Sovereign, adj
1. possessing supreme or ultimate power
2. enjoying autonomy

As women, in general, we are taught from an early age to be more aware of other people’s feelings than our own. It’s how we learned to stay safe, to navigate sometimes very dangerous waters.

As a result, we often aren’t fully aware of how we feel in any given moment. Our antennae are always up, sensing the environment. Even when it’s relatively safe, the habit is so ingrained, we’re still scanning our surroundings for possible hazards in other’s behavior. We often defer to our partners’, employers’, friends’, or children’s needs without even thinking about it.

This long standing habit of hyper arousal and leaving ourselves out of the equations of our lives has a myriad of outcomes — chronic illness, loss of income, depression and anxiety, and lack of meaningful connection with other human beings, to name a few.

We are embedded in the structure of society. We live in a template of hierarchies, implicit and explicit, that can keep us from the connection we all need on a cellular level.

I have found that it’s not enough to understand this mentally, to have the mechanics of “The Patriarchy” or “White Supremacy” mapped out on the cognitive level, although that’s incredibly important. We do need to have our rational minds engaged to help us feel safe to do deeper work.

If we stop there, though, we often get stuck in anger. Anger is important, it helps us get unstuck. It helps us define what’s not working. It’s an important step in discernment. But, if we never move through anger, there’s growth we might not experience.

I want more for us. In my experience, when I can feel myself fully, I’m able to connect more deeply with those I love, and they in turn are able to feel themselves and me more completely. It’s a seeming paradox, that feeling my own boundaries allows a more rooted experience of kinship. It’s a bit like taking photos, if your lens is out of focus, you can’t see anything, and your photo won’t make sense. Once you find the focus, not only will you be able to see the main figure of the composition, but you’ll be able to see its context. If you feel yourself in focus, you can start to feel the whole picture of your life.

I remember my first experience of being in woman only space, it was a weekend in the wilds of Mendocino County. I felt something open up in my body. I still had a bit of social anxiety, I tend toward introversion, but I also experienced a palpable relaxation that was new.

Changing this habit of feeling others more than ourselves takes more than being in same gendered space. That’s a valuable start. There’s another important piece — we have to actually feel ourselves, on the physiological level. Our culture wide tendency to live in our heads leaves us without access to some of our most valuable resources – our heart connection. Our gut instinct.

The tendency to elevate other’s needs over our own is largely unconscious, and we can access those patterns through our felt senses, through feeling our bodies — noticing how fear and love show themselves on the kinesthetic level.

To do that, we need to slow down. Get quiet. Allow things to unfold at their own pace. Notice what happens when we’re not leading with our minds, when we let the heart and body come into focus. And, we need to have an experience of all that in quiet, and also witnessed by others. We need to focus the camera of our lives.

This is why I’m called to offer Sovereign Self, a Women’s Meditation and Deep Communication Circle.

Join me in this exploration. Each meeting I’ll introduce some concepts designed to ground us into the process, then offer a guided meditation. From there, we’ll join together into a Deep Communication process, a leaderless structure I learned from Lasara Allen, deepening the possibility of feeling ourselves as intact and self-complete, and also connected to others. We’ll end with time for more informal discussion and Q&A.

This is a dance, this learning to be sovereign selves. It is not quick or easy, we are unlearning lifetimes of patterning designed to keep societal structures in place that really only serve to keep power in the hands of the few. This is radical. This is personal. This is loving. This is a gentle way of approaching feeling your own power at your own pace, in a safe structure.

The talks and guided meditations will be recorded and posted online for later reference and public access. Deep Communication circles will not be recorded.

This circle is open to all who identify as female.

We’ll begin in July, exact dates to be determined. Meetings will be in person once a month, and via Zoom video conference call a second time a month. If you feel called to join us, or have questions, let me know!

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 9th, 2019 at 12:26 pm and is filed under Events, Integrating Lifestyle Changes, Life on Life's Terms, Living with Health Challenges, Meditation, Spiritual Practice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.