The Power of a Woman: Embodied

Pic credit: Amazing post BIRY session womb art by my client Suvi Hayden

I cannot help but share what I'm writing today.

The urge began a few weeks ago, when a friend's daughter, got her first period. She invited me over to pray and mentioned that she would not send her child to school keeping with her tradition. It was a spontaneous thing and I began writing a letter to this little girl. I let her know that she had come into a most potent gift, the ability to be co-creator of Life with Source/God itself. I let her know how sacred this blood is, filled with stem cells. I let her know not to buy into the conditioning that periods are painful or a nuisance, a time of the month to wish away. I let her know there are ways to not experience pain during menstruation and that I am always accessible to her. I let her know to celebrate the gift she has now and to honour her womb throughout her life.

I have a daughter too, who may soon come to puberty, and working with women all the time, this feels very close to my heart.

At a surface level, being a woman is a gender thing—a decision of chromosomes and genes.

In yogā, we call a woman the embodiment of Śaktī, the power of the creative force that creates all manifestation.

And yet, the conditioning around being a woman has taken precedence over embodying the essence of being a woman.

Most of our conditioning around being a woman comes from how we must appear so we receive validation from men and other women—nurturing, giving, sexy to one's partner, but not to other men, superwoman balancing many roles, emotional but only with docile emotions, having needs, but only virtuous ones. Disguising anger as self-pity and victimhood or often squelching vulnerability under the guise of being alpha femmes and boss babes.

I come from a lineage of the women's path of yoga, a path to be lived by a householder, not an ascetic, a way to live in this world and honour one's biological energy as a reflection and emanation of cosmic energy of the Source. This work began inwardly with myself studying with my teachers of the women's path of yoga, Maya Tiwari and Dr. Kavitha Chinnayan, and then came into my 1:1 work with women in co-meditation and BIRY. I'll share some consistent areas in which I notice disconnection with embodiment. Please receive them as observations and contemplations unfiltered from my heart to yours.

• When menstruation is taught in schools clinically without speaking about reverence and connection with the womb, we rob our girls of actually developing a connection with their own energy. We make it clinical and take the human connection out of it. A girls connection with her womb will go on to shape her decisions and experiences around feminine health, consent, pregnancy, childbirth, lactation, orgasm, pleasure and menopause.

• When we as mothers/adults talk of menstruation as painful and a nuisance, and in some cultures as shameful, we set the tone for disconnection from the womb.

• When women are expected and expect themselves to perform like men linearly, without understanding how their hormones influence their energy and creative powers (which include intellectual ideating) we rob them of the abundance of creative power that peaks at certain times. We force them to push themselves and become constantly performing machines of productivity, when their whole productivity cycle, physiologically whether ovulation or mentally, is cyclical. Ayurveda has long recognized this and has specific practices to honour and optimize this and neuroscientists have now begun studying how female hormones affect brain function etc

• When make pleasure something that can only be derived from pleasing another, sexually or otherwise, we stifle the power of the senses and the heart to experience self-fulfillment.

• When we honour women for how giving they are, setting the expectation that women are giving as a gender, we condition them to give even when they are burnout and spent. Women lose the ability to feel worthy in a way that is not contingent on their "giving" and nurturing "performance data".

• When we lose sacredness for the womb as a divinely created vessel with its autonomy, having sex for validation or a false sense of security or a feeling of control or power, or to fit the role, even in marital relationships, we lose connection with our true power.

• When we treat anger (or aggression) as wrong emotions for women to have, we fail to recognize the expression of hurt and the need for protection of our hearts that anger is an expression of. It is not the anger that is the issue, not feeling it fully and honouring it as energy is. (please note that anger as a biochemical sensory experience of energy is different from anger as expression in a behaviour or relationship. I am referring to the former).

• When we make infidelity and other transgressions, "the woman's fault", we reiterate a distrust in our own gender, often absolving men of their responsibility. Internalized misogyny as my teacher Kavitha called it.

• When we suppress our womb's natural cycle for years, so it's convenient for men, and then expect to suddenly get pregnant and impatient with our wombs when we don't, we have lost connection and embodiment.

*When I say we, I mean "women". Slavery to limiting conditioning of any kind, across gender and race is still that...slavery.

In my 1:1 work with women, this is apparent as burnout, almost always accompanied by menstrual irregularities or issues, inability to create and honour boundaries, constantly seeking validation, over-justifying their decisions and actions, and more. The systematic processes of Āyurveda and the subtler practices of women's Yogā can help shift these patterns.

My invitation to you to read this blog is to contemplate and reflect. Perhaps it will offer some insight or understanding. Perhaps you'll send it to someone who needs to hear it. I know I just needed to write it.

Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below.

More amazing womb art from Suvi