#1 Our Deepest Wound Becomes our Work in the World - My Intention

Misogyny, Patriarchy and Hierarchy deeply wounded me. I’m not the only one. There are billions of us through time and space of our human existence. Its wounding continues today. Healing from this wound has enlivened me to heal others, to speak out, to transform, as well as shift in all the little corners and places of society where I exist. Healing always begins with ourselves first. Like a pebble dropped in a still pond, the rippling rings of consciousness expand outward into the past, present and future.

It begins with Misogyny the dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against women. This unconscious or seemingly “normal” way of seeing women impacted me to my very DNA. It has harmed every woman who has ever existed. The harm also extends to any human with an overt feminine sensitivity and soul. For me, my wounding is intergenerational passed down from grandmother to daughter to granddaughter, which is the nature of trauma. Every woman has had it passed down whether they are conscious of it or not. We also internalize it. Sometimes blatant and sometimes insidiously subtle, it taints all of us. It’s still something I have to consistently root out. This will be, for me and every woman, a lifelong practice. This should be the work of men too, yet some men balk at the idea.

This is a rant for another time.

Patriarchy is a system of society or government where men hold the power and women are largely excluded from it. The power of men over women runs deep in our society and especially in religious subcultures like Christianity. As a child in Sunday School, I was told the very top of everything was God, our authority. Then just below God, were men, below that were women and below that were children. The Earth was implied as the least important, because it was, after all, going to burn in the end. This message was repeated over and over again throughout my lifetime in explicit and implicit ways. The nondenominational church is where I met my husband, married, and raised my five children. This belief was so deeply ingrained in me that I could not see it, until one day I could.

That’s a story for another time.

Hierarchy means a system or organization in which people or groups are ranked one above the other according to status or authority. Isabella Wilkerson calls this a caste system in her book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent. This system says that men are above women, rich above poor, white people above Black, Latino, Indiginous and Asian people, educated above uneducated, housed above unhoused, non-addict above addict, ‘normal’ mental health above mentally ill, human being above nonhumans, Earth and even over the universe.

The insidious danger of hierarchy takes away the sacredness of others. One category of human cannot see the sacredness of another category of human. Neither can they see or know the sacredness of Earth, the Cosmos and everything in it. Hierarchy creates disconnection, dehumanization, and de-sacredizing, which leads to violence, death, extraction, harm and the loss of our very hearts and souls.

And so we have it. These three false beliefs have done more harm for the lives of women and children than anything else I know, simply because they thread through every facet of society and the systems we’ve created and live and breathe in. My story is no different than billions of others before me. I am not unique to this, but I have been healing from these three diabolical belief systems for as long as I can remember and I have inadvertently benefited and participated in them, as well. And that is the work. Awareness.

As a young girl, maybe even back to my infancy or as a fetus in my mother’s womb; I’ve been healing, though unconsciously. The Life Force of Liberation was moving through me even when I was completely unaware. Bit by bit as consciousness expanded, I started to feel it in my body, then I began to see it and finally name it. Naming it is crucial, for it brings clarity.

This is my story, which I hope to share in tiny bits and pieces like scraps of cloth sewn together to create a beautiful, vibrant quilt. My intention is to share in this blog with weekly or bi-monthly posts. I’ll find my rhythm. These posts are my testimony. I promise to write with as much truth and vulnerability as I possibly can. I may change names and circumstances, so as not to bring harm.

My intention is to bring the wounding and damage, into the Light. For it’s only in the Light that healing begins. In Christian circles, we often talked about sharing our testimony. This was the public telling of what God had done for us. Therefore; no one could refute it. What I share in the coming weeks is a testimony to the generative, thriving Life Force of Healing and Liberation that is built into our very DNA.

No one may refute it.