Jean and the Circles of Women
by Josephine Laing
One of our community members, Laura Grace, has done a lovely thing. She created a Women's Symposium and this year for the keynote speaker, she managed to get Jean Shinoda Bolen to come. Jean is a prominent author, Jungian analyst and a mythologist and said that she gets asked to speak a lot and mostly she says no. But it was Laura's beautiful letters and her persistence that finally won Jean over. That alone is a very nice lesson. When we know what is right and good and keep at it, we often succeed. And Laura's symposium was a great success.
There is a reason why Jean was such a big draw. She has been a leader of women for many years, committing heartfelt deeds of activism from behind her computer screen. I first learned of her from a video produced in 1989 called "Goddess Remembered." This film left me weak kneed with longing for our feminine values in society. In it Jean spoke brilliantly about our interconnected natures and she caught my ear. As a result, she has written a great many of the books that comprise the women's section of my library. Her Goddesses in Every Woman is a lioness of a book that shows us how we reflect mythological archetypes in our lives. And her Goddesses In Older Women furthers and deepens that story. The Millionth Circle is a small book that acts as an inspiration and a guide for the forming and maintaining of women's circles. Crones Don't Whine speaks to the value older women can hold in society and Urgent Message From The Mother: Gather The Women And Save The World tells of how women do just that and encourages us in our efforts. She has written more and I look forward to reading them all one day. But for now, I think I'll just share with you what she imparted to us at the Second Annual Circle of Grace Women's Symposium.
As we women do, Jean let her words travel in a circle, a circle that pulled together all of the threads of her talk and wove a beautiful tapestry of support, inspiration and understanding. I'll try my best to summarize what she shared with us over the two hours that she spoke.
She started with the four phases of the moon. We often are aware of the waxing, full and waning moon, but we forget about the dark of the moon. She told the archetypal tale of Atalanta, who was abandoned by the King, her father because she was a girl child and thus was left to die. Jean reminded us that this is the tale of all women as we have been abandoned by patriarchy. Sitting with nothing in the dark phase of the moon. But a mother bear, representing nature, female values and womankind, adopted and raised and protected Atalanta. Atalanta, she said, is also Artemis, the fierce protector of animals, women and children. Artemis was the only Goddess in the pantheon of the Gods who came to the aid of her mother.
She told us of Hecate, the Goddess who stands at the fork in the road. Hecate can see where we have come from, our authentic self, and holds the space at the crossroads of our lives, that liminal threshold where we have not yet committed ourselves to either path. These are the choices that we make that are not seen by the outside world. They happen on an inner plane and then later are reflected in who we become.
She spoke of Procrustes, the mythological inn keeper who had a bed that he claimed fit everyone. Before proceeding on into Greece, travelers were required to spend the night in this bed where Procrustes snuck in during the night and adjusted the length of his guests to fit the bed by sawing off their limbs or stretching them on the rack. The Procrustean bed is symbolic of the ruthless disregard that patriarchy has for other values or for individual differences and special circumstances. Our parents, the schoolyard, sororities, partners, society are all the Procrustean bed in our lives.
Jean reminded us that whatever we cut off stays alive down there deep in the psyche resulting in anxiety or depression, especially if it was an important part of the self. And when we are finally able to access it later in life it is our fondest joy and can be so totally absorbing that we loose track of time while writing or painting, or dancing. She said that this is our authenticity, the depth of who we are which is essential to a meaningful life.
She went on to say, we all know that the passage of the baby under the pubic bone bringing forth a whole new separate life is a miracle. The prehistory ancient times of the Mother Goddess were based on a Divine that was able to birth everything. This was cut off by the monotheistic religions which viewed women as inferior. When God became a man he took the right to name and to label and Eve was created as a helpmate and came from the lowly rib bone of Adam, God's favorite, a man.
