Crone initiating

I have been teaching yoga for 11 years and just a few days ago I had a beautiful exchange with a new student in class, about ten years older than I, maybe in her 60s.  She joined the room hesitantly, as yoga students new to the practice often do, with a furtiveness and a protectedness that comes with being a beginner in a new space.  After class, with a softer, calmer air about her she asked if she could talk to me.  When she began speaking her voice became unsteady with the holding back of emotion as she told me that she had a moment in class that was very profound.   In that moment, she felt who she once was, a long time ago, before giving herself away to her family.  Because of my recent fascination with peri-menopause and the Crone stage of life I felt a deep moment of connection between us, and my response to her was pure, raw,  excitement.  “Oh good! You’re ready for your Crone initiation!  I’m just starting this journey.  Welcome to this sacred club.”   And as if through a small key hole, two women separated by a generation and the walls of societal designation, saw each other in  pure form.  We were seeing each other as Crone women, ripe with wisdom, experience and in the process of breaking free from the chiseled labels that define womanhood.

About two years ago there was a huge wave of upheaval in my life.  It forced me to slow down, look inward and reach out.  When I opened up and surrendered to the fact that I needed to reach out from my deepest, realest and most hidden parts, a circle of women began to slowly appear, women also being pulled by the same force.  What I know now is this is a collective calling to connect with the Crone.  The Crone, has existed in our cells from conception, carried through from the life lessons and struggles of our mother’s mothers.  The Crone which means crown, is the wise woman in all of us.  Around the age of peri-menopause we are ready to shed our former selves and put on our crown, step into our Crone selves, let the divine self fully be seen and begin gathering other sisters into the circle of power.

For many years since being pulled out to sea by motherhood I had been getting small tugs at my heart and signs in dreams that began to get more poignant as the children grew and as I grew older.  I often had dreams and visions of older women guiding me.  At one point I had a dream that my two deceased grandmothers were holding my dad up above a huge abyss.  The next morning I found out he had been diagnosed with cancer.  The communication to me by way of these female energies is a thread needled through my heart stitched from the residue of longing and yearning from lives un-lived and passions not fully realized.   Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963 and described how women repress desire for the care and feeding of others.  This tabling of desire becomes a competitive sport in mommy culture.  I witnessed this, and found in myself, that even the smallest amount of self care can bring on feelings of guilt.  This tabled hunger setting an example for daughters and grand daughters on how to be a good girl who cares for others before caring for herself.   

As I work on surrendering slowly, sometimes reluctantly to the aging process and my circle of genuine female connections grows, I recognize that I yearned for a circle of flesh and bone women guides and mentors my whole life.  Motherhood is a convenient way to ignore your life’s needs and callings.  You can pour all of your energy into your family, and the more you do this the more you are applauded.  Women ignoring their own needs to put family first has forever been the gold standard of the matriarchal archetype.  Glennon Doyle writes that “mothers have martyred themselves in their children’s names since the beginning of time.  We have lived as if she who disappears the most, loves the most.  We have been conditioned to prove our love by slowly ceasing to exist.”  Engrained in the deepest part of our histories is the pressure for a woman to land a husband and leave her youthful freedom and dreams behind to care for her family.  In the current times where women can “have it all” we are still creating our lives within a structure that voraciously fears women choosing not to have children or harnessing power not attached to outward appearance. Times have changed, women have more options, but our archetypes exist and linger around in our bodies for generations.

