Being that your mama is all about “returning a fiercely loving feminine legacy” I certainly think about empowering your womanhood … a lot.

Since you are only five “and a half” and thus, have much more pressing matters on your mind, I’ve decided to write to you about some of my big “aha” moments and maybe one day down the road, you will read them (and maybe even dig them.)

There is so much to write, but today I want to simply tell you about motherhood and sisterhood.  I was recently interviewed by an amazing woman for her “Maybe Baby” e-course and I adorably start off my interview by saying that motherhood “annihilated” me. Though the people who speak embellishmentese understand what I mean, some amazing folks emailed me desiring elaboration.

First, let me distinguish between you and motherhood.

You were hands down one of the most amazing things to ever arrive into my life. I was blown open with a fierce love when I held you for the first time. Till this day, I watch you in complete wonder. And you were born on the eve of the “pink moon” which in hindsight was the most auspicious wink from the universe of all the wisdom you would bring.

Essentially there was something about being the mother of a young child that felt so off for me. I felt a constant craving I couldn’t put my finger on. For the first year and a half, it was a riddle that teased me at every turn and I wrestled with it, and demanded it reveal itself. It eventually did.

What I finally came to realize was that I was missing a strong female community. Not too long ago and for thousands of years, women raised children together. It’s only in the last century that most modern women shifted into raising their kids with their partners. My DNA was craving the old paradigm.

My situation was an extreme case of how not to do it because I had recently moved to Seattle where I didn’t have deep roots. Couple this with my “I can do it myself”-ness (AKA an inability to receive) and I created a breeding ground of isolation.

Not developing/maintaining strong and supportive female relationships was my biggest “mistake.” When the torrential rains of motherhood hit: sleep deprivation, hormones and the pressure that every modern woman juggles, affirming sisterhood gets you through. It makes the first wildly demanding years of motherhood doable.

SO, what I mean by “annihilated” is that motherhood destroyed my illusion that I was an independent being who could do it all by myself. Realizing this truth has been one of the best things that ever happened to me.

Today, I could write pages about all that separates women from each other, but I’ll save that for another time. Know that I am on it. Also know that as soon as I realized what I was missing, I did an immediate course correct and have been soaking up sisterly love ever since.

There it is, love. For these reasons, if you should one day choose to become a parent, one of my biggest desires for you is that you feel fueled by the support of a loving female community. Yes, this is true for every aspect of life - when you have a pack of loving women behind you, you can do anything.

Love,
Mom

I hope this email finds you beaming over the most beautiful desire list for 2012. I wrote mine yesterday and I am abuzz from all the amazingness my soul loves.

Since I am constantly reading crazy-cool stuff online, I wanted to salute you into 2012 with some hot links that I feel liberate us to be more of who we truly are.

The magnificent Julie Wray sent out the best post for digesting 2011. A must contemplation.

Elizabeths Gilbert’s TED Talk on creativity is revolutionary (not to mention validating.)

All of my musings on saying “sorry” inspired this courageous gent to write Screw John Wayne: The Art of Apologizing. (Warning: If you are invested in right and wrong thinking, don’t read this article. If you are invested in compassionate relationships and the power of response ability, then definitely check it out.) I have to say that getting right on wrong has made the word “sorry” the biggest win-win in my life.

I believe we are all living this post by Kate Northrup: It’s not going to turn out how you thought. So true. If we would only get out of the way … it’s really going to be better.

Gratitude is Not a Should by The Organic Sister. I was just pondering how gratitude flowed through my heart after a good cry when I found this exquisite post.

I LOVED this Tanya Geisler interview with the always inspiring Danielle LaPorte. One of her best.

It seems my most popular posts this year were An Arsenal of Feminine Power and When Gratitude is Bullshit. However, it turns out my most tweeted article was The Sexual Limits of a Sex Positive World which I spontaneously wrote in 20 minutes after I Googled “sex positive”. I am delighted that it has been a helpful redefinition for so many.

