120. Women in Community

“If we're by ourselves, we come to feel crazy and alone. We need to make alternate families of small groups of women who support each other. Talk to each other regularly, can speak their truths and their experiences, and find they're not alone in them. And that other women have them too. It makes such a huge difference.”               -Gloria Steinem, writer, political activist, feminist icon 

How can you hear and see things from a different perspective without becoming defensive or ego-injured? The answer involves a commuity of women! Listen to the end for the four essential elements to foster change.

The SkySpace Art

Transcript

“If we're by ourselves, we come to feel crazy and alone. We need to make alternate families of small groups of women who support each other. Talk to each other regularly, can speak their truths and their experiences, and find they're not alone in them. And that other women have them too. It makes such a huge difference.” This quote from Gloria Steinem, writer, political activist, feminist icon starts off today's episode. 

Welcome in. I am so glad you're here on the Modern Creative Woman podcast and enjoying the opportunity to connect with you on a woman to woman personal level. There is an abundance of research on that and we'll get into this soon. I first wanted to say thank you to all the moms out there who reached out to me, lending a little bit of support around the college application process, and it has been incredibly helpful to know I'm not alone in how. Unusual and uncomfortable it feels to sort through all of these applications. My own experience was applying to one college, so this kind of modern day process of making a lot of applications in a lot of different places, it speaks in a really wonderful way to our global community. And being a global citizen, that this is so much easier than it used to be to find schools, connect with people who have studied what you're thinking to study. So thank you to those moms out there. It really felt nice to be supported. Alice Walker, a writer, poet and activist, spends quite a bit of her writing on making sure that we find a circle of women. She suggests that we meet once a month or more, or as often as you can. And she says it's essential to have a circle of smart, wise can do. Women who are in the world doing their work. And we need to meet together as often as we can. So certainly there's the kind of mentoring that happens at work where we learn the ropes from someone. We also learn how to approach people in the office in a way that's productive, and it allows older women to provide guidance to younger women that the opportunity to do that is good for everybody, both the person giving advice and the person receiving the advice. There is, of course, the benefit of networking, feeling that level of emotional support when you're not in the room. That happens when we create allies at work and champions, and there might be people who maybe we're not friends with, but we appreciate their work and they appreciate ours. Those kinds of allies in the professional world can have a huge impact on the doors that are opened to us. The idea that we can rely on one another has shifted. Right. We move often. We don't necessarily live near our families, and we end up in a spot where we often feel like we have to do it all ourselves. And that's simply not true. It requires finding, as as I mentioned earlier, the alternative family who will support us. So I want to ask you, who is your alternative family and how are you connecting? One of the most interesting ways that I have found to connect with other women is over art. And this can be done in so many different ways. You can have instead of a coffee date, go to a museum and walk around. It's unnecessary to read the cards next to the paintings and the sculptures, and just enjoy conversation with one another in a beautiful environment. If you live near a sculpture garden, this is a wonderful place to connect with other women. There's really no pressure whatsoever. You can laugh out loud if you want to because you're outside. The beauty of a sculpture garden is the art is intermingled with nature. And then there you are. More part of nature too. And we get to be within the experience of art. In San Francisco. The DeYoung Museum has a really great sculpture garden, and it's small, except it has this really cool path that leads around a corner and is kind of hidden, and it leads you to a room that is designed to facilitate sound. And you can have a seat. There's plenty of room for maybe a dozen or so women to sit down, and you're in a round room, and the sound carries, depending on where you are in that room. If you stand in the center of the room, you hear things differently than if you're at the periphery. The art itself is called sky space, and it's a sculpture by James Turrell. And there's about a dozen of these installations on the West Coast, so you can find them in many places. The idea that you can be in a place where you're hearing things differently is so appealing to me. We can hear the same thing over and over again, and it won't matter until it resonates. Only when we are ready to hear something differently will our brain pick up on it. And in psychology, I think of myself as doing scaffolding where I'm talking with women, and I'll start to introduce the next step that they might want to move towards. So if they're stuck in non acceptance of something that happened in the past, I'll start introducing language around acceptance and many times they simply won't even hear me. Sometimes people will have a little, um, blank space. I'll say, wait, what did you say? And other times women will. Respond to what I said, but it wasn't what I was talking about. And we all do this, and it's a way that we kind of keep our mind insulated in what we are already thinking, and we just simply don't even hear an alternative way of looking at things until our mind is ready. So the idea of the sky spaces, there's a hole in the middle of this room so you can look up and see the sky. The idea that the sound can be experienced differently in different environments is a way for you to incorporate new ways of thinking into your existing ways of thinking. When we hear something new, we have two alternatives. We can incorporate it into what we already know, and either it fits or it doesn't fit. We hear it or we don't. Or we can start to adjust the way we think. To understand that there are multiple ways of understanding the world or understanding the topic that we're thinking about in our head. Hearing something differently. Seeing something differently is a really powerful way to engage your brain. If you think of how you can do this in art, I have a whole bunch of ideas and we're doing a lot of them inside the modern creative woman in the next three months where we're going to be looking at things differently. And remember, when we see things differently, the things we see change. We perceive things perhaps in a more loving way or with more gratitude, and suddenly we will perceive those things as more loving or more worthy of gratitude. So it's not about anybody else changing. It's not about the situation changing. It's about our perspective changing. And things are pretty hectic in the world right now. Certainly in the United States. They're very hectic. And yet we have the ability to maintain optimism, to maintain gratitude and pursue joy, even while we're working hard to be advocates