Righteous Womb
Connecting to Creativity & Nurturing A New Retreat Space
PHOTO BY JESS DRAWHORN
For those of you who have been with Loam for many years, you’re likely familiar with the work of our beloved co-conspirator tayla shanaye.
tayla is the author of “Nourishing the Nervous System” and “Locate Your Liberate.” She’s a somatic therapeutic coach, consultant, and educator, as well as a facilitator with Weaving Earth.
For many years, tayla has been dreaming of creating a “seasonal retreat and sanctuary space for healers, activists, organizers, and marginalized communities to come rest, recover, and repair in heart-mind-body-spirit.”
Recently, tayla and her family—michael lynn, ayān (5) and amagi (1)—have reconnected with a beautiful place to home this vision. They have 2 weeks to fundraise the $60,000 necessary to protect this property from foreclosure.
If tayla’s work has been of benefit, we encourage you to donate. In the face of ecological, political, and social instability, spaces like this that center community climate resilience and experiential economies are truly life-giving. We have such deep trust in tayla and know that this sanctuary will be a gift to the world.
In celebration of the launch of this fundraiser, we want to share an excerpt from an essay that tayla published several years ago in “Waking the Ground” on womb work. We hope it meets you where you are at.
I want to tell you about a place.1 While these Anishinaabek lands may remain outside your experience, the waterway I speak of is known to you - in some way or another. Its mysterious cave reminds us of our own mystery; its movement reflects back to us our own potential. Like any sacred place on this pulsing blue planet, it has its own secrets, stories, magic, and wisdom. It is full of a sentience that, when we remember to listen, can guide us closer to ourselves. It is a sacred place, hidden yet familiar, where we can come to pray, sing, mourn, release, and touch the Divine.
This is the place of our becoming. The place of our birth.
I recognize I don’t know where to start. I drop my awareness and my breath into my pelvic bowl, feel my inhales and exhales massage my uterus, cervix, ovaries, birth canal, and I listen. They tingle with their unified wisdom and the kind of glee that comes from stage fright – as if they’ve been waiting, perhaps for centuries, perhaps longer, to speak. What comes through my hands is just as much a creation of my womb as menstrual blood, as my child, as (my) Self.
It is this place, my womb, that has a story to tell. I am nothing more than the humble storyteller.
I name this so you know that as you read, you are hearing the voice not just of tayla shanaye – a person with a slew of identities trying to make meaning in this chaotic world – but the voice of a womb that contains stories, generations, and wisdom. Let that be uncomfortable, let that be a homecoming, let that be whatever it is for you. Let your awareness drop down until you feel a tingle of recognition, and trust.
The uterus and cervix are organs activated by the cyclical timing of the moon, waves, and seasons. They work together to co-create the timescale of the universe in human form, guiding awareness through embodied seasonality. Over the course of a menstrual cycle, the land of the womb travels through the vibrant fertile energy of spring to the quiet fallowness of winter. This cycle, when permitted to be a guiding force for life, can instruct us as spiritual, psychological, ecological, and emotional beings on this Living Earth. The rhythm of the uterus and cervix can teach us the steps to waltz through the spirals of time.
Falling in love with these spirals, I find myself diving deeper still into the pelvis of the womb only to find the holy ground of creation - a sacred temple that compels reverence. My awareness wanders this hallowed throne of powerful muscle and memory tissue suspended in the center of a boned-bowl. This womb connects the place of reproductive creation to the nervous system, vagus nerve, throat, and heart - the body centers that inform my capacity for presence. These connections hold the complexity of life; all the stories of human existence are stored here in this sacred place. When engaged in the act of gestating another human, these connections hold future generations through creating a linkage of knowledge forward and backward in time.
Fostering womb-awareness with meaningful intent is a sacrament, ushering in the possibility of a vitality that shape-shifts the entire body. In the depths of awareness, taking up residence in the womb creates our humanity by igniting a primal power so dark and mysterious, so soft and strong, so all encompassing that it terrifies, consumes, and enlivens.
My own journey with my pelvis has been tumultuous. As a (cis)woman, I’ve devalued my womb for much of my lifetime. I’ve successfully internalized patriarchal notions of productivity to the point of demonizing my own cyclical nature in an effort to perform in the capitalist status quo. I’m learning that by rejecting the influence of my uterus, cervix, and ovaries in my perceptions of reality, I have rejected my reality and thus, my own liberation. I’ve surrendered autonomy over my experience as an embodied creature, forfeited my intuition for moments of flawed rationality, and discredited my own knowing time and again. The forces of violation I’ve experienced have been permitted to take up residency in the memory banks of my cervix and uterus, displacing my power of creation with the power of violence.
And yet—as I’ve now birthed my first child, as I’ve finally found safety in intimacy, as I’ve committed to my healing—I’ve been returned home to my pelvis. I’ve come into direct contact with the sacred power of birth, the same earthbound life-force that delivers mountains and creates hurricanes. I’ve discovered a pleasure so profound, I’m left speechless and spellbound. Moments when I’m born anew, witnessing with unshakeable admiration the beauty a body can create; the beauty my body has created.