To examine the “mother” archetype is to dive deep into our psyches.  Lurking  within the soft allure of this word are a million attachments creating a standard that sets up the perfect idol for the mommy wars.   In examining our responses to the word closely we can bring up the shadows cast from reaching for this ideal. These shadows formed from living up to a word as gilded as the word “saint.”  This saintliness, this standard that we try to live up to, is of course set up for us to fail.  In contrast, the crone as an archetype in our culture is an old witch-like hag.   Our society has distorted the idea of the crone but crone actually means crown.  Arna Baartz says of the crone: “Her ancient power has been reduced to characterizations as the evil, ugly witch.  Our culture so prizes youth and productivity, sending a clear signal to fear anything to do with age.”  She also goes on to remind us that the crone is actually a keeper of great wisdom, one of her teachings being that life is a “progression of disappearances.”  You build up a structure in your life, you count on it, you think you’ve arrived somewhere, but at some point, you must realize the impermanence of things.  The upheaval that I was feeling in my life was not something unique to me.  It is a normal but not openly talked about reaction to, not only our children becoming independent, the falling away of our child bearing years, but the falling away of all those things we sacrificed ourselves for.  The common yearning among women of crone age, is a calling out that we can choose to listen to or ignore.  We can think of it as a calling out of our collective crone, our collective wise woman, begging to be heard.

As we enter the crone years around the ages of 42-62, there’s an internal echoing to let go of old stories and to step into our feminine power.  Stepping into feminine power while our outer shell is now changing and no longer fitting societal standards of beauty, is no easy feat.  The challenge being, what is our source of power if we take away beauty standards, or what society deems powerful for women?  I am learning that part of this is getting back in touch with our own needs, appetites, cravings, as we exist now, in this new body, that is ours to live in now, with all of our wisdom and experience.  To sow the seeds we planted in our fertile years.  To enjoy the fruits available now from setting down those deep roots.  To do this we need, more than ever,  the connection to other women.

Through my research on peri-menopause I have come to see that this death of the old self and what has been termed “second adolescents” is the norm.  The amount of power we hold as wise women who are no longer attached to societal beauty standards really shakes the patriarchy, so it makes sense that at the beginning of my journey, when I reached out to other women my age to discuss the process, these women often responded in hushed tones with shallow comments about night sweats or botox.  But these surface conversations are just  manifestations of the gripping, the trying to hold on to the attachments to the motherhood ideal, the beauty ideals, and all the facades that no longer serve us as we are touched by life’s fragility in aging.  The marrow of what I was feeling was not readily met with the comradery and connection that comes with other rites of passage. This being a sure sign that what women in the crone years are feeling is a call to power that truly shakes up the status quo.

Ursula K Le Guin said “when women speak truly they speak subversively- they can’t help it: if you’re underneath, if you’re kept down, you break out, you subvert.  We are volcanoes.  When women speak of our experience as our truth, all the maps change.  There are new mountains.”    We need our life journeys, our stories, to be spoken out, shared.  It’s through the sharing of our stories that they turn to power and lightness.  We must speak our stories into the world and in doing so, back to our younger selves.  In giving voice, we have the opportunity to listen to all that we are and are not.  We connect our wounded adolescence to our wise woman.  This merging of self is the “rebirth” that is so often used to describe this time of our life.  Carol Gilligan has suggested that girls lose themselves in adolescents.  The result of a girls growing awareness that the things she most fundamentally values are demeaned and trivialized in the wider world.  In order to stay connected, Gilligan theorizes that girls “surrender their own perspectives, steer clear of conflict, and focus on what others need and want, learning as they grow to accept traditional feminine mandates about being attractive and nice.” Menopause is a time to also reconnect back with the pre-adolescent selves, or perhaps form brand new selves from those forgotten bits.

Our bodies age and our children start living their own lives and we can either fight against the change or surrender.  How powerful to join forces, how far we could lift then.  And to reach down to young mothers to share our wisdom.  Carl Jung said:  “nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children.  Then the un-lived lives of their parents.” The Innate Wisdom Women’s Circle is a way of closing the circle of sisters so that women in the crone years can show by example how to bring mothering back to ourselves. Ursula K. Le Guin said “there’s no way you can offer your experience as truth if you deny your experience.”  Living in, being alive within this experience, is vital for our power and clarity and it is vital for passing down our wisdom to younger women. Coming together offers us the support we need to grieve the illusions we had about what we thought this age would look like,  and step into the roll of wise woman teacher.  Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes of women gathering: “The things that women reclaim are often their own voice, their own values, their imagination, their clairvoyance, their stories, their ancient memories.  If we go for the deeper, and the darker, and the less known we will touch the bones.”  This “reclaiming” happening by truthfully sharing therefore shining light, through communion and ritual, on those areas that western society likes to keep hidden.   