and promote change. There's no need whatsoever to change our experience of gratitude and joy. We don't have to delay it or wait for it until it conditions are perfect because guess what? They never will be. Things can get better, but we can't. Does not celebrate or avoid joy, and being positive and optimistic doesn't mean we don't care about what's happening. It means that we're staying in contact with what's really, really important, which is happiness and pleasure and joy and freedom. Can you recall a time when you thought something was true and then you realized it wasn't? You believed something to be true, yet you just misremembered it. And when someone showed you, oh, no, the number is 32, not 34. You say, oh, yeah, okay. My mistake, I misremembered. If you reflect on those moments, usually we don't. We can just be corrected in a mistake like that. If you remember that moment of your brain accepting that you misremembered or something was not right, that you recalled or you did the math wrong. Something like this where there's a clear and obvious correct answer, and when we realize we're wrong and we are able to shift, oh yeah, the correct number is 32. There's no harm, there's no ego pain. We just misremembered or we miscalculated and we're not. Our calculations. We're not our math products. It's simply a matter of recognizing we had it wrong and we stand corrected. And a woman with psychological flexibility, we'll be able to do this on a whole host of things. She'll be able to accept feedback from others. She'll be open to what her mentor says. She'll also be able to disagree, if that's important, and she'll be able to shift perspective and experiment and try other ways of being. Again, there doesn't need to be any ego involved in this process of growing and shifting and changing. Receiving feedback has only what we make it mean. If we receive negative feedback, we can just receive it as feedback. If we receive a suggestion, we can simply recognize it as that and get out of our way and not perceive something as a threat or as an attack on our integrity or our ego in some way. When you think of the sky space that I'm describing for you. Imagine that you have a greater ability to hear or see than you ever could have imagined. That's what it feels like to be inside this space. And I'll put a link in the show notes so you can see what the room looks like, what the sky's face looks like. And I want to challenge all of us, myself included, to think about new ways of pursuing ourselves in acceptance and commitment therapy. This struggle is we tend to believe what we think. We become fused to our thoughts. When we start believing our thoughts, we can get into a lot of trouble. It's essential that we relate to our thoughts for what they are, which is a biological neurological process. It is not a fact. If I have a thought, if I'm thinking about my dog, it's just a thought. My dog exists, but he's in another room. He's not here right now. Thinking of him doesn't make it a fact. It's just a neurological process of me reminiscing about my dog. It's the same for upsetting memories. Happy memories. Thoughts about how we're supposed to be the mean girl voice in our head. All of it is just thinking. So what are those moments when you can be open to receive some new information about yourself? It really does take a lot of quiet solitude, art making, writing. To start to understand the thoughts that you think over and over that you believe to be true, and accepting that there's just thoughts. They're not facts. We do this every single month inside the membership. We talk about mindset and that is relating to our thoughts for what they are. And it is one of the fundamental components of how we can change psychologically is beginning to shift the way we think about things and stop being for women so hard on ourselves, so critical of ourselves, so judgmental of our appearance and shift into more body awareness, more feeling, less thinking. Have you ever wondered how you can increase these insights? I have four different ways to increase the possibility of personal insight and personal growth. There are really four ways that I can think of, and they are creativity. And I'm talking about writing, making art, looking at art, being around beautiful spaces, going to the museum, looking at interesting architecture. The second one is stillness and I mean mental stillness. You can get that while you're walking. You can get it in a traditional sitting meditation, but it requires a bit of quiet. It means walking without your headphones. It means being able to hear your thoughts, allow them to flow. With enough time to simply observe the ebb and flow of the thinking experience. The third one is being in community with women, and I can't figure out how to do this any other way. It's so empowering and supportive. It brings up the feel good hormones. Of course, the oxytocin is there when we're bonding with other women. That experience of sharing, mentoring and being mentored is essential to understanding ourselves. The fourth one is really about connecting to yourself as the context of your life. And by that I mean seeing that you're part of this much bigger whole, that you are a creature in the universe. There is sort of this importance to your day to day stuff and this extreme unimportance, this tiny little blip in time when we're on this planet and being able to contextualize that you are experiencing those things that have happened to you. You are experiencing thoughts and feelings. You're the one noticing, observing, being curious. You're the one making art or observing art. And this last one, that is the self as context. It allows you the feeling of connectedness to something bigger than yourself. It's the part of us that feels good, feels cared for, and the part that inspires us to want to help other people and be connected to humanity. Would you add anything to this list? My list of four. Are there more things that you find essential in understanding yourself? More? Now that you know, what will you create? I'm hoping to ask you a favor. If you are enjoying this show. Will you subscribe on whatever platform you're on? Hit the subscribe button and that helps me tally and understand who is where. And the pretty exciting part for me is I'm starting to see that the modern, creative women are all over the world. We are in over 700 cities, 56 countries and growing. If you hit the subscribe button, it just lets me have a little bit better of a count so I can see where I want to direct my energies and how I can connect with you even better. If you're so inspired, I would love if you would leave me a review. It does make a huge difference. It is actually how a podcast kind of moves up the list is. The more reviews there are, the higher up it will go on the list so people can see it and other women can find the podcast, and I would love to have you as a member inside the modern creative woman. We dive deep into the concepts that improve your day to day experience, help you feel better, happier, and use your innate natural creativity to solve problems and connect with people. Every month we meet three times. Of course it's recorded. We have a beautiful platform. You can do all of it online in terms of whatever time you like. We meet three Tuesdays a month and it's a really kind, generous, creative corner of the world. I would love to see you there. You can find the link in the show notes, and I cannot wait to talk with you in the next episode.