The Journey of the Feminine

This is a speech I wrote in 2006 for a school "Mothers and Daughters" event. I hope you enjoy!

Good evening,
I’d like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land we are blessed to be gathering on.

This evening I’d like to share with you some of my personal history related to this topic we have gathered to explore, “Mothers & Daughters”. At first, when I was asked to do this speech I was quite overwhelmed – what could I talk about? What would I have to offer? I don’t have any daughters and I certainly didn’t grow up with the traditional mother/daughter situation. In fact, although I actually have two mothers, it can sometimes feel like I have none. So, I began to ask advice from some very wise women friends, who started to assure me that, yes I could do this – I could do it because of my history, not in spite of it. I started to feel relieved, I didn’t have to put an expert’s cap on and start reading lots of books so that I could offer you lots of research and advise. Instead, I could relax and talk about what I know, what my heart, mind & body knows about what’s at the heart of being a mother or a daughter, the essence of being female.

In my own journey, I grew for 9 months in the womb of my mother; we were connected, physically, emotionally, historically and genetically. However, when I arrived in this world, I was taken from her, kept in the hospital for one whole month without her, without a consistent person to care for me, then when the official time was right, I was given to my adoptive mother, the mother that wasn’t of my blood, my history, my genetics, but who was chosen by someone else, timing or perhaps fate, to take me home, care for me and find a way to love me.

So, 34 years on, I have two mothers, I am the mother of a 16½ year old and a 4½ year old – what have I learned from being a daughter, from having two mothers and from being a mother?

Well, if we boiled all this down, what is it that rises to the top, what is the essence of these relationships? I believe it is the sacred journey of the feminine, the precious gifts that are passed on from mothers to daughters, from wise women to our naïve innocent maidens. The gifts that are our birthright, that are within us naturally. Of course this not an easy journey, these gifts can be lost, covered over, forgotten and even made to seem unimportant. The journey to discover these gifts is of significant importance, it can be a life’s journey, a journey to discover our true purpose. It is the journey of the caterpillar to the butterfly.

I’d like to share with you now an old story that most of you have probably heard in one form or another. It’s called, “The Butterfly Story”.

Once upon a time in a land far, far away there was an old man who loved animals. One day while walking through the woods the old man found a cocoon. Feeling lonely he decided to take the cocoon home to watch its transformation.
He gently placed the cocoon on his kitchen table and watched over it for days. Suddenly on the 7th day, the cocoon started to move. It moved frantically! The old man felt sorry for the little creature inside the cocoon. He watched it struggle and struggle and struggle!
Finally the old man feeling so sorry for the cocooned creature rushed to its aide with a surgical scalpel and gently slit the cocoon so the creature could emerge. Just one slice was all it took, and the creature broke free from its cocoon - only to wilt over in a completely motionless state.
The old man did not know what to think. Had he accidentally killed the little creature? No, it’s still moving a little bit. Maybe it’s sick. Who the heck would know? he thought. He was dumbfounded, and quite perplexed. What should I do, he pondered.
Well he felt so sorry for the little creature that he decided the best thing he could do was to place the creature gently back into its cocoon. He did so, and placed a drop of honey on it to seal the cocoon, leaving the creature to nestle in its natural state.
Well, the next day he noticed that the cocoon was moving again. “Wow!” he said. I t moved and moved and struggled and struggled.
Finally the butterfly broke free from its cocoon and stretched its wings out far and wide. Big time yawn! Its beautiful wings were filled with wonderful colours! It looked around and took off. It was flying. It was so beautiful! The old man was jumping with joy! Wow! Go baby Go! And that wonderful butterfly did just that, it flew and flew till it was almost out of sight. What a joy, the old man exclaimed.

There are many versions of this story and just as many lessons to be learned from it. I would like now to reflect on the metaphor of the butterfly story and the Journey of our Feminine Nature.

There appears to me to be four stages in both journeys:
Stage One – The Struggle in the Cocoon;
Stage Two – The interruption to Nature’s Course;
Stage Three – The Healing;
Stage Four – The Emergence of the Butterfly.



Stage One – The Struggle in the Cocoon.
At the beginning of this story the cocoon is naturally doing what nature intended, until the old man comes along and removes it. Just like the cocoon, our daughters and young girls are born into this world so full of potential, each with their own unique gifts to offer the world and each with the innate gifts of the feminine naturally within them– they are already there just waiting to unfold. The old man represents the patriarchal society within which we live. This western society places higher value on ‘doing’ rather than on ‘being’, on ‘achieving’ rather than ‘experiencing’, on ‘thinking’ more than ‘feeling’. Because the patriarchy is more dominant and ignores the gifts of the feminine it interferes with the natural progression of these gifts and the passing on of these gifts from women to their daughters. This is where the struggle begins.

