Gwynn Raimondi, MA

The wild one behind closed doors

By

In the Being & Becoming Alumna group we are reading a chapter a month of Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ Women Who Run With The Wolves. It is deep reading and I find myself wanting to underline every single sentence in the book (yes, I’m one of those people). Every sentence speaks volumes beyond the limited numbers of words that are within it and stirs and nourishes so much within me.

The book echoes the work we have been doing in the Being & Becoming and (Un)Becoming circles, and will do in Awakening Our Womanline :: connecting deeply to our Feminine Self, our Feminine Source, our own embodied knowing. It is the work that many women find themselves craving and needing to do as they grow older, seeking their identity as a female in a patriarchal culture and trying to understand our values, our roles, our truth.

I mentioned in an Instagram post recently that I have recently uncovered another layer of my own internalized misogyny. Using the words internalized misogyny is part of my tearing away of that layer. Looking at yet another way women play small and don’t stand in our own strength and power.

Something that many of us do is to dumb our Self down: we play small, we say we aren’t smart, we act as if we don’t understand. We allow others to use the big words and we downplay our degrees, or we say because we don’t have the degrees that means we aren’t intelligent or our writing isn’t good enough or whatever the long list of things we are told that we have internalized.

The Truth is, My Truth is, this is bullshit. The women who gather in my circles, the women who read this weekly love letter, the women who I surround myself with in my day-to-day life are beautiful, highly intelligent, competent, and worthy people. If they weren’t, if you weren’t, you wouldn’t be called to do this depth work into your Self, into your own knowing.

And so I dance with another Shadow and I face her and we smile at each other and we hold hands and I thank her for letting me see her, and she thanks me for seeing her. And now that she is seen and known, I can hold her close and take the lead and allow another part of my Light to shine brighter. As I play with this new found aspect of my Shadow, I may start using “big words” and sometimes may sound more academic than poetic.

I also may write more about feminism, the patriarchy, oppression. Or rather, I will continue talking and writing about those concepts, and may start naming them instead of dancing around their names.

This has been part of embracing my (mother’s & grandmothers) roars. Realizing how deeply ingrained it can be in us to not let the world see or hear us, to “play nice,” to not speak out, to not use what my grandfathers called “fifty-cent words.” The truth is, I am smart, as were my mother and grandmothers. I have intelligence and I don’t need to hide it to make others feel comfortable. Yes, I can be a bit vague and ditsy at times too, and I don’t need to play those moments up in order to play down my vocabulary, my knowledge, or my “book smarts.” And neither do you.

Throughout history smart women who utilize their voices has threatened the status-quo. These women have changed history. They have also been subjects of torture, rape, oppression and murder. Historically, and even currently, there has been and is a risk to using our voice and showing our intelligence. =These traumas and realities live in our very cells, in our DNA. These stories live in our bones, our blood, our wombs.

The experiences of the women who came before us are alive in us. We have the choice and opportunity (and in my opinion, responsibility) to listen to those stories, to connect to these women, to heal these wounds and traumas and to let out our own roars, to gather the all the strength and power within us and to create the world we want to live in by making change happen.

Will you join me?

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

Where I live

By

where-i-liveI live in the in-betweens, those back alleys that aren’t really a place of their own but clearly have who we were at one end and who we will become on the other.  While looking back everything is relatively clear, distinct, sharp, looking forward is often filled with fog, hazy, not clear.

I live, physically, in a small apartment with my kids and husband.  It too is an in-between space, where we landed as we figured out our next steps. Now we are here, waiting and doing what we need to move onto our next planned step, not knowing what will come our way to change our course and seeing clearly all the choices we made and didn’t make that brought us to this space now.

These in-between spaces are my life.  The older I become the more I know, deep in my bones that these in-betweens, these back alleys that lead us into our next ways of being, our next iterations, our next phases of life, are life itself.  Those unseen destinations ahead of us are often mirages that shape-shift with our whims and choices and non-choices and with the wind and with things far beyond our knowing or control.

These liminal spaces were once terrifying to me.  My need for plans, for knowing, for having the false sense of control and safety was strong.  I lacked resilience and would fall to pieces if the slightest thing went seemingly off track.  It would take days or weeks for me to recover and even in the recovery of the disappointment or frustration there lived a deep resentment and deeper fear of the fallout of things not having gone “my way.”

In time I learned the value in having fall back plans.  This brought comfort in that if Plan A didn’t work out exactly I still had plans B-ZZZZZ to work through.  These fall back plans were my safety nets.  They both helped me learn to build resilience and also stunted my resilience.  I still needed control.  I still feared the unknown.  I still could not bear the dissonance of the in-between spaces.