It is a power so shocking, so unmatched, so consuming, that it’s immediately and abundantly clear why patriarchy has worked so long and hard to suppress and destroy it. This force moves in waves through deep space and across wide time. It shape-shifts through the act of opening – the biggest teacher in the power of surrender.2 Surrender to the moment, to creation, to nature.
This power can humble us, alongside the other elemental forces of nature, and demands we remember ourselves as cyclical beings. It asks us to be present to our perceptions of reality and change those things that deny the cyclical nature of life on this planet. To attune to the stories of the past and release them with compassion and gentleness. To understand that birth and death are two essential aspects within the cycle of life.
These are truths told from a uterus, a cervix, a birth canal. These are life-ways that stand directly in the path of destruction set forth by white supremacy and male-centered dominance. If those who carry a womb (in part, in whole or in awareness) return to this power, the stories the womb tells will destroy life as we know it and usher us into sacred reciprocity with our cycles, the moon, the water, the Living Earth.
We have been and continue to live in a time that is horrifying as a womb carrier. Hysterectomies are at an all time high, menstrual cycles are erratic and/or debilitating, conception is uncertain, pregnancy fragile, and cancer reigns. When we pause, for just a moment, to inquire why this would be, we can quickly understand that millenia of womb abuse, extractive care, neglect, violence, and power dispossession have resulted in high dysfunction. As the uterus and cervix contain memory cells, the trauma experienced by a single womb gets passed along as a story, a shape, and a capacity to future generations. It holds children in a place riddled with fear, violence, and shame. This danger to the uterus is no mistake, but the logical consequence of generations of denigration, violence, and harm. And why? Because the womb is powerful.
Reclaiming the body from patriarchy is a sensual act. It is to relocate ourselves in womb-awareness, and live in a way that embodies how much the womb matters. It is to meaningfully discharge the historical trauma inflicted on the womb; to come into right relationship with the cycle of the womb; to listen to and be guided toward wellness and health; to be emboldened by our embodiment; to know ourselves, our capacities, our desires, our pleasures, our edges; to be cyclical beings. To reclaim the human womb is to reclaim the womb of humanity and welcome us home to the womb of the Living Earth.3
It is necessary to activate this primal life force in order to stop the technocratic deathforce threatening all life on this planet.
The complexity of this communication tickles me. I give pause as I acknowledge that by speaking of the womb, I am speaking of a place we all experience, albeit in different ways. As we are all emergent from a womb, it is the communication of this womb-wisdom - the actuality of the physical organs that constellate this place of animal/human creation - that is essential to our shared humanity. That, whether we have a womb or not, by centering the wisdom of the womb in our bodies, hearts, minds, culture, and relationships, something renewed about our potential becomes apparent. Reverence for the womb - be it mine, yours or those you know who carry them - offers guidance toward a renewed way of conceiving reality.
The wisdom of water is alive in the womb. Menstrual blood, fertile cervical fluid, arousal fluid, amniotic fluid - the womb is a waterway. The first waterway we know as humans. And like any waterway, any river, it is a teacher. It offers us guidance about our own vitality, how we churn and tumble, how to wash ourselves clean. This awareness, visible when we sit along the banks of a river, is also human and embodied. It is a returning of this waterway consciousness to our collective understanding of ourselves. It is life.
I close my eyes, take a full breath into my womb space, and offer my deepest gratitude. As my bleed time approaches, I feel the sweet swelling of anticipated release in my uterus and cervix, and a growing softness in my belly. My moontime tea, a mixture of uterine tonic herbs like red clover and red raspberry leaves mixed with heart-healers like rose and meadowsweet, rushes through me with glee, inciting momentary contractions in my womb as we work together to let the stories of patriarchy, domination, violence, white supremacy and limiting-fear leave us. There is a profound settling in the whole of me, my skin softening as it stretches with my breath.
I open my eyes and I want to know if you feel it as I do? There is a mysticism here, a womb-based worldview, a womb-lifeway, that knows no bounds – a universal wisdom of cycles, care, creation, death, sensuality, sexuality, sacredness, pleasure, laughter, and power. I have chosen to listen to my body, my womb, with devotion and reverence as nature speaks poetry through me. The message is about coming home, about knowing the power of water that churns and rests inside our bodies. I am being asked to own it without apology in a way that destroys the illusions of linearity that keep us bound – unable to touch ourselves with love. I feel the fear of living in a way that says womb-bodies matter, but if we fail to believe our bodies matter, they will indeed cease to. If we want to “control” our bodies, we must occupy them, know them, love them, trust them, and listen to them. Be guided by them.
And if we can do that, well, things will most certainly change.
I know this because my body knows this.
I speak of the Anishinaabek lands of the so-called Upper Peninsula of Michigan, on the southern shores of Gichigami, also known as Lake Superior.
I speak of surrender not as passive resignation, but as an active effort to open and welcome the force of life moving on life’s terms.
I do not claim that this is how all wombs work, nor do I wish to suggest that it is only women who carry this knowledge. What I speak to here is the wisdom of a place that has been desecrated and dismissed, and that, as a species all born of a womb, can learn to remember and honor the knowledge and spirit of this place, an essential awareness will be returned to human consciousness.