Once Upon a Time i went to see a Naturopath.  This man was calm and used a very soft voice with long pauses between his sentences.  He sat, still and considered, in his chair.  He moved slowly when he wrote or reached out to show me something.

I don't know what his prescription was or what i even went to him about but i do remember something he said

"If you do this, this and this, you will be calm like me."

That sat badly with me for reasons the younger me couldn't really articulate.

I think about it now in the light of so much i see on the internet being about being peaceful and forgiving and Marie Kondo-ing not only the interior of our drawers but our lives with a minimalist broom sweeping all the fuzzy and unfinished things out of the way.

I think about it as i tend to my soul and her shadow and her magnificence and i want to go back to that man in that room in Hamilton and say;

"But i don't want to be like you.  I want to be like me.  I want to be wonky and scattered sometimes, i want to be confused and worried sometimes, i want to be exuberant and loud other times.  i want to be me."

i have been learning so much about the subtle pressure applied to us to be something other than what we are as a form of control from the remarkable Kelly Diels,  www.facebook.com/kellydiels, particularly in her facebook group  "How to sell to women without selling them out."   

Kelly talks about Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand (or FLEB for short) that encourages us to aspire to white, thin, cis-gender, heteronormative, ableist tropes without our conscious participation.  It is a patriarchal bind that women seem to dive into (me included ) without a second thought.  I mean we all want success and to be seen as valuable, to be desired and seen as worthy right?  Through Kelly i am learning about how very narrow the definition of that is.  How very dangerous it is to aspire to be a thin white hetero ablebodied woman at all costs, about the carnage and the division that creates in the hearts of good humans.  I am waking up to the truth that i am outside that gate and that to aspire to that is to pour my energy down the bloody drain.  I am not every going to be all of those things anymore in one acceptable package, ever.
I am other than that.  And i realise now that doesn't make me wrong.  It makes me real.

I want everyone in the world who cares about their inner life to be able to be accepting of who they are in all their wonky glory. No comparison or measuring or judging themselves based on cultural paradigms that have little to do with them.  Look, i am sure Buddha was a stand up guy but i don't live hundreds of years ago in Asia, i grew up in Kamo in a moderately dysfunctional family and am making my way the best i can. i am not willing to perpetuate a system that is designed to divide us as humans, make us comply and shrink in order to fit.  

No siree. 
​
I don't want to be like anyone else.  I don't want anyone else to be anything other than what and who they are.  When that is clean we get to connect more fully and more richly.  When we own who we are we are free.

And that, Mr Naturopath, is fine by me.

These words are like an arrow to my heart.

How many times have i withheld a tenderness due to tiredness or inattention or hurt of my own.
How many times will i be able to reach into my heart and find these tendernesses from now until the end of my time here?  
Who knows how many chances i will get.

I began to berate myself at my meagreness and my incapacity.  The chaos in my heart at the moment has had me counting off the withheld tendernesses like a rosary of regret.  

But then i realised i was withholding a tenderness from myself.  

My tenderness for once needs to reside with me.  To not turn on my heart with the big "you should" stick and begin the familiar whacking that has not just been mine but i suspect is my mothers and her mothers and shaped by the hand of women through time and space.  My tenderness needs to rise like a soft blanket over my tender and bruised heart and say some thing like;

"Darling.  That hurts doesn't it.  Be kind treasure-girl.  There is no need to rush to make it better for them.  First tend to yourself and then reach out.  You will be kinder and stronger and more able to be generous if you do.  It's ok darling.  Take a breather."

And you know what, if i do there is a whole lot more tenderness to go around.  By being attentive to my own suffering i am less likely to cause suffering.  

I can see much of my suffering is caused by the lack of tenderness in my life.  That i am so busy giving in the hope that the equation will balance out one day.  I can be the one who is tender to myself.

The character in this very beautiful short story was berating herself and yet i am using that medicine like a poultice to draw out the splinter that longing for tenderness has left in my heart and i am using the balm of that tenderness back on myself. Tenderness is my Medicine.  

I have come to see that withholding of tenderness, not automatically pouring it out on others, but to first turn it on myself, is the permission to grow tenderness from within that i have always desired.  And denied myself in the hopes that someone will see what a good and giving girl i am.

I am a good and giving girl in my own eyes and that revolutionary thought is growing the wise and strong woman in me like a tap root in loam.

