Entries Tagged 'sacred feminine' ↓

This is a thyroid. Notice how it is shaped like a butterfly. A butterfly is a symbol of transformation. It has lived a life as caterpillar then wound itself tightly into a cocoon and rested, then broke free, morphing itself with incredible amounts of energy, though it looked as if it was doing nothing but lying dormant for a long time, and then one day it stretched its wings and broke free of its confines; expanding itself to its full capacity with its peacock blue and vibrant orange magnificent wingspan, lifting off, fluttering on the currents of wind, landing on whatever pretty flowers or far flung limbs, high mountains or glassy lakes it likes.

Notice too that this organ is located on the throat, where the voice, the epitome of expression emits itself. Where we sing from and speak from, where we make ourselves heard from. Where we choose or not, to say what we have to say and where we allow our thoughts to come out from inside ourselves to be broadcast into the world; to be criticized or praised. We scream from here, we laugh from here, we hum a tune from here and when we do this place in our throat vibrates in a way that makes our souls heal from pain, sorrow and grief in a transformative way that is miraculous and holy. When we are infants the sounds we make are primal crying, cooing and laughing. Through our lives we cry from here; guttural sobs, whimpers, gasps of fear, whimpers of humiliation, all of it passes through this space. Every sound of emotion we have for our entire lives, really, passes through this space in our bodies. Every sound we hold back stops here. Notice too that when we are sad or “fighting back tears” this is the exact place that we get “choked up” or experience a “lump in our throat.” The breath of life, water, food, all nourishment passes here. All swallowing. The thyroid is a miraculous and symbolic part of our body. When it goes too slow, we are holding something back.

It was my alarm that my weight was climbing drastically fast that made me march into the doctors office and demand that my thyroid, which had been a minor problem before, be tested again. Alarm isn’t really the right word: FURY is the one. It turns out I have hypothyroidism. My thyroid is running slow. It is sluggish. Blocked. Not expressing itself quickly enough. The thyroid gland largely controls the hormones of your endocrine system. It also effects your blood sugar system, your brain chemistry, your energy levels, your ability to control your body temperature, your circulation, your ability to think with clarity, your ability to sleep, your metabolism.

Essentially your thyroid controls your emotions.

What interests me about my hypothyroidism is the message my body has for me here, right now. If you’ve read the work of Louise Hay or Dr. Christiane Northrup you too know that the mind, body and spirit are intensely connected, that when the body is out of whack or malfunctioning it is sending you a message, “Hey you, listen to me, I have something important to tell you from your deep, wise Spirit, from the Universe. If you don’t listen, you will get sicker. If you listen and act, you will heal.”

In Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life  for thyroid: Humiliation. Belief: I never get to do what I want. Affirmation: I move beyond old limitations and now allow myself to express freely and creativity. Hypothyroid: Giving up. Feeling hopelessly stifled. Affirmation: I create a new life with new rules that totally support me.

In Northrup’s Women’s Body’s, Women’s Wisdom she points out that the thyroid has to do with one’s will, are you begin too willful or overly compliant? It is a fifth-chakra issue and hypothyroidism often has to do with women who often have difficulty speaking up for themselves, holding their own point of view, may have overly soft voices, and have difficulty making themselves heard.  

This is what I know about my hypothyroidism: My thyroid is tell me “Hey Tracee, there is something you’re not saying that you need to say. You’re afraid. Say it anyway. Or you will be sick from not expressing it. From not saying it.”

My purpose on this Earth is to write; to express; to create with words; to create change with the power of my words. It is my Super Power. There are things that I alone was put on this Earth to say. No one else can say them in the way that I can say them and they MUST be said. When I say them, I am freed. I am the butterfly. When I don’t I have confined in the cocoon, stifled, restricted. I want to be the vibrant blue and orange butterfly!

Finish the book!

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21 Weeks

I’ve been Pro-Choice since I read Orson Scott Card’s classic Ender’s Game, in which, the government limited the number of children parents could have, based on some sic-fi reason of intelligent selection, only parents who had especially bright children could get a waiver to have a third child who might save the world. I figured if the government could make birth choices — well, then they could control birth choices. China controls birth choices. The United States controls birth choices. I don’t like the idea of that at all. I think parents should make birth choices. Since mothers carry the responsibility of birth, and the primary responsibility of raising said children if dads choose to skip out, then mothers should be allowed to make the choices around the carrying of the child.

So, I’ve been Pro-Choice. I’ve been a supporter of Roe v. Wade. Roe v. Wade holds that the termination of pregnancy is lawful until the viability of the fetus or if the mother’s health is in danger. 

