Friday, January 30, 2015

How to get to the place where it is all good

I've been dreaming of Tsunamis these last six months.

In one dream I was far up in the hills and turned to get to even higher ground.

Another dream I am in a house that gets swept out and torn apart and tossed around.

Take three: same house and everyone in it decides to row as if it is a boat.

Take 4: I see the wave and I get in to the water and I swim out to meet it.


Thursday, January 29, 2015

It's All Good

Except that it is not all good.

It is possible...

with some work

contemplation

meditation

medication...oh yes....222a@13232QEQ

and

a healthy

dose of

TIME

to find a way to view it all as good....

BUT SOME THINGS ARE JUST NOT GOOD


Tuesday, January 27, 2015

Self Loving

There have been times when life has crowded in around me leaving no sense of breathing room. Betrayal, outrageously cruel behavior, abandonment, rejection, false accusations...I have experienced all of this. Out of control, mysterious, perplexing, human beings living their own best lives however messy it is for others on the receiving end. And I know my life impacts others too. I used to spend a lot of time trying to figure these things out. Looking for solutions, trying to fix things, change myself, dig in deep. No regrets and likely fruitful behavior in many regards. But I was missing something. It has taken a long time and some very painful experiences to learn what now feels like an obvious truth. Self loving behavior is key.

It's not always clear this is true. It took a radical shaking of my life to bring me to this singular truth. No one else can offer me love that creates the wholeness I crave like I can. I know this is a progressive statement, for some.  There were decades in my life when the idea that Jesus loved me had depth and weight and meant a lot. But somehow that information did not penetrate through the shell that kept me from loving myself. A 'ground zero' kind of eruption took place leaving me with a miniscule thread of chi (vital life force) and prone on the couch for nearly a year, able to see and feel only devastation. I could put in details, but if you have ever lived through anything that felt impossible you know what this is like. In some ways it is less about the mechanism that leveled me and more about learning a new response to life.

Rebalance of the masculine and feminine is not possible without the balance of each individual finding their own way to self loving behaviors.

So when I was laying on the couch and realized I was not dead but still breathing with blood moving through my system...my mothers wisdom came to me. "Look yourself in the eye in the mirror and say 'I love you' everyday." My mom has been dead for nearly nine years. She gave me this piece of her heart when I was in my mid twenties. Three years ago this saved my life. I mean, the air would likely still be going in and out and the blood round and round, but I was in danger of being a zombie. I brought a small hand mirror to the couch and when all the darkness crowded in around me I would pick up the mirror and believing it or not I spoke those magic words to myself. I'd like to say things changed at once, that I leapt up off the couch and walked with joy in my step.

Instead a sort of parallel pathway began. The me that was still very skeptical and had the shell and the new me that dared to believe this simple thing could make a change. The more I feed the me that loves me, the thinner the shell becomes. Today there are actually great swaths of holes in that shell. And life has not become unicorns and rainbows as my friend Deborah likes to say. In fact, I have just come through a year with incredibly hard things, including the broken arm. But the break and the other more serious things, instead of spinning me into deep despair, have been the testing grounds that have let me witness myself as a woman who has is actively growing self love.

And this self love is what prompted me to release the pain and anger having to do with the imbalance between masculine and feminine and all that imbalance has wrought in my own life.


Monday, January 26, 2015

Surrendering to the Balancing of Masculine and Feminine



surrendering
 pain and anger
leaves space
 for healing to enter
for something different to grow

holding myself tenderly
with love and care
giving myself 
 love and support 
is my 
choice

 

Wednesday, January 7, 2015

Rebalancing Masculine and Feminine:Time in the Womb

Lasting change does not happen overnight in my experience. But it can begin in an instant. Like conception, a moment does initiate radical changes for everyone concerned. Fortunately gestation takes time, 280 days, 40 weeks, three trimesters, for humans, giving everyone some time to adjust. My daughter recently had a child and she introduced me to the fourth trimester, the idea being that integration into life outside the womb is another adjustment, obviously. From that first now moment it is a year until all the lives concerned are fully engaged in the changes ignited. And even that is only the beginning.

Conscious engagement with the rebalancing of masculine and feminine begins with an intention to engage the idea. Once this intention is formalized the 'time in the womb' of change is begun. At first changes might not be visible. Nothing of note or significance presenced. But just like the development of a fetus and then a child, there are milestones, benchmarks. Heartbeats, movement, pain, emergence, growth, growth and more growth.

When I heard Ilarion Mercurlieff speak there was an internal 'YES!' which ignited my curiousity around being part of the rebalancing as a woman who embraced men and women with love and compassion. I've never forgotten that I also heard Gloria Steinem speak that same day in Marin at the Bioneers conference in 2011. Ms. Steinem brought attention to the reality that women leaving an abusive relationship are most in danger at the time they decide to leave. To intend to rebalance masculine and feminine is a decision to leave a system that is abusive to both men and women, a system of imbalance. Formalizing my decision to release the pain and anger experienced in my own life as a result of an imbalanced system in a fire ceremony turned out to be dangerous in a very real and visceral way, the breaking of my arm, a potent symbol and reality. I don't know that this happens with every intention to rebalance, but I think it worth contemplation that to move in a direction that is contrary to 6,000 years of trend might be as easy as turning the Titanic away from an iceberg. Be mindful and clear if you decide to move in this direction.

