Good morning beloved reader,
To me, this sentence, “You think you have it all figured out,” feels like a criticism. Kind of like “Who do you think you are?”
But I’m not looking to put myself in the role of teacher, or expert, or even an authority. The truth is that we each have our own inner authority. And the rising and re-claiming of the Divine Feminine is about remembering how to TRUST our own inner authority.
Because of my experience and the in-depth reading and study I’ve done, my intention is to be a spiritual guide. And perhaps even, at times, a provocateur: to challenge you to question your own beliefs and cultural conditioning.
I am interested in sharing the truth of my own experience. I’ve learned I need to speak my truth. And I offer the truth of my experience, “on the table” meaning that of course you get to choose what you may want to pick up, or not.
Women’s voices have been suppressed for too long by the patriarchy.
And in order for us to be able to survive in the outer world of the patriarchy, we have even developed our own “Inner Patriarch” — which also suppresses the divine feminine.
The rising of the Divine Feminine is, in part, about cultivating the space where women feel free to speak our own truth; and where we may even partner with a man who is interested in supporting us by acknowledging and validating the female experience, and coming to understand how this is different from the male experience in our patriarchal culture.
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Maybe when I hear the sentence, “You think you have it all figured out,” a feeling of defensiveness arises in me because I WANT to have it all figured out: so I’ll suffer less.
But perhaps the irony here is that it’s not possible to “figure” it out.
Like the saying goes, the longest journey you will ever make is from your head to your heart. Perhaps it’s more of a matter of letting go and surrendering into my heart.
At the same time, don’t we all want to learn spiritual principles and values that can guide us in our lives to ease the suffering we so often feel in our human experience?
I’ve heard the American Tibetan-Buddhist nun, Pema Chodron often say:
Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.
And because I don’t want to suffer, this appeals to me.
I’m willing to do the inner-work that is required to lead to the cessation of suffering. To own my own shadow. To own the mud under the Lotus flower, that I need from which to grow. Are you willing to integrate your shadow too? To not “other” other people?
Sometimes a quality of character or an act may feel so abhorrent, we want to deny that we could ever do that too. But we’re all human. We need compassion for both ourselves and for others, not condemnation. It’s just not possible to eradicate the shadow. Without the dark, you cannot have the light. The question now is how do we integrate both?
Spiritual teachers like Eckhart Tolle say it’s possible to attain a state of being where there is cessation of suffering, and that he lives his every-day-life from that state of being. He has no interest in “othering” other people. Perhaps he’s more interested in harmony and humility.
Maybe I’ll never attain this state of complete cessation of suffering in this lifetime. But I certainly appreciate the spiritual principles, ideas, values, and concepts that can point me towards suffering less.
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And here I want to play with this character of “I” on the page:
This middle-aged woman — who has now lived the female human condition for 56 years — is highly sensitive and sometimes struggles when she’s with other people as she picks up their energy and mistakenly thinks it’s her own. She’s an energetic sponge. She needs to remember to practice setting boundaries — to know she has the ‘right’ to set these boundaries — and leave other people’s “mud” with them. To recognize and have compassion for the limitations of self and others. To remember that she cannot heal the world, she can only heal herself, and through doing her own inner work and healing old wounds — or in Eckhart Tolle’s words: dissolving the “pain body” — there is the possibility that her own healing may ripple out into the ocean of humanity. She cannot do it for anyone else. She can only do this deep inner work, this healing, for herself, and then remember that it may also serve those around her. Like putting on her own oxygen mask first, before she can help someone else.
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I recently listened to a podcast conversation about how these days a hunger exists within people to sense into their own depths.
How so much of what we see on social media and even in the news, just skirts the surface. And when we touch into and articulate from the depth of our own being, we call people home. We call people home to themselves. And that’s part of the healing that we can offer: calling people home to the depths of their own being.
When we go deep enough into our own specificity, into our own unique experience, we touch the universal.
When we go deep enough, it’s like we hit an aquifer that connects us all.
We learn how the individual journey connects us to the universal human journey.
But we have to be willing to follow that calling, to drop-in and go all the way into the depths. To ask ourselves, “am I in the aquifer?”
I resonate so much with that pull towards learning to trust your inner authority. That feels like a path I'm treading on. I love your thoughtful reflection and will come back to it Camilla
Thank you for this through provoking piece Camilla, I think many healers and light workers are programmed to suffer, it is the commitment to freeing ourselves that eventually will free others from the burdens that our ancestors carried. And so we continue, but we also give ourselves permission to rest, to be joyful to spend time in the light. The shadow can wait for another day. 🙏