Changing Viability

With current science, the viability of the fetus is changing every day. Meaning, younger and younger babies are living outside of the mother’s womb. More babies are being saved with medical intervention. Michelle Duggar’s 19th baby, Josie, at 25 weeks, weighed only 1 lb. 0.6 oz., and she lived. Not only has she lived, but she’s thriving after the first year of a lot of medical intervention. Premature babies that never would have lived in 1973, when Roe v. Wade became law are living full, meaningful lives.

My perspective has changed from when I read that book as a freshman in college, as a 16-year-old kid. I, now have these little kids, five and nine. They aren’t just “cells,” as I have heard some pro-choice abortion activist try to minimize them as. They are people. It bothers me. They aren’t hypothetical anymore.

A 20th Century Debate in a 21st Century Reality

The debate should be different than it was in 1973. Yet, somehow it’s not. I find this incredibly frustrating.

In 1973, there were hardly any birth control choices that were reliable. Condoms sucked. The birth control pill was like 75% effective. There was no Nuva Ring, no Depo Provera shot, no Norplant, no Ortho Ethra patch.

In 1973, having a baby out of wedlock probably did ruin your life or at least drastically change it. Your parents might kick you out of the house or disown you. They sent you off to relatives to avoid the shame you would bring to the family. You would get kicked out of high school, you might be forced into a terrible marriage. You would likely not go to college. You would likely be doomed to poverty. Certainly there was a terrible social stigma.

Today, I’m in my late 30s and have known lots of girls who have gotten pregnant out of wedlock and it’s been long enough that I’ve seen it play out. Here’s the thing — it hasn’t ruined their lives. . . . I know it’s crazy, right?

In fact, some of these women are the best mothers I know. Some of them married the baby-daddies and have solid marriages and went on to have other children and have careers. Some have been kick-ass single moms. Some had abortions and went on to have other children out of wedlock and went on to be great single moms. Some gave their babies up for adoption and went on to have families. Some had their babies, were single-moms for a time and then married and had more children and normal lives.

Having a child did not ruin their lives. Didn’t ruin one single life. Not their’s, not their baby’s. Isn’t that funny? It turned out to be a total fiction, meant to scare us into not having sex, I guess.

This year two women close to me chose to go through unplanned pregnancies, one very young and one in her 30′s. Several relatives of mine also went through the same experience. It was beautiful to watch how warmly those babies were received into this world. It was wonderful to watch how the mothers were warmly embraced and supported during their pregnancies and after. It was an honor to participate in. Was their road harder? Harder than my own road of witnessing 9/11 in my last month of pregnancy and experiencing devastating postpartum depression with my first planned pregnancy? Maybe. Maybe not. Is their future less bright because of their unmarried status? Maybe. Maybe Not. When I look at their future I have no problem seeing a very bright future in front of any of them. I don’t see a scarring social stigma of unmarried, unplanned pregnancy attached to them anymore. In fact, what I see is motivation, they have been motivated to stop playing childish games and get a move on in their futures, enroll in schools and seek out their futures with ambition and energy that they had not exhibited before.

Need I mention that the President of the United States is the son of a single mother, the product of an unplanned pregnancy? Probably not. Though I do think it’s relevant to the conversation at hand.

The Morning After Pill

But, the real turning point for me has been the invention of the Morning After Pill. With the invention of the Morning After Pill, I simply don’t see the need for most abortions anymore. The Morning After Pill prevents the egg from dropping so no pregnancy can occur. You can use it five days after sex and no pregnancy will occur.

Which means if rape, a date rape, a bad decision, the condom breaks, a drunken episode you wish hadn’t happened, something you don’t quite remember occurs or  you get slipped a roofie, you can take this medication and though grief may be had, babies will not.

See, for me, this should make everyone happy. It’s a brilliant and necessary compromise. This should be legal and available for everyone regardless of age and without parental consent. It should be over-the-counter without a prescription, right next to the condoms on the shelf in Walmart.

The Pro-Lifers have a point. It’s Life. Life is essential. Life is beautiful and lovely and worth protecting. So are women’s choices. So are women’s rights. So are women’s bodies. Sore women’s dignities.

But, the reality is that girls and women will make bad choices sometimes. The reality is that men and boys will violate girls and women sometimes.

There has to be something available for women and girls in these cases. But, that something doesn’t need to extend into the lives of babies. If something happens, women and girls should know . . . they can do something quickly and efficiently.

We can educated them about what needs to be done, so they are ready and they can quickly go to any store and get the Morning After Pill. We should educate about it, like we educate about the use of condoms. Let’s just be done with this 30-year-old unsavory, hostile and embarrassing battle that has run its course and has gotten very, very stale.