Without the vital feminine to balance the patriarchal principle, there is a certain barrenness to life. Creativity and personal development are stifled. It is our quest to become more conscious, to feel deeply, to connect, to nurture, to protect, to allow expression and creativity, to flow with our natural cycles, to follow our instincts and intuition. To endure the struggle is to add richness and meaning and a new dimension to life.

Intuition is the treasure of woman’s psyche. It is like a divining instrument, a crystal through which one can see with uncanny interior vision. It is like a wise old woman who is with you always telling you exactly which way to go. A woman’s power of intuition is the blessing to be handed down from mother to daughter. This great power is composed of lightning fast inner seeing, inner hearing, inner sensing and inner knowing.

So, what are the struggles of the cocoon stage, what lessons do we have to learn to reconnect to this innate wisdom?

There are many ways to retrieve one’s intuitive knowing. We must take the journey through the realms of mystery, darkness, chaos, unity and destiny by offering our body, mind, heart, soul and spirit, to fully realize our intuitive abilities and to receive the many gifts of intuition.

Let’s look at the first realm…when we offer our body to the realm of mystery we will receive the gift of INSTINCT. All essential functions in our body are in the hands of instinct, for example, breathing, heartbeat, digestion. The body does these things naturally without the aid of the mind. Sometimes we ‘get a hunch’, or just ‘have a feeling’, something within us just knows without having to understand, this is our instinct.
I’d like you just to reflect for a moment. When you feel things instinctively, what part of your body registers that instinct? What aspect of yourself still feels mysterious to you?

In the second realm…when we offer our heart to the realm of darkness we receive the gift of INTIMACY. Intimacy is when we can connect so deeply with ourselves that it becomes easy to connect with others. Being intimate gives meaning to our lives and requires us to risk all and to reveal all including our forceful, dominating parts, our deep sensitive wounded parts, our everyday humdrum parts and sometimes our wild creative parts.
Over to you now, when you open to an intimate connection, where in your body do you feel either fear or excitement about that prospect? What is the thing about you which remains in the darkness awaiting discovery?

In the third realm…when we offer our mind to the realm of chaos we receive the gift of INTENTION. Intention is what carries us through the hardest times. It requires us to enter the realm of chaos to find our own wisdom. The teaching of chaos is to seek the opposite. When you’re feeling rushed, move more slowly. When you’re feeling your creativity blocked, keep your hands moving over the page. When you’re paralysed with fear, crank up the music and dance. For, hidden in the chaos, like the eye of a hurricane, is the moving centre, your power centre, where all the good stuff is waiting to be felt. Then sudden insight becomes your ally and helps you set clear intentions.
If you allowed yourself to live with all your passion and devotion, what in this moment, would your intention for your life be? When you become aware of your intentions, and know what is right for you, without judgement, how does your body feel?

In the fourth realm…when we offer our soul to the realm of unity we receive the gift of INTEGRITY. Women who are comfortable in their own skin, in their own emotions, with their own opinions; women who aren’t constantly seeking validation, approval, or feedback; women who have faith in themselves; women who move instinctively, relate intimately, think imaginatively – women who are integrated, who live soulfully……. Isn’t this how we would all want to be? Integrity is not about being right or good, it is about being real! To live with integrity we must be able to answer these questions: Who am I? Who am I with? What is my place? It’s only when we can instinctively answer these three questions that we are moving on the soul plane. If we know who we are, we know what we need and how to be. If we know who we are with, we know what they need and how to give it to them. If we know the place we want to inhabit, we know how to fit in and what we have to offer.
How would your life be if you could embrace a soulful, integrated existence? What is the part of your body that knows when your actions have integrity?

In the final realm…when we offer our spirit to the realm of destiny we receive the gift of INSPIRATION. When one is in harmony, one resonates clarity, one’s voice rings true and becomes an inspiration to all who hear it. Inspiration catalyses transformation, whether its transforming a block of clay into sculpture, improvisations into symphonies, or the contents of your veggie crisper into a nourishing soup. It’s the creative spark that ignites a work of art, a garden, or a relationship.
What do you usually find inspiration in? If you could connect with your inspiration, what would be your unique contribution to this world?

Our challenge in exploring these realms is to keep a wary eye out for our ego, which will want to ensnare us in its own web of self-importance…

In the realm of mystery, it will try to define you.
In the realm of darkness, it will try to hide you.
In the realm of chaos, it will try to diminish you.
In the realm of unity, it will try to separate you.
In the realm of destiny, it will try to sabotage you.