This beautiful woman died with her family and friends all around her and so much left that she wanted to do.  I was scared to be there even though i had seen death before.  I loved her and was scared to face her not being there.  Scared to support her family in their immense grief.  Vicki's death was scary and it was one of the most beautiful events i have witnessed. It has been a gift to me in so many ways; ways that continue to ripple out years later.  

Last week, thinking about Vicki, we hosted a movie here called Zen and the Art of Dying. It reaffirmed for me the possibility of a beautiful life making death.  Helped me to turn my gaze a little closer to lady death and nod to her there, some way off in my future.  Seeing her presence helps make me live a little deeper and it made me reflect on the gifts of knowing her proximity.

When we live in and comply with an overculture which teaches us that death is a distasteful something best avoided in both experience and conversation.  When it is someone else's job to tend to the dying, and their bodies and the way they are farewelled, we cheat ourselves out of the truth that to live is also, inevitably to die.

​

We all kind of doff our caps to death, knowing she is there, but we'd cross the street and get busy with our phones/work/achievements etc. etc. rather than look her in the eye.

There are, i think, many losses associated with this avoidance of death.  

We lose the focus that a dead-line (see what i did there?) to our life provides. Our lack of death knowledge kind of numbs us or anaesthetises us to the finite nature of things. But if we know, not just intellectually but down into our guts; body and soul, that we have limited time we allow that to galvanise us into our truth and our desires and we are more likely to step up and LIVE.  

We LIVE when we know we are going to, one day, die. We don't fritter our time away.  We don't waste our time.  We cherish our existence.

As individuals there is something about death that in many cases, melts away that which is not linked to beauty and Love and purpose.  We get real.  Shit gets real.

On a cultural level i think there is an echo of that anaesthetising which our patriarchal overculture puts to use.

​

When we don't have the exit firmly on our roadmap to life we act as if our actions have no consequences.   Like we can just keep going and see what happens.

When we don't hold death and endings as an immutable truth, we act as if we can take what we want, act as we see fit from our tiny perspective, do what we like.  There is something about the narcissistic view of "it's all about what i want that the child- like hands over my eyes i can't see death therefore it doesn't exist, nah nah nee nah nah" thinking that our culture perpetuates that damns us and our future to suffering, particularly when it comes to the environment.

Need water to irrigate crops that weren't meant to grow where you are? - Then drain the river.

Need land to run a potentially dangerous pipeline through? - Take it.
But what if that pipeline breaks or leaks and poisons the water source?  - This means jobs and infrastructure and support industry and... you can't stand in the way of progress, this is subversive behaviour.  Call in armed guards.

The rhetoric around industry and what we do to our planet as a result of this relentless take take take like there is no consequence (ie no possibility of death) is ubiquitous.  That greed and relentlessness is one face of not acknowledging that everything is finite.  That death exists.  When we know that death exists we accede that there are limits.

When we tend to the death of those we care about; get in there and have the hard conversations, sit vigil, watch the leaving, when we know the truth about a life extinguished we can no longer ignore the vast all encompassing truth of death.  

When you know and respect the immensity of death you know endings and how they are intrinsically linked to life. When you know death you know that you have not only the responsibility to live but some hand in where death comes.

When you face life knowing death can be drawn closer by your actions you begin to count the cost and the benefits of your actions.

As humans we have created needless death.  My rivers are unswimmable because of the consequence of deforestation, farming practises and poor guardianship of the health of the waterways.  Many species are extinct on my little part of the planet because of the actions of humans.  The talk of extinction can sometimes seem hypothetical (maybe because the immensity of that terrifies my tiny brain) but knowing that i can't healthily take my children to the local swimming hole is a sorrow for me it's a travesty and ... well, shit is getting real. Knowing Lions and Tigers and elephant and rhino are endangered in my lifetime is deeply sobering.

I have seen first hand the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef .  I have seen the utter destruction of the habitat of the Orangutan and countless other creatures in Sarawak

Our death making culture of greed and production is possible because we ignore the presence of death.  

It is like we have, in our addiction to the consumption/production/consumption cycle lost all awareness of the life/death/life cycle and in our addiction to that, we become blind to the death making nature of our process.

Day after day our culture takes actions that are like the equivalent of chain-smoking cigarettes laced with lead and we just don't seem to be able to stop.

