The Feminine Challenge

Barbara Marx Hubbard is the authentic feminine co-creative leader of our time.  She is a regular source of inspiration for me.  I have just watched these two videos of her and feel like the air has left my lungs.

That's Part One - very informative but the kicker come next in Part Two:

Hey? Isn't it amazing?

My head has been churning lots of thoughts lately on the collective female consciousness.  It started when I wrote my blog on accepting my body.  I came across an artist's website on the history of the female nude. (http://www.anthonychristian.co.uk/ezine26.html) I was horrified to read that the first female nudes represented temptation(flawed values) in the form of Eve .  The male nude, however, represented perfection : Man created in God's image and all that.  Barbara mentions in her videos above that women's value outside the wife and mother roles was obliterated 5000 years ago and that a study done on women in the 1950's reinforced this belief when it was revealed that women had no image of self beyond these said roles.

I found it really difficult to change my name when I got married and I thought I was being silly until 8 years ago I decided that I didn't want to be married anymore.  Don't get me wrong, I love my husband and nothing about that has changed.  What did change was me.  My idea of being a wife was making me very unhappy, to put it mildly.  I felt like a second-rate citizen, one who put the family and its needs above my own.  I was very dissatisfied.  I felt oppressed by my own ideas of how I should be in a marriage, in a family. I thought: "Is this it? Is this all the fairy tales promised my life would be? Is this the end of my life, all I am required to do for the rest of my life?" But, again, it was my own ideas, self inflicted. 

Society through the ages have fed us little girls the idea that we are victims in need of rescuing by our knights in shining armor.  We as women must hide our beauty behind burka's, sit separately from the men in mosque, be ashamed of "the monthly curse", cover up our bodies, our emotions, our very power, beauty and wisdom.  We were burned at the stake for heaven's sake! Just for being women!

And so, in retrospect, this guilt and shame at being a woman motivated me to tell my husband that this idea of being married didn't bide well with me.  Well, you can imagine his shock!  But I did go on to explain that I would prefer to be "partners in adventure".  This image of us two living life as an adventure on equal footing really appealed to me and still does.  But the feeling of relief in letting go of all the traditional expectations of being a married woman and then a mother was huge!  And life changing for me.  I felt that now I could start looking at myself as an equally valuable member of the family with needs that deserved fulfilling and the future felt very bright.  Of course, the reality is that the letting go of old limiting beliefs is a journey that takes time and I am a work in progress, right slap bang in the middle of my "conscious evolution".

Barbara explains in another interview (http://youtu.be/H1yTdmSdKoU)that she had a similar crises after having 5 children and "losing her soul" as she puts it.  She got reading and thinking and came to the realization that she could look for opportunities to express her own unique creative potential and therein lay her power!  We could do the same.