Stage Two - The Interruption to Nature’s Course
In this part of the Butterfly story the old man takes a knife and makes an incision in the cocoon. The natural process of development has been interrupted. In life, the death of ones mother, divorce, adoption, abuse, neglect or some lack of mothering either physically or emotionally can be like the incision – a painful interruption to the natural growth of one’s psyche.

If the cocoon is left wide open and the creature emerges, it is not yet fully formed; it is not yet fully initiated. A great many things can happen to the woman, who for some reason or another has not completed her journey to own her feminine wisdom. You may have seen her or been her at some stage. This is the woman who lives according to others’ rules. She tries to bend and shape herself into something she is not. She’ll try to fit in where she doesn’t belong, she’ll consider herself inferior, be afraid to say “no” and will accept criticism other’s place on her.

The woman who has lost her way will be cold and unable to feel. She will be frozen, lacking creativity and vitality and a zest for life. She will make bad choices, choose bad company, keep knocking at the wrong door, choose the wrong ‘medicine’ and she’ll look for love in all the wrong places. This is the woman who is not in touch with her deep inner knowing and wisdom, her journey has been interrupted.

I know very strongly, that I have been this woman. I was very lost for over a decade. I didn’t have any solid, strong, wise woman role models while I was growing up. I was surrounded by strong males, two older brothers, a father, male cousins, a strong patriarchal town and an unempowered mother. My journey was to be a long one. I looked for love in all the wrong places. I became a mother at seventeen. I was an unmothered child learning how to be a mother. This got me into all sorts of trouble. I spent much time living according to other’s rules, trying to squeeze myself into places where I just didn’t fit, allowing other’s to dictate and criticise, sometimes in obvious ways but mostly in hidden subtle ways. I was afraid to say “no” because I didn’t know who I was or what I truly wanted for myself.

But, like in the Butterfly Story, there is hope….


Stage Three – The Healing
Of course, this interruption to our natural growth is painful, it cannot ever be changed or erased, but must be properly mourned before one can ever hope to be prepared for the challenges of the external world. Then after the mourning and acceptance of the love one did not receive in childhood, this pain can be eased and the natural progression can be rebuilt, like the adding of the honey to the cocoon.

For any woman or young girl who has experienced this interruption to their natural growth here’s a short story of hope…

Once, a lady was transplanting a hedgerow of lilac. One great bush was dead from a mysterious cause, but the rest were alive and shaggy with purple in springtime. The dead one cracked and crunched like peanut brittle as she dug it out. She found that its root system was attached to all the other living lilacs up and down the fence line. Even more astounding, the dead one was the “mother”. She had the thickest and oldest roots; all her big babies were doing fine even though she herself was boots up, so to speak.

Lilacs reproduce with what is called a sucker system, so each tree is a root offshoot of the primal parent. In this system, even if the mother fails, the offspring can survive. This is the psychic pattern and promise for those with little or no mothering. Even though the mother somehow falls over, even though she has nothing to offer, the offspring will develop and grow independently and still thrive.

When girls or even women who have lost all sense of themselves are in the presence of other lost women, there is little hope for their healing. However, when our daughters and women have access to wise women, women whose instincts are intact, women who feel deeply, who live from a deeper sense of knowing, who create with passion, women who know how to discern this from that, whose lives are in rhythm and flow, then there is hope. Then there is a path to follow.

As I think back, I can see my own path; I can see the wise women who were there for me along the long road from being a naïve girl to becoming a woman. At a mere 18 years of age, there was my boyfriend’s mother and his beautiful sister who took me under their wing and nurtured me and taught me that I was great and ok just the way I was. Then there was a new but very dear friend that came along who, she herself, had had very strong mothering. She taught me how to have fun without giving myself away and to start thinking about the future. That set me on my journey to university. Over the last twelve years since then, I have come across many wise women, but none as special as those I have met in the last few years who have had the courage to nurture their own souls, to take time out of their busy lives to go inside, go deeply into their feelings, experiencing and owning their pain and reaching that beautiful butterfly that exists at the core and in so doing become my role models, my friends and my greatest support.

I encourage you, both women and girls, who are here this evening, over the next few days, to reflect on the special females who have touched your life, those who have made a difference to who you are and perhaps, see if you can find a way to let them know.


Stage Four – The Emergence of the Butterfly
Like the butterfly, the woman who has engaged in the journey of her own psychological development exudes a certain ‘presence’, a combination of joy and wisdom. She is ‘one-in-herself’; free of the confines of convention; she lives her life as she chooses. Whatever she undertakes, she does so with confidence, without regression, submissiveness or a feeling of inferiority.