When we as individuals take in the truth of death and live cognisant of that truth we live in the knowledge of the impact of our actions.  We are no longer able to deny the impact of our actions and we understand how each action either contributes to bringing death closer or keeping death in balance with life.  When we acknowledge that death is part of the equation not just for us as individuals but for our species and those other creatures whose lives are at our mercy, maybe then we will not act as if life and everything is an infinite resource.  

Because the truth is that life is not a resource to be mined but a dance towards decay and death.  We are partnered not just by this body, as miraculous as it is, but by our family, friends, antecedents and this beautiful planet.  We are, when lady death is swirling her skirts alongside us guiding and supporting our choices, able to know that we can act in life affirming ways.  And that is a gift.  

I hope in my lifetime we learn to open it wisely.

Yesterday i looked at the noticeboard at the supermarket.  I don't do that often but amoungst the cars and lawnmowers for sale i saw this.

It broke my heart.  

his kind of lonely sorrow is the thing that makes people desperate and angry and creates the kind of violence and crime that our western world seems to be particularly good at squeezing out of the lives of people who live enclosed by poverty and hopelessness.

​

Dear person looking for a trustworthy family,

Look into my eyes, right now, as i am holding you by the shoulders.

Ok, so let me raise your chin,
gently,
with my crooked finger.

There.

look at me, at my eyes that have seen some things and cried a lot.
look at me, imperfect, scared, lonely and brave just like you.

I know you are hurting.
I don't know why or how or who or when 
but i know you are hurting and you have every right to hurt.

Your family are untrustworthy.
That is the kind of injury that marks a heart forever.

I know that i know that you were worth more than that.
i know that they hurt you with such consequences that you are reeling

i know that it took courage to write your note.

look at me

I am no different.
All of these people walking past us with their busy lives and their trolleys either too full or not full enough,
the people with others, the people on their own
none of them are any different.

Each and every one of us have been hurt.
That is not to deny your pain 
oh no.
what you endured is something you deserve to be heard on and held while you heal from.
Nothing should ever diminish what you suffered

And know this too.  
You are not the only one.

We all hurt.
Each of us.

Some of us are just not wise enough or smart enough to call out in our pain and ask for help.
You were.
Some of us believe the bullshit that we should put up with it or that we have to make peace with it or worse and worse that we deserve it.

But you, 
wise and tender heart
You chose to ask for help and so i want you to feel me looking into your eyes and see the truth,

No one is unworthy of love
We might be injured broken confused suffering, wobbly, needy, angry, lonely, reactive, abrasive, scared shitless and a million other things that we have been taught to try and hide.
But the truth is that it is a miracle you make it here at all. 
It is a miracle that you had the courage to write your advertisement.

And i want you to know you are worthy of love and belonging that you can trust and if they can't give it to you then you go and find people who will.

You deserve good things.  You deserve to be held in trust.
Now i will let go of your shoulders and with one long look in your eye i will say.

Go and find kindness because it is your birthright.

​

Henrietta Lacks  born August 1920 died October 1951.  Ms Lacks was a working class African American woman who was diagnosed with cervical cancer in early 1951 and died later that year from metastases.   During her diagnosis and treatment, without her consent, cells were taken from both her healthy and cancerous tissue.  Cells from the cancer tissue were found to be particularly resilient in laboratory conditions and were able to be replicated outside the human body for the first time - the first "immortal cell line".  These cells came to be known as HeLa cells.

Since this time Ms Lack's cells have been reproduced in immense quantities and used for a huge variety of purposes.  

• 20 Tons of her cells have been reproduced.
• More of Ms Lack's cells have been outside her body than were ever in her body
• There have been nearly 11000 patents taken out using her cells.
• Ms Lack's cells were the first ones successfully cloned
• Ms Lack's cells were used in the development of the polio vaccination


• Ms Lack's family were only informed of what had been done with their ancestor's physical legacy when scientists contaminated the HeLa line and wished to get new sources.

Poignantly, this was the photo many family members carried around of their grandmother.

​

We live in times of great change and we humans seem to have a love hate relationship with change.  

We love change when it brings goodness, the things we desire, an end to suffering.  We hate it when it makes us work, face ugly truths, when it makes life harder.  It often takes a great deal of Buddha like foresight, patience, tenacity and willingness to well, suffer a bit to make our way through change.

