We Don’t Do This Alone.
One of the most pervasive and soul-destroying beliefs floating through our collective consciousness at this time are varieties of, “I should be able to do This alone.”
This: life.
This: feeling the depth of our world.
This: challenging stereotypes, lies, and other means of suppression and oppression that run rampant through our bones and cells.
This: having a family.
This: working to make a living.
This: simply being a person in a feminine body… or any body for that matter.
It’s a bit of a conspiracy theory I hold dear and clear to my heart that the sentiment of You Should Be Able To Do This Alone creates a sense of alienation and separation that diffuses our power, voice, and wisdom as a collective.
Doing THIS alone is not only not possible and a complete lie, but it creates shadows of self-doubt and self-hatred and self-mistrust that echo like voices in our bones saying, “I should be doing This better…”
And the problem is… NO.
NO, we can’t do Life alone.
NO, we can’t do this any better without support.
Yesterday I had the profound honor of sitting in ceremony with a group of magical and wise women. We played in nature, hiked, cried, laughed, talked about love and life and orgasm and trauma…
And we talked about the importance of This—This being the feeling that happens when we gather as women which links us to our ancestors through the threads of remembrance in our cellular memory… Our ancestors who knew that they couldn’t do it alone even as the world began to teach them otherwise.
My prayer is that we give up the belief, or more accurately, refuse to believe the lie that we are somehow less-than when we need others…that we are somehow less “productive”, “efficient”, or worthy when we hold our hand in the air and let the prayer of “Help” reverberate down the chain of hearts that hold us together.
Today, I hope we can lean on our brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers and friends and lovers if there is even a faint whisper of, “This is too hard…”
In developing True Hunger (retreat on April 30th), one of the things I have learned to be 100% true is that the work of Life is too hard to do alone. The work of reclaiming our hunger, desire, voice, and truth is done in community, with others bearing witness to our story.
This reclamation might begin alone, in the middle of the night when we wake up with a start and a twist in our belly and a murmur of something feeling wrong, off, or not enough…Or when we walk into the office in the morning and feel a tug in our womb of “Not this…”
And then we come together, even when we don’t want to or it’s hard to be witnessed in all of our humanness, in order to try again…in order to write a story that feels better than the one we are sold. Better than the story that somehow something is wrong with us if we need help, if our bodies are a certain way, if our lives are messy, if we have hungers that gnaw at our souls that cannot be satisfied…
There is no quick fix for this problem of well-trained separation and alienation. In the meantime, you are invited to join us to remember otherwise, that you don’t have to do it alone, next weekend at True Hunger in Boulder, CO.
And if for now you do have to do it alone, please take this message as a branch connecting my heart to yours and feel support simply through letting it be true.
With love,
Kathryn