War, women, keyboard warriors and the feminine

Including my three-step approach to going beyond the headline/social media world

“The feminine feels it all, because she is it all.

She feels everything, because she is everything.

If you close off your feeling body, you close off the feminine.

A rise of the feminine means to keep an open heart and to love.

And to love.”

Three things I want to say up front:

• This is longer than my usual posts but it needed the length to capture it all. Thank you for taking time to read it.

• Trigger warning: there is mention of rape/murder at the end of the piece.

• I still can’t believe or comprehend I’m living in a time when I have to write this post. I wish I didn’t.

My heart is breaking right now. About the current situation in the Middle East. And, about humankind.

On one hand many people are shouting about ‘saving humanity’ and on the other hand they are throwing deadly missiles with words.

Nothing feels very loving in the online world. Or at least very little does.

And what may appear loving is often misinformed.

Who else has spent even two minutes in a comments section on a post regarding the conflict in the Middle East? I sometimes feel I lose more faith in humanity there than I do on a battlefield.

For nearly three weeks now I’ve tried to write something about how I’m feeling, my reflections on the situation and the pain that is shadowing the world.

And each time I fell short. Sometimes because I couldn’t find the words to describe the range of sensations coursing through my being on a daily basis. Other times it was because I refuse to take part in this online war.

The sheer brutality of this war of words is a war of weapons of a different kind.

Is this our future? On-line virtual warfare.

We won’t use physical weapons anymore but we will use words.

As a writer this terrifies me, as words, just like art, are a creative force to be reckoned with. They enter the space and create a momentum of their own.

Our voice is our audible life force. It’s the first thing we enact as a human…we scream. The howl reminiscent of who we are — a creation of the Mother.

The thing is, I actually do know something about the Middle East. More than the average social media influencer or follower who wants to get on the back of a hot topic. I despair at the number of ‘influencers’ and others who all of a sudden have had a crash course in history in one week. With the Middle East this is near impossible as the background is a lot more complex than your feed may be telling you.

I know something about it because I’m Jewish. It’s an area of the world dear to my heart, my history and the body I was born into in this lifetime. It’s something I’ve studied since childhood and I’m now 52. And even so, I still don’t know it all, because there is so much nuance.

So when I see blatant misinformation being thrown around like confetti, I get fired up. Opinion is opinion and I can’t doubt another’s opinion, but I can denounce inaccuracy in facts.

However, the online space is not a safe space, nor a conducive space to real conversation. It has become a battleground of its own kind, a place where unmet trauma is played out on a keyboard.

And this is the crux of it all.

Every single person behind a keyboard has a bias. This bias is based on our individual history. Our genetic history. Our evolutionary history. Our gender history.

We do not come to any conversation completely clean and rarely 100% from the universal heart.

Me included.

Likewise, for all of those aware of Maslow’s Law of Hierarchy or for the more esoteric of us, the chakra system, the first chakra or base chakra is about survival — our own personal survival. When that is threatened, there is no seeing the forest for the trees. And many feel threatened right now. It’s nearly impossible to come to love or self- esteem or self-actualisation when safety and physiological needs aren’t met or under threat.

And even when we think we are evolved, evolutionary history kicks in, as does trauma that is held deep within the body.

I feel blessed to at least be aware of this. My awareness enables me to see when trauma is kicking in. In doing so, I’m not invalidating my body’s history, but taking its presence into account in my entirety as a woman.

My own personal trauma, my familial and ancestral trauma, and that of being a woman have all come into play in this scenario.

What saves, or rather frees, me is the knowledge I have, and tools and practices to support me.

So this is how I’m working with all that is here at the moment. Most of it to date has been an inner journey as I know only once I’ve worked through my inner journey am I able to share authentically on the outside. I guess this is why it’s taken me so long to get to writing on the subject.

How do I usurp my trauma? Or rather, how do I not let it lead to my detriment.

How do I respond and not react?

How do I come from the highest place possible?

This has been my three-point approach.

Firstly, I feel it.

I have opened in a state of non-resistance to all that is there. I have never in my 52 years felt the pain of the world as much as I have in the last 3 weeks. This is both at a micro and macro level.

I feel exhausted from the heaviness of the situation.

I feel scattered from too much online scrolling and news gathering.

I feel angry about the blatant historical inaccuracies and claims circulating and the growing support of terrorism and accompanying rise of anti-semitism.

I feel devastated over the human carnage, the barbaric crimes and the rising deaths of innocent Israeli and Palestinian civilians.

I feel fear for the human race — every single one of us.

I feel deep, deep grief that transcends my own being.

But I feel. And this is good.

I have taken all of these feelings and allowed them space. I do my Non-Linear Movement Method practice, I move, I dance, I cry, I scream, I hold myself, I share with those closest to me.

And perhaps most importantly, I grieve. I mourn. This is imperative for any healing. We can’t go from shock to recovery without grieving. And there is so much to grieve about this situation.

Yet, there actually hasn’t been enough grieving going on. There are lots of words, justifications, and protests, but not the waterfall of tears that ought to be shed right now at both the sheer abuse of and loss of human life.

