Everything goes quiet. You can almost cut the air, that is how dense it is with tension. The women look down, gathering their focus. Their hands are shaking. Suddenly, the sound of an instrument breaks the silence. All women simultaneously pull back their shoulders, taking a warrior stance. They raise their heads high, open their eyes wide, and the first voice calls out into the open. The other women join her, and they become one big wave of energy.
Women performing a Māori Haka is a powerful experience to watch. I feel the impact on my skin, in my heart, and even in my bones. It touches something truly ancient in me: an inner strength, my mana, my mana wahine (strength of a woman).
There is an immense power in women coming together in their individual strength. The amount of energy women have is breath-taking, especially when they come together with clear purpose and intention. Women have the power to truly change the world when they do that.
Why change the world?
First of all, it is personal.
I feel the pain in myself, because the “old”, outdated world essentially lives in me, and is enacted through me. After decades and decades of training my mind, of being logical and reasonable, I thought I had successfully changed course when I left my legal career and became a transformation coach and trainer a few years ago.
Now I realise that despite my immersion over the past 7 years in a body of work that is entirely built on authentic feelings as a resource, I am still in my head probably 60 percent of the time, if not even more. At least I can feel enough to feel that pain. It leaves me with the necessity to admit that I am hardly connected to my feminine wisdom. I struggle to discern whether an impulse is genuine and comes from my Being, or whether it comes from my rapid mind. This reality check is sobering.
I am at the “end of my road” and I have no idea where to go from here, when I do not try to escape the dead end by taking refuge in my head. It is so easy to fill this precious space with ideas of knowing. I have done that often enough. Not this time.
When I stay there and listen, I hear a soft whisper. It comes through the trees, the bright green moss in the forests. The clouds, too, and the flowers that are abundantly blossoming this spring time. It is a soft whisper reminding me of the feminine in me, of the feminine in nature, and of the connectedness of both. It is a gentle reminder, or rather, an invitation. There is no pressure at all. It is a pull, pulling me to relax into Being.
This invitation re-awakens a longing inside me that I had forgotten in the rush of my doing and pushing through with my life. It reminds me of what I had been missing in me and in the world, and what I had forgotten to create.
Secondly, it is supra-personal: It is about the world.
Like fish are immersed in water, we are immersed in the current mainstream culture. It is everywhere out there, yet most have grown blind to it. The results are frightening. Profit-driven corporations ruthlessly kill the planet. “Functioning” Zombies play along and purchase whatever is smartly promoted as the one thing that will make people happy. Meanwhile our young are killing themselves in unprecedented numbers and at earlier and earlier ages. Women still get circumcised, raped and stoned in many parts of the world. Our food is largely poisoned, so are our waters. Marine life is choking and starving on the amounts of plastic we send into the oceans every day. And it is right here, too: Maybe you work for a large or small business that focuses on profit to survive in the business world. The plastic which wraps your meat and vegetables ends up in landfill, waiting for generations of the far away future to deal with it. You regularly ingest microplastics in your own body through your drinking water. You don’t have enough time in the day to handle all your chores, and you put any soul-nourishing activities last. You need a coffee a day to keep you going, and maybe a drink or two at night as a reward for your hard day. You might be depressed or have another dis-ease. Maybe you think that you can’t do anything about the state of the world or even your own life. So you gave up a long time ago. Most likely, you are a Zombie. You suppress your own impulses, your feelings, your dreams of a different way of being, and essentially: your life force.
This life negating system works through all of us because it lives in us, unless we consciously choose a different path.
We need to birth a new world, and women need to go first
For humans and all of life on this planet to stand a chance, we need to birth a new system, a new world. I truly believe it is for us women to go first in that.
After all, women are designed to birth new life. It is absurd for a woman to play along in a life-negating system, and we have ignored that for long enough. Papatūānuku, Gaia, our planet, is crying out to us to wake up and take action.
Or maybe it is a whisper.
The question is: Are you listening?
We cannot know how it goes to birth a new world.
Being at the end of one’s road is a gift for that process. Any kind of knowing would destroy the delicate new life, because it would replace it with a known, already existing form. What we need in order to birth a new world, is to start from not knowing. Just like in indigenous mythology, at the beginning there was the Void (te kore in Te Reo Māori). It is from the void that something new is birthed.
The void is the realm of Fear. In order to create the new, women will need to relearn to fully embrace their fear to start with: Heart beating hard, body trembling, energy shooting through the nervous system. Rooted in a deep connection with the Earth, which women have a natural access to through their wombs. This is the place from which we birth a new world, a new culture, and new systems.
When women make the start, the rest of the world will follow.
Imagine radically alive women fully trusting their inner wisdom and discerning it from their mental ideas. Women deeply connected to themselves and the wisdom of the Earth, moving through feelings like the weather through the atmosphere.
Imagine women that are radically honest, take a stand, say clear Yes and No when they mean it, and who say what they want and what they don’t want. Women who bring up issues directly with each other instead of gossiping behind each other’s backs. Imagine a world in which women are courage, compassion, and love, and co-create in radical reliance on themselves, each other, the Earth, and archetypal resources.
Imagine a world in which whispers are heard. Where push and pull are in a dance with each other just like in the contractions of birth.
There is no other way than to sit in a circle in such culture. Hierarchies are a thing of the past.
When women come together with clear purpose and intention, they can truly change the world.
When women go first.
