ReMothering with Clara Belize Wisner

Today is the day we know as Easter.

I suspect if you’re following me here; it isn’t news to you that most of the collective symbols of Easter and possibly even the resurrection story itself, stem from pre-monotheistic religion or pagan rituals and iconography. 

The Easter egg? A pagan sign of fertility and rebirth. 

The Easter bunny? A pagan sign of prolific fertility, similar to that of rabbits. 

Eating lamb? Flowers? Baskets? Wool? All also related to the ancient pagan celebration of Ostara, which took place over the spring equinox. 

It seems a little too synchronistic to me that Christianity’s Jesus resurrection also falls within just a few days of Ostara, the festival of fertility, new life, and growth. 

Similar to Christmas and the pagan solstice celebrations of Yule. 

There is just too much obvious overlap for these pieces of Christianity and paganism not to be related. In fact, blending Christianity’s holidays with that of pagan rituals and celebrations made it much smoother for ancient people to say they were Christian without really changing much about their day to day life and traditions. 

I fully and completely take all stories and parables coming from religious and spiritual text as metaphorical and rich with symbolism. 

The Soul speaks in metaphor. The Soul speaks through art. Literalism is of and for the mind. 

One of the gravest mistakes of organized religion is taking the stories in the Bible or other religious texts as literal.

They are and never were meant to be taken literally. Plus, they have all been translated so many times by so many people with very human agendas and intentions, not to mention the humans that originally wrote down the stories were also writing it down from their own human memory (which has been proven wildly faulty again and again) with their own agendas and lenses. 

My intention with writing this isn’t to dog on organized religion, but it is to point to what is underneath and what came before. 

The thing about religion and spirituality is that it all has the same inception point. That’s what I’m most interested in. 

What would Jesus dying and being reborn be metaphor for? And how is that metaphor related to the symbolism of the egg, the rabbit, and the season change into spring included in the pagan celebration of Ostara? And ultimately why am I, a spiritually inclined nutritionist in service to the mature feminine frequency I refer to as The Mother, interested in any of this? 

Because all of these themes point to the paradoxical truth that birth and death are related.

Birth and death are two sides of the same coin. You cannot live if you are not willing to die. You don’t get life without death. 

Jesus died and was reborn anew. 

Spring bursts forth from the silent stillness of winter. The grounds are fertile once again after the freezing cold. 

The Mother knows that the birth of a child is indeed the death of herself as a maiden, or as a mother of one, and that the birth of a family of four is the death of the family of three. Any mother understands how much loss is involved with each new birth.

The Mother knows that we must die to birth the next iteration of ourselves.

The Mother knows about cycles, seasons, circles, rhythms and spirals. 

I am no theologian, although a part of me would love that job, and I do not claim to be a scholar of the Bible or an expert on paganism or on anything except what I teach about feminine physiology, but in my life and my practice, I have learned to die well. 

I have attuned myself to that feminine frequency that lives within the feminine physiology and let it lead it my life, and She has taught me that to ascend, you must first descend.

If you would like to truly live, in this body and this lifetime, you must be willing to come down and into the depths of yourself, into the flesh and the blood, and be willing to come into close contact and relationship with your mortality, so that you may meet the eternal part of you. 

This is the wisdom that She has always taught. This is the wisdom subtly weaved into the narratives still told on this Sunday morning around the world.  

She is not dead. She is alive and well if you know how to listen and see. She is in every single cell in your body and atom in the cosmos. 

You must allow what is not true to slough away so that you may rise into the next iteration of yourself. And then do it all again. Until your body dies and you realize you’re part of an even broader cycle of life and death. 

You must die to live, my love. 

Happy Easter.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

I want to tease out some concepts around “listening to your body” and what that actually means. 

I am a proponent of listening to your body. All of my work with my clients and my students revolves around teaching people to listen to their bodies. 

In my nutrition work I guide people into a relationship with their food and nourishment that is self lead and oriented from the inside out. I don’t give people a set of rules to follow that come from theory or dietary ideas. I keep putting people in the driver’s seat of their well being. I keep asking and reminding them to listen to how they feel and pointing them to what they already Know.

In the embodiment practice I created, HomeBody, I teach people how to come inside themselves, listen and attune to their inner landscape.

In my long term 1:1 work I am guiding my students into their most nourished selves and serving that aspect of them until they grasp how to serve it by themselves. 

All of my writing, podcasts and free content seeks to penetrate toxic collective ideas about women’s health, beauty, and the roles we’ve been programmed to play as women. 

I see an epidemic of people thinking they are doing “embodiment work” and “listening to their bodies” when really they are just super dysregulated, disembodied, high on addiction, and simply attuned to whatever makes them “feel” good in the moment. 

How could this be the case, you may ask?

The answer lies in the nuances of listening to the body on a deep, cellular level, from a regulated, mature place versus listening to the body on the surface, static layer level.

Here’s an example: when a heroin addict listens to their body it will say: “I want heroin.” But is heroin what the junkie’s body needs? 

On one level; yes. If they do not get heroin they will get sick. They will puke. They will shake and convulse and feel awful. 

On another level, a junkie’s body really needs to detox. A junkie’s body needs to be lovingly fed, rested, and cared for. This is the Truth. 

But when the junkie is in an addictive state of mind he or she will never feel the Truth of the second level, UNTIL, he or she gets to a place where he or she is not in the addictive cycle. 

Another, less extreme, example: Scrolling on our phones. Is scrolling on our phones something our body needs? No. Is scrolling on our phones something our body does without thinking? Yes. Similar to heroin we get dopamine from it. Dopamine makes us feel good. Our bodies like to feel good. So on the first level our bodies need the scroll. 

On the second level; in our collective society, the typical western person’s nervous system needs a lot less mental stimulation and a lot more physical movement. Scrolling on our phones is the opposite of that. It’s physically restful (we are typically still) and very mentally stimulating. Same goes with watching TV. 

But what does the average person do to unwind when coming home from their typically mentally stimulating/physically restful job? They collapse and watch TV or scroll on their phone because they feel exhausted. When they would probably really feel much better after a walk around the block.  

But, when we are dysregulated, we cannot attune to the thing that would really make us feel better in the long run. We tend to just go for the short term treat or the habit.

The way I talk about this phenomenon in my work with clients is that you have to “develop the ability to intuitively eat/intuitively decide what to do with your body.” 

You don’t get to starve yourself for most of your adult life and then jump into eating ‘intuitively’ because you ‘want to be more in your feminine’. There needs to be a reestablishment of connection to your body and her language first. Which is far more reverent and feminine anyway.

You don’t get to come home from work feeling super agitated and edgy and get to ‘intuitively’ decide how to rest. 

You need to ground yourself first. 

You need to go slower first. 

You need to collect data about yourself and your patterns first. 

You need to be committed to something deeper (Truth) first. 

You need to be willing to question yourself and your motives. 

You need to get sober.

In overarching terms, you need to grow up. 

I’ll give another personal example. I used to be a heavy drinker. I used to binge drink a lot. Over time and via lots of work; I became a very rare occasion drinker. And then there was a point where even if I had a few sips of wine I felt it my sleep and in the morning. 

It became clear that on a long game level it was not at all what my body wanted. It wasn’t True for me to drink. And once I saw that; I haven’t had a drink since. 

Does that mean that sometimes, at a fancy dinner or during a celebration, I don’t have a knee jerk reaction to want some alcohol to loosen up or enjoy with a really good steak? Of course.. but I am so deeply oriented to the deeper level of what is True, I physically can’t do it. This has taken years and years of practice and listening. 

This isn’t a place I got to from a weekend “embodiment” retreat. It’s from literal moment by moment practice dropping into the deeper Truth that my body ultimately resonates with. 

When I say you need to develop the ability to intuitively eat or intuitively move or rest etc, I mean you need to develop an attunement to the thing below the surface level pleasure seeking of the body. 

I mean you need to develop an attunement to something beyond survival mechanisms. 

I mean you need to attune to the Truth, which is in the body, but not necessarily what the body wants most in the moment. 

To attune to this you need to be in a regulated state. You need to be able to feel your pussy and your feet on the ground. 

You need to be aware of the air on your skin. 

You need to be able to drop below the mind’s stories. 

You need to be able to differentiate a mind that is spinning out and aligned action. 