My favorite quotes this year came from Nicole Daedone: “Your desires may not lead to what you want but they will never lead you astray.” Sing it, Nicole. And I have to say that Nicole’s work has had the greatest positive influence on my life in 2011. Thank you, Nicole.

And from Mama Gena: “A woman who owns her [sensuality], owns her life.” (Though you know what she really said.) The truth of this statement makes my head spin with new realities for the world.

Here’s to 2012! May it be filled with true genius, appreciation, sensuality and desires that unfurl better than we ever could  imagine.

Love,
Dara

Why would you read my blog, participate in a workshop and spend your valuable time contemplating the feminine mystery? I can only imagine you are hungry for a relevant, affirming and mighty experience of your feminine essence.

VOLVER’s offerings are crafted to encourage emotional integrity, supportive relationships and the ability to wildly meet the wildness of life. Though the personal benefit is tremendous, at the core of VOLVER’s feast is the desire to return a feminine legacy that is rich with the above.

Returning an affirming feminine legacy is VOLVER’s greatest reason for being.

You may have already noticed that the majority of women in the world are without an affirming legacy. This means that our mothers were unable to offer the information that empowers our womanhood. In many cultures like ours, this void has existed for thousands of years and in my adorable opinion, has and continues to cause loads of unnecessary suffering for women and men.

When I close my eyes and imagine this legacy restored, I see a beautiful web that connects all women. It  is delicate, requires care and reverence, and is also indestructible. This web has taken some major blows in the last five millennia and despite all the aggression, it still exists today.

You’ve read it here:
WHY: I believe that an affirming feminine legacy is nature’s greatest creative and healing force.
HOW: I stand for and express this belief by inviting readers/participants to contemplate, research and align with the gifts of their feminine essence.
WHAT: This soulful site and my workshops that return women to themselves and best of all … to each other.

Phew. Now that I got that all out, if you would like to participate in the WHAT, so you can experience the HOW and return the WHY, my next “Belonging & The Body” course is Saturday December 10th from 2-6pm and is the last “Belonging and The Body” course until March/April. REGISTRATION ENDS THIS SUNDAY: DECEMBER 4th. To score your spot and to infuse this holiday season AND Seattle winter with your feminine power->Click.

For any of you who have checked it out, the School of Womanly Arts is a vibrantly rich, dynamic and multi-faceted experience. Grads can talk for hours about how we are positively affected. I once had the chance to ask Regena, “Of all the many brilliant things you created, what are you most proud of?” Her answer was one word,”Sisterhood.”

Though I am someone who was relatively successful at female friendship, there was something between many women (especially some female family members) and me that felt so … unsupportive. I just chalked it up to personality differences. We were all free women and the wild ride of female friendship was just … wild. Though, when it got wild, it was ugly and painful. For so many of us, sisterhood is a rough, rough road.

Did you know that for thousands (THOUSANDS) of years, women survived by hanging together in tight packs. When you travel to third world countries, you can still see it. In fact, it is only within the last hundred years that modern women have become so separate. Whether you call it biology, genetics or human animal, the last hundred years are a blip compared to the thousands of years of togetherness that is sewn into our DNA.

As a successful career woman who had recently relocated to Seattle with her man, I managed to be completely oblivious of my primal need for sisterhood until I became pregnant. Then when they handed me my little girl, FORGET-ABOUT-IT: The loneliness was immense. The constant craving to be around SISTERS was painfully undeniable.

When it comes to revealing “organic” sisterhood, I have yet to meet anyone who unleashes feminine love like Regena does. Through methods that are completely pleasurable and immediate, she reignites relationship muscles that have been severely atrophied.

Once you sip from these waters, there is no denying how RIGHT it feels and how parched you have been. It is like you have come back home to something that on a very deep level you always knew was possible. As a psychotherapist who thought she knew so much about relationships, I was pleasantly shocked.

How are things between you and other women? How are things between you and your female family members? When things take a turn down hill, do you feel supported? Do you pretend your John Wayne when things get tough? Riding off into the sunset to do it all alone?

