Empowering the Feminine within: A woman who follows her own heart

“The things women are most yearning for---such as deeper connection, spiritual awakening, self-expression, creativity, right livelihood, creating an enlightened world for generations to come---all require a new level of Feminine Power to bring them forth.” Jean Houston

A woman who follows her own heart has learned to listen to her intuition.

A woman who follows her own heart listens to her body guidance.

A woman who follows her own heart shares deeply, listens deeply, is present with others.

A woman who follows her own heart feels her fear, acknowledges it, but is not held back by it.

A woman who follows her own heart is always expanding, growing, learning.

A woman who follows her own heart discovers her true desires and interests.

A woman who follows her own heart is impatient to get started.

A woman who follows her own heart believes in herself, and her creative powers.

A woman who follows her own heart is able to say no, and speak her truth.

A woman who follows her own heart knows the value of doing nothing, of rest and recuperation.

A woman who follows her own heart knows that to go down and in is preparation for coming out and up.

A woman who follows her own heart is a source of calm, a balm for others.

A woman who follows her own heart leans inward in times of trouble, but is not afraid to ask for help.

A woman who follows her own heart knows that angels and guides are watching over her.

A woman who follows her own heart knows her own value.

A woman who follows her own heart accepts herself as she is, flawed but fabulous.

A woman who follows her own heart lets her children be flawed and fabulous too.

A woman who follows her own heart stands her ground.

A woman who follows her own heart knows how to be grounded in root energy.

A woman who follows her own heart lets go to the flow of synchronicity.

A woman who follows her own heart trusts the Universe and knows she is loved.

A woman who follows her own heart has a constant companion and Friend within.

A woman who follows her own heart reaches out in compassion to those who suffer, she has been there too.

A woman who follows her own heart creates an atmosphere of love and caring around her.

A woman who follows her own heart remembers where her Joy is.

A woman who follows her own heart laughs from the belly.

A woman who follows her own heart loves her body and knows she is beautiful within and without.

A woman who follows her own heart forgives herself for her mistakes.

A woman who follows her own heart is in love with Beauty.

A woman who follows her own heart is in touch with her feminine power.

Any woman who follows her own heart can learn to be this woman.

Any woman who is aware of where she is and how she feels, and doesn’t try to pretend to be something different, can be this woman.

You are that woman with heart, unfolding, becoming, and realizing herself as the goal.

Heart is the Hearth and Home of you. Come home to your heart!

Namaste,

Musemother

10 ways to spoil Mom for Mother’s Day (without spending money)

If you’re a mom, what would your favourite gift be? Mine would be free time just for me. Here are some ideas for gifts that don't cost anything, except a little loving attention.

You could leave this list lying around the week before Mother's Day or ask your kids to give you a coupon with one of these ideas on it, instead of spending money on a bauble or another coffee mug that will gather only dust on your shelf.

1. Make her some fizzy bath salts: follow these easy steps at http://www.wikihow.com/Make-Fizzy-Salts

2.  Give her a coupon in a home-made card promising to clean your room or do own laundry.

3.  Make her favorite breakfast and serve it to her in bed (Dad can help!)

4. Give her a foot massage. Don’t know how?  http://www.wikihow.com/Give-a-Foot-Massage

5. Having someone else cook dinner is a great gift! Pasta is easy…

6. Write mom a poem: a funny limerick, a short haiku, or make an acrostic with her name

7. Pick some wild bluebells and make her a spring bouquet. 

8. Remember her favourite colour and use it to make a home-made card.

9.   Make her a frame with pictures of her favourite kids (you!).

10.  Coupon for free babysitting for a spa day (idea from Dad, a whole day off!)

Happy Spring!
Musemother

ps another great gift idea for a mom in mid-life (in her forties or fifties) is the book The Tao of Turning Fifty, What Every Woman in Her Forties Needs to Know, which gives tips and exercises for self-care and mothering yourself!  www.jenniferboire.com

Quotes to help you Just Be Yourself

Let these words resonate and inform your spirit with the courage to be yourself:

"To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

 "We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit."  – ee cummings 

Don’t bend, water it down, or make it logical; don’t edit your soul for fashion. Follow intense obsessions mercilessly. – writer Franz Kafka.

