Women are Sick because they are in Denial of their Power.

An in depth exploration.

The deepest service a woman can offer herself and her relationship is total permission to “contribute nothing.”

To be useless.

Over the last few years I have had seasons where I've had no choice but to lay down and do very little.

I have had a hard time seeing in this season without fighting it to near insanity, is the honest truth. Life has to take me by the wrists and put me on the floor.

Resources - both internal and external - dry up, because I won't drop down and in to gather them. Not bringing in a solid income is not ideal. In fact it's risky as fuck, and the mystery of money being what it is, I do wonder how we manage it.

My husband steps up every time, without complaint or question.

He is a chef and restaurant owner in the early stages of a business. We are both business owners. The site moved three times in the first three years due to an array of plot twists and mistakes. He jokes that he's been in the first year of business (the most difficult) for three years running and it's funny because it's kind of true.

This is all to say that he's not exactly financially comfy. Providing for us both isn't a plain sail, and he has sacrificed a lot for me to go through the initiation I've been in, without fully understanding what's going on.

One of the things that kept me in a state of agonising resistance during these periods, was this delusion of uselessness and what that means about me and my worth, in the context of our relationship. Like I wasn't bringing anything to the table. Like at some point my "time would run out" and he'd lose his patience and ask me when I was gonna get the fuck over myself and figure this out.

When I look back on every single previous instance of life putting my face and arse to the ground, it was those beliefs about worth and being useless that kept me clawing at the walls. I never quite got still enough to listen.

So, last time life called me to descend, while I fought myself bloody - possibly the bloodiest I've ever fought - when I did finally lay down, I found myself quite without the impetus to scratch my way out of the silence.

I found myself overwhelmed with gratitude in the places where I used to writhe in bitterness.

I saw both the beauty and the necessity of the spiral that has at times felt like an endless, vicious cycle. And a deeper death could occur.

The death of a heroic, tough-it-out persona that was convinced it could "conquer" its own dysfunction, failing to see that this energy of domination was the exact thing keeping the dysfunction alive.

My assignment has only ever been to do life in a way that honours me. All of me. And while a huge part of my undoing was to acknowledge that I am not inherently broken, another, equally powerful admission that might seem paradoxical on the surface, was to also acknowledge that I do have neuro-developmental stuff that I wouldn't necessarily call an illness, but absolutely becomes illness if it is not listened very deeply to.

The last round in the ringer of resistance had me fully understand that this willingness to listen is my north star. And that to hear, I have had to get beneath the fallacy of perpetual productivity once and for all. I have to become completely and utterly "useless" and I have to get right with the prospect of giving (and actually gifting) that experience to myself over and over again, because it is an essential and unavoidable part of the creative cycle, and when you try to avoid it, guess what happens? You become extremely miserable and anxious, and eventually go quite insane.

I've been pondering this piece a lot in relation to hormones. Because one thing I have noticed in the months since, is that the way I experience my menstrual cycle has changed quite dramatically. It has levelled out loads. I have frequently had intense psychological disruption on the lead up to my bleed, where I could lose touch with my centre and go into a spiral for days and even weeks.

I think that women get hormonally sick at least in part because we are indoctrinated into a culture that is dominantly geared towards male rhythms. Hyper-masculinisation feels so central to female hormonal issues to me. I've a sense that hormones are, in a way, vehicles for initiation. Feminine rites of passage like puberty, birth and menopause are marked by major hormonal shifts and those shifts bring psycho-emotional material to the surface. We also go through a mini version of this same inner movement every single month with our period.

So I considered whether I feel more level because the hormones themselves have balanced, or if it is because I am dealing with the repressed and unprocessed material that hormonal shifts kick up in a more balanced way. And then I remember that the "one or the other" convo is pointless because it is always both. And so many other things, at the same time.

So much discussion in the realm of health is riddled with woefully simplistic "chicken or egg" debate and I think that kind of convo happens in places where people don't have the capacity to hold the abstraction of both/and. The logical mind finds this kind of spiralised awareness very difficult because you can only comprehend that kind of truth with the body.

So when I say so many things, I really do mean so. many. things.

I spoke with a mate this week who has struggled for a long time with PMDD. She is a gifted healer, has a bunch of tools, knows herself well. And she shared that small doses of an SSRI have gotten her out of the shit a few times. It prompted a conversation about brain chemistry and the efficacy of serotonin theory in science. And we found that chicken and egg thing again. I’m noticing that it is a classic trait of materialist thought to obsess over what came first. And it just feels so redundant and pointless to even wrestle with it because the truth is a spiral.

