Justine Musk's Blog, page 6

in the eye of the beholder: shame + beauty + the face of kim novak

Shame researcher and bestselling author Brene Brown writes about her sense of panic when she realized that her TEDxHouston talk was going viral. The “quick and global spread” of her work exposed her to the less-than-charming side of Internet culture. Comments like:

How can she talk about worthiness when she clearly needs to lose 15 pounds?

Less research. More Botox!

She may believe that she’s enough, but by the look of that chest, she could use some more.

If I looked like Brene Brown, I’d embrace imperfection too.

Keep in mind that Brene Brown wasn’t trying to make a living off her looks. She doesn’t act or model. She wasn’t even claiming to be pretty.

She’s a freaking shame researcher. (Researchers — and writers, for that matter — are not exactly known for The Sexy.)

And of the 12 “shame categories” (appearance and body image, money and work, motherhood/fatherhood, family, parenting, mental and physical health, addiction, sex, aging, religion, surviving trauma, and being stereotyped or label), she says the “primary trigger” for women is – how we look.

We feel shame about – and are shamed for (by men and other women) – not being beautiful enough, thin enough, or young enough.

I thought of Brene Brown when I got online this morning and saw the fallout from yesterday’s Oscars. It wasn’t about Best Picture, or John Travolta’s sudden head of hair, but the wave of reactions to 81 year old actress Kim Novak’s altered face.

(This, I think, is becoming an Oscar tradition. Last year, the appearance of Renee Zellweger also came under fire for being “frozen”. )

Brene Brown points out that it’s not enough for a woman to be beautiful, she has to appear to be naturally, effortlessly beautiful (otherwise she’s superficial and vain). At the same time, women are expected to invest in their appearance – spending the necessary time, money and effort for all that natural beauty. It’s expected that an actress like Catherine Zeta Jones would use fillers and plastic surgery to stay youthful (“more Botox”) even as she’s criticized for using fillers and plastic surgery at all (since they are neither natural nor effortless).

If a woman hasn’t made that obvious investment in looking youthful and thin, she’s accused of letting herself go.

Kim Novak, in short, was damned if she did and damned if she didn’t.

In more than one Facebook thread I saw someone ask if Kim knew how she actually looked, why hadn’t anyone told her?

And I think of something that Joan Rivers – no stranger to plastic surgery herself – said in response to a similar question. Joan knows that she looks odd. She just prefers it to the alternative.



In this culture, words like crone and hag are rarely intended as compliments.

I once posted a picture of the artist Beatrice Wood, who inspired the character of Rose in James Cameron’s TITANIC, on my Facebook page. I quoted her as saying that the secret to her longevity was “chocolate and young men”.

“What she didn’t mention,” a man quickly commented, “was that she cooks and eats those young men.”

I’ve seen the word hag applied to writer Elizabeth Wurtzel, still in her 40s (and attractive). The commenter disliked her and wanted to cut her down to size – but instead of going after her writing or her lifestyle or her history of depression and addiction or, really, anything else she might care about, he went after her for not being young enough.

Perhaps Kim Novak and women like her seem to take their faces to a certain extreme. But instead of mocking them for their choices, or accusing them of being feeble, addled, clueless, or victimized by their doctors, I wish people would remember the definition of a double bind. Writer Marilyn Frye describes it

“as a situation in which options are very limited and all of them expose us to penalty, censure, or deprivation.”

It might be better to take a big step back. It might be better to discuss, instead, the system these women are in that makes their choices nothing more than the logical outcome of what this culture expects from and values in women.

When all our options suck, we do the best we can. We choose the compromises we think we can live with – and hope that amid the inevitable criticism, we might find compassion.

Don’t destroy the players.

Change the game.

because we are what we make

because we are what we make

because the world is your studio

because there is joy when you master the tough stuff

because failure teaches you

what you didn’t know you needed to know

(+ mistakes are an art)

because you have the right to reinvent yourself

+ pain is just a sign your soul is changing

because you live in that squeeze-space of creative tension

+ it’s groovy

because you press the collective soul-nerve

because the universe is infinite

– but we are not.

darling, just freaking do it

There’s that thing you want to do. You know the one. Maybe it’s a course you want to take (or make and sell online), a skill you want to learn, a place you want to go, a person you want to ask to dinner.

It’s the blog you haven’t started yet.

It’s the half-finished manuscript on your hard drive that you haven’t touched in six months.

It’s the saxophone that you almost – almost – learned to play.

It’s the martial arts studio or dance studio or yoga studio you always pass on the way home and never quite manage to check out – even though you’re curious.

You get where I’m going with this.

We talk ourselves out of the stuff that we really, really want to do.

We think we’re being sensible. We have our reasons. No time/ no money/ no talent/ no obvious pay-off in my career or my love life. Don’t want the commitment, the obligation, the responsibility. Don’t want the humiliation of being really sucky at something I’ve never done before. Don’t want the tedium of being a beginner. Don’t want to do something I can’t do well or perfectly.

We’re afraid of failure. We’re afraid of success.

We had some traumatic saxophone/yoga/writing/puppet-making incident in early childhood.

Somebody told us — when we were too young to recognize how wrong they were, how full of absolute bullshit — that we are not creative.

That inner voice. So rational. The kind of voice that wears sensible shoes.