Before you think I’m speaking from my Ivory Tower, in my younger years, I assure you there were plenty of times when I woke up and my first thought was, “Oh my God, I made a terrible mistake!” But, I assure you, it was my very first thought. And after a date rape, I did take the Morning After Pill, and it wasn’t pleasant, but it was better than the alternatives.

Hope & Reality 

Will the Morning After Pill resolve every single instance in which every single woman might want to seek an abortion? Of course, I am not that naive. But, I don’t want to keep having an outdated 1973 conversation about abortion given 21st Century medical advances and a lack of social stigma about untraditional pregnancy timelines and circumstances; my tolerance for legal 2nd trimester abortions is gone because I consider them “viable” as defined by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade; I no longer believe many of the hypothetical fictions and “justifications” often touted by Pro-Choice advocates are acceptable reasons for getting an abortion; I think we can do a hell of a lot better job educating about birth control methods and providing access to them; we should be making better use of and educating about the Morning After Pill; and I think we should be romanticizing the hell out of adoption as a beautiful option.

Comments Note: You are welcome to leave a comment on this post. However, due to the history of hostility on both sides of this debate I request that comments left follow this form, Agree/And (agree with something in the post, then make your statement as an AND statement rather than a BUT statement). For instance, “I agree that science and medicine has changed the viability of a fetus, and I also feel that the Morning After Pill won’t resolve the issue of mid-life pregnancies in the case of women who . . . “

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I have to confess that my passions have pretty much been fueled by anger since my tumultuous adolescence. Anger about gender inequity in general. Anger about horrible, awful, violent, terrible things that men have done to me in the past. Anger about how men treat women in general. Anger about motherhood discrimination in the workplace. Anger about the cultural consumption of girls. Anger about all the millions of legitimately awful things there are to be angry about in the world.

Then I realized there really was no end in sight. I realized that horrible, awful things kept happening despite my being angry about them. I realized that my anger was, in fact, having no. impact. at. all. Terrible things were going to continue whether I was furious and incensed or not.

The real impact was on me. The anger was exhausting me. It was taking a toll on my mind, body and soul. This is the shit that eventually gives you cancer. It was impacting my personal relationships. It was having a serious impact on my personal growth as a human being. One can’t expect to run on fumes and anger forever and still expect their heart and soul to expand. Not if they ever want to achieve some sort of happiness, peace of mind and spiritual growth anyway.

So, I worked on letting it go.

Sounds easier than it is. It’s really kind of hard. Takes a lot of practice. Takes a lot of telling the “ego” to shut up. Takes a lot of sucking it up where previously you would have put your dukes up and opened your mouth.

Then a funny thing happened. The anger faded and what I found in its place was a lot of pain. Some really dark, ugly, excruciating pain that all that anger had been covering up. Pain that had been undealt with. I tried a lot of things to make the pain go away for my own sake. Who wants to feel all that pain? No wonder I had adopted all that lovely, wonderful, beautiful, delicious anger. It felt a hell of a lot better than the deep dark never-ending pit of pain and a vast amount of sheer terror to boot.

I saw therapists and holistic healers and psychiatrists and spiritual healers and had Mormon Missionaries come give me a laying on of hands blessing and tried EMDR and Neuro-Emotional Technique and several medications and started smoking again and drank too much beer to try to stop that awful fucking pain and quell the ever-expanding terror. It was mental and emotion and so physical that I wanted to unzip my body and set my soul free.

Then all the right people showed up here and there to help me figure out how to heal the pain and let it go. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a place like this, but I was on my knees telling God that I would accept whatever help he sent me in whatever form it came in. And he did. And I did. It came in the form of my Mothers, other members of my family and people from various episodes of my past messaging me on Facebook and strangers reaching out to me over the vast Internet, relating their own struggles, texts from dear friends, prayers from many near and far, neighbors checking in on me and dragging me out of the house for walks and forcing myself to get up everyday put one foot in front of the other, go to the gym, do some work, going on vacations and telling myself, “this too shall pass.” (Thank you to everyone, I am so grateful!)

Finally, the pain started to ebb, I let it go.

The strangest things have taken the pain and terror’s place. An odd sort of blank slate, an empty page. Unpredictable emotions. Where before I would have been able to predict with some accuracy how a situation might make me feel, now I am surprised by out-of-the-blue, unexpected emotions. Some good. Some bad. Surprising. Where before I thought I knew with some clarity, “This is what I want and I know this will make me happy.” Now I’m sort of wondering, “What will make me happy? What exactly do I want now, as I pass into this new phase of my life as my youngest child goes off to school?”

