There is a fierce love in the heart of women. Beware! When this love is given expression it has healing powers.
As a woman, doesn’t that statement ring true to you! It does to me and it’s realization among all women is the vision we hold!
When the Dalai Lama says that “The world will be saved by the western woman,"* do you recognize yourself as part of that possibility?
In recent years, the on-the-ground stories that have emerged from New Orleans after hurricane Katrina, from Indonesia after the tsunami, and recently from Haiti after the earthquake remind us of what it looks like to live into our heroic nature, find our generous spirits, and take aim at creating a better world.
Yet we don’t have to be jolted by catastrophe to see women’s love in action. It’s evident in the mother who stays up all night fighting exhaustion to care for her sick child. We see it in the grandmother who listens to her grandchildren with such intent that she notices and is present for their day-to-day developments, recognizing and affirming in them the value of their unfolding lives when so many other things could grab or distract her attention.
A women’s fierce love is never dependant on her roles. Having spent 20 years learning to navigate hospitals, clinics, and doctors offices in order to keep her son alive, one woman now chooses to become an advocate for families beginning their tricky, perhaps treacherous medical journey--families with less education, language facility, and resources than she had. Another woman, having reconnected with a young man with a tragic story of loss and lack of basic support, jumps into a mentoring role that ends up inspiring others to be part of his new beginning.
Women’s fierce love may be global or local but it’s always personal.
How open is your heart to care freely and love fiercely? Have you dared to invest yourself in something that matters to you, even though doing so may bring you to the precipice of what your mind thinks is possible? If not, do you dare discover what is holding you back?
We have all been subjected to a worldview that can make loving and caring of lesser value than dominance and acquisition. We even do it to ourselves when we are self-critical about being soft in the work place or about our particular choices between global, communal, family, or personal needs. It happens when woman of a certain perspective ban together and directly or implicitly personally attack other women by whom they feel threatened
That world-view, self-criticism, and perspective simple do not work and, thankfully, something new is emerging. Can you feel how we are in a new time? This is a time when our fierce love can complete its emergence from the dark years of oppression, cleansed of our own compensatory competitiveness, and become the collective wave of healing that the world sorely needs.
Join the journey into this wondrous new worldview and global reality:
1. Visualize yourself as part of the larger story.
2. Recognize the things that you want most--happiness, freedom, and love—are attained by giving them to someone else.
3. Be an activist both internally and externally, taking a stand for your internal life as well as your external life.
4. When you get stuck, find the fear that is holding you back, greet it with understanding and then take a step forward, no matter how insignificant it seems.
5. Turn your love into action.
Sometimes we will journey together, sometimes alone. But when our paths cross, we will imperceptibly and silently bow to the fierce love at the heart of each woman we meet.
* The Dalai Lama, as quoted at the 2009 Vancouver Pace Summit