These days, most folks think the black spots on the conventionally farmed bananas are “natural” to the banana ripening. It’s not until someone points out that organic bananas don’t ripen that way, that we realize something is amiss in banana-land. That is what it is like in the world of female friendship. We are conditioned to believe so much of our dark spots are “natural” and women are just “bitchy and competitive,” when in fact, we are conventionally bred.

If I have inspired you to know more, here is a link that winks (back to yours truly.)

I have a Master’s degree in Contemplative (Buddhist) Psychotherapy from Naropa University. This three year program involved being part of a 20ish person community that took every class together, participated in a group process (like therapy) and attended two private month long meditation retreats. The idea was that as we learned about western psychology, Buddhist philosophy and practiced meditation, we would begin to re-examine our upbringing and become aware of our “habitual patterns.” We would then naturally act them out within the group and hope to work them out with each other. The meditation practice and retreats would take us further into ourselves and surrender, as we returned to our outbreath and learned to meet whatever arose with unconditional loving kindness. Phew, I know. Quite a dynamic and unique program. I was all about it.

Since writing “MENitation,” I have reflected on how I benefited from my former meditation practice and this Master’s program. Though I graduated from Naropa with girlfriends who will always be like family to me, my most painful moment occurred in sisterhood gone wrong. I tell you the following story to illustrate how women bred in a masculine dominant paradigm compete and create walls between each other.

What I now can clearly name as female competition, just looked like a series of bitchy mishaps with … let’s call her Josephine, a Naropa classmate. Every time Josephine and I tried to connect, we just kept having one awkward interaction after the next. Eventually she decided that she didn’t … (gulp) … like me and began to give me the cold shoulder.

There was definitely a part of me that didn’t care and knew whatever she had conjured up in her mind was hers. And there was another (bigger) part of me that felt very affected by a ton of passive-aggressive energy being swung at me every day at school. Somewhere in there I asked her if we could talk and she said yes, but we never did.

At our second year meditation retreat, I was the last one to arrive. Before I met up with the group, I stopped at the meditation hall to drop of my cushion which I plopped down at the first available spot. The next morning when the retreat began, I found myself sitting right next to her. Now I can only imagine what a truly wise and compassionate person would do in this situation. I, however, went with my adorable ego and thought: F*ck her. I’m not moving.

And thus began one of the most arduous experiences of my Naropa stint. Every outbreath returned me to a cement wall of stuck, unexpressed, tense, restricted, pressured, misunderstood frustration. EVERY outbreath threw me up against this wall, like a panther pacing in a cage, over and over and over again.

When Josephine and I finally got teamed up for a creative project, we had to work things out. She felt terrible at this point and copped to creating a mess between us. I, armed with a roll of toilet paper, watched my cement wall dissolve with every tear as I sobbed and told her how I felt. In all honesty, she explained that she was triggered by my identification as a pretty and sexy woman and that she had a judgment that it was much more valuable to be smart than attractive.

And there falls the axe between modern women.

Attractive or smart? Whore or Madonna? Truthful or polite? On one extreme, if we choose the smart and polite Madonna, we must pretend to be rational creatures and live life denying our emotional and sensual design. On the other extreme, if we choose the attractive and truthful whore, we are exiled from society, living a lifetime of judgment from the very system that enjoys us. It is in the navigation between these poles that the modern woman feels her riddle.

Quick history lesson: Archeological evidence suggests that approximately 5,000 years ago, the shift from hunter-gatherer societies to farming societies enabled a paradigm of male domination. Tribes would fight for the land and women from conquered tribes were enslaved and made a commodity. This created two camps of women: the noble/married women and the slaves who were bought and sold for their ability to pleasure and reproduce. Within this domination paradigm, both groups of women lost ownership of their sexuality. This paradigm persisted for 5,000 years and has only begun to cease with the education and liberation of western women within the last century.

Five thousand years of ownership has left modern women with almost zero reverence for our inherent sexual design. Estranged from our greatest source of power, we compete, as it seems like the only other path. In my opinion, female competition is so painful because it is not our primary design, it is something we resort to.

