Share Your Voice
Women are naturally collaborative, community oriented, and feel the connection to people, to animals, and to life. Everything is interconnected. We feel and we love and we care. To understand and use all of the feelings we have, we need places to express a creative process like writing, photography and art. To do that, we need safety and permission to say what we feel right now, to let it be messy, and to go back and change our minds when we see something we didn’t see before. It is okay to say something and then to change our minds. We are courageous and we are always evolving into the next best version of ourselves.
Reading the discussion topic for this week, inspired me to reflect on past experiences that have led me to Consciously Woman: Heal My Voice, Evolutionary Women, Conscious Book Circles, Insight Seminars, Girl Scouts, Destination Imagination teams, and communities of family and friends.
I started Heal My Voice, a non-profit organization for women, in 2010. I wanted women to have a voice at the table in their homes, communities, businesses, and the world, and to walk side by side with men. I wanted it to be normal for a woman’s perspective to be part of the decision making. I wanted women to be heard and seen and valued. I wanted women to feel safe and practice using their voices. I wanted women to learn how to be leaders of their lives and share the emotions they were feeling right now. I longed for a strong, woman’s voice when I was growing up and spent my childhood reaching out to women and pushing women away. Women had so many bottled up emotions from experiences of trauma, loss, grief, and abuse that sometimes it was like opening the pressure cooker too soon and getting burned.
The mission of Heal My Voice is to empower women to heal, reclaim their inner authority, and step into greater leadership in their homes, communities, businesses, and the world. Our voices matter and they are needed in the world! But, first, we must heal, and express our ideas and voices together.
As I turn my attention to the Consciously Woman community, I access my past experiences with women and look to the future of what is possible here. I reflect on the question, “What has brought us all together, at this time?”
We have experiences filled with questions and answers, and we want a place to express them and learn from other women. We want to feel safe to express what we feel, and to be respected and honored. We want to feel safe to be vulnerable. We have something to say, and we need a place to say it and to practice forming the words. We want to process what we have experienced and be inspired by each other.
Women want to be visible.
Women want to belong.
Women want to be heard and seen.
Women want to make a difference in the world and to be a part of something.
We have many stories to tell each other and in this space that we are creating we can do exactly that. There is so much power in sitting with the discussion topic of the week and letting all of the layers wash over me. I can already feel how I carry the question and your words, with me throughout my day and week. It is helping me to remember even more of who I am.
I also believe that we want to be challenged. So, instead of seeing that we are always going to be “kumbaya” together, let’s embrace that even when posts are written with love and integrity and consciousness, the words we share and the words we read will bring up feelings of discomfort. Let us challenge the things that hold us back: people pleasing; playing small; feeling unworthy; thinking we are broken; and resisting uncomfortable feelings like anger, frustration, fear. We are so powerful! Feel the feelings. Stay connected to the group and to the process that brings up those feelings. Learn to dance with ALL of the feelings. Letting go of the “spiritual bypass” (focusing on love and invalidating your other feelings). Cultivate the feelings. Give them a voice and alchemize them into more power!
I see you as leaders in your homes and communities and businesses and the world. I see your brilliance. I see the glory of ALL of you. I see it in your vulnerability and tenderness and in your strength. Let it out in this sisterhood and let us rise together like the yeast in the bread we are baking, and the places we are standing up and speaking our wisdom.
Written by: Andrea Hylen; Heal My Voice