You need to be able feel the beauty of your heart beat no matter what is happening around you. 

You need to be able to hold yourself in presence. 

If you can’t do those things: you aren’t going to make a Truth oriented decision. You’ll be making an egoic, addictive or survival based decision. 

The practice then is to repeatedly come back to the basic practices of orienting yourself in space, feeling what is in your body presently and leaning toward it, instead of away, and coming back to your breath, and that is the only practice. 

At my retreat SAVOR we will be putting this into practice. We will be dropping below the mind and survival into the regulated place of alignment with Truth in the body and with the Earth. Eating well. Moving well. Nourishing ourselves. So that we may touch the spots beyond survival. So that we may integrate it all. So that we may actually feel the Intuitive Truth for us, maybe deeper than we ever have. 

Still 2 spots open. March 19-22. Sage Lodge in Pray, MT. Reach out ASAP to have a call with me this week if you’re interested. Discounts available for locals (Montana based). 

Free for All HomeBody Practice on Sunday, March 17th. 9-10am PST.

You can register here.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

*I have been writing daily posts on my instagram sharing what I am deeply grateful for in my life as a 30 day practice for a program I am in. This particular post just wanted to be way longer than instagram can hold so I’m sharing it as an article on here.

The journey I have been on with my body and movement is a long one. 

My body is and always will be my most potent teacher. 

I have always been into movement and ‘exercise’ as long as I can remember. It was paired with my obsession with the body and how it worked. It was a healthy and true fascination that quickly got distorted by the obsession with controlling, manipulating, and ultimately punishing my body.

I am sure there was a time when I was very young that I didn’t think about my body and my body and I were fully in sync. I watch my girls now and I see how natural listening to your body and moving your body is. However, I don’t remember this. The only early thoughts about my body I remember having are that my body was wrong, too big, bad, and ultimately disgusting. 

I can probably track these thoughts back to as young at 7. Around 11 I started to consciously exercise to try to change my physical appearance. I would run and run and run the dirt roads around my house. By the time I was 13 it was obsessive and the pushing myself hard physically was paired with a deeply warped view of food or what was ‘healthy.’ 

One of the things I am most grateful for early on in my relationship with my body is that I got into weight lifting very young. I had a gym teacher freshman year of high school that was super into women lifting weights and being strong. He was all about freshman girls setting personal records on bench pressing and would regularly tell us girls how we should always be able to squat more than than the boys. The things I remember him teaching are actually solid foundations of muscle building/hypertrophy that I still agree with today. 

At the time I definitely used this knowledge of weight lifting in unhealthy and obsessive ways, but ultimately, I am so grateful for how early on I got comfortable with barbells, kettlebells, and that feeling of building strength from the inside out.

Girls feeling strong externally, helps them feel strong internally. I know this.

I always loved being really strong and I was relatively strong. Although, now I know if I had eaten more I would have been much stronger.  

As I moved into college, stopped playing sports and having designated practice times or workout sessions I oscillated between lifting weights, punishing my body through hours of cardio on machines, hot inferno yoga, spinning, lots of hiking and biking, and doing absolutely nothing but cowering in bed avoiding daylight after drug and alcohol binges. I had this double life for all of my twenties.

On one hand I was a super health nut and on the other hand I was a complete hot mess ratchet party girl. 

I continued this double life through my stint in Peace Corps, where I was very addicted to opiates, a disturbing (but mostly fun) drunk, all the while doing lots of yoga, meditation, and running half marathons.

When I got back to the states determined to stop using pills as aggressively (but of course still once in awhile), I continued this pattern of sweaty hot yoga with weights, going to spinning classes at 6am after taking ecstasy and blowing lines all night, and eventually I ended up where most people like me do: CrossFit.

What a perfect way to punish myself for my debaucherous ways. 

During the time I got really into CrossFit I did start to clean up my druggy-ness. I could clearly see that I was getting to an age where it was no longer cool to do drugs; it was sad. I was also starting to do the internal work and that god-sized-hole was starting to fill.

As I got more in touch with myself and came back into my body I started to see how deeply all my exercise and movement was about punishment, not joy, and just like the drugs and alcohol slowly stopped being such a thing, the super intense exercise did too. 

By the time I got pregnant with my first baby I was fully sober from substances other than a drink every now and again. I exercised throughout pregnancy and as soon as I could I got back to it after she was born, but my body had started to revolt. 

I was all the sudden incapable of getting into yoga poses that had been very easy for me before. Just walking around the house picking up toys and doing dishes started to flare up excruciating lower back pain that would have me laying on the floor every 10 minutes while I tried to clean up the kitchen. 

I got pregnant again when my first daughter was 6 months old and I started to blame all the aches and pains on pregnancy. I religiously saw a chiropractor, acupuncturist and massage therapist, but I was in a lot of pain and discomfort most of the time. 

I continued to do some pregnancy approved weight training, gentle yoga and walked as much as I could but the truth was it all made me feel exhausted and I was shocked at how little I could do compared to what I used to be able to do pre pregnancy. 

By the time my second daughter was born my body was so entirely unrecognizable to me sometimes I literally didn’t recognize myself in the mirror. I was in pain almost all of the time and I gained more weight in those first 6 months of my second daughter’s life than I had in her pregnancy. Also, around this time is when my severe insomnia started. 

Throughout all this I continued to weight lift, walk, and do yoga as much as I could because I told myself it had to be helping, right? 

I started seeing a nerve pain/nervous system specialist who told me to stop doing yoga and that yoga may have actually been worsening my back pain. She also told me to just stop doing anything but walking and only walking when I absolutely felt up for it. 

It was revolutionary for me to hear these things because even though I was deeply exhausted on every level I just assumed that yoga and weight training were going to be good for me. 

I stopped doing all yoga and my back pain got significantly better within a week. I stopped weight training other than doing the super basic lifts slowly and making sure my nervous system was fully relaxed before and after doing the lifts. I walked only when I felt like it. 

This is honestly where I have been at the last few years. I was able to start doing yoga again about a year ago but I notice that it would flare my back pain if I did it too much. I’ve been through phases where I can lift a little bit heavier and harder. 

I continue to have a lot of body work and be in a constant state of communication with my body. Today, movement is purely for joy and training with weights is to feel strong and capable internally (and be able to play with and lift my kids).

I am still healing the consequences of the choices I made around my body in my twenties. I am clear on that. This last 6 months or so I have felt strong, my sleep has regulated, and my body generally feels good. 

This last summer I stumbled upon Bowspring yoga. I was intrigued because of the somatic repatterining it talked about. 

So I started a totally new thing and it was confusing and weird at first. I would get deeply incommensurately frustrated during class (a good sign you’re repatterining something), but, ultimately after each class I felt clearer. I could tell it was shifting holding patterns I’d had in my body for years. I felt more open and connected to my body and it felt like there was a whole new level of embodiment I was touching. 

After about 3 months of bowstring my back pain stopped flaring. I started to feel like I could “spring” up off the floor when playing with my girls. I was more open emotionally and my body stopped feeling like it was a creaky suit of armor. 

Another wild benefit I’ve experienced from Bowspring is an ability to orgasm in all different positions. Yup. So much more openness in my pelvic floor translated to a higher libido and more pleasure during penetrative sex. 

Now, about 6 months into my Bowspring practice, I am deeply grateful to the modality. It has healed and continues to heal my relationship to my body and help me to fully take up residence in my body in a pleasurable way. My physical body is starting to align more and more with my spiritual embodiment.

My work in the world is truly at the intersection between the physical and metaphysical. So much of what I teach is about how to bring nourishment, healing, openness, and connection from the spiritual, mental, and emotional bodies into the physical body.

Our physical body needs practices to ground and root our mental, emotional, and spiritual healing in to. It’s great to have realizations and make connections emotionally and spiritually, but if you don’t know how to bring it into the physical body, your third dimensional reality will not change.

Bowspring feels like a practice that does this. It helps us repattern the way we hold our bodies so that more energy and life-force can flow through them unimpeded. It helps us open physical pockets of holding and move old energy out. I am so grateful for that. 

I will be offering some super basic and simple Bowspring practices at my retreat SAVOR. I actually believe that somatic repatterining is a huge aspect of truly healing and absorbing nourishment into our physical bodies.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

For the last 2 weeks I have been in a forced pause because I’ve been sick and my kids have been sick.