A blank page is an interesting thing, it’s a mixed bag. It’s intimidating because all the work is ahead of you, and as a writer, there is always a little insecurity whispering in the back of your mind, “what if it’s terrible?” It’s hard to describe how vulnerable a writer is, we put our whole self into our work and then we put it out there for anyone and everyone to love or hate, criticize, critique, form an opinion about. It’s like being naked in the Junior High Cafeteria during lunch time. Yet, something inexplicably beautiful and awful still compels us to do it anyway. Then there are the questions: What do I want to say? Where should this go? How should I begin? What is my lede? What will grab the reader? How will I meet my word count? Can I get it done before the kids get out of school? Will anyone care enough to read it? How should I structure it? Do I really want to put myself out there like this? Do I have the nerve to say this?

My life feels like a blank page right now. Will I continue on this path that I have been plugging away at for five years? Despite the frustration I have felt about it? Despite the odds against it? Will I keep putting my new, more vulnerable self out there? Will I have the guts to do it without the anger as my protective shield? Or will I veer right or left and take an entirely new path? One that’s been waiting for me the whole time, but I never would have seen it had I not let it go?

I don’t know. For now, it feels right to sit in front of the blank page and get in the place of quiet creativity and try to feel that gift of inspiration, for lack of a better word, that inner silence before the surge of knowing that comes right before my fingers start flying and I know, I just know, what word, what sentence, what paragraph comes next.

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. . . and certain women who had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities—Mary called Magdalene, out of whom had come seven demons,

Luke 8: 2 New King James Version (NKJV)

1. Anxiety
2. Depression
3. Addiction (smoking, xanex, beer, food)
4. Physical Illness
5. Hopelessness or feelings of Failure
6. Cyclic Negative Thinking
7. Worthlessness and/or lack of Self Esteem

Oh wait, that’s just me.

But, there’s something universal about the demons, though they can take many forms: eating disorders, addictions, afflictions, victim identities. God frees me from one at a time, but I pick them back up and have to beg, plead and barter to be freed again and again. God frees me from one and I switch it to another. Sometimes, for years even, I feel like I’ve “got it” and make huge strides running forward with confidence.

Then BAM! I find myself wrestling with another demon, usually one I’ve met before, one so familiar to me that it almost feels like it IS me, but it is not. It’s only the demon, or the “Pain Body” as Eckhart Tolle calls it in A New Earth. It is on me, it is tackling me, it is trying to win me over, but it is not ME. It is not who I am. It is a separate identity from my inherent self as God’s child, of God, having God within. It is a demon telling lies in my head, believable and painful lies, but big fat lies just the same.

Fall down. Get back up. Fall down. Get back up. Fall down. Get back up.

Was it a Rocky movie that quoted Gen. Custer, “It’s not how many times you get knocked down, it’s how many times you get back up?”

It is just the human condition. Now, if I could learn to forgive myself the sin of being human it would be easier to get back up and get back in the fight.

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Kristen Herrington's Soul Mandala

My soul has been whispering at me to do something for several years.

I do not want to do it.

So I tell my soul to be quiet and then list all the reasons that doing this will suck for me and my family.

Sometimes I eat enough that she quiets down. Sometimes chocolate will shush her. I sometimes make her slur by drinking too much. I get analytical at her and tell her that, “just maybe she’s wrong.” I might work out vigorously or get centered in yoga, try a new medication or see a therapist or life coach. I have many tricks to make her stop staying this thing I don’t want to hear.

Still, her message persists. Always the same. Getting louder and more percistent as years pass and nothing has gotten better, things have only deteriorated more.

You really never met a more percistent presence than this Holy Spirit or Inner Voice or Conscience or this Wiser Woman inside me shouting the  same exact message inside me.

Do this, she says when I wake in the morning. Do this, I hear her tell me in my dreams. Do this, she tells me louder when I’m off guard soaking in the tub, watching a chick flick, reading a novel, watching the kids at ice skating, Do This!

I don’t want to, it’s too hard, I’m too scared, maybe later, soon I promise, when I’m older, when the kids have moved out, when things settle down, after the new year, when I have more money, when I’m less afraid, when I’m healtheir. Maybe it will just go away and resolve itself and I won’t have to do anything. I’m. Too. Afraid. I don’t know what will happen if I do it, I tell her back.

She just gets louder. The same percistent message. Louder. More insistent. Do This!

I always tell my daughter to listen to this voice. It’s what I tell my friends. The voice’s job is to protect you, this intuition, this holy whisper, this higher self, this message from God, you can never go wrong by following it, I tell them. And I know I’m right. But, me? I listen. I’m just to scared to follow her.

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