They
know much more than I did. But women my age and older who
didn’t know until now should continue to blossom as long as we’re
breathing. For me and for many other women forty and over, the
pieces of the puzzle have only just begun to t together. What mature women want is this: the lightheartednes s of our
youth with the added depth our suering of the past few years has
given us. Through the grace of the Goddess, it is within our grasp to
have both. Genuine spiritual experience transforms our suering
into something beautiful and lifts the heavy burdens  from our
hearts. The older we get, the lighter we can become. It takes eort
to move in this direction, because it is counter to the ways of the
world, but running counter to the ways of the world is the purpose
of our lives. The enlightened system isn’t set up so that we work hard, nally
nd joy, experience it for a relatively short time, and then grow old
and die. Unless we strive for an expanded, more compassionate
vision of age and aging, the achievements we seek here are at best
cruel mockeries of our pain-lled eorts. Let us imagine  a woman’s life improving as she ages. Age doesn’t
have to be bad. It could, in fact, be magnicent, if we would take
our spiritual lives more seriously. Throughout our twenties and
thirties, we care so much about what the Joneses think, even if we
think we don’t. These two decades are the time when we’re most
tempted to try to live for others. Around forty, it occurs  to us thatthe Joneses are either going to like us or they’re not, that the
Joneses have holes in their socks too, thank you, and that we have
less control over what other people think than we ever imagined. And other people shouldn’t have so much control over what we
think either. There’s too much “you should  … you should not” told
to women these days. Wheth er a woman takes hormones, wants to
have a face-lift, wants to admit her age, or wants to talk about
menopause is nobody’s busin ess but her own. There’s privacy in a
woman’s heart  that should never be violated, and certainly not in
the name of feminism. We are doing the best we can. Whatever we
come up with on our journey to expanded consciousness, let us have
and let us be. What’s going on inside us matters; everything else is
cosmetic and should be treated as such. Once we remember we’re
cosmic queens , these issues won’t arise. That’s the only solution to
all our shallow traumas. We can stop trying so hard to win love and power and inuence
in the world, because on some days we’ll have those things and on
others we won’t. But if we look to them for sustenance, we will nd
despair. And growing more desperate, we will grow old. Age appalls
us because maturity appalls us, responsibility appalls us. Our thirties
are the time to get serious about being an adult, taking
responsibility for our communities and our families. Our forties
become the time for getting good at those things, for achieving some
mastery. In our fties, we should be able to shine. People in their
fties are like full-bodied wine. In our sixties and seventies, we
could, in addition to shining, start teaching others, those coming up
after us, how to do what we have done. Without a spiritual life, what are we left with? What is there to
strive for? Where do we look for clues? In magazines? Here are some basics for spiritual renewal. First of all, meditate. Do transcende ntal meditatio n (my favorite), Christian meditation,
Jewish meditation, Buddhist meditation, open-eye meditation, full-
moon meditation, Quaker meditation—it doesn’t matter. Just do it. Also, pray. Engage in some sort of daily spiritual practice—
nonreligious, religious, whatever. Above all else, try to forgive. Andlastly, treat your body well. Practice yoga or some equivalent form
of concentrated physical exercise. Do not look to your husband, your lover, your children, your job,
your money, or your therap ist to make you happy. It’s not their
function, nor within their capacity to do so. Look to yourself, to the
Goddess within you, and take responsibility for your own state of
mind. Women can be masters at negative programming. We constantly
tell ourselves what is not right: our gure, our hair, our relationship,
our job, the weather, someone else’s behavior. Sometimes, we do
this because we have legitimate complaints; at other times, we
criticize simply because it is the turn of our minds to do so. Every
time we do, regardless of why, we attack ourselves. We are
programming our subconscious—the part of the mind that hears
what we tell it and then creates more of the same—to manufacture
the life we’re describing. And then—magicians that we are—lo and
behold, we have a new, even more negative life the following day. Someone once gave me a coee mug on which is printed  ENTERTAIN
NO NEGATIVITY. If only I could be so strong. As 1992 was drawing to a
close and I gathered with friends at the approach of midnight, I
scribbled on a piece of paper, “In 1993, I will repeat no negative
stories.” We are not a little powerful; we are enormously  powerful. Every time we say a negati ve word, we lay the menta l plans for
negative thing s. There is no escaping this law of the mind. As we
think, so shall it be. Here’s another  helpful hint. Choose an armation that ts you,
your hopes and your desires. Try to stay away from specics, and
concentrate instead on the woman you want to be. You could say, “I
am a glorious  child of God. I am joyful, serene, positive, and
loving.” Write it on several pieces of paper. Pin them up in your
house or tape them to the dashboard of your car. The mind is more
powerful than are any external conditions. If you repeat your
armation ten times a day, particularly in combination with
meditation, your life will change.Spiritual techn iques cannot not work. The question is not whether
they work but whether or not we actually do them. If we remind
ourselves often of the woman we want to be, then the woman who
has been masquerading as us all these years will breathe her last
breath and give us back our life. On the days when I do these things—and having turned forty
myself, I have nally learned  how important it is to do them all—I
feel good. On the days when I don’t do them, I don’t feel as well. And I must admit that there are often days during the month when
nothing makes me happy, and that’s it. PMS is PMS. Chemical
depression is an even harder nut to crack. There are times and
conditions when despite our exercises, we continue to cry and we
continue to feel pain. I’m talking here about the broad strokes, the
vast majority of our days. Try those things—meditation, prayer,
yoga, armations—and the fabric of your life will become more
beautiful and peaceful. At times, we can nd sustenance in a spiritual retreat, a woman’s
retreat, a vacation, a time o. It’s important to have the chance to
get away from it all. But we must remember that the serenity and
peace a retreat provides should not be limited to our time away
from home; we must commit ourselves to incorporating the
conditions that foster peace and serenity into our daily lives. So
much inside us can ourish when we turn o the worldly  noise. The
search for inner peace is a life-style decision. Even when we have
children, they can learn that at certain hours Mommy needs quiet
time. As much as we crave the rest a vacation oers, we often resist it. Many of us have set up our lives so that we are consta ntly busy,
living on a kind of adrenaline that poses as energy. This is an
insidious trick of the negative mind: building a wall of frantic
activity that mitigates the experience of a meaningful inner life. We
lose a tremend ous amount of personal power and healthy energy by
allowing ourselves to be lured away from daily spiritual practice. The spiritual life is our inner life, and a woman is lost without her
connection to the God and Goddess within her.As for physical appearance—as we age, gorgeous young hunks
may or may not be interested in us anymore. For that matter, men
our own age and older might not be interested anymore. My
response to that is “So what?” We could have met up with these
same guys when we were young, and they would still have been
turned o to us anyway once we got older. Have faith in men. There’s a new breed forming, just as we’re a
new breed of women. They are quite young, some of them, and they
are older also. They are learning, they are growing, and they are
everywhere. Hold on. Just take care of yourself. Strive to live a
more loving, more beautifu l life. They won’t not nd you. Your
appeal is huge and invisible and real. What now? Agreements. Agreements that we will not hurt one
another, that we will support one another. We will protect the
children and heal the earth. We will make love an art, and we will
love like artists. A woman is meant to hold the heart of the world within her
hands. She must cater to it and minister to it and kiss it when it
cries. We are meant to keep the home res burning, the res in our
hearts. We are meant to prepare the food, the spiritual food of love
and compassion. We are meant to care for the children, not just our
own, but every child. When we do not recognize our cosmic
function, our own hearts break, and so does the heart of the world. Just as children grow by playing games in which they imagine
themselves to be grown-ups, so are we meant to grow by imagining
ourselves to be bigger than we are right now. You need not
apologize for being brilliant, talented, gorgeous, rich, or smart. Your
success doesn’ t take away from anyone else’s. It actually increases
the possibility  that others can have it too. Your money  increases
your capacity to give mone y to others, your joy increases your
capacity to give joy to others, and your love increases your capacity
to give love to others. Your playing small serves no one. It is a sick
game. It is old thinking, and it is dire for the planet. Stop it
immediately. Come home to the castle. OceanofPDF.comFOUR
Embracing the Goddess
A true conception of the relation between the sexes
will not admit of conqueror and conquered; it knows
but of one great thing; to give of one’s self
boundlessly, in order to nd one’s self richer, deeper,
better. —Emma Goldman  
The story of many modern relationships is a variation
on a common theme: the conspiracy between men and women to
murder the Queen. Wheneve r a woman sells herself cheap or a man
is unkind to a woman or a woman gives her body where she is not
adored or a man rejects his true love—we are trying to murder the
Queen. But the Queen is eternal; she cannot die. She can be
tortured, but she cannot die. A friend  recent ly spoke to me of a very powerful man on the East
Coast who has gained a reputation for toying cruelly with the hearts
of so-called powerful women . The question, of course, is how does a
powerful woman allow herself to be toyed with? What place of
wounded self-esteem makes her vulnerable to his emotionally
sadistic machinations? Perhaps, suggested my friend, I would
address this question in my book. “My book will not be about that,” I told her. “That man is a
dinosaur. His breed will die out.” Thousands of us have been intherapy, taken seminars, read extensively, and explored all other
means to personal growth in the last several years in order to learn
how to avoid those guys. We’ve prayed. We’ve been on our knees. Where were those women? Go into therapy. Go to a good bookstore. The buzz words now are recovery , wellness , hinging back joy . There’s a great story about recovering from attraction to
dangerous men. It goes like this: When you’re really ill, you don’t
even know a snake when you see one. Once recovery begins, you
see a snake and you know it’s a snake, but you still play with it. Once you’ve landed in true recovery zone, you see a snake, you
know it’s a snake, and you cross to the other side of the road. Until then, everyone you know can tell you the game is toxic with
that person, but you won’t listen because you think you’re dierent
or that he’ll be dierent with you, or that maybe you’re the rst one
to have really seen his sensit ive side. There’s no forcing the process
by which we simply stop being attracted to pain. It’s a long road for
some of us. It’s work. It takes deeper thinking and more courage
than many of us are used to. But it’s going on everywhere. It’s the
real liberation, and there aren’t a lot of excuses in today’s world for
not joining in the work that will ultimately free us all. There’s not much mystery here. Sickness is not that interesting. When you were a little girl, Daddy told you in various ways that you
weren’t really all that great , so that any man who gives you the
same message years later feels to you like the one you belong with. He’s familiar in that he’s remote and slightly disapproving. And the
more we look,  the more we realize that it wasn’t just Daddy who
went weird on us around the time we reached puberty. The whole
world did. Our burgeoning sexuality didn’t just freak out Daddy,
who was attracted and repelled at the same time. It freaked out
Mommy too, who was jealous, and our teachers, who had similar
projections. It freaked out the entire society in which we grew up,
because sex is still thought of as evil here. As we grew more and
more into our womanhood, we were perceived as being  more and
more dangerous. None of this was conscious on anyone’s part. Very
little is conscious in this society or anywhere. The whole human
race is still basically in a fog, but that’s why we’re here, and it’sdenitely why we’re looking into this painful stu that’s been ruling
us subconsciously for ages. Women are very confused about power, and actually, so are men. Feminine powe r isn’t something we go out and acquire; it’s already
within us. It’s something we become willing to experience. Something to admit we have. Until we do, our positive power lies unexpressed. It’s there, but
