers. And so on back through our womanline for a few thousand years.

These women who came before us, they wanted us to survive too. They loved us, their daughters. They were terrified for us being in the world they brought us into.

So they trained us. They taught us to obey. To be deceitful so we can get our own needs met, and in this deceit we learned to not trust our sisters (or mothers or grandmothers). To play by the rules while still finding ways to hold onto our Self or to let go of our Self completely. They taught us how to survive in a culture that didn’t consider us fully human, that considered us property, that saw nothing wrong with raping, beating or murdering us.

The ways they taught us to survive equated to playing small, to being silent, to being obedient and docile and doing as we were told. It equated to not speaking up or out. It equated to serving others, particularly men, with little to no regard to our own exhaustion or needs.

This training, this wounding, is often called the mother wound. I’ve used that term, as recently as a couple months ago, and although I’ve used it, it has always bothered me.

It bothers me because it places the blame of our wounding, seemingly, on the surface, on our mothers. On all mothers.

Because we as mothers don’t already carry enough of the responsibility of the ills of the world. Hello Eve and Pandora, just to name two.

The truth is, this wounding isn’t from our mothers. Our mothers, all our ancestral mothers, wanted us to survive. They loved us so deeply and wholly. And they were terrified for us.

How do I know?

Because I am terrified for my own daughter and the world I am sending her off into. And this world I’m sending her into is much tamer and gentler than the world our ancestors, including our own mothers, sent their daughters, including us, off into.

So I have an issue with the term mother wound. Because these wounds we carry, aren’t really about our mothers. They are about trying to survive in a culture that hates women.

All women. Yes, some women more than others, absolutely. Yes, the color of our skin and our socio-economic status and how high our education goes all play a part. And whether we’re married or mothers or how many fathers we have for our children and what color skin our partners have and and and…. Intersectionality is vital in the work of unraveling all of this.

And.

All women are hated in our culture. Matters of degree make little difference when we look at the statistics on rape or interpersonal violence or murder by boyfriends or husbands. Those numbers cross all skin colors and classes and education levels.

This is not to say that we don’t carry wounds from our actual lived experiences with our mothers. Of course we do. We feel betrayed by them for trying to break us so we could live. Our pain and wounds of our lived experiences with our mothers are valid. And need to be processed and healed.

And.

While we need to heal our own micro-lived-experience-wounding, we need to remember the macro of the issue at hand.

It is our misogynist, patriarchal culture that is at fault.

Yes, our mothers are responsible for their actions. Yes, many of them did not do their own inner work so that they would not pass on this wounding and instead taught us healthy ways to survive and still feel comfortable in our own skin. Yes, they screwed up. Yes, they are human.

And by placing the blame fully on our mothers and our womanline, by putting them at the center of our wounding, we are continuing to be complicit and compliant to the misogynist patriarchal culture that created the environment for this wounding to even occur.

So I’ve decided to stop using the term mother-wound. Because it’s not entirely accurate. It’s misdirecting. It only feeds our internalized misogyny instead of helping us dislodging it from our bodies and being.

This is actually part of my own boundary work. Making the distinctions between what is mine and what is someone else’s and what is culture. Unraveling the stories and training that my ancestors have passed down through word or action or DNA (or all three). Learning to listen to my own body and knowing and getting to the root of something when it doesn’t feel right or feels off or doesn’t sit well with me.

This is part of connecting to our intuition yes, and it is also part of connecting to our boundaries. Of acknowledging when something, particularly a commonly used or “known” something, doesn’t feel right to us. Of saying no when that not right feeling comes up. Of doing different so not to pass on something that doesn’t feel right to us in the first place and only causes more wounding and damage.

Boundaries are more than telling someone you aren’t going to let them take advantage of you again. Boundaries are about more than our relationships with other people (though, in truth, a lot of how our boundary work plays out is in our relationships with others).

Boundaries are also about saying No More to a culture that hates us.

Boundaries are about saying No More to passing on the training and wounding of our culture.

Boundaries are about knowing our Self, so wholly and deeply that we don’t question when something doesn’t sit right if that off feeling is valid or not and instead we dig into the why so we can understand ourselves better and then do different in the world.

Boundaries, I believe, are at the base of our ancestral healing of our patriarchal wounds. As we learn more and more about our own boundaries, we heal the pain of our ancestors who weren’t allowed to have their own boundaries due to risk of torture or death.

As we lay claim to our bodies, to our minds, to our spirits, we are defining the distinctions between our own Self and the Self of others. We can know intuitively and immediately when someone is projecting their “stuff”on us as opposed to some critique of our behavior having merit.

