Lockdown – diving into feminine mysteries

There’s a shyness I feel in putting to words how I feel as a woman; almost a shame, a sense of unworthiness. I wonder where this comes from. Still, I feel the strength of my ancestors behind me; all the women who worked and loved and cared for their families, with such dignity and strength. I feel them behind me, they have my back. There’s a timeless wisdom to the femininity I feel strongly within me now and it wants to come out, it wants to express itself with creativity, in the stillness of our time. So here goes..

It’s always been there, this mystery of the feminine; a quiet and deep knowledge unfurling slowly and gently backstage within my consciousness as life passes. It catches me by surprise at times, expressing itself through my words before I blink. All the rich experience of life; felt, loved, scarred, grieved, processed and accepted. The acceptance has grown into a beautiful towering Oak whose canopy is wide and strong, with roots which plunge deep into the Earth. The Oak of acceptance is my strength, the wisdom both to speak and be silent, to give and to retreat, to love and to pull away. This is the knowledge of the mystery within me, a mystery which is deeply feminine.

I felt an embryonic awareness of this feminine wisdom within my soul as a child. I tasted it and yearned to learn deeply, hunting for its expression within the women around me. As I grew and experienced the deep societal conditioning of our time, I lost this instinctual awareness. It was replaced with shame; of who I was and what I felt. Life was lived in the fast lane, with burning rubber churning up clouds of smoke and dust. We were taught to do and conquer and achieve. The innocent joy I felt in the silence, in the woods, in the creative centre of my soul, was side-lined, relegated to the irrelevant. Like the headmaster who forced me to quit art to focus on maths. Creativity no longer held importance. The stillness to dream and feel, the adventures in the woods and the inner knowing of my destiny was eradicated, made worthless by a world who told me I was wrong.

Girls in the 80s were taught to aspire high to achieve glittering careers, to work extra hard, to be like men. Women wore trouser suits and tried to break through the glass ceiling. We had Thatcher and were taught that she embodied feminism. We were drilled that Thatcher was the epitome of our aspirations. All the while she tore society to shreds, smashed homes and families to pieces, advocating a cynical self-serving idealism. That wasn’t feminism. Our leader was a psychopath who used and abused our blood and sweat to further her desire to rape the Earth. Afterwards we collapsed in a heap, scarred with abuse.

We lost our voice, our softness, our joy. The deep well of mystery within the inner psyche of women, the intuitive awareness and understanding of creation and love, our instincts to dive deeply in stillness and be, deep within connection, these mysteries had almost drowned. Yet the inner call of our psyche knew the way forward, knew how to navigate through the rough sea and find our way home. In the hardness of our world, all we needed to do was trust. To find comfort in our intuition, within our deep inner knowing. To find the wisdom of our ancestors. It wasn’t an easy path.

In the stillness of our soul is our deepest wisdom, reaching all the way back to the first woman. We can feel it during our monthly bleed, when we embody our wild physicality. Society teaches us to tame this raw power, to medicate and hide it. Yet what we feel when we bleed is a powerful celebration of our bodies, of our physical connection to the Earth. When we bleed we feel our fertility, our power and our potential. In the depths of our past we would separate from our communities and writhe and dance and bleed on the Earth with our sisters, in ceremony, in honour of the deeper mysteries of creation.

Women everywhere need space and silence. We need time to dive deeply and feel our souls. We all have different roles to play in our world, as leaders, artists, teachers, healers, mothers, scientists and sometimes all of these and more. Deep within our soul we share a connection, to all women everywhere and throughout all time. If we are running a country or a business, looking after children or juggling many different roles all at once, women everywhere feel that thread within them; we feel the call of the wild woman, our ancestor, our true nature.

 This time of lockdown is an expression of feminine power. It is uncomfortable, it makes you dive deeply into your own inner psyche and uncover and tend wounds you did not wish to acknowledge. It makes you stalk your behaviour with others and in the world, makes you follow every step you take, encouraging you to check in with that reaction and feel before you respond. It makes you slow down, sleep longer, and feel. It enables you to reflect upon your life and remember what you didn’t have time for, those things that felt less important. Like visiting your grandparents or a sick friend. It brings up regrets, it forces you to confront your shadow. There is no turning away from it now. It reaches out its long, dark fingers and claws its way into your soul, ripping out the heart of what you need to see, dripping with blood and smelling of rotten meat. You need to ingest this dark matter, feel it and see it and learn to accept it. Through acceptance comes growth and strength. This process has a distinctly feminine feel to it and we can all tap into it and work with it during this time, as every being has the capacity to embody the feminine.

 As we come through this phenomenal change within our modern lives, we remember the lives of our ancestors, the women who survived through plagues, through the births and deaths of multiple children, through catastrophic wars, through poverty and hunger, through rape and terrible trauma and abuse. We can feel and connect with all the women in the world today, we can feel and taste their spirit. We are interwoven through a similar experience of life, as we bleed, as we birth, as we feel and scream and cry. Today around the world there are leaders who truly embody the feminine spirit, who are worthy role models. The world is changing and within the fires of the human soul locked away from the do-ing of the economic wheel, both women and men are finding their strength and finding their way again. A new world is possible, we can dream it and create it into being. For the first time in a very long time, the wisdom of the feminine is perhaps the key to a new reality.

 Samara

14th May 2020