it’s not working. We’re wired  for something we don’t know how to
access. Having  been taught that the power of strong women is in
various ways suspect, many of us nd it hard to fully embrace our
power. We’re afraid. But the Goddess is ready to correct our
thinking. Her key, the access  point, the miracle, is love. We are here
only to love, and love casts out fear. When we understand that love
is the reason for our power— that it is our power—we lose our fear
of owning its strength. We become willing to experience the power
within us, that it might be used as a channel through which love is
expressed to all humankind. And so, powerful women fall prey to the East Coast lady-killer not
because he’s consciously seeking to murder the Queen but because
they are. Not having embraced her themselves, they nd no one else
to embrace her either. They are stuck in princess mode, crying and
tearing their hair out, shoutin g “You can’t treat me this way” when,
quite obviously, he sure can. Until we own our own power, we will
constantly seek it in others, particularly in men, and power sought
that way never saves us; it destroys us. Many women complain that they keep attracting the “wrong
relationship.” What they mean by that, of course, is that they are
attracted to the wrong relationship. They are stuck in a place that is
dangerous but seductive. They want desperately to get out of the
pattern but often not quite desperately enough. They lack the self-
esteem to save their own lives. We give up what we want to give up and keep what in some way
we still want to keep. There are payos for holding on to small,
weak patterns. We have an excuse not to shine. We don’t have to
take responsibility for the world when we’re spending all our timein emot ional pain. We’re too busy. The truth that sets us free is an
embrace of the divine within  us. It means remembering we are the
daughters of God, and daughters of God don’t brake for jerks. When a woman falls in love with the magnicent possibilities
within herself, the forces that would limit those possibilities hold
less and less sway over her. A relationship that keeps us tied to the
push and pull of co-dependent neuroses is a block to our shining. When we are very clear that we want to shine—and  if we want to
know the Goddess, we want to shine—then we attract into our lives
the kinds of relationships that help us do that. Until a woman has
given herself permission to be fabulous, she will not nd herself
with partners who promote her ability to be so. As long as she tears
herself down, she will attract others who tear her down; she will
nd people who agree that she is undeserving and lacking as long as
that is how she thinks of herself. So we’re left with a commitment to being a certain kind of woman
before worrying about nding a certain kind of man. Once we make
such a commit ment, good guys will appear. Until we do, let’s just
say they’re waiting in the lobby. Embrace the Goddess and her divine perception of you. Ask her to
reveal to you the you she has in mind. Ask her to send you the
relationships and circumstances that will foster that strength within
you, that the world might be blessed by the presence of a woman in
all her glory. Ask and you’ll receive. Don’t ask, and you’ll continue
to receive the relationships that destroy you. Until we embrace the
light, we remain vulnerable to darkness. The choice is easy once we
see it for what it is. In relationships, as in everything else, we ask for
heaven, or we ask for hell. Several years ago, my boyfr iend left me for a bimbo. Actually, he
didn’t leave me, and according to quite a few people she’s not a
bimbo. But my emotional experience, as arrogant and unenlightened
as it was, was that I had been rejected for someone half my size. It’s not uncommon for an intelligent man to gravitate toward a
woman who can’t quite put a sentence together. But why does it
happen? I wanted to nd out because the pain I felt was searing. Iknew in my heart that I had blown something big-ti me, and I
wanted to correct myself. I would have done anything and gone
anywhere to learn what I needed to before I went out again. Some
of the cleares t thinking we do about relationships occurs while
we’re not in one. We’re humbler, more in touch with our pain, more
teachable. Our intelligence is always sharper when informed by our
own feelings. At another point in my life, I lived a scene like the one at the end
of the movie Gone With the Wind , where Scarlett asks Rhett what’s to
become of her if he leaves her. In my case, the man did give a
damn, but he still had to leave. I then had to prove to myself, and to
whomever else I thought might care, that I could make it without
him. Imagine another scene, the one in which Scarlett says, “I will
never go hungry again.” My pledge, uttered with the same strength
and anguish, was “I will never need a man again.”
That was a awed decision. I couldn’t have him, so I became him. I wanted him within me so
badly I invoked his energy from within myself. I conquered outer
worlds, just as he had. I expressed masculine strength and power,
just as he had. But it didn’t bring me closer to him or to others like
him because I had become one of the guys, and that’s not what most
men are looking for. He had never loved me for being a great guy. I don’t know when my mourning set in, but I know it climaxed
when I lost out to the woman I thought was a bimbo. What I
realized was that she was in some ways the old me—not the me I
wanted to become but the me I had been and then left behind. She
wasn’t stupid; I just wanted to think she was. And that’s why I had
to hate her. I couldn’t bear to take on all the hatred I felt toward
myself for becoming so masculine and tough. I started to understand what had gone wrong, includ ing the
realization that I was far from alone in my predicament. And it
wasn’t enough just to understand. I had to retrain myself,  which I’m
still doing. I don’t want to lose the masculine power I’ve developed,
the worldly eectiveness, the power to act on things I care about. It’s part of me and an important aspect of who we all are. It wascertainly a necessary social development for women to actualize
their masculine power in the world. But I needed to put things in their proper perspective. In intimate
relationships with men, I want to major in feminine and minor in
masculine. At a lecture podiu m, I’m the masculine, active energy to
the audience’s feminine receptiveness. After work, if I’m with a man
I am close to, I want to experience myself as a woman. And I no
longer kid myself that it would work for him, or for me, to play it
any dierently. That doesn’t mean we don’t trade roles at times. It
means the dominant groove is that he’s masculine and I’m feminine. The masculine is active, the feminine passive; the masculine is
dynamic, the feminine magnetic. The masculine does while the
feminine is. Part of our Amazon neuro sis is the way we have all
learned to play the man: to go to him before he comes to us, to call
rst, to make the rst move. Only now do we realize what a mistake
that is, and we’re having to tie our hands behind our backs, bite our
tongues, sit on our credit cards. Most of us want a masculine man, but there’s no way to have one
unless we become feminine  women. At rst, we’re outraged to
realize this because we thought we were being such good girls by
developing our masculine side to begin with. That’s  what we
thought real worth, real power was. We came to see women—
usually beginning with Mommy—as weak and ineective, so we
wanted to grow up and be just like Daddy. And God help us, we did. During the sixties, male and female development was changing as
our parents took what they thought was a more liberated approach
to raisin g their sons and daughters. Daddy slapped his little girl on
the back when she achieved something in the world, telling her how
proud he was— and meaning  it. He didn’t know what to do with the
girl stu anyw ay, since the feelings it brought up inside him were so
threatening. We were movin g into a new, modern era. The sexes
would be equal. Girls were liberated—to be just like boys! When I was growing up, my father was a well-known immigration
lawyer and my mother a housewife. My father was given constant
kudos for his admirable contributions to the lives of poor and
struggling immigrants. My mother, as far as I was concerned, didnot participate meaningfully in the world at all. At the time, I could
not see that driving kids to ballet class, scheduling Girl Scout
meetings, or sewing doll clothes was important work. Today, I see
things very dierently. I see I was one of thousands of young girls
who unconsciously decided that our mothers’ lives were
meaningless, while our fathers’ lives were glamorous and important. The way to succeed, it seemed to us, was to grow up and be just like
Daddy. So, I created a career for myself not unlike my father’s. When I
started lecturing on A Course in Miracles  in the early eighties, I
found myself surrounded by people burdened with serious problems. I met many people with HIV-positive infections and other life-
challenging illnesses. I was thrown into a world in which other
people were hurting more than I was, and the moral as well as
professional imperative was that I be the strong one and hold other
people up. Unconsciously, I had created a career just like Daddy’s. I
had become what in Jungian terms is called a father’s daughter. I learned early on to apply discipline to my professional
endeavors. Week after week, month after month, and year after
year, I showed up at prayer groups, lectures, support groups,
hospital rooms, marriages, funerals. I founded organizations, had a
child, and wrote a book. I knew I had to be strong, and I thought
strength didn’t cry. I had seen my father’s lack of emotion as
strength and my mother’s show of emotion as weakness. I wanted to
be strong like my father. I couldn’t break down at the funeral if I
was the one conducting the service. If a mother was grieving for her
son, I couldn’t cave in. I wanted to be a shoulder for her to lean on. I didn’t want to do anything that would threaten my ability to be
strong in my role of mother hen. What I didn’t understand was that I
had become not a mother hen but a father hen. Although I was driven by tender emotions, I thought that
expressing them fully might limit my power. I built a wall that
would hold my emotions at bay, thinking I needed to do that in
order to best serve others. It took a lot of willpower to build that
wall, but I can see now that it did not take strength. The denial ofemotion through suppression or withdrawal is a weak move, not a
courageous one. So this is the Amazon neuro sis: the woman who achieves at the
expense of her tender places. From the time she was a little girl, she
was slowly but surely led to believe that her emotions  were less
important than her achievements, perhaps even antithetical to them. And the love she received in response to her achievements, if it was
love at all, is not the love that warms the night. A woman who cannot honor  her own feelings will not nd them
honored by anyone else. Other people will nd her hard to
penetrate. I have experienced this in diverse and painful ways. When I began  to recognize what a high personal price I paid for
dissociating myself from my own feelings, I did what I had to do to
let them up and out. Lots of therapy, lots of work, lots of pain. And
then, sure enough, just as I had feared, I began to lose my grip. I
conducted a funeral service for someone I had hardly known, and I
couldn’t stop crying as I gave my talk. But this was just a temporary
phase. I moved on through the weepy period and came out at the
other end stronger and more tender, less guarded and more
available. Usually when we think of power, we think of external power, and
we think of powerful peopl e as those who have made  it in the
world. A powerful woman isn’t necessarily someone who has
money, but we think of her as someone with a boldness or a spark
that makes her manifest in a dramatic way. When we think of a
powerful man, we think of his ability to manifest abundance—
usually money—in the world. Most people say that a powerful woman does best with a powerful
man, that she needs someon e who understands the bigness of her
situation, a man who can meet her on the same or a greater level of
power in the world. This is true if power is dened as material
abundance. A woman often faces cultural prejudice when she makes
more money than a man, as does he. A woman who denes power
by worldly standards can rarely feel totally relaxed in the arms of a
man who doesn’t have it.If power is seen as an internal matter, then the situation  changes
drastically. Internal power has less to do with money and worldly
position and more to do with emotional expansiveness, spirituality,
and conscious living. As we begin to recognize that internal strength
is all that really matters, we come to see that we have often avoided
men who were not powerful in the world not because they were not
powerful enough, but because inwardly they were too powerful,
reminding us of the work we still had to do on ourselves. I used to think that I needed a “powerful man,” someo ne who
could protect me from the harshness and evils of the world. What I
have come to realize is that the evils of the world that confront me
are a reection  of my own internal state, and no one can protect me
from my own mind. The powerful man I was looking for would be,
foremost, someone who supported me in keeping on track spiritually
and in so maintaining clarity within myself that life would pose
fewer problems. When it did get rough, he would help me forgive. I no longer want someone who would say to me, “Don’t worry,
honey. If they’re mean to you, I’ll beat them up or buy them out.”
