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Many of us, Women especially, have had our voices shut down or silenced; so now when we use our voices to share our hurt, our anger and to speak our truth, it helps us heal. And the more we as women heal, the more it becomes about Us, instead of me and the more healing there is in the world.
How is it that birds can land on branch after branch and not fall off? How do they know which branch will support them? The truth is, they don’t. It’s not in the branch that they place their trust, rather it is in themselves.
Each one of us is born as a precious soul with our own unique gifts and talents that shape who we truly are. Yet, often life intervenes and influences who we become. Some of us live within abusive family situations, others are born into poverty, others have physical limitations and still others are taught that who they are isn’t good enough and that they don’t matter. And so over time many of us, women especially, bury our authentic selves in order to be included, accepted and loved …
Today I am a recovered dis-empowered woman, yet my story started even before I was born. As a child I had buried who I was and by doing that, I lost my sense of self which greatly impacted how I showed up in life, how I acted, how I reacted and how I treated myself and others. Decades later, the effect of this choice still controlled my life … yet I never realized it.
I was born in a small community in northern Manitoba to parents who had immigrated to Canada after the wartime devastation in Europe. Unbeknownst to my brothers and I, our parents had PTSD, a condition no-one understood or knew about at the time, but which deeply affected our upbringing …
Most of these Take a Moment blogs were written years ago and yet it came to me to re-edit them and share them now. In hindsight, I needed to go through them again, for they opened the doors to my past. My past behaviour, my past ways of seeing and my past ways of showing up. For me to go forward, I first had to go back and clear or let go of the old stories, the old ways of believing that kept me stuck.
Surprisingly, I found the editing process to be powerful, as the words took me back to when the events transpired. As I worked through the pages, tears flowed, memories made themselves known and understanding took place, as I finally realized why some of the experiences had happened …