the art of being female
october, 2005

Re-imagining, re-claiming & living the wonder of being female

Greetings!

This month's Art of Being Female is short and sweet...it's sweet because it's all about love...it's short because when you are talking about love, there really isn't anything else to say.

My younger daughter Jenny will be married on the first Saturday of November. It is a wonderful thing to know your daughter is marrying someone she truly loves. I have two daughters and after the 5th of next month, they will both be married. It's hard to explain how this feels...to know that both my daughters have married men they truly love. To see them in love fills my heart with such gratitude and joy.

This month my colleague Julie Saltonstall and I started our three-part pilot course, Welcome to YOUR Dating World, in New York. It has been such an amazing opportunity to be able to design and teach a course about dating and authentic relationship to a group of incredibly vibrant women. They have been directly affected by 9/11 and are opening to the experience of loving again.

Listening to our heart's voice takes courage, especially when we have suffered loss and pain. While each person's loss in life and love is different, we all share a universal experience of loving and losing. Whether it is through death, divorce, or never having found that deep love we long for, we all experience grief and the fear the follows about loving again, especially as we move into the middle years of life. But allowing the heart to guide our life is what gives life the richness and meaning we long for.

Open your heart to the love that is all around you. Especially love that part of you, your Authentic Self, who waits quietly for your return.

With gratitude,

Julie

ps - please pass this on to any Wildly Creative Women (and Men) who might enjoy it by clicking on the link at the bottom of the page.

October's Issue:

Love...

wild Self-expression

Play-with your Practice

• love...

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” ~ Rumi

L ove...the realm of the heart. Love is what we are and what we long for. We live to love. So why does it sometimes seem so hard to find someone to fall in love with?

In working with clients who are re-entering the dating world after the death of a spouse, either in a workshop setting or through coaching, I have seen how many ways we keep ourselves from loving again. What I have come to realize lately is how we all have grief of some sort around love and loving again when we find ourselves single at an older age.

Whether through death or divorce, we have endured pain and an aching heart. Many women I know who have never been married are reaching an age where they are beginning to worry about never finding love. What we all have in common are reasons why we don't believe we should or can love again. Our Voice of Judgment (VOJ) wreaks havoc within, keeping us roped in by the many fears we harbor about risking pain in the very heart that longs to love.

"Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within." ~ James Baldwin

It is this VOJ that has us believing to take a risk and try to find love again is just not worth the pain we will ultimately feel. In fact, the VOJ's main gig is to keep us from feeling. It believes we can't handle feeling the fullness of our feelings.

But, our hearts are really very strong and powerfully resilient. While the VOJ tells us we couldn't live through the experience of rejection, our hearts know that rejection isn't the only possibility, and even if it turns out to be so, there is great wisdom and connection for the Spirit in the experience of rejection.

The VOJ loves to hide the fact from us that every relationship ends in some way. It tells us that if we find that one perfect person, we will live happily ever after, forever, without any more worries, and so on. But in our hearts, we know this is not true. We know, if we really check in with our own internal wisdom, that love is more than this idealized image we have of romantic love.

Love is many things, but on the deepest level it is a recognition of our own divinity, our own lovability, and our own ability to love another without needing anything in return. Love is a recognition of our oneness and completeness, just as we are.

If you are one of the many beautiful women (or men) who are really yearning for a loving relationship, recognize that yearning. Allow your heart to really tell you what it longs for. Allow yourself to feel this yearning. Our play-with practice this month is: Open your heart to the Love that is right here, right now."

There is nothing stronger in this world than the power of love.

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• wild Self-expression...

Creativity can't really be defined, but one of the closest definitions I have been able to articulate is that Creativity is Self-expression, where Self is your deepest Self and its expression is your truest Truth. If Creativity is Self-expression, then Wild Creativity is Wild Self-expression! Creativity happens when we are willing to allow the creative force to move through us and flow out of us, by way of our own unique expression.

I invite you to share your own wild Self-expression with other readers here, and at our web site www.wildlycreativewomen.com. I am creating a new page to share your creativity with other wildly creative women.

I realize that sharing one's work can feel vulnerable, but it is in this willingness to be vulnerable that you can experience being seen in a profound way. When we share our Truth, we are seen in a way that brings the most delicious freedom of all.