And here we are, so many of us finally rising up out of these types of patriarchal constraints, reaching for women's wisdom or even entering our crone years in this culture when there has never been a better time in all of his-story to be mature and a woman. We come with a sense of what our past has been. The women's movement gave us opportunities that were formerly denied to us. We know how brutal the fight to get the right to vote was. Many of us remember a time of deaths and dangerous abortions before Roe v. Wade made these choices safe for women. We have risen in the workplace to positions of power and economic stability. We can own land. And it wasn't that long ago that we couldn't. We didn't even own our own children back then.
Blessedly, the beauty of wholeness is that when we have restored ourselves to health we quickly forget entirely what it was like to have been burdened by disease. What was once resisted becomes a cultural norm. This is what success looks like. We take it for granted. Thus many of our young women today are not wary of the threats rising once more. I personally can not bear the thought that this time for women, this time of great advancements might be lost to us under the heavy hand of hierarchy. Yet we've seen it in other countries, in our lifetimes, women who were once doctors and physicists now wear the burka and are forced to retreat from society, no longer able to contribute to the benefit and the good of all, living under the firm and controlling hand of their brothers or husbands.
Jean quoted a line from a Mary Oliver poem, The Summer's Day, which read, "doesn't everything die too fast and too soon." And it's true, we've suffered ongoing wars and disease, if we've lived long enough friends and parents and even children have come and gone. In this story of self and soul we don't know the next chapter, but we do know what matters. And "matter" she reminded us is the origin of the word "mother." When we bring self and soul together, the visible and the invisible world, it is holy and imbued with the sacred. She reminded us that we can trust what we know in our bones to be true.
Jean reminded us of the Mayan calendar and the Hindu calendar both pointing to significant times of transition or the end point of an era and said that this is a significant time that we live in. We've got seven billion humans on the planet. Global warming has now been accepted by most intelligent people. Refugee islands are drowning. As within our psyches, this is a time of transition that could go either way. What on the inside collectively matters to us? How will that decision be reflected in the world?
In this short life, this story of our self and our soul, we don't know what the next chapter will be, but the soul's view shifts our perspective to the lessons we learn. And then there we stand, with Hecate, at the crossroads, making the choice that no one else will know about. Hecate is the witness, the part of ourselves who knows what we have gone through. These are times of transition that could go either way. So, will we forgive or resent? Will we separate from the addiction that harms us? Will we respond compassionately or punitively?
After Mary Oliver wrote, "Doesn't everything die too fast and too soon?" She went on to ask, "Tell me what do you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" And Jean reminded us that Mary's word "wild" can speak to us in terms of nature, the not trampled virgin Goddess, Artemis, who fiercely protects us and lets us know what is mystically and spiritually true for each of us. She said that if there is such a thing as the soul, something larger than the ego, then it can, when it is in touch with us, bring in the sacred and energize the ego. It has a heart opening, expansive, courageous aspect to it and brings the awareness that we get when we are living from our own authentic depth. It lets us draw on our own innate talents and brings us joy.
Jean said that there is a lot to be said for the state of the world we are in, we are walking the liminal labyrinth of the unknown and there are no meaningless steps. When something ends, something else begins. And she asked again, "Tell me... what do you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" Then she told us the story of how her book The Millionth Circle came in to being through a synchronistic set of circumstances which inevitably led to her next book and then to her current one, Like a Tree.
She said that when we are at the crossroads, which we as humanity are all facing right now, if we let ourselves, we can listen like she did, for our assignment, for our truth, our personal myth. If we can say to the universe, "I am available. I will pick up an assignment." Then we may just open to the answer to Mary Oliver's beautiful question and find our direction of true north. But Jean said it must have three very important aspects so we will be able to recognize it when it comes. First, it should be meaningful to us. And this has to do with the suffering that we, as individuals, have gone through. Second, it will be fun! It will use us and our talent and we will get to do it with people whose values are like ours, people with whom we can laugh and we can cry. Third, she said it will always motivated by love. And love is what gives us the energy to keep on keeping on!
With that she took a breath and so will I.