What if you listened closely to it, absorbed all the reasons, and went ahead and did it anyway? What if you let one shining reason for it outweigh several reasons against it?

As human beings we are slanted toward the negative: the lack, the absence, the potential dangers. We are primed to respond in a way that keeps us safe in our caves, away from predators that could eat us and high places we could stumble off of and enemies that could kill us (or force us into unflattering polyester).

The negative always trumps the positive. Always, always, always, unless you’ve got a Mary Poppins thing going on. It’s why you get twelve compliments and one critical remark – and guess which comment you find yourself stewing over five hours later. It’s why, to nurture and protect your relationship, you and your partner need five positive interactions for every negative interaction just to break even.

You will always find more reasons not to do something than to do it.

So listen to your curiosity instead. Your sense of play. Your longing for wonder.

You don’t have to commit to some ten-year drive toward excellence. You don’t have to see, right now, an obvious pay-off for your investment. Pay-offs aren’t always obvious. Take a step, an action, and you set off a series of minor changes that subtly alter the world around you. Keep taking steps, and who knows what those changes bring into your life. Where they will take you, or what window they will open onto some fabulous horizon, or how they will ultimately move your soul.

Do it, because not to do it is to die a tiny death.

Do it, because it moves you a little more deeply into the world.

Do it, because it helps you remember who you are.

Even if it doesn’t work out for you, the decision to embrace yes begins a new habit, a new method of response, a new adventure.

Small things have a way of turning into leaps of beauty.

And that’s the kind of thing that makes a life.

Tweet: darling, just freaking do it http://ctt.ec/1ec2r+

the essence of what makes you unique

In the movie FIGHT CLUB – maybe you’ve heard of it – a character tells his disciples, in a tone of righteous fury, “You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake! You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all a part of the same compost pile.”

He got that half-right.

Perhaps it’s a symptom of a narcissistic culture that we seem to equate unique with being special, as in “be the same as everybody else, just in a better, superior, award-winning way”. When this kind of conformity/competition becomes our main focus, we, perhaps ironically, tend to end up feeling more alone.

We say to each other, If everybody is special, nobody is special! If everybody gets a trophy, nobody gets a trophy!



Not to knock competition – it has its place – but maybe we’re missing the point.

We are lousy at separating essence from ego. We ignore the former. We stroke the latter.

“Among the things I’ve noticed in working with people through the years is that a majority of them never really take the time to discover what is unique about themselves,”



writes author/speaker/teacher Carolyn Myss.

“People invest enormous energy in exploring their feelings but seldom put that same time and energy into exploring their potential talents. Rather, they often decide in an instant that they have no talent – or at least none worth developing – and that’s the end of the discussion. Discovering your original form of expression requires a bit more effort, however.”

I like the phrase original medicine, which indigenous cultures use to refer to our personal mix of attributes and abilities. (I also like Nilofer Merchant’s use of the word ‘onlyness’.) In her excellent book TRANSFORMATIONAL SPEAKING, Gail Larsen emphasizes the importance of knowing and accepting your original medicine, which is key to “personal power, strength and understanding.” But coming to terms with your own originality isn’t something that happens just by showing up (whether they give you a trophy or not).

Your ‘original form of expression’, as Myss refers to it, has to be excavated amid a culture that constantly pressures us to fit into its own agenda.

It must be revealed to yourself, and then artfully communicated to the people it serves best.

That’s the work.

A major component of your original medicine is what Tim Kelley identifies as your ‘essence’. It is the aspect of you, your presence and person, that doesn’t do but simply is. Perhaps because of this, we tend to be unconscious of it, even as it has a “subtle and pervasive” effect on everyone we encounter, everywhere we go.

Kelley writes:

“Imagine that you were born with a bright red lightbulb on top of your head, shining all the time….[You walk into a room and someone says] “Wow, it just got red in here.” Since everything you have ever seen has been under a bright red light, you don’t even know what red looks like. You have no contrast by which to understand and describe ‘red’. But other people do, because they can see the difference between when you are present and when you are not.

Essence operates just this way.”

The way to learn about your essence is to ask people what you bring to a room, what they feel or sense just being around you that they don’t experience around other people (or at least not in the same way).

I started this exercise with two of my closest girlfriends. We did it separately and compared the results. It was interesting to see the overlap: different words, maybe, but they seemed to be describing the same things.

Girlfriend #1

Culture + social grace

Intelligent, analytical

Poised social catalyst

Girlfriend #2

Cheeky empathic dramatic

Effervescent

Charming, earthy

Girlfriend #3

Depth, mystique, striking

Intense, probing, sensitive

creative fluidity

When you understand your essence, you start to understand the story you’re telling just by showing up. You can think of ways to make it work for you – or realize how it might be working against you if you’re putting yourself in the wrong kind of contexts. Your essence is like a door that opens on the great work of your soul, or what Kelley calls your true purpose. When you see who you are, you start to know what you can do – and how it connects to something much bigger than yourself.

The glorious paradox of onlyness is that it sets you apart even as it connects you to others. You radiate, and resonate: neon vibes rippling out across the web.

the art of redefining success ( + why we need to)

Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance,

and there is only the dance.



– T.S. Eliot

When I was a teenager I thought about getting a yin-yang tattoo. You know, the kind that looks like this:

(Twenty years on, and I’m still thinking about a tattoo, although maybe an infinity symbol on the inside of my wrist.)

