My Story, Our Story
Where, Oh Where, Did Our Power Go?
Broken is the beginning.
GLENNON DOYLE MELTON
It usually happens first in girlhood: a break, a crack, a violation, a rupture, a slow, molten erosion — or many of them. Whether intentional or accidental, whether at the hands of caretakers or through the influence of media or culture — or the girl or boy next door — you, as a girl child, had formative early experiences that stole a bit of your fire, and dented, wounded, and bent you out of shape.
Based on those experiences, you developed painful, restrictive beliefs about yourself, about other people, and about life itself. These restrictive beliefs do a great job of, well, restricting you. They hide your light under a bushel. However, these restrictive beliefs are simply “act 1,” the first vignette of your life’s story.
As painful as they are, these beliefs need not determine what kind of present moment you live in or destiny you walk into. As impossible as it may at first seem, you can alchemize the leaden beliefs of your past into your own hand-forged golden future. The wild and wise girl child that you may have thought was lost can rise again. Helping you rewrite act 1, with yourself as the heroine of a captivating play, is one thing that the Sacred Feminine is — honestly — genius at. The rest of this chapter — and this book — is about rewriting those beliefs so you can let your light shine.
Rewriting your beliefs changes your day-to-day experience of yourself, of your life, and of others. In turn, it changes your behaviors, and trickles down and changes your biochemistry, so that the thoughts you think, the actions you take, and the feelings you feel, change forever and for good. So that what you know to be true about yourself, life, and others changes forever and for good. You bow to your broken beginning and turn to stride into the rest your life.
But, oh, act 1 can be so hard and heavy.
WHAT GOES ON — AND WHAT GOES WRONG — IN ACT 1
Rose came to one of my retreats, fresh off an airplane from her home in Australia where she runs a thriving business and raises her son and daughter. Rose’s mother was Maori, the indigenous tribe of New Zealand, and was only seventeen years old when she left Rose’s biological father to get Rose away from what had become a physically and emotionally abusive relationship. At twenty-one, in need of food, clothes, and shelter, Rose’s mother married again.
Rose was a twelve-year-old on the cusp of womanhood the first time her stepfather touched her, and his molestation continued until she was sixteen. Rose was on constant high alert for all of those years, and many times begged her mother to leave him and take her and her two half sisters away. But even though her mother hated living that life, she didn’t take them away. In fact, her mother eventually made Rose leave home to keep the peace.
Rose began to believe that it was no longer safe for her to know what she knew, that being a girl was dangerous, and that being a woman meant being in bondage. She tucked away part of her power into a secret fold of her psyche. As Rose separated herself from her girlhood, she also separated herself from what she felt were weak and untrustworthy “feminine” aspects she saw in her mother and in herself. Naturally fierce, intuitive, and deeply connected with the natural world, Rose’s girlhood spirit was clipped and pruned, then fenced off.
Rose became a successful entrepreneur, supporting other women in their creativity and self-expression, but she also worked all the time, was often exhausted, found it hard to rest, felt competitive with her colleagues, and secretly doubted that she was making a difference for anyone. Rose did a version of what most women do in order to survive in a “man’s world” — she put her head down, put part of herself aside, and made something of herself — but not without sacrificing her full radiance.
Baby, It’s a Man’s World
Rose’s beginning is a dramatic version of how girlhood goes for too many: your shameless joy for being alive gets rudely interrupted, and your unassailable internal knowing ebbs as you cross into womanhood.
In a thousand ways, from birth to death and every day in between, everything that could be wrong with you — as a girl and as a woman — gets listed, repeated, regurgitated, and burned into your bones. Even if your act 1 was less traumatic or dramatic than Rose’s, you were probably still handed a how-to-be-happy script with nifty little check boxes for the perfect body, partner, job, faith, house, and shoes. But as you know all too well, following a script is trip-wired. It requires you to mistrust the impulses of your body, to misunderstand your intuitive guidance, and malign your deepest desires. It requires you to war with yourself and other women.
It is stressful to be on a crusade against your body, your psyche, and your fellow humans. Chronic stress — be it physical, psychological, or spiritual — causes chronic inflammation in your body, and is the root cause of not only depression but also the biggest physical health challenges facing women: heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and cancer. Many scientific studies are done on male subjects (human or animal) so that the results aren’t “skewed” by menstruation, so you often receive medical perspectives that are best suited for a 160-pound male.