When I'm trusting and being myself
as fully as possible,
everything in my life reflects this
by falling into place easily,
often miraculously.
 ~ Shakti Gawain

What we need to know, we already know. It is not more knowledge that is needed, but more careful listening, more dreaming, more daring. It is believing in the possibility that the voice within our skin has an answer to someone else’s question, if not our own. – Jan Phillips, Marry Your Muse

To be beautiful means to be yourself. You don’t need to be accepted by others. You need to accept yourself.  —Thich Nhat Hanh

Healing may not be so much about getting better, as about letting go of everything that isn't you - all of the expectations, all of the beliefs - and becoming who you are. —Rachel Naomi Remen

No one else has access to the world you carry around within yourself; you are its custodian and entrance. No one else can see the world the way you see it. No one else can feel your life the way you feel it.

 —John O’Donohue

Namaste and Happy Spring!

Musemother

Listening to Inner Calling at Mid-Life

Life's journey brings each of us face to face at some point with a search for meaning and purpose - perhaps we begin with one predefined for us by our parents/teachers or mentors. We either accept or reject this. We swim out into the deep waters of young adulthood armed with degrees and book knowledge, then sink or swim with our own hard-learned experiences, failed romances, achievements and ideals fulfilled or unfulfilled. Parenthood and career/work absorb us for twenty or thirty years and then Wham! we hit midlife. The satisfaction meter either glows Hot or Cold - Red or Green. Saying, keep on going this way, straight ahead or STOP. Pause. Rethink. Revise Strategy.

We ask ourselves, where am I on my map? Where am I on my journey towards those inner goals? A longing for a sense of purpose calls us once again, because the outer 'stuff' is now taken care of (or thrown into flux by job changes, health challenges, spousal betrayal). We are creatures of meaning. Not only doing, but being is important to us. We wonder, how am I doing? It's not only about my bank account, my RRSP, savings, success, but also, Where am I on the Authenticity and Satisfaction scale, the happiness and contentment with my life scale? 

Have I begun to pay attention to the inner calling of my heart? Have I begun to give back? Is there a passion that needs exploring, a reminder of my good ole days love for theater, singing, skiing or sailing? Or am I just too pooped to coop and need a bit of rest, some down time to recoup?

This journey to the Self and greater meaning involves not only caring for others, my family, mother, children, aunts, friends, coworkers, but also checking in with me. Have  I grown, developed my gifts and talents? Have I only worked and not played? (that sure makes me a dull girl!) Is my life balanced on the Wellness Wheel of Life (physical, mental, spiritual, body mind and soul). Is it time to take stock and realign with my Core Values, or find out what they heck they are?

Welcome to your mid-life transition! all those questions come up, as you face your own mortality (around age 50 usually). You look back at where you started - you try to gauge how much you might have left to do, or perhaps you simply release all expectations and collapse into complacency, or if you're lucky, deep satisfaction, in perfect flow. Optimal experiences abound - you've sorted out your inner conflicts, and you're feeling good about yourself, you're loving the grandchildren, and your leisure time. Quality of life is finally yours.

If this is not the case, ask yourself - have I listened to my heart's calling lately? What do I really love to do,what takes me into a 'flow' experience, out of time, forgetting about my self and problems? Then ask yourself, how can I make more room for that kind of experience in my life?

It might mean taking a new class, exploring a new hobby, or volunteering part-time to work with young kids, but it always involves lining ourselves up with a deeper sense of meaning and purpose.

If you feel drained, your psychic energy all sucked into doing stuff you hate - then midlife is a great time to stop, reflect, make changes, and bring more attention to doing what you love. Maybe it's time to build a creative life!

The book Flow outlines how a combination of facing challenges and growing skills is required at all levels of our life - at work, play, in family, with friends - to develop and grow happiness. It takes a certain amount of discipline to harness our psychic energy away from self-defeating negative thoughts and investing energy into creative pursuits that fulfill us. TV watching for instance feeds apathy, while gardening may bring harmony. 

We can better cope with stressful events, and create order out of chaos when we learn how to control our inner environment - our minds. 

So that's where listening to the Inner calling of the heart comes in. Discovering myself, from the inside, realigning myself with what I love to do, with my real internal goals (to be needed, to be loved, to give back, to be creatively fulfilled...) and getting closer to my gifts and talents brings harmony and unity back to my soul.

It gives meaning to my life and helps resolve inner conflicts, once I know what I want, and then take concrete steps to learn the skills or use my talents to achieve it. Following someone else's agenda for happiness will never bring me back to my own center, my own peace.  I need to discover what only I love.