I knew in a vague kind of way that the symbol stood for opposites: the masculine and the feminine, the dark and the light, Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, that kind of thing. One side defining the other, balance, “you complete me” and let’s burn some incense while we’re at it.

I began to understand how it’s more complicated than that.

We live in a culture that has its own warped version of opposites: the private sphere versus the public. The former is domestic and feminine, the latter is worldly and masculine.

But unlike night and day, this division is manmade (in the true sense of the word). Although it reaches as far back as the ancient Greeks, separate spheres didn’t emerge as an ideology in our culture until the Industrial Revolution moved the official workplace from in and around the home to the factories.

Women stayed put and men went off into the world. Both genders worked, but only one was paid.

French political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville observed:

“In no country has such constant care been taken as in America to trace two clearly distinct lines of action for the two sexes and to make them keep pace one with the other, but in two pathways that are always different….[The] independence of woman is irrecoverably lost in the bonds of matrimony…[In] the United States the inexorable opinion of the public carefully circumscribes woman within the narrow circle of domestic interests and duties and forbids her to step beyond it.”

Fast forward a couple of centuries and a revolution or two, and we are still dealing with the legacy: a work world shaped by men, for men, with the assumption of a fulltime homemaker in the wings who could keep the domestic front running smoothly.

(Behind a great man was a faithful wife, picking up his socks, hosting dinner parties and making sure the kids he rarely saw weren’t killing themselves or each other.)

We also have a domestic world that – until relatively recently — undervalued the importance of fatherhood. It still likes to depict men as astonishingly incompetent, unable to load the dishwasher, remembering to bring home the milk but maybe not the kid.

We’ve got a world that rules with, and is ruled by, the yang, and keeps the yin for the most part at home.

And we are paying a high price.

In her new book THRIVE, Arianna Huffington takes a long hard look at how we define success and what it costs us: our health, our relationships, our peace of mind. We measure ourselves by action and production, competition and power: the more, the more, the more, the better. Sleep? Overrated. Stress? A fact of life. Besides, that’s what vices are for: addiction, like depression, is on the rise, as we fight constant burnout and struggle to cope. It’s go, go, go and do, do, do –

“Every conversation I had,” writes Arianna

seemed to eventually come around to the same dilemmas we are all facing – the stress of overbusyness, overworking, overconnecting on social media, and underconnecting with ourselves and each other. The space, the gaps, the pauses, the silence – those things that allow us to regenerate and recharge – had all but disappeared in my own life and in the lives of so many I knew.”

We’re not cut out for this.

We weren’t made for this.

We were made to pulse. As high-performance and energy expert Tony Schwartz points out, our bodies were made to expend energy, and then renew. Expend, and then renew. Advance, and then retreat. Do, and then just be. The masculine, and then the feminine, and then the masculine, and then the feminine…

Throughout history, the symbol of healing, renewal and regeneration – the snake – was a feminine totem, the regular shedding of its skin linked to a woman’s monthly menses. (As the times and culture changed, the snake was demonized and menstruation made taboo.) Such a culture perceives a withdrawal into inactivity – the feminine attributes of being instead of doing, contemplating instead of acting– as a waste of time.

This is the culture Jung said to be suffering from “soul loss”, which he called the “great wound” of modern life. (Soul, by the way, is the feminine counterpart to the masculine spirit.)

The irony is, what seems like stagnation is often a period of creative incubation (and if there’s a value that the business world holds more sacred than creativity and innovation, at least these days, then I don’t know what it is). And incubation, as Gertrud Mueller Nelson points out, is “unhurried, an unseen growth prefatory to…a new and conscious way of living life – fully and passionately.”

This is how success should be defined, says Arianna: by living fully and passionately, engaging the “third metric” of wisdom, wonder, wellbeing and giving. She calls on women not just to lean in, but reshape the world of work into a world that cultivates the third metric instead of killing it dead.

(“And men,” she said in a talk at the Wisdom 2.0 conference in San Francisco, “you’re going to love it.”)

Since rest, health, connectedness, and the expansive, energized attitudes of joy actually increase creativity and productivity, work probably won’t suffer as a result.

What I think she’s calling for isn’t women per se, but the power of the feminine — its values, attributes and associations — to be brought forth and allowed to flourish in a world that, up until now, has disdained and disowned them. She’s calling for men to get in touch with their feminine sides, so to speak, and for women to no longer “act like men” in order to get ahead. She’s saying that the choice between achievement and relationship (with others, with ourselves) is a false one. Self-actualization and accomplishment must include the relationships so essential to our health. Doing and being become interbeing.

What I didn’t truly ‘get’ when I was a teenager, contemplating those cool ying-yang symbols, was the circle of yang inside the yin, and the yin inside the yang. The two qualities don’t nestle against each other; they live within one another.

This reminds me of something I read once: how some of the most sexually charismatic individuals have an androgynous quality, a notable streak of the other gender running through them, making that gender more comfortable around them. Think of the pretty-boy looks of movie stars like Rudolph Valentino, or Keanu Reeves or Leonardo DiCaprio when he was younger; think of sex goddess Angelina Jolie flying planes and starring in action films.

(In THE ART OF SEDUCTION, Robert Greene dedicates entire chapters to the power of contradiction and androgyny.)

(As a woman who always loved being feminine but also felt – and enjoyed – a healthy dash of the masculine, I was pleased to read this.)

