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March 21, 2016

Reclaiming Our Womb: Our Center Place.

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One thing I have noticed about us women lately, is how hungry we are. Not only are we hungry for food (and by hungry I mean starving), we are hungry for real, true nourishment.

But, instead of letting ourselves indulge in this nourishment, instead of letting ourselves quench our thirsty pallets and satiate our wild appetites, most of us are starving ourselves silly. Every day, we women are limiting our huge and abundant potential by passing up opportunities to truly nourish ourselves.

Why are we doing this?

As women, we have been taught that we deserve to starve and that we deserve to have less than everyone around us. We think that we have to work and work (and work some more) until there is nothing left of our bodies or souls. We have bought in to the cultural idea that suffering and pain equals prosperity. As women, most of us believe that we deserve the bottom of the barrel.

We have all bought in to this one idea:

I’m not worthy of taking care of me.

So many women say, “I don’t have time to take care of myself!” “Who will do it if I don’t?” Or my favorite, “If I could afford it, I would take care of myself.” Many of us have heard these statements our whole lives and probably from the people we love and respect the most.

But guess what? They’re just lies.

The real reasons that we don’t take care of ourselves live much deeper than those surface excuses. The real reason we don’t take care of ourselves is this:

Fear.

Fear has been constructed by our culture in order to get us to put ourselves last. Fear has been constructed and believed in for so long, that it now controls most of our thoughts in most moments.
First and foremost, we have to break up with fear.

Luckily, we women have a unique organ that sits in the center of our bodies that is capable of guiding us toward powerful practices of self-care and self-love: our womb.

Our womb is a place in our body that can call us back to our center, our sense of creativity and our sense of purpose and passion.

When we are out of balance, our wombs are out of balance.

As little girls in this culture, we are taught to ignore our wombs and, at best, we are taught that our wombs are a source of pain and inconvenience. We are taught that our wombs are something we have to “deal with” and put up with. We are taught that our menstrual cycles are something to be controlled with a pill or a shot. We are taught that our menstrual cycles are something we could never fully know about and for the most part, they remain a mystery to us.

We are definitely not taught that our monthly bleeding is an opportunity for rest and relaxation. Eventually, the womb grows tired of being ignored and begins to show signs of distress and disease that manifest in many different ways.
As women, we have the opportunity to reclaim our womb space as a place of nourishment, intuition, creativity, sexual wildness, passion, love, honesty and aliveness. If we allow her, our womb space has much to say and share, we just need to relearn how to speak womb. The journey of reclaiming our womb starts with the courage of one woman to reach down and touch her womb and say:

“I remember you.”

As women, we have the ability to create life from our womb and our center place, whether we create an actual human, a sculpture or a business. Without this center place, we are lost. As women, we have all the power we need in the center of our being, accessible to us at any time—we just need to relearn to access this potent ability.

The womb waits for us to succeed in our journey back to our center. The womb waits for us to come home to her. The lamps are lit and the eves are hung—it’s a homecoming so grand that the winds are on the tips of their toes in eager anticipation. As each of us comes home to ourselves, it is a celebration of the continuance of life. Each of us makes a declaration that we believe in life again by listening to the voice of our womb and offering ourselves the opportunity for true nourishment. As we believe in ourselves, life can grow and each spring can come.

We women are the carriers of life and the bringers of the new—as we recognize our place at the center of our bodies and lives, we can come home to ourselves at last.

 

 

 

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Author: Jen Antill

Editor: Travis May

Photo: Flickr/Demialia Levasseur

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