Women and Fearlessness

LET me not pray to be sheltered from dangers
but to be fearless in facing them.

Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain
but for the heart to conquer it.

Let me not look for allies in life's battlefield
but to my own strength.

Let me not crave in anxious fear to be saved
but hope for the patience to win my freedom.

Grant me that I may not be a coward,
feeling your mercy in my success alone;
but let me find the grasp of your hand in my failure.

Rabindranath Tagore (1861 - 1941)
Source: 'Fruit Gathering' - Gurudev Rabindranath

For most women, beauty and body issues are the easiest path to awakening, because the pain is so very close to the surface and the inner critic’s voice is the easiest to hear. The beauty of awakening is getting this, down to your bones, so that the world no longer needs to play our internal dramas on the backdrop of life. We can watch the drama as it comes and goes, maybe making a genuine wise crack, or just laughing at our own antics.

We stop looking to manifest abundance; we are abundance. Even without a job. Even when you give away the majority of what you create. Even when there is no one but ourselves standing at the finish line to thank us for doing out part to help save the world.

Robin Rice
Source: ShapeShifting Beauty: A Kaleidoscope

"The original oppression of Woman was based on crude denigration. She caused Man to fall, so she became a scapegoat. No, not a scapegoat which might be blameless but a culprit richly deserving of whatever suffering Man chose thereafter to heap on her. That is Woman in the Book of Genesis. Out here, our ancestors, without the benefit of hearing about the Old Testament, made the very same story differing only in local color. At first the Sky was very close to the Earth. But every evening Woman cut off a piece of the Sky to put in her soup pot, or in another version, she repeatedly banged the top end of her pestle carelessly against the Sky whenever she pounded millet or, as in yet another rendering—so prodigious is Man’s inventiveness, she wiped her kitchen hands in the Sky’s face. Whatever the detail of Woman’s provocation, the Sky moved away in anger, and God with it.

‘Well, that kind of candid chauvinism might be ok for the rugged taste of the Old Testament. The New Testament required a more enlightened, more refined, more loving even, strategy—ostensibly that is. So the idea came to Man to turn his spouse into the very Mother of God, to pick her up from right under his foot where she'd been since Creation and carry her reverently to a nice, corner pedestal. Up there, her feet completely off the ground, she will be just as irrelevant to the practical decisions of running the world as she was in her bad old days. The only difference is that now Man will suffer no guilt feelings; he can sit back and congratulate himself on his generosity and gentle manliness.

‘Meanwhile, our ancestors out here, unaware of the New Testament, were working out independently a parallel subterfuge of their own. Nneka, they said. Mother is supreme. Let us keep her in reserve until the ultimate crisis arrives and the waist is broken and hung over the fire, and the palm bears its fruit at the tail of its leaf. Then, as the world crashes around Man’s ears, Woman in her supremacy will descend and sweep the shards together.

‘The women are, of course, the biggest single group of oppressed people in the world and, if we are to believe the Book of Genesis, the very oldest.

Chinua Achebe (1930 - )
Source: Anthills of the Savannah, Page: 97-99

"Do something you fear, NOT to conquer the fear, NOT to accomplish a task, but to familiarize yourself with the processes with which fear protects itself, to demystify it." ~ Cheri Huber, The Fear Book ~

The lover must often say, "I love because I must, because I will it. I love for myself, not for others. I love for the joy it gives me - and incidentally, only - for that joy it gives to others. If they reinforce me it will be good. If they do not, it also will be good, for I will to love."
Leo F. Buscaglia
Source: Love : What Life Is All

If you have yet to be called an incorrigible, defiant woman,don't worry, there is still time..
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Source: Women Who Run With The Wolves