In retrospect, I now see the wall I experienced during that meditation retreat not only my ego’s refusal to be vulnerable, but a wall that was errected 5,000 years ago. A wall that separates almost all women from a sane experience of their source and from the ease of sisterhood.

Uniting under the truth of our sensuality not only makes these tussles null and void, it unleashes the love we truly yearn for. I believe this is one of the many reasons my intuition continuously whispers to me, “Dara, the path of feminine self-actualization and compassion exists in igniting the world below our hearts, not in calming the world above.”

I have an incredible husband, named David. Truly, whoever wrote the stories about Prince Charming knew someone like him. He is handsome, charismatic, generous, romantic, enthusiastic, devoted, funny (see picture,) well educated, great lover, hard working and a wonderful father. He LOVES to make all women happy and LIVES to be the hero. I am his Queen and I stand confidently by his side. Our relationship is not without the challenges of every marriage, but I see him and he sees me.

My last boyfriend before meeting David had dreads down to his ass and rode a Triumph motorcycle. While he was WAY fun, we missed each other in the response ability department. To go from dread-man to David was a big leap in a very different direction.

There is so much advice about meeting our soul mates: vision boards, books on calling in the “one”, attraction seminars, support groups, dating coaches, etc. With all of the theories on dating, I have often contemplated as to how I “scored” such a good one. I’m sharing this story to potentially inspire anyone who is desiring to meet their mate.

After many adventurous, but ultimately unfulfilling relationships, at 28 I had come up empty in the guy and work department. For me, no man, plus no career, equaled panic attacks. Luckily, I lived in Boulder,CO, otherwise known as psychotherapy central, and I conjured a referral for a wonderful male Buddhist therapist named Bruce.

Seeing Bruce gave me an entirely different experience of men. Here was a man who thought deeply about emotions and spirituality, loved to help people AND maintained his masculinity along the way. I honestly didn’t think men like him existed. He also thought my provocative ways were adorable and affirmed what my soul loved most: psychology and spirituality (I know, I was in good company).

Working with him made me take a hard look at all the men I allowed into my life. I realized that I attracted men who didn’t see me and I also realized it was because I hadn’t yet seen myself. But the crazy part was that I wasn’t seeing myself out of a fear that it would narrow the pool of men to choose from.

When I finally saw this pattern and how draining it had ultimately been to my life force, I vowed that I would never be in another relationship where I wasn’t fully seen, even if that meant spending the rest of my life … alone. I meant it.

But you all have heard this before: the woman who finds a man as soon as she stops looking. Yes, I believe this was a third of my genius. Another third was that I continued to see my therapist and by doing so, continued to fill up on high grade Vitamin See … thus I never went hungry. Vitamin See depletion leads to desperation and desperation is only attractive to other desperate folks.

And my third act of genius was that I took another huge leap and heard a call to attend Naropa University to pursue a Master’s degree in Buddhist Psychology, something I had wanted to do since arriving in Boulder five years prior. I began pursuing my soul’s pleasure.

So there I stood steeped in radical self love, Vitamin See and pleasure. When David walked past me for the first time, I will never forget the double take. Sisters, a woman floating in the delight of her being is the strongest pheromone.

He was overt in his desire to meet me, but I wasn’t interested, I was too busy basking in the pleasure of being me. He called me and I didn’t call him back for a few days. He invited me out and I kept putting him off. He essentially pursued my disinterested ass for a month until one night he got me on the phone and we chatted and chatted and chatted until the battery of my phone died.

We had our first date the next day and I bought myself a new pair of shoes an hour before we met. I was interested. Three months later we moved in together.

So here is the recap:

1. Discover what your soul needs to be in full bloom and stand for that at all costs.
2. Hang out with good men even if you have to pay them (and honestly … you always pay.)
3. Keep your Vitamin See tank full.
4. Pursue your pleasure/turn on and bask in the enjoyment. There is nothing more attractive then the soft smile of contentment.

Did you pull any divine moves in meeting your partner?

Yesterday, I completed Allison Armstrong’s Celebrating Men course. Since awakening to the expansive power of my feminine essence, I have been searching for a course with this very name.