Boundaries are how we connect to our Whole Self. Because without boundaries, we cannot define who we actually are.

As we do our own boundary work we learn that boundaries are not rigid nor are they static. They are flexible and have an ebb and flow depending on the people, places, time and events that are invoking them. We may have a more rigid boundary with one person than with another. We may need more physical space from some people than others. And even these boundaries may shift depending on what all is happening in our lives, sometimes needing firmer boundaries with those we generally are pretty easy and loose with.

Even with this being true, that boundaries are more of a fluid thing than not, we must be able to sense these boundaries in the first place.

And, you can probably guess, I deeply believe we learn to sense our boundaries by deeply connecting to and embracing our bodies. By inhabiting them. Feeling them. Knowing on a visceral and deep level what exactly embodiment means.

So we can feel our boundaries and know immediately when they have been breached. And honor and defend them, as we deserve to be honored and defended.

It is deep work and messy work and there is much unraveling and untangling and dismantling that must happen.

And it is so deeply and truly and wholly freeing.

Our boundary work is all a part of becoming our own version of the Unleashed Woman. It is another layer in taking off the leash that was put on us at birth by our culture. It is another layer of coming home to our Self.

And isn’t it time to do that? To come home to our Self? To take off this patriarchal leash? To become our own Unleashed Woman?

xoxo

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November 30, 2016January 8, 2017

Consent, complicity & rebellion (the complexity of consent part 3)

The topic of consent has shown up over and over for me recently: in Isabel Abbott and Bronwyn Petry’s course The Body Contains Multitudes; observing All Souls Day; in my work with my own therapist; in my ancestral work unraveling what the women and men who lived before me passed down to me and what is me and mine; in my constant work of dislodging and dismantling my own patriarchal training and doing all I can to not pass this training on to my own daughter (and failing, and doing better than my own mother did… sometimes progress is terribly incremental).

Consent. The complexity of it. How there is so much in our lives that we don’t consent to. How so much lives in our own bodies that we never consented to–not only what we didn’t consent to in regard to our own lived experience, but also what our ancestors passed down to us, what lives in our cellular memory and our very DNA.

And while there is so much that lives within our bodies that we did not consent to, it is still ours to manage or heal or dislodge or unravel. We have a responsibility to it, to ourselves, to understand all these parts and where they live and what messages they may have for us that are helpful and what messages they give us that are harmful.

We have a responsibility to untangle the web of stories and training and wounding and strengths that we did not ask for and are within us all the same.

Our bodies store it all. The pain and pleasures of our own lived experiences. The memories that our mind doesn’t want us to remember. The longing for freedom and truth and justice and love that our spirit cries for. The trauma and oppression of our ancestors. Thousands of years of gaslighting from our culture.

All of it. Our bodies hold it all.

Sometimes it’s hard to get past all this. Sometimes the experiences and memories and longing are too much and we need to move out of our body, out of our being, out of our Self in order to escape the chaos and dissonance and get through our days.

That’s okay. We each need to do what we need to do to get by.

And.

Sometimes, we do need to connect to it all. To hear the stories. To know the truths. To sense the injustices of our own lived experiences and those of the people who came before us. To believe that we aren’t just making it all up, it isn’t all in our heads, it is, in fact and truth, very, very real.

This connection doesn’t have to look or feel or be big. It doesn’t need to happen all at once. We don’t need to dive in so deep that the weight of it all crushes us.

We can move into this work of connecting to our bodies, slowly, quietly, peacefully. We can get curious and quiet and give space for our bodies to tell us what they need to. We can listen.

This is the work of re-membering our body.

Of putting all our fragmented pieces back together.

Of coming home into our Self.

Of becoming our own Unleashed Woman.

This is the work of reclaiming our bodies. Or, perhaps really, claiming them for the first time. Taking ownership of them.

This is the work of being able to say wholly, fully, confidently: No or Yes or Maybe or No then Yes then No again.

This is the work of acknowledging all the ways we never gave consent. We never gave permission. We never consciously or in any informed way agreed to the disconnection, the dismembering, the disowning of our own Self – of our physical and corporeal and flesh and blood body.

And neither did our ancestors.

Lack of consent is part of how our patriarchal culture works. Those in power don’t need to ask, and those without power don’t get to say no.

This is as true today as it was 100, 1000, 2000 years ago.

We, you and I, never gave consent for trauma to live in our bodies the way it does. We never consented to the disease or disorders. We never consented to our DNA being altered by the trauma and oppression our ancestors experienced.

We did not consent to the anxiety. The depression.

We did not and do not consent to the constant messages of how we are not enough, how we are too much.

We did not consent to the shame that is instilled in our psyches and being from birth. From before birth.

