Women Gathering

Intensity… and fear

Yet again, another small group of women gathered, talking… about themselves and their lives.  Ten women on a Saturday morning, coming together for almost four hours when each could so easily have been doing many other things.  

In what seems like only moments, each looks around the room and sees herself reflected in the eyes of every other, with each of the others an expression of some aspect of her own consciousness.  The messages… the invitations… all there and waiting.  The trick is:  are we both willing and able to hear?   Will the discomfort of revelation keep us trapped in our unwillingness to decloak and be seen?  Or this time, will the urgency to live fully be enough to stop us from slipping away, hiding once again under the cloak we have designed of compliance with and adherence to an other-defined reality?  As we begin, it’s too soon to tell….

Within the first 10 minutes, the gates blow open wide and the expression/experience of ‘intensity’ surges through the energetic field of this small, awake and enlivened collective.  Not one is left untouched, each noticing what is most relevant for her.  

Some discover their new and heightened capacity to be present to intensity without experiencing fear or the need to stop anything… or shut it down.  Another discovers that the vibration of intensity activates that same note in her as she allows herself to claim that intensity, even though it might wear a different cloak.  This time, not one of anger/frustration/rage but one of sadness/fear/anxiety.  No matter what word we put to it; no matter what shape it takes, it is less about what we call it and much more about the depth to which we experience it in our own body.   The body is always the instrument that calibrates for experience.  The intellect can observe and tell the story… but the body ‘knows’ in  the moment in ways that far surpass the story that will follow.  

It’s not always fun.  Uncertainty.  The realization that no one else is going to fix it.  The requirement to take hold of the direction of our lives with both hands and choose how to live our unfolding lives.  Without exception, no matter what direction we choose, there will be consequences.  The question becomes: which direction will take us to where we want to go?  Which consequences will allow us to unfold into the truth of who we already know ourselves to be?  And which will keep us hostage to the illusion we already know we’re living?  

The pressure to keep to the culturally-refined and life-long bargain of a fixed ‘reality’ is great.  A voice inside each says, “Don’t go too far!  Don’t press THAT edge!  Keep doing this and there will be no going back!”  We pause… we take a breath… and we grudgingly acknowledge that who we have been will not take us to who we want to become.  We also recognize our own resentment… our own frustration and rage and grief… that it is so.  It is far more appealing to continue to invest our effort and energy… to invest ourselves… in holding on to what we were taught to believe would be ‘the truth that will set us free’.  We know how to do that.  And yet it’s too late.  We already know that it’s not so.

What’s left?  Well, we can start looking outside ourselves – again! – for a new guru; a new leader/master/authority figure/fixer/savour… or we can face the truth of our own experience.  In that moment, there is a sickening and sinking feeling in the pit of the stomach… a signal… that life as we know it is about to change.  Warning bells go off in our heads and we know:  one more step, and there is no turning back!  To avoid that one more time means holding on to a lie that although familiar and one that we know how to manage, is still a lie.  

No one knows better the truth of who we are – and can become – than we do.   No one can offer us the formula, hand us the solution or guide us to the doorway and onto the path of our own unique expression of Self.  As annoying as that can be; as terrifying and agitating and irritating; it is indeed, the truth that will set us free. 

How do we live that?  How do we get up in the morning without an external framework to mold ourselves to?  Without a collective to identify with?  Without someone else’s roadmap to show us how to become? How do we face each breath as whole in itself, carrying on its wave of life the information that will allow us to become… and welcome the next… and the next… and the one after that?   How do we let go of what has been so densely and intensely packed into our ages-old conditioning that has defined and shaped who and WHAT we believe ourselves to be; and all the limitations that go with it?

This is not about changing how we do something inside the neatly defined box of ‘reality’.  This is about redefining ‘reality’ and manifesting an expression of it that we might carve out an authentic and meaningful path of our own.    

For this small group of courageous and adventurous women, looking to the past to design their future is no longer working.  For them, it’s not enough to move incrementally toward their own ‘becoming’.  They’re ready for leaps!   A ‘leap’ takes more energy… is more intense… covers more ground, faster!… and demands an expression of power and thrust that far too many women have come to fear in themselves.  It also demands unwavering trust… and faith… in ourselves and in our ability to engage effectively.  When it comes to leaping, half-measures don’t cut it.  Today, this small living collective took the risks and awakened to something different.  