What would you do, if you didn't care what anyone else thought of you? if it wasn't too selfish? if it was just for your own enjoyment? What did you used to love doing that you no longer do? Journaling about these questions will help you uncover the Inner Calling of your heart and help you find meaning and purpose at mid-life.

Namaste,

Musemother

April is Poetry Month

In honour of the Laurentians, where spring melt is glorious, and comes a few weeks later.

Spring melt

Everywhere a fine mist

a million drops rising

into spring air.

Freezing rain iced the roads last night,

layered trees in thin lace.

Now, morning sun tilts the snowwoman,

       head tilts onto ground

arms stuck in the leaning boulders.

Melting snow reveals a rock.

Geese wing northward
in small gaggles.

Spring runoff

from the roof races

my pulse erratic.

last night’s dream moving

up and up

a staircase

looking for You.

I wrote this poem back when the kids were little, and I had broken my leg skiing, so confined to the chalet while they hit the hills. I loved the sunroom in the chalet we rented then, near Ste-Adele and my alone time, writing, reading, lying in the sun stretching the wounded leg, healing and hanging out with the dog.

I later rewrote it, shortened it, took the Samurai Sword and it became:

Spring melt

Geese wing northward
in small gaggles.

Everywhere a fine mist

rises, million drops

lift into air.

Through the windows,

light erratic,

roof runoff spills

from the gutters.

Last night’s dream

moving up & up

a mobile staircase

looking for      

                    You.

and was published in For the Birds, my last collection of poems.

Happy spring all

Musemother

Gather the Women: Menopause and Mothering

SoulCollage(R) Card Multi-tasking Mom Raises a Hand for Help

If it takes a Village to raise a child, then it’s time to Gather the Women.

Yesterday in my Creative Circle class, six women, all mothers, were discussing how hard it is to make time for what you love to do, because it feels self-indulgent and selfish. That led to talking about how overwhelmed we feel with our own emotions at mid-life, our hormonal peaks and valleys, feeling stretched and distracted and having not enough uninterrupted ‘me’ time to journal, write, draw, collage, or just putter around in.

And that led to a story of a woman doctor with three kids who just up and left one day, and didn’t come home for six months. Now there’s a scary thought! It's perhaps the secret fear of every mother,  that we will fail at being a mom. I think the fact that women are putting off having children until our thirties, brings us closer to the perilous period of peri-menopause in our forties. Meanwhile, our children are still at home and needing us to chauffeur, cook, clean and supervise homework for them, which leads to moms feeling ‘on duty’ 24-7 with no breaks, and subsequent feelings of overwhelm. The ideal, multi-tasking ‘supermom’ hits a brick wall at peri-menopause (which begins in your mid-forties), and begins to crumble and crack at the edges.

At menopause, says Dr Christiane Northrup, the reigning expert on the subject, one of the most common needs women express is the need to get away, alone. I’d say the second greatest need is the help and support of other women.

Talking with other women about what really matters is very good for the soul, and very healing. I’ve been part of a woman’s circle for seven or eight years now.  We used to meet twice a month, and lately we’ve moved to once a month, two hours on a Thursday afternoon. We take turns hosting and providing tea, while we have a Circle Chat. It started when our kids were in high school, and we had less opportunity to meet other women while volunteering at school. 

How it works, is that each woman gets to talk about whatever is on her mind, whatever bubbles up from within her soul, for five-ten minutes; we use a crystal rock as a talking stick, so that the whole circle listens deeply,  holding space for her to speak.

This circle of women helped me keep sane and made me a happier mom. I don’t know how I would have gotten through menopause without having these women to talk to about what really matters.

I realized this morning that the discussion in my Creative Circle class yesterday about taking time for ourselves to do what we love, and what pushes a woman to the edge of leaving her kids and family in menopause, are two very related and very important topics.  It’s because we think self-care is selfish that we don’t give ourselves enough down time. Or we think it’s ‘frivolous’ to do something like writing in our journal or making a collage, or something that speaks to who we are, that feeds our creative woman’s soul. 

Some women hesitate to even mention it to their husbands for fear of appearing self-indulgent and less hard-working. Especially if you are a mom who works at home, and already feel guilty that you have time during the day while the kids are at school, so you fill it up to the max with volunteering and other ‘worthwhile’ activities, forgetting to leave yourself any time to do the things that fill the well, make you happy, revitalize and energize you.

Lately I am finding more and more articles and quotes that offer proof that it’s actually better for the people we love for us to take care of our own needs too, and put ourselves on the list. If you have a creative streak, that crankiness and irritability you feel may actually be coming from the need to get back into Flow, to express your creativity. Whatever the needs you have, don’t bury them in busy-ness.