Jean said that in recent years, she has been doing "heart connected activism" at the level of the United Nations. The World Parliament of Religions had received a copy of her book, The Millionth Circle and asked her if she would come to the first meeting and if they could use her book's name for the Millionth Circle Initiative that they were planning for use at the UN. Trusting the heart's intuition is how Jean knows whether or not to do something, and for this her heart said yes. So now there is http://www.millionthcircle.org, a grassroots, international, non-profit organization located in Seattle WA, who believe that women's circles are the means through which world consciousness will change. Their hypothesis is that when a critical number of people change how they think and behave, a new era will begin.
Years ago, while Jean was active with the Beyond War and antinuclear movements, she and many other activists of the time were inspired by the hundredth monkey story. They had all been called fools for trying to stop the super powers, but this story gave them hope and now we have the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, of which, as you may know, has been signed by all but four countries of the world. In the story, a group of monkeys are given yams to eat when they come down onto the beach. The yams get sandy and are less palatable because of it. One young monkey ( the hundredth one to enjoy a yam,) discovers that if she washes her yam in the nearby stream, it is nicer to eat. Immediately all of the monkeys see the value in that behavior and adopt it as well.
Furthering her point about times of transitions and tipping points, Jean also referred to Rupert Sheldrake's research on what he has named Morphogenetic Fields. (Morpho meaning changeable, genetic meaning within a genetic line, and field referring to an energetic field associated with that gene pool.) Rupert found that bird watchers from a time just before WW11, had newly observed the Blue Tits pecking open the tops of milk bottles, which were left on the doorsteps of homes in Britain, so the birds could drink the cream. It started in one area and almost immediately spread throughout England. Blue Tits only live a couple of years. And during the many years of the war, milk was no longer delivered and was unavailable to the Blue Tit population. Several generations of Blue Tits came and went before milk started to be delivered on doorsteps again. Yet, as soon as the milk arrived once more at the doors of homes in England, the Blue Tits throughout the country immediately started to drink the cream. And there were no senior birds around to inform them of that food source.
Rupert's postulation is that the knowledge of how to get cream from milk bottles had entered into the sphere of Blue Tit knowledge and awareness. As he puts it, the information had entered into their morphogenetic field. Jean said that this story is of significance because it speaks to the critical mass of new behaviors in a biological group. And she feels that this will happen to humanity when women's circles, which actively hold strong safe places for individual women as well as for women's values, become numerous enough to inform our human gene pool.
And circles like these have already begun to work. Jean told the story of a prominent African woman activist, the founder of the Green Belt Movement, Wanguari Muta Maathai, who was imprisoned by her government because the dictator of her country, Kenya, realized that her circle based tree planting empowered women. It created sustainable development for democracy and peace, and thus was subversive to his regime and he felt that she was a threat to his entrenched masculine power structure. She was given one phone call from jail, and with that she called an American activist whom she had met in 1995, (pre-internet,) at the last UN conference for women in Beijing. The American woman mobilized an international female force to be reckoned with and had Wanguari immediately released to freedom so that she could continue to do her work in her country.
Jean also reminded us that it was not until 1991, (as a result of the women's movement from the 70's,) that female researchers entered the workplace in significant enough numbers to allow them to realize that men and women react differently to stress. When men are badly stressed their hormones cause them to move into either the "fight or flight" mode. They see the situation only in terms of win or loose and they tend to get angry and withdraw. This behavior tends to make them very poor peace accord ambassadors. Whereas when women get stressed, and it was the women researchers who noticed these behaviors in their own selves as stresses arose in the lab environments, the women would get together and start talking about the problem, and they would also clean. So the women researchers would scrub and clean the lab and converse about what went wrong. They realized that when women get stressed, they don't do the fight or flight behavior, instead women will "tend and befriend." With the female hormone, oxytocin, women don't see trauma as a win or loose situation, instead they tend to collaborate and compromise. This makes them much better peace accord ambassadors and bears the question, "In world crisis situations, who should make the decisions, men or women?" For me it's pretty obvious. I'd choose the women every time. It only makes sense.
Jean spoke of the need for the valuation of beauty in our culture. She reminded us that Aphrodite is the Goddess of love and beauty and that we women love beauty and love. This spontaneous desire to create beauty and love exists within the field of women everywhere.