Work-life balance is not enough — and isn’t what we’re truly after. What we want is integration, integrity, harmony, the separate spheres interconnecting, falling into natural rhythm, so that the sum is always greater than the whole.

What a beautiful world that would be.

Not to mention an awesome tattoo.

how to transform suffering to strength

I saw Arianna Huffington give a talk in San Francisco last weekend. She spoke about the day she found herself lying on her office floor in a pool of her own blood (she had collapsed from overwork and hit her face on her desk).

She described this incident as more than a wake-up call; it was an “entry point into the journey”.

Maybe you know the journey she’s talking about.

I’ve had some entry points of my own, most notably the death of my infant son and the car accident mentioned in my TEDx talk.

An entry point changes everything.

A hero’s journey compels you out into the world. A heroine’s journey (which men can take as well as women) sends you inward and down to face a difficult truth of your soul.

You’ve been wounded, disrupted, pushed to the edge: your old life isn’t working anymore.

So you’re forced to go deep – because where else can you go? — and integrate some as-yet-unclaimed element of yourself, that allows you to rise again and live in a new way, in a new psychological skin.

There’s a word for this: resilience.

In an article in the HBR, Diana Coutu observes

“More than education, more than experience, more than training, a person’s level of resilience will determine who succeeds and who fails. That’s true in the cancer ward, it’s true in the Olympics, and it’s true in the boardroom.”

One way to foster resilience is to vow to yourself that you will use everything that ever happens to you to learn from and grow. This is possible through the twin powers of creativity and compassion.

The creative act is the act of making meaning. It is not the event that determines the quality of our life, but how we choose to interpret the event; meaning isn’t something we find but what we create from the raw material of our lives.

Through our creativity, we can, as Joan Halifax writes, “heal old wounds by reentering them in order to transform our suffering into compassion.”

By creating meaning from our woundedness and sharing that meaning in a way that helps others – that provides insight and guidance – we also find a way to integrate and move forward.

Arianna’s personal journey resulted in a book called THRIVE (it drops in late March). It is about our culture’s desperate need to redefine success in a way that reaches beyond wealth and power to include a “third metric” of wellbeing, wisdom, wonder and giving. These are the things, say Arianna – and ancient philosophers support her in this – that restore us to ourselves and connect us to our loved ones, our communities, the very pulse of life itself.

It seems to me that you could sum up the third metric in one word: soul.

The heroine’s journey is the soul’s drive toward wholeness. Chances are you’ve had an entry point of your own. What was it?

the art of older ( + how to become a “free radical”)

1

Not long after I turned 40, a female photographer I trusted and respected (Christa Meola) took some photos of me with a snake. I was wearing fringed high-heeled booties, black leather pants, some false eyelashes, and nothing else.

After Susannah Conway invited a group of us to blog about the positive side of growing older, I found myself thinking of those pictures, the Western mythology they evoke.

Eve was a woman after experience and knowledge, and I could relate to that.

Eve had a rebellious streak, and I could relate to that too.

As I get older I feel my growing sense of space and authority, my determination to live — and love — on my own terms (thank you much). I think it’s this way for a lot of women. Former Ms magazine editor Suzanne Braun Levine refers to the “fuck you 50s”; I would suggest they start earlier than that.

In her book INVENTING THE REST OF OUR LIVES, Levine writes:

“The dynamic that many women are reporting – new outlook, new confidence, new dreams – is supported by scientific research from many disciplines. What we are learning about our bodies tells us that nature has by no means abandoned us at this stage…we are not programmed to fade away. On the contrary, we might be as well or better suited to new challenges at this stage of life than before.”

The brain is “generating in ways that are supportive of big achievements after midlife”. In the part of the brain “responsible for making judgments, finding new solutions to old problems, and managing emotions – not sweating the small stuff – there is a great leap forward.”

Maybe, when Eve ate the apple, she had just leaped forward herself.

2

You learn that you are tougher than you thought. There’s so much more to you than you realize, or that they – whoever “they” are – might have led you to expect. You take pride in your grit and resiliency. You show off your battle scars. You are no longer the sweet young thing you were at 20 — too insecure to understand how desirable you were just because you were 20 — but that’s okay. People look at you now because you have something to say. Your growing sense of personal power no longer requires the sexy black dress, the overpriced handbag (although they are still there for you to enjoy should you want them). You know who you are, and what your strengths are. You are damn good at what you do.

You are so much more interesting now.

3

As a symbol, the snake has an interesting history. The relationship between it and the feminine goes back to ancient times: snake symbolism has been found carved into pots, painted in caves and temples. Ancient artifacts contain images of women holding snakes, or wrapped in snakes, or sporting snakes for hair. There’s the mysterious Minoan Snake Goddess, who was also known as the Household Goddess, since the snake was a domestic symbol of protection (it ate the mice that got into the grain) as well as renewal.

Historically, serpents and snakes have been used to depict the creative life force. Hindu mythology stars a serpent goddess who sleeps at the base of your spine. Her full name is Kundalini Shakti, and she represents the divine feminine — the ability to energize, illuminate and create – that lies within us all. Snakes represent rebirth, transformation, and healing. The famous ouroboros – the snake with its tail in its mouth — is a symbol of immortality and constant renewal of life.

There are worse things.