I’m not entirely sure I can pinpoint when it all changed.  When these in-between spaces, when these gates into the Underworld, began to feel like home.  When my resilience grew back wholly and completely.  I can not tell you the date or the exact steps I took to land here.  I know part of it was coming into my body.  I know part of it was seeing an amazing therapist (or three).  I know part of it was becoming a mother and wanting more and better and different for my child.  I know part of it was the reading of All The Books and getting my own degree in psychology.  I know part of it is simply growing older and no longer having any fucks to give.

Here I am.  I have been walking with Inanna for years now, going down into the Underworld, learning to sit in the discomfort of my own grief and trauma, learning to hold space for others to do the same.  With each descent and ascent more layers come off and I leave more of my masks and armor and distracting baubles behind.

I live in my body.  In her very real liminal space, moving from motherhood into cronehood.  Shifting and softening.  Creaking and popping more than in years past, and even with the pains and aches that are new to me now, I feel more comfortable and at home in her than ever before.  The anger and resentment and sense of betrayal that I once had for her feels like a distant memory and I almost question if I ever hated my body at all.

Almost question.  Because I know.  I know I hated her.  I hated her softness and curves.  I hated how she drew attention from some people but not from others.  I hated how she felt weak and defenseless against the world, against men who only wanted to take her and use and then discard her like a piece of trash.

I know I resented her.  I resented all her limitations.  I resented how she “turned on” me, how she wouldn’t bend or sway or stand or leap or run or punch or kick in the ways other bodies did.  I resented how she was built and what all that meant.  I resented her nature and naturalness.  I resented how she was a target for pain and beatings from those who were supposed to love me.  I resented how she just kept taking it, kept going on, wouldn’t stop.  I resented my body’s resilience with all my mind.  I resented her because I could not understand her need to survive or keep going or keep living, even in the worst and most torturous of circumstances.

I know I felt betrayed by her.  Again and again.  Becoming pregnant when I didn’t want her to and then becoming infertile when I desperately wanted another child.  I felt betrayed by her “unspecified” diagnosis and how there was no clear or straight path to fix her, according to the myriad of doctors who poked and prodded and cut and then sewed her back up. I felt betrayed again by her curves and the attention they received, both “positive” and less “positive.” I felt betrayed by her sicknesses.  I felt betrayed that she wouldn’t do exactly what I wanted her to do when I wanted her to do it.

I lived in that space for a long time.  The hatred and resentment and betrayal almost ate me alive.

And here I am.  From where I am now that all feels so very long ago.  Though I know it wasn’t.

Here I am now. Now, I love my body.  I revere and respect her.  I am honored and humbled and so deeply grateful that despite me she kept going.  I am amazed at all she has endured and grateful that she has held these stories and truths about the experiences that made me in a safe space until I was ready to know them.

I am at home in her.  At home in the pleasures and pains of her.  At home in the discomforts and comforts.  At home in what she is right now. At home with the aging body she is becoming.

This is where I live.  In my body.

In this amazing body that has endured tortures and pleasures.  In this amazing body that keeps going despite all my past attempts to stop her.  In this amazing body that has given me two beautiful living children.  In this amazing body that is shifting and moving in her own ways.  In this amazing body that holds both my stories and the stories of my ancestors.  In this amazing body that knows.

I live at home. In this body. In the liminal spaces of life.  In this tiny apartment that keeps us warm and safe and dry.

I live at home. In my freedom and unapologeticness and strength and power and daring and light and wholeness and knowing.

I live at home in my being and becoming the Unleashed Woman who my body held and nurtured and kept safe and brave through all our years.

I live at home in me.

xoxo

Did you enjoy this? If so, I invite you to subscribe to my weekly love letter right over here.

Today’s post was inspired by two different writing and exploration courses.  One by Jena Schwartz and the other by Isabel Abbott and Bronwyn Petry.  I encourage you to explore their work and see if any of their future offerings are right for you. xoox

 

 

What lies beneath

By

Deep in my belly lie the words that need to find a page, the passion I have suppressed for too long, now clawing its way up and out, across my heart and throat, pushing, tearing, seeking.  The words are not words, formless. Emotions and expression trying to find their way.

My throat, my strong brave throat, she stops them, silences them. I feel the battle, throat tight, sore, raw. How long can she hold out? How long until the rawness breaks through and pours out my mouth, my fingers?

So many years of not writing, of not speaking. So many years of keeping secrets and wearing masks. Untold stories lost, but not really. They have found their way deep into my bones, my DNA.

What have I passed down to her? To him? What struggles, heartbreaks, tragedies have they never experienced yet live within them? Because I experienced them, or my mother or grandmother or great-great-great-grandmother. I sometime wonder what is mine and what was theirs.