I am not Buddha.  I am a flawed and wonky human and i just don't know how to get to that place where i am all Buddha-ish foresight and patience and all those other worthy things.  I find the more i exhort myself to be those the less accessible they are to me so in the face of all the hard that is going on right now - racism and homophobia being aired, destruction in Syria, Kashmir, Afghanistan, Turkey,and sadly Nice as we speak, on and on and on... - the more i fall into the trap of feeling too small, too flawed, to useless to do anything.

 i think that very sense of feeling inadequate to do anything is part of what keeps us stuck in the damaging ways of thinking and behaving in our world.

Instead i am asking myself to try.  I give myself permission to be clumsy.  To do what is within my reach right now.  I give myself permission to know that anger and suffering and guilt are likely to turn up and try not to let that derail my commitment to change.  I give myself permission to not expect to get it right the first time.  I give myself permission to notice defensiveness as it rises up in me.  I need to be alert to this because defensiveness is for me and i suspect many others, a sure fire sign that outmoded behaviour is digging in for the long haul.

The Long Haul.
This kind of change and i am going to talk specifically about rooting out and changing racism because that is front and centre for me at the moment, is about changing legacy, societal structure, power paradigms and my own thinking.  That change does not happen easily.   We are digging out that nasty root called racism and  that nasty root is just part of a more poisonous weed called the patriarchy.

Racism, sexism, ageism, ableism, genderism, consumerism, environmental destruction; all of these things are rooted in the system that values individualism, wealth and power over connection, fairness and sovereignty.

That's immense. And all i can do in the face of that immensity and my non-buddhahood is turn back towards myself.  I have to know where that root has its hold in me.  I need to learn about the ways i collude with the things that cause suffering.  i have to ask myself the gnarly questions.  Pull up from the soil of me some carcasses of things i have inherited or created in myself that stink to high heaven.  

Rooting things out.
Dr Estes, in her recent workshop ,taught us about the deep magic of asking the right questions.  In order to root racism out i have to learn to ask questions about where that poisonous root lives in me.  These include; How do i benefit as a person of white skin, from the culture i live in?  How am i advantaged?  What part of me feels entitled?  How does that play out?  Where does my sense of deserving disadvantage others?  What do disadvantaged people in my community miss out on that i take for granted? What can i shift in order for that to no longer be so? 

But that is just some puny inner work.  What the hell difference will that make if people are dying on the streets because of racism?

I think the patriarchy would like us to believe that one person's inner work, one puny human's efforts to see and transform inherited social patterning is laughable, too small, too miniscule to make a difference.  
I disagree.  If we take this inner work on as a part of our responsibility - part of the toll we pay for being human, then each of us have a role.  Each of us counts.  That's how social change happens; one person taking a stand, other people upholding that stand and making a difference.  What if Mandela thought "Fuck it, these white men are just too powerful i am going to hang out here on the Transkei coast and farm my goats instead".  No, each person, whether they can gather the power that Madiba had or not, has a responsibility to do their bit. 

I am not, quite frankly, smart enough to know where my piece in the jigsaw of life will fit but that doesn't mean i just give up.

When our interior life; the starting place for all our actions, decisions, and beliefs is changed, then our contribution to the world changes.

The patriarchy separates and in building connectedness both within ourselves and outside ourselves we rebell.  If we recognise our interconnectedness and our responsibility to one another we undermine the patriarchy.

"Mainstream communication does not want women, particularly white women, to respond to racism. It wants racism to be accepted as an immutable given in the fabric of your existence, like eveningtime or the common cold.” ~Audre Lorde


A note to introverts.
As an introvert in an extroverted world our natural "turn inwards" response is often maligned.  Yes action is required to overturn racism and yet as an introvert i value my innate inwardness as a gift.  For introverts, starting the  process with ourselves, doing the critical questioning, feeling the gamut of what arises, constructing something new and doing the inner work first means we are able to turn up in the world with a strength and a bridge from the old to the new.

Once our interior path has begun we are equipped to engage differently in the world.  We talk with family and friends differently.  Maybe one of those we talk to and shift is a scared policeman.  Who knows?  We write letters that may support and strengthen. Who knows what a difference we can make or how something might arrive at a critical time for someone else? We make art. Who knows what our expression might inspire or shift in someone. We can trust that the things us introverts do from our deep inner work moves things, that we begin to do things from that new inner place that shift the current.  Our outward contribution is deep because we have done our inner work.

Different=wrong is a bronken equation; part of the patriarchy and part of what allows the "isms" to flourish.

