#53 Powerful Messages from the Frontier of Anti-Patriarchal Personal Exploration
As I shared a while back , I had a sudden, intuitive hit that I needed to immediately create a lot more room in my life for reflection and rest, especially in light of my struggles with sleep. As a parent of young children during a pandemic, the only place to find that space was in slowing my “work” down.
My experience these last two months has been incredible. And painful. And vast. Maybe - like me! - you thought this would be a bit of a pastoral time off for me. But no. No. Absolutely no. Most of the time, I’ve had to navigate the idea that I’m doing something wrong, something terribly, terribly wrong.
Here, I drop you into bits of my experience through a series of mini-reflections and insights and lessons. I trust some of these will find a crack in your own life to land and might offer you some of the medicine you need right now.
#53 powerful messages from the frontier of anti-patriarchal personal exploration
Being in motion feels safe to me, has been safety for me. It is extremely uncomfortable and disorienting to not be in motion in my work.
There’s so much grief. Personal grief, generational grief, cultural grief. It sits in my womb and longs for me to sit with it.
Shame emerges in so many corners. The shame of having so many needs that ask for so much from me and those around me. It doesn’t matter that I teach women to take care of their needs. In this place of stillness, I am ashamed of my own needs.
I have betrayed myself in my busy-ness. I have been betrayed by the culture in its rewards of my busy-ness.
Focusing on my needs creates a sort of unfairness with my husband and his own needs. This is true and not true. He has his own path to walk.
I am generations of women who have been forced out of bed and back to work when what they needed was more rest, more receiving. I am the embodiment of that, of doing that to myself, whether I need to or not.
Lacking the freedom to come and go as I please feels sometimes like a yoke I must bear. There is always someone waiting on me, wanting me, needing me, demanding me. I am overwhelmed by this.
The problem isn’t my children. The problem is that the nuclear family is bullshit.
I need community. So much community. Lockdown is making this nearly impossible.
I meet a group of women with toddlers on a trail. After an hour together, I am aware of the grief I feel at encountering their lack of inner knowing, their practice of giving away their power, the way that is becoming the permanent narrative, etching deeper and deeper, carving these women into shapes that do not reflect their truth, their beauty. I know how easy it is to go there. I waver in and out, in and out. I see my students do it, too.
I am so accustomed to turning outward and offering. If *I* am the task, if the only witchcraft to weave was that which could further free me, then what? What would I see that needs doing? Or undoing? Or not doing?
Something in me wants to speak. My ears aren’t quite attuned. I am astray. The day-to-day has been allowed to cut me off from my deeper magic. I have not tended the land where the sacred plants grow. Rather, I have not been walking them.
My work in the world has grown too big and too deep and my spirit too sensitive to not rest deeply. I know this now.
I am still afraid of the past. I am running from the past. I am forgetting it. Trying to forget it.
I’m bleeding out. I cannot contain my own nourishment.
I’d rather bleed out than hold what I need. So many years of letting what I need slip through my fingers, my vagina, my solar plexus. Bleeding out feels familiar and right.
I’m starting to embody the truth that I am worthy of holding, of nourishing myself, of experiencing myself as whole. I am at my edge.
I am afraid that if I contain myself and my energy, I will lose my power.
Being unable to find a pen with which to write in my journal almost unhinges me. It turns out I am sad that I cannot call my mother and ask her to reassure me about my children.
I am not metabolizing the care I provide for myself because then I’ll feel the pain of my not having had it in the past and of my now having and of others not having.
I understand I am having a spiritual crisis as much as a physical and psychological one.
If I expand myself spiritually in the ways I feel drawn to, I am afraid I’ll lose connection. I understand that there’s more possibility for connection with All, but I’m gripping onto the connection I experience in this physical plane.
I am afraid my children will die.
I’m doing this wrong. What is “it”? What is “wrong”? Can I accept my path?
I must lose myself to find myself. This is not a new lesson. I dislike this lesson.
The insights come fast and furious. My understanding increases 10 fold. I still have absolutely no idea what to do with it all.
I love to pathologize. I love to fix.
I take adaptogens, CBD oil and melatonin. I do Qi Gong, Restorative Breathing, acupressure. I see an osteopath, an acupuncturist, an Avrigo practitioner. I am doing the things.
A friend asks me the most essential question: What do I need to let go of so I can hold the nourishment I need? I remember hemorrhaging during a miscarraige because a piece of tissue was stuck in my cervix. Paradoxically, I am bleeding out because I am not letting go.
My son is clearly weaning, has been weaning for some time. I feel profound grief that this childbearing part of my life is ending. More than that, I notice that it awakens my attachment wounding, the ways I was not felt, the ways I fear my children will not feel me, the ways breastfeeding reassures me that my child can feel me, the fact that I have trouble feeling myself.
The creation energy of childbearing is powerful and encompasses all the parts of self. It also takes time to transmute into something more sustainable.
I have a few brief mystical experiences. I become one with a basketball. I shed a thousand identities, I sense myself coming and going. I am excited, uneasy.
Heartbreak, ancient heartbreak, rolls through me, shakes me. I let the tears flow. I let my husband say kind things to me.
I see how I push away that which I deeply desire in an effort to repeat an early pattern.
I need to out-maneuver the intruder in my psyche. Deception is a useful tool.
My fear of particular types of independence is connected to a lack of tethering earlier in life.
My inner knowing tells me to keep going. The parts that are rooted and aware and expansive. There is no uncertainty there. This is all so beautiful. Above that, it’s mayhem. AllI want is an analgesic. I think of my addict friends. I wonder how we’re not all addicts. I decide we are.
Is the question of worthiness actually always a question about safety? I want to observe this more.
As a friend noted, the idea of “taking time off work” is patriarchal. You don’t “take time off” looking at one tree to look at another; it’s all a part of the cycles and flow of life, which most of us have largely forgotten. I’d like to tackle her in a giant hug for pointing this out to me.
Baths might save me. Schitt’s Creek might save me. Walking might save me. Orgasm might save me. Circe by Madeline Miller might save me. Feet in a stream bed might save me. Making art might save me.
This is all what I desire. My bitching about it along the way is predictable, but also not necessary. I see now that I’ve been immersed in my own pleasure, even as I have felt the pain.
This struggle with sleep is about the past and my fear of repetition.
This struggle with sleep is about blood deficiency, yin deficiency.
This struggle with sleep is about not allowing myself to slow down during the day.
This struggle with sleep is about thermoregulation and how I’m staying too hot at night.
This struggle with sleep is about my spirit not being rooted enough in the body to feel free to leave it during the night.
This struggle with sleep is about my fear that my child will leave me.
This struggle with sleep is about my fear that I will leave me.
This struggle with sleep is about my mother.
This struggle with sleep is about 10 years of childbearing hormones.
This struggle with sleep is about my holding on to that which needs to die.
This struggle with sleep is about my inability to contain nourishment.
This struggle with sleep is about yet another call to freedom.
I don’t want to miss the freedom. I don’t want to miss the call. I am answering the call. I will keep answering the call.