To share yourself through your wild Self-expression, is the greatest gift you can give, not only to the world, but to your Self.

To start things off, I offer my own wild Self-expression.

ripe with love

You see me here, strong and soft, eager and afraid,
my heart racing with desire
to be seen and heard,
to be held and to hold.

I am here,
emerging
from this bondage placed on me long ago,
from this cage of sin, fault, and fear.

I found the key
to my release when
I saw myself
in the reflection of your rejection.

My open heart was
both weakness and threat, lover and enemy.
You saw me seeing you
and you shut the door on my escape.

But freedom is funny,
it was mine to find all along.
Redemption came
when I filled my emptiness, with the fullness of me.

The dive was deep, the way was dark.
On the surface I had only seen,
how I never quite matched up
with everything I was expected to be.

But as I dove deeper into the depths of my being,
A glorious Light began to emerge.
It came from a time long ago,
It called me home in a language I had long forgotten.

There, deep inside me, I found the seed
Planted long ago, at the beginning of time.
My deepest Self, my truest Truth
My inner being in perpetual Spring.

I am ripe with love,
Ripe with the nectar of passionate presence
I am here to hold you,
within the folds of my velvet petals.

Fall down, deep down, into the depths of my being.
For I blossom in time to break your fall
As you land with a thundering whisper,
“Catch me, please catch me.”

Open yourself to the center of me.
Drink deeply the love that has been waiting for you,
waiting with timeless patience,
knowing what has always been, will be again.

Let me lay side-by-side with you.
Let me feel again how perfect the fit is,
if we only allow ourselves to relax
into the shape we already are.

Remember the rightness of this fit.
Don’t fight what you know to be true.
I can love side by side again,
Knowing the love comes through me to you.

You see me here,
soft and strong, knowing and sure.
My heart is filled with the truest Truth and the brightest Light
See your Self reflected in my love.

~ Julie Daley

I hope you will take me up on my invitation to share your wild Self-expression with other Wildly Creative Women. Somewhere there is someone who is needing exactly that which you feel compelled to express!

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Please pass this newsletter on to any women or men you think might enjoy or benefit from receiving it by clicking on the link at the bottom of the page. Thank you!

•play-with your practice...

Each month a new play-with is offered as an addition to your practice of the art of being female.

Playing-with your experience is the basis of the "creative cycle of self-discovery" used in Wildly Creative Women's coaching and courses.

Play-with for October:

Open your heart to the Love that is right here, right now

So much of the time we don't see the love that is right there in front of us. We are off in our heads, dreaming of the love we yearn for, seeing someone somewhere out there, somewhere unreachable. It's a pretty interesting tactic the Voice of Judgment uses to keep us from surrendering to all the lovable people and moments right there in front of us.

1. Remove your barriers to love. Open your heart to life and to love. Practice opening your heart to everything that comes your way: people, possibilities, opportunities, and experiences.‘Opening’ is seeing the world through a new filter, one that doesn't let in those absolutes the VOJ wants to hang on to; you know, those “have-to-have”, must-be-this-way”, “couldn’t-possibly-allow-that” ways of seeing. See the love available right in front of you, right here, right now. Do this many times each day.

2. Open your heart to your Self. When you open your heart to your Self, you begin to honor who you are, the choices you make, and the desires you hold for your life. Notice how often you criticize yourself for the choices you make, the actions you take, or the way you look. Instead, choose not to abandon yourself. Choose Love for yourself and your Self.

3. Opening your heart to others allows for appreciation of their humanness and recognition of their individual hopes, fears, and personal dreams. Perhaps it is a stranger on the street. Maybe it is a friend that calls you up unexpectedly. Possibly, it's someone causing you distress or making you angry. Find a way to open your heart and see then through the lense of Love.

4. When you open your heart to others, your heart expands, making space for new people to come into your life. Allow your heart to be expansive. Make room in your heart for someone new to come in to your life. Picture them inviting you in, just as you are inviting them in.

With an open heart comes the ability to love, without demands. This happens in your love of others as well as in your love of Self.

I would love to hear from you about how your practice went. Remember, the point is to play-with your experience.

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