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Feminist Angle Category
I was guided to Debbie Ford. First I heard about her and her work through another person’s newsletter, I got
on her Shadow Blog mailing list, and heard about her Shadow Process workshop through her website. Then I was a participant in her Easter Sunday guided visualization…the most powerful I’d ever experienced. Then I walked into my tiny public library and there was her latest book and her previous book on the front shelf by the checkout, so I read them. Finally I heard about the Shadow Process again in James Twyman’s Moses Code (he’s a friend of hers and found the workshop helpful).
Finally I said to myself, “Something’s going on here…I’m going to take this Shadow Process workshop!”. So I enrolled in August for the November process. I felt ripe for doing it in the summer, but it was well worth the wait. The workshop is a deep, deep process that skillfully takes us down inside ourselves and draws out all the junk – the hurt, the anger, the guilt – the old baggage that we’ve held down for so long. We’re not the same when we come out as when we go in.
Debbie and her team have been presenting the Shadow Process for 14 years, and have taken many North Americans and other folks in 15 countries through it. There’s likely nothing like it anywhere. Debbie told us that she didn’t design it, it was ‘given’ to her.
I had quite a few awarenesses while I was there…some expected and some not…and released a lot of energy that I was holding in. I realized at a deeper level that I am indeed okay and I ‘got’ that because someone very important in my life didn’t take me seriously, I haven’t been able to extend that courtesy to myself in many ways. I released old anger from my body, and severed a negative energetic connection between myself and a person who has been ‘in spirit’ for over 30 years.
The Process workshop is definitely not for the faint of heart. We must be ready to open ourselves, to not judge, and to let go and let the pain come up to really benenefit from it. It was a very demanding, but extremely worthwhile experience for me.
I went to town on the weekend – to hear Bob Dylan at GM Place, and next day to the Vancouver Art Gallery.
It was a surreal experience to be sitting in a hockey arena with 1000′s of other people watching tiny stick figures make music down there on the stage…can’t remember when I did that last!
The energy was huge, the air thick with smoke (didn’t know you could do that), and the noise level about what I 
expected. (I wore ear plugs, good for 30 decibels. They helped; I justify the uncoolness of it with a tinnitus excuse). Although Dylan did almost all new stuff, the sound was very much his own brand, identifiable anywhere. He encored with Like a Rolling Stone. It was recognizable, but so re-arranged, not even close to the original in quality. Oh well!
The art show was called Wack: Art & the Feminist Revolution. and was about second wave feminism. There were about 125 contributors from all over the western world. It opened at The Museum of Contemporary Art in LA.
The art gallery was magnificent as usual, and the women’s art provacative. Such an incredible variety of 
viewpoints and mediums, hard to take it all in. My fav was the life size mannequin whose dress was made entirely from gloves! Her Miss America-style sash said Madame Bourgeouisie – 1955 on it. There was a video of a woman being raped and murdered while others watched. My daughter told me not to go into that room, so I didn’t.
I was bothered by the story board on a display of collages. It was an explanation of how female artists often cut and pasted and juxtaposed women’s body parts together, and mixed parts of bodies with depictions of women performing their social roles. This kind of art was attempting to demonstrate how we ourselves are fragmented by our gender roles so the true self is not allowed to emerge. It made me wonder, how much has changed today?
You can read other news about this art show by clicking on: Vancouver Sun article
and That Lady is Naked @ the VAG
I’m wiped after all that city energy, so I’m winding down now. Tomorrow I gear up again for the final leg of The Caregiver in MidLife, projected launch date to be November 30th!
We saw an interesting movie the other night put on by the Sunshine Coast Film Society. It’s called What 
About Me?, I was told that it was shown at the Vancouver Film Festival recently, but hasn’t been released into theaters here in Canada yet. The website for What About Me says it received Grammy nominations and has also been a TV series.
It’s hard to say what it was about as it covered such a huge variety of topics…but I’ll try. The film “aims to reveal how we are all connected through our creativity and beliefs, but most of all through our madness”. Music, from countries around the world, was not only the underpinning, but a prominent theme in it.
The writers emphasized how we’re all connected regardless of who we are or where we live. The emphasis was, appropriately, put on countries all around the world, as we in North American & other Western societies are such a small part of the world really (we just tend to think we’re the center of the universe).
Conditioning and the limitations we put on ourselves (or are put on us by society) was another theme. That resonated with me of course, as that’s what I harp on all the time with my emphasis on stressful, limiting, and negative beliefs.
The movie emphasized how limited and often uptight we are in our thinking about our bodies and our sexuality. We’re all heavily influenced by what goes on around us, and by advertising.
The best line in the movie for me was about women and beauty products. The speaker was a hispanic man, and his words were translated. He appeared to understand marketing and women’s issues very well. I’ll have to precise what he said as I can’t find my rough notes!:
- The emphasis on selling beauty products separates women from the inside of themselves. Then they can’t be in their power
I thought this was very well put…brilliant in fact. If we are separated from the inside of ourselves, then we’re only connected with the outside of ourselves!
Emphasis on the external is, of course, a benchmark of our society. We’re all products of our culture, and it takes a lot of thought, determination and conscious action to begin to step outside of this ‘indoctrination’.
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On another note, Susan Schachterle is launching her new book, The Bitch, The Crone and The Harlot: reclaiming the magical feminine at midlife on October 28th through www.Amazon.com. For that day only she is giving away many bonus gifts. Her own website is, The Bitch, The Crone & the Harlot.
The US federal election has gripped us up here in Canada. We always like to know what’s going on south of the border, but this time around I even got into your primaries. I wanted Hilary to win the Democratic leadership, because she’s a strong capable, experienced woman. But I do think Obama would be a very capable leader. My friend who’s an intuitive, says he’s “a strong light in the world”. I agree – besides having the brains & credentials, his values are very high. Best of all he doesn’t bullshit! But now that Palin is in the picture, I think many more votes will go to the McCain Camp.
We have a federal election coming up in a month here in Canada, it was just announced. (our process is much shorter). We have an extremely right wing, Conservative minority leader, who’s been operating like he had a majority, running again. Hi wife doesn’t appear to ever have an opinion. He’s probably going to win, & with more votes this time. The only thing I can find in his favour is that he is pro Dalai Lama, meeting with him a year or so ago when he visited Canada, much to the chagrin of the Chinese.
It’s a bummer!
PS See Obama States: Lipstick on a Pig is Still a Pig, by my friend Rita of Homespun Healers.
MidLife Women – Accessing our Core of Peace
But what was clear was that I wanted more from my life. It was as if another part of me – one that lived in rest mode much of the time – took over my mind and spirit from time to time and challenged me to make a positive change in some area of my life. It was a drive to be a better person.
I didn’t understand it then. But now I view it differently, from the perspective gained from age, from hard-won personal growth and from the holistic beliefs I now hold. It was my spirit that carried me forward towards a more joyful, satisfying life…my spirit that helped me divest myself of old emotional baggage so I could become more of who I really was.
I understood this explanation ‘from the horses mouth’ in a way that I hadn’t understood the book or my study course with the Martha Beck Master Coaches. I realized that what my spirit has pushed me to do all these years was just what Martha described. She has her own words for it and I have mine.