Musings on Women’s Empowerment
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sophiehainsworth.com
creating life
Musings on Women’s Empowerment
Are we Empowered, and Who Are We?
Bold question I know, but one I feel has to to be explored if we are to stay sane, wake up and evolve both as individuals and collectively. For me, and here I am referring to post modern, western women, it seems we are calling ourselves empowered women, yet we are still far from it. And I say this not to be overly negative, or to scar you, but to explore the truth.
On a societal level, we are given ample opportunities for success and the elusive “happiness” we assumed that empowerment would bring us. We are being told that, as Western Women we can now “have it all” . Yet it seems that women today are unhappier and losing more self esteem than decades ago when our role was that of the traditional housewife. Elizabeth Debold, senior editor of ’EnlightenNext’ magazine and a senior teacher of Evolutionary Enlightenment, recently struck a cord with me by asking the question “Where are the women?” Where are the women who want to change things? Where are the women who can see that so often we are giving up on success, and not exploring our potential? Recent studies have shown that we are not happy, we are in a strange sort of transitionary phase and we can’t find our place in the world. We no longer need to adhere to the traditional role of housewife, and there are opportunities out there for us to explore, yet we are finding it difficult to find our feet in the world.
We pretend to our friends we are ok, we pretend to everyone around us we are ok. Many of the self help sections in bookstores are creating a false illusion of happiness. This idea of happiness is not realistic and instead we should be celebrating our wholeness. We don’t know that we are not empowered because we cannot admit to ourselves that we don’t know what empowerment really means. I think the first step is to admit to ourselves and our fellow women friends is that we are not empowered, and that we are not ok. How can we be? Because we are the first generation of women just trying things out, we are constantly making mistakes, creating new pathways. Yet it seems that we are too scared to admit that we have messed up and that actually we have no idea how we are feeling because we were taught, through adolescence that we had no right to feel, to trust our feelings, to speak up, to get angry or to be who we really, truly are. So, can we please stop pretending? Can we start to learn how to feel, and to trust who we truly are? I have learnt not to look at society for support, for guidance, for empowerment, because we simply won’t find to it.
I believe that, whilst it is important to change society in order to accommodate women’s desires for success, it is also important to change the generational, unconscious patterns that are holding us back, and we can only do this when we work on ourselves individually. There are many factors that may occur in the family that cause success inhibition later in life, and it is up to us to be honest with ourselves and break those patterns.
Marianne Williamson says, “Our love is here to spiritualise the earth” and as the divine feminine it is totally within our reach for us to do that, yet we must also peel away the self sabotages that inhibit the truly powerful feminine beings that we are. And we must see that we can be more, and that there is more to being a woman, there is that of a truly liberated woman. The personal is political, therefore liberating individuals becomes a collective and powerful feat. So, when we start feeling that it’s safer to not achieve, to not shine our light, we need to be stopping and exploring the place within our psyche that this lives. Because it’s not safer, it’s not truthful, it’s a road to depression, and we are certainly not supporting other women,or being true to ourselves by doing so.
And when we look at what we are tolerating, what we are giving our power away to in society, we can reclaim our power from the energy we so freely give away, and we can go further down the process of evolving into our true divine, feminine selves, free from the constraints and conditioning we have become so accustomed to. And it doesn’t take the hard grasp of masculine energy that has dominated our path and left us frazzled and unbalanced as souls. It takes pure intention to follow what is right for you, and what is true for you.
This entry was posted on Sunday, October 17th, 2010 at 1:03 am and is filed under The Liberated Woman. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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One Response to “Musings on Women’s Empowerment”
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Jocuri thinks:
November 4th, 2010 at 11:53 am
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