This time of life is an intricate dance of opposites.  As we begin to emerge from the veil of care taking we begin to hold BOTH/AND.   It is a time of the ending of things and also the beginning. Motherhood in many ways is a veil of giving of ourselves that often shields us from having to face those areas that need tending.  Mark Nepo poetically references the nautilus in how we age.  The nautilus, over time, builds a spiral shell but always lives in the newest chamber.  The other chambers, however, contain an element that help it maintain its buoyancy in the rough ocean waters.  He also asks if “In this same sense we may break down our past so we may use it but not still carry its weight?” And of course the nautilus becomes more beautiful over time.  Often, even moment to moment, I find myself at once feeling the buoyancy created from my vacated chambers and also feeling a sense of desperate reaching to fill all those unsatiated appetites I suppressed while forming myself into the female structure that the world deems acceptable.  The reaching out amongst each-other, the fire formed from that small spark of female connection, is what can be used to burn through our embodied expectations.  May we, through our raw connections, bring our shadowy selves to the surface for others to witness.  May we connect to that ancient yearning and bring it forth for others to feel less alone. May we burn down the “living up to” and begin to LIVE IN the most current chamber of our nautilus shell and all ride together the waves that are taking us home.

To a woman

I have been asked to offer advice to parents or loved ones of children with eating disorders, and though I come to you with feet freshly placed on this new path, I feel that every single woman knows in some form what it means to have a sorted relationship with their bodies and what their bodies take in.  I don’t know about advice but I have dug down deep enough to recognize perhaps the questions that we may need to be asking and the source of pain that perhaps is familiar enough between all of us that it can be collectively (maybe only collectively we find the courage) held to the light.  I can say that this journey will feel at times desperate and overwhelming.  You will find yourself going down pathways of denial.  Though I am still in the midst of it, I have developed an understanding that to really listen to this particular struggle is to listen to a very old song of womanhood.  Recently there has been a shift in my connection to my daughter that I would love to offer.  The shift was in really deeply listening and awakening to not just my daughter’s struggle but what exists within the struggle between us and the struggle still echoing from my connection to my mother and her to hers.  With this new terrain in front of me, the sounds that I had to learn to hear were the quietly untethered places that had been knocking against my insides even before my arrival on this planet.  This was the sound of a deeply feminine, familial ache that we were now being gifted, through this struggle with food and body image, the beautiful opportunity to receive.

About two years ago, before my daughter’s illness had come to light, I flew to visit my mother to help support her through a jam she had gotten into with an online con man.  The trip was cathartic.  Perhaps because it was just the two of us untangling some tricky minutia in areas of the heart, my mother and I connected in a way we hadn’t before.  In a raw, static moment alive with my own frustration over her having gotten into this situation, she revealed to me that for many years as I was growing up she had suffered from an eating disorder.  We also for the first time spoke about how much her insecurity and attachment to male attention deeply triggered me, and the situation we were currently untangling was bringing forth much of that anger.  I told her how I desperately I needed her to be an example of a strong woman my whole life but that she was always so small and invisible.  She told me what it was like for her to grow up in the 50s with a beautiful mother who carried the shame of wearing a  yellow star to school in Poland as a young girl and denied that part of herself by marrying a handsome protestant doctor and focusing on outward appearances.  As a child I remember my grandmother critiquing my mother’s looks and my mother shrinking and tightening to calm the rising anger.  Not knowing that my mother was in the throws of her own eating disorder I witnessed her monitoring my sister’s food intake, taking her to Weight Watchers and dragging her to aerobics classes during the 80s fitness craze.  My sister unfortunately got caught up in my mothers ache for perfection, that was so big she spread it out to catch my sister in order to lessen the load.  I remember my tiny 5 foot tall 90 pound mother coming home from 10 mile runs and looking for candy wrappers in my sisters bedroom garbage.  I recall vividly her finding an M&M wrapper and telling my sister that if she got fat her boyfriend, the son of a local doctor whose family my mother admired, would break up with her.  I was 5 years younger than my sister and a quiet observer.  This was a large chapter in my schooling on what it means to carry around a female body.  This chapter being a vital beginning piece in a larger story of my own self blame and romance with self loathing validated and solidified as I made my way in a man’s world.

