EMBRACING THE FEMININE

WHAT I AM SHARING IN THIS BLOG MAY RILE SOME PEOPLE UP AND MAY ELICIT FEELINGS OF COMBAT AND ANGER.  MY INTENTION IS ONLY TO GIVE THE FACTS, IN LOVE. 

 I love and appreciate the sisterhood of women. I am not gay, lesbian or bi-sexual (not that there is anything wrong with any of these). I am just grateful for the camaraderie and the connection that all women share.

Once upon a time, I felt threatened by other women. When I was younger, I considered other girls as competition. I did not especially like other females and I would much rather have a male as a good friend than a female. I just did not trust females. I considered them to be catty, bratty and bitches.

As I have matured and grown within myself I have come to love other women and would never even think of calling a woman a bitch. The more I know myself and love my authentic being, the more gratitude and love I have for all of my sisters. By the same token, the more I understand the history of feminine energy, the more gratitude and love I have for all of my sisters. 

I first began to understand the feminine connection, when I gave myself permission to question my beliefs. Because patriarchy was all I knew did not mean there was not more truth to be seen. I began to wonder what happened to the feminine part of creator energy.  Why did the feminine side of humanity have to fight for everything, like the right to vote, to own their bodies and our belongings, to have credit in our name and/or to not be seen and considered as a sex object. The more I delved into the history and the plight of the feminine spirit the more I respected and grew to love myself and my feminine nature. 

I was raised in a patriarchal home, in a patriarchal society, and in a patriarchal religion. The church I attended was run by males, altar boys were of course masculine, and women were only considered worthy enough to keep the church clean. As a result of the patriarchal teaching that men are superior, girls naturally compete with other girls for that all-important male attention. Women assume we need to please men. We dress for them and unfortunately do a lot of other things just so we can get and keep their attention. 

Growing up, I was led to believe that my worth was defined by how much male attention I received. Though I was taught that boys only wanted one thing from girls, I was also taught that men were superior. No one ever told me that, they showed me that by their actions.....by the way men were given the right to do things women couldn't.  In our home, the men were served meals first because they worked, so they needed the meat.😢 My brother was raised to go to college, I was raised to be a housewife and a mother. My brother, as a teen,  could have all the sex he wanted, in fact he was encouraged to have sex by the older men in the family. When I had sex as a teenager I was considered used goods and a slut. I was shunned, called names and made to feel like a leper. My brother was praised for learning the ropes as a teenager.

I seemed to always be angry with some girl because she got the date I wanted, she was prettier and/or more popular, the boys all liked her, and of course she was always queen of something. I  was not taught that women and men were equal, nor did I know anything about the history of women.  All I knew was all I knew and all that was taught to me was all that the adults believed. 

Since coming to know and understand the feminine side of creator and therefore seeing the importance of balance within the masculine and feminine spirit, my life and relationship with women has changed, as has my relationship with men. 

Women are beautiful, magnificent creatures. The majority of us are nurturing and loving beings. We also many times are the glue that holds most homes together. Women are powerful beings.  We can carry a child, nurse a child and raise a child while working a job, plus running a household . What women are not are sex objects who are here for men's entertainment or pleasure. We are not a weaker sex because the majority of women carry their families on their shoulders. There are quite a few physical chores I cannot do and I defer to my husband to do them, but that does not make me a weaker person. 

As women, we are all part of the collective unconsciousness, which according to Carl Jung, contains river beds of collective experience.  The collective unconsciousness is the place where preexisting traces of ancestral experience are encoded. Thousands of years of feminine rejection reside there, and it can rise up to do a dark dance with our conscious beliefs. (C.G.Jung, On Psychic Energy)

Women, who are an embodiment of feminine creator energy, have been taught that our bodies do not belong to us; that they belong to our husbands. We have been taught to dislike our bodies if they do not conform to an ideal. We have been taught that menstruation was a "curse" and that instead of honoring our cycles, we have learned to turn them into a negative experience. We have been taught to feel shame about our bodies. 

We cover the gray, we pay a lot of money to cover the wrinkles and we do our best to prop up the sags. We do all of this because we believe growing older is also a curse because we no longer are seen as sexy or desirable to men. This is all hogwash and pure bullshit. 

My dream is to see women become conscious of our feminine selves and know our dignity, power and value. My dream is to see women take the high road and stand tall and strong in  our feminine self. There is a whole empowered woman within and all of life changes as we grow into and become women who know their power. Power is love, nurturing, kindness, and tenderness.

Let me close by saying I am not a feminist, nor am I a women's libber. This is not about women being powerful in the workplace or in government, this is not about burning my bra or male bashing.   Men are awesome also and I love the men in my life. What  this IS about is women being powerful in our femininity. I repeat:  Feminine power is not about doing, it is about knowing who we are and being comfortable in that knowledge. It is about claiming our bodies as our own and honoring the feminine spirit.

