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Appreciating the legacy of our ancestors: the Goddess of Marija Gimbutas

Tens of thousands of years ago, there was a world where culture flourished in peace and harmony with nature. Anthropologists, like Marija Gimbutas , found evidence of a female centred culture in what she called the Old Europe. This Lithuanian American archaeologist found evidence of a world supervised by women, with thousands of figurines representing female fertility and control of agriculture and harvesting to maintain life. Female figurine from Cyprus13th century BC The female figurines that have been found date from as early as 29000 BC, in the old stone age. They represent birth, growth, regeneration after death, in an organic cycle. Marija Gimbutas was inspired by the women of the villages in Lithuania. She knew how to appreciate the richness of her culture. Se believed folk tales and songs carried ancient wisdom and she connected them with the language and beliefs. Steatopygus Goddess, Crete, 5300-3000 BC Marija Gimbutas introduced the concept of the goddess associ...
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Yes we inherit trauma and we can heal from it

As if it is not enough to face the challenges in one lifetime, epigenetics has shown that we inherit the unresolved issues of our ancestors. Each one of us has a particular fear or an inclination that is difficult to explain based on our life experiences. Many people believe it has to do with past lives. Science says it has to do with genetic inheritance. Epigenetics states that traumatic experiences in parents lead to sensitivity in their children. It is thought to be the link between nature and nurture, where life experiences alter how the DNA is read in the cells.  In a recent BBC article , Martha Henriques reveals a model from the University of Zurich showing evidence of the RNA molecules altering gene function.  Brian Dias, of Emory University in the US, shows how mice that are trained to overcome a particular fear are less likely to pass it on to the next generation. He suggests that if humans inherit trauma in similar ways, the effect on our DNA could be ...

Young husband acknowledges value of SAHM in an Oxbridge TEDTalk

Ben Young is a young husband and father of two daughters. His TEDTalk about the stigmatisation and marginalisation of the Stay-at-home mom made an impact on me as a Gen Xer. He showed how the number of women who opted to stay at home to take care of their children instead of going to work full-time, decreased steadily in the USA until 1999. That was the year I had my first baby and I kept working full-time while very confused as to how I had to pause being a mum while I worked a paid job. From 1999 onwards, the number started increasing again. Maybe those mothers, like me, were confused and not too happy with the option to continue working a paid job full-time while having to deal with the also full-time job of being a mother.  Young highlights the three hyphened words that precede the condition of being a mother in the term SAHM. You can watch the video at  https://youtu.be/UTnosFGtQSM What I like the most about Young's talk is his explanation as to how the ...

What brain science says about long term LOVE

One of the greatest challenges of our time is to remain happily married for more than a decade. Dr Helen Fisher is an anthropologist who has studied the "brain in love" for many years. Her findings pair up nicely with those of couple therapists and psychologists specialised in long term relationships. Her methodology used MRI scans to look at parts of the brain that were activated when people were "in love". During decades Dr Fisher has been perfecting her studies and she has come up with a recipe for being happy in a long term relationship. I hope that these will be helpful for you at any stage of your life. How to sustain feelings in the three brain systems involved with LOVE Sex drive: driven by one of the most primitive parts of the brain. Cannot be sustained for more than two years on its own, so you must schedule sex regularly with your long term partner in order to create feelings in this part of your brain.  Romantic love: do novel things toget...

Nine reasons we become stronger after a loss

Loss in life is unavoidable. As long as we are alive, we will be disappointed by losing a dear friend, a relative, a pet, a home, a job, a love -or the illusion of love we were focusing on. The perception of every person's reality varies as much as the possibilities for the combination of genes from their ancestors.  If you have been touched by loss in any way, you might be still grieving. There are losses we never come to terms with, so the acceptance part of grieving is never achieved. In the process of becoming changed by the "heat and pressure" of life, I have put together a list of reasons why we become stronger after a loss. This is not exhaustive nor exclusive, but I hope you might find a few that resonate with you.  Without further ado, after a loss we become stronger because: Life goes on. Losing something or someone doesn't kill you. The surprise factor can cause physiological damage but while there is life there is hope and you can work on your...

Does freedom lead to loneliness?

Do you agree that today we have so many choices regarding our personal and professional lives yet we have lost the support structure that predetermined roles offered in the past? The meanings of activities that fill most of our time, like working and long-term personal relationships have changed from being financial exchanges to having to offer psychological satisfaction. We don't just go to work, it has to be rewarding in other ways apart from getting a paycheck. We don't just get married to procreate, we have to find the "soulmate". Clarissa Pinkola Estés in her treaty about the ancient female archetype, Women who Run with the Wolves , explains how women can lose their creative soul in search of security. Inhibition of her true desires for an extended period of time leads to voraciousness for the soul-satiating attributes: emotional, physical, spiritual, financial or rational. Domestication of the female instinct kills creativity and fulfilment. Eventually, ...

Under Heat and Pressure

The name of this blog is inspired by the hidden pain in women. Under heat and pressure is how precious minerals are formed. There are all sort of changes in the structure of matter at high temperatures, accelerated when there are forces that push in from all the sides. This is exactly what women have been exposed to during the history of humanity. And they have become the gem they have been for the past twenty thousand years. When you see a smiley woman young or old, can you see the pain in her? She might have lived a very happy, almost perfect, life yet she carries the sorrows of her female grandmothers. Somewhere in her lineage, there was a woman under heat and pressure.  In whichever society you live, any country, any culture, it is women who have maintained the family structure. For every mother who abandons a child, there is a foster mother who takes care of another. Beware of the impression that the men in a certain family are truly committed to their family. Their...

Dancing with the wolves: revising the wild women archetype

Ancient wisdom, as stated by Clarissa Pinkola Estes in her treaty-book "Women who run with the wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Women Archetype" determined that a first-time mother would receive support from a network of other women in the community. Today, she is supposed to be supported enthusiastically by her spouse. In a heterosexual couple, we have a father who has not been trained historically to perform as a hands-on baby/child caretaker. For the last 5000 years, since men discovered their sperm was necessary for the woman to bear a child, they have been doing everything they can to make women forget they once were worshipped as goddesses for precisely giving life to baby humans. The feminine and the masculine paradoxes  Women, as a female collective, have been so dominated by the traditionally man-managed institutions that control Estate, Religion, Education and everything else, that today we have abandoned the essence of the goddess, the giver of life,...