Claiming our intellect is a way of taking our power back.

It doesn’t have to be in a masculine way. The invitation I’m making is about a feminine path.

The feminine path is about listening to our bodies, our dreams, following the symbols within our dreams and unconscious, researching them, following our curiosity, interacting with the world and the universe that we are part of… the question is “What message do I have to bring forward?”

This path of weaving our intellect with our families, with our children, with our home, with our relationships, our inner world, our outer world, is about alignment and synchronicity, so the world brings us back in connection to a world of excitement and adventure like we were on as young girls.

A lot of the knowledge that we were taught when we were little was in our heads: stuffing our brains, memorizing facts, it may have even felt boring, but we were “good girls”, and we did the memorizing.

As we shift into a more feminine way in life, we tune into our body, and our body wisdom. This process, within a larger collective, can be facilitated and encouraged, when we find or we connect with what I, and a lot of people call “herstory”…

So “herstory”, as in “history”, coming from a feminine perspective.

So, not all words, not all battles and kings, but also … what were families like? What about the arts? What is my own way of viewing the world or cosmovision? Spirituality? The arts? Dance? The healing arts? The moon, the stars, the cycles?

Connection to knowledge that supports rather than suppresses the growing wisdom within ourselves, is coming into balance within ourselves, nourishing ourselves, not only with the food we eat, but the ideas we feed ourselves. Coming in touch with that kind of intellect should feel satisfying, rather than draining.

It is important that this connection between the body and the intellectual side, comes in touch with wisdom, that is, connects us with our emotions, our feelings, our unconscious, and also connects us on all levels. It also verifies the internal shifts that we are going through.

So the kind of wisdom I’m talking about will validate and verify that- “what I’m feeling inside is real,” and it should be in tune with our intuitions, and our “bodily” wisdom and knowing.

One of the main things about education in the way we were taught when we were young, for the most part, is that it’s extremely externally motivated. What I mean by that is that we were rewarded like Pavlov’s dogs when we got good grades, when we passed a test, and that meant our learning was based on pleasing others, and the opposite of that is intrinsically-motivated learning, which is actually the basis of “unschooling”, founded on the idea that we have to “unschool” ourselves or unlearn all of all the habits and stuff that we learned from the past, and rather become intrinsically motivated again, which means that we start to follow our natural curiosity and interest from within.

The premise of that is that, if you watch kids you will see that they’re very motivated learners- curious, interested in life. The thing is to trust that natural instinct and desire to learn, to feed it, and to continue allowing it to blossom, rather than squashing it, and then force feeding a bunch of learning, which we see many teenagers are rejecting.

You can see this general pattern based present in stereotypes: as a reluctant student, the kid who is bored, or in the overwhelming occurrence of ADHD, or other learning disabilities. We limit teaching and learning to the classroom, rather than opening up life to be our laboratory—or to be at least in balance with it-–, and trusting ourselves to be naturally led to what it is that we’re meant to develop, and really learn from, and grow from, and grow ourselves.

When we access feminine wisdom, it is often based in stories, symbolic language, and it includes body-based wisdom and practices, and you should feel good in your body when learning. It is not closed off to intuition, art, music, nature and more. It’s like a spiral. It doesn’t have an outcome like passing a test or getting a degree, it’s not linear, it’s more like a spiral in which- it touches you somewhere inside, and something inside of you shifts and grows, and then you have something to share with the world from the inside, you have a message to give; it’s not meant to impose some learning that you should memorize and then regurgitate, rather awaken something within you, which is actually the true meaning of “educate”, which comes from “educare” in latin “draw forward”… so we’re drawing something forward.

Femininity is a body-based practice, and, our individual home is our body, and the larger body and home is the earth, and in a wider context, the universe.

So the indigenous were wise, because they based their wisdom and their intellectual studies in listening to the universe. Listening– receptivity, a feminine stage, then they created calendars, like the Mayan calendars, based on that, rather than imposing their own ideas onto nature.

We marry our feminine and our masculine sides, our ying and our yang, in pursuing intellectual activities, that not only include, but tie in our body, making our intellect part of our sensuality.

Methodologies

Sometimes, I know all of us have resistances and even hate the word research, because you could say “Oh my god, I don’t wanna sit in a library and stay so quiet, and do bibliographies, and citations and quotations” and then it’s just terrible.

Actually there are some methodologies that have come up recently that make research really exciting. One of them is called “Organic Inquiry”, which treats research as sacred. It invites you to start with a question you may have in your own personal life. Let’s just take my example: “How can I raise my children in a way that feels very aligned with my values?” I start off by journaling (journaling is a great way to tune into that intellectual space). And I offered, taking research as a sacred matter, making research as a prayer, I asked the universe to respond to me. And I know this may sound really woo woo to some of you, but, go with me here for a second. In fact there are so many books written about all this, with very scientific views, very intellectually- based, in which they do recognize that things- the world, responds to our intention, so when we have an intention in asking a question, you may already “feel” the answer, like it’s already birthing the answer from within you.

So when we ask a question to the universe, we can say that the answer wants to give itself to us, so the task of research then becomes a sacred prayer… so I hold this question, I write it down, I pray, I sit with it, and then I allow the answer to come. Maybe it doesn’t all come at once, and sometime that has to do with the beauty of the process. And then I get some synchronicities, messages, and we all know what that feels like.

As much as we resist the woo woo, you know, you have that feeling when you are thinking about a friend and she calls you right then, or when you’re thinking about an ex-boyfriend and you run into his mom in the supermarket, and then you can see how synchronicity works. If you want further proof, you can read Einstein’s theories on physics and the nature of reality.

The process of allowing answers to come to us, writing them down, and then we may have further questions, and then more answers, letting them sink in, and then we have more questions, and it’s a dance, it’s an organic inquiry.

The acknowledgement that organic inquiry makes is that research is like growing a plant, so the question is like a seed that I plant, and then I have to water it- read some books about this subject that I’m interested in, and then I start watching for signs, and then “Ooh!” I see something popping-up over here, and then I water over here, and let me nurture and tend to this inquiry. And then it kind of grows into something that I never would’ve expected.