She said that the 1960's and 70's were pivotal times. The women's movement was born and man took his first steps on the moon. As the astronauts headed out for their conquest of the moon, their attention was unexpectedly caught by the beautiful blue and green sphere of our earth behind them with her halo of atmosphere starkly contrasted against the void of space. This photo which the astronauts brought home created a profound awakening in our world culture to the beauty of our home and the realization that there is no other place to go, was globally transforming for us humans.
Speaking as a daughter, a mother and a psychiatrist, Jean said that the earth view was for humanity like the experience that a child has when first separating from the mother. While we were in the womb, our mothers breathed for us, fed us, and eliminated our wastes. When we first turn and see our mother as separate from ourselves and our needs, we can begin to recognize her history and her limitations and her gifts. As she becomes older and more vulnerable, she may need our care. Jean said that this is exactly where we are in our human development. We are finally adult enough, grown up enough to take care of ourselves. Our world population is now at seven billion. And we have turned and seen her, our earth, our mother, vulnerable, no longer capable of giving and providing for us endlessly, but instead, more in need of our caring for her.
When an idea comes to fruition, it becomes adopted by the culture. At first it's like, "Shouldn't women be allowed to vote?" Then just a little while later, it becomes, "Well, haven't they always voted?" When a sufficient number of women form circles with a spiritual center, not only will this help them as individuals, but it will also provide the cultural difference of bringing the masculine into balance with the feminine. Jean said that the spiritual center of a circle is formed when you proclaim or write down your intentions and state what the point is for what you are doing.
The Millionth Circle organization which Jean has helped to found with the World Parliament of Religions, has as it's mission the goal of helping to tip the scales, and thus shift planetary consciousness through connection and cooperation among members inspire compassionate solutions to individual, community and world problems. Their intention is to: 1.) Seed and nurture circles, wherever possible to cultivate equality, sustainable livelihoods, preservation of earth and peace for all. 2.) And to bring the circle process into the United Nations accredited non-governmental organizations and the 5th UN World Conference on Women. 3.) And to connect circles so they may know themselves as a part of a larger movement that is shifting the consciousness in the world. Their vision (and I love this,) is a proliferation of circles with a spiritual center which become a worldwide healing force by bringing forth the feminine values of relationship, nurturing and inter-dependency into the global culture, healing and tempering our world dominant values of hierarchy, conflict and competition, power over others and exploitation of the earth's resources. Sounds pretty great to me.
The idea of bringing women together to end patriarchy is Jean's great vision and was the driving force that moved her to write Urgent Message from Mother, Gather the Women and Save the World. Now, this year, in fact, last month, on March 8th, International Women's Day, there was a joint announcement in the UN calling for a 5th UN Women's Conference. There has not been a motion for a UN Women's Conference for the last fifteen years, since the one in Beijing. But this year, because of the committed efforts of many circles of women working for many years, we may just succeed in getting one. It is long over due and because it is the alpha males who have called for it, this is very, very good news.
Of course the opposition is rising. Vested interests feel the threat. So, women all over the planet are holding their breath for the next three or four months as plans for the conference firm up and mature. Jean emphasized that this is a tipping time, a liminal time, a make it or break it time. And she said that there is no better work then putting yourself on the side of what you love with mother bear energy, which is not ego or vengeance based, but is love based and thus has the power to bring together a circle of people who will help you to do what ever it is that needs doing. She urged us to link to 5WCW.org and sign the petition to help build up momentum in our society for the 5th UN World Conference on Women.
She also said that if anyone knows an ambassador to the UN, it would be really helpful to have their organization contact the ambassador and urge them to stand in favor of the conference and that it would be great if we could inform everyone in Washington of the need for women's values to be recognized globally and even try leaning on State Department for the same end.
So, with that I'll let you go to google 5WCW.org to sign the petition there and help Jean and all of us women throughout the world reach for that dearly needed critical mass of women's values, held in equality, allowing us to begin the process of balancing and healing our world from the long standing woes of patriarchy. And, I do hope to see you all next year at the Third Annual Circle of Grace Women's Symposium.