Instead, I want someone who prays and meditates with me regularly
so that fewer monsters from the outer world disturb me, and who,
when they do, helps me look within my own consciousness for
answers instead of looking to false power to combat false power. There’s a big dierence between a weak man and a gentle man. Weak men make us nervous. Gentle men make us calm. Many of us have desired, or do desire, marriage. How much of our
desire is natural, and how much of it is cultural? What is natural is
our desire for the beloved. What is cultural is our tendency to forget
that a piece of paper cannot tie hearts together. The issue is not
whether we marry, but whether we allow any choice of life-style to
impinge on our ability to y. What is important, if we do choose to marry, is that we not give
up our wilder spirits. I once heard someone say that married women
can’t write. I don’t think this is true, but I understand what it means. Marriage is not a mere convention but it is often lived as one and, as
such, will sink instead of uplift a woman’s spirit. The creative spiritthrives on freedom and daring. Many of history’s most creative
women have not been married. As for the priestesses of olden times,
don’t even think about it. Priestesses were spiritual merm aids, and a
lot of men were drowning. Patriarchal culture senses danger in the unmarried woman. If a
man is unmarr ied, he is called a bachelor. If a woman is unmarried,
she is called a spinster or an old maid. What is it about an
unmarried woman that poses  such a threat to the patriarchal order? Mainly, it is that women are no one’s property when we’re
unmarried. We’re under no one’s control, and neither are our
children. There is no telling what we might do or say. Much of the prejudice against women is stored at an unconscious
level. Many of those who hold the most punishing attitudes toward
passionate women—and free women are passionate women—
consider them selves social liberals, even feminists. Wom en’s rights
seem to them to be of obviou s importance, but what is not obvious
to them is how much they themselves conspire to keep the lid on
female power. Female power transcends what are known politically as women’s
issues. Female power has to do with women taking an active part in
the conversation—whether in the public arena or at the dinner table
—and having the same emotional space in which to do so as men. It
means women not having to fear punishment of any kind. It means
women not having to worry that we’ll be considered unfeminine if
we speak up. It means women really coming out to play and getting
support for our playing—fro m men as well as from women. Until
this is accomplished, political, economic, and reproductiv e freedoms
will not be enough. We will not be free until we can speak our
minds and our hearts withou t having to worry that men will crucify
us, women will crucify us, the press will crucify us, or our children
will be ashamed. The true politics of women’s liberation is human politics. It is
under the surface, the energy in a room—not in the bedroom,
because there we won freedom as soon as it was discovered how
much more fun life is when we are in the game. But outside the
bedroom, we are still not equal partners, and until we are, the worldwill not be healed. Women are still in emotional bondage  as long as
we need to worry that we might have to make a choic e between
being heard and being loved. After the Anita Hill–Clarence Thomas showdown on Capitol Hill,
a friend  told me an interesting story. She had watched the televised
hearings with several marrie d couples. Except for herself and two
others, the women in attendance remained silent. Their husbands,
on the other hand, held forth on how shameful it all was, expressing
their perfect liberal views with seemingly no awareness of what was
going on in that very room. Their wives behaved like good little
girls: they sat by quietly, allowing their husbands to sound brilliant
and insightful. Would things have been dierent had the couples not been
married? I don’t know. What  is operative in this case is not marriage
but the connection between women and men itself. What needs to
be addressed is who we are in partnership. Whether we are married
matters less and less today as the denition of marriage changes
along with everything else around us. What I think is relevant in
this story is not that the couples were married but that they were in
public. Behind  closed doors, perhaps each of these husba nds shows
great respect for his wife. What is still lacking in American society is permission for women
to speak up in public—loudly and clearly—without being
considered ball breakers. Let’s look at that name one more time: ball
breaker . Try to come up with an expression that conjures more of an
association with male pain. It’s almost impossible. Now try to come
up with an expression more often associated with a woman who
speaks her mind. Most wome n faced with the choice of hurting men
or shutting up go back to sleep and sleep forever. Women and men are now obviously relearning our roles vis-à-vis
one another, both in marriage and out of it. Several years ago, I was
leading a weekend seminar when the subject of marriage came up. I
asked how many people in the group were married and then asked
them to express their thoughts about it. As the group of thirty or so
talked late into the night, I heard things that surprised me. I realized
that weekend, and became more and more aware during subsequentsessions of counseling marri ed as well as unmarried couples, that
marriage is whatever people make of it. And it is detrim ental to all
of us to hold narrow, formulaic pictures of what that should be. I have heard married couples who describe their conjugal
relationships as very, very happy, in monogamous as well as in open
marriages. I have heard married couples who describe their conjugal
relationships as boring and unhappy, in monogamous as well as in
open marriages. Sex is a sacrament, not a prison. While monogamy
can be a beautiful, even sacred bond, it might not be the agreement
that best suits everyone. Our thinking that monogamy is inherently
a nobler arrangement than any other has created a nation of
hypocrites—which is what we’ve become. Don’t kid yourself. Historical ly, monogamy didn’t begin as a way
to ensure that two people could relax into the deepest intimacy. It
began as a way for men to assert their ownership over a woman’s
body. In many cultures throu ghout history, and in some today, it is
acceptable for men to have multiple partners but not for women to
do the same. The value of monogamy and the persistence of the
double standar d are subjects that need to be discussed, by men as
well as by women, in public and in private, in order to exorcise the
sexual demons we still allow to control us. It is very dicult to be
clear about what you want when your mind is overwhelmed by
input about what you’re supposed to want. If you love a man—how wonderful if you do—and if you desire a
monogamous union with him—how wonderful if you do—then
marry him if your heart calls you to, and know that the union you
have chosen can serve God and Goddess, and men and women. But
never, ever—married or not—allow your partnership with a man to
silence your voice or keep you from supporting another woman in
using hers, or you are helping to perpetuate a most vicious muing
of a most beautiful sound. The world has no idea of the song we’re
not yet hearing: women singing out, in harmony with men and each
other, at full blast, at full volume. It’s music we need. Men long to
hear it, and women long to join the choir. Be very clear. The silence is a sick one.If men only knew how much we have to say. But so often, we
cannot speak. In the presence of resistance, we clam up. In the
presence of approval, we blossom into goddesses. There are times when we have to turn away from things that hold
us back, and nothing holds us back like someone who invalidates
who we are and what we’re capable of. A young man is often
brought up to think that he will one day nd the right woman to
support his vision and greatness. Many young girls are brought up
to think that we will one day nd a man whose vision and greatness
are worthy of our support. The ancient Greek word for courtesan is hetaera . The hetaera  was
a man’s lover, his equal, and his muse. She carried his vision and
made space for his brilliance. There is no such word for the
correlative male position, although husband  would be nice. Who is to hold the space for a woman’s greatness? In many
heterosexual relationships, a man is threatened by a woman’s
greatness, nding a variety of ways to make her question her own
beauty and strength. A secur e man is not threatened by a woman’s
intellectual or emotional power but celebrates the opportunity for
joyful partnership that it oers him. The conscious question is
whether a relationship can handle two stars. We must relinquish the paradigm of men as power with women as
support and instead embrace the image of both men and women as
powers, with each supporti ng the other. Any man who holds a
woman back is not a man a woman can aord to be with. A woman
has a mighty and sacred task to perform on earth. She will not be
able to fulll her function if she remains with a man who derides
her glory. Women are not powerless. We just pretend we are. We do this in
large part because we are afraid of the punishment inicted on us
when we dare to be who we really are. It’s a subtle form of
discrimination, but it’s clearly there. A few women are allowed into
the club, it seems: women who have allowed themse lves to be
partially decla wed, their sexual threat to the status quo diminished
just enough, so that men and women alike can handle the juice. Butan animal in the wild is not declawed, and an animal in the wild is a
beautiful thing. In the wild, we scream. We scream when we hurt, we scream
when we give birth, we scream when we come, and that’s just the
way it is. Now what kind of man can handle our passion , and what
kind of man can ascend to the throne next to a woman who owns
her own crown ? A princess attracts a prince, and a queen  attracts a
king. Women who whine attract men who whine. Women full of the
lioness heart attract men who are full of the lion. And this is where women are now, at a place where, perhaps for
the rst time ever, people are remembering en masse our cosmic
function. Our love aairs are not here to serve an industrialist
machinery or a government system. Our sex is not for procreation
alone. Our love is here to spiritualize the earth. Both women and
men are in quantum fast forward. We are growing new brains. We
are using new eyes. And when a woman rememb ers her glory, a man of goodwill can
barely contain his joy. His real self arises in the presence of her
own. I’m telling you, it works, this thing, this looking within to
attract what is without. Make room for love, and it always comes. Make a nest for love, and it always settles. Make a home for the
beloved, and he will nd his way there. OceanofPDF.comFIVE
Sex and Soul
Be not ashamed, woman …  
You are the gates of the body,  
and you are the gates of the soul. —Walt Whitman  
When the enchanted woman  has come into her
power, then and only then has she the inner strength to turn her
face toward someone else. Only then does she have the authority to
meet another person’s gaze and hold it. A lover is a high-stakes proposition. He, or she*, is the best of all
worlds, or the worst of all worlds. We have no capacity to deal with
another person’s power eectively until our own is pure and intact. Knowing this, we begin to understand the relationship between our
search for the self and our search for the beloved. For the Goddess
inside us, there is no distinction between the two. The lover is not
whom we hide behind; the lover is who appears before us as we
emerge from the shadows of our own delusions. A godde ss does not
go and “get” a lover; she is a true lover, and happiness gathers unto
her. Love is not something that comes into us from someone else; it
