Seeking a Spiritual Toolkit for Women
Continuing our conversation last week on why religious tools don't work for women. We ask what does? And why are those tools so hard to forge?
“I can’t”
“Why not?”
“Because it would hurt her feelings.”
“And you aren’t allowed to hurt other people’s feelings?”
“No.”
“Ah.”
This was a conversation I had last Friday with my spiritual director.
I needed to set a boundary with someone. I felt like I couldn’t. Together we peeled back the layers of the “I can’t” onion. Sitting at the bottom was the dirty face of the belief that I am not allowed to make other people think I don’t like them.
It reminded me of October 2019 sitting at a women’s retreat, trying to peel back the “I can’t” onion of wanting to leave the church. Wouldn’t you know it - at the center laid the dirty face of “I am not allowed to disappoint other people.”
Oy! The list of people I would disappoint by leaving the church! My mom! My dad! My bishop! My primary class! My former Young Women! My mother-in-law! My daughter!
Couldn’t. couldn’t. couldn’t. couldn’t.
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It’s been an interesting week.
My Substack last week called “Why Religious Tools Don’t Work for Women” took off in a way I wasn’t expecting. It’s now my most popular post, dethroning my Jesus poem and “The Never Ending Story of Mormon Feminists.”
Each week I have a delicate little feather of something I find interesting. I flesh it out, hold it up in different lights. I board a thought train not knowing if the destination will land with other people too.
This one landed.
I wanted to ride this train just a little further.
Linger at the station a little longer. Come, let us linger together.
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I’m a visual learner. Let’s add some visuals.
Some of you took issue with the term “degraded” from last week.
Fair enough.
Let’s not talk about “degraded/divine” this week- let’s talk about BALANCE.
Important Note before we begin talking about masculine/feminine: gender is complicated. Gender is not binary. Gender is a spectrum. When I talk about masculine and feminine- I am talking about energies, not biological sex.
For the purposes of this visual, let’s define masculine energy as assertive, authoritative, confident and self-prioritizing, and feminine energy as accommodating, compassionate, humble and others-prioritizing.
So.
Our goal is to reach some sort of internal balance between our masculine/feminine energies. A healthy balance of prioritizing the needs of others and prioritizing our own needs. A balance of giving and receiving. A balance of confidence and humility.
Nature starts us all off somewhere different on the scale. Societal pressure can be relied on to push men further towards the masculine side (valuing power, assertion, taking up space) and women further towards the feminine side (valuing permissiveness, giving, peacemaking).
For centuries now, spiritual tools have offered a helping hand to the masculine to become more balanced. Religious and spiritual teachings, scriptures and communities all help men become more mindful, peaceful, generous, giving, forgiving, compassionate. They are given tools to give up carnal desires, be more selfless.
These are exactly the tools masculine energies need to move towards balance.
But for women or those who already start off skewed towards the feminine energy side of the scale, pushing self-sacrifice only further imbalances us. Pushes us so far off balance that climbing towards balance becomes a radical uphill battle.
For the masculine to find balance it must lose the self. For the feminine to find balance it must build the self.
But both the secular and the spiritual push losing the self onto women. We are without a toolkit, so moving towards balance takes an insane amount of self-validation. Because when we move towards building the self and prioritizing our needs, we are called selfish, catty, a bitch, lazy, un-Christlike, a bad mom.
Not only do spiritual tools not help us achieve balance, they barricade us from it.
Spiritual tools outlaw the exact things the feminine needs in order to find balance: confidence, assertion, prioritizing desires. In order to even start moving towards balance, we first must hurdle over all the spiritual tools we’ve been given.
The comment section from last week is full of women who have seen this in their own lives:
Jaime commented:
“Examples of degraded feminine are absolutely everywhere. EVERYWHERE. And so even though I pushed back at the idea of becoming that, and tried to maintain who I was, and pursue my gifts, and find my voice, etc., it was difficult AF, because I felt GUILTY ALL THE TIME. I’m not exaggerating. The voices in my head were constantly: “You should be serving more.” “You should be listening more.” “You should be bringing a casserole to that person.” “You should be babysitting that person’s kids.” “Sure, I can say no, but only after I’ve already said yes to these other things.”
Maria on Instagram commented:
“the “beware of pride” mentality shared by white men because it’s what THEY need to hear, and they over-generalize that everyone needs to hear it when it’s actually not helping most other folks.”
I’m reminded of this excellent poem by Nicola Jane Hobbs:
Because it can be so hard for women to validate themselves when prioritizing their own ease, I think it’s useful to dig a little deeper on this point. To outline just how off balance we are pressured to be. Especially in a religious context. Allow me to illustrate this point in my own religion of origin- Mormonism.
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A few years ago I read The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan. It was published in 1963. My jaw never left the floor the entire time I read.
It was so unnerving to see my exact life experience outlined so specifically- all of my fears, guilts, longings, questions- all written down 60 years ago.
Betty interviewed hundreds of women. It was wild how similar their problems were both to mine and to each other’s. How often they all wondered why they weren’t happy when they had the life they always dreamed of having- husband, kids, house. How often they asked themselves what was wrong with them. Why couldn’t they shake these secret feelings of unfulfillment?