© 2012 Josephine Laing
One of our community members, Laura Grace, has done a lovely thing. She created a Women's Symposium and this year for the keynote speaker, she managed to get Jean Shinoda Bolen to come. Jean is a prominent author, Jungian analyst and a mythologist and said that she gets asked to speak a lot and mostly she says no. But it was Laura's beautiful letters and her persistence that finally won Jean over. That alone is a very nice lesson. When we know what is right and good and keep at it, we often succeed. And Laura's symposium was a great success.
There is a reason why Jean was such a big draw. She has been a leader of women for many years, committing heartfelt deeds of activism from behind her computer screen. I first learned of her from a video produced in 1989 called "Goddess Remembered." This film left me weak kneed with longing for our feminine values in society. In it Jean spoke brilliantly about our interconnected natures and she caught my ear. As a result, she has written a great many of the books that comprise the women's section of my library. Her Goddesses in Every Woman is a lioness of a book that shows us how we reflect mythological archetypes in our lives. And her Goddesses In Older Women furthers and deepens that story. The Millionth Circle is a small book that acts as an inspiration and a guide for the forming and maintaining of women's circles. Crones Don't Whine speaks to the value older women can hold in society and Urgent Message From The Mother: Gather The Women And Save The World tells of how women do just that and encourages us in our efforts. She has written more and I look forward to reading them all one day. But for now, I think I'll just share with you what she imparted to us at the Second Annual Circle of Grace Women's Symposium.
As we women do, Jean let her words travel in a circle, a circle that pulled together all of the threads of her talk and wove a beautiful tapestry of support, inspiration and understanding. I'll try my best to summarize what she shared with us over the two hours that she spoke.
She started with the four phases of the moon. We often are aware of the waxing, full and waning moon, but we forget about the dark of the moon. She told the archetypal tale of Atalanta, who was abandoned by the King, her father because she was a girl child and thus was left to die. Jean reminded us that this is the tale of all women as we have been abandoned by patriarchy. Sitting with nothing in the dark phase of the moon. But a mother bear, representing nature, female values and womankind, adopted and raised and protected Atalanta. Atalanta, she said, is also Artemis, the fierce protector of animals, women and children. Artemis was the only Goddess in the pantheon of the Gods who came to the aid of her mother.
She told us of Hecate, the Goddess who stands at the fork in the road. Hecate can see where we have come from, our authentic self, and holds the space at the crossroads of our lives, that liminal threshold where we have not yet committed ourselves to either path. These are the choices that we make that are not seen by the outside world. They happen on an inner plane and then later are reflected in who we become.
She spoke of Procrustes, the mythological inn keeper who had a bed that he claimed fit everyone. Before proceeding on into Greece, travelers were required to spend the night in this bed where Procrustes snuck in during the night and adjusted the length of his guests to fit the bed by sawing off their limbs or stretching them on the rack. The Procrustean bed is symbolic of the ruthless disregard that patriarchy has for other values or for individual differences and special circumstances. Our parents, the schoolyard, sororities, partners, society are all the Procrustean bed in our lives.
Jean reminded us that whatever we cut off stays alive down there deep in the psyche resulting in anxiety or depression, especially if it was an important part of the self. And when we are finally able to access it later in life it is our fondest joy and can be so totally absorbing that we loose track of time while writing or painting, or dancing. She said that this is our authenticity, the depth of who we are which is essential to a meaningful life.
She went on to say, we all know that the passage of the baby under the pubic bone bringing forth a whole new separate life is a miracle. The prehistory ancient times of the Mother Goddess were based on a Divine that was able to birth everything. This was cut off by the monotheistic religions which viewed women as inferior. When God became a man he took the right to name and to label and Eve was created as a helpmate and came from the lowly rib bone of Adam, God's favorite, a man.
And here we are, so many of us finally rising up out of these types of patriarchal constraints, reaching for women's wisdom or even entering our crone years in this culture when there has never been a better time in all of his-story to be mature and a woman. We come with a sense of what our past has been. The women's movement gave us opportunities that were formerly denied to us. We know how brutal the fight to get the right to vote was. Many of us remember a time of deaths and dangerous abortions before Roe v. Wade made these choices safe for women. We have risen in the workplace to positions of power and economic stability. We can own land. And it wasn't that long ago that we couldn't. We didn't even own our own children back then.