is an extension of our own minds, reverberating back to us in what
seems to be another person’s smile. A female who does not know  these things is a primary candidate
for wearing two emotionally wounded feminine faces: the womanwe call doormat, and the woman we call bitch. Having lost her
inner girl, she has for all practical purposes lost the experience of
her own innocence. She can’t remember why she is guilty, but she
has been eectively convinced she is not OK. And full of conviction
that she is far from perfect, she projects onto others—p articularly
those who have the audac ity to draw close—that they are as
imperfect as she and therefor e just as deserving of punish ment. This
is when the bitch takes over. She will do to someone else the
damage she is bent on doing  to herself. She will punish them as she
is so sure she deserves to be punished. On the other hand, since she knows she’s so bad, she thinks
maybe she hasn’t the right to do anything or say much or even live
at all. And if all she is, is a hotbed of guilt, then all that is good will
be seated outside her, and every so often it will seem to be seated in
someone she meets. That other person, then, is given all the power,
and the woma n will lie there, quiet and docile, martyr to the evil
that is rampant in her system. The classic doormat, the classic
wimp. She will have no power to speak or assert herself. The other
person will have taken it all. The other person has been given the
right to hold the whip and do the whipping. Yuk. How sick. Yet how familiar. Those demons are know n to all
of us, but we are not reading this now to get further acquainted. We
are here now to meet the Goddess, to hear her thoughts and learn
her techniques for meeting love in the light of day and fullling its
promises late at night. Let’s linger no more over problems in love, except where they still
need to be confronted. Let’s instead map out the Goddes s’s way, of
meeting a beloved and touching his soul and loving him with all her
miraculous power. We usually know a lover is on the way well before he gets here. As
often as we hear stories like “I met my partner when I least expected
to meet anyone ,” on some level, we know that’s nonsense. A woman
in touch with herself can sense the coming of things, and the
coming of love is like a deer running through a forest on the way toyour door. We can feel a love approaching; and when we are in
touch with the Goddess, we prepare ourselves in advance. How do we do that? It is as if we were pregnant when  we are
about to meet a beloved: We are about to give birth to a new
creative force. The highest preparation is a strengthening of our
calm, a focusing of our clarity on who we are and what our values
are. The core values—the ones that feed the lesser ones as a river
feeds its tributaries—are those of love, forgiveness, and the desire to
serve God. We serve him to the extent that we have thoughts of
purity. Purity means that we do not manipulate or seduce or
preprogram or project hidden agendas onto anyone or anything. The Goddess is in her highest glory when we are in love. We are
also the most tempted at that time to spit in her face and mock her
virtue. Our highest work is to remember how importan t it is—for
the world, for our spirits, for the relationship itself—that we learn to
be a friend to our beloved and a spiritual companion to our beloved
and provide a sense of home to those we love the most Otherwise,
we can look great, smell great, and use our bodies like the best of
them; but without our virtue, we are whores and we will not know
love. Once we meet him, we’d better have our spiritual chops down,
because the attraction—his smell, the chemistry betwee n us—will
tempt us to forget the truth if it’s not a solid part of us already. If it
is, then there is no higher high than that of the passion ate love. I
don’t have sexually intimate relationships with women, but I assume
they are the same joining. I do know that when a woman loves a
man and opens to him and lets the spirit move her, the ride is a ride
to the center of things. Our bodies don’t just feel as though they
melt, they do melt; and our spirits don’t just feel as though they
merge, they do merge. We enter a divine room when the Goddess meets her consort and
beckons him to enter. Her joyful hello is often “Hello, again!” for in
that place we can remember that we’ve known each other before. How glad we are to be back whenever we nd ourselves in love
together. How lonely we have felt at times, and how ecstatic we are
to spend some time at home.How important it is to know  that he is as tender as we are and
just as lost and just as scared . Until we know this, we miss the point. We think he’s such a monste r, until we see he’s such a boy. Like us,
scarred from Daddy’s whatever disaster; so too is he aected by
Mommy foreve r. And all of us stumble and cry, and fall and seek in
each other the relief from our pain. We are meant to be that relief
and more than that. We are meant to be the healing of the wound;
and if we will allow it, our love will heal us both. Remember the eyes of one who loved you, and don’t forget their
mark on your soul. Carry it always, the badge of a woma n who has
opened her heart and allowed it to hurt, for herself and for him. She
has gone crazy for love and been ridiculous for love and grown
neurotic for love and wasted her time for love. But she has grown
from the heartaches and endured until the sun shone, and nally
she has seen the sky. Now she’s a woman when before she was a
girl; now she’s a goddess when before she was a brat. This is the journey of every woman who has loved a man. May we
all nd sustenance in knowing there’s a remarkable prize waiting for
us as we approach the truth. We are so lucky to be women, and
those men are so lucky to know us. We are so full of miracles for all
who come to us with pure and open hearts. We are so full of love for
those who approach with tender souls. We are so full of beauty for
those who believe it’s there. And men are such a gorgeous lot, the boys who made the climb
from the arrogantly weak to the humbly strong. The initia te into the
ways of love is like a letter from God telling us that he’s here. The
initiate, both man and woma n, has seen a dark night and then seen
another day. There is no substitute for the res that purify us;
whatever they were, they served a purpose. And now we will know
how to love and be loved, and never again will we lose our way. A woma n in love is drunk with something. There’s a chemical syrup
that permeates  her cells, a place in her being where hormones meet
God. It’s hell or heaven or both. If we could harness its power, we
could heal the world.And that’s the point. A woman in love can do anything. She can
run a business, bear childre n, create art, make love, cook meals,
lead a nation, and gure out how to look great. But if she is not in
love, she lacks  energy; and if she is in love but spurned, she can lack
the will to live. Women need to be in love: with themselves, with a
man, with a child, with a project, with a job, with their country,
with the planet, and—most important—with life itself. Women in
love are closer to enlightenment. For angels and lovers, everything
sparkles. Our love is not co-dependency. Co-dependency is what happens
when we don’t know how to apply our love, where to put it, what to
do with it. Most men have no idea of the lengths to which  a woman
will go for love or the depths  of our despair when we feel it cut o. This is not to say that men don’t y high or crash tragically. Of
course they do. But their love doesn’t fuel the world the way ours
does. Their love is the car; ours is the gas. The only beloved who can always be counted on is God. The
ultimate partn er is a divine one, an experience of ourselves that is
totally suppor tive and forgiving. Until we know this, we keep
seeking sustenance from men that they cannot give us. Most men
and women today are wounded. The search for someone who isn’t
in pain is unreasonable until we ourselves are healed of our own
dysfunctions. Until then, we will be led to people as woun ded as we
are in order that we might heal and be healed together. What this
means is that no partner can save us, deliver us, or give meaning to
our lives. The source of our salvation, deliverance, and meaning is
within us. It is the love we give as much as it is the love we get. The
passion we most need to feed is our relationship to God. This is
ultimately our relationship to ourselves. It’s not as easy as a good date, as much fun as sex, or as dramatic
as romantic tension. It is work. Personal growth, recovery, religious
practice, spiritual renewal—whatever words we care to use—these
are the keys to our return to sanity and peace. When we have
reclaimed our wholeness, we are ready to face the worldly beloved. Until then, we will look to a romantic partner to give us peace
rather than remember that our role in the relationship is to bringpeace, by receiving it from God and allowing him to spread his
peace through us to all humankind. How often I have betrayed myself, forgetting—or , more
accurately, resisting—the twenty minutes of meditation, the hour of
reading, the spiritual meeting  or recovery group that would prepare
me for the roller coaster ride that always lies poten tial in an
intimate relationship. Part of our problem is that we expect love
aairs to always feel good. They don’t. Actually, relationships don’t
feel good anyway. We feel good. Unless we are centered within
ourselves, we cannot blame a relationship for throwing us o. No
man can convince a woman she’s wonderful, but if she already
believes she is, his agreement can resonate and bring her joy. This is our function in each others’ lives: to hold the space for
each other’s beauty, that our beloved can leave us and we still feel
in his absence how beautiful we are. Most women today are borderline hysterical. We are loudly
hysterical or quietly hysterical. Our despair is acted out externally,
or it cuts throu gh our bodies in the form of physical illness. We are
desperate to nd serenity and peace. When we were taught as children, and most of us were, that our
value lies in what we do as opposed to who we are, we
automatically switched to a masculine psychological mode—doing,
doing, doing— in order to feel worthy. There seems to be no value
placed on the experience of inner peace, and without it we nd no
room in which  to rest. This leaves men as well as women feeling
spiritually homeless. I have a friend , Gwen, a woman about my age who has contracted
a rare and particularly viciou s form of cancer. At one of my support
groups, when the subject of death came up, she said that she had
been obsessed with thoughts of dying since she was a little girl. Her
life as a child had been hideous, and her only idea of a possible
escape was through physical death.Her psychoimm unologist had told her before we met—and I agree
—that her body has merely caught up with her mind. But I know
this girl, and it behooves all women to be clear about the reason she
felt so alien in this world that she wanted to die. Gwen is the
essence of a certain kind of femininity, all gossamer and fairylike. She is the kind of woman we read about when we escape into books
of tales about Merlin and enchanted castles. It’s not that women like
that don’t exist anymore. But they are the girls who have the
hardest time today, who so often become deeply depressed while
young, get cancer while young, and die while young. These girls don’t make it. They wither and die. Fish can’t make it
without water , astronauts can’t make it without space suits, and
enchanted women can’t make it without love and a sense of the
miraculous. Period. We live in an environment hostile to sensitive
souls. Sometimes, the reason the good die young is that they don’t
want to hang out here any longer than is absolutely necessary. So I said to Gwen, “You didn’t really want to die when you were a
child. What you wanted to do was to live. You just didn’t know that
the world you were living in was a living death.”
