Belly-Centering Our Awareness for Peace & Justice

Here's an excerpt from a message I sent to peacemaker Sharif Abdullah. He recently met with a group of people interested in Sacred Activism.

My questions these days: How can we bring our power-centering practice to the attention of those who could and would like to use it in the process of peacemaking? How can this practice play a part in resolving the local and global crises that are putting human and planetary survival in jeopardy?
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Dear Sharif,

I loved the moment during your presentation when you showed us the photo of Earth from space. You said something like "Look at this picture with more than your eyes. You have to look at it with something deeper." At the same time, you brought your palms down from the level of your chest to the level of your waist.

Several times during the afternoon you asserted that transforming the dead-end "mess" we've created into a sustainable future depends on our changing our consciousness. Given our brief time together, we didn't have a chance to explore just how to generate the inclusive consciousness that peace, justice, and sustainability require.

In my own work, I name the divisive patterns of perception sustaining the "mess" as "conquest mentality." I name the holistic patterns of perception as "connection consciousness." And I suggest that the evolution from one to the other follows from a change in the locus of our awareness....

Awakening and energizing the body's center, the hara, develops the awareness that we're kin to all creation. It awakens our capacity to see with that "something deeper."

Informed by the consciousness alive in our body's core, we can look at the photo of Earth from space and see the sacred home that we share with each other and all of life.

continued...

Wear your politics on...

...your undies!

Panty Palooza (a.k.a. Stiff Competition 2007) is a fundraiser for Pittsburgh's Planned Parenthood Action Fund. If you've read The Woman's Belly Book, you already know about adorning your briefs and bikinis -- the chapter on "Spice Up Your Sensuality" features the Decorate Your Underwear project.

Now's your chance to help cultivate the art of political underwear. All you artists, knitters, sewers, sculptors, and crafters are invited to send your entries into this juried art show. Due date is May 24 — and there's no limit to the number of entries you can send in. Enter as many times as you wish!

For more info, read the press release and call for entries.

Don't just wear your politics on your sleeve; keep them close to your passion....

Satisfying Hunger

I recently led a 90-minute workshop in Atlanta titled "Satisfying Hunger: The Secret Your Body Wants To Tell You." (Click here for details on the program.) Here's a comment from one of the women who attended...

My experience at the workshop, after doing some of the belly-energizing exercises, was a delightful and delicious sense that I was completely filled with my Self.

The struggle or effort I continually put into "connecting" to myself was gone. The distance or gap I imagine to be present most of the time as I journey through daily living, vanished. The energy released from my belly filled me up — it filled in the gap — effortlessly.

What is most interesting and most exciting to me is that although I "know" that the gap isn't real, I still feel it most of the time. I've gotten used to it and tend to try to fill it with food — the image that comes to mind is throwing food into Tallulah Gorge. It's about that senseless and satisfying.

So, I'm excited about making these exercises/practice part of my daily routine. I love the feeling of being filled with Self. I think the belly work will be a crucial part of healing my relationship with Self. Again, thank you, thank you!!

Do not strip mine our daughters!

Corporations have a long history of exploiting natural resources – the earth's body – to make their profits. Think global warming. Think strip mining.

The drug companies are exploiting another resource:

Women's bodies.

Drug-manufacturer Merck, for example, is capitalizing on women's susceptibility to cervical cancer.

Merck has waged a nationwide campaign to make its Gardasil vaccine mandatory for sixth-grade girls. The company has lobbied state legislators to make 11- and 12-year-old girls ineligible to attend school unless they've received the vaccine's three doses.

Why bother creating consumer demand for a drug with limited effectiveness when you can bypass the illusion of free enterprise and free choice?

Why bother creating consumer demand for a drug with limited effectiveness when you can use the government to enforce it?

The company recently suspended its campaign in response to parents' and medical groups' objections. But not before the campaign had made its mark. And not before its questionable practices had come to light.

Continued, with links to updates, at lisasarasohn.com/gardasil.

Menstrual supplies for women's shelters

Click on a link and Seventh Generation, an earth-friendly paper products company, will donate a pack of organic cotton tampons or chlorine-free pads to a women's shelter in the state of your choice.

The link is at http://www.tampontification.com/donate.php.

What could be easier?

Soft Belly

a poem on writing practice
by Jennifer Browning

Click.
Rustle.
Scratch and scribble.
The ring of the bell.
The breath in.
The breath out.
The smell of coffee.
And paper.
And ink.

A prompt.
A sword to the heart.
Soft belly open to possibility.
Bleeding on the page.
Real life.
Real death.
Real writing.

Like blue faced Picts
facing the hordes
we rush forward
fear inspiring our courage
brandishing only a pen
for battle
for defense
for life.

Belly Story

From a belly buddy...

