1. The power of beginning
If you’re like me, when you’re at the beginning of something — a new job, a new school, a new relationship, a new health routine — you may feel a combination of excitement and apprehension. Excitement because it’s a new opportunity and nervousness because you’re entering a territory where you’re untested; you don’t know how it will go.
In many Western variations of the Tarot deck, the first card is the Fool. Its number is 0, representing unlimited potential. In the illustrations for the popular Rider-Waite deck, drawn by Pamela Colman Smith in 1909, the Fool is youthful, poised on a precipice, about to step off into the unknown. Each time we begin something new, we embark on the Fool’s journey.
You’re called to this journey because you’re hungry for new experiences, because your mind is open and curious, because you know it will help you grow and change. You may feel alive in a new way, pulsing with expanded possibilities.
In Zen Buddhism, the concept of Shoshin is translated as “beginner’s mind,” the willingness to discover, to explore questions without preconceived answers, to “not know.” The beginner’s mind leads us to that sense of exhilaration, unhampered by predetermined notions or expectations. Its opposite, the “expert mind,” might instead impose a judgment about how the experience is supposed to be, or how we’re supposed to be in a given circumstance, and that can make us fearful of the new. It might delay us or even stop us altogether from embarking.
In what situations have you trusted your gut, taken a leap of faith, and approached a new opportunity with a beginner’s mind? Are there times when you’ve held back or refused a new experience because you didn’t want to reveal your lack of skill? Because you didn’t want to look like a Fool?
How we feel about beginnings may have a lot to do with our own start in life. Although each of us is born, we do not all experience the same beginnings.
Did you have a mother who sang as you nestled in her womb, who dreamed about the individual she hoped you’d someday grow to be, who could not wait to greet your entry into this world? Or did you have a mother who didn’t feel ready to be responsible for a child’s life, or who couldn’t imagine how she would be able to feed you, or who could not awaken from the trance of addiction, or who decided or was forced to decide to give away her baby before she laid eyes on you.
What kind of beginning did you have in life? And how did these circumstances affect your view of your potential?
My own origins, perhaps like yours, were not particularly auspicious. I was born in 1954. The 1950s was not a decade in which women were being asked to think about their destinies. Society insisted that “biology is destiny” and that marriage and motherhood was our pre-ordained fate. My mother left college to get married, determined to escape her father’s control and angry temper. She quickly became pregnant with me and at age 22, found herself physically and emotionally abused by my father; she and I were both targets. The 1950s was not a decade in which anyone was talking publicly about domestic violence. Women were expected to hide the bruises, blame themselves, and put up with it.
She divorced my father at a time when many women remained in violent marriages. She returned to Michigan to live once more in her father’s house. It was too late to return to college; she had a child to support. She got work as a secretary, and in my early years I was cared for by my grandmother. By the time I was five years old, my mother remarried, once more escaping her father’s house, once more jumping into a situation of violence and abuse.
Our beginnings do not determine our destiny, but they certainly can shape our sense of possibility about what our destiny might be. Our destiny is often greater than our beginnings might suggest.
How might your beginnings have influenced your ideas about your destiny?
The word “begin” means not only “to come into existence”; according to Miriam-Webster, the word also means “to originate and invent.” It derives from a word in Old German meaning “to open.” Guru Grrrl engages in the process of opening herself to expanded power and possibility, originating and inventing ourselves and the world anew. She knows it’s possible for us to evolve beyond our origins, whatever they might have been.
Guru Grrrl understands that none of us has a single beginning, but multiple opportunities at any stage of our lives to re-create our conceptions and begin anew.
What are some of the reinventions you have undergone?
Although as a young girl I didn’t own the word, I did long to be powerful. I wanted to shape the path of my own life. I wanted to do something meaningful. I felt an irrepressible need to be creative, which can be seen as the intention to shape the world according to our vision — itself an act of power.
Even as a child, I did not long to get married or have children; I saw my intelligent, beautiful mother trapped in the obligations of marriage and motherhood, never having the life she might have had.
As I grew into adolescence, my attention shifted from my home and toward the world. Power was an electric current convulsing the body politic around the world. I watched civil rights protestors blasted with water cannons on TV, witnessed coffins of soldiers shipped home from Vietnam in the pages of Life magazine. I saw National Guard tanks roll past my house during the 1967 Detroit riots and joined student walkouts to protest the war. I bought the first issue of Ms. magazine and joined a gay liberation group in my high school. Like the Fool, I left the solid ground of my upbringing and embarked on a political education.
Activists in these movements taught me that power was external, something to be wrested from those who had abused it. Power would be gained by making trouble. Big trouble. By getting thousands of people to march in the streets. Or by being where you weren’t supposed to be — at the lunch counter or the front of the bus. By setting the city on fire in response to systemic police abuse. It stirred in me a hunger for more than what was expected of me, a girl.