We know so little in this society about the search for
enlightenment, and what’s worse is that in our pugnacious
arrogance we often look down on those who do know something
about it. We have squeezed  the mystical experience out of our
cultural data bank. And millions and millions of starved souls are
reaching for it anyway, lining up in fervent pilgrimage. Women are
at the forefron t of the spiritual hunger march. Why? Because it is
our only hope. Back to Gwen  and her cancer. At every meeting, as she lay her
painfully skinny body agains t pillows on the oor because a chair
was too hard for her to sit on, there was next to her, every time, a
handsome man. He was her boyfriend, Daniel, obviously healthy
and devoted to her healing. What a good sight: a man concerned for
a woma n’s pain, there for her through the thick of it, sharing this
time of crisis as if it were his own. When human beings stand by one
another, testify to their faith, and witness each other’s pain, miracleshappen. If we are loved enough, we are emotionally healed and
spiritually made whole. There is a little bit of Gwen in all of us, struggling to deal with the
pain of our predicaments yet holding on to the love we’ve found,
knowing it’s the only thing that can save us. Gwen and Daniel
struggle, as do every woman and every man, with the questions that
illuminate the fundamental issues of life: Why are we here? How do
we heal? Are we, in fact, our brother’s keeper? We might not be our
brother’s keeper, but we are denitely his mother, his sister, his
daughter. For his sake and for ours, we must begin to say no to the
diseases that threaten to kill us. Some of them stalk our bodies, and
some of them stalk our souls. I once told a lover that I would write a book of poems for him and
called it Severely Laid. Now I would  write another book and call it
Sincerely Touched . It probably would not be interesting to anyone
but me, since the rocky road to peace is more sensational than peace
itself, and the yearning for love is more dramatic when it hurts. Until we get to the point where we’ve had enough of things that
hurt and long more than anything for a peaceful love, we are bound
to take painful roads. We are destined to play out our frivolous
disasters until we declare ourselves nished and done with them. How much pain do we have to suer before we are sure we want no
more? As much, it seems, as we have to until we don’t. We just get
tired, or we get reborn, when we have suered so much that we
have started to die. The scars on our hearts do not last forever. They are the
temporary signs of a tender soul who has touched the earth and
been burned by such a low descent. Once the earth has been
redeemed and our relationships are returned to God, the scars
within us will be miraculously healed. But until we know  the source
of true healing, we will continue to go down, and we will continue
to hurt. This is endurable until we are no longer young, but even the
young grow old if our hearts are blasted hard enough and often. What holy thought can spur us on when we feel too sick to try
again? The thoughts of God are not so distant. The truth is therewhen the mind  is ready to receive it. As soon as prayers are lifted
up, the heart begins to rise and mend. There are many books and
many teachers. So many new friends arrive when we stop making
love to enemies. As soon as we have chosen to do so, we can see each other not as
we were but as we would be. We can choose to see the goodness in
each other, to be loyal friends, to forgive and support. The sight of
our innocence is the experience of light. We know the darkness: how
to condemn, how to judge. The pain we felt there was a symptom of
our sickness, a sign that we had turned away from love. Love is not a cool arrangement or a night in bed. Love is angels
hovering, circling, calling us to seek the sky together. And when we
do, we change our patterns. We become new women; we become
new men. And then we can go back to bed and laugh and howl as
we used to do, but with much more joy and such relief. Our goal in love is to love like queens, showing up not as girls but
as women, with faith and charity and purity of heart. Love is very
serious business. It takes a powerful heart to invoke it clearly and
prepare for its coming. We must recognize the perniciousness of our predominant cultural
imagery. Everywhere we look we are presented with the idea that
men toy with women, women toy with men—that’s just the way
things are; it’s the way of love. But that is not the way of love; it’s
the way of lovelessness. How often we seek love but leave love out. We don’t think  about being kind and caring, we think about how we
can hook a man. We don’t think about his fears and his problems,
we think of our own and how we can get him to solve them. We
don’t think about him period—but about his money, his body, his
job, or his connections. Perhaps these mistakes don’t apply to you. But if they apply at all
to any thoughts that ever enter your mind, then know the universe
is taping your every thought and playing them back to some council
in the sky. Consider it all recorded in some book they keep and tally
up. And we suer according to the level of our bullshit. Exploitative
thoughts are not pure, and our function on earth is to reach for
some pure state. Until we do, the pain will endure.Sorry, girls, I never said this would be easy. Dear God, we have wandere d in the desert for so long, cut o
from each other and from ourselves. Never again need we go back
to worn-out patterns of cruel ty and betrayal. From this day forward,
let us love anew and become like new and forever laugh. Let the
devil, whatever we call his power, be cast into hell and never get
out again, never stalk our streets again and never poison  our wells
again. We have found the key that opens the gate, and we enter the
garden of our father’s house. We are comforted, and we are released
at last. We smile at our brothers, embrace our sisters. They have
made it too. No one remain s outside the gate—only the devil is
there, and he can reach us no more. Some men know how to love a woman, and some men don’t. Some
men know that a light touch of the tongue, running from a woman’s
toes to her ears, lingering in the softest way possible in various
places in between, given often enough and sincerely enough, would
add immeasurably to world peace. Add to that pertinent
conversation about political events, history, philosophy, art, and—
most particularly—your feelings and hers, and you’ve got the stu
that makes a woman happy. It sounds relatively easy, this
prescription for pleasing a woman, because it is. Do not tear her
down. Do not ignore her. Do tell her she is beautiful and wonderful
and precious. Do kiss her often and caress her shoulders. Give us a little, and we y. Give us the things I just told you
about, give them consistently  and do not get caught up with drugs,
alcohol, or any similar obsessions, and you will not believ e the way
we soften. Our hearts melt when we’re loved; and when we’re loved
the way I’m telling you, we’re the best, the most wonderful, the
most lovable creatures. When love goes wrong, terrible chemical reactions occur in our
cells. They cause illness and hysteria and deep, deep sadness. We
feel as if a dark ink has spilled through our emotional veins when
we are toyed with or our hearts are crushed or our sexuality is
mocked. Our womanhood is major business. When it is treated like a
minor issue, we burn.In bed, we want to surrender. We want to feel he’s bigger , stronger,
on top, in charge, and that he could be tough if he had to be. Outside of bed, we want the opposite. How dare he be bigger,
stronger, on top, in charge, or even a hint of tough. There is obvio us confusion here. Surrender isn’t a losing position
in bed, and it’s actually not a losing position outside of bed, either. But we can see this only when we’re clear that surrend er doesn’t
mean giving up or giving in. Surrender is not loss. To surrender is
not to capitula te. To surrender basically just means to relax and let
someone else have his or her own strength. A lover used to say to me, “Surrender, Dorothy,” whenever I
would get too pumped up and full of myself. When we surrender,
we don’t surre nder to a man. We surrender to a part of ourselves
that is softer, less controlling, more interested in peace than in
argument. It’s not a game we play; it’s a dance we do. And the truth is we all want to so badly. For a lot of us, it feels
like a dirty secret at rst to admit this. We’re afraid not to toe the
party line. God forbid we should say, “I want to surre nder.” We
might be labeled retro-ites, backlashers, the ones who would send us
back into the kitchen instead of forward to the White House. But it is not regressive to surrender to our feminine selves. It’s the
most progressi ve line of development because it honors, instead of
represses, our emotions. We’re denitely headed for the White
House, please God, and to Congress, the state house, the mayor’s
oce, the boardroom, and every other seat of worldly power. But
when we get there, we must arrive as women, not men in drag. Being a woman means much more than just having a vagina. The feminine force is intuitive, nurturing, the connecting glue. The feminine is a place inside us where we’re receptive rather than
active. In this country and on this planet, humans have everything
we need in order to heal the world and live happy lives. We have
information, technology, skills, money, intelligence, and scientic
ability. What we are lacking is a meaningful relationship among
these things. We have knowledge but little understanding. We lack
context. We lack the consciou s intention to use our resources for thepurposes of love and healing. And without this, we cannot go
anywhere. We are like a 747 without fuel. Love is our fuel. It gives grace to progress and blessing to our will
for power. We fail in our deepest responsibility to God and to
ourselves each time we fail to declare love and act on love and
witness to love. As women, we must keep this message  alive. We
must understan d its importance and relay it to others, whispering it
in the dark and shouting it in the light of day. Yes, it is time for
women to enter the worldly mainstream. But not in such a way that
we contribute  to the power that produces without meaning or
strives forward  without love of humanity in mind. Let the word go
out and grow stronger withi n: The love in our hearts is the power
that matters. Let technology  serve our love for one another and not our mutual
destruction. Let intelligence lead us to peace and not to war. Let our
money be used to heal and not to further wound. We must
understand these words. They must become part of who we are. This is the song of the Goddess as she makes her way across the
earth. Sing with her, or lose your voice. The purpose of love is to nd a partner we can grow with, through
the barriers that keep love at bay, to the center of the universe that
exists inside all of us. Getting past the barriers, those walls that
surround our hearts, means hanging around long enough to get a
look at what they are. We must work to nd God, not to nd men. Women must stop trying to be good enough, except for God. People
judge us; God doesn’t. When we listen to God, it’s very clear to us
that we’re more than good enough already. We learn from God that
we’re absolutely glorious—in his image, for his sake. Ultimately, we learn to stop trying so hard. We no longer try to
get a guy when we remembe r we’re only here to bless him. There is
a dierence between getting  a partner and attracting  a partner. Getting  implies that our hooks work; attracting  means that our light
is brigh t and appears like a beacon to one who is mean t to see it.When we try to get a partner, we increase our chances of getting the
wrong one. Yes, we can hook one perhaps, but a hook in him is a
hook in us. We either end up neurotically obsessed, or he gures out
it’s a hook and does his own casting o. When we attract love by an
intensied connection to the spirit inside, we take responsibility for
the energy around us, harmonizing it in such a way that those who
come forward—who we sense are meant to be with us—connect
with us out of similarly pure intent. Surrender of the partner obsession is a great release and allows
much greater room for real love to enter. Be friends with a person. Don’t underestimate the grace of true friendship. If passion is to
follow, don’t worry that it won’t. But sex isn’t everything; and until
we know that, we are slaves to something stupid. And when we get
that gured out, then everything, including sex, gets better. Our entire life is a cycle of desire: desire satised, desire felt,
desire satised and then felt again. Sex keeps rhythm. When we love
a man, we love from the bottom of all souls, from our source, from
the center of things, from God. If men only knew what a blessing
our love is. And if we only knew what a blessing it is to be loved by
them. To say “I love you” and to mean it is the same thing as saying
“God bless you.”
When he is not with us but we can feel him inside us anyway,
when we can feel his energy penetrate our own, we long to squeeze
him, as we do when making love.
