7.4
August 18, 2021

A Letter to my Fellow Sisters: you can Sit With Us.

Hearted by

This is for my everyday women, my otherworldly women, my way-out-in-left-field women, my out-of-the-box women.

This is for the dreamers, the doers, the achievers, the believers. The wanderers, the healers, the creatrix, the matrix-undoers. This is for my paradigm weavers, the divine dancers, the God-devotees, the trophy wives. This is for the mothers, the savages, the medicine women, the weirdos.

I see you. I hear you. I feel you. All of you.

It is hard being a woman in the world today.

Heck, it’s been hard for women for eons.

It seems like no matter what we do, or how we show up, we are met with a layer of shame, control, sexualization, and coercion. And frankly, I’m tired of it. I’m f*cking bone dead tired of all of it.

And of all of it—I am so over the headbutting that takes place from woman to woman.

It’s one thing to dismantle and untangle the knots between men and women. But it’s a whole other slice of pie when you bear witness to two women up against one another.

I am so tired of the cattiness, the shaming, the blaming, the need to try to rescue, control, heal, or mother our fellow sisters through unsolicited coddling, protecting, fixing, or teaching.

Whether conscious or subconscious, there is not one woman on this planet who is not dealing with the burden of breaking generational trauma. And if she isn’t, she’s subtly carrying the burden of repeating the generational patterns. She is going through the motions, nonetheless.

Consciously dismantling and re-integrating or not, she is in that field of work. And I honor her.

I honor her stages and phases. Her temporary explorations of embodying and invoking the archetypes.

I honor her need to isolate. To search. To dig deep.

I honor her invocation to go backward in time, to recollect pieces, to sniff out clues and hints as to what makes the universe go ’round.

I honor the part where she sheds and purges, over and over again, to get even closer to the core of her truth.

I honor her bravery and her audacity to break the molds from society, to undo her engraved, indoctrinated programming and devote herself to an ever-evolving journey of truths, core beliefs, and origins.

I honor her need to rage with holy wildfire and destroy the detriments of the systems at play. I honor her need to point out what is no longer working as an attempt to be done with the abusive structures once and for all.

I see her. I feel her. I know her.

And I know firsthand her innate desire to reclaim her lost soul pieces. To redeem her sacred existence. I know that for each and every woman out there, this looks different. Yet—I know that for many women out there, who have been through the trenches of some of the most prolific and cataclysmic experiences, their transformation and rebirth into the holy self is absolutely revolutionary and revoltingly out there.

It is way out in left field from what your modern-day, innocent, quiet, small, submissive everyday suburban soccer mom shows and knows.

And that’s okay too, to completely fit in with how society wants us to look, if that feels natural to us. But this woman—the one who lives at the core of each and every one of us, whether activated or not, the wolf, the primal ancestor, the earth-based shaman—she will make your eyebrows raise.

Her path to embodiment will put questions in your brain and shake your sense of truth and self altogether.

She will challenge you to undress yourself from your layers. She will radically and with full ownership show up as her wild, untamed, and feral self. And she will move with grace in her highest, best, god-like, divine self.

She will accidently make you question everything just by looking at her.

And still, I honor her.

I know she feels the need to step full-heartedly and unapologetically into her body sovereignty after years and lifetimes of abuse. I know she feels the need to pursue her dharma and heavenly callings that have been shoved down her throat in suppression for eons. I know she feels the need to draw boundaries, to create space, to draw the line in the sand and say, “This ends with me. And this here, this piece…this begins with me.”

I know and honor the part where she reemerges back into her embodied, collected, and redeemed self. The part where she integrates back into community—this time strategically diligent about who and what occupies her time and space.

I know and fully acknowledge and absolutely value the part where she says, “This is who I am. To hell with the old paradigm.” And she knows exactly who and what she stands for at that point. Which, typically, is her own untethered commitment and devotion to God herself.

She doesn’t care what other people think.

She knows that her path from that point out is a vertical relationship between her and her creator.

And the finest and surest way to continue to honor her place in it all—is to stop making it about you.

Her path, though relevant and somewhat parallel to that of yours—despite how different it looks—it is not yours. It is her own sacred contract, deep covenant, and holy beckoning to open up and search deeper and further into.

Her path—it comes with twists and turns. It comes with stages and phases.