The stories they never told, but held tight within their muscles. Passed on again and again. Through blood and cells and actions and words. Through tears and shame.

If the trauma runs so deep, why doesn’t the joy?

Deep in my belly, my heart, my head, lies the passion to share these stories. To hear them. To witness and be witnessed. To find relief and release.

My quest, to shed the stories that no longer serve me, no longer serve you. The ones that get caught in our throats, held there by fear of releasing them and becoming what is unknown.

I’m right along side you.

So many paths of womanhood. All of us mothers, whether we have children or not. We are creators, birthing beauty into the world. Sometimes birthing ugliness. And what does that mean? We are not to blame for this world we were born into, for the scars so deep that they are passed along through womb after womb down to us. And yet… and yet.

We, the creators, can also be the destroyers, the rebuilders. Once the old stories are excavated and released, new stories can be written. We will stumble along the way. I know I do, constantly stumbling and thinking as the hurtful words pour out of my mouth “What the fuck are you doing?? Stop!!” And still they flow.

I fall to my knees, sometimes metaphorically, sometimes literally. I ask for forgiveness, of her and him and her and him and them. I beg forgiveness of myself. I find grace and new definitions of beauty. I get up, brush myself off and try again, and again, and again.

And slowly, so slowly, the new stories are written and some of the cells from other generations are shed and I emerge, new but not new.

What stories lie beneath? Let’s unearth them together.

A part of the alter in my office. Release mantra card by Jen Lashua.
A part of the alter in my office. Release mantra card by Jen Lashua.

Inspired by a Liberated Lines Flash offered generously by Alisha Sommer and Robin Sandomirsky, by the reminder in this article and by my own calling to do this guiding work and play . xoxo.

Our foundation

By

I watch her. One moment a little girl, the next a young woman. She’s only seven and a half and yet her body is starting to connect with the moon and with mine. Mood swings monthly. Huge tears. My sensitive girl made more sensitive. I ask her, “What is wrong?” and the sobs wrack her body as she shouts “I DON’T EVEN KNOW!!”. Her confusion breaks me. I find my soft place for her, knowing this change won’t be easy for this girl who weeps at every birthday, not wanting to become older, not wanting to accept the next age and iteration of her life.

I find a soft place for myself. To mourn the little girl who is disappearing but not really. The moments I missed or worse, tainted and destroyed. Knowing my own imperfect journey of motherhood. Forever trying. Sometimes wondering if I’m doing more damage than good and still  knowing now, that I am good enough. Knowing she was meant to be my girl and I was meant to be her mama.

Finding my own innate wisdom, my own embodied knowledge. Allowing the wise women before me to come forth and hold my hand through this new trial. Helping me to both hold her and let her go, at the same time. Allowing myself to shed my own layers of hurt and let that young girl in me come forward, to comfort her along with my daughter.

This wisdom rising up of what it is to be a woman. What it is to own my power and strength and beauty. To know there is infinite strength in the softness, the curves, the bending.

I see myself reflected in her eyes. I allow her own sadness to burst forth. Holding space for her as I do for so many others. And yet I sometimes forget she needs me to hold space for her first, always. Sometimes she gets my impatience and annoyance instead. Sometimes I fail at this thing called mamahood. And yet she always forgives me, she always tells me I am the best mama in the world, the most perfect mama just for her. And my heart cracks and shatters at her words and I find the strength to be gentle with her, with me.

I find myself grasping for her as she giggles and pulls away. In the next moment, she reaches for me, but I am not there. This is the dance of this mother and daughter. Beautiful, imperfect and filled with love and humanity.

I root down into my own embodied knowledge, my own wisdom. This too shall pass, too quickly. I have blinked too many times and missed so much. Those moments I have caught though, with my eyes wide open… they have been breath-taking, amazing. And it is those moments that remind me it’s not the big events and once time occasions, its the every day that defines us.

The every day quiet moments. The snuggles at bedtime. The warm hugs first thing in the morning. The bowl of oatmeal, lovingly prepared. The stopping typing and looking at her when she speaks to me. Holding her hand as we cross the street. The long talks in the car as we go from here to there. Those are the moments that have build the foundation of our relationship.

So we dance on this foundation, allowing it to hold us, to keep us safe during the turbulence and stress. For each moment I know I have screwed up, there is another moment or five that I know I got right. Those moments, the ones I got right, they keep us going, they give me faith in the tomorrows to come, again knowing in my bones I’ll screw some of those moments up too, and yet I will get so many more of them just right.

 

It seems just yesterday she was napping peacefully here.
It seems just yesterday she was napping peacefully here.

Inspired by a Liberated Lines Flash offered generously by Alisha Sommer and Robin Sandomirsky. So thrilled to be writing from and for my heart again.