A part of my mind really did not like this. I am smack dab in the middle of promoting one of the highest stakes things I’ve ever promoted, my retreat SAVOR, and I have been left exhausted, plagued by brain fog, and unable to get myself up on the floor. 

But, today, I started to feel my energy come back online. I feel myself peeking out from between the covers of my sick bed with a whole new outlook on life. 

As I sit in awe of this newfound energy and opening I’m having a profound realization of how I am always led by the deeper thing in me, even when the more superficial things are really loud and upfront. 

In hindsight (and it’s important to see that we can’t always see it in the moment), I am realizing that through this sickness (downward moving energetic) I fully let myself off the hook.

I could hear all the voices that wanted to pressure me into doing more, keep myself going at a certain expected pace, to make things happen no matter the cost to my well being and I was aware of these voices. In some ways I even believed them.  

But ultimately, I listened to my body. I heard the voices that said I should be doing so much more than I am doing, but I let myself be, because the truth is, pushing myself to do things when everything in my physical body is saying “No. Rest. Stop,” is just not worth it to me anymore.  

Nothing is worth the cost of my well being. Even a total and complete career “failure” is not worth risking my well being. 

Because when you run yourself that hard, you’re already failing, even if you’re optically winning somewhere else.

True success to me means that I learn the lesson to be learned and I learn it all the way through.

True success, to me, means I am more integrated as a whole. It means I have come into a more authentic version of myself. 

True success to me means all parts of me are welcome and can have a place at the table, not just the parts concerned with the rigid societal ideal of what success looks like. 

I really let myself sink all the way down into the comfort of my sick bed. 

I released all the deadlines, the “have to’s”, I really took pleasure and joy in the extra time spent with my girls.

I allowed myself to BE sick. More rest and sleep. More tea. Canceling plans and appointments.

I took many hot baths and trips to the wild hot springs up the road. I spent way more time dancing, slowly, with lots of breaks to roll around on the ground. I spent more time doing nothing at all because, in reality, it was all I could do. 

Even though there were voices in my mind telling me how entirely not ok this was, I did it anyway. I gave it to myself anyway; voices and all. 

The thing about letting yourself “have” the nourishment of an acute illness, a (sometimes, forced) pause, a disappointment, a let down, an overwhelming melancholy, a period of deep story-less exhaustion, a winter, is that, eventually, you have been on the bottom long enough that the only option is to push off the floor and float back up. It’s just the way it works.

Winter will always, eventually, shift into spring. Death always serves life. Look at the collapsed tree in the forest and how many burgeoning things make new life in its dead trunk. 

We all need periods of rest and retreat. Our bodies are of the Earth and Earth Herself works in seasons and cycles. Women have a deeper connection to the truth of cycles within their very flesh and blood. The way we demonize the winter and our bleeding bodies is similar to the way we demonize death and these inevitable phases of downward depressions that are simply natural. 

Show me how you treat yourself when you are sick and I’ll show you your relationship with the Feminine. 

The true meaning of investing in yourself is allowing yourself to have your downward cycles. You can let them nourish you. You can let them show you where you need to put your attention and your energy. 

These downward cycles do not have to be miserable. You don’t have to get deathly ill, injure yourself, or develop a chronic illness. You don’t have to bypass the sense of something not being right in your life until you’re in a full blown meltdown or keep creating drama that needs to be constantly dealt with so you exist solely on the surface of your life.

You can let yourself go inward and downward on your own accord. That is what I would call truly investing in yourself.

It is possible to let yourself have the nourishment you need before the call for it is forced upon you.

However, this requires that you do something differently than you normally do. 

It requires you question all the voices in your head that say: “Not right now! Later.” Or “That thing I want just isn’t for me. It’s for other people, better people, richer people, people with more time and less demanding schedules.” Or “If only I had more fill-in-the-blank (money, time, energy, skinnier body), then I would give myself what I want.”

The voices that give you these excuses are the exact voices that would tell you to just keep on keeping on as you are because it’s cool, you’ll figure it out later. These are the voices that keep you in a life that feels stagnated, stuck, and lacking in nourishment and eventually, normally, ends up in a life-stopping-ly loud wake up call of some sort. 

You have to see that these voices are not the voices you will need to listen to if you want to grow, expand, and have more. These voices actually want you stay smaller, less expanded, and still because that is what feels safe.

That’s why expansion generally doesn’t just feel “good”, it also comes with some “Oh s**t! This is scary!” Vibes as well. Expansion should be exhilarating, which includes nervousness and a sense of stretching. 

Investment in your holding ability for life will require you to stretch your capacity to face uncomfortable situations head on. However, this doesn’t have to equate to force and “earning” it. This can also pertain to how much pleasure, passive nourishment, and wholesome goodness you allow yourself to have and be present with. 

SAVOR the retreat is exactly that, an opportunity to stretch your capacity to hold more wholesome goodness in your life.

It’s an opportunity to be fed better than you’ve maybe ever fed yourself.

It’s an opportunity to tune into your body more than maybe you ever have.

It’s an opportunity to let your body lead you maybe more than you ever have.

It’s an opportunity to be held by me while you unwind what is holding you back from letting yourself receive what you already have; the love, the beauty, the connection, and the depth of your life as it is.

It is an opportunity to feel yourself come into right relationship with your own nourishment and fully nourished self.

What would happen if you gave yourself this? What would happen if you said; “Yes. I can have this. I can invest in myself.”? 

Message me to have a call about coming to SAVOR ASAP. Only a few spots left.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

We have been programmed to believe that our bodies are not to be trusted. 

We collectively believe our bodies are fickle, prone to break and get sick, full of unruly needs for food, rest, and sex. We collectively believe we need to default to someone else to tell us what is wrong with us and what we should do about it. 

If we are constantly exhausted it couldn’t possibly be as simple as we need rest. 

If we are constantly craving sugar it couldn’t possibly mean that we aren’t getting enough calories and our body is craving a quick shot of energy.

One of the things I ask all my clients is: what does your body need to heal? 

In my experience, if we really tap in and move underneath the mental ideas of what it means to be “healthy” everyone knows what they need to heal.

They’re just looking for some short cut or work around so they can avoid the subtle, baby-step, no-silver-bullets, lifestyle altering work that is actually required and they know is required. 

So they get another supplement they read about on Instagram. They go to another practitioner who tells them they just need this diet or this cleanse. They go to the doctor expecting to get some explanation that isn’t as inconvenient as what they already know to be true. 

In my health journey, as a teenager and young adult; I had the self loathing trifecta of: disordered eating, substance abuse, and obsessive exercising/body abuse.

Then as I got a little more health conscious and grew up; I got digestive issues, thyroid, and adrenal burnout. I healed a bit via diet, learning about my physiology and implementing lifestyle changes.

Then I had babies (two in two years) and gained around 80 lbs give or take and developed severe insomnia. 

Through all of this I can track a desperation to find “the answer” that would explain and fix my “conditions.” 

At first, it was all about controlling my body and its needs so that I didn’t have feel anything.

When that got entirely too painful, then it was about reaching some epitome of health which also had to do with external ideals and aesthetics and superiority. 

This third phase of health issues (weight gain and insomnia) has been an oscillation between some desperation to feel “normal” (whatever that is) and trusting my body’s path.

The thing that reverberates truth through my Life is: when I orient to my body as my greatest ally, I am less tempted by reactionary grasping to quick fixes, overriding my Knowing, and desperation for some external ideal of health. 

When I orient to my body as my greatest ally I remember my innate value, as I am in the present moment.

To stay with the innate value of a body that falls so far out of the ideal aesthetic and consistently, lovingly feed, care for, and listen to it is truly a revolutionary act in our collective society.

Some days I honestly don’t know where I’ve gotten the fortitude to stand so solidly against the narrative that fat bodies do not deserve the love and attention that thin bodies do. 

A huge part of it is I simply know my body is on my side. I know she is my ally. I know she would never have gained this weight or screamed at me via the inability to sleep if she didn’t need that experience in some way, if there wasn’t a massive amount of wisdom within the experience for me. 

I know I have to listen, and you cannot listen if you are deep in judgment. 

I know feeding her well is never going to not serve her.