And I’m just here to say, there is no right way. Every step that a woman goes through in this hard and holy devotional work is absolutely crucial and necessary. Not one piece of it is cancelled and thrown in the doomsday box of hell, forever.

We have got to start being okay with where women are on their path. We have got to look at her and say, “I was once there, so I will hold the bridge, or hold the lantern as she traverses through.”

What we don’t need, however, is further shaming and blaming. We don’t need unwelcomed mothering from our fellow sisters. We don’t need the holier than thou, up on the pedestal rescuing from our fellow sisters. Unless we specifically ask for it, we don’t even need advice, remedies, or choices to choose from.

No. All of that is taken up with God.

If anything, all we truly need is to be witnessed and accepted just as we are, where we are.

We need to stop looking at one another and only seeing a tiny little speck of the process and confusing it for the entire truth. We have got to grant one another the dignity, the intelligence, the trust, the reverence, and the recognition of the organic unfolding of life—and the belief that each and every woman will get to where she is going. That wherever she is now is just a piece of the whole spectrum.

We don’t need to condemn her for her process. We don’t need to point fingers.

Not one of us has reached the “end all, be all.” And if any of us claim to have reached that point, I actually wouldn’t believe it and would have zero interest in meeting that person.

So please: if we want men to stop the coercion toward us, we have got to stop subtly doing it toward one another. We have got to stop objectifying and sexualizing pretty much everything about one another. We have got to let our sisters rise up in body autonomy, sovereignty, and liberation, however that looks for her in her process, without a distorted idea of whether she is “appropriate” or “doing it right” or not.

Her words, her voice, her choices, her work, her shorts, her bra, her suit, her skirt, her lace, her lips, her dance, her face, her art, her chest, her legs, her ass, her stance are not sexual, inappropriate, or counter-intuitive—until you shame them as such.

Sexual liberation does not make a woman a slut.

Sovereignty doesn’t make a woman susceptible for energetic siphoning.

Her vulnerability in healing does not make her a prey to all other predators out there.

So, let’s start developing healthy relationships with our own stuff—intimately, honestly, safely, authentically, accountably—so we can rightfully and honorably recognize and value that in each other without projecting our own internal woman-shaming, fearmongering, body-blaming, and slut-shaming upon one another.

Stop feeding the program that perpetuates shame. Undo the colonization.

We owe that to one another and most importantly, to ourselves.

So, if you are like me, and you have an organic drive and deep yearning to dive headfirst into reclaiming and valuing pretty much all of it, then come sit with me. You are welcome here.

It’s like the grown-up table in the high-school cafeteria, but the difference is, you don’t have to pick. The jocks, the preps, the cheerleaders, the scholars, the band geeks, the computer nerds, the mathletes, the athletes, the artists, the musicians, the philosophers, the stoners, the burnouts—everyone is welcome here.

Because at my table, nobody gets left behind.

At my table, women can be all or any of it on her path of seeking and redeeming. (With the exception that nobody ever wants to sit at the mean girl table.)

At my table, women can be spiritual and still be sexy. She can be holy and still be wildly primal. She can be aligned with the highest and best in accordance with God and still not ignore the needs and cries of her wild body. She can be a devotee, a lovemaker, a medicine woman, a businesswoman, a mother, a student, a teacher, a worker, a creatrix.

She can be playful, serious, informed, erotic, boundaried, protected, and sensual all at the same damn time. She can know and be with the wisdom of the earth, the plants, the land, the ancestors. She can be tapped into the dream worlds, the unseen, the prophets, the oracles, and still go out into reality, have a drink, have a smoke, dance, be a human.

She can be all of it and then some.

Let’s please stop limiting each other to these containers. Let’s please stop putting our truth and possibility into a tiny little box with no room for evaluation, consideration, expansion, compassion.

We have got to stop nit-picking. Bullying. Degrading. Chastening.

The first and most detrimental thing that does is it takes us away from our own individual core. It disembodies us from our own work and purpose every time we try to put a limit on our fellow sisters.

And as my birth mentor, Whapio Diane Bartlett once said, “It is not my place to know another woman’s destiny.”

And I honor that.

We must value her right to know herself, and if we can’t honor her—then lovingly, we must step away.

But for now, if you are like me, here—take a seat.

You can sit with us.

Hearted by and 1 other reader

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