Dense, intense, heavy and significant

Today, I am feeling awake and enlivened! Having just completed the inaugural offering of Engaging…and awakening others , I could say that it was good but I would be lying. It was much more than that - it was amazing in its results!

I am more mindful than ever of what lights me up: working with the women whose desire for their own evolution compels them to work with other women who are seeking that for themselves. Women awakening to awaken other women. It’s really not complicated – and I know the power this carries to transform my world.

I spent time today reading the blog entries of Amy, Lori and Sarah , all of whom were part of this five-day experience. In addition to the courage, commitment and unshakeable will to ‘become more’ that they share, they also share one more thing: youth. As I slide to just the other side of mid-fifties, I am encouraged by the degree to which these young women are willing to do what it takes - freeing themselves of the yoke of their histories, determined not to wait in hope that someone else will do it for them. Theirs is a journey that they share, even as each stands alone in finding her own path.

It was not an easy five days. We talked about how frequently the words ‘intense’ and ‘dense’ came up over the span of the experience. As I listened, I realized that the underlying presupposition of this language was that somehow, it should not be so. For some reason, these words indicated or implied that moving forward in our lives should be ‘light’ and ‘airy’ – with a greater sense of ‘easy’-ness. (You know, the 'white light and forgiveness' thing.)

What came to mind for me was all those times in my life when my desire to go beyond what was presented as ‘truth’; to move out of the habituation of my own thoughts and my own behaviours; to engage in explorations that left others uncomfortable, were frequently labeled ‘heavy and significant’, as if somehow that were not acceptable and to be shunned.

Over the last five days, I watched as five women became willing to become what is required to punch through the veneer of their own lives, that they might lay claim to their own potential. Their bodies reeling from the years….no, decades!....of embedded (not chosen!) beliefs, their willingness to trust themselves took them, in five short days, to where they had not been able to get to in their lifetime. They found their way back to the truth of their own experience, waiting for them in their own bodies.

It is not the experience of discovery that is dense, intense, heavy and significant. That comes from what is required to break through the density and intensity of years of the embedded commands of a cultural conditioning that we are told is ‘truth’ and/or ‘reality’. These women discovered how to see it for the deception that it is.

In one breath, Amy said: “It may be our (fill in the blank: family, marriage, relationship, team, work, etc.) but it’s my life! “ In that moment, I could hear the ‘click’ and life will never be the same again.

I know that the ‘Women and WEL-Systems’ intensives is a wave that will feel like a tsunami to many. And as much as it may sweep away that which is and has been for a long time, it will also prepare the ground for new beginnings. And, like a tsunami, its impact is neither incremental nor temporary. Once experienced, life is never the same again.

Breathing is good…..