We did not consent to having our boundaries disregarded, ignored, torn away from us, over and over and over again.

We did not consent to being told that we have no value, no worth.

We did not consent to the disconnection from our Self or our sisters or our community.

We did not consent to the gaslighting or torture or murder both we and our ancestors have experienced.

We did not consent to having all this patriarchal training living within us, burrowing so deeply into our blood and bones and being.

We did not consent to unconsciously and unintentionally passing on this training.

We did not consent to being complicit in this culture that hates women.

We did not consent because we were not informed.

We were not told we had a choice.

We were not told there was, there is, a choice.

We were told, taught, indoctrinated with the idea, that we have to follow the rules. That we must play small. That we should strive to achieve that never ending To Do list.

We were told, taught, indoctrinated with the idea, that to rest is to be lazy, weak, proves our worthlessness.

We were told, taught, indoctrinated with the idea, that we deserve all the pain we endure. Because Eve. Because Pandora. Because all the “evils” of the world are our fault.

Psst… I wanna tell you something…

THEY FUCKING LIED.

xoxo

We do have a choice.

We have the choice to say No more.

We have the choice to say, No, that isn’t correct.

We have the choice to use our voices. To access our power. To demonstrate our strength.

We have the choice to stop following the rules, to stop passing on the rules, to stop being complicit in a culture that wants us gone.

We have the choice to do and be different. For ourselves. For our daughters and nieces. For our sisters. For our mothers. For all our grandmothers, long forgotten in our conscious memory yet still living within our cells and being.

And not only do we have a choice, we have a responsibility.

Now that we are aware of this training, now that we are unraveling all the ways we have been lied to, tied down, leashed, we have a responsibility to continue in this unraveling, in finding our truth, in taking off this leash that has choked and silenced us for generations.

We have a responsibility to do and be different. For our Self. For our daughters and sons and nieces and nephews. For our mothers and fathers. For all our grandmothers and grandfathers, long forgotten in our conscious memory yet still living within our blood and bones and being.

We have a responsibility to break the rules. To defy this sick normal. To tear it all down, burn it to the ground, and build new.

New. Different. Creating a time and place where all of us are free and equal. Where we no longer feel shame. Where we embrace our sisters. Where we find deep connection with our Whole Self, with our community, with our world.

This responsibility can feel heavy. It can sometimes feel like a burden. We may sometimes want to put it down and wish we were not aware of the oppression, the hatred, the inequality.

That’s okay.

Even Jesus had moments of doubt.

And.

We can do this. Together. In community. With each other.

Together. Always.

Now, let’s go smash this shit to bits.

xoxo

The text of this essay originally appeared my weekly love letter on November 5, 2016 and has been slightly edited and modified to appear here. If you enjoyed reading this, and would like to read more like it, you can sign up to receive my love letter right over here.

Isabel Abbott and I have locked arms and joined minds and are offering a six month circle unearthing, exploring, dislodging and embracing our consent and boundaries. If you’d like to learn more and possibly register, click right here.

November 23, 2016January 8, 2017

The complexity of consent Part 2

consent-part-2 Last week I wrote about how sometimes consent is a tricky thing, how sometimes our mind will give consent to something, like a surgery, but our body won’t (and really can’t). How sometimes our logic needs to override our body because our mind actually does know better (for example that a surgery could actually save our lives.

The point being that sometimes the giving or not giving of consent isn’t always a straight forward thing.

And, while that is true, it is also true that more often than not, the giving or not giving of consent is very straight forward.

Like the not giving consent for sexual abuse and assault or physical and psychological abuse and torture.

The not giving consent for mundane and yet traumatic things like car accidents or cancer or any disease or illness.

The not giving consent for other people to break our hearts, or betray our trust, or dishonor us in any of the big or small ways.

The not giving consent for our children becoming ill, our parents dying too young, our best friends suffering in any way.

There are million things in our lives that we do not give consent to. Some of them extraordinary and some mundane.

All these noes that we may or may not have given voice live within us. In our minds, yes, and also in our bodies.

Every time our consent is disregarded, our bodies know. They react. They store the data.

The data of emotions and pain and the color of the walls and slow motion detail right before impact.

This data lives in our shoulders and necks and jaws. In our chests and hips and underneath our scapula.

This data lives in our intestines and stomach and womb.

This data lives in our blood and bones and muscles and sinew.

The raw non-verbal emotions, the howls and screams and wails, all vibrate within our being. And not only does the disregard of our own consent, from our lived experience, live within our body and being, that of our ancestors does too.

This includes the gaslighting that women have experienced for thousands of years.