The idea of a having a child and the reality once it is lived in to rarely match. Even the most prepared and studied parents-to-be can not anticipate, not fully, the dramatic life altering changes that come with the birth of their child. So too is the commitment to rebalance masculine and feminine a radical departure from the life known before. To rebalance is to love radically. In the same way radical love is called for when parenting. The grace is that this love is grown over time. This love is grown with practice, imperfection, forgiveness, decision, grief, praise and all the ingredients only discovered in paying attention to what is called forth in and from you.

Monday, January 5, 2015

Slowing Down to Rebalance Masculine and Feminine

This may be obvious. Breaking my arm initiated an IMMEDIATE and unavoidable slow down. Living in a remote area I take a little bit of pride in the fact that for nearly 17 years life moves at a much slower pace than much of urban and suburban human beings. Sometimes I go for days without getting in to a car and move only by walking. I am no stranger to slowing down. But the breaking of my arm induced an entirely new layer and really brought the rebalancing of my masculine and feminine to the forefront.

For a month I had to have my arm suspended nearly all the time for pain management and to create stability for healing. The fall, in addition to the five broken places in the radius and ulna,  actually severely sprained every tendon and ligament in my hand, forearm, elbow and slightly dislocated my shoulder. It might sound funny to say it but I learned that every movement in my body affects every part of my body. Everything I did hurt. I opted to do without the hydromorphone the doctor prescribed since it made me ill. And having made a commitment to taking loving care of myself in a ceremony for intentions, well...what an opportunity.

Rather than abandon loving self care, I found moving in an incredibly slow manner to be perfectly rebalancing. Doing less. Far less. Sitting and watching the wildlife for long hours with my window and door open to the outside. A dragonfly came in the door and flew around my bedroom several days in a row. I could carefully slip my arm out of the contraption and engage some simple yoga asanas. I had often craved taking longer time in poses. Now the poses were dictated by pain and the least painful was to stay in a pose for 10 to 15 minutes or more. Walking around the house (I was housebound for one month) I found myself moving mindful of each step. My foods became incredible simple since I could not prepare meals. My body craved simple nutrition and I honored this. My neighbor came to brush my waist length hair. We chatted while she made her way through the tangles and braided it. Writing on the computer was not possible. My thoughts slowed down in part due to the constant pain. My writing style became spare and all hand done. My journal became the most precious place to spend time instead of one thing I did on the way to twenty other things.

How is this a rebalance of masculine and feminine? More nurture. Less doing, more being. In my personal ecology this has proved invaluable. Instead of being able to run off and do I now have to take careful stock of what is most important. All options are not available to me, even now a few months later. The slowing down has nuanced my direction, refined and expanded my vision, my passions are clearer. I am embracing, holding on to, this moving slowly even as more mobility and less pain comes with incremental healing. Life feels more spacious, less cluttered and frenetic, meaningful direction lucid, remembering what is important.


Saturday, January 3, 2015

Rebalancing Masculine and Feminine

Several years ago I heard Ilarion Merculieff speak about this new balance point we, as humans, are undergoing. Coming out of 6,000 years of patriarchy we are now, according to global indiginous elders Merculieff gathers with, arriving at a balance point. Neither matriarchy nor patriarchy, a balance between the two. The gathering I attended set the stage for many years of personal meditation on this topic. Merculieff said it would be most challenging for women to release the pain and anger that comes from inhabiting a millennia old system which routinely has failed to presence women with value. My point is not to rehash this imbalance. Rather, my own personal quest in the years since I sat in circle with Merculieff has been to find out what balance looks like in my own life.

There is not a straight forward answer. This is not a linear process. And I imagine for every human who might decide to explore this idea, whether you are male bodied or female bodied, your inquiry will yield very personal results. There are some individuals who are living without the use of masculine and feminine to define any attributes they may possess. Speaking with those who identify as 'they' I have found my own sense of humanity reshaped. How can any characteristics or actions be so narrowly defined to be either feminine or masculine? It is not that simple. Nor is it that complex. It could be that the balance point means we simply are, as is, perhaps best without definition. But better with understanding.

I have spent a lot of the last year in particularly deep inquiry around exploring where my ideas about masculine and feminine arise from. One venue that has been helpful for me has been the Ecology of Leadership class at Regenerative Design Institute. Their work facilitates personal exploration regardless of the area of inquiry, so their work, per se, is not about this topic. What this class has provided are useful tools for a method of personal inquiry which has allowed me to dive deeply into my own history, the history of my family and even further into cultural history, global history.

These last few months I have been able to see the pain and anger not only that I have felt, but also as a more universal human response to imbalance. In a recent fire ceremony I specifically spoke the intention to release the pain and anger of the imbalance between masculine and feminine and to seek balance. Less than a week later I broke my left wrist in five places. I have since read that sometimes when we are breaking large patterns an actual physical break down can occur, even must occur, to facilitate the repatterning. The broken arm unexpectedly created an opening in me and a flooding of new ways of seeing, hearing, feeling has come, quite viscerally,  into my own masculine and feminine selves. I may write more about this later. But for now I am in deep gratitude for the many gifts, practical exercises, tools and insights that came to me and are serving the slow regeneration of some very new ways of becoming an alive human in a female body.