Such a woman is also aware of the cyclic rhythms of her body, and intuitively moves with the ebb and flow of changing energy or moods. She acknowledges her own cyclic nature; understanding her need for extraverted times as well as for times of seclusion and introspection. Both are comfortable positions when she is in harmony with her own unique rhythms.

Actively connecting to our feminine enables us to be related to our own emotions, and also to touch the emotional substance of another. The process of what scientists call “emotional attunement” enables us to achieve a direct connection between our children and ourselves. This alignment is a form of interpersonal integration. At the heart of this attuning is the sharing of nonverbal signals, including tone of voice, eye contact, facial expressions, gestures and timing & intensity of responses. Being mindful of these signals in our daughters is paralleled by our own awareness of the sensations of our own bodies. Bodily sensations form an important foundation for knowing how we feel and what has meaning in our lives. Emotional communication enables us to actually feel the joy of our children and to share and amplify such positive states with them. Such emotional joining also enables us to feel our children’s pain and then to soothe their distress with our nurturing connection. Emotional communication connects us more fully to others and to ourselves.

I’d like to offer a quote that I recently heard, for parents, teachers and anyone that has the great responsibility of working with or caring for our children, especially our young girls.
“Each child comes to us with a gift.
It is our task to help them unwrap it”.
Unfortunately, not many of us have had the support to unwrap our own amazing gift and we can lack the modelling for how to do this for our own daughters and young girls. This is when I believe, the psychological journey to retrieve the gifts of our innate feminine nature, our intuition, is essential in helping our daughters and young girls unwrap their sacred treasure.

Monique Rutherford, 2006
Inside Out Counselling Service
www.insideout-counselling.com.au


Visualisation
I invite you now to find a way to relax and to sit as comfortably as you possibly can for a few minutes more while I play some music and offer a visualisation developed by a wonderful woman, Ruth Strelan. All you have to do is sit back, relax, follow my voice, close your eyes if you feel comfortable to do so and allow your imagination to do the rest.
I’ll ask you to begin by bringing your awareness to your breath, allowing a big deep breath in, filling your lungs and then allowing it to simply drop out of your body and as you do so, allowing your whole body to simply let go and melt into your chair. See if you can do this several times being mindful of letting go of any holding or tightness in your body. If at any time you feel distracted, simply come back to the breath and connect with your own rhythm, your own natural cycle of life.
Let’s begin…
“Transformation” by Ruth Strelan
As you close your eyes picture yourself as a caterpillar, a tiny newly hatched caterpillar lying on a leaf of a milkweed plant. The sky above you is blue, the sun warms your body, and the leaf is succulent and tasty. As you munch on the leaf you feel the skin of your body becoming tighter and tighter, until it actually begins to tear apart. As you wriggle your way forward you realize that you are actually losing your skin and there is a new layer underneath – check what colour it is, how you feel about leaving the old skin behind and how you feel about this new look.

As you continue to munch on the leaf this actually happens to you four more times.

And then you have a sense that an even more important change is about to take place. You’ve tired of eating the milkweed leaf and you crawl away from it and find a safe place. There you make yourself a silk-like mat and attach yourself to it, allowing yourself to hang from it. Once again your skin begins to split, but this time as you shed it you begin to feel yourself completely encased in a kind of protective shell that is hardening around you.

There are still changes happening. No longer are you happily munching on a juicy leaf; instead you are hanging precariously from a twig of the bush. The air around you has changed and you sense that the sky is now dark and cloudy. The wind is blowing strong, and you hear the sound of a storm coming. There is thunder and rain and the strong wind makes you sway backwards and forwards.

Inside you feel change as well. On your back you feel two bumps emerging and the space in your cocoon becomes more and more crowded until you feel unable to move at all. You remain completely still and you realize that the storm has also passed.

Suddenly you feel a loosening of your cocoon and some cool air on part of your body. You begin to wriggle and you realize that the shell of your cocoon is split and part of you is pushing its way out into the open. More than anything now you want to get out. You push and wriggle as hard as you can, but then it becomes too much and you have to rest again. As your energy begins to return, you begin to try again – wriggling, pushing, squirming, stretching. Gradually more and more of you emerges until suddenly, with a final push, you become free of your cocoon. But your energy is spent, and you cling to the silky mat that you attached yourself to.

Gradually your energy returns once more and there is a strange pulsating in your back. As you stretch yourself you realize that you are different now – that the bumps you felt on your back are wings. You take a breath, stretch them out, and look at the possibilities that lie before you……Take some time to be with that.

When you feel ready, come back to this room, to being yourself, but stay connected to where you have been. Feel free to sit back and watch the following display then you may like to turn to someone near you and share a bit about your experience.