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/

Writing in Tuscania : Notes from SoulCollage(R) Conference 2016

Once there was a woman who traveled to the sacred land of Tuscania.

Along the highway from the bus she watched the hills roll golden against pewter clouds and sky, then the Pouring of Rain down on the windshield. She was sheltered and safe but newly landed, having hardly slept. She was alone but had been greeted, met and taken under the wing, so to speak of the small group of 3 women waiting at the meeting point, as instructed. One British, one American and one with tattoos on her arm.

The pilgrimage was on, although she hadn’t called it such, as yet. Every morning she walked down the road lined with small dark paving stones on her way to the Tower where the SoulCollage(R)  journeyers were, and every evening she walked up the hill back into the town.  In between, although she didn’t know it yet, her pilgrim soul was waiting for her in-between the lines and the cover of her golden notebook. Golden because she chose the yellow covered book over the red or blue. 

The first days were a flurry of collage, art making and meeting new companions on the road and in the Tower, over tea or cafe latte and breakfast, meals together, twilight suppers, fellow pilgrims and travelers who came to dance, take photographs or write their way home with SoulCollage(R) facilitators.

She knew, one day near the end of the week that something Big was calling her to Home. Homing in, and honing in, on the true nature of her calling – she needed a new relationship with the Self – she had been held hostage, too long, by the critic, naysayer and doubter. She had called on her angels and guides for protection, but in a very ancient church she heard the words  (La Grande Madre) and it sat right with her to pray in the middle of the night for a dream for a signal or a sign. We are here in the sacred land of Tuscania, she thought, as she held her hand to the ancient porous rocks of an Etruscan villa. We are here to hear the memories of the ancestors, but she didn’t feel it yet.

She asked for a sign and received a dream, a solid bull, larger than life, standing in front of the gates of an ancient city; a white horse harnessed, a line of men harnessed to it, pushing the mare into the bull, ramming it again and again and raining sweat blood and tears as she cried. Why can’t you stop? The men were also ramming their bodies and heads into the old walls.

So she sat with the question, in front of the old stone wall the next day, sitting with her back to the verdant landscape. What does the wall say? What does the horse say, what does the bull say, as Mariabruna suggested she ask the dream.

Her pilgrim self had wandered into the waking dream, in between ancient and new, in between past and present, in between her old self who rammed right on through things and people and got things done, to the new, softer around the edges intuitive person waking up, peeling off layers of Strong, Bold, Leader, and Commander to strip away a certain layer of Ego protection and rediscover underneath, the “authentica” or ancient feminine mythical layer, deep in her bones, in her heart and soul, the untethered, unharnessed, fluid, green as the grass bloodline that she felt when she looked out over the valley to the cows grazing below – Oh how soft the trees, Cypress, pine and oak, fig and corn, and vines, such fertile fields and harvests.

This land, sacred land, somehow hers, though not through any heritage or inherited lineage. Is it true to say, mythically connected to the land of the goddesses who came Mare ad Mare – Holy Mary as the guide said, before the Romans, before the Bull, before the conquering tribes and nomads who built the Wall, Under the wall, always down, down in the earth, the voices of the women singing, in long cool tunnels, in warehouses and storage rooms, where oil, wine and grain and sacred objects for ceremony, the baths, clean water, the Flow, in the midst of Stone Walls, a hollow space for the pilgrim to wander, to hear the melody of stillness, embrace the sacred in the sanctuary. 

Oh my Soul, pilgrim that thou art, I hear your voice, more clearly here than anywhere. It is not the landscape, that holds it, but the sacred stone walls have echoed my Name, announcing my place in the scheme of things, (as Mary Oliver says), the animal body of my soul, speaks again and again.

So I am happy to be writing (again) and listening for the Voice that speaks. I may forego the old story for a new one, as has been suggested to me by teachers wiser and older than I. I have been very stubborn, the Catholic child in me confesses, not a mea culpa, but an Ave Maria. 

Help me Sweet Feminine face of god. Help me listen to my real Voice, my intuitive layer, the strata underneath the wall I have built. Help me even tear down the wall (if this is recommended and necessary). May I allow “not knowing”, and learn to lead by surrender. May I allow allowing and receiving – it is my greatest wish that you write through me. And I will dance to the strings, I will chant and dance and swirl to your musica - in the sacred land of Tuscania, I heard this.

SoulCollage(R) card: Persephone in Tuscania, view from Tower

www.soulcollage.com

A Particle of the Divine

Prayer for a Questioning Heart

May your journey
through the questions of life
bring you to a new moment of awareness.
May it be
and enlightening one.
May you find
embedded in the wisdom
of the past,
like all the students
of life before you,
the answers
you yourself
are seeking
now.
May they waken
that in you which is
deeper than fact,
truer than fiction,
full of faith.
May you come to know
that in every
human event
is a particle of the Divine
to which we turn

--- Joan Chittister

After reading a Facebook post on whether the goddesses in mythology are too ‘feminine’, I wondered, is the divine feminine? Then I found the poem above, and wrote this in my journal this morning.

I have felt the divine as a lover, as a Mother, as a Father, as a Friend, as a soft invisible Presence, as a singing silence in my inner ear, and a flutter in the ribcage of my heart. I have not imagined it as He or She in a really long time (except as manifest in certain teachers who have taught me how to center and be still). I am of the school of no religion, no symbols needed to feel or experience something real, the Radiant Mystery – not a belief, but a felt contact. Unseen, but felt in the heart. Unknown but inhabiting my presence. Untouched but moving within the boundaries of my body awareness, and beyond.

When I call out, I am answered. When I ask for help, I am guided from within and without (sometimes by a song on the radio, a chance encounter). Serendipity, synchronicity and alignment with objects, schedules, and people abound. When I am trusting and relying on being grateful, aware and conscious, all things flow towards me. When I trip, fall, bump into furniture, cut a finger or burn my arm, miss a meeting, lose patience, hurt a friend, I am reminded to come back into presence. It is a learning flow, always a teaching moment available, if I am on that wavelength. I am not always.

SoulCollage(R) Card: DizzyTizzy Self

Probably because I am enamoured of speed, of getting things done quickly, of flitting in and out of Noise and mindless activity. Lately, I am learning to appreciate the joy of slowness, stillness and surrender. I am practicing awareness, when I remember, moment to moment;  I am often brought up short by my shortsightedness or short temper. I am stretched and relaxed and massaged into stillness. I sleep and wake, and begin again.

There are no steps I am aware of, no phases, no progress, except Here, or Not. There I go again. Stop, breathe, repeat. Hello. Slow Down. Remember. You are not alone. In this sea of souls, remember. You can call out, reach for the One Breath, the One Sound, the One, will hear you. 

SoulCollage(R)  Card: Hearing the Call

Dance, as Hafiz and Rumi request, dance with life. Don’t sit on the sidelines anticipating the end. Dance, enjoy. Be in the swirl and whirl of it all, this myriad, colourful rainbow world; pain, sorrows, griefs, joy, love, simplicity – all turning on the wheel, Cosmic Ferriswheel of life. Now you are Up. Now you are Down. Do you still feel the need to control? How small you are in the scheme of things. Up, up, up you go – it’s a wild, smooth, terrible, wonderful ride. Yesterday I was struggling to master my panic at a supposed computer threat. Today problem solved, all is well, my heart beat is back to normal. Praise be. I appreciate the peace my morning practice brings.

Journey Card: root chakra, Red