Hitting Bottom and Choosing to Leave the Patriarchy
Legend from the Women of the Earth Lab in Terra Luminous, Brazil
I am writing this legend from the living room of the Women Of Earth Bridge-House near Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I am in a very big Liquid State. My old Thoughtware is dying. I have decided that here I will feel everything that I have prevented myself from feeling or stored away during my whole life, therefore everything I knew is falling apart.
It began last year in October when I arrived in the space where the Archiarchy Maker Fair was held in Portugal. It was the same physical space that the first Women Of Earth Lab was held only a few days before. The space was still vibrating with the incandescent transformative field that was created during the Lab. I could feel it in all of my 5 bodies. The conversations and legends, fields of research were flying in the space. Fast forward to a few months later. I already knew I would go to the next iteration of the Women Of Earth Lab in Brazil.
The Lab was held about 1.5 hours from São Paulo. It is my first time ever in Brazil. Already the lush greenness of this country was amplifying what I would live at the lab. The connection to Gaia is palpable here, informing all my 5 Bodies.
There are many legends that are creating shifts in me from the Lab. There are two particular ones that I will write about that are working through me still.
Hitting Bottom
I had no actual experience of what this process was and what it meant. Referring once again to my experience at the Archiarchy Maker Fair and a follow up article I wrote on the topic of getting closer to Reality, experiential reality. I had no previous register of doing a process for Hitting Bottom before, hitting the bottom of Reality by coming down from fabricated Fantasies. Fantasies often hidden from plain sight being mistaken for Reality.
If I am not feeling the grief of the Fantasies I have been creating, I am living out of touch with Reality. The fall from living in a very convoluted Fantasy hits hard. It particularly hurts more because of the amount of enmeshment I have been unconsciously creating: my Fantasy hasn’t been so glamorous, my fantasy has been all about suffering. Something like “I get to live only if I suffer.” Something passed being raised in a culture of latin american and catholic drama.
Hitting bottom is the particular way that I can actually leave patriarchy.
What is the Patriarchy? There are many roads that lead to living in Patriarchy. One of them for me was living in a glamour-less Fantasy that I am a Victim of life.
Choosing to leave the Patriarchy
On the third day of the Lab the trainers Vera Franco and Anne-Chloé Destremau invited the Women to collectively create the Map of Patriarchy. One by one, each woman exclaimed out loud what the Patriarchy is.
“Being subject to the winning and losing paradigm, destroying nature, fear of being, trying to be nice, productivity, going to work on the first day of menstruating, hiding bleeding and pain, staying quiet, etc etc etc.” What are the ways you subject yourself to patriarchy?
One woman yelled “Standing in line to take your turn to write is Patriarchy!”
The space became flooded with dignified Rage from all the women now screaming what else the Patriarchy is for each and how it is affecting our lives.
Vera stood up to draw a line with blue tape across the room and said some words along the lines of “you are all currently on the side where you are living Patriarchy, there is a choice for you to leave it now, what is beyond Patriarchy is on the other side of this line.”
Some women, me included, rushed to the other side of the line screaming “it’s over, I am done with this, I am out of the Patriarchy!” Yet Vera asks “is this really the way? Have you really done it? Is it that simple? ”
It really is not. Everywhere inside and outside we are swimming in a Gameworld that for centuries has oppressed and crushed the souls who participate in it. Through it, and from that Point of Origin, us humans have been creating fast modern comfortable lifestyles that have been killing entire ecosystems, we have been polluting the waters, depleting the ozone layer, piling up trash, poisoning the rivers and oceans, enslaving entire countries, raping children, producing weapons of mass destruction, becoming war in our relationships, crushing our souls continuously by nurturing a huge headless system created by the unconscious fear and jobs to huge corporations and continue to find no way out.
There is no map created by the Patriarchy that allows us to see where and how to leave the patriarchy.
Even in that act of rebellion to try and rush to cross that imaginary line there was Patriarchy in me.
We screamed, yelled declarations of Dignity and how each felt undignified, grieved together and alone within the space, shook with Fear. The space was a cauldron of Feelings and Emotions.
I feel absolutely heart broken. None of my Survival Strategies that fuel the Patriarchy within me work for me anymore. They do not work for me to cross the line to Archiarchy, which is what lies beyond Patriarchy and Matriarchy. They do not work for me to relate to others, to create Intimacy, they do not work for living. The Fantasies, the self-battering, the playing small, the self-doubt, the child ego state victimhood, the Low Drama, self-loathing, and even creating a big show of how I am fine and doing well within the Patriarchy do not work. All these strategies work perfectly well to keep one in survival.
I am at point zero within myself. I have been dying under a rubble of conditionings. And now I choose to live. But first there is a real process of burning that in me that does not create from a place of consciousness. My unconscious ways of thinking, relating and acting are now actively burning. I choose to burn them by feeling the utter grief, Sadness, Anger and Fear of seeing how I have been operating in my life, my relationships, destroying instead of creating, and playing very very very small. The size of a Victim.
The process went on for a few hours. Women who had gone through the burning and crossed to the other side, came back to the side of Patriarchy to hold and empower other women to cross. To listen to them, to be with them.
After the many hours of the high intensity feeling and loud boundary-setting, declarations, new decisions and breaking down the strings within each of us we went outside to de-baptize ourselves from the patriarchy into the spring water lake of Gaia of the land that held us. One by one each Woman declared what she was de-baptizing herself from before jumping into the water.
Declarations such as “I de-baptize myself from staying quiet and not speaking up when I feel it!” or “I de-baptize myself from playing small and pleasing men in bed and betraying myself,” and “I de-baptize myself from numbing out and self-sabotage.” etc, etc, etc. Mine is “I de-baptize myself from being a lone-wolf and a successful independent woman as dictated by capitalism and the catholic church!”
This is our journey. This is what we stand for. We stand for a New Culture of Empowerment, Love, and where we are guided by our Archetypal Lineages to create and be real.