Secondly, I rise it up.

And when I say rise it up, I don’t mean to some invisible God in the sky. I mean to the higher part of me. The part that is from that God/Goddess and exists in every living creature and being on this planet.

To rise it up I pray and I chant. I connect to something universal that is also personal.

This is the only energy I believe will create peace on this planet. Only when I’m connected to this place within me will I be able to radiate that energy fully.

This is no spiritual bypass. This is a plea, this is a knees on floor, head bowed to the ground prayer for me to recognise the divine within me. For even in trauma, for me to see past the shields and the shells to my essence.

We are co-creators of the world we see. We create together. The energy around us is also the energy within us. How do you want that world to look?

And this is where it intersects with the divine feminine energies and the heart of my life work.

So right now as women, we don’t need to be calling on our human feminine side, we need to be calling on our divine feminine side. The part of us that is Mother to the entire world.

The part that is loving and compassionate but fierce.

The part that values truth.

The part that values life.

And we can’t just wait for her to arrive. We need to call on her, she will not answer unless we ask.

For those familiar with bhakti yoga and mantra, the chant I’ve been using for this is the one invoked for the Goddess Durga. The great feminine protector and guardian.

Om Doom Durgayei Namaha.

Thirdly, I make a commitment to deep diving and real connections and not living in a headline and social media influencer driven-world.

This also means a commitment to sharing the truth and facts, where I can.

When I have real time conversations I share the facts as I know it. I will not do this on a platform incapable of holding this information but I’m willing to have as many conversations with people as possible. I invite you to reach out to me if you want any information and I’m even prepared to hold an open conversation here if anyone is interested.

The only one thing I will state here that needs unequivocal clarification. This is particularly for my Australian compatriots who are taking to the streets likening Palestinians with Aboriginals as displaced indigenous first nations people.

Contrary to what you may be reading, Jewish people did not just arrive in the Middle East in 1948. They’ve been there since the dawn of time, around 1200BC, way before the Muslim religion even existed. I invite you to look up any history book, go back as far as the bible. And if you would prefer non-written history, there are numerous archaeological references. It was actually the Jewish people that were driven out of their land time and time again over the centuries, including by the Persian, Ottoman and Roman empires. And the original name for this land was Judea. Christians may know it as the birth place of Christ, — Bethlehem, Judea. Who we also know was born Jewish.

Palestine has never been a distinct Arab country. And it was the Romans who renamed the area from Judea to Syria Palestinia, later simplified to Palestinia in 135 CE/AD.

What comes after that is long and complex and can’t be summed up in a paragraph and nor do I wish to use this post as a history lesson, rather just to make the point that if anyone is truly indigenous to that land it is the Jewish people. So if you are really committed to truth, the linking of the two groups must be ceased.

Finally, but not least, seeing this substack is about being a woman, I wish to focus on how I’m feeling this situation through my womanly body.

When I saw Israeli morgue reports of how Hamas brutally mass raped women, grandmothers and children until their pelvises were smashed and their legs were so broken they couldn’t even put them together afterwards, a part of me broke.

When I listen to accounts of Hamas terrorists describing the rape ‘as getting our way with them’ and separating the pretty girls from the ugly ones, so that the pretty ones were raped then murdered, the ugly ones only murdered, I scream in the dark of the night.

When I read an account of a pregnant woman whose foetus/baby was cut out of her while she was alive, and then both her and the foetus/baby were beheaded and murdered, I nearly vomited.

Most of these women were at a music festival. A Burning Man, a Coachella, a Splendour in the Grass equivalent. They were dancing for peace in a democratic country. Their only crime was to be young, beautiful and peace loving.

And to not see one women’s group/feminist organisation in the world take this on has left me  wounded at my core. Every woman, no matter what side of the fence you wish to sit on, must come together where women are violated in this brutal way. A part of me will never ever recover from this.

The horrific terrorist attack, which included the above and a lot more, of 7/10 is the only reason why the current conflict has broken out. Full-stop. It needs no other context. History is irrelevant for the moment. No one went into the history of the US when ISIS attacked on 9/11. Israel has never (and you can check the historical facts) attacked or initiated war first. They only defend.

I too do not want to see death tolls rise. I desperately wish there was an alternative to war in this world. I wish for peace. I continue to hold hope for a two-state solution in this region.

.But for now, negotiation with a terrorist organisation, who commits atrocities such as those committed on 7/10 and so much more, is unfeasible. Unless we get a miracle.

So again I turn to rising it up. And as women of the world, I invite you to as well.

I end this post with a prayer.

“May we all find the divinity within. May we all remember the Goddess that lives within us. May we join forces in creating a more loving world for us, our children and the children to come. May we find a way to unite under the Great Mother we all are birthed from. May love trump hate. Amen.”

Namaste. Shalom. Salaam.

With love, Sharon

PS: I invite genuine discussion and conversation here. If you wish to comment please do so with grace and with a desire to contribute positively.