Doesn't that just let introverts off the hook?
No .  I think it puts us on the spot or on the hook if you are a fan of Innana.  It means we have to step up.  It recognises that to turn up strong for change we need to do our inner work.
It doesn't have to be either or.  You can do your inner work and protest.  You can do your inner work and participate in anti racism action.  You can do your inner work (and critically, i think) listen non-defensively and take action on what needs to change in you.  You can connect with your outward action extrovert cousins and then look at each other's contributions as valid because by maligning and valuing one as more different than the other you are just entering the same patriarchal paradigm of better than/power over.

Once you have assimilated a view from a different path you change yourself.  You live differently.  You act differently.  For an introvert, that is how change occurs.

"If you are a white person who would like to treat black people as equals in every way, it requires more than a simple commitment to equality. It requires that you change your life, so that you are exposed to minorities on a regular basis, and become familiar with the best of their culture, so that when you want to meet, hire, date, or talk with a minority, you aren't betrayed by your hesitation and discomfort." – Malcolm Gladwell

Of course making a change is more than interior work but for introverts this needs to come first. 

How to we make that happen?

I don't know the answers but there are two things that make change stick in me.

1. Notice don't judge.  If i can notice what arises and not leap to judgement i am buffered against defensiveness and the truth allows me to soften the hard roots of the patriarchy that makes them easier to pull out.

2.  Play to your strengths.  Trying to have an extroverted response when you are an introvert just wonks everything out.  Do what comes naturally but for God's sake do it.  We live in a critical time and we must dismantle this foulness wherever it lives in the world; our social systems, our services, our friendships, our families, our hearts.

But step up.  This broken system feels the urge to change right now and is roaring back.  Keep your shoulder to the work.  You are not alone.

Places you might like to look at to stimulate change and questioning.
Desiree Adaway - this woman is an activist and coach and is daily giving me much to digest and shift.  
Jennifer Davis  Artist and deep soul Jennifer creates openings and hearts... 
Heather Plett - this woman is a wordsmith who opens conversation with wisdom and grace.
Kelly Diels  amazing writer and thought provoker.
 
tedxtalks.ted.com/video/Homegirls-guide-to-being-powerf;search:Rukaiyah watch and learn 
read and learn www.jenniferpricedavis.com/blog/whats-love-got-to 

and when you ask the question what would love do? it is not always an easy answer but it is a question we have to ask ourselves especially in a time where hate is showing up so strong.



​

In honour of Dr Estes and the story of the handless maiden - a story of innocence and betrayal, of sorrow, loss and never being truly abandoned i read the story from Women Who Run with the Wolves.

 Recently i was asked if i qualified for senior discount.  Twice in the same week.  

Now, i laughed and said no ( i am more 13 years away from that cheap ride) but it got me thinking about age and appearance all over again.

A while back i railed here about the violence our ageist community inflicts on women.

So after that carding attempt i circle back to think again about aging and the way our world sees it.  

Ok, so here's my truth.  I'm 51 years old.  I lived most of my life on the coast in a part of the world where the ozone layer has had a big hole in it since the 1970s.  I was a burn, peel, burn baby of Celtic mongrel extraction - white skin developed in the haar of Scotland and the dusky dells of Ireland.  And yet, self proclaimed part lizard that i am, I have lived my life loving the sun.

All of this prefaces the fact that I am wrinkly and sun damaged.

I have grey hair, finding my first one at 16.

I have a wattle.  I have deep mean looking creases between my eyebrows and deep creases from the corners of my nose to the corners of my mouth which show the well worn path of all the smiles and grimaces i have made over my life.

I look like an old woman.

When i look in the mirror i see the wrinkles and the sagging and the pigmentation and the other varied marks of time, the way i have been taught to by my culture; sneeringly, critically.

To all intents and purposes I have committed the heinous and self destructive crime of "letting myself go".

​Go Where?

Go into aging.
Go in without the immense sums of money spent on face cream or treatments.
Go in without botox or surgery or (and i kid you not i know a woman who has done this) only ever sleeping on your back in order that your face is not squashed into wrinkles while you sleep.

​Why does this bother me?

It bothers me because we rob ourselves of a sense of beauty if beauty is only able to equal agelessness or youth.

For a while i was heartened when i began to see images of grey haired beauties turning up on my social media feed and then i looked a little closer.

If you don't beleive me go now and look.

