Bianca Young

I have been reflecting lately about the places within ourselves that we cannot reach alone. Years ago, I undertook a 6 month women’s Rite of Passage through the wild landscape of Tasmania.

I thought the underworld would be the wilderness, the isolation, the land and everything I would meet within myself. But some of the deepest terrain was between us. We became mirrors for one another.

Our mother wounds. Our sister wounds. Jealousy, comparison, belonging, exclusion, resentment, longing, the need to be seen and the fear of taking up too much space.

None of it arrived neatly labelled as a wound. It arrived through relationship.

And I am recognising that landscape again now.

When women gather closely enough, eventually we meet more than each other. We bring our mothers, our sisters, our friendships and betrayals. We bring every room where we learnt to compete, compare, become smaller or disappear.

Then another woman touches one of those old places, often without even knowing she has done so. Perhaps this is why some wounds cannot be healed alone. A sister wound may need sisters.

The wound of not being heard may eventually require the courage to speak. The wound of exclusion may ask us to risk belonging again. The wound of comparison may ask us to stand beside another woman’s radiance without believing it diminishes our own.

Perhaps real sisterhood is not a place where we never trigger one another. Perhaps it is a place where we become curious about what is being revealed when we do.

What belongs to this moment, and what belongs to somewhere much older? Where are we still waiting to be chosen, understood or validated? Where are we mothering others instead of mothering ourselves? Where are we leaving ourselves in order to remain connected?

Another woman can become the mirror. She does not necessarily create the wound. Sometimes she simply illuminates a place that was already tender. This does not mean tolerating harm or abandoning our boundaries. Sometimes sovereignty means leaving.
Continued in comments…..

I’d love to invite you to a beautiful circle I’m starting that we can come together and support one another on the physical and spiritual journey that is Perimenopause and Menopause.

Bring your cuppa and an open heart and let’s have a yarn together! Sundays once a month at 3pm - 4.30pm and the first one starts on the 20th September.

Life can be a meditation.

Gratitude, for me, is not a list of things I am thankful for. It is a way of living.

Over time, my life has become quieter, simpler, almost monk-like in its rhythm. And somewhere within that simplicity, I’ve realised I don’t need to separate meditation from the rest of my life.

I feed the wild birds that visit my home. I wash the floor. I prepare food. I shower and tend to my body. I water the plants, care for my home, sit in silence and move my body.

None of these things are separate from my spiritual practice.

They are the practice.

When I wash the floor, I care for the ground that holds me.
When I feed the birds, I participate in the living world around me. When I shower, I tend to the body that has carried me through every chapter of my life.

The ordinary becomes meditation when I am fully present within it.

Perhaps this is what gratitude has come to mean for me — not simply saying thank you for my life, but loving my life by tending to it.

To live as though everything is service.

Not obligation.
Not self-sacrifice.
But devotion.

A willingness to care for what has been placed in my hands.

My life does not need to become more sacred.

I need only remember that it already is.

And perhaps every ordinary act, when met with enough presence, can become a prayer.