In a world designed more with men, maleness, and masculinity in mind, you develop a feeling that something is fundamentally wrong and flawed within you, within your femaleness. You grow to assume that someone else — be that person a doctor, rabbi, priest, parent, expert, or Oprah herself — knows better than you do. You get the message that you will become more spiritual (or enlightened) only by ignoring, purifying, or transcending your body. You learn that it is virtuous to cultivate a calm (and positive) mind and triumph over your messy emotions. You learn to smile, look pretty, and pretend you don’t feel dark, distressed, or depleted.
In order to “make it” in a world more suited to masculine models of success, sexuality, spirituality, and professionalism, you overuse your masculine strengths, becoming gravely out of alignment with your feminine cycles. You “make it” by medicating your moods, caffeinating your productivity, stifling your voice, dumbing down your sensuality, and trying to beat out the competition. When you falter or flag, perpetually one accessory shy of perfection, you pull yourself up by your bootstraps and re-enter the battle with renewed determination.
In trying to be superwoman, supermom, or superworker, you fry your adrenals, choke your thyroid gland, become utterly depleted, get into painful competition with other women, question your purpose (and worth) on the planet, and dry up below the waist.
Most leaders, decision makers, and folks in power, even the few that are women, don’t look particularly sensually alive; at the same time, most of us understand that a woman’s sexuality is a hot commodity that can sell, buy, or get nearly anything. So you do your damnedest to appear sexy, but not too sexy, because you also know that your sexuality can be used against you to cheapen, defile, and dirty you.
You learn to use your sexuality as a weapon or a currency, or you ignore it completely and pretend to be chaste and professional. Since one in three women will be sexually abused or violated in her lifetime, any confusion you have about your sexuality and power is (unfortunately) quite normal.
One in three. Pause for a second.
Look around. Can you see (or imagine) three women? One of those women has had or will have her sexual innocence prematurely snatched from her. She might do the near impossible and pry back from the jaws of death an appreciation for her body, a feeling of general physical safety, and a robust trust for sensual energy, but it is less common than we would wish it to be. If she can once again feel at home in her skin, she will be the exception, not the rule.
Look around. Can you see (or imagine) two women? Count yourself in as the third, because that third woman, that one in three from the faceless statistic I just quoted, might just wear your face.
There are as many different beliefs as there are people, all with an astounding level of nuance and individuality. But over my fourteen years of helping to make sense of seemingly senseless act 1s and helping to rewrite restrictive beliefs through a process I call “belief re-patterning” in client sessions, leading groups, and interacting with readers, there are four main groups of restrictive beliefs that rise to the top of the fray. The first group of hard and heavy beliefs comes straight out of my own act 1.
ACT 1, REVISITED
My parents rarely raised their voices or fought. But on one particular snowy night, I wondered, a slow creep of doubt across my belly, if something was wrong. My four-year-old ears noted that my dad’s voice was brittle, alarming, and full of sharp edges as he watched my mom put our dinner of spaghetti and tomato sauce on the round wooden kitchen table.
Suddenly, my dad grabbed the edge of the table and gave it a powerful heave. I froze while the whole kitchen exploded into brimstone and chaos. Broken shards of plates stabbed the guts of the noodles and lodged in the blood of the sauce. My mom said nothing. She put on her snow boots, slammed out the front door, and disappeared into the black night, all but brushing shrapnel off her shoulders as she went.
A tiny crack appeared in my frozen brain, and a painful belief seared like lightening: Anger breaks things. Conflict makes people leave. Things can break without warning. If I don’t fix it, I will be left. Forever. Go. Fix it. Now.
That was the moment I started to become a conflict-fixing, people-pleasing perfectionist. Perfectionism, a form of people pleasing, is a compulsion to paper over a deep mistrust in yourself and in life, like slapping a Band-Aid over the warning light of a car dashboard. That was the moment I began to believe that harmony is more valuable than expressing a need or yelping honestly in pain. That saying the “right” thing is more important than saying what I feel is true. That others can’t handle what they feel; I must do it for them. That emotional upset equals abandonment and must be “fixed” immediately before it can irreparably snap human connection like a twig.
That winter night, so long ago, I put on my own tiny snow boots and all but leaped through the snow drifts after my mom, my little legs struggling to make it from one mommy-boot-shaped trench to another. I found her a half mile up our driveway and vaulted into her arms, my landing pad the startling cold of her down jacket. At once hysterical and focused, I touched her face and applied my four-year-old diplomacy: “Mommy, can we go back now? Mommy, please, let’s go home.”