Some days I definitely feel at a total loss as to why this excess fat hasn’t dissolved, but I trust that if I continue to care for myself with the utmost reverence that my body will regulate to the size she feels best at. And maybe that will be this size. I have to be ok with that too, although I don’t believe that to be the case for me. 

As a woman who comes from a line of women very much plugged into the collective ideas that being fat is shameful, bad, disgusting, and entirely the last thing you would ever want to be, I can see that I may have gained the weight that my mother and her mother couldn’t let themselves gain but needed to. It’s representative of all the ways they didn’t let themselves take up the space they needed to.

I will allow myself to take up the space I need to with zero shame so my girls don’t have to worry about the space they take up. 

I also know that our bodies are our karma. They are the very last aspect of our being to transform. They are the result of our decisions 10 or 20 years, maybe lifetimes, ago. Our bodies are our subconscious. 

The level of rigidity and control required to hold a body in a shape and size that isn’t true is insane. Literally like working against the flow of a huge rushing river. No wonder women are so badly depleted. We are all imbued with the idea that we must fight against our bodies.

Our bodies want to be healthy. They want to be robust and dynamic and morph and shift with the phases of our lives. They want to be our ally. 

Acquiescing to our body’s needs with reverence may result in a change in body composition because there has been so much contortion in the past. She must come out of all twists and self inflicted girdles, but if you keep listening, treating Her with reverence and have a deep respect and trust for Her guidance you will not be led astray.

I know my health journey and body story continues to be permission for so many others who also feel on shaky ground about what their bodies deserve. 

Our bodies deserve our continued gentleness, nourishment, devotion, trust and deep love. They are our greatest ally. No matter where we go in this life; they go with us. They are our home. 

You can punish, starve, injure, bend, and deform them and they will not leave you. Like a sweet loyal dog the soft animal of our body will stay even if you beat it. It will cower. It may not be ok. But it will stay. An example of unconditional love if I’ve ever seen one. No matter where you go, there she is; with you. You can’t say that about any other human.

If you want to feel safe, loved, and cared for: care for your body. If you can feel safe with her you will feel safe in all places because she is there with you.

Start to attune to your body by coming to HomeBody practice. In HomeBody we offer our bodies loving self touch and neutral appreciative attention. Next HomeBody is Wednesday February 21st at 10am PST. Send me a message to sign up. 

If you are ready to spend 4 days connecting to your body and fully, totally meeting her needs SAVOR is for you. March 19-22. Sage Lodge in Pray, MT. Message me to discuss details.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

What is required for you to live from a place of overflow? For you to be fed, full, nourished?

What would you need to feel like you had the capacity to be generous with your love and your being?

I guarantee it’s a lot more than you think or want to admit.

If you think sneaking in a hot bath on a Sunday while your husband takes the kids to the park or getting a yearly massage with a gift card your mom got you for your birthday is decadent and fulfills your need self care; I am here to say, you need to start thinking a whole hell of a lot bigger, my love.

Our bodies, minds, and souls need attention, nurturance and tending to.. consistently and with big doses of permission and approval.

We need to stop thinking about what our bare minimum needs are and start thinking about how to give ourselves so many inputs that feed us that we can’t help but feed others.

We need to be big and audacious with our self care rituals.

Women in joy in their bodies feed the world. When women are overflowing with life force the world is fed. That’s the right relationship between women and life.

Life is nourishment and nourishment is life. If you are eating the bare minimum to get by or giving yourself the bare minimum inputs in the form of rest and bodily care you will have a bare minimum life.

Maybe not externally, but internally your life force will be dwindling and starved.

Life force requires nourishment. It requires inputs so that you may offer true aligned output.

If we want a life where we feel alive, nourished, creatively fulfilled, where our kids have a mother that is happy and present, where our husbands are sexually satisfied and also well nourished, we better make sure we are full to the brim with life force.

Because we are the faucets that the nutrients of Life pour out of.

Too many women feel like their needs need to come last.

Too many women feel their bodies are a burden. That they need to control themselves lest they let their unruly appetites turn them into a woman who has “let herself go.”

We need a world where more women have done exactly that.. let themselves go and be full and fed and nourished.

A world where women claim their needs with bold rightness and go above and far, far beyond the bare minimum for themselves.

I have been on a journey of giving myself more than the bare minimum for many years.

As an entrepreneur in the wellness industry I saw the women I looked up to and heard them talk about their weekly self care rituals. I was floored by the amounts of time and money they spent on themselves.

One of my early mentors told me, “My weekly massage is where I make the most money,” and, “the moments I sit in silence with nothing to do are the most valuable to my business.”

What she meant was that the massage and space was where her best ideas came to her. It was where she filled herself up so that she could continue to hold what she held (which was a multi 7 figure business and huge team).

And so, about 8 years ago now, I wrote out what I thought was an almost unimaginable goal of having a massage once a month, a yoga class weekly, and one full day a month that I took completely off work and just did whatever I wanted to do.

This was a BIG financial and time investment in myself at the time. It stretched me wide.

But I did it. And each year I added more to this list of inputs. I started building a team of body workers and practitioners that knew me and my body. I started to see how these investments in myself actually opened me to receive more in all facets of my life.

I saw how focusing on being nourished meant even more nourishment could come in.

I saw how giving myself these seemingly “extravagant” things created more space in my container. They were literally investments in ME.

Now, I have so much pure permission for self care. I take incredible care of my body. I eat 3 square balanced meals a day plus snacks and always, always take a lunch break.

Every two weeks I get a massage, have acupuncture, a chiropractic visit, Rolfing work and a cranial sacral and energy clearing session. This is my minimum. Sometimes I go every week if I’m having an issue.

I get a facial quarterly and go to as many yoga classes as I feasibly can with my schedule. I do daily pussy practice, morning sun light, journaling, walks, workouts and dancing. Lots of salt baths and skin care. I do castor oil packs multiple times a month, vaginal steaming before and after my bleed. I have an osteopath I go to a couple times a year as well as a naturopath that knows my health history and I can come to with questions or for insights.

This doesn’t even include my counsel of coaches, friends, support systems that I touch in with multiple times a week. My husband and I go on 24 hours trips alone to hotels and have beautiful fancy dinners together once every couple months.

I give myself so much support. And I receive it all wholeheartedly. And true nourishment requires both; the giving and the receiving.

I really let myself HAVE it. I go into my sessions with my body care team and I let myself open and receive their love, touch, and wisdom. I am very particular who I hire and all the people I work with respect me.

This is not a “oh look at me and look at how lucky I am.” No, this is the result of 8 years of slowly building this level of nourishment into my life. I can fully receive it now. The average person could not actually stay present with all that self care, even if they did have the appointments.

It started with that monthly massage which was all I could receive at the time.

There is no fully nourished woman that doesn’t have the same level of commitment to her nourishment as you see here.

It doesn’t mean she necessarily does all the sessions and body work, but she may nourish herself deeply in other ways. Her nourishment is the top priority.

Nourishment is going to be fully bio-individual. I personally love the bougie, spa experiences, maybe that isn’t your jam and you would prefer to have hours on the beach each week or singing lessons or a new watercolor set.

The amount of money spent isn’t important, the investment in yourself and joy is.

When my clients really start to get a taste of what it would mean to be the fully nourished version of themselves they comment about what an insane amount of attention it will take. And there is this moment of “why do I need so much more than everyone else?” There is this comparison that comes in.

I feel it too. Part of what is so confronting about writing this and letting the true level of support I have in my life be seen out in the open is that I don’t want to feel like I need so much more than most people could ever imagine having or giving to themselves.

But that right there is the little virus that I want to kill off right here and now: what it takes for you to be full cannot be subject to comparison.

We are not in some competition of who can take up the least amount of space and have the least need is the winner. Or vice versa: who can spend the most money at self care doesn’t win anything if they aren’t actually being nourished by it.

We actually don’t need to compete with each other at all. When women are full there actually isn’t any comparison and competition at all. Feeling that way is a sure fire sign that you’re not fully nourished.

That is the old story that has kept women starved, brittle, and constantly about to snap at their children, their partners, and feeling void of joy.

That is bare minimum thinking and I am interested in the world of overflow thinking. The world where women are so full of themselves that it spills over and feeds everyone around them. A world where women are juicy and fed and capable of savoring every centimeter of their lives.

