Women are mean. Is that not what they say? Unfortunately it is true. Girls, do you remember that from pre-school on, you always tried to be popular. To bully the weak one just to make sure you are not the one bullied? To spread rumors about a pretty girl, trying to lower her social status to your benefit? Or maybe you were the bullied person and you have seen the other side of the malice women can practice.
We have created a society where women forgot how to connect with each other. We forgot how much we can uplift and support each other. In this fear-based society, we base our actions on the projections that frighten us most.
What would happen if we, women, lower our shields, fill ourselves with love and see, really see, all the other women on this planet as our beloved sisters, instead of our enemies, our competitors, our rivals?
Prehistoric hunks and protection
When you look at it from an evolutionary perspective, the competition between women makes sense. When we were living in nomadic tribes in an ancient era where there was no concept of property or exclusive relationships, it was living according to Darwin’s survival of the fittest. We were not aware of the connection between sex and babies, but intuitively we knew we had to get the strong ones. We needed access to the fittest guys around. The alpha males possessed the good genes. They were strong, full of testosterone, scarce, and wanted big time. Not just for making babies, but –more important- for protection and securing the continuous supply of food. The best hunters and the strongest men had benefits when it came to sharing the mammoth. These alpha-males were the prehistoric hunks. No follow-the-crowd-metro-sexual-shaved-chest hair-day-cream-wearing beta-males (no offense), but leaders who knew how to kill a mountain lion with their bare hands. But hey, all the ladies wanted the hunks. Even though the alpha-males could mate with more than one girl, there were limits to his availability and protection. We had to compete with each other to get access to his services.
Maybe this prehistoric competition is the root of the insecurities that seem to be so innate for women. Raise your hand if there has never been a moment in your life where you felt insecure about your body. I cannot see you of course, but I bet nobody raised her hand. Competition creates high expectancies of the self as well as projections of how others see you. This increases insecurities and fear.
Hidden emotions
Women have been suppressed throughout our entire history, which was based on patriarchal systems in most cases. Men were given the leading role, while women followed more passively. We learned to be quiet and hide our emotions. We surely had emotions, but we learned to ignore them. We learned to ignore the messages of our body. For a long time wives had to grant their husbands access to their body any moment the husband wanted to. Women had to be at service. Did you ever wonder why there are prostitutes, brothels and red light districts all over the world, aiming at a male audience and not at female costumers? The idea that women crave sex less than men is straight nonsense. Women learned to hide their feelings of lust and their sexuality.
Sexual energy is life energy. Many tantra practices and energy work systems agree on this point. Whether it is called chi, ki, prana, life force or any other name; sexual energy is our main life energy. It is the energy that enables creation. It is the rush we feel when we have an epiphany. It is the creative flow where we forget all concepts of time and place and just be.
But sexual energy has been cursed. A sensual woman is a slut. A women who enjoys sex is a dirty b*tch. And it is not even the men who point their fingers first. It is women who call other women names the loudest.
As a result, we have taught ourselves to hide our most valuable form of energy because we feel ashamed of it. We live a life where we hurt other women, get hurt by other women, or fear getting hurt by other women.
It makes me so sad to see how women have hurt each other and still hurt each other. Is there a way out of this vicious circle?
A journey towards sisterhood
As long as there have been women hurting each other, there also were women who were supporting each other unconditionally. Old documents and archeological artifacts tell the stories of temples where women lived together in joy and abundance. They initiated boys into men, taught other women about wisdom, traditions, medicines and how to take care of their bodies.
The journey towards sisterhood is largely a journey towards self-acceptance. I will explain some steps that help you move from perceiving women as competition towards joining the sisterhood. These steps are interchangeable, not separate from one another and ongoing processes.
Step 1: Understanding the concept of competition for love
When you really love yourself a 100%, competition does not exist. Why not? Because competition means that you need something outside of you that you consider scarce. Love is such a resource. Love is abundant and always present. Even tough, there is a strong paradigm that considers love as something which is scarce and limited. We need a partner to provide us with love (and only that partner). Without this continuous confirmation of affection, we feel lost.
When you start to realize that all people in your life mirror parts of YOU, you will also realize that the love you receive is a reflection of the love you feel inside yourself. You do not need anyone to feel loved. The only way to feel loved is by loving. Love inside you is not scarce. On the contrary: love is infinite.