And we did. The windows were wide-eyed and glowing from the inside. And inside, slowly, silently, sheepishly, my dad picked splinters out of the viscera of our cold spaghetti dinner.
Formative beliefs take hold in a moment where your sense of love, belonging, or survival seem threatened. This holds true even if — as in my case — the upsetting incident was fairly uncommon. I didn’t grow up in a household riddled with conflict. But still, on that long-ago winter night, my lifelong aversion to conflict and my long-suffering case of perfectionism was formed. From that night onward, like too many women do, I trained myself to detect the moment that my anger (or any other emotion that could spark dispute) sprang into being, and I would swallow it whole. Like too many women do, I stole away with my truth and sacrificed it to the gods of perfection.
And, while I could tell “perfect” was going to be a lot of work, I knew I was just the young woman for the job. I graduated high school as valedictorian, spent weeknights and weekends rehearsing for dance and theatre productions, and got into every prestigious college I applied to — and I applied to ten. If there were odds to be found, I wanted to beat them, no matter what I had to do to myself in the process. I became addicted to overworking and under-earning and to overwhelm and under-eating. I refused to recognize much more than a tiny bit of my own success, value, or beauty. After all, I was not yet perfect.
Yes, I am unique, and my act 1 experiences are unique, but nearly every woman I come across has a version of the belief I formed on that snowy evening of spaghetti death: “Me? I don’t need help. I’ve got it, don’t worry! I’m a giver; I was put on this Earth to give and give and give. I have to do it all by myself. No one is going to do it as good or fast as me, anyway. But once I have over-done, over-given, and over-achieved for long enough, perhaps you’ll consider loving me in return. How does that sound as a deal?”
And thus, as a result of an act 1 sort of like mine, Restrictive Beliefs Group #1 is formed and goes something like this: Needs make you weak. Get rid of all needs. Ask for nothing; take nothing. Get busy giving and doing — but make sure you do it all by yourself. I can’t need much because I don’t deserve much. I am a mistake. I am not wanted. I don’t deserve to be here. I have to earn my existence.
Act 1 for Callie, one of my mentees, began when she turned five, and her friend and neighbor, eight years older than her, started touching her. When Callie and I began working together in a group program on women’s embodiment, she was thirty-five years old, a statuesque, whip-smart, self-employed project manager. I loved how we often spoke of fairies, homemade blackberry jam, and computer code all in the same few minutes. Callie was in a fourteen-year relationship that everyone assumed would turn into marriage and last a lifetime, but Callie was increasingly, alarmingly, unsure. She wanted to do everything she could — personal growth, looking at her own demons, working on her communication and sex life with her partner — so she could answer for herself one of the hardest questions, “Should I stay or should I go? And how will I know?”
But back on her family’s farm (literally, Callie’s girlhood was spent on a hobby farm in Northern California), five-year-old Callie had gone along with what her friend and neighbor suggested they do and try. After all, he was older and she trusted him. Callie was at first curious about the new energy and sensations she experienced with him, but over the coming months, it all started to feel “off.” So, one day she barged in on her mother making lunch, laid out what was happening with the neighbor kid, and asked what she should do about it.
This clear and empowered girl child’s question did not go over well. Not at all. Callie could tell by her mother’s stiffening body that something had just gone very, very wrong. Confused, Callie struggled to understand what she had done to make her mother so cold. Her mother told Callie to stop making things up, that the neighbor boy would never do anything like that, and that “good girls don’t get into situations like that.”
Callie’s inner mouth clamped shut. Her ability to speak up disappeared. There in the pantry of her childhood home, holding on to her mother’s apron strings, she began to believe, Sexual energy is dangerous. My body is dirty and wrong. I don’t have a voice. I can’t trust anyone to really keep me safe and care for me.
You can follow Callie’s belief train, right? If good girls don’t get into situations like that, it stands to reason that she must not be a good girl. The opposite of a good girl is a dirty and wrong girl. Situations “like that,” with sexual energy present, must be avoided upon penalty of removal of Mother’s love. And as for speaking up and saying it like it is? As Callie tried to ask for help to get out of an increasingly unwanted situation, she was told she was a liar. It was no longer safe for her to feel what she felt. Her trust in others to help keep her safe broke.
