- Diverse societies are more adaptive, resilient and survive longer.
- Diverse diets support a healthy body and microbiome.
- Diverse plant life support each other to grow and the health of the whole region.
- Biodiversity is a key indicator of the health of an ecosystem.
- Diversity supports life in the earth’s system, and you are a microcosm of the earth.
The rule of diversity relates to emotions as well when it comes to a health and wholeness. My work centers around emotions as key drivers of a person’s life. When we are missing some, it affects the whole.
For too long now, centuries really, women have been trained out of certain emotions deemed “bad” or “unacceptable” and shameful, and funnelled into what the outside world deems pleasing and “nice”.
What we call the “positive” emotions. Yes, of course I also want to feel joy and happiness all the time, but this thing called being human was not designed that way.
The costs of the “good girl” conditioning is high.
We know repressed emotions causes high blood pressure, suppressed anger fuels chronic pain and illness, not to mention the amount of energy and tension that results from keeping part of your aliveness under lock and key.
But I think the biggest symptom I see is the anxiety and shame that women feel from not behaving properly. The consequences of “what will they think of me”, “I shouldn’t have said that”, “I don’t think he/she likes me.”
This social pressure to present oneself in a certain way to avoid judgement and criticism is killing us.
Buried alive, these emotions can’t breathe, so either can we. Anger, greed, jealousy, envy, lust, pride, sloth… all deemed sins for women are actually the doorways we need to walk through and reclaim.
This reclamation first and foremost is for our own health. To have a dose of anger is healthy, to feel pride is wonderful. They open us up to the mutlitude of diversity within our own bodies. This is the path to wholeness.
They are also our allies in reclaiming our power from patriarchy. We can’t do it without them.
Anger to stand up and speak out, to protect ourselves and what we hold dear like our children, the planet, our communities.
Pride to celebrate ourselves and our accomplishments is good for the soul and for other women to see and support us. To share celebrations is an old tradition cut short by the competition and cut-throat scarcity lie we have been brainwashed into by patriarchy.: that there is not enough for everyone.
Sloth is being lazy. I have heard many a woman say she couldn’t possibly nap, or even sit down, the result being that “I am lazy”. We are trained to do it, be it all, and make it look easy, and look perfect while you are doing ti. This conditioning extracts any value from simply being, let alone resting. Rest is our birthright and being exhausted all the time is not normal. Our natural circadian rhthyms are key to fertility, and the health of every single system in our body. It is the main key to health, and yet we refrain from rest or getting enough sleep.
Jealousy, in it’s purest form, shows us what is also possible for us. I am not jealous of what I don’t want, say winning a marathon. I will celebrate the winner, but there’s no jealousy there!
We shut ourselves down so quickly when it comes to greed. Don’t be greedy, feed others first, is the mantra of the century. To be seen as greedy as a woman is unattractive to the male gaze at best and disgusting at worst, yet this trait we see in men all the time, used to destroy and colonize.
Lust is desire, and in relegating it to the shadows, we cut ourselves off from access to our greatest gift.. our bodily right to pleasure, touch, sensuality and sexual desire. Our inner desires point us in the direction of our dreams and wants and needs and if this connection is broken, so is access to our full aliveness.
Each poison is needed in it’s healthy, truest form in a healthy dose.
They are the pathway to our aliveness, our authenticity and our true selves. But it’s not enough to simply say “yes, I need access to anger.” We first need to “drain the swamp” of stuck and stored rage, accumulated over centuries of oppression and inherited in our DNA, as if one lifetime wasn’t enough! Then we need to learn a whole new vocabulary in our bodies that can recognize the crescnedo-descrecendo of the energy we call anger, and gain skills to access it skillfully as needed.
One of the surprising/not-surprising side effects of reclaiming your right to all the sins of the bad girl, is access to the other end of the spectrum: the feeling and expression of joy, laughter and enthusiasm.
Then we can take the drivers seat of our full experience once again. We live in animal bodies that have living, breathing, alive instincts in voice, senses, movement and emotions.
The lioness prowls, she is alert, awake to threat. She only responds when necessary for survival, otherwise she rolls, plays with her cubs, and rests.
When we reclaim our inner lioness, we can embody the full spectrum of our diverse ecosystem of e-motions (energy in motion) and recover our natural urges to laugh, cry, protect, make money, move or rest.