I am going to be very transparent. My minds ability to see the brilliance of women is uncanny; however with men I was finding myself too often frustrated, baffled … and pissed. Fortunately, I knew deep down that my frustration had to be my problem. If the feminine essence was drenched in divinity so was the male. I just wasn’t seeing it and I needed a course correct on men … bad. I got exactly that and then some.

I heard about “Celebrating Men, Satisfying Women” from one of my Nia students, the exquisite Cherie Martin-Irwin. Cherie told me how both she and her girlfriend met their future husbands three months after taking the course. These kind of results get my attention.  I looked it up as soon as I got home.

Sisters, if you are struggling with men or lack of men and suspect that you may have been poorly educated, this course delivers the goods. My being is now overflowing with all of the beautiful things I learned about men.  Allison Armstrong is the real deal. Her vision for the world is stunning and she is making it happen. She is elegant, professional and hilariously funny. By the end, women were weeping and in complete awe of men.

Since I am town crier for anything that will effectively end unnecessary suffering, I am a LOUD and PROUD affiliate for this program which means if you use this link (or simply tell them your heard about it from me) I get a share for sharing. Please know I am very appreciative.

I know so many of you on this list are national, so go check out the site and find the next course nearest you. For those of you in Seattle, they are having a free intro-course this Wednesday night 5/19, at 6:30pm.

Here’s to men and all of their golden generosity.

This move instantly returns me to the truth of my energy body.  Reminding me that my emotional integrity is more important and efficient than chasing after my list.

By burning it all up, I am giving it all up.  This creates lots of room for goodies, adventure and blazing intuition.  So much so, I am beginning to see the bubbling of overwhelm as a sign of sweet surrender to come.

What are your favorite rituals?

In true Volver fashion this Blog has some HUGE and beautiful desires:

I desire this blog be a beacon for goodness. Some of the things I will be writing about include pleasure, love, beauty, intuition, possibility, P*ssy, emotions, chakras, desire, self-love, truth, individuality, body, divinity, motherhood, flirtation, compassion, egolessness, creativity, sensuality, sisterhood, trust, celebration, energy, art, rightfulness and magic … to name a few.

I desire this blog to be as enjoyable as your favorite magazine. Where you will enjoy the latest of my adorable rants, “Returning” interviews with divine feminine/energy rock stars, “Dara’s Favorite Things” and general awesomeness that is sure to make our world a better place.

I desire to be a Top 50 Blogger.

Are you out there reading this?  Are you feeling a twinge of excitement?  Would you do me the BIGGEST honor and bless my blog with your three greatest pleasures du jour?  Right here, right now – leave a comment with three things that switch you to “ON.”  That remind you of your rightful place. That “RETURN” you to yourself.

OK – I’ll go first. Three of my most favorite pleasures are:

• A unique pair of shoes.

• A super warm bath (followed by sleeping naked between 400 thread count sheets!)

• An amazing Nia class.

What about “sex” you wonder?  Yes, sex is definitely one of my greatest pleasures – AND our culture is quick to equate the word “pleasure” with sex.  While sex is a phenomenally powerful pleasure, human enjoyment and sensuality encompasses much more than the sublime pleasures of sexual ecstasy.

So with that said, what are your fav-o-flav pleausures???  What do you LOVE about this physical experience we call life?

Beaming with appreciation,
Dara

Here I am 10 years later, living in Seattle, packing those 15 (or 20) pounds, married to David, with a 4 year old girl, a baby boy, Volver, Zing and LOTS of connection, laughs, friendship and love with my man. Marrying David and creating our family are certainly my greatest brags of the decade, AND I have two more that rock my world.

First, I radically trust myself: my desires, my intuition and my truth. RADICALLY. Second, my sister is one of my closest friends. After 30 + years of relationship strife, we now bask in the sublime pleasures of true sisterhood. I have Mama Gena to thank for both of these brags. She is no joke.

Happy Birthday to me!

Happy Anniversary David!

Welcome to this world Volver blog! May you be a beacon for all that is awesome.