Feeding Our Fire to Move the Mountains,
Ride the Waves and Fly
ALisa Starkweather will be teaching Feeding Our Fire to Move the Mountains, Ride the Waves and Fly at the Wise Woman Center on Sunday, September 23rd. She shares a personal response to a woman who was asking her how we come to love and accept ourselves as women who want to be empowered in this world.
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For me this is not only my work in the world with others, but also my personal quest and journey as a woman. It begins as a question which is who is the "I" that is wanting acceptance and love?
The first assumption may be that we know who we are accepting but since we also intuitively know that we are a mystery and there is more to us than is in our consciousness, we may hold out suspecting that to "accept ourselves" would be too limited with what we know so far. Accepting "ourselves" might be a lie because we are only accepting the part of ourselves that we know and "approve of". All along we may suspect that to accept ourselves might be a bigger sphere than we presently know. A metaphor of this might be the leaf eating caterpillar worm who innately knows yet doesn't know that one day in its destiny it will liquefy and become a flower nectar eating butterfly. But of course it is easy for us to think why not? Let's accept us as the caterpillar form now in the ultimate knowing (and not knowing) that we will continue to evolve and become ever more beautiful!
The hard part however is that we are dualistic in our nature. We have all the qualities of things that we respect, aspire to, know are good. And all of the qualities even if dormant, of things that we judge as "negative", "bad", "shameful", "cruel", “weak”, etc. What do we do with those parts as we are accepting “ourselves”? This is the crux of it in my journey and for this reason I studied Shadow Work and became in the early nineties a facilitator of the work. I discovered that by exploring not only what we like about ourselves but also that which wefind unlovable and make room for that too, did self-acceptance begin to naturally occur.
If you think about it carefully if we accept what we find "acceptable" about ourselves, yet leave what we truly hate and are embarrassed by in our human nature (worm caterpillar), we don't accept ourselves because this too is part of our nature. So truly loving all of your self is to find peace, compassion, and witness to "all of ourselves" without the need to make ourselves totally change in order to have the love that we seek.
Now back to not knowing who the "I" is. We often want to answer soul questions with the premise that we know who and what we are. But truly, we are a mystery even to ourselves. This is a wonderful thing and something that we could use to celebrate more ~ our amazing diversity.Who we often come to know as us is really our made up personalities~ the things that other people think we are and have told us since childhood ~ our habits ~ the events that shaped us~ our genetic nature ~ and certainly things taken in by living in our culture, a culture that we cannot forget has oppressed many peoples, including women, in blatant and subtle ways for thousands of years, maybe always.
Discovering as a woman where we are carrying internal oppression will truly help us liberate from the inside out.
What I love now is that the older I get as a woman, the easier it becomes to accept myself, all of the great mystery of my being.
I have heard this from many women. Something like the cocoon drops away and there we are against our own life's backdrop instead of the dominant culture, coming to love who we are ~ the flaws, the wrinkles, the gray hairs, the absolute magnificence of our bright spirits. We are laughing, creating, unbound by our internal chains to now voice and stand up to forces that would in any way judge us as too anything. Too big, too loud, too opinionated, too old, too little, too sensitive….. But it is not only accepting ourselves but also the deep commitment that we will remain TRUE to our becoming that I have witnessed in the thousands of women that I’ve had the privilege to meet and work with.
Think of water in a flowing river. Sometimes the pure flowing water can get trapped, literally sidetracked, and now it lives in a stagnant pool. To accept ourselves is not to accept sometimes too. Right? Sometimes we need to accept that we are more than what we are living and we need to accept that we need to do something, know something, feel something, in order to return. To accept ourselves is to know that we are pure water that deserves to free ourselves from whatever binds our spirits or has us living in toxicity. In fact, to fight against the status quo by NOT ACCEPTING ourselves as we now things now in this culture would be a healthy process.
The women are in a global invitation now to rise up and be the visionaries of what we do not accept within us, without us and around us but I know that it not where you are going with your question. I am simply saying that unrest within ourselves may be a very important component that we don’t want to bi-pass in our growth and our transformation in life. Here in the uncomfortable parts of ourselves and the world we can stand up for what we will no longer accept. We need to not use "acceptance" as an excuse to stay oppressed or bound in ways that no longer serve us but rather find the courage with one another to return to the greatness that we naturally are. Here acceptance is always found. While we are busy becoming we can always shortcut if we choose and look at the big picture and realize that we were born pure and loveable and that all that is of this beautiful universe is within us. We can here and now rest assure that we are love incarnate, dancing cosmos, wonder in action. But then, we would miss out on crawling on our bellies for a while and discovering all the amazing things that come from learning compassion with our limitations, discovering our passions to right injustices, to come home at last to the truth after a long amazing odyssey we call living.
Many blessings to all and desire for us to be free from the inside out. You are loved, you are loveable, you are love. Fight it if you choose but ultimately you don’t need to because it is the truth of your being. In sisterhood and the pure running waters in us all, ALisa Starkweather
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