Hello and welcome to Five Minutes in Nature with me Liz Scott.
As you can probably hear I'm still beside the Mediterranean Sea.
I'm in Spain for a few days on a retreat where I'm exploring how I might share the three principles in community.
We've already shared the three principles in community,
Myself and my husband,
And we're both on this retreat and really hearing from other people and learning and considering what's next for us in our lives as we move into the next stage of our lives.
Yesterday I wanted to share something about male and female energy which I want to continue today.
It's an idea of taking shape.
It feels like it's coming from a really nourishing place,
Looking at male and female energy.
I guess the first thing I want to say is that language is a clumsy thing and when I talk about male and female energy I don't want to make this into a battle of the sexes like men versus women.
That's not what this is about or women versus men or who's better.
When I talk about male and female energy I'm talking about different vibrational qualities that for the want of better language than having male and female,
I'm just going to use male and female because it's an easy way for me to articulate it to you in a shorthand way.
Maybe there's a better way,
Maybe there's better labels to give this energy.
Yesterday I was sharing how the pilgrimage,
As I followed the Michael and Mary lines across England,
So this was a pilgrimage of 630 miles.
I did this in March and April.
Seven weeks of walking,
Following these energy currents,
Earth energy currents,
A male and a female earth energy current that wove their way and they cross over at different points,
Making their way from the southwest of England all the way up to Norfolk.
I followed these energy currents and I know that this experience of the pilgrimage is giving me an opportunity to see something that I haven't seen,
Is to experience something that I haven't experienced,
Is to be present to something about what's next in the world.
For me there's something really rising around the power of older women and older women who maybe have a sense of invisibility or a shift in transition in their identity or wanting to move on.
A real sense of being with older women and exploring what's next,
How they might be rooted and grounded in the world.
I'm going to use the metaphor of the tree because I do love trees as you know,
But it's almost like when you've got those roots deep in the earth that you can just be whatever tree you're meant to be.
One tree is not better than the other.
This is about you finding your stability on the earth,
In the earth,
In your world.
For me there's something about understanding that the way that we have been brought up and culturally we live our lives,
There are a lot of stories that we take on board and we take as true and we believe as we grow up.
For me anyway,
I try to live my life according to being a good woman,
What I thought a good woman was meant to be like,
A good daughter,
A good wife,
A good stepmother.
I did the best I can but you know,
I'm sure I didn't do as good as I might have done,
But I have done the best I can.
And there's something about taking on board somebody else's identity or somebody else's ideas and trying to make them fit and that's what I've done for all of my life and sometimes it's worked and sometimes it hasn't.
And in this part of my life I realised that this is about shedding the identities that no longer make sense and really deeply allowing whatever it is within me to take root and to grow and to come through.
And I deeply see that this experience is also linked with the experience of men in the world.
Men often find that they too are living in a set of tramlines or boxes that have been put into boxes of being expected to behave or do things in a certain way and for many men they just don't fit in the box,
Like they aren't designed for that box that society has designed for them.
And my sense is that as we women find our power,
We will also help men find their power.
As we start to really get a sense of our authentic being,
Our authentic self,
It will show a way for men to experience that too,
Show them that there is a different way,
That they too can shed their identities,
The identity that they've been trying to make fit and yet it doesn't fit.
It doesn't fit because it's not who you are.
And the question is this,
I'm particularly speaking to older women,
What would it be like to find your power,
To find your rootedness,
To find your authentic self,
What would that look like to you?