Realizing that all you need and all you will ever need is inside you, makes competition inexistent. You have nothing to lose that is outside of you. The only thing, the only one you could lose is YOU. You will never lose yourself in the sisterhood, because you just love yourself too much to spend a second without you 🙂
Step 2: Loving who you are
Body, mind, features you love about yourself or prefer to keep in the shadow, your beliefs, past, hobbies, friends and music taste. They are all part of what makes you YOU, and they may all be there.
There are libraries full of books about diets, fashion and how to use Photoshop to make women look perfect. Let us throw them all out of the window. Start taking good care of you. Eat healthy but enjoy the foods you love from time to time. Please do not force yourself to go to the gym when you hate that, but take your bicycle a bit more often or find something else that keeps you in physical shape that you enjoy. What about dancing for example?
Take good care for your inside too. Especially those women with tempting careers or with little kids are champions when it comes to forgetting themselves. Make your own wellbeing your number one priority. The most amazing gift you can give to people around you is being really happy. So do what makes you happy. Every day.
Step 3: Connecting with your womb and yoni
(Yoni is just another word for vagina. It is an ancient word and I chose to use it because it has a little less charge to it than vagina has.) I started to realize that women hardly connect with their women parts. Have you ever taken a mirror and held it in between your legs to take a good look there? Have you ever taken a good look at another naked woman? We feel ashamed for our genitals, we hide them. In many cultures the pubics have names like hairs of shame and so on. But our genitals are valid parts of our body, just like our eyes and hair. The reason that we feel ashamed of these parts is because we have put such a charge to them. We connect them with sex, and sex is something to be ashamed of and to hide.
But sex is as natural as eating, drinking and sleeping. Without food, water and a good night’s rest we would die. But what would happen if we stop screwing? No progeny means extinction. To put it bluntly: our yonis are as important holes as are mouths are.
Our womb and yoni are places where a lot of emotional pain is stored. Many women have experiences with rape, unwanted sex or painful sex. But there is also the tension of shame, fear and guilt that are linked to genitals, sex and everything linked to it. A lot of women hardly have feelings inside their yoni. Many women do not enjoy sex at all. They avoid it or clench their jaws to get it over with.
The way I try to connect with my womb and yoni, is by starting to connect with my heart. You are probably familiar with that sensation in your heart region when you feel your heart almost burst when seeing a photo of a kitten, holding your baby niece for the first time or seeing a beautiful sunset while walking on the beach with your new boyfriend. To connect with my heart, I place one hand on my heart and I connect with that feeling of love pounding in my chest. I start to feel gratitude for all that I love about myself and my life. Sometimes I feel like my whole body starts to glow. There may be emotions, memories or images passing by in my mind. I am aware of them like an observer, neither holding on to them nor ignoring them.
Connecting with your heart in this way may take practice, so do not worry when you do not succeed the first time!
When I feel connected with my heart, I can move that feeling of connectedness towards my womb and yoni. I keep one hand on my heart and place the other over my womb (a little below my navel). I try to feel that same connectedness here as I feel with my heart. You will probably notice that making a connection with your womb and yoni is much more difficult than connecting with your heart (which can be a challenge on its own!). When you succeed, it is very possible that you will feel a lot of strong emotions. I have cried, sung, shaken and shouted in this process. You can feel physical pain and other strong sensations. But when you get through, you will feel a whole new dimension of energy flowing through your body.
Another way of releasing pain and tension in the yoni is by applying direct pressure. There are amazing tantra practitioners who offer yoni-massages that can do miracles for you. It takes some courage maybe, but your (sex)life will never be the same again because without the tension in the yoni, energy flows through easily and is no longer contracted and stagnated. No tension means much more sensitivity. Imagine what that will do!
What helped me personally on my ongoing path of accepting my body was going to a sauna. I saw so many naked people of all sorts and shapes in one day! I could only come to the conclusion that I did not know which people were beautiful or ugly. They were just different.
Step 4: Shouting it out
We have so many emotions and tension inside us. Most people tend to hide their emotions and stuck them away. You can feel these emotions like physical pain or tenseness. Famous places for stored emotions are our back, shoulders, womb and yoni. But this will not help you. The emotions will keep coming back until you look them in the eyes and release them. When you work on yourself, make sure that you release those emotions. Find ways that suit you. Sing, dance, run, shout, talk or write… get those emotions flowing!
Step 5: Choosing your partners wisely
The people you are with influence you. There are people who drain your energy or force their ideas onto you. There are people who enlighten you and inspire you. The choice is yours.
