Being a woman today
As Sue Monk Kidd writes about her experiences & those of many women in her book “The Dance of the Dissident Daughter”, with hindsight I slept walked through the first decades of my life. Unwittingly I was a passive recipient of many social & cultural ideas about what it was to be female, which perhaps mostly influenced who I thought I ‘should’ be in someone else’s eyes.
The impact of these were gentle yet insidious – ranging from the choices I made about my work to how I objectified my own body. Sadly understanding & cherishing my unique identity & how this related to me being a girl & then a woman was never something that was offered or encouraged.
The combined experiences of having fertility issues & then finally becoming a mother in my mid-30s was when I most keenly felt the difference in being a woman – in terms of being subjected to medical procedures, being pregnant, giving birth & then being the main care giver for my daughter. In the process of exploring what it meant to be a mother, I also had an awakening about how I felt about being a woman.
Much is now acknowledged about the ‘feminine wound’, which has come about through the socialisation & treatment of women in our western, capitalist, Christian & largely patriarchal culture over the last few hundred if not thousands of years. This involves being taken away from our inherent connection with nature, our own sense of ourselves, our inner authority & relationship with our own bodies. On a larger scale, this can be seen to be directly correlated with humanity becoming disassociated with the Earth:
“the same kind of acts that are perpetrated against us, our daughters & our mothers, are perpetrated against the Planet; the Earth which gives us life, the Earth with which women have for so long being identified”
Sharon Blackie
The way forward from here - for me & other women - will be a continuous, organic & creative path that involves grieving for what has been in our collective pasts, exploring what we need & want for ourselves in this modern world & reclaiming lost parts of ourselves. This will be a unique journey for each woman as it takes place within her wider life story – through the story of her ancestors, her family of origin, her cultural & racial influences & personal experiences in this life.
Jung believed that the Self – the deeper or more soulful part of who we are - wants to be realised through our journey in life. What is to be gained for each woman is to understand & honour her own ‘authenticity’ in that she becomes the ‘author’ in her own life. Empowerment comes into a woman’s life as she finds her own inner ‘authority’ with the meaning for this coming from the Greek ‘to stand forth with power & dignity’.
I feel that this is important given the number of options & pressures which many women face today, including decisions about work, balancing family life & often still having greater care giving & domestic responsibilities.
If life does not offer her the opportunity to be connected to her own deeper journey, it is crucial to offer herself a space for her thoughts & feelings to be acknowledged.
To reflect, look after & value herself.