During this same visit with my mother she told me a story about her father who was very distant but who she grew up enamored with.  A successful doctor, he would bring her to the hospital with him sometimes and introduced her to colleagues, which was a highlight of her childhood.  One day, proud and upright, sitting at lunch with him, she heard him say to his coworker across the table “this is my daughter Chris, we are looking into plastic surgery for her.”   Later, after marrying my father, she did get plastic surgery.  She also became an accomplished professor, traveler and mentor.  But the vibration of unworthiness, in the dark felt places, created that undertow beneath what is learned, that carried those of us seeking the watery buoyancy of a mothers love, pulled out to sea and struggling against that current of being not quite right.

Before knowing the story of that day at the hospital with her dad or her eating disorder, I understood her pain only has it was interpreted through my childhood frame of reference.  And as I grew, without digesting the full scope of my mother’s pain, I intellectualized how she raised us and swore to never do that to my girls.  I was going to break the cycle.  I kept scales out of the house, I worked on puffing up their self esteem and did all the right type of foot work, on paper.  Of course, like most women, I always was subconsciously noting and keeping track of what I ate, but what was more insidious was to deny myself anything that could promise joy, passion, desire, voice.  Those were hungers that I did my best to push down in order to be what I thought was the perfect mother.   Glennon Doyle touches on this so perfectly in Untamed when she says “we have lived as if she who disappears the most, loves the most. We have been conditioned to prove our love by slowly ceasing to exist.”  As I have begun the slow process of healing, I have found that as I excavate all those buried needs there is a fresh layer of unworthiness attached to each.  Motherhood was the perfect disguise for my dying light.  My daughter was not only witnessing my disappearing act but that of her female peers, one by one, trading in their childlike wonder for the promise of possible connection by way of fitting in.  This spoke louder than any sign I hung in their bedrooms about loving themselves.

When I found out about my daughter’s eating disorder I was floored.  I was called and told by her therapist.  After the first wave of realization hit I desperately struggled for air by denying the scope of the problem.  As that night wore on I began to slowly become aware of signs that had given me pause but that I had shrugged off.  To face the truth surely meant coming face to face with my own failure as a mother.  The measuring cups and tablespoons she used to measure out her portions of food for example.  Perhaps her personal form of abstaining felt so familiar to my own measured out emptiness that while it was happening I couldn’t see it as a symptom.  The anxiety she always had when we ate together, the taking plates to her room, each realization came to me as a cut to the motherhood ideal we collectively hang our hats on, until morning came and I was hemorrhaging out.  To stop the bleeding I sunk back again and again into the comfort of denial.  Even justifying the situation by reminding myself that all girls go through difficulties with food, I saw her eating, surely it was a phase.  After the Doctor visit, the EKG, bringing me face to face with reality, I was still denying.  At one point thinking we were perhaps victims of the healthcare system, trying to invent issues to keep us coming back.  Eventually all those doors of possible explanation began to shut and I was left feeling cornered and paralyzed.  This is where I have set my feet on the starting point to healing.  Stripped of my intellectual guard and beginning new, where she’s at, trying to find out how to be a woman again in the achingly familiar dance of whether to take up space or make myself small.  From a place of being broken and humbled I had to begin again at this mothering thing.  Starting brand new, where she was.  Without a choice, the broken-ness was forcing me to go slow enough to hold each unearthed form of unworthiness up to the light.  So we started new together and in doing so I had to take a look at my ties to my own mother, and she to hers.  I began to recognize that being still enough to notch my heartbeats along that frayed and timeless thread would hopefully connect me back to a place of true healing.  Once the negotiating with reality is let go, there’s an opportunity for space within the discomfort.  In this space the work is to be with and feel into this point of fear.  The basis of the fear is not being lovable or worthy enough to do the work of taking deep loving care of myself.  Honoring myself as far back as to touch the shame of my grandmother and love all those hollowed cells back into flowering.  But don’t concentrate on the flowering if that’s too scary,,,just keep the loving and honoring going.  And when the flowering happens you will be love and love is the opposite of fear.