What lessons about power did you absorb from the world around you, and how did you apply those to the way you thought about your life?
The burgeoning feminist movement ignited a new beginning for an entire generation of women. “Power” was still seen to reside in the external world, although it existed in the family too — between wives and husbands, daughters and fathers, sisters and brothers. Power defined who got the money, who had the say-so, and how much trouble you could get into if you didn’t follow the rules of husbands and fathers and brothers. We — women who wanted to be powerful — would march and legislate and refuse to do what we were supposed to do. We would make trouble, in our homes and our workplaces, and legislate for change. Each action was a step off a cliff into unknown territory.
Feminists in the 1970s offered analyses of rape and domestic violence, the denial of reproductive rights, laws that favored men, unequal pay, and professions that were closed to women. Feminists scrutinized cultural representations that depicted women in demeaning or dismissive ways or left us out altogether. We dissected personal and familial relationships in which the man was just assumed to be the more important party.
Yet for all its accomplishments, the women’s movement of the 1970s did not universally understand that without having a true anchoring in inner power, one cannot project this power into the world. We can only replicate a model of dominance, of power over another. As author and activist Audre Lorde[i] wrote, “…the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”
What was your earliest exposure to feminism and how did you feel about it? What issues or themes still resonate for you today?
What few of us understood then is that power is not primarily an external force to be seized or wrested from another. Power is generated from within. It is limitless, not a zero-sum game.
Power is about being able to connect with the source of infinite energy and harness it to shape your destiny and to reshape the society in which we live.
To believe you have access to this. To understand you have a destiny. To recognize that each of us is the source of our own power.
To have faith that the world can be reconfigured. That you have a role to play in this.
Does this way of thinking about power change the way you think about your own life? Can you feel the ground beneath your feet shift as you take that leap?
In 1976, I left Detroit to join the feminist arts movement at the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles. This was truly a Fool’s journey — I had little money, no place to live, no job; I knew no one in L.A. But my destiny was calling so loud I couldn’t ignore it.
Woman’s Building co-founder and art historian Arlene Raven declared that feminist art “raises consciousness, invites dialogue, and transforms culture.” Women, art, and activism; it was a compelling recipe for power.
But within even this most energetic and visionary community, I also experienced ways in which my own unhealed wounds weakened my capacity to be there for other women or for myself. I hid behind a mask of bravado. I used alcohol and drugs to numb the pain of my origins. I was constantly judging myself and other women. I was not honest. I didn’t accept responsibility for myself or my actions. I couldn’t begin to live the vision of myself I aspired to.
It took many screw-ups, sabotaging my projects, inflicting pain on myself and other women, shredding my nervous system, before I came to recognize that my damaged self could not build a healthy culture without healing. I would need to begin a new quest to find methods and processes for repair and recovery. These have included 12-Step recovery, psychotherapy, alternative methods of healing such as acupuncture and herbalism, bodybuilding, Hatha and Kundalini Yoga, and meditation. Each provided tools to replace the questionable strategies I had adopted to survive my childhood.
Through these processes, I learned to cultivate my inner power, to become aware of and build my energy field. I embraced the idea that, like every person, I have a destiny. I was able to heal a lot of the damage from my childhood, let go of resentments or feelings of victimization that held me back, free myself by forgiving, and strengthen my nervous system so I can face challenges with calmness and an inner sense of trust instead of freaking out.
What techniques or traditions have you found to help you address your inner scars? Are you able to put them into practice?
This is what I wish someone had told me when I was a young woman:
At any moment, you have the option to stand in your power or succumb to a belief about powerlessness. At any moment, it is in your power to choose to begin anew.
Our lives contain so many beginnings. We may change locations, go back to school, make a new group of friends, take up a new hobby, pursue a different career. Every day presents an opportunity to change our minds, make a commitment to a new habit, set a relationship on a different footing, adopt a different view of ourselves and the world. We are always beginning again.
From the perspective of age, I see that every time I’ve had a challenge in my life, I’ve been offered a path toward change. Another chance to embark on the Fool’s journey. Every time I’ve pursued that path I always been led to a better destination, a little closer to my destiny. And so, whatever the challenges facing you as a woman entering this conversation, Guru Grrrl offers you a path and invites you to begin.
Practice: What are you beginning now?
(If you’d like to listen to this practice, click here.)
Spend some time responding to these questions (in your journal, your sketchbook, or have a conversation with a friend):
- What are you at the beginning of right now? Is it a new job, a new
relationship, a shift in the way you think about yourself or the world? - How did this pathway open for you?
- What’s exciting to you about this beginning?
- Do you have any fears about this new direction you’re embarking on?
- What kind of support do you need to face those fears?
[i] Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” This Bridge Called My Back, edited by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, State University of New York Press, 2015, 94–97
