Singing The Songs of The Ancient Ones
I have come to intimately know that all the women that we ever were, in this lifetime and before, live within our wombs. They remain as a part of us, their stories and memories stored within us. This means that their lifetimes of experiences are imprinted upon us and therefore impact us in this lifetime.
Their love is our love and their pain is our pain, engraved upon our souls. These women are constantly trying to reach us through time and space to reclaim the parts of ourselves that remain fragmented, wounded and broken, so that we can become the women who we came here to be in this lifetime. If we ignore their calls for too long, their pain manifests as mental, emotional and physical pain within us. We ultimately cannot manifest our dreams and become who we long to be, unless we face the parts of us that remain fragmented, wounded and broken.
For weeks now, these women, specifically medicine women from lifetimes past, have been singing through me. They have been sharing with me the stories of what happened to them throughout the ages. It has been so profound and tragic at the same time. Profound, as they are teaching me the wisdom and power that lies within my womb, and tragic, because I am learning the intimate stories of how their wisdom and power were taken from them.
This morning, a wave of sadness flooded me. I knew that one of these ancient women was visiting me. I knew that I didn’t need to run from her sadness, rationalize or fix it. Rather, I was being called to simply sing to it. In doing so, an Indigenous grandmother who has come to me before came through in song. I allowed the vibrations of her song to target where the sadness was living within my body. As her song touched the pain, her story began to unfold before me.
She guided me to pick up my markers, and I intuitively began to draw. In doing so, more of her story became revealed. She was a medicine woman at the time of first contact in North America. She and her people told the newcomers that they were not welcome. However, their words couldn’t fight against the colonizers' weapons. With the strokes of my marker, she showed me the rage and anger she felt towards them. My hand suddenly felt weak, and I understood that the weakness in my hand was an embodiment of the weakness she felt in their presence so long ago. Her rage and anger could not be expressed towards the colonizers because she was powerless in the face of their weapons and violence. I paused from singing and drawing, feeling her helplessness and waves of rage and anger flooded my being.
However, in that pause, I understood she was singing me this story to help illuminate the origin story of my feelings of weakness and powerlessness that arise when I feel the injustices of the patriarchy. I quickly comprehended how she was here to show me that this weakness and powerlessness that I feel is lifetimes deep.
I paused to eat breakfast, but I wasn’t that hungry. When I went to eat anyway, I heard her say, “Don’t eat my pain.” I understood what she was saying. She was asking me to no longer allow her weakness to manifest as my weakness. She was asking me to allow the force of her rage and anger to be the fuel for my power and freedom.
Though her story is part of my soul’s story, it is also part of our collective story. It is a story of the fall of the divine feminine and the divine masculine and the rise of the wounded masculine and the wounded feminine on Turtle Island. It is a story that has been passed down from one generation to the next and lives on within our bodies and psyches. It is a story that continues to unfold and repeat itself again and again, albeit in more subversive ways, as we are forced to suppress our natural cycles and emotions to a system that doesn’t honour the female body. This story can only change when we awaken to our sadness, grief, anger and rage and channel them into our power, which becomes our collective freedom.
However, accessing our sadness, grief, anger and rage as women is not so easy. We have been enculturated to believe that our power comes from overcoming our emotions rather than being guided by them. As women, we are sold a static ideal woman that we should aspire to. We are made to believe that in becoming this woman, we will access our power. This woman is young, beautiful, physically fit, nice, polite, logical, eloquent and respectful, to name a few of her qualities. We are made to believe that if we want to be seen or heard, there is no room for us to be old, ugly, lazy, emotional, selfish, weird or disrespectful.
However, as women, our power comes from honouring our cyclical nature and being guided by our bodies and emotions. This static identity that we are sold is strategically done to keep us fighting against our cycles, bodies and emotions, directly cutting us off from our true source of power.
As we try to morph our cycles, bodies and emotions into this static identity that we are told we should be, our bodies fight back. The ancient women within us know the weapons of the patriarchy, and they rise within us, begging us not to be hoodwinked like they once were. They cry out to us in our anxiety, sadness, anger and rage. They come to us in the form of our menstrual cramps, hot flashes and uterine illnesses. Rather than respect these warning cries within us, we have come to fear them.
We have so deeply internalized the patriarchy within us that we turn against ourselves, believing that our cycles, bodies and emotions are the problem that needs changing, rather than the system that is causing them harm. As a result, we direct our negative emotions in on ourselves, and ignore, numb and medicate our pain.
However, without going to the source of our pain, we are never able to recover the fragmented, wounded and broken parts of ourselves that are calling out to be reclaimed. We continue to replay the story of the wounded feminine who feels weak in the face of the wounded masculine patriarchy. This wounded femininity manifests in us trying to mould ourselves into a static and diluted version of ourselves that denies our uniqueness, strangeness, weirdness, oldness, difficult emotions, ugly artwork, and our unmade and unscripted selves. It plays out in us believing that our life cycles of menstruation, perimenopause and menopause are curses to be cured, rather than gifts to be claimed.
As modern women, most of us have lost at least 25 generations of matriarchal guidance in understanding the divine feminine womb mysteries. Most of us cannot even begin to conceptualize or fathom the wisdom and power that exists within our wombs. We have largely lost female elders who can guide us into understanding the transformative force of our wombs. However, through my own womb journey, I have learned that all of these female elders exist within our own wombs. I am not speaking symbolically, but literally. They exist within us and want to show us the way. These are the women from this lifetime and others guiding us towards our wholeness.
It is not easy for us as women to access our sadness, grief, anger and rage when we have been conditioned for generations to fear them. The wisdom is for us not to fear what we feel, but to be guided by it. If we can patiently turn towards these emotions, rather than against them, we will learn that they are the women within us, from this lifetime and before, guiding us to recover what has been fragmented, wounded and broken to bring us home.
The Indigenous Grandmother that came to me this morning in the disguise of my sadness came with the gift of transforming her weakness into my power. She showed me how a wounded masculine suppressed her divine feminine anger and rage with violence so many centuries ago. She came to show me how this divine feminine power could be reclaimed by having the divine masculine rise up within me and transform her emotions into my art. The divine feminine is the intuitive wisdom that lives within our wombs, and the divine masculine is the force that shares that wisdom through our words and actions. In feeling my sadness, anger and rage, I allowed the divine feminine to be seen and heard. In channeling those emotions into my artwork and this newsletter, I allowed the divine masculine to rise up and speak.
The story of the fall of the divine feminine and the divine masculine happened here on Turtle Island 500 years ago, but lives on within the cellular memory of our own bodies. The women within us are calling through time and space to have us change the story by allowing the divine feminine and the divine masculine to rise within the land of our own bodies. In doing so, we are setting the women that were, the women that we are and the women that we will be free. We are dismantling the patriarchy from the inside out. We are writing a new story.