Your needs are not a burden.

Your needs are yours to tend and meet and go beyond.

You can want more for yourself.

You can have big, audacious desires and I know that the only way for you to really meet those are through filling yourself up to the very brim with love, support, care, and attention.

If you are ready for a big fat dose of having-ness expansion. If you are ready to give yourself something that will nourish you down to your bone marrow; SAVOR is the place for you.

A retreat over the spring equinox (March 19-22) at Sage Lodge in Pray, MT with me curating the food, the conversation, and offering self care practices and contemplations that will leave you with a blue print of your most full and nourished self.

Send me a message to get on a call to talk about your desire for something like this.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

A woman in her true power is a woman in her sex. For a woman, these two things cannot be separated.

True power is not domination or force, it is innate. It is the thing that just is. In this sense, my power doesn’t diminish your power. Me becoming more powerful does not mean you need to become less powerful.

In fact, in this way of interpreting power, me being more powerful may actually invite out more power from you.

This is True Feminine power.

Power that isn’t about who has the upper hand, but about that which cannot be grabbed by anyone else, no matter what. Power like this is is like sand through the hands. No matter the effort it always stays the same. No one can take it away from you.

A part of me cringed a little when I wrote that first line. “A woman in her sex,” is a phrase I have historically rolled my eyes at. Psh…What does that even mean?

All these ideal-bodied, scantily clad, bedroom-eyed, ‘tantra teachers’ running their own finger tips over their exposed cleavage, whipping their hair around, with looks of contrived ecstasy on their faces, humping the air and flicking their tongues and calling this power. I was not impressed in any way shape or form.

To be honest, I’m still not impressed by most of what I see in the tantra, sex-positive, pleasure-seeking teachers out there.

That is part of what this post is about: how one dimensional, scripted, and formulaic we are about sex and what we consider to be sexy, even the people who may think of themselves as edgy sex educators and coaches.

Coming back into my true power has been a long and winding path for me, and therefore, so has coming back into ‘my sex.’

As a young woman I was very interested in sex. I loved it. I had a lot of it younger than most people would consider ok. I wanted it and I wanted to.

I also had a lot of questionable sexual experiences fueled by drugs, alcohol, and a desperate need for validation and love.

I grew up too fast in a lot of ways and that isn’t something that’s anyone’s fault, it’s just the way my life went. In true Manifesting Generator, 1/3 profile fashion, I learned a lot through trial and error and went too fast for what most would consider my own good, although I know it to be exactly how I learn.

In my twenties something dark started creeping in around sex for me. Maybe it was too many sexual experiences where my consent had been a little too questionable. Maybe it was all the self abandonment for perceived love and affection catching up with me. Maybe it was the virgin w***e split phenomenon that so many women experience.

In hindsight, I can see at this point in my life I started to feel shame around sex when I actually hadn’t before. Sex stopped feeling as easy. It stopped feeling as good. And I started to realize that most of the time I was playing the object and not the subject in each sexual experience.

Sex started to be more about how it (I) looked and what it produced for my partner and less about experimentation, my experience or my pleasure. The only pleasure I really experienced was through the pleasure of my partner.

Did he like the way my ass looked there? Is eye contact or no eye contact hotter while I suck his cock? Should my moans be higher pitched or quieter? Dirty talk or no dirty talk?

This is such a clear example of where I gave up my Feminine power. I started to completely and totally be in my head during sex. There was no connection to my body from the neck down, which is a big problem when it comes to something as intimate as sex.

I don’t think my story is unique. I’m willing to bet most women reading this story resonate with a large part of my early story with sex.

After all, it is what our porn-obsessed, intimacy averse, fake tits and ass loving, talking-about-sex-openly-is-taboo society teaches and models to us.

Objectifying women’s bodies and sex is the standard. Thinking about women’s physical attributes in regard to how men might perceive them is the norm.

I was having a dance party with my toddlers the other day and that Megan Trainor song “All about that Bass” came on. I remember this song being such a boon to the body positivity space at its time. People treated it like it was some testament to body love. But listening to it the other day I realized that the song literally orients women’s bodies to men’s pleasure. The lyric is: “Yeah, my mama she told me don't worry about your size. She says, boys like a little more booty to hold at night.” Why are we orienting to what boys like at all?

Megan Trainor is also no where near fat and the idea that she is is as this song suggests, is insane and definitely part of the phenomenon I am speaking to here. It’s glaringly obvious anywhere you look in collective society that women’s bodies are some sort of commodity. There is zero focus of how it feels to be your body. What makes you feel good? What do you actually like to look like without the programing of the collective body ideals? What makes you feel alive and juicy and like the energy of Life is moving through you? Because that is what “your sex” actually means.

What a way to create the illusion that a Woman, who is quite literally the portal between the manifested and unmanifested worlds, is powerless and weak.

What a way to create a disconnect between a Woman and her power, which is intertwined with her sex, than to let her think her pleasure, her overflowing juice, and her subjective experience of sex and life isn’t important.

I am not interested in blaming, shaming or pointing fingers here. I am not going to talk about the ‘patriarchy’ or rape culture, although you can see where these concepts could attach on to what I’m laying out.

I want to come at this neutrally and with a lot of sober curiosity and willingness to parse apart what is collective programing and what are the values and beliefs I would like to consciously stand upon now as a full, fed, and adult Woman. As a Woman who does not orient toward the collective mental ideas of “what men like.”

Collectively sex is taboo. We talk about it in hushed voices, with side glances and innuendo. To really touch the tender spots of our relationship to sex, our desire, and our shame around it, can feel almost crippling. It can be so damn hard to communicate about.

We are sold this picture of sex that it is for young, hot, hairless, coifed people only.

Young twenty-something women in bikinis with waxed legs and vaginas can want sex and be sexy, but pretty much any other type of woman is out of sexually acceptable bounds for the collective.

If you’re a woman who is a mother, frumpy, middle aged, overweight (whatever that actually means), have bad hair, dress in yoga clothes every day of your life, and smell bad from time to time you aren’t worthy of desire according the mainstream narrative.

No wonder when I talk to so many friends who are mothers to young children they talk about how their libido is no where to be found. Yes, early motherhood can be exhausting but we don’t typically hear the narrative that fathers to young kids don’t want sex.

Sex is a biological need. It should be an experience that is full of love, connection, intimacy, pleasure, and fun. Connected, mutually pleasurable sex is nutritive, not depleting.

It is my theory that if there weren’t so many collective stereotypes about what sex needs to look like and be like and how women need to look and behave mothers wouldn’t be too tired for sex.

If women were centering themselves in their sexual experience then having sex or being intimate with their partner would be a fulfilling experience for them and they would want more of it.

It is all the baggage and expectation we put on sex that makes it feel like a chore or makes it an energy expense instead of gain.

We don’t have to carry this baggage with us, but we do need to unwind why we are carrying this baggage with us in the first place, release it, and choose a new, more resonant framework to operate from.

“Our sex” is where is get our juice from. Our connection to the life force that moves through all things. It is that buzzing, humming, electrical zing that moves from the crown of our heads through the tips of our toes.

This isn’t necessarily the act of sex, but the aliveness in our own pussies and hearts and that connected channel of energy between the two. The act of sex should be a place where we feel this aliveness in an intense and almost involuntary way. It’s where we can lose ourselves.

As women, if we are disconnected from our pussy and its aliveness, we will feel sucked dry, brittle, rigid, hard, dead and empty. We will feel angry, fed up, trapped, and crusty.

Sexual energy is pure creative energy and we are innate creators.

The ability to access this sexual energy has absolutely nothing to do with how you look or your physical form.

This is the lie I want to penetrate right here, right now: The way you look has absolutely nothing to do with how much access you have to your sex. Your relationship to the life force that lives in your pussy, heart and voice does.

How much access you have to your sex will definitely change the way you look, how much life force radiates from your eyes and skin, how you hold yourself, how you feed yourself, how you care for yourself, how you hold boundaries, how you mother.. it will change everything if you let it.

But you will not get more access to that sexual life force by changing your appearance. You can only get more access by being willing to go back, down, and in to your body.

This is why the size of your body has absolutely nothing to do with what gets your partner’s cock hard or pussy wet. Pussy and cock don’t lie. You can create some weird patterns around the need for certain kinds of visual/mental stimulation around turn on (porn), but our bodies know when they come in the presence of someone who has a deep, intimate relationship with their pussy or cock.

