This is the fifth in a series, WomanKind, on reclaiming the feminine.
Standing in the snaking line of a busy coffee shop, the woman in front of me comments on the lack of social distance I am giving her. I am standing on the front door mat of the cafe and she is on the marked cross ahead of me in the queue. We are not 1.5m apart. Luckily mo masks hide our facial expressions and I know that she is joking. We lean into each other.
In leaning into, not away from her gaze we recognise kindred beings and I want to know her and hug her. We don’t, in that coffee shop, but she shares with me the desperation her brother is experiencing living in Melbourne and how dancing and singing Happy Birthday may be banned. He wants to flee his hometown.
What would I do if I met with a hostile gaze? Would I put up my defenses, react to her prickly looks. I hope not. I hope I would respect her right to have her 1.5m. I am recognising that in being willing to meet the “truth” of the other, even if it is not my ‘truth”, I am learning to show up in love rather than the fear of reactive, defended ego.
In that coffee shop queue this morning and over the last year of the pandemic, I am re-imaging life, as I aim my soul in the direction of love. Imagine a life where I could wake up into love everyday, despite a lousy night’s sleep, a triggering conversation with my partner, terse words with my daughters, or aches and pains in my body?
The inner voice of spirit asks me to sit with this heavy energy that’s lodged in my head, neck and shoulders. To acknowledge, feel and hold the broken, gnarled, damaged and self-disgusted parts of myself that are wanting my attention. Turning inwards to my complex nature, I breathe into this trapped energy, trapped inside a body where someone has lived before me. The body is a complex reflection of past life, present life, genetics, and soul journey.
I have not only inherited my DNA from my ancestors but also the trauma scars passed down through generations of oppressed and marginalised women, the denigration of the feminine. To reclaim my body as my own, I have to challenge and change the deep cellular patterns that are causing dis-ease by breathing love and life into them, thereby releasing them. This is not a rescue operation, it is the work of love; there is nothing to fix or solve.
What if we reimagined our true humanity as love not the cultural distortions of masculine and feminine? We could heal ourselves, we could heal each other. Love is the effort required to step into someone else’s shoes – “strangers” in a queue, untouchables, the not beautiful – who may be struggling with the same things as us.
To our “leaders”, politicians, corporations, structures and systems, this is dangerous. If we all operated from love, we would not tolerate infringements of our liberties – our inalienable right to body integrity and sovereignty as expressed in our constitution, our freedom of speech and movement. From the space of wholeness and love, dis-ease could not exist, inequality, white supremacy, patriarchy, violence against women, violence against Mother Earth could not exist.
Is it any wonder we are desecrating and pillaging Mother Earth, so that little pristine wilderness remains, at a rate inversely proportional to how much time we spend contacting, understanding and working with our inner wild feminine realm? It takes courage to sit in the uncomfortable space of un-knowing myself and all that I am and are not and to keep showing up wholeheartedly for each other when there is no ground to stand on.
…nothing is more important than this love, that this is the love that rescues nations from intolerance, that pauses wars, that halts recriminations, that calms furies, that prevents murders – and that allows civilisation to continue. True love involves precisely not giving someone what is their due, but giving them what they need in order to survive instead.
What Love Really Is – and Why It Matters, The School of Life
The pandemic is fracturing the foundations of our world, to the extent that enough of us are waking up to love and asking the big, beautiful questions. What kind of world, what kind of society, what kind of body do we want to inhabit?
In this time of The Great Dying, The Great Unravelling and The Great Turning -a phrase from Joanna Macy climate ecophilosopher- the biggest death is our willingness to be in denial of a system that perpetuates fear and separation. The pandemic is a siren call to show up to do the inner work in order to co-create the outer world; to be the change we want to see in the world.
Blessings on the journey xx
References:
Kyodo Williams, A, 2016, Radical Dharma, North Atlantic Books, California, US
Richardson, D 2011, Slow Sex, Inner Traditions Bear and Company, Rochester, US
The School of Life, What love really is – and why it matters