Unrealized Goals from Cycle II

From Cycle II Report: Bane of My Existence/Window Pane Onto My Existence -- On the physical plane; this manifests as coming up with a way to organize and keep organized my personal record keeping/filing. While I am doing the work on this plane, I am seeing that this problem has origins in early self/psychological trauma (related to not having a sense of, and a sense of control over, what is mine) and that resolving it on the physical/practical plane has transformational implications for moving forward in my spiritual practice and spiritual leadership (including accessing and reclaiming the profoundly creative energy which has not really seen the light of day). My recent move from Jenifer Street to Pleasure Drive, with the need to organize my things for less space and easier access, has really taken this work I have been doing and manifested that I have done tremendous work in this area. This feeling of "Bane of My Existence" is very minimal now, and while I will continue to work on this, I feel that I have truly accomplished a significant body of work in terms of my own personal growth.

Unrealized Goals & Progress: Despite my successes with this issue in Cycle II, it continued to be a challenge into Cycle III, so I continued to work on it. Early on I learned an important piece that has helped with the slow working out of this problem: I read about research that showed a connection between childhood emotional neglect and adult difficulties with personal organization. Bingo! This gave me an important direction for continuing this work -- to explore the ways in which I neglect my needs and to change that behavior. My Cycle III meditation breakthrough and psychic skills development have helped with this (read more in those sections). Likewise, my Cycle III magic work has helped.

Peer Evaluation (click here to see my evaluation form with feedback)

Identified Activities From My Peer Evaluation, and the Work I've Done on Them

• Self-love/health ego:
  • Work on my "harsh (internal) task-mistess"
    • This is one of two areas where my personal growth work has made a change in my life. What I tell younger friends is that in my forties I learned to relax, to trust that I would meet my deadlines and that everything would work out, even when I didn't know how that was going to happen. It turns out that much of my angst and performance anxiety were about "not getting it done now/soon enough," fears that were taking valuable energy away from my ability to get things done. My years spent working in Touchstone coven, with elder priestesses for coven sisters, also gave me the love and nurturance and insight I needed to take charge of the task-mistress instead of allowing her to continue to be in charge of me.
  • Is there a dark part of me that I'm afraid to share with others?
    • Well, of course there is. I'm a woman, living in the patriarchy.... But specifically, my fear that I'm not good enough, that I'm an imposter. This is not something new to me, I remember having the same feelings in when I kept getting As in graduate school courses when I felt like I didn't deserve them. I thought there was something wrong with my professors! The truth behind this is that I knew I wasn't doing my best. I wasn't getting along rather than really investing myself (in my graduate studies and in other parts of my experience). I have waded through a lot of stuff to remove obstacles to my giving myself completely to my Goddess work. An example: my struggles with meditation made me feel like an imposter in Cycle II. In Cycle I, I thought it was okay that I was struggling for the discipline of meditation. I knew that I would not be able to ask for my certificate of graduation from the Cella Training Program if I did not give myself to this and move through the obstacles. It took several years and breaking all the "rules" of meditation. Specifically, I meditate while lying down. Everyone says don't do that, and yet it is what works for me. The weekend a friend of mine was ordained by RCGI, she told me that she had never meditated in the whole time she had been in the Cella program. She has since gone on and learned to meditate, but her not fulfilling this requirement did not stop her from claiming that she had done all the work. At first, I felt some judgment about her, as if she were an imposter and not worthy of her credentials. Finally, I realized I was projecting my experience onto her. She accepted that she could not meditate as being just that, not something deeply dark and objectionable about herself. I needed to learn to meditate for just that reason, to move through my own fears of inauthenticity.
      
• Lover relationship:
  • good in some areas, blocks in others (trust, openness, self-esteem)
  • work for emotional equality between self & lover (easier to love others than self)
  • my attitudes & feelins are in a process of change
  • socialization has inhibited my natural playfulness
    • Mostly I report about this in the magic section. As I write this, however, I've just had a 6th anniversary with my partner, my peer, and my playmate. The work of being a good partner in an equal relationship is ongoing, and it is one of the greatest joys and "accomplishments" of my adult life.
      
• Emotional well being: It would be nice to see more self-confidence and self-esteem and less stubbornness
  • This evaluation was done as I was reeling from experiences in Madison that rocked me back to emotional ground zero. I was experiencing post-traumatic stress and revisiting childhood issues that I had worked through therapeutically. Sexual harrassment and shunning brought out the worst in me, for a long while. I have worked hard to find supportive friends and environments to help me regain composure, heal, explore the parts of this whole mess that were mine, learn from them, and grow on. It has been a hard journey and I'm still sometimes tested and still sometimes need a reality check from others.
    
• Creative expression: --This tends to be a hidden area of my life, one that I don't share readily, openly or publicly.
  • My work with MatriFocus and this website demonstrate how public I've become in my creative and scholarly work (see last entry below for more information).
    
• Spiritual leadership --
  • I'm insecure and judgmental and these are blocks (coming from life history/personality) that get in the way of my potential
  • I am self-judgmental (I seem to be frequently, and unconsciously, apologizing about/for myself)
• See above re: these two.
  
• I need to think about what is my vision of spiritual leadership, because I am drawn in two directions:
  Jade's direction (the words of my evaluators) -- placid, laid back, politically cautious/indirect
  Sage's direction (the words of my evaluators) -- lively, committed, willingness to say both yes and no publicly
• Hmmm. I've chosen what comes naturally to me: honesty and straightforwardness, yet I have also been coached by Iris to learn and practice the benefits of diplomacy.
• As I was grappling with this issue, and related ones, I did what turned out to be a powerful personal ritual. From the Goddess, I saw and heard "What is at the root of you? Speak your truth. Frame it well." I've been using these to guide me ever since.
  
• think about what I'm going to "lead" and how I'm going to lead -- specifically, what are power and participation in the context of a leader
  
  • I've experimented with leadership in several areas during my 11 years in Cycle III. What I've come to is this: whether I teach, facilitate ritual, learn, counsel, publish, serve or organize, what I'm about is leadership by example, leadership that is a collaborative effort that can include many leaders, leadership that is all about empowering women to create earth-, life-, goddess-, woman- and spirit-positive systems, works and communities. What I know is that these can't be well accomplished using the patriarchal "girl-group" dynamics and model of relationships, nor can they be accomplished using "the master's tools."
  • I'm pretty much guided in most things, including spiritual leadership, by my dreams, my meditation, and by hypnogogic activity (without neglecting native intuition and intelligence). This website is what's resulted from a "spiritual leadership" dream I had during an annual Hallow's sacred dream time. How public is this work? As of Summer 2003, I average 1100 unique visitors per month, from
    • the US (commercial, non-profit, military and personal sites)
    • Canada
    • Australia
    • United Kingdom
    • Netherlands
    • Brazil
    • Japan
    • Singapore
    • France
    • Norway
    • Israel
    • Belgium
    • Italy
    • Poland
    • Thailand
    • Finland
    • New Zealand (Aotearoa)
    • South Africa
    • Hong Kong
    • Indonesia
    • Czech Republic
    • Denmark