"Women have to come to understand ourselves as central, not peripheral, before anything real can happen. We have to depend on ourselves. This cannot be done AGAINST men, and that's the real problem. It cannot be woman against man. It has to be woman finding her true self with or without a man, but not against man."  May Sarton in The House by the Sea 

MY LIFE - AS IT WASTHEN AND AS IT IS NOW

Today started like almost every other day. I got out of bed, fed my cat and made sure she had clean drinking water, then I scooped her litter box. From there I made my way into the kitchen where I fixed myself a cup of coffee topped with flavored creamer and home made whipped cream. I turned the outside lights off, raised the thermostat to 68 (in the winter) and finally sat at my kitchen table. 

I have four large windows across the back of my kitchen. My back yard is mostly woods so when I sit at my table I can see into the woods. After taking deep breaths and just looking out the window, I begin my morning ritual of writing in my journal followed by reading something of a spiritual nature. I like to start my day by checking in with my body, my surroundings and my spirit. I generally do not like outside noise first thing in the morning, unless it is the sound of birds singing or wind rustling the leaves. I love the quiet and I love easing gently into my day. 

Looking out one of my windows

This morning, like so many mornings, I found myself overwhelmed with gratitude for the life I have been given, and for how I get to live that life. I live in the woods, which I love, surrounded by trees on the outside and people who love me and care about me on the inside. 

I have chosen this quiet life. I find quiet affords me the opportunity to go slow, be introspective and give myself and my body the nurturing and healing energy it deserves to have.

As I contemplate where I am now, I am filled with memories of how my life was, and the one thing it was not, which was peaceful. I packed a lot of hard living in the first 60 years of my life. I was a stay at home mom until my youngest reached junior high. I raised four children and a grandchild. I have had three careers and three businesses and I am on my fourth career as a writer and author. It feels like I have run the gamut on ups and downs in both my personal and professional life.

I was not a happy person and I lived for years in the pit of depression, feeling overwhelmed by panic and anxiety. Hypervigilance was my constant companion along with working hard to try to feel okay about myself. This was all I knew. I was not born this way, but many negative experiences in my childhood and young teens helped to shape the path my life took.

I survived it all, including my daddy leaving when I was around three, and my being told he did not care about me, being ostracized by a group of teenage girls, who I thought were my friends, and told they did not want to hang out with me anymore, being raped at gunpoint when I was seventeen, being thrown out a non-denominational church on a Sunday morning in front of a packed crowd and  somehow winding up as the pariah of my family. And yet, despite it all, I am still here.

There were many times when I did not know how I was going to make it through; but I did. I never dreamed I would one day be in the place of peace and contentment I am in today.

I tell you about these events not for you to feel sorry for me, but to show the miraculous resilience of the human spirit and how a life can heal and change. As I look back on the wonders of life and the events that brought me to through to where I am today, I feel deep gratitude. The human spirit is awesome and I know from experience that it can be knocked down over and over and still get up, brush itself off and take the next step.  

It has taken time and an enormous amount of healing, introspection, good trauma focused therapy plus a deep hunger for light and life to get to this place of quiet.  Along the way I have engaged in a lot of excavation into my being to heal my childhood wounds and to recover my sense of self and find my self worth. My healing did not happen in an instant or a day. What really matters is that it happened and is continuing to happen. I keep giving myself over to light and life. I keep looking within instead of focusing on what is going on around me and who is doing what.  It has taken time for me to learn that I am the captain of my ship and I can be defined by self-love and gratitude or I can allow myself to be defined by my perception of my childhood experiences or by others thoughts and actions. 

By: Alex Elle

Would I change any of my life if I could? No, I would not because it has all brought me to where I am today. Somewhere along the way I was given the gift of willingness to question the status quo and what I was taught and groomed to believe along with the desire to find my authentic self. As a result, I have arrived at this place of peace and contentment with myself and life. 

The way my life was and the way it is now are light years apart, yet I know one is the result of the other. Thanks to creator energy I now live the life I love.  

More on Resistance and Surrender

 

I recently wrote about surrender and had no intention of writing about it again. However, life has a different intention for me because I often find myself in situations where I am being called upon to make a choice. Do I surrender or do I resist.  

Before I get to writing more about surrender, I want to focus on the opposite of surrender, which is to resist.  The word resist means to set back, to oppose actively, to ward off.  Please know this: resistance does create anger and anger can create resistance.

For most of us, our first instinct, when something is not going the way we want it to go, is to resist.  It is so easy to get angry about life and others and to build a case for the anger. However, when we choose the anger that resistance creates, we inadvertently bring distress to our sensitive nervous systems. Doing this to our self actually creates a storm of inner violence and is very stressful to our bodies and our psyches. 

Resisting is an attempt to control and one of the biggest fear mechanisms we all possess is "control."  If we can control, or attempt to control, we ward off having to face unpleasant feelings, especially fear.  Control is a powerful offshoot of fear. We fear that which is different, so we attempt to control it. We may fear anger so we attempt to control our own and others expression of anger. We may fear sadness and tears so we attempt to control all expression of sadness. We may fear feeling shame or embarrassment so we attempt to control anything and anyone whose behavior may elicit shame within. 