4

We are complex human beings who leave a lot of ourselves in shadow, in the realm of what Robert A Johnson calls “the unlived life”. Every door we have ever walked through, was another door closing. Every choice we made, was another choice that was no longer available to make. Every element of your personality you expressed…was another element that got repressed, packed off into shadow.

That shadow life never goes away. Sooner or later, it starts to knock on the doors of your soul. Hey? Remember me? That painting class you never took? That outdoorsy person you decided you were not? That path of spirituality that had no “relevance” for you? Well…guess what?



You can still surprise yourself.

5

In 1900, the average age an American woman could expect to reach was 48….assuming she didn’t die in childbirth (roughly 6 to 9 of every 1000 women did). Now a woman aged 40 or 50 has a decent chance of living to 100. What a woman faces now is her Second Adulthood (as Levine terms it). Time to explore new possibilities, as well as a chance to loop back and pick up, in some form or other, what you might have missed the first time around.

Time to spread your wings — or develop a whole new set.

Levine refers to anthropologist Kristen Hawkes, who lived with a tribe called the Hadza in northern Tanzania and observed their daily routine. The men went off hunting, the mothers stayed behind and cared for many children. Perhaps too many. Hawkes identified the older women, the no-longer-fertile women, as “free radicals” who would go where they were needed – tribal troubleshooters. They could tend to the children who risked being neglected, and in this way help the community survive and thrive.

Levine points out that it is not the physical survival of the species that we are “called upon to tend to”, but other kinds of tribal or global flourishing. She quotes psychologist James Hillman as saying that older women are “packed with memes. Memes are the cultural equivalent of genes.” It’s this wisdom gathered from our trip through First Adulthood that we can apply in our Second, whether it’s choosing a new and ambitious set of problems to work on professionally or explore artistically, or transmitting to others what we’ve already learned.

6

As I step into my early forties, I have to say that life, despite its hiccups and inevitable low points, feels pretty awesome. I suppose at the back of my mind I thought that 40 would be like dropping off a cliff (into an ocean of fillers and Botox). But there’s more intimacy and close friendship and general satisfaction in my life right now than when I was younger (and married). A lot of that has to do with me – what I have become capable of giving, what I have learned in my relationship with the world. First Adulthood wounded me in many ways – how could it not? – but the healing process involved an education that I wouldn’t trade for anything.

I was exchanging emails with my friend Nilofer Merchant, who just landed on the north side of 45. She wrote this:

“…But I’ll tell you what I’ve learned after passing through that gateway of birthdayness: I’m glad for these wrinkles because it shows that I am alive. I’m glad for the curves left by baby and life because it also means i know a good lasagne recipe. And what bra to wear, and what jeans look best. I am glad for the years of experience that let me know when someone is lying, or when someone is worth backing. I know what I know and thus 46 is beautiful. I know more than I knew last year, and so to diminish the years would be saying I wanted to return some of these experiences, some of these things that now make me completely me. I wouldn’t turn in any of these years as if I could — like returning a sweater to Nordstrom. So instead I will relish ALL of it. And celebrate all of it. And go on from here. Because that’s the real joy of 46. To go on, to keep going. To aim higher, to try again. It doesn’t matter where you’ve come from or how hard the journey is… all that matters is where we end up. And for now what it means is I’m on the journey. So that’s what 46 is.”

There are worse things.

7

Maybe you’re familiar with the story of the goddess Demeter and her daughter Persephone. Persephone is kidnapped by Hades, lord of the underworld, and Demeter lets the whole world feel her fury (imagine how that would play out in contemporary media). Grieving, depressed, disguised as an ordinary old woman, Demeter takes a job as a nanny. And what a hell of a nanny she is: the sickly baby thrives in her care, grows robust and happy and handsome. Every night, Demeter holds him in the fire, to strengthen him and make him immortal. Finally, inevitably, the parents catch Demeter putting their child to flame, and — not understanding the goddess logic at work here — are less than impressed. Things do not go well.

Demeter throws off her disguise and reveals her true self, in all her blinding, immortal beauty. She decides it’s time to bounce (although she doesn’t phrase it like that).

In her book SPINNING STRAW TO GOLD, Joan Gould notes the bare elements of this story – the old woman, the child, the flames – and wonders if the raging, grieving Demeter didn’t slowly evolve into another kind of character: the crazy psycho witch who lives alone (scorned, no doubt, by a man who traded her in) and wants to cook a boy in her oven so she can eat him.

It’s time for new stories.

Or maybe it’s time to reclaim the old stories.

To shuck off the dead skin, and see what new, vibrant life waits beneath. Scratch a so-called ‘witch’ and find a goddess.

It will take courage, and imagination, and some fire in the soul. But I think we’re well equipped for the job.

how to heal the feminine wound

I told a good friend of mine that I was kicking around the idea of a creatrix.

“A what?” she said.

“Creatrix.”

“Like a dominatrix?”

“Yes,” I said, and nodded sagely. “Except totally different.”

My idea of a creatrix was this: a woman who maintains strong relationships with others while cultivating her natural gifts and pursuing mastery, for however long it takes her. She actively uses her gifts in service of herself, her loved ones, and the world. She is grounded, sensual, and comfortable in her body. She recognizes her birthright to pleasure and play. She believes in interdependence and interbeing: she is her own person while knowing that we are at least partly defined by our relationships. She may or may not have kids. Chances are she tried the conventional thing, or came close – the wedding, the ‘safe’ job or career, the house in the suburbs – and it didn’t work out. So now she lives in the country/on the beach/in a loft downtown/ in Thailand.

