Networking with authenticity
So many women, mothers, caregivers are in a crisis of conscious and a deep level of exhaustion. Whether it’s staying competitive professionally, while caring for children, siblings or parents, and addressing their own underlying physical, emotional and spiritual wellbeing, women have long been ready to break and swell.?
It’s no wonder so many leave the workforce, get divorced, live in states of anger or depression and some even ghost their old lives. Some people in our society would say that these women couldn’t cut it at work or at home. Still others would judge them not doing everything under what is an impossible, colonized approach to success and abundance.?
Let’s face it, whether in the corporate, private or public sector, we are being asked to uphold systems that are inherently designed to undercut us and keep us small. Worse than that, they are designed to keep us angry and eventually that unprocessed anger will make us physically, emotionally and spiritually sick.
You have a right to be angry.? A part of your essence is being robbed by the experience of having to serve everyone all the time with no viable systemic way to rest.?
The underlying premise of colonization is that all parts of our system shall extract everything they can from us so that a small percentage of people will remain comfortable. These “modern” plantation systems look like freedom on the outside but smell like rotten eggs on the inside.?
And now I am going to say the hard part.?
Many people of color knew that something smelled rotten or wasn’t right when they signed up. Women of color often discover a form of self-oppression and collusion with colonized systems and go on, because it’s better to leave it alone than open up decades of self-oppression in the making. I often hear from women who have “made it” that they actually know another way to live and “they can’t seem to turn away from this moment.” You’ve probably heard or said something like:?
Is it getting chilly inside yet? Breathe. Go get a sweater and keep reading.
So what can women of color do??
I don’t judge these women. Like them, we were all sold an American Dream that lives on the premise of an extractive culture including one that requires us to extract our own wellbeing.?We have a complex problem centuries in the making and it won’t be undone easily. Advocates in all three sectors have been trying to solve for extractive culture with slow or no sustainable results.?
That being said we can’t be fatalist about this moment and stick our head in the sand.??
Even if we are stuck in what seems an unsolvable situation we can revisit some aspects of our identity and formation. This requires us to look back at our lived experiences and look at the driving factors of our experience that no longer interest us.??
This evaluation will look different for each woman as we are all in different seasons of our lives. We all have tapped and untapped gifts waiting to be discovered or reimagined. This new exploration requires a bit of rigor and support to map our gifts, redefine our values and decide new boundaries for our relationship to society.?
Here are three pathways to get you started:?
What role or cycle am I in?
A valuable way of looking at long standing archetypal roles comes from the teachings of Chief Hale Makua, a Kahuna elder of Hawaiian ancestral traditions. In the book Bowl of Light, he spoke of 7 main roles that we cycle through in our lives, those being: The Helper, The Artist, The Warrior, The Scholar, The Teacher, The Healer, and The Chief.
Helpers, for example, are in a position to serve and support others. Helpers also run the possibility of becoming overly supportive of others, and turning into victims of their own experience. This is amplified by a system that is led by people who believe it is their right to take advantage of others.?
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Makua describes the archetype of the Chief as the embodiment of self-mastery, yet in many ways, it reflects the role of the helper in the sense that a true leader knows they are in service to their people. The positive embodiment of this role represents deeper knowledge of self, collective wellbeing, and humility.?
Chief Hale Makua also spoke of three sacred laws to live by – love with humility, live with reverence, and know with self-discipline. These principles should be explored by each of us as we set intentions and build interpersonal exchanges.??
Returning to authentic ways of being
The crises and collapses we see in modern times are largely related to our disjointed interactions with our planet and our networks. The negative polarities of our roles are being magnified and stretched to the limit. This is why we see so many people struggling and feeling ‘trapped’, while a select few are in positions of dominance. Our collective imbalance is at a tipping point – many are entering a new cycle or transitional phase as we become aware of this fact.
The key thing that we can do in these times is to remember and return to ways of indigeneity. Rejecting a colonized view of our society, culture and economy opens us up to the vast potential that each human being has to share. Instead of operating in scarcity and disconnection, the indigenous mindset constantly reminds us of our strength in unity.?
Being in community requires getting comfortable asking for help
Weaving our networks is impossible unless we make asks. Without making requests, the aliveness of this network won’t reach us, simultaneously stopping the flow of our gifts to others. None of us can exist in a solitary universe. Even a hermit who lives alone in a remote location is in a relationship – with natural elements, plants, animals, and the essential processes they’ve learned to live and survive.?
In the individualized society we’re living in, it is seen as taboo to ask for help. The tropes about Women of Color - the strong Black woman, the independent woman who knows everything – are not only untrue, but they are damaging. Whether we internalize them or not, in reality, many WOC are afraid to ask for help for fear of being seen as vulnerable. This is just another mechanism we use to keep ourselves safe, but it ends up pushing people out of our networks.?
The universe has a particular way of hearing our requests if they are made according to its expectations. We cannot control the how, and we cannot force it to come in a straight line. As we put our asks out to our networks (a.k.a. the universe), the spirit of generosity and the willingness to invest ourselves are fundamental.?
This way of asking will begin to magnetize the opportunities that we are primed to receive. At that moment we have to dial up our sense of discernment. The universe isn’t going to do that work for us. The way we make our ask is equally important as saying no to the things that are not the right fit.?
What we are being called to do at this moment cannot be accomplished individually. Our cultivation of offers and exchanges from a place of reverence and respect will help us recognize the infinite value in our networks. The path to realizing our wild dreams is to get really good at asking.?
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