An Unbecoming Woman

There’s a lot of talk in the Consumer Spirituality world about the Embodied Feminine. It’s all Queen, Goddess, Empowerment.

We sit ring-side watching the Badass Boss Bitch duke it out with the Awakened Feminine, cheering on our preferred avatar of The Fully-Expressed Woman.

And peddled alongside are images of radiant, sensual (white) women Living Their Best Oprah-Lives and Manifesting Their Dreams (usually involving multiple-$K months, 100K+ followers, Way-of-the-Superior-Man-Kings and spiritually-sexy relationships).

I was besotted, drunk with this image.

I wanted to be That Woman so badly I was a Lotus Eaters clamoring after the sweet, obliviating fruit that made Odysseus’ men lose all desire to return home.

I wanted to feel about myself the way I thought she felt.

I pursued her with a fervor.

I had the goddess jewelry and sensual, silky clothing.
I did the feminine movement practices, held full moon circles, and preached the Gospel of the Divine Feminine everywhere.

And then I went into a profound depression.

And no amount of yin yoga, yoni meditation, ecstatic dance, ‘I teach this shit!’ made a whit of difference.

I could not help myself in this place.

Because there is no way to help a ‘self’.  It is a false construct, a function of our ego.

Anything I think ‘I want to be’ is an elaborate illusion,
a byzantine rabbit-warren filled with chutes-and-ladders booby-traps
that no vision boards or abundance affirmations or sensual dance or pretty mala beads bought in the gift shop at my $2000 yoga-retreat will pull me out of.

I could not help myself.  And that was the good news.

With this depression came the pervasive feeling that nothing mattered.  Nothing I had wanted — and tried to create, manifest, or embody — seem to matter.  Everything I’d tried to taste turned to ash in my mouth.

Everything I’d wanted to experience and strived for — god, did I strive— was suddenly pointless, ridiculous, absurd.

I felt numb as I watched, frozen, the depression burn through my life like a wildfire, expunging the aim that had been my map and compass.

The depression eclipsed my previously rabid hope of what being That Woman would do for me.
What being That Woman would fix in me.  What she would save me from. And left behind a profound emptiness. No hope, no way out.

I’d bet the farm on an identity that died and without it, without the striving toward it, my life lost its meaning and direction.

I felt suicidal in this place. I’d lost the means to what I thought was freedom, lost my attachment to life as I’d believed it needed to be for me to be happy, healed, whole.

It’s not so much that I wanted to end my life but to end the the overwhelming pain of feeling so utterly lost.

When we lose the meaning, purpose, and sense of ‘self’-importance that comes with a strived-for identity, what it often leaves in its wake is despair.
We have lost a beloved illusion that we did not know was an illusion.
And while our identity is an illusion, it is a comforting one that brings with it yet more illusion: that of stability, certainty, control, and reward.

We know who we are — I’m That Woman — and isn’t that the end-goal of modern psychology?
But the dark underbelly of knowing who we are — ‘our identity’ — is that we are also bound to all its beloved stories, beliefs, and wounds that cause us suffering.

The depression forced me to reckon with the reality that The Wounded One can walk only so far on the path holding her wounds (and identity) in place.

To go any further, all of it needs to go.  It feels like dying, this healing beyond our wounds.  And no part of me (that I could then discern) wanted to do this.

The door of the temple is very low and small.
To enter the temple within I had to get down on my knees for something I had not yet seen.

I had to let go of habitual and precious thoughts and beliefs.
I had to see and deliberately change unconscious emotional patterns I'd fought very hard to keep.
I had to sacrifice on the altar of my becoming an entire life constructed on a false sense of self.

Real transformation requires deep humility.
It requires letting go of anything I think I know — about myself, my “story”, my purpose (which is often just another story).

When the depression forced that I relinquish my striving, my covetous reaching for an identity that might finally silence the mad chorus of ‘Am I enough? Am I worthy? Am I lovable?’ —
all voices of the ego, all fueling the misdirected aim of being That Woman
— it no longer mattered what I did. Or if I failed. Or if people liked me or my work.

It was at this point that I gave up the idea of coaching and went back to nursing.

Deeply humbled by (what felt like) losing my way, I was showing up to save my life, to get out of the house and out of my head.  I prayed that I could, for 8- or 12-hours, forget my own suffering.

It no longer mattered if I succeeded or failed or was worthy or lovable or would ever become That Woman.

I was showing up empty, and praying that Something Else To Come Through Me.

I prayed for The Thing that I could no longer feel — because the only way I’d had any inkling of feeling It had been attached to being That Woman.

I prayed that if there was Something Greater Than Me that It would show up and work through me.

I prayed with no hope.  No attachment to outcome and from a place of profound emptiness. Because that was all that was I had left.

What arrived first was a flicker of relief. A subtle sigh

I knew suffering and I could feel it in others, so my intention was simply:  Can I relieve some suffering?  Is there anything I know — clinically, emotionally, spiritually — that would relieve suffering here?
And if not relieve it, could I acknowledge and keep company with it?

I began to finally grok what it means to practice seva — selfless service:
It is a gifting of this vehicle — this heart/body/mind and its hard-won wisdom — as the means for Consciousness (God / Source / The Whatever You Want To Call It) to do ITS Thing.
And the only way to do this is to get the self out of the way.  Completely.

Do you see how exacting this is?  How easy it is to delude ourselves that we are doing this vaunted thing?  Summiting spiritual peaks with all the supposed Becoming and Transforming so celebrated in social-mediated-spirituality?

If you do, then you will see why the only way you can get to the real thing is by letting go of the striving-self, by relinquishing the cosseted, precious, reached-for identity.

And who wants that?  How utterly unsexy.

Give me the Embodied Goddess, the Sovereign Queen, The Boss Bitch Who Slays All Day. I don’t want no stinkin’ self-less-ness.

But the only thing an identity — That Woman — can do is harm herself and carry that suffering into her ‘service’.

She cannot enter the temple.  She cannot be a vehicle for Something Greater.

That Woman can aspire to Live Her Best Oprah-Life but it will always elude her.

Because to truly live That Life requires giving up all control and getting out of the way so the Soul can speak through us.

It requires giving up trying to become anything at all, least and most especially That Woman.

It requires letting go of the idea that our purpose is something we decide, rather than something that is lived through us.

The only way is to become no one at all: Un-becoming is the way.

Taking off all the garb, all the niceties, all the facades, all the pretty, all the wise, all the affectations that you did not realize were affectations, all the anything-you-think-you-know-about-yourself.

Totally, completely emotionally and spiritually bare is the place from with Source creates through us.

And that, my friends, is a hard sell.