Women: Trusting Each Other,
Our Beauty and Expecting More
I am here to help you re-connect to your innate bottomless capacity for pleasure, meaning, intimate connection, ferocity and power. Women...not unlike our men, we have been taught how to be very small. We are far too dependent on the men in our lives for our sense of meaning, beauty and purpose. Innately, we are independent thinkers who thrive on interconnection with our sisters and profound sexual intimacy with our mates. In that order. As the ones who birth future generations, we are responsible for tending to the life/death/life connection humans have with the larger world. We do this by honing our skills as profoundly orgasmic beings (whether we are partnered or not), as truth-tellers, as sisters and as Beauty-in-action.
When I work with a woman I focus on a few critical areas of her experience as a female: her level of embodiment (including her sexuality and her emotional and erotic intelligence), her ownership and celebration of her unique beauty, her relationship to her gender and the women in her life, and the discovery of her particular truth; the story that is alive and well deep in her woman's soul. This mytho-poetic story, one that is uniquely hers, will guide her to know how she is meant to live in her skin, how she is mean to couple, to birth and raise children (if this is part of her story), what she is meant to be doing in the world and how she is meant to tend to her power, her beauty and vulnerability.
On The Importance of Beauty: Depth Psychologist, James Hillman says, "Of all psychology's sins, its most mortal is its neglect of Beauty." Ed Tick, in his pioneering work with veterans and trauma, warns that the importance of Beauty to the soul's well-being cannot be overestimated. In 'Dark Nature', a study of the origin of evil, Lyall Watson says, of nature, "even its least enduring designs are intriguing, and the successful ones take your breath away. Most often they do this by their simplicity. By the way they solve complex environmental problems with economy and austerity, producing solutions that not only work well, but are also aesthetically satisfying." I remember, on my first Animas Valley Institute program, we had been sent out into the wild and my task was simply to listen to the stories of the forest around me. I sat down in the shade of a beautiful aspen tree next to a cold tumbling stream, resting on the wet moss, marveling at its plumpness when the question, "what - really - is Beauty and where does it come from?" left my lips before I had realized I was forming words. Less than a heart's beat later, this plump moss replied, "Beauty is not defined by how we look but rather how well we see."
Beauty is, in this way, a radical verb; a reclamation, an honoring and a powerful invitation. We have been taught that beauty is almost entirely an exterior reality, one that can be manipulated with the right cosmetic surgeon, gym membership or make-up regimen. And this is catastrophic. True, innate, radiant breath-taking Beauty is perhaps the most compelling human attribute available to us. And it is absolutely in the purview of the feminine. Women are created to be beautiful. Revisit Lyall Watson's statement above and see how he is describing the feminine form as much as he is describing an untouched rain forest ecosystem. We, women, must reclaim our beauty, owning it fully and unapologetically. We must see the radiance and ownership of our innate beauty as one of our most potent gifts to the world. And an elegant efficient way to feed the Holy.
On The Importance of Women's Culture and Community: I hear several common themes from women; we are dis-empowered, confused and angry, feeling tapped of vital juice and female energy; feeling as if we are responsible for ‘everything’ and given credit for nothing. But most of all it seems we women are starving. I have heard a strong theme of starvation even from women in intimate partnership – in fact, it is possible that the starvation is most fierce for women who are coupled, because it is discordant with what we are told we ought to be feeling. There is much work to be done in reclaiming the language and infinitely varied flavors of the authentic feminine principle. And our modern culture, with its double standards and double-speak does great harm in confounding even our ability to know what to ask for. The first and most important step is reuniting each woman with a community of her own gender. Women must spend deep intimate time with other women. The restoration of vibrant, fierce communities of women across the globe would eradicate much of the world's injustice almost overnight.