As she crossed into womanhood, Callie became chronically anxious about sex. Throughout her years of partnership, she often felt numb to her partner’s touch and resented him for trying to connect intimately with her. She tried to express to him what she wanted and what he could do or say that would have her feel more open to him, but they both got frustrated when he didn’t understand how. Callie trusted almost no one to have her best interests at heart. She was plagued by ambivalence, wondering if she should keep working on herself and her “issues” or whether she was with the wrong guy and should do them both a favor, call a spade a spade, and move on.
An act 1 sort of like Callie’s helps to form Restrictive Beliefs Group #2: I can’t trust my body. I can’t trust other people. My body will betray me. I am weak; I am broken; I am damaged goods. I can’t trust sexual energy. Desire and pleasure will get me into trouble.
Riya, whom I got to know through our individual coaching sessions and group retreats, infuses warmth and sparkle into any room she enters. A lawyer, wife to a Fortune 500 executive, and mother of a teenage son, Riya also moonlights as a priestess. For real. Riya tracks down wise spiritual mentors in obscure towns and travels tenaciously to study with them and absorb their wisdom.
In one of our sessions, we traced back to one of Riya’s original ruptures in her act 1. Riya was four, standing up in the backseat of the family car, gripping the faux leather headrest to steady herself, talking and singing excitedly at the top of her mini lungs. Face tight with annoyance, her aunt turned around and said, “Riya, you’re talking too much. Will someone give her some food to quiet her down?”
Riya’s song stopped. Tiny wheels began to turn in Riya’s heart. As it sank in that her “too loud” voice and “too big” presence was a problem — a big problem, a too big problem — a belief formed: Who I am, as I am, is too much. So I will be who they want me to be, so they will love me.
Riya began to try to tone down her boldness and loudness. The voices of her mother, father, aunts, uncles, and grandparents in her Indian-American family became louder than her own inner voice. For this naturally precocious, vivacious little girl who naturally knew her own mind, it became harder and harder to hear what she wanted for herself, until eventually she couldn’t go there at all. Her inner voice simmered down, and then went mute.
Although she was of average weight, Riya became obsessed with being thinner and more beautiful. Throughout college and the early days of her marriage, she would sneak cigarettes and binge on junky foods in order to calm her nerves and “quiet herself down.” She would then take all the evidence down to the trash bins behind the house before her husband got home. A chasm formed between them. After her Monday through Friday routine of dieting, fighting with her husband, sneaking food, and working a job she barely tolerated, on weekend nights she would go out dancing and drinking with friends to “let off steam.”
This went on for about ten years until one Friday night she rear-ended a car. Looking at the driving-under-the-influence ticket in her shaking hands, Riya realized that she could have just killed someone. She realized that the part of her that she was stuffing down in order to make her family happy had burst out of its seams and could have taken two lives with it. She felt the cold, hard floor of her personal rock bottom smack her in the face.
Restrictive Beliefs Group #3 comes from an act 1 sort of like Riya’s: I’m not enough. I’m too much. I feel too much. I am too loud, too big, too bold. I am not lovable as I am. I can’t do what I want and still be accepted. I always make the wrong choice. I must be perfect. I can’t speak up, or I will lose love. What I have to say doesn’t matter. I don’t have a voice.
Remember Rose, the beautiful Maori warrioress from the beginning of this chapter? Rose’s act 1 beliefs — about womanhood as indentured servitude, and about colleagues as competition — bring it all full circle and complete the set, with Restrictive Beliefs Group #4: It is not safe to see what I see. It is not safe to know what I know. I don’t know enough. Others know better than me. The only way to be free is to not be me.
Ours are four unique childhood stories, yet I see our stories and our resultant beliefs repeated, in infinite variation, in the women I get to work with, as well as in my friends and colleagues. (You may have found some of your own beliefs in there, I suspect.)
These ever popular, restrictive beliefs effectively separate you from your own truth, voice, and sense of personal power. You might then tend to lose yourself in relationships, mothering, achievement, work, or “keeping up with the Joneses,” and might often lead a secret life, where you can express aspects of your true self on the sly, often with unhealthy and dangerous side effects.
Rewriting Your Beliefs with Feminine Genius
That’s the bad news. Ready for the good news?
