Archive for ‘blogs’

Integration (AKA “growing up”) is the new frontier for me these days, and it has been showing up in so many different ways:

– Working mixed with fun
– Service mixed with self-care
– Sex combined with profound connection
– Practical “root chakra” considerations seen through the lens of the more soulful “crown chakra” ones
– Athleticism combined with activism
– Art as social commentary and consciousness raising service
– Beautifying self and environments while considering the earth’s longterm well-being…

Etc, etc.

There is no better combo these days than healthful eating combined with sensual rapturous-ness and satisfaction.

This was never more the case than a few nights ago, when I invited the luminous Anna Thomas to come to my house, along with 25 of my girlfriends, to learn how to make soup from her. She just released a book called “Love Soup” and, those being two things I am obsessed with, I thought we’d both might be oriented to a similar ‘true north’.

Soup! Love! Let’s do it!

We were.

The opportunity to have 25 women in one place is my FANTASY, as without my ladeez I am NOTHIN’. And a gaggle of them all about, all focused on Anna’s labors, fruits and guidance was right up there in my top 10 favorite communal experiences.

The hands-down favorites were the green soups, proving that healthy does not have to mean disgusting.

…. continue reading the full article here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alanis-morisette/alanis-morissette-and-aut_b_380422.html

Far be it for me to bite the hand of the movement that’s fed me.

If it weren’t for the feminist movement, I would be a mere shell of the woman I am today. There have been many brave women who have gone before me who warrant deep thanks for their tireless effort in paving the way for as much egalitarianism as our innate and biological gender differences can allow for. I humbly bow to those visionaries who saw us as something much more than a mere and second-class possession or object.

What has been hard for me not to notice, however, are the many women my age (I’m 32) who are finding themselves at an identity crisis point at this particular juncture in their/our lives.

Whereas a hundred years ago (and still in some parts of the planet today) I would have been laughed at (or killed) for my masculinized tendencies that have run most of my short life, I find myself struggling with how to temper the more stereotypically male aspects of myself that I have valued so much, to return to my natural, more feminine rhythm. It’s a rhythm that was lost in my attempt to prove my competency, survivability and valor in a male dominated society and entertainment industry ” a most valiant and effective attempt that I have no regrets about, but one that did not go without great sacrifices along the way that I barely noticed at the time.

As I write this, I am taking the first real break I have ever taken since I was 9 years old. I am just learning how to cook (I am within hours of having made my first true meal), and am finally slowed down enough to be hosting incredibly fun parties at my house regularly. A hundred years ago, I would most likely have been shamed publicly for my inability to do the things most expected of a woman: to keep house and provide meals for her loved ones, to be the centerpiece and heartbeat of her community. Today, based on my achievements” and all the bacon I brought home to my own self, people are kind to cut me some slack. But I wonder, what else, besides my inability to cook, has been lost in my effort to prove that whatever a boy can do a girl can do better”?

Has my obsession with my career and feminism been responsible for the aspects of the divine feminine that have gone un-nurtured and unnoticed in me? How has this unshakeable focus on my stereotypically masculine qualities skewed my vision and thereby my ability to see and connect with other women? And how has it affected my ability to follow my natural and intuitive feminine rhythms?

In the midst of creating the answers to these questions, I now find myself at this most exciting place of wanting to thank the feminist movement, and thank the women who came well before and precipitated it, and to then move forward into some new kind of 2006 grey area.

An area in which I am aware of my competence and ability to swim with the guy sharks, so to speak, but in which I am also aware of my ability to be all girl, all soft and surrendered and receptive and allowing and connected to the divine in a way that is equated with the great feminine’s way. For all that I have achieved, and all that it has cost me, I am now ready to claim it all– the true gift of the feminist movement: choicefulness.integration.

The gray area of knowing that if I wanted to take the path of the more male-oriented, I could, that It’s available to me at any time. But then to feel the invitation to explore the other side as well, now, the side of woman, and all the goodness that that holds, is the single most exciting and relaxing thing I can think of. It’s like the grand return home after fighting a war, a war going on in our own identities and hearts and social structures.

I feel a growing peace in knowing that I can trust rather than run counter to my natural feminine rhythms, wherever they may lead me…whether It’s to the kitchen, the boardroom, the garden or the Oval Office. I think this is the true gift that feminism has been leading up to all these years. Because eseentially, egalitarianism, at its’ core, speaks to mutual empowerment, the seminal win-win.This sigh of relief alone is worth all the efforting that has led me, and trillions of other women, to this point. And I feel that somewhere, my feminist fore-mothers are smiling, as though they knew this is where we were headed all along.

