You Weren’t Told Just How Powerful You Are!

"Laya" @ Jambhukeshwara Mandir, Trichy, India I Photo Credit: Sonika Das

When you got your period,

You learned about physiology and hormones, 

contraception and safety

You didn’t learn how to have a relationship

Of connection, respect and responsibility

Acts of immense love for your womb

You didn’t learn how powerful you are-

Yes you, co-creator of life!

You weren’t told just how powerful you are!*

When you had a miscarriage

You were told that time will heal

You learned how to “move on”

You never learned how to be with the emotions

To be grateful that a soul chose you, if only for a while

No one taught you that it's okay to be angry and grieve 

And how to acknowledge and allow those emotions.

You weren’t told just how powerful you are!*

When you couldn’t get pregnant

They told you “your ovaries are lazy”

They pumped you with hormones

And stimulated your ovaries till they winced and screamed in pain.

They didn’t tell you how stress affects your womb

They didn’t ask if perhaps you had been sexually abused

And held that pain inside the cells that couldn’t scream

Suffocating, silenced carrying both rage and shame.

They told you, your womb wasn’t good enough - they would fix it.

They didn’t tell you you can process each traumatic thought,

Each belief and experience

So your womb can feel safe, heard and respected again.

And be your biggest most dependable ally ever!

You weren’t told just how powerful you are!*

When you got pregnant

You learned how the baby grows each month

You learned to be super cautious

To panic when something was a little off

You were sent recommendations for clothes and doctors

You never learned how to listen to your body

That your baby was a soul in transit through you

To trust the intelligence that created, nourished and sustained your baby.

You weren’t told just how powerful you are!*

When you gave birth

You learned it's a matter of life and death—doctors know best.

You learned that C-sections are safer

And lying supine is best to give birth

You learned contractions are painful and birthing is excruciating.

They didn’t tell you those contractions are surges of life’s passion for giving life

Or that giving birth can be uncomfortable but also orgasmic.

You weren’t told just how powerful you are!*

When your breasts were full of milk

You may have been told that formula is more nutritious

Or if your milk wouldn't flow after a traumatic birth,

You may have been told you don't have enough.

Either way disempowered.

You weren’t taught how beliefs, stress and drugs affect milk production and let down

You weren’t taught how breast milk changes composition with every feed

You weren’t taught what an incredible pharmacy is in your breast milk

You weren’t told just how powerful you are!*

Before you started menopause,

You heard the stories

Raging hormones, hot flushes, brain fog, endless fatigue

HRT and other women saying “I can’t wait for freedom from periods.”

You expected the worst.

You learned to manage symptoms not heal.

You weren’t told of the power of personal responsibility,

Of nutrition, movement, connection, rest

You weren’t told just how powerful you are!*

This masterclass is that education

Sorry for the delay.

• true power is openness and emptiness. In more tangible words, when we are in power, there immense humility becuase we recognize and embody pure light.

Depending on what is in its path, light can be partially obstructed by shadows. For all humans, being aware of our shadows is essential if we are to live as the light we are or have been created as a refelction of by Source. For women, sometimes shadows take on the guise of being feminists, activists, spiritual crusaders and more. Nothing wrong with those. However they are limiting. They make us take a stance vis-a-vis something that is limited itself. There can be an unconscious power play at a very transcational obvious and often self-rightoues level. This poem does not allude to that power.

The power that this poem speaks about is true power, openness and emptiness. Light streams in all its respelendence and brilliance and yet completely unware of itself as the Source of light. It needs no identiity or identification, validation or proof. It simply is.

This poem arrived unfiltered and in flow with a power of its own as I was planning for a masterclass I'm teaching with a functional medicine doctor.

It feels like so many life experiences and people have contibuted to it's birth and I feel to acknowledge them.

To all my clients who give me their trust to be a midwife for their rage, joy, sadness, ease, resentment, creativity, pain, ecstacy and everything in between. Specially to the women whose experiences have been so intense and who bring such courage to processing them through the Consciousness centered practices of yoga and ayurveda.

To my mother for birthing me.

To my daughter for giving birth to the mother in me.

To my husband for never being intimidated by my power, for walking side by side as my equal. May all women have husbands like you.

To Maya Tiwari, my first teacher of the women's yoga and ayurvedic healing rituals for the womb and for young girls coming of age.

To Natalie Backman who would not take no for an answer and invited me to be a panelist with luminaries like Sally Kempton, Mirabai Starr and Shamini Jain, starting a whole new phase of my life.

To Effath Yasmin for showing me the power of trust in my body, intuition and the divine nectar that is breast milk.

To Om Swami for igniting Devi Shakti in me through a random messenger.

To Swami Sivananda Saraswati and Guru Amritananda Natha Saraswati ji for calling me to to Sri Vidya and leading me to Devipuram. To his daughter Rama Kandarpa for the gift of Kalavahana.

To Dr. Kesarkar for teaching me Ayurveda for women.

To Dr. Nidhi Pandya Bhansali for simplifying women's ayurveda for me.

To Dr. KC my SriVidya teacher for showing me what the shadow of a woman in power can look like.

To Dr. Anoop Kumar and Sreesha Srinivasan, who inspired me and part of this poem with Numocore, their wisdom and generosity of heart.

To my dear teacher, Stuart Schwartz for transmitting light beyond words.