She is not afraid of power: standing up to it, speaking truth to it, or using it to advance her own agenda.

She is not afraid to have an agenda.

The other night, in a cozy and chattering Italian restaurant, my friend told us that she had just encountered the word again. She is taking an online course about female goddess archetypes, and one of those archetypes is The Creatrix.

“Yes,” I said, trying to sound all wise and knowing, as if I hadn’t just discovered this yesterday. “Creatrix is another word for Goddess.”

I abruptly realized that discussing this idea of the creatrix is, for me, another way of discussing the feminine. A Creatrix can be a man or a woman. It is not the gender but what that person is in service of:

Wild, raw, creative energy.

Soul energy.

According to Thomas Moore, “….the spirit is what is divine in us, and the soul is what is human.”



Spirit, or however you want to think of it, is some abstract, impersonal state of cosmic perfection that exists “up there”.

Soul is what we are tasked to work with – and work out – down here. Soul is highly personal, individual, messy, entangled, embodied, complicated, shot through with blood and darkness. If you ascend to find Spirit, you descend to find Soul, plunging into the murky world of your own private underground.

If Spirit makes us all One, your Soul makes you…more you.

Soul, according to Jung, is a feminine concept.

Spirit is masculine.

We need them both — soul and spirit, ascent and descent –in order to be psychologically whole. But as Sera Beak points out

“…spirit is the most popular and public ‘face’ of spirituality. More often than not, soul has been relegated to the moldy basements of the clean and bright McMansions of mainstream spirituality.”



We have lost the art of psychological descent, of “going there”: down through the difficult emotions, the darker elements of our personalities. The purpose of descent is to work through our shit, integrate and rise into a wiser (and happier) state of being. This is also known as the heroine’s journey, based on the great, ancient myth of Inanna.

It is the female initiation into higher consciousness.

But in a culture where emotion is tagged as dangerous – slipping very quickly into crazy, hysterical, irrational – we seek as much distance between ourselves and our feelings as we can. We find our favorite ways to numb out. We stomp the dark stuff down with a relentless focus on positive thinking. Stories about ancient female rites give way to Disney tales about happily ever after, more seasons of The Bachelor. This, the culture tells us, is what female life is supposed to be. We know this is wrong – this is nowhere near enough for souls as mighty and hungry as us – but maybe can’t put our finger on why, or what we’re supposed to want instead.

Spirit is perfection.

Soul is creativity.

Perfection, like spirit, is impersonal. The task is to meet or exceed certain standards, to fit into the box.

Creativity lives against the box, or outside of the box, or doesn’t even realize there is a box. It serves as the expression of your unique, individual soul. It is your soulprint on the world. We are what we make. When we create, the process also creates us; it shows us, and brings into being, aspects of ourselves that we didn’t know existed.

“People will do anything to avoid facing their souls,” Jung noted, concluding that ‘soul loss’ is the great wound of our time.

We wonder who we are. We go off looking for ourselves (if we can afford it) in a therapist’s office, in exotic places, in relationships with inappropriate people, in designer handbags and sleek shiny sportscars and other goods that can’t satisfy for long. We regard ourselves as “not creative” (since what is creativity but your soul making itself manifest?).

It’s interesting that Julia Cameron based her famous Artist’s Way books and workshops partly on the 12-step philosophy of AA, referring to the participants as “recovering artists”: seeking not creativity but the restoration of it. The healing.

Perhaps ‘soul loss’ is not a cause but the main symptom of another kind of wound, what Sue Monk Kidd terms the feminine wound. This is the devaluation and degradation of the feminine: regarded throughout history as the defect to the masculine norm, the wrong to the masculine right.

I believe that creativity – the act of making meaning out of things which would appear to have none – can be both therapeutic and healing.

I believe that the feminine wound slashes so deeply through Western culture that many of us take certain attitudes and behaviors as “just the way things are”, whether it’s women “opting out” of the workforce, or a teenage girl calling another girl a slut and a whore, or cutting herself, or starving herself, or driving herself past burnout as she tries to be everything to everybody, or a boy shutting down his emotional life and his ability to empathize so he won’t get called a [insert slang for female genitalia] and beaten up after school.

I see a creatrix as someone who uses his or her creativity to take the feminine wound and transform it. To take us from pain to power. To release the shame that keeps so many of us trapped and fearful. To give voice to authentic feminine experience. To give the feminine a voice — every bit as bold and loud and vibrant as it wants or needs to be.

A creatrix can look past her own personal drama and understand how her story hooks into the bigger picture, the global system. She understands that when you change yourself, you inspire others to change, and the system has no choice but to change itself around you.

The Creatrix has many faces.

Perhaps one of them is yours.

creativity + soul: “like a dominatrix, except different”

I told a good friend of mine that I was kicking around the idea of a creatrix.

“A what?” she said.

“Creatrix.”

“Like a dominatrix?”

“Yes,” I said, and nodded sagely. “Except totally different.”

