Liberate Your Story Podcast

Today I’m sitting at my table with my computer in my tiny little home on the road. I have a hot cup of lemon tea, a pumpkin spice candle burning, a slice of pumpkin spice bread with yummy cream cheese icing on top and…snow out my window.

Can you smell the pumpkin spice? Can you feel the cold air? Can you hear the silence the snow brings? Can you feel the hot tea run down your throat and warm your tummy?

When you take all of this into your mind and interpret into your body, what does it mean to you?

Is it safe and cozy?
Is it bitter with a longing for sunny hot days?
Is it anticipation for the holidays to come?
Is it pure boredom and you’d like me to describe a completely different setting with much more excitement?

Isn’t it curious how we can all take in the same 5 items and yet have completely, sometimes opposite, experiences with them?

If I’m honest, the cup of hot tea, pumpkin spice bread, and spicey candle are an effort to make me feel better about the snow I see outside. You see, we didn’t intend to be in the pacific northwest for the winter. We were going to be chasing sunshine and warm sand. But here we are with a twist in the story we thought we were writing for ourselves.

I’m enjoying what’s in front of me in the way of my current context and experience, but my take on these items may have held a very different meaning for me than for you.

I’m currently enrolled in a coaching program called Activating Ecstasy. My participation in this group was a gift to me from my friend Sara.
We had collaborated on a few things to promote her program that I 100% backed. She is liberating women from backstories around their femininity and sexuality.
I backed this because I know that the oppressive ways I and others were programmed to believe about our being, our bodies, and our pleasures in this world damaged us in ways that just keep on giving.

What is surprising me about this coaching program, is how much-unresolved anger towards my femininity I actually have.
You see, Sara and I have all the same parts to our being in terms of being a woman.
We have the same potential in these bodies.
We have the same access to pleasure and awareness in these bodies.
But Sara and I grew up in very different permissions about the space we could take up in this world and in our own bodies.
So taking all of those same parts, we lived and experienced very different relationships with our bodies.

She was taught that her voice was not just necessary in the world, but it was expected. And she learned that her body got to come along for this ride.

I was taught that my voice was tested against men in my community for permission to access the world. I could take up space among other women but not men. I learned that my body was to be saved for someone else’s pleasure and that I was a duty to a holy mandate. Femininity was defined to me as submission to men’s authority, chaste and pure of desire, and a pathway for our lineage to continue.
I think this is where my anger comes from. In Purity culture, I was taught that my body as a vessel of pleasure was sinful. In Biblical Womanhood, I was taught that pleasure was for my husband. In my Pastor’s Wife role, I was taught that self-sacrifice was my calling.

So…love and respect my body? How?
How do you do that when it is your very foe?
How do love what is made for others and not for yourself?
How do you love what will always be imperfect and in need of saving?
How do you love your body when you are told that it can not be trusted?

Now…this isn’t what my own mother taught me, I’ve said before that she and I were on a journey of trusting our own knowings for as long as I can remember. But she and I were both subject to beliefs that asked us to live in the depravity of our own wants and desires.

I even struggle with the words I use to describe the meaning I have in my soul around this. These words are heavily loaded for me….wants, desires, depravity, chaste, pure. These words have meaning in that culture that is very powerful and drenched in my ability to be accepted by God.

Our life role as women in evangelical Christianity was to deny ourselves, trust the men for leadership and raise our children to love and obey God, as we were loving and obeying our husbands.

Imagine for a moment, what it means to live in this role. It means that anytime you rise up in your soul with thought, inspiration, curiosity, and wonder, it must be passed through the lens of male leadership in some aspect. Women caused men to fall. Remember Adam and Eve? So my femininity was defined in the church as weak. I would sin if I was given the freedom to…so we must pass through the accountability of male leadership. If you think this is not true for your experience in the Evangelical Christian church, then answer me this.
“Are you free to speak your thoughts and questions at any time in church, or is there a proper process and setting in which you can do this?”
Will you be tested against the bible, church rules and doctrines, or by the elders?
Can you read what you want to or is there an expectation for you to stay away from certain titles?
Is modesty a high value that you are being held accountable to?
Is your place and role clearly defined in your church, like youth, children and women’s ministries?
Does your church have rules about men and women settings…like never being alone with someone the of opposite sex?
Is guilt or shame the motivator for remaining in favor with God or with the leadership?

I know that our church culture is changing a bit and some churches are becoming more “liberated” in allowing women to teach in the main church, be elders, lead in various ways like worship, and even call women “pastors”.

The problem with this small move towards anti-patriarchal culture is that when we are offered these positions, there is an expectation that we will lead as men have led and that we will not be trusted enough to stand on our own, without evaluation by men.

I’m not anti-men. Please know this. I am anti-patriarchal systems that oppress women from being fully and equally human.

I am, as a 48-year-old woman, finding all the layers in which patriarchal systems oppressed my ability to be a free human.

I have lived a very free humanity inside my marriage. Partly because I am married to someone who has chosen to question all that he was taught as well.
AND this kind of patriarchal leadership was not something he even wanted. He wanted, from the beginning, to do life together.

We spent the larger part of our relationship trying to fit into the roles we thought God wanted us in. It created a lot of hurt and pain for us that we have spent the last 6 years unraveling from.
Not everyone is as fortunate as I am to journey together with their partners in the deconstruction of faith and politics.
So when I speak to this, I speak from a voice that has been free in this partnership for quite some time.
These are conversations we have regularly. And they are awakenings we have both had to journey through.

The freedom I did not know in the first 40 years of my life, has resulted in the latter years of healing and learning a different viewpoint. One free of guilt and shame.
Maybe by working with someone like Sara, I can learn a different way to experience these same components of my woman-being.
Maybe Sara, can show me the expanded vantage point I was never offered?
Maybe someone like Sara, can give me new permission to understand myself that carries no judgment or shame.
And Maybe someone like Sara knows something I wasn’t allowed to know.

You see, I think oppression happens when someone else is afraid of our potential. Their own potential feels threatened and their own freedom feels fleeting. And I do believe that some oppressors just simply need to be in power, no matter what it costs others.

Every day, I’m learning more about my own potential. It’s vast and it's magical, I think.
I no longer have to feel ashamed for being a woman.
Eve no longer decides my place in this world. And neither does anyone else, man or woman.

What if we started asking questions that actually led us to a new place of wonder?
With each question, we offer new wonder.
With new wonder, we free ourselves just one bit more.
And what if, you stopped placing rules around what you could know about your own being and lived in curious unlearning?
Might we unlearn our way right into our liberation?
If you lived deeper each day into more knowledge of yourself, is it possible that you could find the potential you knew you had?
Is it possible that you could give yourself permission to accept it all in and not deny any part of you?
Is it possible that you could finally like who you are because there is no longer an expectation of who you SHOULD be?
And if this is a new way of living with yourself, then wouldn’t it be impossible to live in shame and guilt?

What if that was your liberated story?

Liberation is realizing that the rules we played by weren’t there to help us be more…they were there to ensure we were less.
Liberation is knowing that it's YOUR responsibility to take up all the space that you want to.
Liberation is setting free the way you look at the snow…and see that its not actually there to keep you indoors with your cup of tea. It’s there to be experienced in a new way each time it comes.
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You see, Equality isn't about rising above men or whoever your oppressor might be.
Equality is about the freedom to fully live in your OWN being.
And Feminism isn’t about taking things from men and it surely isn’t about being LIKE men.
Feminism is about the freedom to be Feminine.
And that would be quite the adventure to explore, wouldn’t it?

Liberate your femininity and you liberate your story.