Becoming a Woman

When you enter this cycle of growth and change that you pass through as you reach thirteen and slowly become twenty, you experience the massive change of leaving your childhood and facing becoming a woman. In today’s world girls are bombarded with images and suggestions of what it is to be a woman. This happens very strongly in the western world where huge forces of advertising and influence for commercial interests have developed very powerful methods to gain a way into your life. So I am going to say things to you that you may not accept or believe at first, but I feel are important for you to have heard.

First, you are an animal, a female mammal. To have reached the point of becoming a human female you went through millions of years of animal life. If you doubt that you must realise that you are left with a reptile and mammal brain as well as the human brain.

The neurologist Paul MacLean gave a definition of these physiological and psychological facts of our brain in 1990. He said that these levels of the brain work like “three interconnected biological computers, each with its own special intelligence, its own subjectivity, its own sense of time and space and its own memory”.

Prior to MacLean’s findings it was assumed that the highest level of the brain, the neocortex, the human brain, dominating the other lower levels. MacLean, and since him others (Earl K. Miller), have found this is not so. In fact Miller was recently able to demonstrate that the older brain learns fast, and it gradually ‘trains’ the prefrontal cortex.

Returning to MacLean’s definition the base brain is the Reptilian. The next level he called the Mammalian or Monkey Brain, and the third is called the Neomammalian or Human Brain. See Levels of the Brain

To ignore that we carry our animal past with us and that we are still very influence by our past, can lead us to live in a way leading to enormous confusion and emotional pain, because in doing so we are living a life in conflict with oneself. Such conflict can lead to the depression, being lost in relationships, painful or passionate, and anxiety and panic attacks.

It can also help us to realise that consciousness on our planet started in the slime of creation, the slime we return to, to procreate. And from that slime which is a vehicle for our seed to exist in, our awareness goes through the whole process of evolution, the dividing of cells, as happens in plant growth, the forming of structure and organs as with animals, the creation of a creature with gills such as fish use, and on to a human form ready to breathe air, carrying our seed onwards.

Yes, you grew from a seed, but no plant or creature grows from a dead seed, and each living seed carries within it all the past gathered from all its forebears. So, the seed in your mother’s womb is as old as and even older than human kind, and you carry that wisdom or memories in you. But in this life you developed a new brain, and the memories you gathered this time are what you built your personality from, but beneath that is a very huge and ancient self. For in a real way, you are simply a conscious personality riding an ancient beast, your body. If you value this wonderful animal you ride, you will care for its needs; it needs exercise, food it has been eating for millions of years that has not been made by manufacturers, like white flour and white sugar products; so eating and drinking what nature produces, and a need for sexual expression in some form.

Being in touch with your ancient self is the way to wholeness. It might help you to make contact with that wonderful wisdom and growth energy if you try Intuition – Using It

Because the cell that you grew from has a vast life experience, for the cell started its life when life began on Earth. A cell doesn’t become old it is immortal, for it keeps dividing and doesn’t die.  Of course it produces your human body, but to do that it does not produce an exact copy because it does this to experience a separate self you call your ego or personality. In that way it gathers new experience which is carried forward in the eternal sex cells.

So, as a human woman you have a massive background of being many, many life forms. What was said above points to you arising not simply through evolution but through immense cosmic principles, a form of cosmic mould or archetype. Older cultures recognised that and though up the title of Great Mother. For somewhere, deep below the surface of your waking mind, this stream of life starts its flow. In underground caverns it moves through channels formed in ancient times, bringing life to all those tiny lives that, separate or in unity, form the shell you call your body. Within the universe of yourself you are a young goddess playing at creation with the stuff of life. Whatever thought or feeling, longing or emotion you harbour takes form, and is given life, beautiful or awful as it might be. And when you do not own that power, when you push back any part of that flow into the dark caverns of your mind, where fears and wounds, black angers or unspent vengeance lurk in shadows, they are given life. They grow strong until they wrestle with you, invade the living tissues of your body with their sickness, or burst out into the world as action.

“There for any to see the splendour – Of this most ancient goddess – Revealed and revealing – She was and is the revelation.”

So never think you are simply a no account human female. For though you arise from an ancient mould, the same as any mammal, you have a uniqueness through personal memories, we call that personality.

It is important to see if you can feel the lioness within you, because otherwise you might remain one of those helpless modern screaming females who are victims to their own fears and panic and end up being hurt, abused or even murdered. Of course, there are thousands of other strategies you are capable of once you are open to your wider self.

Sometime see if you can explode in angry energy – it helps if someone threatens you. Believe me it is possible, and if you learn a few self defence moves it gives you so much more confidence.

The wider self can also warn you about opportunity or danger.

But because you are from mammal stock, you will probably feel a great urge to find a partner. For many people it is a very difficult challenge to find the right one. All I need to say about that is that often it doesn’t work out the way our dreams, longings and emotions have painted it. My findings are that you cannot find the ‘right’ one until you have found yourself.

The Long View

You also need something of a long view, again difficult if you feel you are ‘in love’.