The twenty-something, perfectly-lean-muscled-body, big luscious lips, doe eyes, perky tits, and a bubble butt becomes almost boring when you really start to touch what sex actually is and what it actually has to offer.

Men with big fragile egos may want some aesthetically ‘perfect’ trophy to show off to their externally oriented friends. These men may even get off on it in some shallow one-pump-chump way.

But when things are entirely externally oriented and there is no depth and it will all feel empty soon enough.

Our egos could never know how to get what our Souls need.

A woman who is in her body, who is well-fed and full, has her sex turned on from the inside out will always be entirely more capable feeding a Soul than a woman who has her true hunger on locked away.

A mother, who has willingly entered through the portal of birth and opened her body to create life has infinitely more capacity for sensation than a woman who has not crossed that threshold.

A woman who has let life lead her and guide her into version after version of herself, who has taken on the inevitability of aging with grace and a willing acceptance, who has not fought against the loving life lessons she has been dealt is a woman who has infinitely more capacity to receive than a woman who fights that which is inescapable and completely natural.

These are the tenants upon which I would like stand as a woman who knows that I am worthy of pleasure, satisfaction, connection, intimacy and being the subject of my own experience. These aren’t just statements that I will repeat to myself over and over again like some positive sex affirmations (that s**t never worked for me), these statements are just True in the deepest sense of the word.

A woman who inhabits her her body fully is the sexiest thing on the planet. A woman’s age, size, wrinkles, flab, has absolutely nothing to do with a woman’s ability to inhabit her body fully and come into a deep relationship with her life force that runs through her and in every living thing on the planet and the planet itself.

A woman’s body was meant to create and sustain life. Creating life, sustaining life, birthing life does nothing but deepen a woman’s capacity to receive and therefore to feed the Soul of her partner, which is what our partners most want from us.

Breasts that have made milk and fed children are precious and deserve to be touched and worshiped at the hands of her beloved. And they are full of sex in a way that virgin breasts are not. I look at my breasts, sagging and stretched as they may be and I remember them before I nursed my two children, and the depth and richness of love I feel for them is deeper and more satisfied now.

Pussies that have birthed babies actually have more capacity for all sensation. This idea that we get “stretched out” is so entirely untrue and in fact, offensive. Our bodies were made for birth. It is the most natural thing on the planet. A pussy that has opened to that level of union with the divine is a holy thing in indeed. Any man who has connected, intimate sex with the mother of his children knows this.

Yes, there are things like prolapse and tearing, but those things are fully and completely curable and have to do less with the process of birth and more about how we connect and touch ourselves after becoming mothers. If you have prolapse put your fingers loving inside yourself and massage daily with castor oil and see what happens.

If you believe your physical body is less desirable or capable of pleasure because of your size, your age, your life circumstances, you physical attributes, your looks, I ask you this: Less desirable to who and what? To people who are only interested in your external appearance and what they can get from you? Less desirable to you? Why?

Orienting to what the idea of what men want is entirely untrue. Orient to what you want, what feels good in your body, what makes you feel alive, juiced up and fed.

It is not the main point, in any way shape or form, but what real men want is a woman who is connected to Life itself. That is what is exciting and enlivening and turns them on in the deeper more whole body way.

As my dear friend, Blaire Lindsay, told me once when I was really working through a spot with this stuff: “You are the [pleasure] faucet.” You are the source of the deeper pleasure. When your pleasure is on and and turned up, then the man’s is too and all parties are fed and nourished in all their cells with life force.

Some Inquiries to Sit With:

* What am I oriented to when it comes to sex?

* What makes me feel truly sexy that isn’t externally oriented or physical appearance based?

* If my body was fully capable and deserving of all pleasure, what would change in my life?

* What have I been programmed with when it comes to sex and who has good sex and who doesn’t? What does ‘good sex’ mean to me?

Come explore orienting to your own nourishment at my retreat SAVOR at Sage Lodge in Pray, MT. March 19-22. Send me a message and we’ll set up a phone call to talk about your readiness and more details if you feel called.

Come Experience Truly Being with Your Body with love and presence

January 24th. 9-11:30am PST. Online. More info or sign up here.

Other Resource on this Subject I recommend exploring:

* Carly Rae’s Nectar Classes

* Blaire Lindsay’s writing and podcast, Siren, about the intersection of sex and motherhood.

* Olivia Lara Owen’s writing and videos about sex, hunger, and nourishment of the Woman

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

Responsibility is a word that typically can send people in one of two directions: 

* Victimization/Resentment: Responsibility takes something from me. I resent how much I have to hold. I feel bitter about the amount of responsibilities I have.

* Self-Punishment/Martyrdom - I need/should/have to do this. I need/should/have to be responsible here. Even though a part of me doesn’t want to, I have to sacrifice and abandon that part because this is the “responsible” thing to. 

When we relate to responsibility from an immature/naive place we tend to oscillate between these two camps. 

Personally, I notice I like to start with self punishment in the name of “responsibility” and then eventually swing into victimization and resentment.  

Motherhood is the perfect place to play out these two reactions to responsibility.

It’s so easy to tell ourselves, as mothers or adults, that we have so much we need to do, are responsible for. We can’t pay attention to our own well being when we are so needed by others. 

There are very real and necessary responsibilities that come with parenthood, and it can be so easy to martyr ourselves there. 

But we must come to see that it’s because we martyr ourselves so readily that we get so resentful, uptight and rage-y.

This is also, on one level, completely and totally understandable. Mom rage is a thing. It is a symptom of so many things that are wrong with our society. 

I can easily swing into a rage when I think about how little mothers are appreciated for the way we hold together the f*****g fabric of the future of humanity.

You know, no big deal or anything. 

We are simply raising the next generation of humans, keeping everyone fed, clothed, healthy, and safe, while also running businesses, holding down jobs and careers, being attentive and loving partners, and more. 

The responsibilities here are massive. 

They just are. 

If you’re a mother, you do have a responsibility to raise your children to the best of your ability. You do have the responsibility to feed, clothe, keep your kids safe, etc. 

No matter how you relate to these responsibilities; they exist. 

One of the main things becoming a mother has taught me about growing up and being an adult is that responsibilities are a reality. 

Yes; you need do nothing. In the sense that you could always just lay in bed all day if you really chose to. No one is holding a gun to your head and telling you to get up and brush your teeth and even if they were, you could choose to be shot instead of do the things. You could.  You don’t have to any of it. You do have free will here. 

Every single thing you do in a day is a choice you’re making on one level. And getting in alignment with this fact is step one to relating to responsibility more soberly. 

If you’d like to be a mature adult Woman, you have accept that you have responsibilities and that you are always making choices. 

And some of those responsibilities you won’t enjoy or want to do, but you still have to do them. 

The key is, instead of spinning off into victimization or winding yourself up with self punishment, can you let your responsibilities be neutral? 

Can you accept where you are and the choices you’ve made up to this point? 

This is the only way to get to a place where you actually find joy in the mundanity of everyday life. You don’t find joy by telling yourself you’ll find joy and forcing yourself to do things that don’t feel true. That will leave you shriveled, rigid and cold. 

You don’t find joy by repeating affirmations of joy or by doing mental gymnastics to explain away all the ways you feel resentful and victimized by your life. 

In simpler terms, you don’t find joy through your mind. You find it through your beingness and if an element of your beingness is not on board with something, the first step is to accept that too. It’s not to pretend it doesn’t exist or shove it in locked room in your psyche where it will fester and become toxic. 

You practice accepting all the parts of you. Radical self acceptance. 

As you relate to responsibility in this way you will find you have far more energy because you’re not wasting it fighting the inevitable or punishing yourself for the ways you don’t align with your life. 

This isn’t a call to check out or go on autopilot through your days either, that’s a form of self punishment because it requires you to leave your body (abandon yourself). 

This is an invitation to see where you make responsibilities your God. 

When you stop feeling like your responsibilities have power over you and also stop fighting them, you will have found the life-giving middle way of mature relating to your life. 

This is a supple, dynamic place where you can simply meet what’s true in the moment without victimization or any form of self depreciation. 

You wash the dishes because the dishes need washing. Not because your husband is a slob and your kids don’t respect you and you have do everything. 