My idea of a creatrix was this: a woman who maintains strong relationships with others while cultivating her natural gifts and pursuing mastery, for however long it takes her. She actively uses her gifts in service of herself, her loved ones, and the world. She is grounded, sensual, and comfortable in her body. She recognizes her birthright to pleasure and play. She believes in interdependence and interbeing: she is her own person while knowing that we are at least partly defined by our relationships. She may or may not have kids. Chances are she tried the conventional thing, or came close – the wedding, the ‘safe’ job or career, the house in the suburbs – and it didn’t work out. So now she lives in the country/on the beach/in a loft downtown/ in Thailand.

She is not afraid of power: standing up to it, speaking truth to it, or using it to advance her own agenda.

She is not afraid to have an agenda.

The other night, in a cozy and chattering Italian restaurant, my friend told us that she had just encountered the word again. She is taking an online course about female goddess archetypes, and one of those archetypes is The Creatrix.

“Yes,” I said, trying to sound all wise and knowing, as if I hadn’t just discovered this yesterday. “Creatrix is another word for Goddess.”

I abruptly realized that discussing this idea of the creatrix is, for me, another way of discussing the feminine. A Creatrix can be a man or a woman. It is not the gender but what that person is in service of:

Wild, raw, creative energy.

Soul energy.

According to Thomas Moore, “….the spirit is what is divine in us, and the soul is what is human.”



Spirit, or however you want to think of it, is some abstract, impersonal state of cosmic perfection that exists “up there”.

Soul is what we are tasked to work with – and work out – down here. Soul is highly personal, individual, messy, entangled, embodied, complicated, shot through with blood and darkness. If you ascend to find Spirit, you descend to find Soul, plunging into the murky world of your own private underground.

If Spirit makes us all One, your Soul makes you…more you.

Soul, according to Jung, is a feminine concept.

Spirit is masculine.

We need them both — soul and spirit, ascent and descent –in order to be psychologically whole. But as Sera Beak points out

“…spirit is the most popular and public ‘face’ of spirituality. More often than not, soul has been relegated to the moldy basements of the clean and bright McMansions of mainstream spirituality.”



We have lost the art of psychological descent, of “going there”: down through the difficult emotions, the darker elements of our personalities. The purpose of descent is to work through our shit, integrate and rise into a wiser (and happier) state of being. This is also known as the heroine’s journey, based on the great, ancient myth of Inanna.

It is the female initiation into higher consciousness.

But in a culture where emotion is tagged as dangerous – slipping very quickly into crazy, hysterical, irrational – we seek as much distance between ourselves and our feelings as we can. We find our favorite ways to numb out. We stomp the dark stuff down with a relentless focus on positive thinking. Stories about ancient female rites give way to Disney tales about happily ever after, more seasons of The Bachelor. This, the culture tells us, is what female life is supposed to be. We know this is wrong – this is nowhere near enough for souls as mighty and hungry as us – but maybe can’t put our finger on why, or what we’re supposed to want instead.

Spirit is perfection.

Soul is creativity.

Perfection, like spirit, is impersonal. The task is to meet or exceed certain standards, to fit into the box.

Creativity lives against the box, or outside of the box, or doesn’t even realize there is a box. It serves as the expression of your unique, individual soul. It is your soulprint on the world. We are what we make. When we create, the process also creates us; it shows us, and brings into being, aspects of ourselves that we didn’t know existed.

“People will do anything to avoid facing their souls,” Jung noted, concluding that ‘soul loss’ is the great wound of our time.

We wonder who we are. We go off looking for ourselves (if we can afford it) in a therapist’s office, in exotic places, in relationships with inappropriate people, in designer handbags and sleek shiny sportscars and other goods that can’t satisfy for long. We regard ourselves as “not creative” (since what is creativity but your soul making itself manifest?).

It’s interesting that Julia Cameron based her famous Artist’s Way books and workshops partly on the 12-step philosophy of AA, referring to the participants as “recovering artists”: seeking not creativity but the restoration of it. The healing.

Perhaps ‘soul loss’ is not a cause but the main symptom of another kind of wound, what Sue Monk Kidd terms the feminine wound. This is the devaluation and degradation of the feminine: regarded throughout history as the defect to the masculine norm, the wrong to the masculine right.

I believe that creativity – the act of making meaning out of things which would appear to have none – can be both therapeutic and healing.

I believe that the feminine wound slashes so deeply through Western culture that many of us take certain attitudes and behaviors as “just the way things are”, whether it’s women “opting out” of the workforce, or a teenage girl calling another girl a slut and a whore, or cutting herself, or starving herself, or driving herself past burnout as she tries to be everything to everybody, or a boy shutting down his emotional life and his ability to empathize so he won’t get called a [insert slang for female genitalia] and beaten up after school.

I see a creatrix as someone who uses his or her creativity to take the feminine wound and transform it. To take us from pain to power. To release the shame that keeps so many of us trapped and fearful. To give voice to authentic feminine experience. To give the feminine a voice — every bit as bold and loud and vibrant as it wants or needs to be.

A creatrix can look past her own personal drama and understand how her story hooks into the bigger picture, the global system. She understands that when you change yourself, you inspire others to change, and the system has no choice but to change itself around you.

The Creatrix has many faces.

Perhaps one of them is yours.

soul vs spirit: “like a dominatrix, except different”

I told a good friend of mine that I was kicking around the idea of a creatrix.

“A what?” she said.

“Creatrix.”

“Like a dominatrix?”