I had a fun belly moment last night:

I was cooking and my fella was there standing behind me with his hands wrapped around my back. He was playing with my belly roll ... tapping it rhythmically and squeezing it and such.

In the past I wouldn't have been able to stand this because of how much shame I have had about that part of my body. Last night was different though.... I actually felt comfortable while he was doing it: empowered, even if just for a few moments.

He was being playful and laughing as he did it, and eventually his laughter triggered me and I blurted out, "Hey, now, don't be squeezing my beautiful bodacious belly and laughing while you do it!"

I noticed myself wanting to collapse into a victim energy because of the old emotional charge I have had about my belly, but I didn't. His reply? He smiled and said, "Why can't I? Your belly makes me happy ... and I think it is really cute."

Spiritual Activism

Just returned from a life-changing conference at Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, NY -- Enlightened Power: How Women Are Changing the Way We Live. The speakers were fabulous -- Yolanda King, Marcia Ann Gillespie, Loung Ung, Marianne Williamson, and more. Twenty-three women joined me for a 90-minute Gutsy Women workshop. Their comments were enthusiastic!

Marianne Williamson closed the conference with an inspirational talk on spiritual activism. She presented a shining example of an articulate, self-validating, no-apologies woman.

One comment she made particularly piqued my interest. I believe she referred to the Course in Miracles in saying something like "seek power not in the body but in the spirit."

I'm not familiar with the text of the Course in Miracles, so I may have missed the full meaning of this line. As I heard it, the line seems to enforce a distinction between body and spirit, highlighting the spirit and denigrating the body.

But denigrating the body does not serve us. Rather, we must acknowledge and value the power we actually embody. It's an enormous power, a magnificent power.

As women and men around the world have known -- as the witches and pagans of pre-Christian Europe knew -- the life force concentrated in our body's center links us to the Power of Being that creates, sustains, and transforms the world.

The power within women's bellies is procreative, giving birth to new generations of humans. At the same time, to the extent we claim it, our belly-centered power is pro-creative: it's the power to promote creation in any dimension we choose, according to our intention.

In this light, the history of Western civilization is the attempt first to participate in and then to control, usurp, and exploit women's pro-creative power.

In Asian traditions, the body's center is known as Energy Garden, Sea of Vitality, Luminous Pearl, the Gate of the Mysterious Female. The Hopi call it Throne of the Creator. Although Western culture has shamed women's bellies and nearly banished our awareness from the body's center, this one-point remains the meeting place of body and soul. This one-point is the fusion of body and spirit. As we live through the consciousness implicit in our body's center -- expressed as authenticity, creativity, instinctive wisdom -- the distinction between "doing" and "being" disappears. Living through our center of being, we are spirit in action.

Over the years, I've developed a practice of dynamic yoga moves that activates and directs the life force concentrated in our body's center. The practice concludes with a body prayer aligning our belly-centered power to promote creation -- our Source Energy -- with our soul's purpose, with Universal Spirit, and with the planet's center.

Moving through this prayer, we become a conduit between Heaven & Earth, inviting Spirit to accomplish its purpose through us. Our core life force aligns with and participates in the Power of Being that animates the world. What greater power could we wish to realize?

Perhaps "seek power not in the body but in the spirit" means to direct our attention away from the force we might apply to dominate others. Perhaps these words point us toward the energy we can cultivate to revitalize our own domains, making them expanding realms of acceptance and affirmation, beauty and truth. As we live through our body's center, the union of body and spirit, each of our domains becomes a palace of creation.

In Appreciation

by Elizabeth Hall

"Perfectly beautiful bodies are not composed of angular parts."
--Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757)

It all started around puberty. Until then, I viewed my body strictly in terms of what it could do. It could do backbends on gymnastics mats, flips on trampolines, and cannonballs off diving boards. It ran tan-lined and naked through backyard sprinklers with my younger sister and cousins. Then I turned eleven and started thinking that running through the sprinkler naked might not be such a good idea....

This was also the time that I began accumulating more fat around my hips and waist. My mother had said this was normal when we had "The Talk." But Teen and Seventeen and YM and every other girl in the sixth grade didn't think it was normal. Fat was an excess and a nuisance, boys didn't like it, and we had to do everything in our power to get rid of it. So we did. Some of us were more successful than others, but, by golly, we tried. And so began fifteen years of tortuous yo-yo dieting....

Finally, about a year ago, I was in the dressing room at a department store and discovered that I had gone up a size. My first impulse was to crumple up into a ball and sob. Here we go again, I thought. Here comes another diet. So long, chocolate! So long, cheese! But, suddenly, a little voice popped into my head. I would like to think it was the voice of the true goddess that dwells within every woman. She said, "This is crazy! Stop seeing what they want you to see. See yourself as I see you: a Wonder of Creation."