Blessedly, the beauty of wholeness is that when we have restored ourselves to health we quickly forget entirely what it was like to have been burdened by disease. What was once resisted becomes a cultural norm. This is what success looks like. We take it for granted. Thus many of our young women today are not wary of the threats rising once more. I personally can not bear the thought that this time for women, this time of great advancements might be lost to us under the heavy hand of hierarchy. Yet we've seen it in other countries, in our lifetimes, women who were once doctors and physicists now wear the burka and are forced to retreat from society, no longer able to contribute to the benefit and the good of all, living under the firm and controlling hand of their brothers or husbands.
Jean quoted a line from a Mary Oliver poem, The Summer's Day, which read, "doesn't everything die too fast and too soon." And it's true, we've suffered ongoing wars and disease, if we've lived long enough friends and parents and even children have come and gone. In this story of self and soul we don't know the next chapter, but we do know what matters. And "matter" she reminded us is the origin of the word "mother." When we bring self and soul together, the visible and the invisible world, it is holy and imbued with the sacred. She reminded us that we can trust what we know in our bones to be true.
Jean reminded us of the Mayan calendar and the Hindu calendar both pointing to significant times of transition or the end point of an era and said that this is a significant time that we live in. We've got seven billion humans on the planet. Global warming has now been accepted by most intelligent people. Refugee islands are drowning. As within our psyches, this is a time of transition that could go either way. What on the inside collectively matters to us? How will that decision be reflected in the world?
In this short life, this story of our self and our soul, we don't know what the next chapter will be, but the soul's view shifts our perspective to the lessons we learn. And then there we stand, with Hecate, at the crossroads, making the choice that no one else will know about. Hecate is the witness, the part of ourselves who knows what we have gone through. These are times of transition that could go either way. So, will we forgive or resent? Will we separate from the addiction that harms us? Will we respond compassionately or punitively?
After Mary Oliver wrote, "Doesn't everything die too fast and too soon?" She went on to ask, "Tell me what do you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" And Jean reminded us that Mary's word "wild" can speak to us in terms of nature, the not trampled virgin Goddess, Artemis, who fiercely protects us and lets us know what is mystically and spiritually true for each of us. She said that if there is such a thing as the soul, something larger than the ego, then it can, when it is in touch with us, bring in the sacred and energize the ego. It has a heart opening, expansive, courageous aspect to it and brings the awareness that we get when we are living from our own authentic depth. It lets us draw on our own innate talents and brings us joy.
Jean said that there is a lot to be said for the state of the world we are in, we are walking the liminal labyrinth of the unknown and there are no meaningless steps. When something ends, something else begins. And she asked again, "Tell me... what do you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" Then she told us the story of how her book The Millionth Circle came in to being through a synchronistic set of circumstances which inevitably led to her next book and then to her current one, Like a Tree.
She said that when we are at the crossroads, which we as humanity are all facing right now, if we let ourselves, we can listen like she did, for our assignment, for our truth, our personal myth. If we can say to the universe, "I am available. I will pick up an assignment." Then we may just open to the answer to Mary Oliver's beautiful question and find our direction of true north. But Jean said it must have three very important aspects so we will be able to recognize it when it comes. First, it should be meaningful to us. And this has to do with the suffering that we, as individuals, have gone through. Second, it will be fun! It will use us and our talent and we will get to do it with people whose values are like ours, people with whom we can laugh and we can cry. Third, she said it will always motivated by love. And love is what gives us the energy to keep on keeping on!
With that she took a breath and so will I.