“Yes,” I said, and nodded sagely. “Except totally different.”

My idea of a creatrix was this: a woman who maintains strong relationships with others while cultivating her natural gifts and pursuing mastery, for however long it takes her. She actively uses her gifts in service of herself, her loved ones, and the world. She is grounded, sensual, and comfortable in her body. She recognizes her birthright to pleasure and play. She believes in interdependence and interbeing: she is her own person while knowing that we are at least partly defined by our relationships. She may or may not have kids. Chances are she tried the conventional thing, or came close – the wedding, the ‘safe’ job or career, the house in the suburbs – and it didn’t work out. So now she lives in the country/on the beach/in a loft downtown/ in Thailand.

She is not afraid of power: standing up to it, speaking truth to it, or using it to advance her own agenda.

She is not afraid to have an agenda.

The other night, in a cozy and chattering Italian restaurant, my friend told us that she had just encountered the word again. She is taking an online course about female goddess archetypes, and one of those archetypes is The Creatrix.

“Yes,” I said, trying to sound all wise and knowing, as if I hadn’t just discovered this yesterday. “Creatrix is another word for Goddess.”

I abruptly realized that discussing this idea of the creatrix is, for me, another way of discussing the feminine. A Creatrix can be a man or a woman. It is not the gender but what that person is in service of:

Wild, raw, creative energy.

Soul energy.

According to Thomas Moore, “….the spirit is what is divine in us, and the soul is what is human.”



Spirit, or however you want to think of it, is some abstract, impersonal state of cosmic perfection that exists “up there”.

Soul is what we are tasked to work with – and work out – down here. Soul is highly personal, individual, messy, entangled, embodied, complicated, shot through with blood and darkness. If you ascend to find Spirit, you descend to find Soul, plunging into the murky world of your own private underground.

If Spirit makes us all One, your Soul makes you…more you.

Soul, according to Jung, is a feminine concept.

Spirit is masculine.

We need them both — soul and spirit, ascent and descent –in order to be psychologically whole. But as Sera Beak points out

“…spirit is the most popular and public ‘face’ of spirituality. More often than not, soul has been relegated to the moldy basements of the clean and bright McMansions of mainstream spirituality.”



We have lost the art of psychological descent, of “going there”: down through the difficult emotions, the darker elements of our personalities. The purpose of descent is to work through our shit, integrate and rise into a wiser (and happier) state of being. This is also known as the heroine’s journey, based on the great, ancient myth of Inanna.

It is the female initiation into higher consciousness.

But in a culture where emotion is tagged as dangerous – slipping very quickly into crazy, hysterical, irrational – we seek as much distance between ourselves and our feelings as we can. We find our favorite ways to numb out. We stomp the dark stuff down with a relentless focus on positive thinking. Stories about ancient female rites give way to Disney tales about happily ever after, more seasons of The Bachelor. This, the culture tells us, is what female life is supposed to be. We know this is wrong – this is nowhere near enough for souls as mighty and hungry as us – but maybe can’t put our finger on why, or what we’re supposed to want instead.

Spirit is perfection.

Soul is creativity.

Perfection, like spirit, is impersonal. The task is to meet or exceed certain standards, to fit into the box.

Creativity lives against the box, or outside of the box, or doesn’t even realize there is a box. It serves as the expression of your unique, individual soul. It is your soulprint on the world. We are what we make. When we create, the process also creates us; it shows us, and brings into being, aspects of ourselves that we didn’t know existed.

“People will do anything to avoid facing their souls,” Jung noted, concluding that ‘soul loss’ is the great wound of our time.

We wonder who we are. We go off looking for ourselves (if we can afford it) in a therapist’s office, in exotic places, in relationships with inappropriate people, in designer handbags and sleek shiny sportscars and other goods that can’t satisfy for long. We regard ourselves as “not creative” (since what is creativity but your soul making itself manifest?).

It’s interesting that Julia Cameron based her famous Artist’s Way books and workshops partly on the 12-step philosophy of AA, referring to the participants as “recovering artists”: seeking not creativity but the restoration of it. The healing.

Perhaps ‘soul loss’ is not a cause but the main symptom of another kind of wound, what Sue Monk Kidd terms the feminine wound. This is the devaluation and degradation of the feminine: regarded throughout history as the defect to the masculine norm, the wrong to the masculine right.

I believe that creativity – the act of making meaning out of things which would appear to have none – can be both therapeutic and healing.

I believe that the feminine wound slashes so deeply through Western culture that many of us take certain attitudes and behaviors as “just the way things are”, whether it’s women “opting out” of the workforce, or a teenage girl calling another girl a slut and a whore, or cutting herself, or starving herself, or driving herself past burnout as she tries to be everything to everybody, or a boy shutting down his emotional life and his ability to empathize so he won’t get called a [insert slang for female genitalia] and beaten up after school.

I see a creatrix as someone who uses his or her creativity to take the feminine wound and transform it. To take us from pain to power. To release the shame that keeps so many of us trapped and fearful. To give voice to authentic feminine experience. To give the feminine a voice — every bit as bold and loud and vibrant as it wants or needs to be.

A creatrix can look past her own personal drama and understand how her story hooks into the bigger picture, the global system. She understands that when you change yourself, you inspire others to change, and the system has no choice but to change itself around you.

The Creatrix has many faces.

Perhaps one of them is yours.