Answering The Call: a Return to Sacred Feminine Spirituality
I'm in the business of women's stories.
I have been for years, as a designer, entrepreneur, business mentor and eventually as a Psychotherapist in Private Practice. When I talk with women who are approaching or in midlife, so many of them tell me different versions of the same story: one of an unrequited love.
I don't so much mean romantic love (though a romance with oneself is, in fact, a thing). I mean the confronting sense of longing that women find themselves wrestling with, just on the other side of 'someday'. A pervasive feeling that, no matter how far they've come or what they've achieved, something essential is still missing. They hear a 'call' compelling them to seek something that's unrelenting yet also unclear.
Why women grapple with fulfillment.
Despite the call's persistence, these women cannot, for the life of them, tell me what's missing. It's like the message is coming though some kind of distorting filter, or in an unknown language. Women who hear this call seldom know how to decode it, or how to answer. What they always know is that it's real. Despite being mysterious and even frustrating, this call that's drawing them to parts unknown has an innate ring of truth.
As a child of the 80's I was among the first young women to receive the great cultural memo of my generation: "you're officially allowed to have it all". But there was no follow up memo telling us what 'all' meant, how to go about finding it or how to know when we were in possession of it - this great 'all'. So, we did our best in the pursuit of the closest thing we understood, which was to be equal. By this, of course, I mean equal with our male counterparts and all of the 'all' they had been entitled to for all of time.
We've come a long way in not so many years. I remind myself that my own mother, when she and my father first married and moved in together, was denied the right to put the electricity in her name, despite choosing to call and give them her business. Outrageous, right? This was a mere 50 years ago.
Despite how far we've come, and we have, there's an elusive substrate layer women are still trying to chisel through to access real fulfillment. I hear it in the unrequited tales they tell.
They tell me they're trying to connect with something just beyond reach. Something they feel more than they know, something they hear more than they see. Many of them tell me they have good lives, lives they're proud of and grateful for (always they mention the gratitude, so afraid of being caught without it) and then they tell me that they simply do not understand why this "call" would call on them at all. They say this message within basically distills down to one word, "more", and they are horrified by the implication.
"Many women still subconsciously consider equality to be a privilege when it is, in fact, a baseline."
More? Wanting more is a confronting concept to every woman who's ever been told that she's just lucky to be allowed to have it all. There's a lot to unpack there, but this much is clear to me: many women still subconsciously consider equality to be a privilege when it is, in fact, a baseline. A minimum. A fundamental human right.
Whether you consider this a nuanced difference or a great divide, the way women regard their freedom has great bearing on what they do with it.
Internalized patriarchy & growing pains.
The question of what women truly, deeply want in this world is often lost in the snow-blindness of what we are now allowed to want. After about 2,000 years of oppression, women were granted the freedom to have careers, to divorce if needed, to remain single, to marry another woman, to vote, to be judges and police, to have babies on their own with purchased sperm from men they never wish to meet, ... to have the utilities they pay for put in their own name.
It is glorious, it has happened fast (relatively speaking), and we have skipped some steps on this light-speed journey. Is it any surprise? The list of liberties I've just cited still leaves me reeling with gratitude and amazement. So many women feel that same feeling when they reflect on their own lives. They say things to me like:
"I've accomplished everything I set out to do..."
"I have everything I dreamed of growing up..."
"I have so much more than my parents did..."
"I set goals my mother wouldn't have dreamed of, and I achieved them..."
"I don't know what more I could want..."
In essence, they tell me that they did the math, worked the equation and ended up on target, just as planned and maybe even a bit better. Or if they tell me things didn't go as planned, they tell me, with great relief, that they were just thankful to have options and choices. These are all perfectly valid feelings.
Yet they're so often saying these things not as assertions of fulfillment, but as reasons why they should feel fulfilled when... they don't. The idea that we have no right to feel unfulfilled is the Olympic anthem of Playing Small, and wherever we're playing small, internalized patriarchy has seeded itself.
When women believe they have no right or reason to feel unfulfilled, the idea of wanting "more" is spiky, and laden with feelings of failure and shame. Why? Usually because some part of us, often long ago, agreed to align our expectations with someone else's limits.
Enter internalized patriarchy: subconscious, self-limiting beliefs that run like a power-sucking program in the background. When we drill down to these sneaky, internalized teachings in therapy and I ask, "whose belief is that?", they can't answer me. But there the belief is, making hidden messes and paying no rent.