You cook a wholesome dinner most nights because it’s true to nourish your family. Not because you need to control every little piece of food that goes into your kids’ mouthes and make sure it’s organic and healthy or else you’re a terrible mother. 

AND 

Maybe sometimes you don’t fold laundry because it honestly doesn’t matter more than snuggling your kids on the couch after dinner.

Maybe you give up that project you were volunteering on or you say no to another sport for your kids because you actually don’t want to drive around anymore after work and that’s more important than looking like a ‘good’ person or a ‘good’ mom. 

When you relate to responsibility in this neutral way you create space to meet each adult task from a center point of Truth, not obligation or defiance. 

This is wisdom. This is maturity. The ability to hold nuance, subtlety, and paradox. The ability to adjust your stance depending on the circumstances. 

When we can leave the charge behind and find the neutral still point we can find legitimate joy and connection in our responsibilities. 

Responsibility is simply the ability to respond.

More and more as I practice relating to my responsibilities in this this neutral way my tasks, jobs and duties feel pulsing and alive. 

The more I truly cultivate the ability to respond soberly, maturely and with a lot of love the more turned on I am by my every day life.

I literally feel my pussy and heart fill with juice because of my every day life. 

This is living as a mature adult Woman. To be in your body and pulsing with life force because you are here, doing exactly that which you are made for, living. 

Introducing JUICE …

I will slowly be releasing more details about this all day workshop, but for now I’m keeping it fun and mysterious and only sharing the name, the date, and the location.

If you’re turned on by that (even if you don’t want to admit it) then this is for you.

I want to play with the players so I’m making it $111 less for those of you who want to come to the workshop and are willing to say YES solely based on what you feel from this piece of writing and this name and image.

Sign up for the big time player price of $333 today here.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe

I have been taking my time processing what is happening in the world right now.

I have been taking in what I can while staying grounded and rooted.

I’ve been in a pressure cooker of personal stuff and intense emotional waves for the last couple weeks, as I know a lot of people are.

As a person who is not Jewish and does not have any personal ties to Israel or Palestine it can be easy to tell myself some story of “this isn’t about me or this doesn’t involve me.”

There is a way I could believe the idea that I should just stay out of it and let those who do live and know this conflict and subject matter speak.

And that is partially true. I will not pretend to know more than I know or be something that I am not.

But as a teacher that teaches about true nourishment on a physical, mental, emotional and spiritual level there are actually some things I need to say.

It would actually be more untrue for me to say nothing here.

I can feel in my bones that this point in time is a never-going-back-moment.

On a spiritual level this is a time of prophetic proportion.

There is something playing out here between what it means to be justified vs unjustified and ultimately good vs evil.

The truth as I see it is both sides have ample reason to be justified in their hate, violence, and judgments. Each side is due vengeance on some level.

As Charles Eisenstein said in his recent piece about this conflict: “vengeance is self-escalating, as each atrocity loosens further the bonds of restraint.”

In this situation there have been atrocities committed on both sides, that is clear.

The bonds of restraint have blown completely off to where we have witnessed some of the most inarguably ‘evil’ and inhumane atrocities.

But those evil and inhumane atrocities were predicated by slightly less evil and inhumane atrocities over time.

And my point here is, people are suffering and people have suffered gravely.

I will not actually choose sides here because choosing sides is what perpetuates the justification vs un-justifcation.

I could also escape into bafflement and fog. To say, “I just can’t believe this is happening. How could people DO these things?!” And then feel uncomfortable while I move along with my daily life.

It also would be easy to do some major spiritual bypassing here. To say something like, why can’t we all just get along? We are all human, right?! To say something about the human heart and its capacity for forgiveness and move on.

We are all absolutely human but if you haven’t noticed humans are capable of some mind bendingly awful things.

The human heart does have an infinite capacity for forgiveness and it also has an infinite capacity to wall off, shut down, and to vitriolicly spew hatred.

I won’t ever operate from a political, policy, or social justice level.

My being only sees things from the microcosm of my own internal practice and on the macrocosm of spiritual principle.

To me the externally oriented level in between the micro and the macro is just a mirror, so the only way to change something at that level would be to change your relationship to it.

But that is not a reason to bypass the very real third dimensional pain that is happening here either.

So what do and we do here?

What is the commensurate response to what is happening here? What is this asking me to see on the microcosmic level of my own internal landscape? How can I alchemize what is inside me so that I may see a change on the outside?

Or as my teacher Perri Chase said recently in one of her teachings on this: What is here for me?

What comes up for me when I sit with these inquiries is that this moment is asking us to look inside ourselves and see where we are capable of vengeful atrocities.

To look at all the places in our bodies and minds where we harbor hate, the desire to hurt, the desire for retribution and pay back.

We are being asked to go in and go in deeper than we have maybe ever gone before.

To feel our pain, our anger, our wounding, so that it may be alchemized.

I just keep hearing the statement: You have to feel it to heal it.

This isn’t just for us on an individual level, but it is also for us on a collective level.

We are indeed interconnected. What hurts you, hurts me.

And we can continue to add to the collective trauma by perpetuating an idea that there is an us vs them, a good vs evil, a justified and an unjustified, or we can get down on our knees and forgive ourselves.

My mentor, Coly Vulpiani, gave me this prayer and I have given it to many of my clients. This prayer is meant to be directed at yourself, not others: “I judge you not. I forgive myself for what I have created with my judgement. I embrace you. I accept you. I leave you with the blessings of forgiveness.”

This prayer is what I leave you with as advice on what to do in times like these.

Forgive yourself, my love.

Lay your judgments of yourself down. Be open to and with the most inhumane parts of you.

Practice forgiveness towards the parts of yourself you’d like to keep locked away.

This does not mean let those parts drive. No, it means to stay open to them and see what wounds they are protecting so that you may connect with them. Connection is what we need right now. Radical self acceptance and self responsibility.

And also, take care of yourself.

Hold your family close.

Feed yourself well.

Rest and sleep.

Go outside and as my 3 year old says, “be a sun catcher!”

This is a long, long game we are playing and the state of your nervous system contributes the state of the collective nervous system.

For those of us that have the privilege and luck to be safe and sound, please do not take that for granted and keep yourself stable and healthy with all you’ve got.

This poem that has given me the metaphor to understand in my body what I am trying to convey here.

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In the spaces I hang out in, there is this kind of return back to traditional ways of living.

Some examples are: growing your food, raising your own meat and eggs, valuing local food, building tight knit community, birthing babies at home with midwife or free birthing, spending more time with your babies and resting postpartum, valuing motherhood, breastfeeding and extended breastfeeding, taking care of and managing the home, homeschooling, learning about and utilizing herbal and natural medicine for yourself and your family, cooking from scratch; you get the picture.

In the past these things may have been called ‘Women’s Work’. That term itself has almost become derogatory in some circles, but for me, it’s the perfect term.

These pieces are generally women’s work. It doesn’t mean men can’t do them, but it does mean that women are generally better at them and value them more and I would argue, have more innate gifts in these departments.

Here is the first thing I’ll say that may be slightly inflammatory and that is women and men are different, they are not the same. This does not mean one is worse or better, it means they are different. Their physiology is different. Their brains works differently. Their hearts and minds are focused on different things, generally.

Collectively, we have undervalued Women’s Work for generations because we have undervalued women on the whole and feminism didn’t value women, it just told them to be more like men.

And through the traditional feminist movement, women moved more and more into other types of work. The traditional feminist movement says, “Women can do whatever men can do,” and held this as empowering to women.

I am so grateful for the feminist movement and it’s figureheads like Ruth Ginsberg for making it possible for women to vote, take out a mortgage and own a business etc.

However, my argument has always been, yes, women can do whatever men can do, but what about what they want to do? What about what nourishes them? What about what feeds their soul on an internally oriented level? I wrote more about this feminism piece here.

To me the true feminism is valuing Women’s Work just as much as Men’s Work. To value birthing a baby as much as a corporate high paying job. To value what it takes to keep a home as much as the procurement of a home. To value the production of breastmilk as much as the production of investments.

For example, to actually see breastfeeding as an investment equal to or more important than an IRA.

This is the next evolution of feminism. To see the work that women and men do in the world as equally important and valuable.