When you look at images of grey haired beauties they have two things in common.  They have grey hair which i will grant is a rebellion against one facet of aging.  

But they also have flawless skin.

Do they show any other signs of aging apart from the hair?  

No.

Wrinkles?  Liver spots?  Sagging?

No.  No.  And No.

These role models for aging beauty are either airbrushed - in which case we are being lied to, or they have worked damned hard to avoid wrinkles.  Which of course is a personal choice and more power to them but I wonder why being unwrinkled makes people happy and the only answer is 

Aging is abhorred in our society.

Is it because it reminds us or our perishable nature? As my friend Vynka says, aging is a privilege not all of us get to enjoy. Aging is actually a gift - we get more time on this beautiful planet with the people we love.  But the spectre of death that has its whispers in our creases scares people it seems.

Is it because we are so fixated with newness in the consumer culture we live in we have to want a new looking body and face?

I don't know.

What i do know is that our perception of aging is being mightily fucked with.

We don't see people aging naturally.  We see, and applaud people fighting aging.  The rhetoric around aging is all about the battlefield.

There is no winner in this war though.  Only skin care companies and other's who profit off of our fears.

So i wondered how do i strengthen myself to walk away from the fight?

How do i remember that it is ok to sag and wrinkle and crease?

How do i look in the mirror without admonishing the tracks of time?

I realised that what i really need was the company of other women who have walked this path.

So i asked myself...

Where are our aging role models?

I went looking for memes and images about aging that showed women aging naturally and i either found those grey haired beauties with their ironed out skin or very wrinkled natural looking African or Asian women in traditional dress.

It seems aging is only acceptable when you are "ethnic"  Racist aging?  I think they might be linked.

Where are the wrinkly European women?  On some warped plain do we think we are "above" that?

The only one i could think of was Georgia O'Keeffe - who with her angular-i -don't-give-a-fuck-because-i --am-a-desert-loving-art-making-icon seemed to defy the norm.

Are the women who are wrinkly and European too busy trying making themselves invisible?  Hiding in sensible shoes?  Not dressing like lamb? The uniform of short hair and unthreatening dress?

Are we hiding our potential role models in a cloak of shame?

Lots of women say when they hit 45 they begin to become invisible.

I think it's probably more true to say that when women get to 45 they often pass out of the overculture's subset of desirability; they commit the crime of moving away from youth.  Our societies' gaze no longer naturally falls on women beyond this age.  Is it that youth so completely equals desire that we forget the rich complex beauty of an old woman.  Is it that desire is the only way we get to make the equation for  beauty work in our tiny well corralled minds?  

Or is it, more insidiously, that we as older women believe the bullshit rhetoric enough to be brainwashed into thinking we can't be gorgeous if we are wrinkly and we just begin to dim that inner light?

Why does it matter?

It matters because when we rob the world of beauty we all suffer.  A paucity of beauty is a meagre mingey unhappy-making thing.

It matters because we, each of us have the capacity for immense beauty up until, and even after we die.

It matters because a narrow definition like beauty = youth robs us all.

If somehow we can't find a way to decolonise our minds as older women, find a way to overcome that fucked cultural paradigm that robs us and our wattles of feeling as celebratory about life and our own unique beauty as we can, then we let the overculture win.  The patriarchy gets to live in our heads, robbing us the chance to sashay and wear whatever the hell makes us happy for some invented perception that crushes hearts and makes us and our world a less generous place.

So what do we do about it?
My best suggestion is to start something new.  Take a selfie without filters with our wrinkles and our beauty showing.  With our sagging and our grace showing.  With our liver spots and our lusciousness.

Let's start a hashtag revolution on facebook - #oldANDbeautiful. Post a photo of yourself untouched and hashtag it with #oldANDbeautiful and see what we can cook up.

I will if you will.

love

jane

 

Something we all need from time to time and it is something I feel so tangled about.  Let me start out by saying I am a shitty helper and an even shittier help recipient.  I am also learning about what will make be better at both of these things.  I want to talk about help because as a human being I need it.  Every day I need help.  And my world is better if I receive it too.  So here is as far as I have gotten with the untangling so far.

I have been helped immensely by my friend Vicki in understanding help and the glorious gift of a clean ask.  I wrote about it in this blog post.  Reading that today made me cry - the generosity of a clean ask and the clean give was something that up until that time i can't ever remember seeing.  There always seemed to be so many rules around help and asking and politeness that i tripped up more often than i care to remember.