Relationships, whether heterosexual or homosexual, fail, even with the starting point of intense love. Figures differ from fifty percent failure in the US, to one in three in the UK. Hetro or homo are about the same. Statistics show there is a huge decline in marriage, with a swing to living together without the ceremony. Also there is a massive increase in adults without a partner. It has risen from six point five to thirty percent since 1960. 

Even though you have attained some level of self-awareness, the process that brought you into being still functions within you to continue your existence.  Without it you would immediately cease to be.  In fact most of the vital processes within you still occur without any conscious effort or participation on your part.  Your ego, your conscious self, is a tiny and almost insignificant part of the process.  However, what you do, what you think and what you feel can enhance or interfere with that core process.

The most important part of anything; a person, a machine, an organisation, a fruit, is the core of it. An apple is an example: the core carries the seeds, that are the most important thing as far as its life is concerned. The same goes for the person who may believe their body, the external them, is the most important, but it is their core being that is the most important and carries their essential self. Ways of connecting with your core self are Opening to Life and Water Wonderland

Sex

Another big part of being an adolescence, and something that will become a dominate part of you is your sexual nature. Remember that you evolved from animals, and sex was a natural part of their existence. As such they didn’t think about it, study it or wonder if they were good at it – after all, they/we have had millions of years living with it – they just did it.

So, don’t make it terribly personal, because sex has been an urge not just for millions of years, but billions. Because, honestly you are basically another mammal driven on by nature itself. But as humans we make the whole business very complicated by our thoughts, our emotional reactions, and from the immense advertising cleverly disguised as truth. You cannot completely escape from its influenced, but you might be able to mitigate it a little by understanding what you are facing.

Example: I dreamt of being with a woman who was desperately seeking a man. I was also with my own female companion. I believe the woman had been suddenly dropped by her man, and I and my partner were close and with her.

Still in the semi-awake state I tried ‘being’ the woman, and had a very clear response. I experienced being her, but was also me with experience of seeing into myself in some degree. I saw that the woman, like most of us, was a female creature whose instinctive drive was to find a mate. But she was not aware of this as an instinctive drive but as a personal feeling. As such she had become, like many women and men, lost in a huge web of personal ideas about whether they were attractive, sexy, with many complications about love, gender mixed with childhood unconscious traumas and the heartbreak all that brings.

A huge adaptation you will meet concerns your sexual feelings, which in turn includes your emotions, your self image, your dress sense and many others things. We are each unique, and because of factors such as self confidence, level of physical and psychological strength, traumas we may hold within us, difficulties or ability in meeting challenges we will choose different paths to sexual expression. To list he main ones:

• A heterosexual and long term relationship; with or without children.
• Relationships with a number of partners, none of which you choose to stay with long.A polygamous relationship either with one man and several women, or a single woman with several men.
• A homosexual relation ship with just one partner or with several different partners.
• No sexual relations but a friendly partnership, or a non sexual life without partners; also maybe a religious loving life.
• Quite a number of people are neither one nor the other, so are married with children but are also homosexual.
• Some choose to either act out becoming the opposite sex, or have a sex change.

In one sense we have enormous choices how we express sexually. In another sense we may be pushed to choose because of fears, traumas, or programming by parents, peers, and social and media influence. See Programmed 

All of us are born with genius as a fundamental part of us. But of course things get in the way of it expressing. Our body for instance, our programming from parents and culture, also our inherited attitudes such as – “I was always told I was no good and would not amount to anything.” When or if you are feeling hopeless and helpless watch this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNZVV4Ciccg

Your personal consciousness is a mirror in which your innermost hopes, longings, fears/terrors and genius are made real. They are made real of how you react to and experience people, animals and relationships. Perhaps your genius has been buried deep, but it is there by the immense number of lives that left traces of genius, or persistence against odds, of curiosity or love. See Ancestors 2 – Seed

If you are unclear about that take time to recognise that as a personality you are almost totally unaware of what is taking place in your body right now. You are not aware as personal experience of the huge history of evolutionary changes your being has gone through in order to become you. You perhaps have little conscious insight into the massive background of social, religious and family influences that go together to enable you to function as an individual and a social entity. Your self consciousness may not include awareness of how your present personality was shaped out of those influences. Maybe you do not know what the major life lessons are that confront you, or what your innate genius and passions are.

In general you are barely awake of whom you are! But that is not unusual; most of us are in the same boat. Only here and there does an individual wake up with such wide awareness and shine with light, love and creativity.  Yet that light and love is in everyone. See Edgar Cayce

Any journey we take into uncertainty takes trust in ones own innate processes and genius. Without calling it genius, it takes trust in oneself, ones own innermost voice. In general we are barely awake to who we are! But that is not unusual, most of us are in the same boat. Only here and there does an individual wake up with such wide awareness and shine with light, love and creativity.

Meeting with Your Sexual Power

A good example of your sexual power is the way electricity exists in a house. First, we have the supply of electricity into the house. The wires carrying the supply to the house are not in themselves the electricity. The current is invisible, but it has great potential for good or harm. So we usually deal with it carefully, and have means of controlling it via insulation, fuses and switches. When the electricity is wired into the house, its potential can be expressed in a huge variety of ways. It can manifest as heat, light, and power to move or do things, such as with a drill or vacuum cleaner. It can produce sound or images as with television, and can, via programs for the computer, manifest in almost magical ways, storing and retrieving huge amounts of information and manipulating it.