Here's the wild part: these beliefs I speak of? The ones quietly sabotaging our full Self-expression? They aren't beliefs at all. They're teachings, distinguished by the fact that it's someone else's thought masquerading as your own. This very often begins in our youth, when we don't yet have the skills of discernment and critical thinking. A teaching takes root as a belief when it isn't sufficiently questioned. It can happen in adulthood, as well.
Why does this matter? When we don't understand the difference, internally, between beliefs & teachings, we make life choices with navigational tools that aren't even ours. This is so often the real reason we feel lost. It's less about where we find ourselves, and more about how we got there.
Inner & Outer Jurisdiction.
The hard-earned legal rights of women that have taken so long to reclaim are sacred. They are also concrete, measurable, visible and external. The right to pursue our external wants (careers, voting... utilities in our own name), these are granted or denied by the laws of our land.
Who grants us the right to pursue our internal wants? How do we reclaim those? Is it even true that we need permission? Do we even know that covert teachings could be holding us back?
Internalized patriarchy has us dismissing ourselves as we have been dismissed. Dismissing the 'call' to more as we have been dismissed. It is the reason the 'call' is so elusive - we are conditioned out of our natural capacity to hear and attune with our own inner voice, our intuition, our gnosis. And all of this, my loves, is a trap.
This trap has us questioning ourselves. looking to the horizon, seeking permission or approval from "out there" and (perhaps even for years) trying to figure out where this contrary, elusive 'call' to more - the one we're not sure is allowed - is even coming from.
The most complicated part of this is also the best part. Are you ready? The call isn't coming from out there. It's coming from within you.
Recognizing & responding.
After years of subconscious self-dismissal, a 'call' from within can be confusing. It certainly was for me. My own story of 'having it all', my emotional math and my equation of fulfillment was nearly impossible to let go of. But it was formed on a foundation of teachings, rather than beliefs, and eventually it made me soul sick.
Sometimes when I look back on navigating that change and answering my own inner 'call' I feel embarrassed about what I did not see, self-critical for how long it took. Especially working in mental health, we often accept the cultural myth that, as therapists, we're supposed to have all the insight and know all the answers. But then I remember two things:
First, I recognize those thoughts as holdout pockets of my own internalized patriarchy - the shoulds and demands upon myself that snuff out what's just real right now. Second, I remember that I did not figure this out on my own. Despite my then-concrete belief that I had to discover the path unseen on my own, it was anything but a solo journey.
"I'm here to support your journey of reconnecting within and decriminalizing the idea of MORE."
In one of my next entries here, I'll be sharing my personal story of hearing the 'call', what it took for me to listen, and the larger, mythic story that has guided me on own return journey. The Sacred Feminine was a large part of my young life but in this linear world, my soul's draw to this way of working was supplanted by the masculinized version of it: a career in psychology.
It wasn't until 25 years later that I found myself burned out in that career, mystified by my lack of fulfillment and sitting in a Sacred Feminine Temple ceremony (a women's circle of sorts) that I found clarity about what happened at that early intersection.
For now, in this moment, my greatest wish is to inspire you to consider how what I've shared here rides along with you. To help you more carefully consider the unfolding story of your own life. To support your journey of reconnecting within and decriminalizing the idea of "more".
Even though it was a struggle to leave the work of trauma treatment for my deeper purpose of helping women live in their fullest self-expression, I've managed to cross that divide, and bring everything that mattered with me.
For a long time, I was hung up on Why? Why did I want to close the Private Practice I'd worked so hard to build in the pursuit of:
Work that could take or leave my fancy, six-figure education?
Work that's in the infancy of a cultural renaissance, and still poorly understood?
Work that gets measured against my old career and brutally invalidated as "less than"?
I had to sit with these questions, and others, for a long time and through many seasons on my own initiatory journey. The bigger answer is a story for another day, my loves. The quintessence of it, however, is this: my gnosis, the voice of my inner well, told me there was MORE.
And I chose to believe her.
If you're hearing the 'call', if you're ready to embark on the return journey to your sacred Self, I'm here for it. I've created a gorgeous, FREE guide as a starting point for your unique journey of Inner Relationship. You can get the instant download at charityeugair.com/links.
Thank you for being here.
Until next time,
Charity