When we truly care for ourselves, it becomes possible to care far more profoundly about other people. The more alert and sensitive we are to our own needs, the more loving and generous we can be towards others. — Eda LeShan

So back to Gathering the Women – when I meet with other women, when I share my feelings about what really matters to me, or just spill the beans about the crazy-making days when I don’t have a minute to breathe, or pee, or eat lunch….when I get a chance to feel heard and seen, and can take off the pretend mask of Perfectionism or Super-mom who has it all together, it saves my life. It probably saves the lives of my kids too, because my mood is brighter, I feel less cranky and irritable. I can give from the well, because my well is feeling rather full. I don't feel like throwing in the towel and taking a year's sabbitical from motherhood.

Can you recognize the symptoms of overwhelm before they explode on you? Can you lean on friends, hire a house-cleaner, leave the house for tea with a friend, make time to write in your journal or start a women’s circle? How can you give yourself a break, cut yourself some slack, ease up on the list of things to do and create some Creative Space for yourself? Begin by gathering other women and having the conversation about this hairy mid-life transition and the strain it puts on our mothering.

As a bonus to anyone who leaves a comment here, I will put your names in a draw for the book An Anthology of Babes, 36 Women Give Motherhood a Voice, edited by Suzi Banks Baum. In this book you'll find 36 women writers and artists, sharing their stories, writing from their souls. You will find a circle of voices here.

Namaste, Musemother

an-anthology-of-babes

The Gifts of Taking Time For Yourself

Having a snow day here in Montreal, yeah! good for those moms who can't go anywhere and good for those kids who wanna stay home and play games or build snow forts, but boo hoo, my Creative Circle class was cancelled! We still had yoga this morning at my house, which felt like being wrapped in a white cocoon, the window and the lake outside are all white! The Green Spring we felt yesterday has been covered up.

So afterwards, over lunch, I picked up a book from my pile of books to read, since the driveway hasn't been ploughed yet: Finding the Deep River Within, http://deepriverwithin.com/book/ and re-read it, looking for an exercise we are going to use in class next week on Doing what you love. And lo and behold, the same message I just blogged about yesterday, came shouting back at me: "In order to take time-in, we need to choose it." Alone time without distraction is what author Abby Seixas calls 'time-in'.  Slowing down, watering the root of your soul with some down time, is so nourishing, but you have to make time for it.

Her point in the first few chapters is well taken - that until we recognize how pressured we are by the culture, how aligned and in synch we are with technological speed and multi-tasking (a computer term by the way), it's hard to disengage and slow down without feeling we're going against the grain. Usually it takes an illness or a deep sense of fragmentation or falling apart before we even consider slowing the pace (without feeling guilty). Unless you are a gardener, or a person who loves to cook from scratch...then you know what I'm talking about.

As far back as the sixth century BC, Lao Tzu was dealing with this 'running around', so it may not be something 'new' per se, the need to get back to a rich inner life:

There is no need to run outside

for better seeing,

nor to peer from a window. Rather abide

at the center of your being;

For the more you leave it, the less you learn.

Search your heart and see

If he is wise who takes each turn:

The way to do is to be.

Not surprisingly, one of the six tools for getting back in touch with that inner river within is Journaling. I know, I know, the excuses we all come up with...the feeling of never having enough time, or not being 'good' at it.  But just sitting down to untangle my thoughts, and hear myself muse out loud or on paper about what's going on underneath the ruckus on the surface is really healing.  It helps me sort through my feelings, and even begin to acknowledge some of those feelings. It doesn't take an hour, even ten minutes feels good.

Of course, the best way to make time for either journaling or time alone uninterrupted is to write it in your agenda. I just made a hair appointment for Thursday at 1 pm. Why can't I also write in 'meditation, 7:30 am, followed by Journal writing 8:30 for 10 minutes'. There, done. Morning is not always the best time for people (especially busy moms) to take time alone in. You can do it over tea at lunchtime, you can take a walk alone during a break. Or you can write in your journal before bedtime.

Get creative about feeding this deep need of your soul to have a long conversation with you!  You will actually find yourself being more productive, you'll have clearer vision, and feel less bone-tired, once you get in touch with that soul energy slumbering underneath your busy schedule....try it.

Take small steps and make it doable, so you have a better chance at success!

take care

Musemother