We can fool ourselves into thinking we are strong when we are "in control" but this is not necessarily so. Real strength comes in being able to let go. Due to the experience of learning to let go, especially when it comes to others and their choices in life, I find myself experiencing a deeper sense of inner peace and a heightened sense of gratitude. I have found that the deepest peace and contentment I have ever felt came from surrender to what is. 

I am not saying surrender is easy, because often it is not. But it is the way of the peaceful warrior. I can fight against or I can stand for in gratitude and self care,

There are some things I can change, and when I can, I do. I am aware that most of what I can change has to do with me and not others behaviors, attitudes or choices. I can choose to cut down on how much chocolate I eat or how many martinis I have. I can hold my tongue and check myself before I say something mean or inappropriate. These are all within my control and to change them does not interrupt the smooth functioning of my nervous system or cause harm to myself. 

As humans living in this world we will always be faced with choices in life. It is up to each of us to decide whether we want to live a peaceful life or if we want to fight life. For me, I choose peace. 

THE SACREDNESS OF SELF-LOVE

 The following is an excerpt from "You Can Heal Your Body" by Louise Hay, founder of Hay House.  This was written quite a few years ago but it certainly still stands true today. I have read this poem numerous times over the years and still go back to it when I need to remind myself of the importance of taking care of myself. 

Jesus tells us to love our neighbor as we love ourselves and I have learned over the years that we can only love others to the extent that we love ourselves. Self-love is not about pride, which is akin to haughtiness, vanity and  arrogance and is more connected with what we have and what we do. .One has nothing to do with the other. Self-love is about respect and dignity for the fact that we are beings who carry divine, loving, creator energy within. It is about our internal being, our soul, and not about what happens externally. 

This poem, by Louise Hay, is a great treatise on how to love ourselves. 

Deep at the center of my being there is an infinite well of Love...

I now allow this love to flow to the surface---It fills my heart, my body, my mind, my consciousness...

my very being...and radiates out from me in all directions

and returns to me multiplied. The more love I use and give, 

the more I have to give.---the supply is endless.

the use of love makes me feel good...It is an expression of my inner joy.

I love myself, therefore, I take loving care of my body. I lovingly feed it nourishing foods and beverages.

I lovingly groom it and dress it, and my body lovingly responds to me

with vibrant health and energy.

I love myself therefore---I provide for myself a comfortable home,

one that fills all my needs and is a pleasure to be in.

I fill the rooms with the vibration of love so that all who enter, myself included,

will feel this love and be nourished by it.

I love myself, therefore, I work at a job that I truly enjoy doing,

one that uses my creative talents and abilities,

working with and for people that I love and that love me,

and earning a good income. 

I love myself, therefore, I behave and think in a loving way to all people---for I know

that that which I give out returns to me multiplied...

I only attract loving people in my world for they are a mirror of what I am. 

I love myself, therefore, I forgive and totally release the past

and all past experiences and I am free.

I love myself, therefore, I live totally in the now,

experiencing each moment as good

and knowing that my future is bright, and joyous, and secure---

for I am a beloved child of the universe

and the universe lovingly takes care of me now and forever more...

And so it is.

By: Louise Hay

GRATITUDE, FULFILLMENT AND SURRENDER

 "If you look to others for fulfillment, you will never truly be fulfilled. If your happiness depends on money, you will never be happy with yourself. Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you."  Lao Tzu

I read the above quote on New Years morning and it stopped me in my tracks. I kept reading it and decided to sit with it for a few minutes and let it sink in. After a while I remembered I had written in my journal on the morning of December 30, "What do I need to know, or be, or do in order to be fulfilled?"

As I continued to read, I ran across this quote, which answered my question of two days earlier. 

"Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos into order, confusion to clarity.... Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow." Melody Beattie

I immediately understood the connection between gratitude and fulfillment. I believe gratitude is thankfulness on steroids. I see thankfulness as an acknowledgement of something and gratitude as a deep heart feeling. I am aware that when I feel gratitude, it elicits within me a feeling of joy and happiness. It takes thank you to the next level.

I want to live a life of gratitude, and though I do have a lot of gratitude for most of life, there are still areas that I find myself struggling with. It is this struggle that stands in the way of my living a satisfied, fulfilled life. It is my need to fight for control instead of surrendering. 

It is easier to surrender to life when it feels good, than when it requires looking at  pieces of my life I would rather not have to deal with. I am talking about areas like looking within for the source of my frustrations and anger that take me out of a place of contentment and into a place where I cry out, "Got damnit" or "F**k"; a place where I want to blame someone or something for my anger. 

Since walking this healing path requires me to be present to whatever is, I have many moments of frustration and anger. I am not always happy with what is and I sometimes want to fight life instead of surrendering to it.

I am aware that to some, surrender means weakness.  To me, surrender means to give up my need to control people and life . My concept of living in gratitude means accepting life, myself and others as it and we are. 

My intention for 2023 is to experience a level of contentment and joy beyond what I have known, to be filled with gratitude and to live a fulfilled life. I know it is there, I know it is possible. In fact, I believe contentment, joy and fulfillment is our birthright.