_OceanofPDF.com_A_Womans_Worth_-_Marianne_Williamson.txt
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        They
know much more than I did. But women my age and older who
didn’t know until now should continue to blossom as long as we’re
breathing. For me and for many other women forty and over, the
pieces of the puzzle have only just begun to t together. What mature women want is this: the lightheartednes s of our
youth with the added depth our suering of the past few years has
given us. Through the grace of the Goddess, it is within our grasp to
have both. Genuine spiritual experience transforms our suering
into something beautiful and lifts the heavy burdens  from our
hearts. The older we get, the lighter we can become. It takes eort
to move in this direction, because it is counter to the ways of the
world, but running counter to the ways of the world is the purpose
of our lives. The enlightened system isn’t set up so that we work hard, nally
nd joy, experience it for a relatively short time, and then grow old
and die. Unless we strive for an expanded, more compassionate
vision of age and aging, the achievements we seek here are at best
cruel mockeries of our pain-lled eorts. Let us imagine  a woman’s life improving as she ages. Age doesn’t
have to be bad. It could, in fact, be magnicent, if we would take
our spiritual lives more seriously. Throughout our twenties and
thirties, we care so much about what the Joneses think, even if we
think we don’t. These two decades are the time when we’re most
tempted to try to live for others. Around forty, it occurs  to us thatthe Joneses are either going to like us or they’re not, that the
Joneses have holes in their socks too, thank you, and that we have
less control over what other people think than we ever imagined. And other people shouldn’t have so much control over what we
think either. There’s too much “you should  … you should not” told
to women these days. Wheth er a woman takes hormones, wants to
have a face-lift, wants to admit her age, or wants to talk about
menopause is nobody’s busin ess but her own. There’s privacy in a
woman’s heart  that should never be violated, and certainly not in
the name of feminism. We are doing the best we can. Whatever we
come up with on our journey to expanded consciousness, let us have
and let us be. What’s going on inside us matters; everything else is
cosmetic and should be treated as such. Once we remember we’re
cosmic queens, these issues won’t arise. That’s the only solution to
all our shallow traumas. We can stop trying so hard to win love and power and inuence
in the world, because on some days we’ll have those things and on
others we won’t. But if we look to them for sustenance, we will nd
despair. And growing more desperate, we will grow old. Age appalls
us because maturity appalls us, responsibility appalls us. Our thirties
are the time to get serious about being an adult, taking
responsibility for our communities and our families. Our forties
become the time for getting good at those things, for achieving some
mastery. In our fties, we should be able to shine. People in their
fties are like full-bodied wine. In our sixties and seventies, we
could, in addition to shining, start teaching others, those coming up
after us, how to do what we have done. Without a spiritual life, what are we left with. What is there to
strive for. Where do we look for clues. In magazines. Here are some basics for spiritual renewal. First of all, meditate. Do transcende ntal meditatio n (my favorite), Christian meditation,
Jewish meditation, Buddhist meditation, open-eye meditation, full-
moon meditation, Quaker meditation—it doesn’t matter. Just do it. Also, pray. Engage in some sort of daily spiritual practice—
nonreligious, religious, whatever. Above all else, try to forgive. Andlastly, treat your body well. Practice yoga or some equivalent form
of concentrated physical exercise. Do not look to your husband, your lover, your children, your job,
your money, or your therap ist to make you happy. It’s not their
function, nor within their capacity to do so. Look to yourself, to the
Goddess within you, and take responsibility for your own state of
mind. Women can be masters at negative programming. We constantly
tell ourselves what is not right: our gure, our hair, our relationship,
our job, the weather, someone else’s behavior. Sometimes, we do
this because we have legitimate complaints; at other times, we
criticize simply because it is the turn of our minds to do so. Every
time we do, regardless of why, we attack ourselves. We are
programming our subconscious—the part of the mind that hears
what we tell it and then creates more of the same—to manufacture
the life we’re describing. And then—magicians that we are—lo and
behold, we have a new, even more negative life the following day. Someone once gave me a coee mug on which is printed  ENTERTAIN
NO NEGATIVITY. If only I could be so strong. As 1992 was drawing to a
close and I gathered with friends at the approach of midnight, I
scribbled on a piece of paper, “In 1993, I will repeat no negative
stories. ” We are not a little powerful; we are enormously  powerful. Every time we say a negati ve word, we lay the menta l plans for
negative thing s. There is no escaping this law of the mind. As we
think, so shall it be. Here’s another  helpful hint. Choose an armation that ts you,
your hopes and your desires. Try to stay away from specics, and
concentrate instead on the woman you want to be. You could say, “I
am a glorious  child of God. I am joyful, serene, positive, and
loving. ” Write it on several pieces of paper. Pin them up in your
house or tape them to the dashboard of your car. The mind is more
powerful than are any external conditions. If you repeat your
armation ten times a day, particularly in combination with
meditation, your life will change. Spiritual techn iques cannot not work. The question is not whether
they work but whether or not we actually do them. If we remind
ourselves often of the woman we want to be, then the woman who
has been masquerading as us all these years will breathe her last
breath and give us back our life. On the days when I do these things—and having turned forty
myself, I have nally learned  how important it is to do them all—I
feel good. On the days when I don’t do them, I don’t feel as well. And I must admit that there are often days during the month when
nothing makes me happy, and that’s it. PMS is PMS. Chemical
depression is an even harder nut to crack. There are times and
conditions when despite our exercises, we continue to cry and we
continue to feel pain. I’m talking here about the broad strokes, the
vast majority of our days. Try those things—meditation, prayer,
yoga, armations—and the fabric of your life will become more
beautiful and peaceful. At times, we can nd sustenance in a spiritual retreat, a woman’s
retreat, a vacation, a time o. It’s important to have the chance to
get away from it all. But we must remember that the serenity and
peace a retreat provides should not be limited to our time away
from home; we must commit ourselves to incorporating the
conditions that foster peace and serenity into our daily lives. So
much inside us can ourish when we turn o the worldly  noise. The
search for inner peace is a life-style decision. Even when we have
children, they can learn that at certain hours Mommy needs quiet
time. As much as we crave the rest a vacation oers, we often resist it. Many of us have set up our lives so that we are consta ntly busy,
living on a kind of adrenaline that poses as energy. This is an
insidious trick of the negative mind: building a wall of frantic
activity that mitigates the experience of a meaningful inner life. We
lose a tremend ous amount of personal power and healthy energy by
allowing ourselves to be lured away from daily spiritual practice. The spiritual life is our inner life, and a woman is lost without her
connection to the God and Goddess within her. As for physical appearance—as we age, gorgeous young hunks
may or may not be interested in us anymore. For that matter, men
our own age and older might not be interested anymore. My
response to that is “So what. ” We could have met up with these
same guys when we were young, and they would still have been
turned o to us anyway once we got older. Have faith in men. There’s a new breed forming, just as we’re a
new breed of women. They are quite young, some of them, and they
are older also. They are learning, they are growing, and they are
everywhere. Hold on. Just take care of yourself. Strive to live a
more loving, more beautifu l life. They won’t not nd you. Your
appeal is huge and invisible and real. What now. Agreements. Agreements that we will not hurt one
another, that we will support one another. We will protect the
children and heal the earth. We will make love an art, and we will
love like artists. A woman is meant to hold the heart of the world within her
hands. She must cater to it and minister to it and kiss it when it
cries. We are meant to keep the home res burning, the res in our
hearts. We are meant to prepare the food, the spiritual food of love
and compassion. We are meant to care for the children, not just our
own, but every child. When we do not recognize our cosmic
function, our own hearts break, and so does the heart of the world. Just as children grow by playing games in which they imagine
themselves to be grown-ups, so are we meant to grow by imagining
ourselves to be bigger than we are right now. You need not
apologize for being brilliant, talented, gorgeous, rich, or smart. Your
success doesn’ t take away from anyone else’s. It actually increases
the possibility  that others can have it too. Your money  increases
your capacity to give mone y to others, your joy increases your
capacity to give joy to others, and your love increases your capacity
to give love to others. Your playing small serves no one. It is a sick
game. It is old thinking, and it is dire for the planet. Stop it
immediately. Come home to the castle. OceanofPDF. comFOUR
Embracing the Goddess
A true conception of the relation between the sexes
will not admit of conqueror and conquered; it knows
but of one great thing; to give of one’s self
boundlessly, in order to nd one’s self richer, deeper,
better. —Emma Goldman  
The story of many modern relationships is a variation
on a common theme: the conspiracy between men and women to
murder the Queen. Wheneve r a woman sells herself cheap or a man
is unkind to a woman or a woman gives her body where she is not
adored or a man rejects his true love—we are trying to murder the
Queen. But the Queen is eternal; she cannot die. She can be
tortured, but she cannot die. A friend  recent ly spoke to me of a very powerful man on the East
Coast who has gained a reputation for toying cruelly with the hearts
of so-called powerful women. The question, of course, is how does a
powerful woman allow herself to be toyed with. What place of
wounded self-esteem makes her vulnerable to his emotionally
sadistic machinations. Perhaps, suggested my friend, I would
address this question in my book. “My book will not be about that,” I told her. “That man is a
dinosaur. His breed will die out. ” Thousands of us have been intherapy, taken seminars, read extensively, and explored all other
means to personal growth in the last several years in order to learn
how to avoid those guys. We’ve prayed. We’ve been on our knees. Where were those women. Go into therapy. Go to a good bookstore. The buzz words now are recovery, wellness, hinging back joy. There’s a great story about recovering from attraction to
dangerous men. It goes like this: When you’re really ill, you don’t
even know a snake when you see one. Once recovery begins, you
see a snake and you know it’s a snake, but you still play with it. Once you’ve landed in true recovery zone, you see a snake, you
know it’s a snake, and you cross to the other side of the road. Until then, everyone you know can tell you the game is toxic with
that person, but you won’t listen because you think you’re dierent
or that he’ll be dierent with you, or that maybe you’re the rst one
to have really seen his sensit ive side. There’s no forcing the process
by which we simply stop being attracted to pain. It’s a long road for
some of us. It’s work. It takes deeper thinking and more courage
than many of us are used to. But it’s going on everywhere. It’s the
real liberation, and there aren’t a lot of excuses in today’s world for
not joining in the work that will ultimately free us all. There’s not much mystery here. Sickness is not that interesting. When you were a little girl, Daddy told you in various ways that you
weren’t really all that great, so that any man who gives you the
same message years later feels to you like the one you belong with. He’s familiar in that he’s remote and slightly disapproving. And the
more we look,  the more we realize that it wasn’t just Daddy who
went weird on us around the time we reached puberty. The whole
world did. Our burgeoning sexuality didn’t just freak out Daddy,
who was attracted and repelled at the same time. It freaked out
Mommy too, who was jealous, and our teachers, who had similar
projections. It freaked out the entire society in which we grew up,
because sex is still thought of as evil here. As we grew more and
more into our womanhood, we were perceived as being  more and
