The body speaks what the mind cannot. The deeper question is, are you listening? Your true embodiment can only be expressed when your soul is able to position itself to the physical world, settle into it fully and feel completely safe to stay.
It is not uncommon to feel disembodied, unsafe, or distant from your true self. The damage from trauma, which becomes part of our embodiment, is because our full way of being was not welcomed or safe. Let me ask you a question, were all parts of you accepted as a little girl, teen, or young woman? Or did you have to hide parts of yourself for safety, belonging, or fear of judgment? What do you remember? Sometimes entire aspects of our psyche are completely blocked out or repressed after hiding.
I will never forget the day I finally allowed myself to feel the despair that my whole life did not reflect the feelings inside my soul. This happened only years after listening to my body and leaning into the edges that I felt alone in but home. I had repressed pretty much most of my true self. When we have awareness of truth, it means we have to make changes to reflect that truth. It is not surprising that we try to forget out of fear. If I was honest, I was scared to death. Sylvia Brinton Perera writes, “we all have archaic depths that are embodied in us which are capable of taking us over and shaking us to the core”. That is what it felt like for me. Wildly unknown yet deeper sensation of coming home for the first time.
Early in life, I was led to believe the American dream would mean safety and happiness. I did not know in my early years, this dream was built on strong and zealous ambition founded on exploiting people for quick arbitrary gains and growing scapegoats.
Nevertheless, I was overworked to achieve the promise of the American dream and it was all grounded on complete falsehood. I was trying to achieve worth based on the value I contribute to a capitalistic and masculine society. My natural way of being and capacity to love the world was drowned out by the doing. I pushed, overworked, and disconnected. Nothing outside matched the inside of me. The embodiment of my soul was missing.
Finally in graduate school, I learned of the world’s first love story, two thousand years older than the Bible. A story shrouded with mystery, eroticism, and compassion. It is a sacred myth of a woman named Inanna seeking wisdom and wholeness. In doing so, she finds herself outside the traps of a masculine world that has “forced the binary level of feminine power into dormancy”. (1)
This myth explores a whole new level of connection. With Inanna, she enters the place where all women have permission to explore: the place where not all our energies have order. Like Inanna, I was broken over and over again, before I learned who I was. This picture resembles how I truly felt deep on the inside.
Through experience and exploration, like Inanna, I began to feel again what I, my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmothers lost from colonization. I began to feel through my body, parts that had never been expressed.
The most astonishing thing is that I did not turn evil, and wicked things did not happen to me, as they tell you. Actually, my life and people became more sacred. Let me share a deeper glimpse. In her book Descent to the Goddess (1981), Perera writes, “What has been valued in the West in women has too often been defined only in relation to the masculine: the good, nurturant mother and wife; the sweet, docile agreeable daughter; the gently supportive of bright achieving partner. This collective model was INADEQUATE for my life. “We silence ourselves trying to compress our souls into it just as surely as our grandmothers deformed their fully breathing bodies with corsets for the sake of an ideal.”(2) I remember feeling this, similar to a caged animal needing to run wild. As natural as this instinct felt, it was unfamiliar and uncertain, and no woman I knew spoke of it.
Where are we to find the full mystery and potency of the feminine? Who will teach the young girls of our generation?
Collectively, we are experiencing the return to the “sacred feminine”. But I wonder if it is enough? Because present-day society has not understood and feared the process which women must undergo to claim their power and wisdom. It has recognized only the masculine process of self-realization. Women who have become alienated from the feminine are assumed to have the energies, drive, and attitudes of the masculine. It is a tragic result of the lack of recognition of a separate and unique feminine process…
Let me clear, I am not writing about gender. Rather, the acknowledgement of the intrinsic need for a balance of energy in all people. The feminine energy that receives for the sake of building resilience and intuition. The language of the soul. Maybe that is why humanity is disconnected, always seeking for more. This imbalance in energy has led to fatigue, depression, anxiety, and greed. The feminine nurtures from abundance and wisdom, but instead is met with scarcity, hostility, and disconnection. Beloved sisters, take down the armor. It is far more than learning to be strong, rather than learning to soften and receive help. Like Inanna, start telling your own story. In darkness, receive, be vulnerable, and then rise.
1). Sylvia Brinton Perera (“Descent to the Goddess”)
2). The Heroine’s Journey Workbook, by Maureen Murdock
About the Author:
Raechel Morrow, Depth & Spiritual Psychologist, Yoga Trainer, Speaker, Certified Yoga Therapist and Certified Trauma Specialist. After years of researching, learning, and working in the field of trauma treatment, she was overwhelmed with the profound understanding of the value of actively seeking what was lost from the trauma of colonization.