Journey of women

Recollections and retreats, any length of time they may be, are wonderful healing events that should be consciously included in the calendars of our lives. Yearly retreats were the practice of my youthful days growing up in a Catholic school. As life went on, my retreats became self-imposed personal escapes into meditation and quiet time. Group retreats were for yoga practices and teacher trainings. Recently, I went back to the old form of the day recollection with some of my Assumption Convent High School batch mates. I couldn’t pass on the theme for the day, which was the “journey of women.”

The venue was at the beautiful Angelfields in Silang, Cavite. The recollection priest was, surprise of all, my delinquent yoga student Bosconian Fr. Dennis Paez, who is also a family and marital counselor. I think all high school or even college friends should do such circles of recollections and stay in a circle of trust and acceptance, with no judgment. What makes old friends special is we have known them for so long that we accept and take them for what they are — warts and all. The power of bonding on a much deeper level within such a circle is intense when it is spiritually guided.

This coming together of old school friends around a spiritual purpose is shared by many women who are in the mid (or pass it!) of life. The journey of women is at once both personal and community-oriented. It is personal in that we look back at the many milestones that have shaped us, formed and influenced our present states of bodies, minds and spirits.

Old friends who come together can do so just to catch up and talk about school memories, gossip about the latest things happening with classmates. But the coming together can also be made powerful transformational events that allow us to check the “pulse” or our lives and bring understanding. This is what happened to us that day at Angelfields. Years after the formation of a religious school had been given, we moved into the rough and tumble of life marked by both joy and pains. Life weary, we meet up at the signpost of our 50 years, and view what we have as a group: marriages, children, empty nests, heartbreaks and betrayals, sicknesses and the awareness that our batch has lost so many to cancer, financial losses and professional successes, separations and aloneness, menopause and the body electric with fuses going in disarray, life choices made that define the complexity of life. Half a life lived as friends, or even just classmates moving around their own worlds and pivoting to this one day to recollect, gather and share. Then we were girls. Coming together at 50, we each are supposed to be “woman.”

“Its all about FACE,” Father Dennis said, defining the acronym as four tools that our small ego personalities use to block our transformation towards freedom: Fear, Attachment, Control and Entitlement.  And don’t we know this all? Fear of growing old and the future, of financial security, of being lonely or alone, of death.  Then there is the attachment to all the trappings that define our personalities, our possessions, our relationships that we are attached to and perhaps are not even growing from or with. And how we know control! When it’s got to be our way or the highway, of wanting our children to be what we want them to be and not accepting that they are souls that merely come through us to likewise evolve. Then entitlement, thinking we are so important! Many of us live just with FACE and don’t even think there is anything wrong with this because we are asleep to our inner spiritual core, with actions reactive only to FACE.

One of my classmates asked me, “What if I really don’t care to transform?” I responded jokingly, “Magdusa ka!” But the truth is that when one remains asleep, unwilling to make changes towards transformation, suffering will be the companion to life. Courage, detachment, surrender and humility, the opposites of FACE, are what bring us towards peace in knowing our petty selves are exactly that: petty. That we are so much grander because deep within each of us is a part more noble, more divine, pure, clear and loving. Because of these, we can affect change beyond our wildest dreams not only in our own lives, but in our families and communities. That once the wheels of change begin, transformation won’t be too far behind. 

Father Dennis, knowing me as his yoga teacher, asked me to share something about what I thought the journey of woman is about. So I did. Woman is like the moon in its many phases. To be truly woman, she must experience and transcend her dark shadows, embrace all the wild longings as represented by the dark side of the new moon. Here, all the darkness, the baser instincts must be accepted and embraced before the peripheral light shines on the new moon phase. She must feel and live from the innocence of a virgin in total surrender (as the Virgin Mary exemplified), with the fullest potential as represented by the new moon. She must awaken to the warrior nature with courage as represented by the waxing moon phases. Then as mother and creator, she nurtures and that brings forth the fullness of life as represented by the full moon. She must embody the wisdom of the Crone as age and experience tempers her into the Priestess that radiates spirituality, as represented by the waning moon. All phases must be integrated for wholeness.

“What is the purpose of life?” Father Dennis challenged us. “It’s not the pursuit of happiness, but the pursuit of meaning,” he said. This phrase really got me because I was always pinpointing my life goals towards happiness. And now I learn something new: It’s not happiness… but meaning, meaning. As a daughter, sister, mother or wife, as a woman, as a leader, as a contributor to society, our journey as women is to find meaning as we move through those roles we play. Once we capture meaning, the happiness and peace will follow.

(Follow the writer in Facebook Jeannie Javelosa and Twitter @jeanniejavelosa.)