Tending to Ourselves

I am loveable. I am capable. I am powerful. If you really believed these statements, how different would your life look?

It amazes me how often I hear in my practice room beautiful, strong, successful women describe consuming inner thoughts of self-doubt and shame. These pervasive narratives interfere with living a life that feels satisfying, whole-hearted, and fully expressed. It seems the script for a women’s ‘meaningful life’ was written for them a long time ago, but is still gripping our inner worlds and keeping us stuck.

Holding oneself back, keeping oneself small is not exclusively a woman’s story. However women seem particularly conditioned in this way. It seems that centuries of restriction and limitation are still playing themselves out in the narrative of the modern woman. She is consumed largely by fulfilling other people’s needs and looks to her own needs rarely, and in a way that doesn’t sustain itself. There appears a default setting for many women who strive for balance but never feel they can achieve the unreasonable demands put on them in the exhausting and unrelenting juggling act of work, family and personal life.

We seem to run over the quiet voice inside which whispers possibilities of a different way of being that is expansive, restful and spacious: a life more on our own terms.To really shift these inner spaces, we must create space and time and choose to listen deeply to ourselves, being present with what our bodies and hearts are showing us. Too often, we numb out, engaged in a myriad of distractions the world seems consumed with, which is preoccupied with outer value and unrealistic ideals of how we should be.

We have not been taught to tend to ourselves as we tend to others, to turn our compassionate heart towards itself. Creating women’s spaces where we can support each other to do this, and to bring us in touch with our inner, is essential to rewire and transform our collective narrative. Women’s work, whatever the format and however it is possible, is key for our individual and collective expansion of consciousness. This could be simply meeting a friend for a weekly 30-minute inquiry or compassionate listening session, or starting a women’s circle, developing a trusting and supportive field simply holding space for each other’s stories.

In showing up with ourselves and each other, we enable our essential nature to reveal itself, and step by step emerge into our full potentiality and magnificence.

‘There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom”

Anaïs Nin