We are growing tired of the sound of our own voices repeating what we know does not work!  We are losing interest in the telling… and telling again!… of our stories, long ago embellished that we might not bore ourselves to death.  Our interest in and desire to invest ourselves in what was is rapidly waning and we are desperate in our search for what else… for how else to live.  And perhaps more than anything else, our willingness and ability to trust what moves inside us is beginning to outpace our need to be approved of and applauded by others.

In these small groups of women gathering, talking… we are finding ourselves and coming face-to-face with what we have long suspected and often desperately denied to ourselves:  my life is up to me.  Without exception and without apology.  

In that realization, I wonder what world we will create?

June 29th, 2008 Posted by Louise | Insights | one comment

The Palpable Presence of a Woman Awake!

A small group of women recently gathered for an Emerging Futures conversation about what it is to be an Entrepreneurial Woman.

Trusting ourselves and each other; without agenda or defined outcomes or targeted results, we took the exploration far beyond the suffocating confines of a business interpretation and moved it much closer to home… to the core of who we choose to be in the world… and significantly altered how we see the profound connection between ourselves and the world in which we live.  

There is no world ‘out there’.  What we call ‘reality’ is indeed nothing more than a feedback loop to let us know how we’re doing at this game of living.  Do we really like what we’ve created? 

During our time together, we explored what it means when I say that “My very life is a metaphor for how I’m choosing to live it.”  Our lives are not real – they are a sensory cornucopia that makes it impossible for each of us to NOT notice that the choices we’re making are manifesting a deep and highly personal truth that each of us carries.  When we stop to explore what that truth is; when we become more willing and able to claim it and own it as our own, our world expands and the essential Space required for us to transform our lives (and our collective ‘reality’) opens up.  We can breathe again!  

With this realization, it becomes possible to pause… and notice that we are indeed, already the creator of it all.  Owning and claiming the immensity of that Force that we already are, we then are faced with the decision:  do we invest ourselves in ‘trying’ to change the world we’ve already created, or do we invest ourselves in creating the world we want?  Do we look back or do we move forward?  We seem to be mesmerized by the unending and thankless process of ‘trying’ to change the world we’re in; of attempting to deconstruct matter from the bottom up rather than recognizing that we create matter from the top down; that thought flows through a manifestation spiral and ultimately becomes matter… becomes the ‘reality’ that we call ‘truth’ or ‘fact’ and are so doggedly committed to and yet held hostage by when indeed, it is nothing more than the manifestation of an intention long forgotten.  It becomes helpful to notice what intentions we choose mindfully and which ones we simply repeat because someone told us to, at a time so long ago and forgotten that we cannot even make sense of it in our own minds. In our confusion and chaos, we just keep plodding along…

It was truly an honor for me to be part of this small group of women gathering, talking… about what is most profoundly meaningful to them, in their lives.  In this moment, I know that I am not the same.  I also know that every other woman in that room is profoundly changed, each having become more willing and able to be shamelessly present to the truth of who she is; and to allow that truth to be seen by any and all who choose to notice.   What may have begun with hesitation and uncertainty has become a personal declaration of unwillingness to be anything other than awake, fully present and mindful of those moments when what we choose determines the direction of our lives.

What became clearly evident to all who were present is that indeed, women are the key.  Despite the acquired capacity that women have to be beasts of burden to their own secrets; to continue to press down and press back the truth that they carry about themselves, the quality of their lives and their impact on others, they also carry the capacity to allow that truth to flood their bodies, transform their lives and propel them into expression of the force of creation that they already are.  Once freed from the body into voice, the vibration that they become pierces through the veneers of ‘acceptable’ and ‘normal’, fracturing the illusions that are shrouded in what should/must be and creating the space within which potential can unfold.  In that moment, a new way of being awakens to itself and life changes.  

Far beyond the simple miracle of birth that is impossible without women, there are other miracles of birth that simply cannot be without women.  The birth of  a new way of engaging with each other.  The birth of a more powerful way to connect to Self and our physical world.  The birth of a transformative way of expression sourced not by ‘doing’ but by ‘being’.   All of these – and so much more! – are the gifts that women bring to a physical universe.  And yet, for any of it to be so, women must first awaken to themselves.  It cannot be otherwise. What we manifest when we are awake is very different from what we manifest from our coma of cultural bondage.  But we will nonetheless, manifest.  

 Only women who are awake can awaken other women.  The vibration of who we are must precede the sound we become in a physical world.  And with that sound, the walls that trap us in a collective untruth will crumble.  

June 17th, 2008 Posted by Louise | Events, Insights, leadership | one comment