Is there value in telling your story? We hear “drop the story, be in the moment!” That is a great direction if we have actually integrated and digested the story. The paradox is, I have discovered, that we need to recall it and feel it from a place of presence to really let it go. Then the past becomes a resource for this moment, as energy available in your body.
I first told my life story quite a few years ago to an on-going group I was a part of. Then I listened to nine other stories through our week together. There is a saying "there isn't anybody you couldn't love if you've heard their story" and I found it to be true. Since listening to each person, my sense of them has broadened and changed completely. Those little things that irritated me about them became precious battle scars to be respected.
Later, when I chose to share my story with my community, something profound happened. Something in me came to rest and "I let the story go". It was engaging and fun to then continue crafting it and making it into a performance piece but it didn't feel personal anymore. From then on I wanted other stories to be set free.
We all carry many tales inside of us and when they are told we receive the medicine. It is often in challenging situations, when we might have felt victimized, that we developed our precious gifts and strengths. When we look at our lives as a piece of art, we bring reverence to it and find the patterns that are specific to us. As we find those patterns and recognise ourselves as heroines on this journey of life, we find why we are here.
As women, we particularly need to do that, because we have lost some of the feminine mythology and need to rebuild our archetypal domain.
I have recently been working with a story of Inanna, an ancient Sumerian myth. What struck me about this remarkable heroine is that she combines a versatile range of feminine archetypes in a unique way. She is a loving mother, a passionate free lover, a fierce warrior and a priestess. In our modern society not only did all these faces of the feminine become split but also suppressed and distorted. We all know the dilemmas we have to face when we open to our erotic power. Being a mother is indeed welcome but quite compartmentalized. The warrior woman is generally considered “masculine” and put down. The nature-connected sorcereress has been cast out and persecuted throughout the ages.
Here is what we read about Inanna:
“…she is also goddess of war…More passionate than Athena, she is described in one hymn as ‘all-devouring in…power…attacking like the attacking storm’, having an ‘awesome face’ and ‘angry heart’ and she sings with abandoned delight of her own glory and prowess: ‘Heaven is mine, earth is mine,-I, a warrior am I. Is there a god who can vie with me?’
Equally passionately, she is goddess of sexual love. She sings ecstatic songs of self-abandonment and desire and of the delights of lovemaking… More extravert than Aphrodite, she craves and takes, desires and destroys, and than grieves and composes songs of grief. She claims her need assertively and celebrates her body in song. Her receptivity is active. She calls out to have her body filled, singing praises to her vulva, and bidding her consort come to her bed to ‘Plough my vulva, man of my heart”*
I feel moved by remembering the ones who have come long before us, long before the rise of the patriarchy. Their power and purity of transmission trickles down through the ages and awakens in our blood now. We are not complete pioneers, though it sometimes feels like walking in the dark with no guiding hand to hold. The ancient ones are celebrating again as we carry on the path they once walked.
* Qoute from Brinton Perera S. (1981) Descent to the Goddess: A Way of Initiation for Women Inner City Books
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