This includes the impact of rape and abuse. It includes not having control or sovereignty over our own bodies or lives.

Yes, there a million mundane ways in which our consent is disregarded. Yes, this all lives within us. And the trauma and impact of these mundane, ordinary things, like car accidents, can be quickly and easily dislodged from our bodies.

It is the millions of ways in which our consent is disregarded that are not mundane, though in our culture considered ordinary and almost unremarkable, like rape or abuse or gaslighting, that takes time and patience and focused intention to dislodge and dislodging is made even more complex by living in a culture that continually and constantly traumatizes us.

It may take a lifetime to dislodge some trauma, some violations of our consent. There are some things that we will only learn to live with, as we also continue to chisel away at the layers. The hope always being that the more we dislodge, the more we chisel away, the less the next generation will need to do.

In truth, the trauma of being women living in a patriarchal culture makes it almost impossible to completely heal our bodies and minds and spirits.

And.

As we continue to do the work of unearthing, examining, dismantling and dislodging these traumas we also learn to resist and to prevent more trauma from impacting us as deeply.

We learn resilience.

We learn that no matter what, we will not only survive, in many ways we will also thrive.

We learn that our NOes matter. We learn to honor them and defend them and demand respect for them.

We learn that our boundaries matter. We learn how to notice them and feel them and know them. We learn how to honor and respect them. We learn how to demand others honor and respect them too.

This is not easy work. It is messy. It can be dark. It can at times feel like we are sinking into a deep abyss.

And, as we build our resilience, we learn that this messiness, this darkness, this sinking into the abyss will pass.

We learn hope. We learn to breathe. We learn to rest and nourish and replenish.

We learn to wield our consent. To state that we matter. Our Noes and Yeses and Maybes matter. Our boundaries matter. Our voice matters. Our essence and being and life matters.

We learn that as we chisel away at our own trauma, we are also chiseling away at a culture that insists on oppressing us. As we learn to wield our consent, to declare that we matter, we chisel away at the stories our culture has fed us since birth, since our mothers births, since our grandmothers births. As we learn resilience, we rip away at leash our misogynist, racist, patriarchal culture has put on us.

As we learn, we begin to do different. And in our doing different, we take back our bodies, our consent, our autonomy, our lives. And in this taking back, we begin to crumble the bricks of a culture that tries to tell us our bodies and lives are not our own.

And this is how we will tear it all down and how, in the end, we will win.

xoxo

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November 16, 2016January 8, 2017

The complexity of consent -part 1

consent-part-1 Five years ago, while still in graduate school, I had a day surgery give me a bigger understanding of trauma and the impacts it has on our body. That semester I fought to be in the Crisis & Trauma class, it was the last time it would be offered by one of my favorite professors and there was a screaming within me that I needed that particular class at that particular time in my life. I had to fight with my academic advisor and demand over and over to be let into the class. I didn’t understand the warrior within me who was battling so hard for this class, there was no logic at that time which said to take it now and that I couldn’t take it later. And yet I knew, my body knew, that taking the class later was not what I needed. I needed to take it now. I eventually convinced my advisor and he got me into the class.

Let’s go back a bit.

When I was 18 I was diagnosed with endometriosis. In the months leading up to this diagnosis, I had horrible and debilitating PMS and periods. Debilitating to the point that I missed many days of my senior year of high school because I was curled up in a ball on our bathroom floor, dripping cold sweats or tightly curled in my bed moaning and crying and screaming because of the pain in my abdomen, my uterus, my womb. This pain led to multiple ER visits and one of them finally led to me being fully admitted and having the surgery that discovered and removed, the endometrial tissue growing outside my uterus causing all the pain.

The whole of that hospital experience was awful. The surgeon, may he be burning in the depths of hell, completely disregarded me. He wanted me to sign a “consent” form that would allow him to remove my uterus and ovaries if he saw fit (I did not agree to this, but only because my adopted mom was there at my side advocating for me; I was so doped up on pain medication I would have signed anything). When I asked him if the surgery would leave scars he let out a smug laugh and said in a condescending voice “Of course it will leave scars!”. After the surgery, a week or two after, in the follow up appointment he told me I would never be able to have children due to the endometriosis, that I would never be able to get pregnant and if I did by some miracle I would never be able to carry a child to term. These words, his authoritative words, led to some rather risky and stupid behavior during my early 20s and honestly I am lucky that I survived that period of my life as relatively unscathed as I did.

Fast forward to five years ago. We had been struggling to bring our second child into the world for years. Four early miscarriages. Twice with hopes so high that we finally did it. Visit after visit to more doctors and being told the miscarriages were “normal” for my “advanced maternal age”. More smugness. More not being heard when I said, NO! This is not normal. Not for my body. Not for my family. There is something else at play. More being disregarded and dismissed.