Jean said that in recent years, she has been doing "heart connected activism" at the level of the United Nations. The World Parliament of Religions had received a copy of her book, The Millionth Circle and asked her if she would come to the first meeting and if they could use her book's name for the Millionth Circle Initiative that they were planning for use at the UN. Trusting the heart's intuition is how Jean knows whether or not to do something, and for this her heart said yes. So now there is http://www.millionthcircle.org, a grassroots, international, non-profit organization located in Seattle WA, who believe that women's circles are the means through which world consciousness will change. Their hypothesis is that when a critical number of people change how they think and behave, a new era will begin.
Years ago, while Jean was active with the Beyond War and antinuclear movements, she and many other activists of the time were inspired by the hundredth monkey story. They had all been called fools for trying to stop the super powers, but this story gave them hope and now we have the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, of which, as you may know, has been signed by all but four countries of the world. In the story, a group of monkeys are given yams to eat when they come down onto the beach. The yams get sandy and are less palatable because of it. One young monkey ( the hundredth one to enjoy a yam,) discovers that if she washes her yam in the nearby stream, it is nicer to eat. Immediately all of the monkeys see the value in that behavior and adopt it as well.
Furthering her point about times of transitions and tipping points, Jean also referred to Rupert Sheldrake's research on what he has named Morphogenetic Fields. (Morpho meaning changeable, genetic meaning within a genetic line, and field referring to an energetic field associated with that gene pool.) Rupert found that bird watchers from a time just before WW11, had newly observed the Blue Tits pecking open the tops of milk bottles, which were left on the doorsteps of homes in Britain, so the birds could drink the cream. It started in one area and almost immediately spread throughout England. Blue Tits only live a couple of years. And during the many years of the war, milk was no longer delivered and was unavailable to the Blue Tit population. Several generations of Blue Tits came and went before milk started to be delivered on doorsteps again. Yet, as soon as the milk arrived once more at the doors of homes in England, the Blue Tits throughout the country immediately started to drink the cream. And there were no senior birds around to inform them of that food source.
Rupert's postulation is that the knowledge of how to get cream from milk bottles had entered into the sphere of Blue Tit knowledge and awareness. As he puts it, the information had entered into their morphogenetic field. Jean said that this story is of significance because it speaks to the critical mass of new behaviors in a biological group. And she feels that this will happen to humanity when women's circles, which actively hold strong safe places for individual women as well as for women's values, become numerous enough to inform our human gene pool.
And circles like these have already begun to work. Jean told the story of a prominent African woman activist, the founder of the Green Belt Movement, Wanguari Muta Maathai, who was imprisoned by her government because the dictator of her country, Kenya, realized that her circle based tree planting empowered women. It created sustainable development for democracy and peace, and thus was subversive to his regime and he felt that she was a threat to his entrenched masculine power structure. She was given one phone call from jail, and with that she called an American activist whom she had met in 1995, (pre-internet,) at the last UN conference for women in Beijing. The American woman mobilized an international female force to be reckoned with and had Wanguari immediately released to freedom so that she could continue to do her work in her country.
Jean also reminded us that it was not until 1991, (as a result of the women's movement from the 70's,) that female researchers entered the workplace in significant enough numbers to allow them to realize that men and women react differently to stress. When men are badly stressed their hormones cause them to move into either the "fight or flight" mode. They see the situation only in terms of win or loose and they tend to get angry and withdraw. This behavior tends to make them very poor peace accord ambassadors. Whereas when women get stressed, and it was the women researchers who noticed these behaviors in their own selves as stresses arose in the lab environments, the women would get together and start talking about the problem, and they would also clean. So the women researchers would scrub and clean the lab and converse about what went wrong. They realized that when women get stressed, they don't do the fight or flight behavior, instead women will "tend and befriend." With the female hormone, oxytocin, women don't see trauma as a win or loose situation, instead they tend to collaborate and compromise. This makes them much better peace accord ambassadors and bears the question, "In world crisis situations, who should make the decisions, men or women?" For me it's pretty obvious. I'd choose the women every time. It only makes sense.
Jean spoke of the need for the valuation of beauty in our culture. She reminded us that Aphrodite is the Goddess of love and beauty and that we women love beauty and love. This spontaneous desire to create beauty and love exists within the field of women everywhere.