On some level, I knew my secret longings and questions were shared by the women around me. Often confessed in whispers late at night on girls nights or after bookclub. “It’s not fair. I do everything.” “I’m so tired.” “I feel crazy.”
At one point Friedan is trying to trace back how women got here. She quotes magazine articles from Cosmopolitan, Ladies Home Journal, Readers Digest from the 1940s. Story after story idolizing the fulfilled wife/mother fairy tale.
Friedan was pulling quotes from 20 years in her past with a tone of “can you believe how blatant this use to be?! No wonder we’re still struggling.”
Similar to conversations we might have these days saying “remember how sexist 90s romcoms were? Crazy!1”
Only the articles from the 1940s she was quoting didn’t sound crazy to me. They sounded like they could have come from the mouth of our current prophet in his latest talk. They sounded like the hundreds of stories I heard at church week after week about the fairy tale life of the giving woman.
As I read The Feminine Mystique I wrote the following note in my phone:
“Holy shit we are so far behind. Mormon women are SO. FAR. BEHIND! 70+ years behind. But instead of being allowed to progress, our doctrine keeps us preserved in amber in 1940.”
We are so far behind that even the slightest movement towards equality or freedom feels extreme, radical, selfish, mutinous, not ok.
Last week in the comments Angelica wrote,
“I felt so much pressure to be “humble” that I felt guilty for ever thinking of my own needs, health, or mental well-being above always being there for others. 🙏🏽
I sometimes also felt shame about being confident in myself as a person who worked hard and achieved a lot, and felt pressure to “dim my shine” because I didn’t want God or others to think I was prideful. 🌤️
I also felt like if I spent time focusing on myself and my needs that I was wasting precious moments of God’s time to be his full time servant and vessel and that it was my job to always be on alert for the needs of others, even if my bucket was nearly empty.”
When extreme sacrifice is the norm, equality feels like selfishness.
Even teensy acts of self-prioritization feel over-the-top. Unnecessary. A little much.
Our minds can be a confusing minefield of judgment, so in order to gauge how we are doing, we look around at our peers. At their choices and their lives to see how ours compare.
But when every fish in our peer group was raised in the same ocean of prioritizing the needs of others over our own, this only accentuates the feelings of being “too much” when we make space for ourselves.
We can’t look to our peers as a reliable metric of normal. We’ll either feel crazy or we’ll be content with baby amounts of equality.
……………………
So what do we do? Where do we turn?
Men have the Torah, the Qur’an, the Bhavagad Gita, the Tao te Ching.
All the major books of scripture were written by men to men with the spiritual toolkit for the masculine.
The masculine has the literal Bible, what’s the Bible for the feminine?
Words by women for women offering the the toolkit for the feminine?
A few candidates for your consideration:
First and foremost I’m going to say that this book is required reading:
Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself. by Melody Beattie
Next:
Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype by Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Also:
Cassandra Speaks: When Women Are the Storytellers the Human Story Changes by Elizabeth Lesser
Untamed by Glennon Doyle
The Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd
The Chalice and The Blade by Riane Eisler
Wild Mercy: Living the Fierce and Tender Wisdom of the Women Mystics by Mirabai Starr
What did I miss? Tell us in the comments!
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I started this essay with a conversation with my spiritual director. Allow me to offer some mantras she offered to me (replace my name with your name):
“Celeste is ok even when she disappoints someone.”
“Celeste is ok even when someone is upset with her.”
“Celeste is ok even when someone thinks she doesn’t like them.”
“Celeste is ok even when she hurts someone’s feelings.”
Am I embarrassed I need these? I am.
Do I like to think of myself as better than wallowing in people pleasing? I do.
Do I think other women will be able to relate?
Yes. I do.
Please share with us your thoughts and as well as what resources have helped you forge your own feminine toolkit?
ok but seriously have you seen Miss Congeniality lately? The sexism is WILD! The blatant sexual harassment? The oogling of the room of men creepily watching the hidden camera feed of the women’s changing room? Barfaroony.
The realization of women’s spiritual work being entirely different from men’s has slapped me across the face in ways I can’t stop considering since I read it last week! I have spent YEARS and YEARS of my life trying to play basketball 🏀 only using one hand. A good ball player can easily switch between hands and use the skill/tool needed for that situation. I’m so thankful to have awareness of such a fascinating concept and realize the FUTURE OF POSSIBILITIES is yet to be written! Perhaps we form a new “religion” that teaches the feminine how to dribble left-handed: one of us teach a lesson on saying no, hearing our own inner voice, trusting self, standing up, advocating for ourselves or others, cultivating leisure time, allowing creativity and contemplation be as paramount as anything else, and allowing ourselves to experience life on our terms. THAT is the religion I know I need right now. Who’s with me?!? 😄.
Love that you have explored this topic more since the last essay. As predicted I haven't been able to stop thinking about the concept and shared your article with my fellow sisters who are seeking a different way post orthodox religion. Thanks for the reading list.