The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman's Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine

by Sue Monk Kidd

Outrage is love’s wild and unacknowledged sister. She is the one who recognizes feminine injury, stands on the roof, and announces it if she has to, then jumps into the fray to change it. She is the one grappling with her life, reconfiguring it, struggling to find liberating ways of relating. She

You forgive what you can, when you can. That’s all you can do. To forgive does not mean overlooking the offense and pretending it never happened. Forgiveness means releasing our rage and our need to retaliate, no longer dwelling on the offense, the offender, and the suffering, and rising to a higher love. It is an act of letting go so that we ourselves can go on.

“My religion is kindness,” says the Dalai Lama,

In the end, refusing the fear is what gets us through oppositional experiences. Refusing to half-live our lives means going out there and daring our dance.

A spirituality of feminine naturalness not only teaches us that the earth is our true home but that this moment is our true home. “You cannot step twice into the same river,” wrote Heraclitus, “for other waters are continually flowing on.” This river is your life, and it is different every moment. The important thing (the sacred, empowering, natural thing) is to step deeply into it every single moment and be there as fully as you can, seeing as clearly as you can. Being fully in the now implies a certain acceptance of what is. When my children were small, I read them Winnie the Pooh, who, as you may know, is an exceptionally enlightened bear. One thing Pooh says is, “A fish can’t whistle and neither can I.” When the enlightened Pooh says this, he’s accepting “the clear reality that Things Are As They Are,” says the little book The Tao of Pooh. “That doesn’t mean we need to stop changing and improving. It just means that we need to recognize What’s There.”16 When we do this, we start to come home to the now. We accept where we are standing in the river right now, and we enter the immediacy of it, even when it’s painful, because by doing so we are being present to our lives. We are attending to them, living them with awareness. If you think about it, how else can we be fully alive?

“The daughters of your daughters of your daughters are likely to remember you, and most importantly, follow in your tracks,” writes Clarissa Pinkola Estés.