Your brain chemistry is, in part, a product of your genetic inheritance and the circumstances of your childhood. And it is continuously affected by what you choose in adulthood. Your brain chemistry affects how you feel and how you feel affects your brain chemistry. There is no what came first because the causes and the results orbit one another. Not just through this lifetime but through generations and dimensions.

We arrived at the opinion that hundreds and hundreds of years of a severely imbalanced, masculinised culture is bound to affect the brain chemistry of women.

And whatever route of thought I take, I arrive at the same, core undercurrent: The incredibly deep set cultural rejection of the descent. I.e one of the most essential and powerful aspects of our nature. A primordial inner-movement that has been all but exiled from the collective psyche for a long, long time.

As I have said before, women are sick because they are in denial of their power.

The listening is part and parcel of that power.

And in order to hear, you must get beneath the trance of worthlessness. Women cannot hear themselves, cannot discern the sound of their own souls, for as long as they are spell-bound to the delusion that their worth is connected to what they can achieve.

Leaning back, all of the way, into the void of "contributing nothing" showed me how much I actually contribute, without even trying.

A couple of times very recently my husband has turned to me and said, with heart rending sincerity: Thank you for taking care of me. And in hearing it, something in me understood on a very deep level, that it had nothing to do with anything I was actually doing and everything to do with a presence that I am bringing.

There is a quiet softness that emanates out of a woman who is done with the tyranny of hyper-masculinisation, that is so nurturing for men, without you even saying or doing a thing.

When a woman holds fast to the story of her worthlessness unless she is actively producing something, the relationship stays in a holding pattern and evades the depths it is destined to go to. Intimate nurturing is replaced with controlling mothering. Gentle holding is replaced with judgement and criticism.

The tension of this holding pattern creates a barrier where you can't really see each other.

The depths are dug out in the silence. In the fallow seasons. In the moments where neither of you know.

There is something really massive in getting into a good relationship with the descent, and powerful, feminine communication. We sit in silence together a lot, and it speaks volumes all on it’s own. As a recovering over-explainer and hyper-intellectualiser, I find myself saying a thousand less words than I am accustomed to, and getting something across a thousand times more clearly. In conflict, and in places where we are not on the same page, the silence - the void - brings an answer. I don't need him to say a whole lot - if anything - to know that I am heard and received. And I don't require him to present me with a powerpoint presentation to know that he has everything in order.

We hit a circumstantial obstacle very recently that kicked up a sharp survival response in me. I watched myself do my usual for a minute: flap like a dying bird and then fly into problem solving. And barely a second after I'd straightened my own shit out, a simple, short text message sealed probably one of the most important pattern interrupts of my life and our marriage so far:

Leave it to me. I will figure it out.

I didn't realise what a seismic shift that this had brought about until I told my friend and promptly fell apart to a grief that felt like it had been passed down through generations for fucking centuries. It was like tectonic plates moving. Because I realised I didn't need any more than that from him. And that nothing in me felt scared or tempted to keep problem solving, or to try and "be of use".

I does not matter how cash-rich you are. So many women in situations of reasonable and even enormous material affluence cannot receive masculine provision and support. Cannot let themselves lay down and trust. Cannot be useless. And I know this article is written through the lens of a woman in a long term relationship with a man who can at least contemplate taking on the brunt of material provision even if it is not easy, but this energetic and practice is not dependent on that.

Releasing yourself from needing to prove worth doesn't necessarily mean you stop doing what needs to be done. Doesn't mean you must have a man to pay your bills for you. It might mean those things and will almost definitely mean that you back up and slow down for a minute, but it is not devoid of action. It definitely doesn't mean you don't participate in life.

Quite the opposite, actually. The unravelling that happens here is what allows you to finally start participating in life with undivided attention, with your whole heart.

Recently my prayers have been:

Show me how to release control and participate fully in my life.

Give me the strength and clarity to meet the moment fully, whatever it brings.

It doesn't matter what your life looks like, if you can't receive, you can't receive. You could be offered all the support in the world and it wont quench the thirst of a mouth made bone dry by the sand of hyper-masculine conditioning.

And until you agree to the initiation that takes you through the patterned shut down response that blocks true receptivity, you will continue to suppress your most essential nature.

The force that wants to create through you inverts and gets turned inwards. It's like walking around with a constant hurricane happening inside your body and mind.

The crust covering this repressed material has, for me, been my relationship with shame.

And not so much the shame itself, as the incredible structure of mental patterns and maze of internal alarms systems that I had set up to protect myself from even touching the shame. Feeling shame felt like a fate worse than death. So I unconsciously did everything in my power to not feel it, tying up an insane amount of life force in the process. The shame of being shut down from receiving was the most painful part. The shame of perceiving myself to be locked out of my heart and soul, to that end, outside of God.