She said that the 1960's and 70's were pivotal times. The women's movement was born and man took his first steps on the moon. As the astronauts headed out for their conquest of the moon, their attention was unexpectedly caught by the beautiful blue and green sphere of our earth behind them with her halo of atmosphere starkly contrasted against the void of space. This photo which the astronauts brought home created a profound awakening in our world culture to the beauty of our home and the realization that there is no other place to go, was globally transforming for us humans.
Speaking as a daughter, a mother and a psychiatrist, Jean said that the earth view was for humanity like the experience that a child has when first separating from the mother. While we were in the womb, our mothers breathed for us, fed us, and eliminated our wastes. When we first turn and see our mother as separate from ourselves and our needs, we can begin to recognize her history and her limitations and her gifts. As she becomes older and more vulnerable, she may need our care. Jean said that this is exactly where we are in our human development. We are finally adult enough, grown up enough to take care of ourselves. Our world population is now at seven billion. And we have turned and seen her, our earth, our mother, vulnerable, no longer capable of giving and providing for us endlessly, but instead, more in need of our caring for her.
When an idea comes to fruition, it becomes adopted by the culture. At first it's like, "Shouldn't women be allowed to vote?" Then just a little while later, it becomes, "Well, haven't they always voted?" When a sufficient number of women form circles with a spiritual center, not only will this help them as individuals, but it will also provide the cultural difference of bringing the masculine into balance with the feminine. Jean said that the spiritual center of a circle is formed when you proclaim or write down your intentions and state what the point is for what you are doing.
The Millionth Circle organization which Jean has helped to found with the World Parliament of Religions, has as it's mission the goal of helping to tip the scales, and thus shift planetary consciousness through connection and cooperation among members inspire compassionate solutions to individual, community and world problems. Their intention is to: 1.) Seed and nurture circles, wherever possible to cultivate equality, sustainable livelihoods, preservation of earth and peace for all. 2.) And to bring the circle process into the United Nations accredited non-governmental organizations and the 5th UN World Conference on Women. 3.) And to connect circles so they may know themselves as a part of a larger movement that is shifting the consciousness in the world. Their vision (and I love this,) is a proliferation of circles with a spiritual center which become a worldwide healing force by bringing forth the feminine values of relationship, nurturing and inter-dependency into the global culture, healing and tempering our world dominant values of hierarchy, conflict and competition, power over others and exploitation of the earth's resources. Sounds pretty great to me.
The idea of bringing women together to end patriarchy is Jean's great vision and was the driving force that moved her to write Urgent Message from Mother, Gather the Women and Save the World. Now, this year, in fact, last month, on March 8th, International Women's Day, there was a joint announcement in the UN calling for a 5th UN Women's Conference. There has not been a motion for a UN Women's Conference for the last fifteen years, since the one in Beijing. But this year, because of the committed efforts of many circles of women working for many years, we may just succeed in getting one. It is long over due and because it is the alpha males who have called for it, this is very, very good news.
Of course the opposition is rising. Vested interests feel the threat. So, women all over the planet are holding their breath for the next three or four months as plans for the conference firm up and mature. Jean emphasized that this is a tipping time, a liminal time, a make it or break it time. And she said that there is no better work then putting yourself on the side of what you love with mother bear energy, which is not ego or vengeance based, but is love based and thus has the power to bring together a circle of people who will help you to do what ever it is that needs doing. She urged us to link to 5WCW.org and sign the petition to help build up momentum in our society for the 5th UN World Conference on Women.
She also said that if anyone knows an ambassador to the UN, it would be really helpful to have their organization contact the ambassador and urge them to stand in favor of the conference and that it would be great if we could inform everyone in Washington of the need for women's values to be recognized globally and even try leaning on State Department for the same end.
So, with that I'll let you go to google 5WCW.org to sign the petition there and help Jean and all of us women throughout the world reach for that dearly needed critical mass of women's values, held in equality, allowing us to begin the process of balancing and healing our world from the long standing woes of patriarchy. And, I do hope to see you all next year at the Third Annual Circle of Grace Women's Symposium.
© 2012 Josephine Laing