The usefulness of this image of the house with its electricity is that we can use it as an analogy of energy in your own life. Your potential can express as cellular activity, or physical movement. You can experience it as sexual drive and its pleasure and pain, as emotions, as sight, hearing, sensation, smell and taste. You can express it as thinking, and vocalising in speech or singing, or as the creation of a personal virtual reality, as you do in fantasy and dreams.

You cannot really own your sexual drive, for it as an expression of Life, that you can relate to in various ways, make decisions about, but cannot completely control. If we manage to repress it then it tends to become different tendencies, and can divert its energy in the way described where is says, “we will choose different paths to sexual expression. To list he main ones:”

But such enormous energy can also become destructive.

Example: I am in overalls working in a house. I am kneeling on the floor. The house is not familiar to me. In some way I had hold of, or was connected with, a large electric cable. The cable was live with electricity, and it touched my right shoulder. The effect was excruciating and shocking pain. The most intense memory is of struggling to pull the cable away from myself, fighting to stay conscious against the terrible current lashing through me. I screamed out for my mother, who I was sure was in the building somewhere, to switch off the electricity. I knew I only had a little time because I could not survive that current long. I have a vague sense that the current stopped, and then the current and struggle started again. Steve.

The dream portrays a dangerous situation. We know that touching an uninsulated electrical supply wire can kill. But what are these dreams saying about human potential being so dangerous? But the electricity in the dream was found by the dreamer to be his own powerful energy turned inwards, short-circuited by what he felt to be the criticism, the rejection, non-understanding of his two last women partners. “I felt that I had tried and tried, while preserving my own integrity, to live in the way they wanted me to become. But this felt as if it was an enormous self-denial at times. It was a self-denial that created this almost death dealing introversion of energy.”

Steve felt the electricity illustrated how his enormous emotional and physical energy was being turned back on himself. Steve expressed a lot of his love through work, supporting and helping others. But in his relationship he had felt deeply criticised. And through this criticism had been holding back his flow of love. In other words his energy was being interiorised, turned back on itself. This is depicted as the electricity flowing into his body. Steve realised from the dream that he must not allow past or present criticisms to cause him to hold back his positive flow of life and love.

The damage such in-turned or negative emotions can do is enormous. Many years ago a woman who could hardly walk came to stay with my wife and I. She hobbled along using two sticks. Within a week, without any treatment, she could walk normally. She told us with great enthusiasm that she now knew what had caused her illness. Three years previously her son had married and had asked if he and his new wife could lodge in his parent’s house for a few weeks while they looked for a house of their own. His mother felt resentful that he and his wife had stayed for years and made no effort to move out. But being a Christian woman she kept her feelings to herself. She ended the story by saying, “Being on holiday away from the situation has allowed me to be free of the resentment, and this has healed my legs. So I know what I am going to do when I get home. I am going to tell my son and his wife to pack their things and move out.”

If we look back to what was said about energy, and remember that at base our psychobiological energy is pure potential, this ties in with what is emerging about how our we see our gender. Our energy can express as anything, creative or destructive. Also, within ourselves, we can be anything, any gender, any age, and any disposition.

This may at first seem to be an exaggeration. But if you have kept a record of your feelings and tendencies over a period of years you will see the extraordinary number of people, of creatures, of places and situations you create while you sleep. For instance, Bob actually felt what it was like to be totally loved by a woman, and to have his being merged with hers in his dream. We could argue with this and say, yes but that is just a dream, and has nothing to do with reality, with waking life. But if you have that viewpoint, it is just an assumption you make based on what you have experienced so far. See Archetype of the Animus and Archetype of the Anima

Whatever name you give to that enormous potential underlying your existence, whether you call it Life, Chaos, God, The Mystery, it is the source of your physical existence. We struggle with words, with concepts, when we approach that Mystery. Even the words used here, such as energy and potential, are simply attempts to define something that in the end is more than the words we use to describe it. We struggle to understand how we exist. With great passion and one pointedness we have learned some of the secrets, as in recognition of DNA and the genetic code. But if you have followed what has been said above, such enquiry leads us beyond forms, beyond definitions. They suggest that the flow of energy that you call your sexual drive and your urge to parenthood, does not in the end belong to you. Yes, you can restrain it, deny it, completely give yourself over to it, or even attempt to wash your hands of it. You can add quality or brutality to the way it is expressed. But in the end it is like a river that flows on, and passes through you.

And isn’t love like that too? Do you ever possess it? Dreams suggest that the painful love so many of our painful cultural love songs mention arises out of our attempts to control or possess this natural flow, this wonder that is not ours to possess. We relate to it so personally.

This wonderful wood carving shows a woman taking flight. In the world of the physical body we cannot suddenly sprout wings; but in the inner world of our mind and heart, we can ascend on wings of wonder and inspiration. For at base we are pure potential, and with that you can fly to great heights, in life, in the arts, in being a mother or lover, so take flight.