So many times, standing on the street corner, I would experience someone walking up to me saying hey girl! I love you! I hate men too! High fives!!!” I would smile a wan smile and i would be rendered speechless. While I knew many of my songs spoke about love, awakening, responsibility-taking and man adoring, I also knew answering but I don’t!” would have been somewhat of a lie. I had allowed my subconscious rage toward men to be written and sung about around the planet in a way that I knew I would be asked to comment on and stand behind in my day to day life. I knew that the singing of these songs had helped validate and comfort many people who had been in the same place I had been. And yet there I was, being repeatedly and directly asked about something that was still too painful and confusing for me to have come up with any answer other than, well, not really”. The person would often awkardly say oh. Well I love you girl!”
It is only lately that I’ve begun to truly understand the journey of my rage and pain with regards to men into the gratitude and deep respect that I’ve now begun to feel.

Having been born at the beginning of the post-feminist era, it was hard for me not to feel the effects and strain of patriarchy everywhere I turned. Whether it was on a volleyball court, in an improv class, in a studio, in the streets in different countries, in the pages of magazines I read or in the brilliantly written but decidedly woman-hating episodes I watched on television or on the silver screen….there were three perceived messages I received that were most pervasive:

1) women are inherently less important than men
2) women’s power and value lie in how they look, and how much sex appeal they have
3) there is no room for vulnerable emotionality in this world

At the time the only way I knew how to deal with this affront to my life force, as I saw it, was to blame someone, and that someone was the entire existence of men. I didn’t know then what I know now, and I felt I had no other way to channel this pain than to attack the very gender that I believed was the source of all this oppression I felt. When I am very quiet and I think about being a female in my youth, I am touched with a deep sadness about the disempowerment, helplessness and anger I felt. The thought of taking on a planet that demeaned women in the way it seemed to felt overwhelming to me.
The one thing that kept me baffled and stuck was how deeply I LOVED men, and how I knew on a spiritual level that I was part of them, that we were one. There was nothing more confusing that my continuing to fall in love with the enemy”. I read countless psychology books while holed up in my hotel rooms and on airplanes, to understand why god would create a world where women seemed undervalued, overlooked, objectified and invisible and for them to then fall in love with the very people they deemed responsible! A cruel hormonal joke! A terrifying existential imperative! A subconscious tendency fueled by the desire to self-annihilate! Get me to the nunnery!

I remember my father telling me as I grew up that my masculinity was a little overboard” and that he wondered where my femininity had gone”. I imagine that what he was seeing was my compensation and adaptation to a society that only heralded stereotypically masculine qualities as valuable and powerful, and that my femininity, as such, had taken a backseat in order to survive. I also see that I was challenging roles from the past in both my house and in the world at large. my generation and i were growing toward a more androgynous and integrated state of being, and the apple cart of defined roles was being upset at best, altogether flipped over at worst, in the eyes of my father. where does this leave men?” was his question when we talked about this years ago. if women are growing into such power, what of the men? What is left of their role?” my response then is something I still feel today, which is that as women evolve into the fullness of their being, so too are men invited to, alongside. And that my goal (and I think the goal of most women I’ve spoken to) is not to have the pendulum swing to the other side toward matriarchy, in order to punish men, but to have the pendulum dangle somewhere in the middle. Where both genders grow toward wholeness by embracing parts of themselves that their sexual counterpart embodies (both the qualities we hate AND love in them!) that the goal, in today’s supposed enlightened age, is to move toward wholeness, rather than goodness and righteous imbalance.
That the very act of life providing two genders to begin with is a call to both genders to become whole ny moving toward their counterpart (and that this applies to same sex couples as well, with the opportunity to claim both their masculine and feminine qualities equally available).

I see the many gifts of my having had such struggles and pain as a young girl in a perceived man’s world. To compensate and survive in that world I grew into all my stereotypically masculine qualities (my assertion, my leadership, my self-reliance, my ability to solve problems in a heartbeat etc). The very same qualities that my father had said I’d gone overboard in were the same qualities that have helped me live my life purpose and survive in the world. And it has become my goal now to get back to a place of balance and choicefulness with regards to which of my masculine or feminine parts I access in any given moment. I am free in this choice now.

I see the fear in both genders and in myself of having to navigate in this new climate of integration, a context in which there are no predetermined, easily defined roles. I see us all as cross-country ski-ers moving into virgin snow with no trail map. I myself prefer the unfamiliar and terrifying promise of wholeness to the familiar and safe fragmentation that is required to continue to play out these rigid and confining roles on this planet.
In no small part due to the love I feel for the most amazing men in my life, I am slowly growing into a feeling of deep gratitude for men and the patriarchal society that compulsively and rebelliously drove me to become all that I am today (although at times, I twitch from the ptsd of it all).
I am grateful for the choicefulness that has come of my journey into the wholeness of claiming both my masculine and feminine qualities. (All of us, doing this in the face of biological and historical predispositions to remaining half the being we were born to be! Kudos to us!) And I am growing into the awareness that my true peace comes from working alongside men as we all journey this unfamiliar terrain. That partnership speaks the real truth about how this all works. And that power struggle and us-vs-them speaks the ultimate lie about how life really works. I know that the feminist movement may have given us a (false?) sense of power. But it did not give us peace. I now see that joining hands with them makes this journey less terrifying, less arduous, and less lonely. And ultimately, a choiceful one, that leads directly to this peace.

-alanis morissette