Compassionate: is empathetic, warm, open-hearted
Complementary: lives in concert with others, augmenting the whole with her presence
Connective: desires to link hands and hearts
Cooperative: is able to work with others without needing to be in control
Diffuse: perceives and understands a wide range of stimuli
Relational: is interested in preserving and deepening relationships
Gentle: is able to live gently with herself and others
Receptive: is open to receive the new, different, and wondrous
Empowering: awakens others to their potential
Forgiving: realizes that we are all imperfect and that nonforgiveness dams the natural flow of spirit
Introspective: is drawn to the spiritual and the philosophical
Healing: carries the ability to heal body, mind, and spirit through talent for listening deeply to her internal, inherent wisdom
Recognizing these qualities as ones that we possess, or can aspire to possess, frequently helps us recognize and respect our innate talent to usher in to all situations the energy of love and acceptance. As with everything—and much to our chagrin at times—the revolution of compassion, caring, and kindness exemplified by the Divine Feminine needs to begin within ourselves. As the song says, “Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.” A revolution of love, a revolution of respect, a revolution of acceptance, tolerance, and inclusion. All of these values must first be nurtured in our own hearts and souls, and in our intimate social groups, if they are to be transformative for the whole. To begin this revolution of love, we need to brave our fears, extricate ourselves from the dung heap of disrespect and dismissal, and honor who we truly are.
FREEZE-DRIED FEMININE
In what was for me an eye-opening conversation, a dear friend was telling me that her adult daughter only seemed to relate to her when she needed something. “It's as if she freeze-dries me and puts me on a shelf until she needs something. Then she takes me down, reconstitutes me with her tears, and fully expects me to help her.” I answered, “And you do, right?”
She moaned, “Yes. . .” and we laughed in recognition.
As I reflected on our talk, I realized that over the last several hundred years, our society, both consciously and unconsciously, has attempted to freeze-dry feminine energy and power, stow it safely in a corked jar, and bury it in the remote recesses of a dark cavern. As well as trying to silence women's intuition and wisdom, society has denigrated the Divine Feminine qualities of cooperation, inclusion, receptivity, and compassion, to name only a few, by relegating them to the second-class areas of servitude and sacrifice.
As sad as I am to admit it, the attempts to bury the innate spiritual qualities of the Divine Feminine were certainly successful with me. For many years, my sense of spiritual and personal power lay dormant, and I felt no sense of connection to the Divine Feminine or to the divinity within myself. Although I tried to act out feminine values by loving, caring, and supporting others, my service sprang mostly from fear and a sense of obligation rather than flowing freely from my heart. I did what I should do and neither embodied the values, spoke with the voice, nor radiated the joy of the Divine Feminine. She was asleep, freeze-dried in my heart, buried under mounds of false beliefs, societal injunctions, and visceral fears.
From talking with friends and working with clients, I know that my barren experience was not unique.
WAKE-UP CALLS
The Divine Feminine is issuing wake-up calls. And the most important of those calls are the ones stirring within our own hearts. Such stirrings may come in the form of little nudges to invoke a female power or deity while praying, intuitive flashes that we have the courage to voice and act upon, acts of kindness, love, and wisdom that effortlessly bubble from us, feeling intensely connected to nature, joyous bursts of creativity, or soft, silent whispers that come during dreams or meditation.
As we pay rapt and respectful attention to the whispers of the Divine Feminine within, we can usually find the courage to restructure our values around a core of compassion and connectedness toward both ourselves and others. Waking up to the Divine Feminine within our souls and then heeding her gentle pushes and pulls empowers us to live the expanded vision of self we are being shown. The invitation has been sent. With courage, commitment and intention, we can become our true selves: authentic, heart-centered women, light-bearers in our beleaguered world.
CHAPTER TWO
COURAGE: YOU HAVE IT!
I have met brave women who are exploring the outer edges of human possibility, with no history to guide them, and with a courage to make themselves vulnerable that I find moving beyond words.
GLORIA STEINEM
Are you often filling the wants and needs of others without having your own met? Do deadlines and difficult people leave you feeling frazzled? Do you feel overworked and under-appreciated? Do you grapple with self-limiting fears? Are you more an enemy than a friend to yourself?
Despite the tremendous changes of the last fifty years and the new vision of ourselves we've been given, many women will still answer “yes” to the above questions. Often we are caught in a tangled web of emotional dependence, afraid to express who we really are.
EMOTIONAL STRENGTH AND SELF-ESTEEM
Emotional strength flows from a healthy and hearty sense of selfesteem. Emotionally strong women know themselves well, honor their strengths, nonjudgmentally work on their weaknesses, and treat themselves—and consequently others—with respect, understanding, and kindness. When a woman is emotionally strong, she is able to be gentle with herself and call upon her own inner core of strength as her main support even in the midst of chaos and failure.
For the vast majority of us, emotional strength and high self-esteem are attributes that we have worked diligently to attain, not ones that came easily or automatically. Courageously we build, balance, and stabilize our internal ego structure by overcoming one tiny—or tremendous—fear at a time and embrace a new vision of ourselves one insight at a time.
Uncovering, strengthening, and allowing our authentic self full expression is an ongoing, eternal process, a dance with our soul.
WHAT IS EMOTIONAL DEPENDENCE?
Emotional dependence is the opposite of emotional strength. It means needing to have others to survive, wanting others to “do it for us,” and depending on others to give us our self-image, make our decisions, and take care of us financially. When we are emotionally dependent, we look to others for our happiness, our concept of “self,” and our emotional well-being. Such vulnerability necessitates a search for and dependence on outer support for a sense of our own worth.
Being emotionally dependent puts us at the mercy of our fears and other people's whims, and severely limits our freedom to be ourselves. Although our minds often know better, when we are emotionally dependent, we feel that others hold the key to our wellbeing, that they must know better than we do what is good for us. Or, we may believe that we must give ourselves away in order to gain and hold someone's love. That belief makes reassurance a necessity rather than a nicety.
Before I ever heard the term “emotional dependence,” I knew that, in some mysterious way, I turned my life over to other people. It didn't really matter