As you start to appreciate yourself more, you will probably notice you do not need others to confirm who you are. You do not need to try to talk that guy in the bar you do not even really like into your bed just to make sure you are still attractive. You are the darn jackpot! Do not give yourself away so easily. Be very conscious about who you are intimate with. It is not about not being intimate. Being intimate is something that can be extremely healing and pleasurable. It is about sharing your vulnerability and the amazing beauty of your body and soul with people who appreciate it and can share their beauty and vulnerability with you in return.
Step 6: Following your intuition
You know.
You know exactly what is good for you, to whom to listen to. You know perfectly well what is love and what is fear. But conditioning blurs our sight and we get caught in the webs of norms of others. The more you connect with your heart, womb and yoni, the more you will be connected with your intuition and inner wisdom.
Trust it. Trust yourself. Trust your inner Goddess.
Step 7: Stepping into the circle
When you start to love yourself and get to understand competition is nothing but a mental state of fear inside us, you will start to see other women differently. You will see their beauty and wisdom. Participate in a women’s circle, or some other event with only women attending. You will find a warm bath of recognition, support and understanding. Women amongst each other can create an amazing vibe of nurturing love that will last for days.
Step 8: Freeing yourself
What would free you? I would say turning my largest fears into states of pure love is what I consider ultimate freedom. My personal challenges are letting go of the need for control in situations where I feel vulnerable; and the fear of being confirmed in unworthiness. I have felt extremely insecure about who I am and the body I have for many years. Having an open relationship forces me to face my fears quite extremely. When my partner is somewhere else I have no control over the situation whatsoever. I could view it as him preferring to be with someone else and feel the need to compare myself with this other woman. Or I can realize there is a part of me insecure about myself and see this as an amazing opportunity for growth. There is no reason to feel emotional towards this other woman, this sister, who is sharing moments with him for reasons based on love. She knows about me, respects me and probably shares amazing experiences with my loved one. I can only love her for doing that.
On the other hand having this relationship status appears to be an open invitation for men to try to approach me for several reasons. Trying to get into my pants is definitely not the last one. In the past I found it very difficult to express my boundaries (I just might make somebody feel rejected and turn away, which would confirm my unworthiness since I would take this personally). I love connecting with people. Expressing boundaries clearly is very important. In the beginning I found it hard to communicate here. But I have experienced that when I am sincere, the people I am with respond to that respectfully and understanding (and if they would not, they are clearly not the people I want to be with). People are grateful for clarity. Being able to set boundaries appears to be liberation beyond borders for me. I call it ‘defining the playground’: I let the other person know what is okay and what not (whether that is a conversation, a hug, going for a walk or intimacy) and within the playground I become able to completely let go of control and surrender to what comes into being.
I have always felt very vulnerable with women I really liked. I kept my distance, especially physical. What was extremely liberating for me was to let go of all conditioning and especially projections (”I think she is amazing, so she must find I am a sad little thing”). I started to let women come very close. Each time I have touched a woman it felt emotional. It is such an act of love and kindness that it brings me to tears often. Besides, the kiss of a woman is the softest kiss you can imagine. I can recommend it!
Love your sisters towards world peace
It fills my heart with so much joy and love to realize how connected we are as women.
Throughout history many of us have lost that connection due to many reasons. We became competitors. We became envious at each other. We learned to feel guilt and shame towards our bodies. We connected very distantly. We have created distance towards each other and towards our self. But there is a way back! I truly believe that we can make this world a better place when we, as women, start loving each other instead of being mean for reasons of fear and insecurity. We need to cuddle our inner-sister as well as our outer-sisters.
I notice that the more I align with myself, the more I connect with the woman I am and my sisters in the world, the deeper this connection goes and the stronger I feel love vibrating through me. Very recently I met with a wonderful sister I feel deep love for and her man. As time went on we moved from talking to cuddling towards a more intimate setting. There were no goals, no intentions beyond connecting. The feminine and masculine energies mingled and danced through us. From soft and nurturing to strong and sensual. When she and I kissed for the first time we both felt very emotional, as if our kiss was healing the wounds of many generations of women who struggled for survival. His energy was not dominating or prevailing the feminine energy, but blending in perfectly. As he leaned backward and enjoyed our presence, she looked at me with sparkling eyes full of wisdom and she said: “This is sisterhood too”. It was as if I suddenly understood it all. I could see what a shame it was that women lived in fear of each other for so long. That if we could really let go, there is no competition. There is nothing to be afraid of. If we can stop believing we have to be afraid of other women, there is so much more love in this world.