A shame that took on an enormous, lurching presence the more I turned away from it. A shame that unravels into nothing when I let it rise in me and choose to see myself through it.

For most of my life I wasn’t even been able to label shame as a sensation. That is how locked down it has been. It was just a rising storm of deafening internal chatter and intrusive thoughts that I'd conditioned myself to try and "solve" at all costs. Instead of recognising the natural passage of the storm and riding it out, I attempted, over and over again, to dominate the force of my own nature, rumbling underneath this repressed crust. Once upon a time, I was so dissociated from the enormous shame tumour hanging off of my pain-body and leeching my creative life-force dry, that I was convinced I didn't even experience shame.

And what a smart story and compelling performance that was, from an ego terrified of the massive shaving back it would undergo when that power got free. The feeling of shame was just a flimsy cover for the force of nature beneath it. A screen of stale smoke that the winds of truth blew away in an instant.

Shame is not the problem so much as the intense fear of it. Because the fear tells you that the presence of shame means instant exile. Means you will be cast out of the clan and worst of all, cast out of yourself.

You have to stop seeing shame as a threat. You have to be so thoroughly done with believing the story of it and be completely willing to stand in the storm of everything that the delusion of your inherent wrongness used to mean. It is unpleasant. Sometimes very much so. But it is temporary.

Things will happen that kick storms up. There is nothing you can do about it. Nothing that you need to do to resolve it, because the storm itself is the alchemical process that brings about a resolution all on its own.

No, it won't bring you instant relief. Yes, it will take time. You just have to remember, no matter how shit you feel in the moment, that the storm is not you. It's not something to get right or wrong. Your perfectionism won't survive the wreckage. It's not supposed to. And thank fuck for that.

Storms will always happen because changes in the weather are a part of life. A cycle within a cycle. But they rage harder and faster and at much greater frequency when the descent is fought against. We only need look at this on a literal and macrocosmic level to see how this rejection of our very nature plays out.

I listened to a podcast just recently - an account of a woman who endured a terrible hurricane on her ancestral land of the Bahamas, where she observed that the storms had gotten progressively worse throughout her life.

The gradually worsening extreme weather is a direct reflection of a feminine current that has been suppressed for too long. Catastrophic tropical storms are a mirror image of the destructive psychic storms that occur in an attempt to lay waste to oppressive mental structures, built off the back of centuries of cultural hyper-masculinisation.

Women suffer with hormone imbalance, illnesses of the reproductive organs, anxiety, depression and OCD as these storms rage beneath the sediment layers. We become more and more ill the more we try to pack those layers down, which is something most of us are very deeply grooved to do without even realising that is what we are doing.

Women are sick because they are in denial of their power, but we are not to blame for that. This statement is not one of blame. I know how easily one can take in a statement like that and filter it through the very lens of perfection and punishment that we are tasked with removing. The conditioning we have absorbed is a shit show and this sediment of shit has been thickening with every generation for God knows how long.

But, like it or lump it, we are here to carve a new way. We must find it in us to let go of the spinning plates that we are so afraid of dropping. I don’t have all the answers and there are a million circumstances and stories and factors that you could distract yourself with to avoid facing the chaos that may ensue from embracing a new way, but we must let ourselves vision something else and be prepared to face the consequences of life rearranging to align with that vision.

We must let the storms roll through the field - our field - and let it take whatever it takes with it. Because that was all it was ever designed to do; clear the space for new creation.

No it won’t make sense. Yes there will be loss. No you will not be in control. Yes it will look different for everyone. No, please don’t attempt to work out the logistics of it.

To release yourself from the compulsion to prove worth, and to finally drop the shackles of perfectionism and perpetual productivity, in your relationship, in your work and in your life, is to become the soil that the rain hydrates and the wind spreads the seeds atop of.

Nothing grows in a healthy way unless you give yourself over to this.

How many more times will you force leggy plants out of parched and depleted ground, that do not bear fruit that truly feeds you?

Do you feel me?

If only we all knew in our bones what a gift it is to become the soil. What an indescribably beautiful experience it is to learn to relish in our decomposition, to be exquisitely free of the conditioning that demonises and stunts it.

It is unfortunate and sad that the bones of many of our elders largely do not carry this memory. But, the prognosis is anything but bleak, because what is truly eternal and eternally true, can never be completely forgotten.

We came here to have the ecstatic experience of recovering the ancient, feminine memory of blissful descent, so that future generations can arrive with this knowing, already bone-deep.

And in the shorter, more immediate term, you came here to remember this for you. For the intimacy, beauty and vitality it opens you up to. For the freedom of a life lived in rapturous communion with the up that must go down and the down that must go up.

I pray that you remember.

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