For over 20 years I have been involved in women’s spirituality and women’s circles. The relieving message that always shines through is, ‘You are not alone!’ Not alone in my pain, my shame, my confusion, my excitement, my rage, my dreams and my prayers. There is immense healing available through women’s sharing of their authentic stories, for the storyteller and for those who sit as witnesses listening with their hearts.

Yet today, when I sit in circles, I find that, as a collective, women are more strongly bonded by our wounds than by our collective vision of a new paradigm. We have grown in our solidarity more as victims, as oppressed, as fighters for the underdog’s cause, than as agents for true change. It’s time to return the ancient wisdom of all traditional cultures: let’s measure our actions by how they will affect the next seven generations, the Great Mother Earth, and how much beauty and harmony they will bring. Let’s re-learn how to listen to what is needed, to trust our intuition, and allow ourselves to feel.

The first change I can imagine is that we will have to gather as women, in circles, and begin with an honest look at where we are now. I am not talking about seeking change within the existing paradigm to make us more comfortable, but facilitating cultural changes to create new ways of exchanging resources, communicating, raising our children, approaching our health, and caring for our Earth and each other. Only when we have had enough of twisting our rounded selves into linear and square shapes to fit the masculine template of today’s world will we be able to direct our attention towards a new paradigm.

Big changes start small, global changes start local.

‘As a human being you are duty-bound to get engaged. When you find injustice, when you find unfairness, when you find untruth. But you have to get engaged knowing that you have no control over the outcome. It’s that combination of passion and detachment that allows one to carry on. Of course otherwise you would have burnout’.- Dr. Vandana Shiva, sustainability pioneer, ecofeminist, social justice advocate, wise woman.

As women we carry Shakti in our wombs, the primordial creative force, the ability to infuse the ordinary with the sacred. It is our task as women of political freedom who have the time, the literacy and the health to even read this today, to actualise a kinder, more humane world.  Stand up. Speak up. First at home, at work, and in our internal dialogues; then out into our communities. Guiding first ourselves, and then our culture, from the linear to the circular, from the economic to the humane, from the perverse to the sacred, from resignation to courage.

I am excited about the future we as women can create, not from our striving to fit in a world of masculine and linear acknowledgments, not our capacity to match up to male measurements of achievement and competitive ladder climbing, but by living, dreaming and cultivating a world of circles and cycles, of community and parity, of acceptance and compassion.  A world where we recognise our interconnectedness to each other, where we practice listening deeply to the Earth and to the Invisible, where we are motivated by gratitude and generosity instead of individualism and entitlement.

Am I an idealistic dreamer? Am I another victim of the disease of dissatisfaction, unable to find peace and acceptance in what is now? Maybe. Or maybe I’m becoming an elder who wants to be held responsible for what I leave behind.

“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” ~ Arundahti Roy

Portions of this blog were published in www.womenheal.org  Check out their site http://womenheal.org/what-healing-women-means-to-me-now/