Paralysis And Rage in Women
Grandfather, look at our brokenness.
We know that in all creation only the human family has strayed from the Sacred Way.
We know that we are the ones who are divided, and we are the ones who must come back together to walk in the Sacred Way.
Grandfather, Sacred One, teach us love, compassion, honor that we may heal the earth and heal each other
~ ❤ ~ Ojibway Prayer
— From Global Council of Indigenous Women…
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I have worked with woman after woman who was intelligent, capable, even professionally trained, and yet was still paralyzed when it came to pursuing her life with a sense of authenticity and security, grounded in her own ability. I am even more saddened to see how our ability to love and be loved, and to be whole people in relationships, has been frozen by the Death Motherʼs influence in our families and in our society.
Not only have I seen this in the people I work with, but I have experienced it myself. I have questioned my own ability to believe in myself, in my potentials, and in my own success, not for years, but for decades. And I have wondered if I would ever really know what love is and if I would ever really experience it.
How do you understand our statement that “…the Death Mother gives us a frightening picture of the outside world, but she also gives a terrifying countenance to our own inner world”?
Does it make sense to you that the “writhing snakes of rage” are the first emotions we need to face, and then once they are faced and transformed, they become the source of our strength and life?
— Bud Harris PhD and Massimilla Harris PhD
I think our patriarchal culture was created partly to inspire doubt in women. There’s a certain kind of male consciousness that relies on aggression, violence or threats of violence as a basic principle of living in the world. Listening, intuiting, coordinating with others to promote mutual thriving is the way of patience and caring. At some point in prehistory humans decided it was better to cut the Gordian Knot of complicated human interaction, Devil take the hindmost.
We are presently seeing the logical conclusion of this approach to living. The Devil is well and truly taking the hindmost, and us with it. The only way patriarchy has been able to survive is to overwhelm feminine ways of being and thinking. It’s fundamentally an unjust repressive system.
The logic of co-existence and cooperation that sustains the whole web of life on earth has been violated and is reacting to its suffering in ways that upset our societies in shocking ways. We are strangely unable to connect the dots. Our mental paradigm of quick profit taking doesn’t include caring about the suffering of humanity, much less the other beings we share our planet with.
Not being able to connect our inherited patriarchal vision of things with the incipient collapse of earth systems is our Achilles heel. As long as we refuse to see what’s staring us in the face we endanger the source of life itself.
Breaking through this impasse is the function of the volcanic rage of the violated feminine consciousness. It is responding to the rape of the earth naturally, as a personal violation, because that’s what it is in more ways than one. Those voices that rise in protest and accusation are here to speak unpleasant truth to power.
Women will be the natural forerunners of these voices, but this consciousness lives in men too if they can access and hear it. We live in a time of great shifts in the kind of consciousness we embody. Heart centered consciousness is entering a time of resuscitation. That will remake the world if we nurture it.
