What We Learn to Look Away From

As women, many of us learn to read the room before we learn to read ourselves.

I sometimes wonder whether what we call women’s intuition, or our sixth sense, comes in part from generations of women having to pay close attention to their surroundings. To notice the energy in a room, to anticipate what might happen, just to stay safe.

We do this by noticing what makes other people comfortable. We learn when to soften our voice, laugh something off, stay agreeable, or pretend something didn’t bother us, even when we know exactly how we feel or what we think. Then we begin negotiating with that knowing. We question, explain, or push down what we truly feel.

We want to be loved. We want to belong and to remain part of the family, the friendship, the community, or the group.

Sometimes, the price of that belonging is giving up our own truth.

So we begin to edit ourselves by hiding our anger, by questioning our instincts. We make our needs smaller or wait for someone else to confirm what we already know. Looking away from ourselves can become so familiar that we stop noticing we are doing it.

Domestication is the process through which we learn the agreements of the world around us. We learn what makes a woman good, difficult, lovable, selfish, respectable, or too much. These messages may come from our families, relationships, religion, culture, and what we witness growing up.

Over time, these agreements can begin to sound like our own voice or a very familiar voice.

The work of awareness is to recognize these voices and ask whether they reflect our truth.

What am I feeling before I explain it away?

What do I know before I ask someone else to confirm it?

Where have I learned to abandon myself in order to remain loved?

As I’ve been studying the stories of Mesoamerican goddesses, one of the things I love most is their complexity.

We live in a time when everything moves quickly. We want to summarize, label, and diagnose in order to understand how to relate to one another.

In these goddesses' stories, we encounter water, shadow, endings, fragmentation, beauty, pleasure, creation, and renewal. Their stories hold qualities that women are presently and often taught cannot exist together within the same person.

Nurturing and pleasing are rewarded. Anger, sensuality, instinct, grief, and power can be much harder for the world to accept.

The goddesses offer us a wider mirror.

They invite us to see a woman as a whole being. A woman who can create and destroy. Grieve and experience joy. Nurture others and protect herself. Change her mind. Trust her body. Speak.

Their stories awaken a question:

Which parts of myself have I learned to look away so I could belong?

Awareness gives us a place to begin, it's the first step.

We can pause before laughing something off.

We can listen when our body tightens.

We can believe our own discomfort before we have all the words to explain it.

We can stay present when another woman shares something difficult.

We can ask what our silence is protecting.

The person who causes harm remains responsible for that harm. No amount of intuition can guarantee safety, but listening to ourselves can help us recognize the moments when we are being asked to leave our truth behind.

Perhaps belonging begins with us, with choosing to remain beside ourselves, and from this place, we may also find the courage to remain beside someone else.

This exploration of women’s wholeness is part of what we’ll hold in our upcoming Journey of the Mesoamerican Goddesses. Together, we’ll meet these figures as mirrors and listen for what they awaken within us.