The Queen of My Self

You take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame. – Erica Jong The story of our lives is ours to create. We can design our own roles and ideals, compose the scripts, and author the sagas of our own futures and that of the environment around…

Today, we see many women in public life, ranging the gamut from Hillary Clinton to Sharon Osborne, who have stepped out of the shadows of their husbands and families to pursue their own ambitions for themselves. Millions of ordinary women face the same challenge in our daily lives, as well. After a couple of decades…

  Several of my recent posts have been about the Self, including “What Exactly is the Self?” in which I wrote, “The Self is the sum of all of our parts, and holistically, it is greater than the sum of all of our parts. The fluid Self transcends time and space, expanding and shape-shifting, changing…

Aging and changing might be inevitable, but they ain’t easy. They precipitate in us a great uncertainty. The myriad dramatic disturbances of modern middle life — menopause, health concerns, career shifts, the empty nest, divorce and death — create an overwhelming crisis of identity and purpose for each of us. What follows is an intense…

The notion that fifty years of age could be considered a “halfway” mark is unprecedented. For most of human existence, life expectancy hovered at around twenty to thirty years, and it was only by 1800 that folks commonly began to live to be forty. American women now enjoy a mean life expectancy of eighty-four years,…

During the decades of our Maiden and Motherhood, women grow to meet all of our many demanding responsibilities. Like the moon that can’t keep getting fuller and fuller with no retreat, we can take on only so much before exploding like a balloon pumped up with too much air. In the second half of Her…

                Unlike my grandmother who personified the archetypal transition from Motherhood to Cronedom at menopause, her daughter, my mother, was a Queen long before her time. Her story is quite a common one now, shared by many millions of women, but in the early 1950’s, she was a lonely pioneer when she…

Soul searching, like the practice of any devotion, requires solitude, quiet and quality time. But life is hectic and our inner needs have often been relegated to the bottom of our endless to-do lists, our dreams and desires deferred, left on the back burner to simmer. More than a hundred years ago, Florence Nightingale observed,…

  Coming from the tough love school of spiritual counseling as I do, I feel that it is only fair to warn you — There are no 10 Easy Steps to Sovereignty. The roads leading to Queendom are diverse and many. The way to Self-esteem can be complicated and long. Each woman must take her…

Certainly the most crucial step toward sovereignty is to know our Selves. After all our years as mothers and others, we need to reestablish who we are as individuals, separate and distinct from our relationships with those around us. Who am I if I am not a mother, a daughter, a lover, a wife, a…

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