Community
Practical Ways To Transcend Sisterhood Wounds To Make 2023 The Year of Community
Community supports your business – it was how word spread, referrals were made and people found you before the internet.
Through colonization, the grounded power of our village has been stripped away and replaced with a ‘crabs in the bucket mindset’, competitiveness among women fuelled by scarcity, fear and greed, deepening the Sisterhood-wounds that already run deep for so many women.
In order for us to harness the power of sisterhood, we must first come to terms with releasing the masculine paradigm that preaches ‘fighting your way to the top’. Before we dive deeper and get practical, having a basic understanding of what the ‘Sisterhood Wound’ is, is essential:
“Simply put, the Sisterhood Wound is the pain, distrust, or dis-ease that many women feel when relating to other women. Jealousy, insecurity, cattiness, comparison, fear— these are all ways that the Sisterhood Wound manifests itself in relationships with other women.”
Today, with hyper-masculinity in women at an all time high, pitted against one another to gain jobs, men, status and ‘the body’, many women have forgotten their true nature, along with what it means to align with other women, to move in community and collaborate to achieve great things and dismantle the toxic paradigm now so prevalent in our society.
The question then remains:
How do we surrender to sisterhood and build better community and collaboration practices?
1. Have Honest Conversations
“Are you willing to be accepted as you are? Are you willing to be received as you are?”
Two powerful questions that Alyse-Marie Gallagher Warren asked herself when desiring to sit in Womens Circles, to have those deep female connections, work collaboratively and feel confident and grounded in who she was, in the presence of other women.
Meeting her fears head on, to be willing to ask herself the honest questions, was the thing that catalyzed her now potent collaborative projects, business referral partners and life-long friends.
“Never be afraid to show up as who you are- the last thing you want to do, is show up in a space where you have to play a persona that is not yours. How exhausting! Choose to look at the stories you are telling yourself, the language you use, when you are talking to other people about yourself – that is often where the magic is hidden as to what and where you need to be honest with YOU”
Practical Takeaway: Journal on the questions that Alyse-Marie asked herself. Be curious about what comes up, and when you notice a tightness, a trigger arising, gently lean in. Ask a trusted person to ask you about it. Engage in honest conversation. The act of voicing it and being witnessed with compassion is deeply healing.
2. Do The Inner Work
“Do the inner work. You cannot come into collaborative spaces until you are willing to look at your own darkest spaces, the places where you need to grow as a person, where you need to learn to fully love and cherish yourself as a person. Otherwise you come from a place of need and scarcity, desperation even.”
Else Johnson was always the ‘Tom-boy’ growing up, who believed she didn’t fit in with ‘the girls’. When the invitation came to be part of a spiritual, connected and feminine aligned group of women – she was challenged.
“I had to learn how to let go of my pre-programming of the competition and the belief that ‘I didn’t fit in’. I had to let go of the mentality that I was different and in doing so was in acceptance of the other women’s differences, uniqueness and brilliance. Be willing to see the endless possibilities both personally and professionally, that exist beyond the wounds when healed.”
Practical Takeaway: Ask to be challenged. Ask your community to reflect to you, with love, one area that you could improve in. Then go and do the work.
3. Leverage Your Insecurities
“The insecurities that arise when I compare myself to other women are my biggest hurdle. I see the challenge, and the antidote is to recognize we all have different paths and different timelines, and to connect to why we do what we do and why we love it.”
The things that most women compare and pit against one another, comes from their own insecurities about themselves. When we embrace them, we can no longer use them as shields keeping us from the connections we desire the most. For Terrie Silverman, a woman who has continually danced with her insecurities and consciously chosen to mine them for medicine, has now translated them into fabulous, relatable and humorous stories:
“all my stories are about something I feel insecure or embarrassed about, be it body shame, depression, inadequacies around womanhood, the battle for self-esteem, being a love dork”
Within your insecurities lives a permission slip for you to walk free of comparison and judgment, and gives rise to newfound community and friendship. Other women have already created it!
“If there’s a woman who’s achieved what you want to achieve – look at her as a role model and observe her tactics and strategies!”
Practical Takeaway: Write a list of all of your insecurities, all of the judgements you have about other women and how you then relate that to yourself in terms of comparison. Lean into self-love and weave a devotional practice for each one into your day. This could include creative writing or ecstatic dance. With patience, they will dissolve over time.
4. Learn To Somatically Trust Again
“If you think that you have high output now, if you are ambitious – imagine what is available when you amplify that through the power of community and collaboration? Imagine what is possible when you heal your heart and learn to trust again!”
For the modern hyper-masculine woman, regaining trust in herself and in her community is *the work*. Tarsh Ashwin developed a high level of ‘Lone-wolf Syndrome’ after enduring a particularly negative experience. She hired many Coaches and Healers to support her journey of remembering how to trust again.
Somatic healing takes the client back into their body to release trauma that has been stored there. “I did the work to come back into my body so that I could truly feel it, heal it and release it. It wasn’t until I did that work that my body literally began relaxing and I could remember what trusting felt like. It was from this place that I discovered that one of my greatest skills is actually building community!”
Practical Takeaway: Where do you feel the most tension in your body when you are invited to community or collaborative business opportunities? Invite the tension in. Research what this specifically relates to in terms of trapped trauma and emotions. Then somatically release and embody it under the proper guidance of a trained facilitator.
