Goddesses in the Making

i am doing a course with the amazing Queen Dani - the changes are so immense, the love so deep it is hard for me to gather them in words here

i just wanted to touch on a realisation i had this morning which relates to my last post (bloody blogger lost 15 comments in their little melt down yesterday which i need to have a mourning period for - i do treasure comments and i feel their loss)

Goddess Pam the Paradoxical from the heART and soul course run by Queen Dani talked about her grand-daughter as a GIM - a Goddess In the Making.

and something clicked inside me

i said in my last post that i wanted to be like the Goddess for my girls

well now i have realised that i have to acknowledge the Goddess in them...

i also see that my frustrations, particularly with the daughter who is prickly and stroppy and at times downright mean are connected to me trying to poke her into the nice box

to take those loose strands of the Goddess that are part of her being and make them fit into the box of nice...

The Goddess is stroppy when she needs to be. She knows how to protect her soveriegnty, she knows when to call out the shit, she knows that nice is just not worthy of her strength and her love.... Nice, being nice, being sweet unnaturally is not the behaviour of the Goddess - that is the behaviour of someone under the thrall of the Bishop....

I have felt this swirling of dismay and anger whenever i have felt challenged by her behaviour, whenever i have seen other people reel back from her fury...

To be able to go a place where i can see this as Kali in action in her, and i can teach her to temper it to the situation, but honour the Goddess in her at the same time feels so deeply right....

My girls and I are Goddesses in the Making...

dismissing, reclaiming and calcification

I spent this morning in the breast clinic getting a repeat mamogram, after they found calcifications there... so i went to the hospital prepared - taking the Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd with me. I read and cried and wrote as i waited with the needle of damocles hanging over my boob...

This book has mainlined it's words right into my bloodstream - i have experienced anger, a welling up, deep sadness i cannot name, powerful feelings of longing and wisdom and connection....

and this is what i wrote in my book in the waiting room (while they were playing Knocking on Heaven's door over the speakers - in a room where women are worried about hearing they have cancer - give me strength!)

I do not want to propogate the myth of the patriarchy for me or my girls.

I want that to stop right here right now.

I want my girls to think they are embraced by he Divine Mother when they think of me. I would like to embody her - a part of her- for them.

I want to dismiss my bishop (Sue Monk Kidd writes about her rule making tyrant in her head as the bishop) and his messages of NOTENOUGHNESS.

I reclaim my feminine path
my intuition
my connection to nature
my deep feeling heart
my interior eyes
my ebbs and my flows
my cycling watery life.

And i Honour that in this world of maleness = rightness I am reclaiming my womanness = rightness

and i gift this to my girls


as i sat thinking about how powerful a change this would work in my life - if i could put my intuition in the driving seat, show the girls how to find solace in stones, trusting the tears and the quiet and the raucous joy... instead of being constantly chastised by my inner PTA Mother "Oh don't do that, that is not normal, you cant think that, that is just weird......."

then as my eyes wandered down the page i found this phrase "calcified bitterness"

what?

"CALCIFIED BITTERNESS"

What am i sitting in an ill fitting gown for? To have calcifications in my left breast examined....

i read again

"Rage or untransfigured anger can become calcified bitterness"

i had the beginnings of calcified bitterness in my breast - my seat of womanhood... ENOUGH - THIS ENDS NOW

Thank you body... that is all the hint i need.... and with that i get the call - ALL IS CLEAR YOU CAN GO...

There is lots of jigggly titty dancing going on in this house tonight!

my own little standing up for myself revolution

sometimes standing up for myself means:
STEP 1: ACKNOWLEDGMENT.
acknowledging that i feel hurt
acknowledging that i feel fear

STEP 2:DISSECTION
thinking about what i truely want from the situation -
do i want this for myself?
do i want to be seen to be good?

STEP 3: COST BENEFIT ANALYSIS
what is the benefit to me?
what is the cost to me and those i love?
do i want to persue this no matter what?

STEP 4:WEIGHT TO LIGHT RATIO
weighing ALL the factors up.
finding out which option brings more light

After much analysis and heart examination (and chickens in my head) i have done the above step wise process and i now am walking away.

This is revolutionary
i used to think standing up for myself meant fighting
sword and breastplate and speaking my truth as the fire licked my JoanofArcish ankles

but now i see that walking away with integrity is a loving and valid way to stand up for myself.

my own revolution

Another poem

The middle of the night

She comes in to my head,
flapping her apron.
Herding a bunch of malevolent chickens.
Whish, skudder,
in through the open door.
Skwarking,
flapping,
they peck away at my integrity,
while she scatters fear pellets far and wide in my brain
so they shambol further in
further out
and she cackles at the havoc she is reeking.

self compassion inventory

Finding out how kind you are to yourself can prove to be enlightening in more ways than one...

i recently filled out this inventory and it turns out i am mean to myself like Miss Trunchbull is mean to Matilda

but secretly as i was filling out the scores i found myself gloating just a little - feeling like i was self righteous because i was so damn self abnegating

the moral of the story is martyrdom runs so damned deep in my veins

and my first instinct is to wage war on it

but because it is so deep within me i would just be waging war on my self

so i am choosing the self loving option

i am noticing

and i am making a different habit grow....

one kind step at a time

want to fill out the test too??

http://www.self-compassion.org/ then look on the list down the side to find self compassion inventory

a gift to my 46year old self

(this was from my work on the amazing Unravelling course by Susannah Conway - we have just had a week of examining and being kind to our faces which,as i seldom look in the mirror for fear of the horror that aging has wreaked on my life and general self distain evokes, was challenging and ultimately rewarding.

i write this here as a birthday present for myself

Looking at my face
26th april 2011

when i hold my own gaze i am more attracted to me

Yes i am tired and wrinkly but there is more to look at than that.

My lips are thinner than i deserve but i look better in a smile.

I have passable eyebrows

I deserve to take care of this face.

I can't hide it away, so i might as well cherish it...

treat it tenderly...

it greets the world for me so why not let it tell the world that beauty lives here?

I can smile lovingly at myself then, not withold kindness from my self as kind of honourable sacrifice.

No more.

Yes i am wrinkly and greay

AND YES, i am going to cherish every bit of beautiful i have.

(Maybe even grow some more)

i had a big shift the other day

you know the kind where you hear an audible clunk inside yourself?

it centered around my constant need to be seen

which of course is part of the reason i come here

why i read your comments obsessively

why the kindness of your words fills my thirsty heart so deeply

i have desired the experience being seen for as long as i can remember

the times when i sang with gusto out of tune, danced badly but with passion, became sick,(particularly useful in my family of origin)performed, was the class clown, all of it was my desire to be seen

and in the middle of that desire to be seen was the need to be acknowledged

to define the reality of me

which i am unsure of without hearing about it from the mouth of others....

the sense of only really being real when i am seen through the eyes of others

but the down side to this means that i can only get nourishment outside myself as well - if i need soothing, redirection, dusting off, solace - all of it has to come from outside myself to be valid too...

so with the effort i have been making to soothe myself i was checking in when i remembered - looking inside myself to find out how I felt - and validating myself and being kind to myself whatever it was that i was feeling



and then the clunk

and it felt like just being in my skin was enough

REVOLUTIONARY

AND as a consequence i feel like all i need to do here is share,

not prove

just open my heart further to my friends that come here

and just be