Stepping into my power - by Sophie

On January 1st, this year, I made my New Year’s resolution – this year I want to step into my feminine power. I didn’t have the slightest clue how this would happen, I didn’t even know what it meant. It just felt as true as true can feel. When I said it to myself “my feminine power”, it surged like an electric current in my veins, the inner ‘yes’ was so loud, I felt fortified by steel, well, more like bamboo. I felt held, seen, certain, alive, joyful, terrified.

I walked down to the beach underneath the house we were renting on Vashon island near Seattle and looked out to the water and said it to the sea, “this year I want to step into my feminine power”. And an answer came back in the form of four sea otters (four!) slinking through the water towards me. They looked right at me, coquettishly, as if tempting me to join them, then swan away, flipping and rolling in the little waves. Then again, towards me, I swear, they were even winking. Then rolling away, playing in the water, batting eachother softly with their paws and rubbing their fur up against eachother. I watched them for twenty minutes, playing in the foamy water, until they disappeared out of sight.

In some native American teachings, otter represents woman medicine. The soft, joyful, playful feminine, the unbound, all-embracing, sensual animal. It felt like a perfect beginning to this process I had no clue about, but wanted, yearned for with my very bones.

And now here I am, it’s the middle of May, I’m approaching the middle of my feminine power year and yesterday I had a total meltdown. Snot pouring, tears flying, roaring at my husband, who was doing all he could with this strange, flailing creature. “I don’t know if I’m living into my feminine power” I wailed. “How do I know???”.

I sat with that feeling all night, and awoke this morning with it still alive. Just a little less snot and roaring. How do I know? How do I know when I’m growing in my feminine power? What does it look like? What doesn’t it look like?

I began to write – one of the main ways I get to my truth - asking the question, what do I want to see by Dec 2012 as the fruits of my quest? What does it mean for me to be in my feminine power? Immediately I got vague, confused, antsy and it hit me. That which might be totally obvious to everyone else, all these amazing treesisters, but smacked me around the face for the first time like a big wet trout. This isn’t the kind of shit you can write an essay about! Because this isn’t a process that I can control, or even get to with my mind. It’s not one to be understood, analysed, but to be met with something different, something new.

Trust.

Perhaps what this process needs is just to be nurtured and experienced, and trusted. Because perhaps something new is being birthed in me, something so new that I don’t even have a name for it, don’t even have words to describe it. Maybe this is a question of faith. Like Alice Walker says, a question of opening to the ‘absolute goodness of the earth’, not quantifying or analyzing her greatness, just relaxing into her supremely capable hands and allowing myself to be molded, unfolded, turned inside out and on my head. To allow myself to walk face first into the walls my mind has erected, and, still standing, look at them, allow myself to melt into puddles of tears of grief at their existence, and let that grief work its magic.

Perhaps it will melt the walls, help me to see the mental and emotional cement that has held them together for so long. Or maybe the tears will carve a way past the walls that I couldn’t see before. And maybe I’ll just be left sitting in even more puddles of tears and snot that I don’t understand one iota, but am invited to trust.

What if asking the feminine to work her way through me, asking to grow into my feminine power looks nothing like I expected it to look? What then? Can I trust when all is turned inside out and upside down? Can I trust in the process, and in the absolute goodness of the earth, knowing that something new is being born? Can I let her in – into all my dark places, and can I let the tears that come when she is there melt and carve me? Can I let her revolutionise that very place that my thoughts are formed – a place crafted in a more masculine paradigm which taught me that control, and analysis and looking out for me meant safety? Can I let her soften that place like butter in the sun, soften control into trust, and analysis into curiosity and ‘me’ mind into ‘us’.

Yesterday my panic was about not seeing fruits of my quest, about not knowing if anything is even happening to bring me closer to this elusive feminine power. And today I see that the answer, at first frustrating, then deeply relaxing, is that I just don’t know what it will look like. But I know that I’ve been surprised at myself many times already in these five months; surprised by new ways of behaving, surprised at times I said no, simply no, as a complete sentence, surprised by new little confidences, surprised that it was me my dear friend reached out to when her relationship began to dissolve earlier this year, surprised to hear the words of support that came from my mouth that helped her to rebuild it, surprised to have helped birth the TreeSisters Women’s Circle retreat this summer, surprised to be sitting here, writing this, feeling slightly more comfortable with the utterly unknown.

So, goodbye control and analysis of this precious process (at least for ten minutes). I will not make you smaller in these ways. But I will instead open to you, trust you and god, expect surprises.