more dangerous. None of this was conscious on anyone’s part. Very
little is conscious in this society or anywhere. The whole human
race is still basically in a fog, but that’s why we’re here, and it’sdenitely why we’re looking into this painful stu that’s been ruling
us subconsciously for ages. Women are very confused about power, and actually, so are men. Feminine powe r isn’t something we go out and acquire; it’s already
within us. It’s something we become willing to experience. Something to admit we have. Until we do, our positive power lies unexpressed. It’s there, but
it’s not working. We’re wired  for something we don’t know how to
access. Having  been taught that the power of strong women is in
various ways suspect, many of us nd it hard to fully embrace our
power. We’re afraid. But the Goddess is ready to correct our
thinking. Her key, the access  point, the miracle, is love. We are here
only to love, and love casts out fear. When we understand that love
is the reason for our power— that it is our power—we lose our fear
of owning its strength. We become willing to experience the power
within us, that it might be used as a channel through which love is
expressed to all humankind. And so, powerful women fall prey to the East Coast lady-killer not
because he’s consciously seeking to murder the Queen but because
they are. Not having embraced her themselves, they nd no one else
to embrace her either. They are stuck in princess mode, crying and
tearing their hair out, shoutin g “You can’t treat me this way” when,
quite obviously, he sure can. Until we own our own power, we will
constantly seek it in others, particularly in men, and power sought
that way never saves us; it destroys us. Many women complain that they keep attracting the “wrong
relationship. ” What they mean by that, of course, is that they are
attracted to the wrong relationship. They are stuck in a place that is
dangerous but seductive. They want desperately to get out of the
pattern but often not quite desperately enough. They lack the self-
esteem to save their own lives. We give up what we want to give up and keep what in some way
we still want to keep. There are payos for holding on to small,
weak patterns. We have an excuse not to shine. We don’t have to
take responsibility for the world when we’re spending all our timein emot ional pain. We’re too busy. The truth that sets us free is an
embrace of the divine within  us. It means remembering we are the
daughters of God, and daughters of God don’t brake for jerks. When a woman falls in love with the magnicent possibilities
within herself, the forces that would limit those possibilities hold
less and less sway over her. A relationship that keeps us tied to the
push and pull of co-dependent neuroses is a block to our shining. When we are very clear that we want to shine—and  if we want to
know the Goddess, we want to shine—then we attract into our lives
the kinds of relationships that help us do that. Until a woman has
given herself permission to be fabulous, she will not nd herself
with partners who promote her ability to be so. As long as she tears
herself down, she will attract others who tear her down; she will
nd people who agree that she is undeserving and lacking as long as
that is how she thinks of herself. So we’re left with a commitment to being a certain kind of woman
before worrying about nding a certain kind of man. Once we make
such a commit ment, good guys will appear. Until we do, let’s just
say they’re waiting in the lobby. Embrace the Goddess and her divine perception of you. Ask her to
reveal to you the you she has in mind. Ask her to send you the
relationships and circumstances that will foster that strength within
you, that the world might be blessed by the presence of a woman in
all her glory. Ask and you’ll receive. Don’t ask, and you’ll continue
to receive the relationships that destroy you. Until we embrace the
light, we remain vulnerable to darkness. The choice is easy once we
see it for what it is. In relationships, as in everything else, we ask for
heaven, or we ask for hell. Several years ago, my boyfr iend left me for a bimbo. Actually, he
didn’t leave me, and according to quite a few people she’s not a
bimbo. But my emotional experience, as arrogant and unenlightened
as it was, was that I had been rejected for someone half my size. It’s not uncommon for an intelligent man to gravitate toward a
woman who can’t quite put a sentence together. But why does it
happen. I wanted to nd out because the pain I felt was searing. Iknew in my heart that I had blown something big-ti me, and I
wanted to correct myself. I would have done anything and gone
anywhere to learn what I needed to before I went out again. Some
of the cleares t thinking we do about relationships occurs while
we’re not in one. We’re humbler, more in touch with our pain, more
teachable. Our intelligence is always sharper when informed by our
own feelings. At another point in my life, I lived a scene like the one at the end
of the movie Gone With the Wind, where Scarlett asks Rhett what’s to
become of her if he leaves her. In my case, the man did give a
damn, but he still had to leave. I then had to prove to myself, and to
whomever else I thought might care, that I could make it without
him. Imagine another scene, the one in which Scarlett says, “I will
never go hungry again. ” My pledge, uttered with the same strength
and anguish, was “I will never need a man again. ”
That was a awed decision. I couldn’t have him, so I became him. I wanted him within me so
badly I invoked his energy from within myself. I conquered outer
worlds, just as he had. I expressed masculine strength and power,
just as he had. But it didn’t bring me closer to him or to others like
him because I had become one of the guys, and that’s not what most
men are looking for. He had never loved me for being a great guy. I don’t know when my mourning set in, but I know it climaxed
when I lost out to the woman I thought was a bimbo. What I
realized was that she was in some ways the old me—not the me I
wanted to become but the me I had been and then left behind. She
wasn’t stupid; I just wanted to think she was. And that’s why I had
to hate her. I couldn’t bear to take on all the hatred I felt toward
myself for becoming so masculine and tough. I started to understand what had gone wrong, includ ing the
realization that I was far from alone in my predicament. And it
wasn’t enough just to understand. I had to retrain myself,  which I’m
still doing. I don’t want to lose the masculine power I’ve developed,
the worldly eectiveness, the power to act on things I care about. It’s part of me and an important aspect of who we all are. It wascertainly a necessary social development for women to actualize
their masculine power in the world. But I needed to put things in their proper perspective. In intimate
relationships with men, I want to major in feminine and minor in
masculine. At a lecture podiu m, I’m the masculine, active energy to
the audience’s feminine receptiveness. After work, if I’m with a man
I am close to, I want to experience myself as a woman. And I no
longer kid myself that it would work for him, or for me, to play it
any dierently. That doesn’t mean we don’t trade roles at times. It
means the dominant groove is that he’s masculine and I’m feminine. The masculine is active, the feminine passive; the masculine is
dynamic, the feminine magnetic. The masculine does while the
feminine is. Part of our Amazon neuro sis is the way we have all
learned to play the man: to go to him before he comes to us, to call
rst, to make the rst move. Only now do we realize what a mistake
that is, and we’re having to tie our hands behind our backs, bite our
tongues, sit on our credit cards. Most of us want a masculine man, but there’s no way to have one
unless we become feminine  women. At rst, we’re outraged to
realize this because we thought we were being such good girls by
developing our masculine side to begin with. That’s  what we
thought real worth, real power was. We came to see women—
usually beginning with Mommy—as weak and ineective, so we
wanted to grow up and be just like Daddy. And God help us, we did. During the sixties, male and female development was changing as
our parents took what they thought was a more liberated approach
to raisin g their sons and daughters. Daddy slapped his little girl on
the back when she achieved something in the world, telling her how
proud he was— and meaning  it. He didn’t know what to do with the
girl stu anyw ay, since the feelings it brought up inside him were so
threatening. We were movin g into a new, modern era. The sexes
would be equal. Girls were liberated—to be just like boys. When I was growing up, my father was a well-known immigration
lawyer and my mother a housewife. My father was given constant
kudos for his admirable contributions to the lives of poor and
struggling immigrants. My mother, as far as I was concerned, didnot participate meaningfully in the world at all. At the time, I could
not see that driving kids to ballet class, scheduling Girl Scout
meetings, or sewing doll clothes was important work. Today, I see
things very dierently. I see I was one of thousands of young girls
who unconsciously decided that our mothers’ lives were
meaningless, while our fathers’ lives were glamorous and important. The way to succeed, it seemed to us, was to grow up and be just like
Daddy. So, I created a career for myself not unlike my father’s. When I
started lecturing on A Course in Miracles  in the early eighties, I
found myself surrounded by people burdened with serious problems. I met many people with HIV-positive infections and other life-
challenging illnesses. I was thrown into a world in which other
people were hurting more than I was, and the moral as well as
professional imperative was that I be the strong one and hold other
people up. Unconsciously, I had created a career just like Daddy’s. I
had become what in Jungian terms is called a father’s daughter. I learned early on to apply discipline to my professional
endeavors. Week after week, month after month, and year after
year, I showed up at prayer groups, lectures, support groups,
hospital rooms, marriages, funerals. I founded organizations, had a
child, and wrote a book. I knew I had to be strong, and I thought
strength didn’t cry. I had seen my father’s lack of emotion as
strength and my mother’s show of emotion as weakness. I wanted to
be strong like my father. I couldn’t break down at the funeral if I
was the one conducting the service. If a mother was grieving for her
son, I couldn’t cave in. I wanted to be a shoulder for her to lean on. I didn’t want to do anything that would threaten my ability to be
strong in my role of mother hen. What I didn’t understand was that I
had become not a mother hen but a father hen. Although I was driven by tender emotions, I thought that
expressing them fully might limit my power. I built a wall that
would hold my emotions at bay, thinking I needed to do that in
order to best serve others. It took a lot of willpower to build that
wall, but I can see now that it did not take strength. The denial ofemotion through suppression or withdrawal is a weak move, not a
courageous one. So this is the Amazon neuro sis: the woman who achieves at the
expense of her tender places. From the time she was a little girl, she
was slowly but surely led to believe that her emotions  were less
important than her achievements, perhaps even antithetical to them. And the love she received in response to her achievements, if it was
love at all, is not the love that warms the night. A woman who cannot honor  her own feelings will not nd them
honored by anyone else. Other people will nd her hard to
penetrate. I have experienced this in diverse and painful ways. When I began  to recognize what a high personal price I paid for
dissociating myself from my own feelings, I did what I had to do to
let them up and out. Lots of therapy, lots of work, lots of pain. And
then, sure enough, just as I had feared, I began to lose my grip. I
conducted a funeral service for someone I had hardly known, and I
couldn’t stop crying as I gave my talk. But this was just a temporary
phase. I moved on through the weepy period and came out at the
other end stronger and more tender, less guarded and more
available. Usually when we think of power, we think of external power, and
we think of powerful peopl e as those who have made  it in the
world. A powerful woman isn’t necessarily someone who has
money, but we think of her as someone with a boldness or a spark
that makes her manifest in a dramatic way. When we think of a
powerful man, we think of his ability to manifest abundance—
usually money—in the world. Most people say that a powerful woman does best with a powerful
man, that she needs someon e who understands the bigness of her
situation, a man who can meet her on the same or a greater level of
power in the world. This is true if power is dened as material
abundance. A woman often faces cultural prejudice when she makes
more money than a man, as does he. A woman who denes power
by worldly standards can rarely feel totally relaxed in the arms of a
man who doesn’t have it. If power is seen as an internal matter, then the situation  changes
drastically. Internal power has less to do with money and worldly
position and more to do with emotional expansiveness, spirituality,