Each month was a roller coaster of hopes and prayers and disappointment and tears. And then the symptoms came back. More cold sweats while curled in a ball on the bathroom floor. And now, projectile vomiting added to the mix. After three months of this, it was my husband who observed this was happening right before my period would start. And so back to my doctor. My doctor who had been with me over the last almost two decades. My doctor who had been with me through cancer scares. Who treated me. Who knew that I knew my body better than her. My doctor who I trusted.

When I told her all the symptoms, and all the fertility struggles, and all the All Of It, she asked if I thought my endometriosis was back. I sat quietly for a moment and said Maybe? She sent me home and later that day called me with the contact information of the best gynecological surgeon in Seattle and she had a referral into her for me. I made and appointment the next day. And this surgeon, this woman surgeon, listened. And knew. And knew that I knew. And we came up with a plan, including a surgery, to help heal me.

Here’s where consent can get tricky. My mind consented to this surgery. Wholly and completely. But my body, my gorgeous amazing body never gave her permission. And so post-surgery the trauma symptoms, that I have lived with since I was a child, intensified.

Back to my Crisis & Trauma class. In this class, I was learning how trauma lives in the body. How we can help trauma move out of our bodies. What we can do as therapists to help others and ourselves heal from this deep wounding that isn’t only about the stories that run through our minds. It is also about all the ways our bodies scream out and relive the experiences over and over and over again and how we don’t listen to them.

So, thanks to this class, I was able to piece together that my body was traumatized by the surgery. That we can actually experience trauma even when we give consent to what is happening to us. That our body doesn’t always understand things in logical ways. That our body only knows it is frozen on a table and being sliced open and having metal shoved into it and pieces of itself being cut and torn and burned away.

Our bodies are wise and hold much. And also, they don’t understand the world or our experiences in the same ways our mind does. And so, in order to heal trauma, we need both mind and body to be connected and listening to each other. We need to not try to rationalize what our body is experiencing because the logic and rationale of the body is not the same as that of our mind.

We need to listen and heal.

That class on trauma saved me in many ways. It showed me how I need to listen, we all need to listen, to the messages of our bodies. And that our bodies will respond to having its consent disregarded, our consent disregarded in the ways it knows how.

Where this has all left me is in a place of questioning and wanting answers. I want to know the facts and figures and statistics for women who have been sexually abused or raped and the correlation to “women’s health issues” like endometriosis, ovarian/uterine/cervical cancers. I want there to be research on the real health impacts of abortion on women. I want these numbers and this research not to have further reason to take our choices away, but rather so we can have more fully informed consent.

Without all the information, how can any of us ever truly give our consent?

I understand, as well as anyone, that sometimes our mind must make decisions to override the consent of our bodies. If I hadn’t had that surgery five years ago, and the follow-up medical treatments, I would not have my son today. I also would still be losing a week every month to debilitating pain and agony. There are times when logic, when our mind, must prevail.

And in those times, after the consent of our body has been disregarded, we need to come back to her. Back to our body and reconciling with her. Back to our body and soothing and healing her. Back to our body and letting her know in all the ways that in this moment, she is safe. We need to let her know we hear her, we feel her, we respect her, we honor her.

Our minds and bodies and spirits are separate parts of our Self, and they are deeply connected to and intertwined with each other. This must be remembered. It must be remembered that we cannot heal our body through the power of our mind only. We must do other work, body work, to help her heal, to help her release, to help her feel safety and comfort.

By connecting to her, listening to her, hearing our body, then we can heal. We can heal our own pains and traumas, planned or otherwise. We can shift from spaces of anxiety and depression (because the health of our body affects the health of our mind) to spaces of calm and peace. We can feel the interconnectedness within our Self and within our greater world.

xoxo

PS – The first draft of this essay was written a week prior to the presidential election here in the US. I have debated posting in now, and instead focusing more on the outcome and fallout of the election. However, consent, consent in regards to our bodies as women, hangs in the balance again. Having claim to our bodies, having total authority over what happens to her is now in question, again. And so, I have decided to post this, as the first in a series I have written on consent and our bodies, as it does directly relate to all that is again hanging in the balance.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, and oh that warms my heart if you did, you can read more of my writing by subscribing to my weekly love letter right over here. xoxo

November 8, 2016November 7, 2016

Finding comfort

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

In a cup of chocolate hazelnut milk.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the liminal spaces, the unknown, the uncontrollable.

These are some of the places I find comfort.

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

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

And yet, it has been won.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

xoxo

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