Instead of going on to live numb lives, unhappy or cut off from our power, each of us — myself, Rose, Callie, and Riya — came to a reckoning point. We each took a deep breath and took the path less traveled, a path that routed us through our shadow — that place in our psyche that holds our unwanted, unknown, and outdated beliefs. Wild and winding, the path eventually brought us back to our body, our voice, our girlhood, our womanhood, and our native intrepidity, innocence, and genius. The cracks are, to borrow from the songwriter Leonard Cohen, how the light gets in.
The reckoning point is when you see that there is a problem in your life, yet you refuse to cast yourself or anyone else as the villain. You want to change but, to paraphrase Einstein, you know that trying to solve any problem with the same reasoning that created the problem is insanity. At the reckoning point, you notice the particular kind of box you are in, and you lift the lid of that box and climb out so that you can begin to think “outside the box.”
As I see it, in order to rewrite your restrictive beliefs (and the script you learned to follow as a result) and forge a new future for yourself, you must resist focusing forever on what your parents or caregivers did or didn’t do. As I see it, on a metaphysical level, we have all tasked our families and life journeys to repeatedly gift us with yet another chance to learn and to grow. (Or, to put it less politely as my acronym-loving, spaghetti-tossing dad would: AFGO — Another Fucking Growth Opportunity.)
As intense, random, and rude as your growth opportunities can be, I know it can be hard to see them as intentional — and even loving — parts of the grand design of your life. I know that your growth opportunities generally feel nearly impossible to make it through. And yet, making it through to a truer and freer version of yourself allows you to raise your face to the sky in relief and ecstasy, learned, wise, and re-united with your power. Even so, you can’t rest there for long. Soon, the cycle of learning and growing begins again. (Don’t blame me; take it up with Feminine Genius herself, the grand designer of your life.)
Learning to see that while your beginning might be fractured, you are never broken is pure Feminine Genius in action. Learning to see your own act 1 as a valid and valuable first step on your divine path is key to rewriting your future. You can see each subsequent growth opportunity as another lap on the cycle of learning and growing. Then, like we four women in this chapter did, you can change where you are headed, forever and for good.
Whereas Rose used to believe that being a woman was a prison sentence, she now knows that her Feminine Genius is the source of her inspirations for her life and business. Where she used to believe that creating anything would require soul-sucking toil, she now knows that she can enjoy herself and have fun as she strives. Whereas she used to feel profound self-doubt, she now knows, as you will come to know, that following someone else’s map only gets her further off her path.
Whereas I used to believe that I would only be loved and accepted when I was perfect, I now know that the true measure of success is threefold: how vibrantly and sensually alive I am, how clearly I can hear my inner voice, and how much courage I have to follow my inner voice. I now know that there is wisdom in every rage, rupture, and breakdown. Thus, I no longer rob my — or anyone else’s — dignity by trying to sanitize and anesthetize every conflict. I now know, as you will come to know, that welcoming these shadowy demons into the most tender part of my heart will, without fail, leave me stronger, sovereign, and more loving.
Whereas Riya used to believe that her bold, authentic self was too much, she now knows that she is more than enough. She now knows that she will only feel lovable, through and through, when she is herself, through and through. She now knows that she has everything she needs within her. She now knows, as you will come to know, that she is whole and she is home.
Whereas Callie used to believe her sexuality was toxic, she now knows that her body is sacred, and that her erotic energy is the ultimate creative force. She now knows how to radiate her beauty to inspire reverence and can choose to become invisible to unwanted, predatory energy. She now knows that her real choice (whether to stay or to go) will be made before, beyond, and in spite of reasons — and never because of reasons, no matter how compelling the reasons may be. She now knows, as you will come to know, that her body never lies and her inner knowing always guides her right into her brilliant life.
Where did your power go? Your power went running for its life after your childhood cracked, after your act 1 was interrupted. Your power went underground into your shadows as you galloped off to find a script to follow. Your power went dark as you waged a war on yourself, became deaf to your voice, and numb to your desires. Your power shape-shifted into a block of lead, waiting for you to place it in your crucible and transmute it into gold. Your power stole away into the dark night, waiting for you to welcome yourself home.
But really, prodigal daughter, your power didn’t go anywhere. It has been here all along. Your power is waiting for you, in the most unlikely of places in your life and in the most unlikely of places in your body.
And without a doubt, sister, it is yours if you want it.
You can start with nothing.
And out of nothing, and out of no way, a way will be made.
REVEREND MICHAEL BERNARD BECKWITH