Women's Wisdom and Writing the Body: Dialogue

“What is your truth? Ask your heart, your back, your bones, and your dreams. Listen to that truth with your whole body. Understand that this truth will destroy no one and that you’re too old to be sent to your room.” —John Lee from Writing from the Body

What is Women’s Wisdom? It means learning to live consciously, in touch with our inner guidance through our thoughts, emotions, dreams, and feelings in our body. It means believing that our bodies are able to receive and transmit energy and information. Instead of feeling trapped by the cyclical nature, the ups and downs of our emotions, women can begin to know and understand the waning and waxing that is as regular as the moon’s cycle. A good tool is journaling, and dialoguing with body parts.

Here is an exercise I have used in Journaling Classes to help women listen to their bodies. (taken from the book Writing From Life: Telling Your Soul's Story, Susan Wittig Albert.

Take out your journal. Sit for a few minutes quietly before writing, to get you connected and thinking about a body part. Start with a centering breath exercise, hands on heart, upper and lower heart, just breathing in and out for a minute.

Then pick a body part and imagine it can speak to you. What would it say? What does it want from you? what does it give to you? How does it feel to be this body part? Example below is with breasts, our most visible part, and one which holds conflicting feelings for many women.

Dialogue sample:

What Breasts Say

Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/en:Anton_Nossik

We sing with milk for you, we love your caress. Sometimes we sag empty, other times balloon into gorgeous melons. When you lie down we softly melt into your ribs. We are a soft cushion for your son’s head, something to pinch for your daughter. Always a safe haven. 

We love to wear brushed cotton, hate metal under wires, undulate under sweaters, push out high beams in a T-shirt. Molded to wet skin in a bathing suit we are voluptuous. When expecting, you wait for our every twinge, hold us to yourself when running downstairs or in a field of grass singing. What do we fear? A stranger’s eyes undressing us. 

We were slow to come into being, ripened over many years into something you could be proud of. Our marvelous liquid is like love; hot, untamed squirts of bluish fire, we nourish, give life. 

We are called Wonder, or Fame.

If you want to continue with this, pick another body part and do the dialogue. 

Another creative idea: make a collage for this body part, and let your intuition choose the images and put them together on a page in your journal, or on a cardboard sheet.

See the Creative Soulful Woman Facebook page for an example of What the Uterus says.

https://www.facebook.com/creativesoulful/