Thoughts on Empowerment and Strength

Like so many of us open-minded beings, I never even dreamed that Roe vs. Wade could ever be overturned. I would also never have imagined that in the year 2022, females around the world would still be subjected to extreme sexism and weaponized rape, but here we are.

The very idea of male incels who feel that women owe them something, so they feel entitled to rape us is so fucked up and insane that I don't even know where to start - so I won't.

I am in awe of the women in Iran who are standing up fearlessly to a culture that needs to change. If I could, I would stand with them, against the powers that be, and fuck the consequences.

I may be fluid, but I am Female, and I stand with my sisters in my heart, and with my words.

It seems to be the universal way of the pendulum swinging from one extreme to the other that creates and sustains these eras of human existence where men are looking to make all women less than. Times of wars and suffering are (almost) always ruled by testosterone-fueled, power-hungry and greedy men, and all you need to do is look around to see where we are at right now.

It even just came up in an episode I was watching one of my all-time favorite show, Law & Order: SVU, where Rita, one of the sharp defense attorney's who has recurred on the show for many years, says to Captain Olivia Benson, to "lay back and pretend you're enjoying it" in dealing with the male-dominated world. Rita was so incredibly cynical and jaded at this point in her career, which in this case is partly why she is so successful defending male predators and murderers.

I get it though, having found myself in male-dominated fields throughout my adult working life. The "good old boy network" is alive and well, maybe thriving these days. I am so blessed that I am older now and well established in a position that I can work alone and avoid most all workplace drama. It has been so good for me, but wouldn't matter as much if I did not meditate twice a day.

Yeah, it really does make a difference, at least for me.

A bit off the subject, but I just had an amazing epiphany regarding my own heightened sense of anxiety in my childhood and beyond. I obviously did not feel safe and I bit my nails to the quick, once I was forced to stop sucking my thumb. I did this until I was about twenty-six years old. That anxious and tense feeling within me has been so constant, I almost missed it in my healing of the past traumas in working with my inner child, because of the extent that I had normalized it.

There are so many layers to our onions to peel and heal. But then we can grow!

We simply need to be fearless in our self-awareness and our work within.

I know there are still way too many places on Earth that women are raped and killed like it's nothing. Even in this country, the fact of the backlog of untested rape kits across the country is sickening and offensive as fuck. As if we needed yet another way to make us feel less than and unimportant. To put a woman, thousands of women, through the second rape of having to do a rape kit in the hospital and then let that kit sit and collect dust as more women are assaulted is atrocious and inexcusable.

What message does this send? You don't matter much if you are Female.

It seems to me that it has been too long since the pendulum swung back the other way.

But before it can, and we can fully take back our power as a unified force, we have to clean up another vitally important mess that the tyrannical patriarchy has ironically shackled us with: being women that do not (always or ever) support other women.

Truly, our sense of empowerment begins within, for each and every one of us, and we need to see and gently confront any destructive, and preconditioned ideas that we women are competing against each other in some dysfunctional and harmful way.

Finding more ways to support ourselves in our own journey and other women in more healthy, non-judgmental and unconditionally loving ways has been something that I have strove to tackle and accomplish in my own life. I grew up more as a boy than a girl and so many of my earliest relationships were with guys. I struggled at some point to make friends with more women, and it's still like this today, more than not. The difference is, most of my male friends have also disappeared.

Once it became clear to me that most of my relationships with men were either sexual in nature, mostly with my consent, or with so-called friends, that actually were wanting to get into my pants the entire time.

I was shocked and hurt when one of my very best friends back in the day, actually told another guy I knew that he had in fact slept with me, when nothing of the sort had ever happened. He lied because the other man wanted to have sex with me, so my friend pretended that he had, I guess to look like a stud for the other dude.

I mean, what the fuck is that about?

Has this ever happened to you?

I spent many years doing healing work, and while I worked with both men and women, it was empowering other women and girls that really resonated with me the most by that point in my life. When I started teaching yoga, it was the same, and that gave me such a wonderful opportunity to spend more time with women in that community.

I can count my true female friends on one hand though, and I would love to change that.

There is also a lot of really vital, healthy masculine energy that is non-toxic and balancing for us that we can tap into once we can really feel the difference. There are men who are really balanced in their own energy and once we are too, it's much easier to find commonalities than differences.

I have had to be strong for most of my life, and I bet most of you reading this have had to be super courageous as well. I salute each and every one of you with only admiration and love.

I've survived three sexual assaults, federal prison and a (mostly) dysfunctional family. I have felt like I needed to be a warrior most of my life and I am finally ready to lay down the gloves and surrender to all that life still has in store, without resisting what still challenges me, and continuing to adapt and adjust when Life asks this of me.

I am exhausted from fighting myself.

None of this makes me any less empowered as a woman, in fact, I feel that it makes me stronger than I have ever been.

I am also so grateful that I understand that everything is Energy, Consciousness, and that gender, in reality, doesn't even exist. This truth is right there underneath all the misunderstanding, but we have to see this to embrace it.

We are all One.