I have learned that you can keep the scales out of the house.  You can hang the positive affirmations around, you can tell your girls endlessly how wonderful they are.  Maybe these things do help a little.  But what is needed is to go deep into those ugly fears that are birthed out of our own relationship to how our bodies are carried around in the world. When a child shows their own fragility by putting voice to their pain it pokes at the source of perfectionism formed from the weight of the mother archetype.  This brings forth reaction.  Different for each of us, for me the reaction is a sense of panic that my girls see as exacerbation, frustration, anger.  I have come to know that this motherhood ideal where the reaction erupts is where the healing has to start.  And so it happens with healing, there is always first a period of breaking down or as the healing begins the breaking down also begins as those old notions of who we are are challenged.  So as my daughter and I celebrate small wins, like her eating her first piece of bacon, I am re-examining my life and learning slowly what it means to stand firmly in the center of it and give myself what I crave.  That It is my birth right to feel pleasure, to rest, to take up space, to be.

One of my first courageous acts of self care was about two years ago during the aftermath of several awful alcohol fueled nights.  I was broken and knew I wanted to give up drinking.  I flew to Arizona by myself, rented a car and drove to the middle of the desert for an all female sobriety retreat.  One night during the retreat all the women took a Goddess Yoga class in the dark around a blaze of candles.  Goddess yoga is about harnessing your sensuality and raw feminine power.  Even with the lights off we felt shy and unmoored.  Feeling sheepish about moving our hips and seducing our shadows, most of us cringed inwardly as we went through the motions, giggling and apologizing.  As we shared the experience with each other afterward one of the women spoke of how interesting it was that we all felt so shy about expressing our sensual side amongst a group of women who we had come to bond deeply but yet many of us had had multiple one night stands, offering our bodies over to men we didn’t even know.  This sense of vulnerability I felt there, as I awkwardly tried to be sexy, holds so much.  This vulnerability contained in the detachment to the form I carry.   Detachment from what has to be carried around in this world.  And in our insults we hurl at ourselves when we are together we call upon each other as women to validate this detachment in order to form some sort of connection, as if we are crying out to each other to call our souls back home.  This stayed with me as a glaring truth about how we move through the world and make those subtle discernments about whether to inhabit ourselves, our bodies or leave them vacant for the discernment of others.  I had only ever come together with women to speak horribly about my body not dance with it like I loved it.   All of us, with the capability to mirror one another’s power, and so much power in one space, could be too much for our system to fully digest.  If let loose in the unguarded spaces we could begin to fall too deeply in love with our own being.  Better to fall back to our narrow scope of sight under light of day in preparation for falling back into the lives we chose that rely on us being up for interpretation.  Fall back to taking small bites.  Dismissing our stirrings that we keep small enough to quell the waves of shame.  Marianne Williamson says “our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate, our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.”

I have come to see that from the breaking down there was within me a deep hole formed from years of yearning for validation.  In so many ways we as women stifle craving in order to fit the female mold, mother mold.  But whether we are trying to eat less or be less in any form, it stems from the fear of being too much.  I believe that the struggles of those closest to us can spark a reaction that always deserves a long deep listen.   I’m learning that this spark invites us to find the courage to face and meet the parts of ourselves that need to be reclaimed, held and loved into the light. Carl Jung famously said “nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children. Then the un-lived lives of their parents.” So mother, woman, daughter, grand-daughter who may be reading this, the moment you were pulled with loving hands into this world, the yearning deep behind your mother’s gaze was for you to passionately fall in love with yourself as unapologetically as SHE couldn’t.