And of course, for those of us, myself very much included, who would like to work and have a family, that should be available too, but without it meaning that I have to shoulder all of the Women’s Work of my home.

We are starting to see how important Women’s Work is to our health on a collective and individually, and that is why I think we see so many women choosing to stay at home with their kids, give up their ‘high powered’ careers, and focus on Women’s Work again.

However, the distortion I want to point out here is the reverting back to traditional ideologies around the value of feminine and masculine within this phenomenon of women returning back to the home. This is what I’ll refer to as the ‘trad(itional) wife’ movement.

Just because you want to take care of a home does not mean you have to be a pretty wall flower who is subservient to her husband.

Just because you’d like to stop doing your life-force-sucking-big-girl-job and raise a family doesn’t mean you are dumber, less capable, or less worthy than your husband who keeps his corporate career and directly brings in the money.

This idea would just be reverting back to the way things were before the feminist movement. This is not actually valuing Women’s Work. It’s continuing to put it a rung lower than men’s work.

It’s saying, staying home with my family means I have less power than my husband who “earns” the money. And I put earn in quotes, because the truth is the Woman is always responsible for tapping into the life force that brings money in. All very rich men have women with huge systems behind and around them.

Something I see in the content these trad wife people put out is this concept of being ‘in your femininity,’ so that your husbands can be ‘in his masculinity.’

There is a big difference between femininity/masculinity and the feminine and the masculine.

Along with the femininity and the masculinity ideals is the assumption that the woman and the man in a relationship are these clear cut puzzle pieces that fit perfectly together. The truth is so much more nuanced and gray.

The feminine and masculine are about content. Each and every human has both aspects, feminine and masculine, within them. This is a ubiquitous teaching across many traditions and modalities. Yin and yang, for example.

Most women have more feminine aspects in their total system and most men have more masculine aspects in theirs, but in these teachings around feminine and masculine energetics this doesn’t have to be the case. 

For example, I am very close to even in my feminine and masculine aspects in my system and so is my husband. I have a touch more access to the feminine energetics because of my gender and he has a bit more proclivity to masculine energetics, but really we’re both similar in total.

Femininity and masculinity is about affectation, it’s about how you present yourself or act. It’s about a performance. It’s about the form, not the content. 

So this idea of being in my femininity is really just about about how you dress, act, look, how you do your hair, it’s not about about who and what you are. It’s not about the Truth.

This is the crux, for me, about why, collectively, moving into our femininity or masculinity is not what to focus on if we want to create more Truth.

The feminine is Life force itself. It’s chaotic. It’s messy. It’s the matter. The puss and the blood. It’s also collaboration, community, and nourishment. It’s unconditional love. It’s fierce mama bear love that sets us right when we’ve gone off track. It’s the pure energetic power. It’s receptive.

The masculine is the holding. The container. The linear. The organizing force. The skill. It’s penetrative.

These two working together in a system where both feminine and masculine aspects are revered and fed is what I called Divine Union, which is what the femininity and masculinity and perfectly fitting puzzle pieces is a toxic mimic of.

In my world, the Feminine leads with her Holy Desire (aka her connection to Life itself, not her egoic wants), the Desire of Life that moves through her, and the Masculine holds and directs based on that Desire.

Or as my teacher says and her teacher said before that, “The Feminine is the call the Masculine is the response.”

This is the phrase that my personal marriage and partnership is based upon.

However, this isn’t actually about wife and husband. I didn’t say, “The wife is the call and the husband in the response.” No.

This is about the right relationship between the feminine and masculine energetics within the husband and wife themselves.

The masculine is in service to the feminine opening because the feminine opening to Life is what feeds both of them.

The masculine wants to serve. The masculine within our own selves as well as the masculine within our partner.

But this orientation has to happen internally, first. Then you see it reflected in the external.

The feminine leads because She connected to the pulse of Life. She is connected to the greater flow of Life.

The masculine serving the feminine opening to Life is the right relationship. And by ‘right’ I don’t mean defendable or logically right, I mean as in the energetic of the ISness. It is what is. It is energetic law.

And anything that isn’t in that relationship will feel like grinding. It will feel like it goes against the flow. It will feel unsatisfying, untrue, crunchy, to the part of us that is connected to our mind-less Knowing. And we can go against the flow in this dimension if we choose to.

Bringing these energetics within ourselves into right relationship with each other is how smooth creation happens. Creation requires both masculine and feminine. Hello human babies!

Divine Union is how we create in flow with Life/God/Universe.

This Divine Union has to happen within ourselves before it happens externally. And thats why the affectation of masculinity and femininity will never result in Divine Union, because it’s externally focused.

In a relationship, internally or externally, where the Feminine aspects are just as revered as the Masculine aspects, insights like bodily feelings, intuition, clair senses and oracular sight are valued just as much as logic, reasoning and rationality.

She (and I don’t mean the Woman, necessarily, although a lot of times she has most access to the Feminine, I mean the Feminine) is the first step in any decision. She is the one who says “This is a Yes,” or, “This is a No,” of “I don’t know yet” (which could always be the Truth too.)

She is trusted. It doesn’t mean the Masculine doesn’t have a say. It doesn’t mean logic and reasoning are not taken into account. It just means they are not overvalued or where action springs from.

She is most definitely not subservient. She is equally revered. Which is a great responsibility.

Because the Feminine pole is generally held by the woman in most heteronormative relationships these days, this is where I feel women aren’t willing to take responsibility and where the trad wife/polarity thing becomes so appealing.

If you have to hold the pole of Feminine Knowing, which is so undervalued in our collective society, you may be called crazy, you may be called emotional, you may be called hysterical, you may be called silly.

You may come up against someone (and this someone might be your husband) who says, “Where is your research? Where are your peer reviewed studies?”

You may come up against someone who says you’re dangerous and harmful because you’re not taking into account “the science.”

And I’ll tell you, as I have held this pole against these types of accusations my whole life, it’s not easy. It is not pleasant. You do not get accolades or praise. You mostly just get side eyes and head shakes.

But, it’s worth it to me. Because I am here to uphold the Feminine, the Mother and Nourishment on all levels.

Look around, we are all starving for Her.

The Masculine is starving for something True to serve. Give him someone he can follow and serve, so that true creation can happen.

I believe we need a return of the cultural Mother archetype.

Someone who says, “That is enough. Time to eat. Time to rest.”

The one who can see the larger picture and without proof back and trust the Wisdom in her bones because our bodies can interpret so much more than our minds ever could about reality.

The one who can say No More without any explanation.

Then we will see the Mature Masculine arise as well.

He needs Her and She needs Him.

Feminity and masculinity would like you to believe polarity is what is required for a healthy and exciting relationship.

Polarity is not Divine Union.

Polarity is a kink. Polarity can be super sexy and hot, no doubt, but Divine Union is much more long term, adult, and satisfying on a soul level.

If you get off on acting out little girl and daddy dynamics and you do that consciously by choice, more power to you.

When it comes to raising little humans and living your real life, you better show them and allow yourself the full range of human expression and hold permission for that.

If not, you’ll end up burying and suppressing huge parts of yourself or your little one’s selves. And subverted parts of ourselves will always come out sideways and toxic if you let them fester underneath the surface for too long.

You are the whole package, my love.

You are Her and Him.

The King and the Queen.

And the true King and Queen rule together, side by side.

This is the next evolution of Woman and Man, to exalt and revere each other and all eachothers’ gifts equally, so that Divine Union and creation in alignment with Life itself may happen.

If you are a Woman reading this, your role as a Mother, Wife, Daughter, Sister, Friend, is to allow yourself to be the fullness of who you are, not to play some fun little role.

Being all of yourself is terrifying because you are Huge.

Just remember, that does not make others smaller.

It only gives permission to those around you to be their right size too, including your partner. If you make yourself smaller than you are, you are actually doing them a disservice, because you moving into your fullness is an invitation for them to do the same.

The Feminine in the call, the Masculine is the response.

Inquiries to Sit With:

What have I been calling into my relationship?

What is my internal relationship to the Feminine? What do I judge or hold dangerous, unwanted, gross or unpalatable about my nature?

Allow yourself to feel into the energetics of subservience vs reverence in your body? What does It feel to be subservient to your partner vs having reverence for your partnership?

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clarabelize.substack.com/subscribe