Reluctantly, I took another look. Much to my surprise I saw, not the superimposed "flaws" of a fucked-up society, but a radiant, opulent, curvaceous body that was healthy and fit and oozing with sensuality. I saw my body. And I fell in love with it.

Fast-forward to the present. I am fresh on the heels of quite possibly the most intensely pleasurable sexual encounter of my life. Incredible sex, incredible because I can barely believe I could let myself go that fully....

First published in Western North Carolina Woman

My Rights as a Woman at ANY Size

From Fatima Parker, President, with credit to Laurie Richards
International Size Acceptance Association
Middle East and North Africa

I have the right to love and be loved.
I have the right to move freely and express myself in my own ways.
I have the right to feel sexy.
I have the right to feel beautiful.
I have the right to move with dignity and grace.
I have the right to take up all the space my body needs.
I have the right to be treated with respect.
I have the right to love myself as I am NOW--not as I wish I was, or as I was at another time in my life, or as others want me to be.
I have the right to feel successful and fulfilled in all aspects of my life.
I have the right to live joyfully and fully.
I have the right to be a diva, a Beauty Queen in body heart and soul.

Honour my belly?

What a concept! No one has encouraged me to do that before. In fact, our culture wants to me to hide my belly. No longer! Belly bold: belly beautiful.

I attended Lisa Sarasohn's one-day workshop held in Thunder Bay just recently.... She tells her own story and the stories of other women. Her book surprises me. Her book makes me chuckle. Her book gives me belly laughs. Her book sobers me. Her book makes me realize that my problem is not with my belly but with my culture.

The Woman's Belly Book is a real gem. I encourage you to begin what Lisa calls "a belly-celebrating adventure." What we do to our bellies we do to ourselves. What we do to ourselves we do to the earth.

--Marjut Vahtola
Resting Frog Yoga Studio
first published in the Chronicle Journal
Thunder Bay, Ontario, June 2006

Body, Beautiful

I was avoiding the mirror as usual one day as I was getting out of the
shower. My daughter, who had magically grown to be a tall, long-limbed
six-year-old, came into the bathroom and considered my familiar
hulking form. As I was toweling off, she pointed to my stretch marks,
now mostly faded to a silvery white, but just as plentiful as ever.
"What's that?" she wanted to know. I explained how she had grown in my
tummy and stretched the skin, leaving those marks.

She gave me one of those I-am-your-amazing-guru looks and said, "I'm so
glad I was born. I love this life!"

Yes indeed. And I hope with all my heart that her body treats her as
well as mine has treated me. I know, all too well, that many women are
not so lucky. That 95-pound figure I had in college is long gone now,
but I have gained an appreciation for what my body can do and all it
has given me. My children's strong beautiful bodies are a reflection of
the beauty and grace that are still mine, and always will be.

--Elizabeth M. Browne

Excerpt from "Body, Beautiful," first published in the July 2006 issue
of Western North Carolina Woman, used by permission.

The only Bush I can trust...

...is my own.

(Seen on a bumpersticker in Asheville, NC)

What's Your Story?

What's a "belly story"? It's a story about how we're valuing and revaluing our body's center. Here are a couple of examples:

In The Serpent and the Wave, Jalaja Bonheim writes that while she was shopping in a local market, a toddler approached her. Proudly patting his belly, he declared "I am me!"

Did you watch Wonder Woman on television back in the '70s? I missed that. But according to Michael Sims in Adam’s Navel, when Diana Prince changed into her Wonder Woman wardrobe, special effects showed a "cosmic force seeming to radiate outward from the vicinity of her navel."

What's your story?

Dinner for the Earth

Did you hear Terry Gross' April 11 interview on Fresh Air with Michael Pollan? He's the author of The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals.

I'm especially moved by his statement that eating is "our most profound engagement with the natural world." Pollan titles the introduction to his book "Our National Eating Disorder."

I'm preparing to lead a ritual with therapists working to prevent and treat eating disorders, especially among women. I'll be telling the story of grain goddess Demeter and her daughter Persephone as the story of our relationship with our bodies, with earth's body.

NASA's telerobotics program has developed a robot to automate "terrestrial agricultural operations," naming the machine "Demeter." How great do you think the grain goddess' fury might be?

The Goddess On My Desktop...

I've been revamping my loveyourbelly.com website in preparation for the release of the new and expanded edition of The Woman's Belly Book, all about reclaiming our body's center as sacred, not shameful.

I've been working long hours, my belly rumbling its own comments from time to time. As I prepared to call it quits last night, I noticed that one of the web pages had made its way to my desktop. It's an excerpt from an ancient Indian scripture called The Mystery of the Triune Goddess. The Mother of the Universe tells us where she is and how to connect with her:

"Abide in the core of your being — you will find Me there."

What a timely reminder!