But this reciprocity between giving and receiving is the stuff of deep humanness.  It is the in breath and the out breath and i had felt like i had been wanting to hold my breath rather than participate in that flow.  Like there would be some badge of honour for holding the breath that was my birthright and my responsibility to tend to so that i was well.  Is it that it is so akin to the life death life cycle that we are scared of the flow of giving and receiving I wonder?

Help in our western world is something we are often ashamed to ask for and more often ashamed to take.  I learned pretty early in life that it was better to give help than receive it, and I think this stems from power.  The giver of help is the one who is seen as better than and can bask in the beneficent glow of having imparted their goodness on someone less fortunate, hell let’s just say it, less than, them.
 
I know I watched things foisted on people they didn’t want.  Heated fights over who was going to pay for things where the one who ended up paying wasn’t paying attention to the feelings of others they just wanted to be The One To Pay. (cue spotlight and admiring glances).  I didn’t like the feelings this aroused but I watched the dance so many times it became normal.
 
I learned to equate asking for help with weakness, power under,  and when I had the temerity to ask (or observed others squirming under the weight of asking for help) I discovered that what greeted me was seldom what I needed.  When I asked for help with something, often what I received, rather than the thing I needed, instead what i was delivered was a big pile of shoulds.  Steaming hot with righteousness, the shoulds landed on my doorstep in a well–meaning pile that I had to be grateful for and spend quite a long time sorting through and disposing of.
 
Let me give you an example that makes me cringe when I think about it.  My darling friend was struggling with anxiety and a physical body that broke down/through under the weight of an immense burden.  I had never dealt with anxiety myself (it’s come to live in my house now so I know it much more intimately, I am sad to say) and her health spiral was frightening.  I went into help mode.  My nursing background kicked in, with advice and recommendations.  My creative side kicked in using information from other friends who had managed anxiety I made a set of cards.  With “helpful” advice and “calming” thoughts on each card I thought I was going to really make a difference.  I presented these to her, in the midst of her anguish and release saying maybe she could pull one to help.  Oh Lord.  Here is a woman of immense beauty and love almost crushed under the weight of her own sorrow and illness and I was giving her cards for fuck sake.  Now I am grateful to say she is well again and yet I reflect now on what well-meaning arrogance those cards represented.  They also represented my own discomfort in the face of her overwhelming pain.
 
In the face of her sorrow I could only manage to say the equivalent of “do this” “just be…”  or “it’s all…”  I turned, in my own discomfort, to flimsy generalities.  In the face of her sorrow I could not bear to be nose to nose with her and with her broken heart.
 
And that is what I think is at the crux of my problem with help.  When we ask for help we NEED something.  And help needs to be what helps.  Not what makes the helper feel useful or important.  Not necessarily what makes a sudden change.  Help needs to be there. 

Help needs to be that which nourishes the help asker.  It’s as simple as that.  Not what we think will nourish them.  Not what nourishes us.  Nope.  Help needs to nourish the asker.

And the uncomfortable truth is that all help begins with witnessing.  Really seeing the difficulty that the person needing help reveals.  Not glancing at it and running for muffins, but looking it in the eye, breathing with it.  Staying with the person in their place of need and seeing the need for what it really is for them.
 
Not leaping in with a “Well when i….” story (raises guilty hand) Help is about dropping our stories and supporting someone to hold their story, their own need in the gentle spotlight.  We must caution against knocking the person’s hands away from their own need in order to help, usually with the conviction that we can do it better.
 
But instead help is hearing the other person’s truth and having the guts and the compassion to sit with it is the help that matters.
 
And before my inner martyr starts girding her loins, let me say help is in my experience only worthwhile when we as the helper do what we can.  Not exhausting or depleting ourselves.  Any help like that has a very short shelf life and starts to smell like resentment pretty quickly.  When we help in a way that is freely given and doesn’t cost us a huge amount, we really help.  For bonus points we might model self care in a way that is liberating but that is not the point, when we give it must not be about martyring ourselves.
 
Help is seldom, unless specifically asked and even then not always, telling someone what to do.  Anything advice-wise that starts with “You should…” Is a sign i am on the wrong track.  If the word should makes an appearance we are usually wanting to be in control of what happens and taking the reins away from the person who needs help does not help them, it helps you.  The reins must remain firmly in the hands of whomever is in need.  And asking for advice,after hours of soul searching, i have come to see, is me wanting my deepest needs to be confirmed and advice seldom nails that so is again, seldom useful, even if well intentioned.
 
