(Photo taken at Ephesus, a Greek and then Roman city that flourished around the time of Christ)
I have been exploring Dan Siegel’s Wheel of Awareness in which he describes the hub of awareness as the center of ourselves and the spokes and rim as the things we take in from the outside world: our senses, our mind thoughts, our relationships, our body sensations.
Practicing this for several days I became interested in my hub, the essence of me that is me — the center.
This is a new variation on many practices of I have tried over the years. I have always found some resistance to going into the center of myself. In the past I have thought I was afraid of how little would be there, that I would find that I am really just made up of everything going on outside of me. I am very ‘other’ focused.
This time I began to notice something new stir in the center of my being. The word feminina came into my consciousness. It is a word my husband uses to refer to me often. The word means feminine in Portuguese. I have noticed that I have a slight aversion to him calling me this name.
This aversion, as I really explore it, contains a lot of strong emotions and is a microcosm of myself as a sexual woman — fear, shame and lust. In the center of my being I find my sexuality as an integral part of the essential me!
When I was becoming a woman at age 14, my mother was becoming a man. She had a radical mastectomy and then took hormone treatment which made her voice lower, and hair grow on her face. This was horrifying to me and I understood — this happens when you are a woman. I also knew that for women there was another type of danger, whispers of pregnancies, getting in trouble, being a bad girl.
My own budding sexuality, although active, went into hiding, laced with shame and isolation.
This may be a common experience for women even though my coming of age experience with my mother was unusual. The photo above depicts Medusa looking very ambivalent herself, some 2000+ years ago. It adorned a wall of a home in ancient Ephesus.
If I am Feminina, what does that mean? Pressure to be something, the receptacle of endless need? I have not had many positive associations. AND that is changing!…