and conscious living. As we begin to recognize that internal strength
is all that really matters, we come to see that we have often avoided
men who were not powerful in the world not because they were not
powerful enough, but because inwardly they were too powerful,
reminding us of the work we still had to do on ourselves. I used to think that I needed a “powerful man,” someo ne who
could protect me from the harshness and evils of the world. What I
have come to realize is that the evils of the world that confront me
are a reection  of my own internal state, and no one can protect me
from my own mind. The powerful man I was looking for would be,
foremost, someone who supported me in keeping on track spiritually
and in so maintaining clarity within myself that life would pose
fewer problems. When it did get rough, he would help me forgive. I no longer want someone who would say to me, “Don’t worry,
honey. If they’re mean to you, I’ll beat them up or buy them out. ”
Instead, I want someone who prays and meditates with me regularly
so that fewer monsters from the outer world disturb me, and who,
when they do, helps me look within my own consciousness for
answers instead of looking to false power to combat false power. There’s a big dierence between a weak man and a gentle man. Weak men make us nervous. Gentle men make us calm. Many of us have desired, or do desire, marriage. How much of our
desire is natural, and how much of it is cultural. What is natural is
our desire for the beloved. What is cultural is our tendency to forget
that a piece of paper cannot tie hearts together. The issue is not
whether we marry, but whether we allow any choice of life-style to
impinge on our ability to y. What is important, if we do choose to marry, is that we not give
up our wilder spirits. I once heard someone say that married women
can’t write. I don’t think this is true, but I understand what it means. Marriage is not a mere convention but it is often lived as one and, as
such, will sink instead of uplift a woman’s spirit. The creative spiritthrives on freedom and daring. Many of history’s most creative
women have not been married. As for the priestesses of olden times,
don’t even think about it. Priestesses were spiritual merm aids, and a
lot of men were drowning. Patriarchal culture senses danger in the unmarried woman. If a
man is unmarr ied, he is called a bachelor. If a woman is unmarried,
she is called a spinster or an old maid. What is it about an
unmarried woman that poses  such a threat to the patriarchal order. Mainly, it is that women are no one’s property when we’re
unmarried. We’re under no one’s control, and neither are our
children. There is no telling what we might do or say. Much of the prejudice against women is stored at an unconscious
level. Many of those who hold the most punishing attitudes toward
passionate women—and free women are passionate women—
consider them selves social liberals, even feminists. Wom en’s rights
seem to them to be of obviou s importance, but what is not obvious
to them is how much they themselves conspire to keep the lid on
female power. Female power transcends what are known politically as women’s
issues. Female power has to do with women taking an active part in
the conversation—whether in the public arena or at the dinner table
—and having the same emotional space in which to do so as men. It
means women not having to fear punishment of any kind. It means
women not having to worry that we’ll be considered unfeminine if
we speak up. It means women really coming out to play and getting
support for our playing—fro m men as well as from women. Until
this is accomplished, political, economic, and reproductiv e freedoms
will not be enough. We will not be free until we can speak our
minds and our hearts withou t having to worry that men will crucify
us, women will crucify us, the press will crucify us, or our children
will be ashamed. The true politics of women’s liberation is human politics. It is
under the surface, the energy in a room—not in the bedroom,
because there we won freedom as soon as it was discovered how
much more fun life is when we are in the game. But outside the
bedroom, we are still not equal partners, and until we are, the worldwill not be healed. Women are still in emotional bondage  as long as
we need to worry that we might have to make a choic e between
being heard and being loved. After the Anita Hill–Clarence Thomas showdown on Capitol Hill,
a friend  told me an interesting story. She had watched the televised
hearings with several marrie d couples. Except for herself and two
others, the women in attendance remained silent. Their husbands,
on the other hand, held forth on how shameful it all was, expressing
their perfect liberal views with seemingly no awareness of what was
going on in that very room. Their wives behaved like good little
girls: they sat by quietly, allowing their husbands to sound brilliant
and insightful. Would things have been dierent had the couples not been
married. I don’t know. What  is operative in this case is not marriage
but the connection between women and men itself. What needs to
be addressed is who we are in partnership. Whether we are married
matters less and less today as the denition of marriage changes
along with everything else around us. What I think is relevant in
this story is not that the couples were married but that they were in
public. Behind  closed doors, perhaps each of these husba nds shows
great respect for his wife. What is still lacking in American society is permission for women
to speak up in public—loudly and clearly—without being
considered ball breakers. Let’s look at that name one more time: ball
breaker. Try to come up with an expression that conjures more of an
association with male pain. It’s almost impossible. Now try to come
up with an expression more often associated with a woman who
speaks her mind. Most wome n faced with the choice of hurting men
or shutting up go back to sleep and sleep forever. Women and men are now obviously relearning our roles vis-à-vis
one another, both in marriage and out of it. Several years ago, I was
leading a weekend seminar when the subject of marriage came up. I
asked how many people in the group were married and then asked
them to express their thoughts about it. As the group of thirty or so
talked late into the night, I heard things that surprised me. I realized
that weekend, and became more and more aware during subsequentsessions of counseling marri ed as well as unmarried couples, that
marriage is whatever people make of it. And it is detrim ental to all
of us to hold narrow, formulaic pictures of what that should be. I have heard married couples who describe their conjugal
relationships as very, very happy, in monogamous as well as in open
marriages. I have heard married couples who describe their conjugal
relationships as boring and unhappy, in monogamous as well as in
open marriages. Sex is a sacrament, not a prison. While monogamy
can be a beautiful, even sacred bond, it might not be the agreement
that best suits everyone. Our thinking that monogamy is inherently
a nobler arrangement than any other has created a nation of
hypocrites—which is what we’ve become. Don’t kid yourself. Historical ly, monogamy didn’t begin as a way
to ensure that two people could relax into the deepest intimacy. It
began as a way for men to assert their ownership over a woman’s
body. In many cultures throu ghout history, and in some today, it is
acceptable for men to have multiple partners but not for women to
do the same. The value of monogamy and the persistence of the
double standar d are subjects that need to be discussed, by men as
well as by women, in public and in private, in order to exorcise the
sexual demons we still allow to control us. It is very dicult to be
clear about what you want when your mind is overwhelmed by
input about what you’re supposed to want. If you love a man—how wonderful if you do—and if you desire a
monogamous union with him—how wonderful if you do—then
marry him if your heart calls you to, and know that the union you
have chosen can serve God and Goddess, and men and women. But
never, ever—married or not—allow your partnership with a man to
silence your voice or keep you from supporting another woman in
using hers, or you are helping to perpetuate a most vicious muing
of a most beautiful sound. The world has no idea of the song we’re
not yet hearing: women singing out, in harmony with men and each
other, at full blast, at full volume. It’s music we need. Men long to
hear it, and women long to join the choir. Be very clear. The silence is a sick one. If men only knew how much we have to say. But so often, we
cannot speak. In the presence of resistance, we clam up. In the
presence of approval, we blossom into goddesses. There are times when we have to turn away from things that hold
us back, and nothing holds us back like someone who invalidates
who we are and what we’re capable of. A young man is often
brought up to think that he will one day nd the right woman to
support his vision and greatness. Many young girls are brought up
to think that we will one day nd a man whose vision and greatness
are worthy of our support. The ancient Greek word for courtesan is hetaera. The hetaera  was
a man’s lover, his equal, and his muse. She carried his vision and
made space for his brilliance. There is no such word for the
correlative male position, although husband  would be nice. Who is to hold the space for a woman’s greatness. In many
heterosexual relationships, a man is threatened by a woman’s
greatness, nding a variety of ways to make her question her own
beauty and strength. A secur e man is not threatened by a woman’s
intellectual or emotional power but celebrates the opportunity for
joyful partnership that it oers him. The conscious question is
whether a relationship can handle two stars. We must relinquish the paradigm of men as power with women as
support and instead embrace the image of both men and women as
powers, with each supporti ng the other. Any man who holds a
woman back is not a man a woman can aord to be with. A woman
has a mighty and sacred task to perform on earth. She will not be
able to fulll her function if she remains with a man who derides
her glory. Women are not powerless. We just pretend we are. We do this in
large part because we are afraid of the punishment inicted on us
when we dare to be who we really are. It’s a subtle form of
discrimination, but it’s clearly there. A few women are allowed into
the club, it seems: women who have allowed themse lves to be
partially decla wed, their sexual threat to the status quo diminished
just enough, so that men and women alike can handle the juice. Butan animal in the wild is not declawed, and an animal in the wild is a
beautiful thing. In the wild, we scream. We scream when we hurt, we scream
when we give birth, we scream when we come, and that’s just the
way it is. Now what kind of man can handle our passion, and what
kind of man can ascend to the throne next to a woman who owns
her own crown. A princess attracts a prince, and a queen  attracts a
king. Women who whine attract men who whine. Women full of the
lioness heart attract men who are full of the lion. And this is where women are now, at a place where, perhaps for
the rst time ever, people are remembering en masse our cosmic
function. Our love aairs are not here to serve an industrialist
machinery or a government system. Our sex is not for procreation
alone. Our love is here to spiritualize the earth. Both women and
men are in quantum fast forward. We are growing new brains. We
are using new eyes. And when a woman rememb ers her glory, a man of goodwill can
barely contain his joy. His real self arises in the presence of her
own. I’m telling you, it works, this thing, this looking within to
attract what is without. Make room for love, and it always comes. Make a nest for love, and it always settles. Make a home for the
beloved, and he will nd his way there.
The author believes that women can still grow and blossom at any age, but it requires a spiritual life and commitment to self-care and self-acceptance.
What is the author's perspective on women's aging and self-acceptance?
The author emphasizes that true power comes from within, and that women should not seek external validation or control from others. Instead, they should focus on embracing their own inner strength and femininity.
What is the author's view on the concept of "power"?
The author suggests that women should practice meditation, prayer, and affirmations to reprogram their minds and focus on positive self-talk.
What is the author's advice for overcoming negative thoughts and self-criticism?
The author emphasizes the importance of self-love, self-acceptance, and spiritual growth before seeking relationships or marriage. She also stresses that women should not seek external validation or control from others, but rather cultivate inner peace and strength.
What is the author's stance on relationships and marriage?
The author encourages women to take responsibility for their own lives, seek spiritual guidance, and focus on their own inner power and femininity. She emphasizes the importance of self-love, self-acceptance, and personal growth, and warns against seeking external validation or control from others.
What is the author's message to women about their role in the world?