The Wild Woman's Way

"The most practical and inspiring guide yet to self-care for a woman's physical, spiritual and emotional needs."

Autorentext

Michaela Boehm

Klappentext

“As pragmatic as it is compassionate, this intimate, humorous, and ultimately relaxing invitation to re-wild yourself, stripping away all that is not your true nature, will leave you inspired and curious to discover the wild woman within” (Lissa Rankin, MD, bestselling author of Mind Over Medicine).

Leseprobe
The Wild Woman’s Way

Introduction

THIS BOOK IS FIRST AND foremost my passionate love letter to the body: an invitation for each of us to remember the innate wisdom of our bodies—not our looks, or our various shapes and sizes, but the living, feeling body as a portal to unlocking who we truly are.

Our bodily genius is a premier decision-making tool, a navigation device extraordinaire, an agent of release and healing, a wisdom-carrier of deep insight, and a holder of secrets and mysteries.

This book is a call to come back to our wild, undomesticated “original nature,” which, combined with an untamed heart, knows what is true for each of us. It is a call to return to the inborn genius that guides our passion, whispers in our ear with longing, and reveals itself abundantly when we allow our bodies to show us the way.

This is a deeply personal book, born from my own explorations, struggles, and victories, infused with my passion carried over the span of more than twenty years of teaching and mentoring individuals and couples in the realms of relationship and sexuality.

I am focusing here on women’s bodies, for a few reasons.

First, I am happily living in a woman’s body—yes, I said happily!—and as such am continually traversing both the fertile lands of feeling embodiment and the turbulent seas of unfeeling numbness. I am also the lineage holder, a keeper and teacher of the ancient wisdom of a Kashmiri Tantric tradition that has been passed down from woman to woman for thousands of years, and, as such, am dedicated to empowering women’s understanding of their bodies as a devotional vehicle. I see the current cultural emergence of the sacred feminine as a beautiful opportunity for exploration and growth, and, at the same time, a movement fraught with the dangers of gender wars and false entitlement.

I am writing this book mainly for women. I also hope that men will benefit: in their relationship with their own bodies, and by gaining a different access to and understanding about what it is like to be a woman in the twenty-first century.

I personally love men, and am fortunate to be surrounded by wonderful, talented men with generous hearts. This is not a book to set men against women and fuel a battle of the sexes; it is instead an exploration of what defines us as men and women, what unites us, and how to become whole and serve one another as we traverse these extraordinary times.

Never have we as women in the West had more opportunity, more choice, and more freedom. Granted, we still have a long way to go, yet compared to any other time in history, we have the greatest options and choices to forge our own paths and determine our own destinies. At the same time, with these opportunities come new challenges and distinct difficulties: the demands of life have created unprecedented levels of stress, pressure, disconnect, discomfort, and dis-ease in women.

We women are now, more than ever, able to have the careers we want, whether that is to be an entrepreneur, a CEO, a full-time parent, an educator, or a social media sensation. We make our own money and our own decisions. We vote, we march, and we support our causes. We have more freedom today than ever before to determine the kind of relationships we want—and freedom to determine if, and how, we will birth and raise children, and to make decisions about how our households will be taken care of.

With all these options, there are a dizzying variety of versions of “Woman” to which we can aspire: Boardroom Executive, Mother, Entrepreneur, Martha-Stewart-like Homemaker, Vixen in the Bedroom, Visionary, Academic, Artist, Yogini, Leader, Goddess, Scientist, Earth Mother, Warrior. We are told we should “lean in,” “drop out,” and, on top of it all, “be forever young and radiant.”

Then there are the spiritual choices. We can practice yoga, chant, dance ecstatically, meditate in a vast variety of traditions, go Zen, swirl like a Sufi, discover the Goddess or reclaim God, take “plant medicines,” and embrace a variety of pagan traditions. We can follow one teacher, or piece all the above together into our own á la carte menu of spirituality.

We can even combine our quests of spirit and sex through a variety of ?Tantric explorations. The options to work on our feminine wiles have vastly increased, from wrapping ourselves around a stripper pole, to “vajazzling” our previously private parts, to sex-toy parties and hands-on classes on how to achieve multiple orgasms.

Regardless of what we choose (and regardless of how tired we are), we are also women who want meaningful relationships and fulfilling sex lives, with all their inherent benefits and responsibilities.

The good news: amidst such a multitude of options we are free to choose what resonates with us. The bad news: it’s confusing, overwhelming, time-consuming, fraught with many pitfalls, and requires constant discernment.

No wonder we often find ourselves confused, stressed, and unsure of what to do and how to be. Even though there are abundant choices, there are subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) pressures from society, spiritual and communal dogma, our own belief systems, and the habit patterns of our past that tell us that we have to be Superwoman to be loved, or that our real choices are narrower than we thought them to be.

More than ever, it’s time for each of us to ask ourselves:

Who am I out in the world?

Who am I when no one is watching?

What does my unguarded heart yearn for?

Who am I when everything is stripped away?

How does my body want to move when I am alone?

What would I do if nothing was required of me?

These are the kinds of questions I ask women in my workshops. When they hear them for the first time, their initial response is almost always stunned silence.

Within the swirl of all the demands and options of a busy life, it becomes hard to know who we are, and almost impossible to discern what our best choices are.

In the midst of this paradox of opportunity and confusion, we have become disconnected from our most valuable ally: our body.

Stress, tension, overwhelm, and excess mental activity are drowning out our feeling. We no longer notice our bodily sensations or our emotions as they attempt to arise within our being. Without access to the subtle genius of our feeling body, we have a reduced ability to discern and respond accurately.

Thankfully, the way out of this conundrum is neither time-consuming nor expensive, and it is within the reach of every woman, no matter her schedule and commitments. In fact, the process of reconnecting with our bodily genius is something profoundly natural to every woman.

The solution lies not in adding to or enhancing our bodies, or chasing after some external ideal; it lies in remembering that the body is not just a vehicle that needs to be maintained (or disciplined) so that we can function; rather, it is a potent source of power, intuition, feeling, and abundant pleasure.

Feeling is our birthright. It is innate wisdom, and through reconnecting with it, we can re-wild ourselves back to our original nature: the place we started from, before layers of doing, pushing, …