Supporting people to learn to find their own way through the confusing business of life is true help.  Staying with them while they figure out what their unique recipe is – that’s true help. 
 
Giving something to make you feel better is not help for the other person although it might of course be helpful to you but own that and don’t make it the other person’s responsibility.  The guilt of throwing away a well-meaning but for us unpalatable casserole is adding burden not taking it away.
 
If you need to do something and you want to see results and the person isn’t asking for anything. It might be good to say “I want to help and I am a doer – what do you need done?”  If you are lucky there might be lawns or laundry or groceries and if not, please remember that is not a rejection or an insult to you, rather it is a statement about what that person’s need looks like and at the moment it just doesn’t match what you have to offer.

If we help in ways that remind the person in need that they know, that they have capacity then we strengthen and en-courage them.  That is what help looks like.
 
Help sometimes requires us to remember people are doing the best they can.  People are vulnerably asking us to meet them as humans, not as the better model of human but as a person who knows what it is like to need.  Help truly is what helps.

My dear friend has helped me by never mentioning the cards again (lordy I hope they made good kindling).  Learning to sit with my own discomfort long enough to be able to tolerate the discomfort of others has taught me a lot.  Need and discomfort are basic human experiences and when we shun them we shun true connection.  And true connection is the deepest gift of friendship.

If we can help both as giver and receiver; if we truly connect in the vulnerable and needy spaces we have as humans we affirm life and build love.

And if in doubt, build connection.  Connection always helps.

i would like to know if this was helpful - please let me know in the comments

x love jane
 

As women there are unsaid rules about how we should be.

These are rules like;

• being sweet
• being pleasant
• being palatable
• being predictable

We are asked to look a certain way, say certain things, make certain things, be a certain size, be a certain shape.

There are many certain ways we are expected be.

Being anything out of these 'certainties'  is an act that threatens the sureties that make others feel safe.

What is a woman who steps beyond these bounds?

What is a woman who dares to threaten the bounds of expected behaviour?

What is a woman who makes others, by her unruly presence feel uneasy, unsafe and uncertain?

Who is she, this woman?  Who is the one who dares to break the bounds of decency?

Who is she who dares to be bigger than, louder than, quieter than, less pretty and more beautiful than she should be?

Who is she who is unfettered and unpredictable?  Who is she who dares to resist the pressures and certainties?

She is a woman who is free.

She is free to be true to herself.  Free to follow the urgings of her heart, to respond to possibilities and desires and hopes.

This woman is capable and alive and through this action she is worthy of this gift of life.

I hope this woman is you.

Because life is worth so much more than being acceptable and tidy and smaller than you need to be?

May it be the you are the woman who is able to be all that she wishes to be and all she is capable of.

And if you are anything like me when you read those brave and fearless words, all that chest beating and drum banging can be intimidating and make being free seem even further away.

Finding our way to a freedom that feels further than you can see, can be very hard.

One way that I have envisaged and discovered a new form of myself is by Painting Myself BIG. 

I was lucky enough, at a time in my life  when i felt small, so small that the box i was in felt closed on my windpipe, that i found Connie Hozvicka and her painting course BIG.

Painting a BIG portrait of myself allowed me to imagine myself out of the box. And with that image of myself as BIG I could use that like a magnet to draw myself towards that freedom, that future, that Truth.

Painting myself BIG allowed me to see myself differently. I would like to be in a world with women who can imagine and then draw themselves out of the box. 

I want to live in a world where our lives as women are ours to decide about, mete out, measure and enjoy.  I believe it is our birthright to be outside this box.  That truth is something which we are required to remember and with that memory, turn up any way we wish to.

When you paint yourself big you create a new vision for yourself, you can create a new space for yourself to inhabit.

Painting yourself big means you get to experience BIG for yourself.  Taking up space.  Like an arrow out into the future, painting yourself BIG means you are drawing yourself towards who you want to be.

And creating yourself free means you are able to be whatever it is that calls to you from outside the box.  You no longer feel limited to the box.  You experience taking up space in however you are drawn to do so.

If you would like to join the gathering of women who are Painting Themselves Big in Whangarei on 30th April and 1st of May please contact me here for details.