A Woman's Love

The subtitle I wanted to add to the above was "Precious or Pernicious?" I am wondering if there is anything in the world less trusted, or perhaps less valued at a collective level, than a woman's authentic love. 

I am not trying to exclude men or folks along the gender binary here, but want to speak from the reality of my own experience and what I have come to understand through my conversations with,  and my engagement with the work of, other women.  I know that all people suffer from not having healthy avenues of expression for their love.  What I would like to touch upon here is how women's love can be taken up and perceived when it is expressed.

Does our struggle to honour women's loving have to do with our psychological struggle with our own mothers, and our spiritual struggle to see the feminine valued in the world?

When a woman expresses her love, gives from her heart, and speaks from her deepest truth, I see again and again that these acts are put under a suspicious microscope.  Being real in our loving (which encompasses many things, including honouring our truth) can often put us in direct line of projections.  This creates a vicious cycle.  The more we experience our deepest authenticity being unwelcome in a power-driven world, the more we hide that essence, or become more skilled in disguising it, or more strategic in protecting the truth of our being and knowing, which makes us feel like we are hiding a shameful secret (Shhh...don't let them know you love that much!).  The most dangerous thing it seems we can be in our current cultural climate is genuinely open-hearted and honest.

Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that power does often masquerade as love in our lives.  When we are experiencing the real thing, it's hard to know if it can be trusted.  Conversely, we can get severely hurt by mistaking love that really isn't love at all for the real thing, and that gets us into all kinds of challenging and painful situations.

Our bodies can be our greatest friends in helping us to know the genuine from the false, but having ignored our body's wisdom for a long time, this takes patience and skill.  How do we know when our old fears and wounds are getting triggered?  How can we know if the feeling of mirroring we are experiencing in a relationship is genuine?  Again, the devaluation of the feminine principle that is reflected in our disembodiment needs to be challenged in order to befriend the wisdom of our most trusted ally, which is our body, our very matter.

Learning the language of our greatest guide can then release us into what Mary Hamilton refers to as "original flesh" in her book The Dragonfly Principle: An Exploration of the Body's Function in Unfolding Spirituality.  Honouring and expressing our body's innate capacity for love and joy allows us to be more capable of receiving the love of another.

As we become more embodied in our spirituality, the hope is that the feminine depths of love that we are capable of expressing will be restored to a cherished place within our world, and that its extraordinary ability to heal and renew is remembered for nothing less than what it is:

The sacred essence of peace.

The Power of Projection

Have you ever found yourself at the centre of a vicious storm of projection and betrayal?  The wounding of being so devalued and delegitimized to the point of dehumanization results from the confrontation with the raw, brutal energy that has been split off from feeling or empathy.  It's something that one never forgets if one has experienced it.  It is part of the collective memory that lives in the bodies and psyches of those who have experienced genocides (at the collective level), and serious bullying (at the personal level). If you are a woman, it is often experienced as the energetic equivalent of being perceived as "the witch."

Owning our projections is the difficult work of a humanity seeking to embody soul values rather than keeping them out of life on a perfectionistic pedastal.  Reclaiming our capacity for deep love is the healing journey that leads us into our frailties and wounds, and the ways in which these wounds prevent us from trusting new dimensions of life and love to flow through our bodies and psyches.  It is not an easy journey, and it takes us right into the centre of our own fear and the tender bruises of our heart's frustrated efforts to connect and be received.  It reminds us that our vocal chords may be 'choking' on the repressed expression of the truth of our experience, and our eyes are fearful of recognizing what they see as plainly as posssible.

While projections have real power when they are unleashed, they are equally powerful when they are reclaimed.  Instead of that energy being placed out there on the "enemy", it can instead flow into creative possibilities and connections.  With new eyes, we can see others in a fresh light.

In the reclaiming, we remember who we really are - and are humbled and healed by our own perfectly imperfect story, and our ability to honour it in the other.

Life's Exquisite Promise

To believe that love is stronger than fear and hatred is the most radical idea to embrace.  I would argue that it is more radical than any political philosophical position.  How does one live this in a world so fractured?  How do we embrace this within our own wounded hearts?  What does this mean in the context of life's realities, and our personal and professional obligations and responsibilities?  How is an open heart lived within the paradox of the fundamental need to protect oneself and others from harm?  How do we allow ourselves to be inspired by transpersonal ideas and symbols, yet work to manifest these within the small and immediate realm of our human lives and communities?

From an early age, I have been asking questions centred around the reality of love, and its possibilities for transforming our world.  Rilke's words have helped me in this inquiry - an inquiry that has been (and I would imagine will continue to be) full of challenges, contradictions, pain and joy.  In Letters to a Young Poet he writes:

...I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Now that I am entering early middle age, I revisit Rilke's words again with a more experienced eye, and a fuller and wiser heart.  I glimpse an implicate order where myriad manifestations of its stunning accuracy reveal themselves if I pay attention.  I recognize the capacity of life to bring me into situations that, if responded to from my deepest truth, reveal their brilliant tendrils forcing me, leading me, to greater wholeness and healing.  I am brought face to face with my deepest fears, my hidden wounds, and my unclaimed gifts.  I am brought face to face with my capacity to love, forgive and learn in the face of life's unrelenting force of will. 

Life is the most radical, transformative classroom of all, and its lesson, its promise, is so simple that it is always a learning in process, one that takes lifetimes to master:

Love.