Feminine Light

“Daddy, I feel like I have this light inside of me, and when I dance people get to see it too. I just want to share it.”

So when I turned sixteen, I got myself a scholarship and left my hippie home in northern New Mexico to go to a fancy boarding school for the arts in conservative New England. I quickly memorized the script I would need to follow if I were to go pro: be very, very thin and get the steps very, very right. These harsh rules apply for a girl aspiring to be a dancer as well as for a girl aspiring to be a woman. On both accounts, I got busy. I shifted my focus from sharing my light to getting it right, from following my bliss to following the script, and from shakin’ my booty to working my ass off.

Along with biology, French, and ballet classes, I studied up on how to become an excellent anorexic, and embraced my new way of life with religious fervor. I ate nearly nothing. I scrutinized the girls who were technically advanced and tried not only to dance like them, but also to move like them, sit like them, and even talk like them. I stayed late in the dance studios, practicing long past the point of pain and fatigue. As the weeks and months went on, people asked with concern if I was getting too thin, but I knew other students were secretly jealous of me and my teachers were proud of me.

During one visit home, I handed my parents my report card — a column of straight As — and waited for their reaction. Instead of admiring the piece of paper, they looked at me and beamed. “You know,” my father said, “we love you unconditionally. Always will. There is nothing you could do or not do to change that.” While that was probably the best thing any girl could hope to hear from the god and goddess of her universe, inside I was distraught. No, I thought. No! Don’t you understand? I don’t deserve that. Not yet. There are so many things wrong with me, so many ways I am not yet perfect. I can’t accept your love until then.

Back in boarding school, I was hungry, tired, and felt like I was holding my breath all the time. I dreamt at night about the indulgences I wouldn’t let myself have by day, things like meat with gravy, ice cream sundaes, boys to kiss. I longed to skip class and sleep in. I started to feel that the urges of my body — my hungry, unruly, feminine body — were antithetical to my goals of becoming a great dancer. I began to believe that somehow my body was against me.

I doubled down with my preferred war tactics of control and deprivation, and didn’t look up for the next ten years. One day, in my twenties, in rehearsal for a dance company I dearly loved, I watched a fellow dancer practice. As I stretched on the side of the room, an icy realization poured into my body. She was a great technician (she got the steps very, very right), yet as I watched her, I became aware that her greatness was about something far beyond her technical virtuosity. She seemed completely at home in herself. A luminescence shone from her that was almost holy. In that third-story dance studio in Lower Manhattan, it hit me in the gut: I would never feel truly successful, in dance or otherwise, because I was focused too much on following my script and too little on sharing my light.

But the light I saw in my fellow dancer woke up a dormant part of me. I realized that I gravely missed my light, even if I had no idea how to regain it. I realized that I had traveled far from my true self, and the path back was anything but clear. Regardless, more than the salvation that I thought my script would offer me and that I was killing myself to reach, I began instead to want to feel completely at home in myself. I longed to feel luminous and to know myself as holy — or, if that was too much to ask, then to just feel okay. Although I didn’t know it at the time, it was my want that was actually my first step on the path that led back to me. It was my longing that let me pick up that humble white flag that signifies the end of a war…

One afternoon, I sat in a lecture on Vedic Tantric philosophy (the guiding principle behind many forms of yoga), for which I was getting certified so I could offer it to my coaching clients. Originating in India around the fifth century, the word tantra loosely translates as “web” or “weaving.” As I learned that day, Tantrists — an unruly band of mystical upstarts — believe that since all life is interconnected (like a web), humans are not separate from God (or whatever term you choose for the divine power that animates all of life), but are in fact interwoven with God.

Many world religions see humans as inherently and irreparably flawed, salvageable only if we live precisely by one ordained script or another, getting high enough marks in this lifetime to earn our reunion with All That Is in some kind of afterlife. Tantrism, however, like the Buddhism and Hinduism it influenced, sees humans as suffering only from a simple, easily reparable misunderstanding. We aren’t separate from the Holy One; we have simply forgotten that the Holy One and we are one. We aren’t hopelessly messed up; we have simply forgotten that the Divine is having a messy human experience through us. We needn’t follow a stringent set of conditions in order to be worthy of love; we have simply forgotten that the Universe adores us unconditionally. Tantra kindly reminds us that whatever it is we have simply forgotten, we can remember.

Oh, I realized. So, I am a strand in the web of All That Is. That means that no matter how many pounds I gain, classes I flunk, or relationships I mess up, I will still get an A+ from the Universe. It slowly dawned on me that if being human is not a fallen condition, neither is being a woman. No longer my prosecutor and executioner, my hunger became holy. Instead of hurling my requisite one hundred “I hate my body” bombs at myself each day, I realized that — as a woman and a human — I could sing a new refrain to myself. I repeated a line from Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese”: “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves”…

Women are the key. The wild grace of Feminine Genius blossomed in my body like spring-drunk forsythia and refused to ever let me go. Feminine Genius directed my wary gaze onto a path that curved off into a future that didn’t at all resemble my scripted, contorted past. Then without any instruction, Feminine Genius cackled a bit, smacked me on the ass, and sent me walking…

One of the most enduringly inspiring things in my life is to watch a woman slip the Gordian knot of self-loathing, people pleasing, and overachieving and become simply and fully herself. The light that comes on in her, comes on in the world; it confirms that I am doing my part to leave this wacky world that much better than I found it, one Feminine Genius at a time.”

~ LiYana Silver, Feminine Genius: The Provocative Path to Waking Up and Turning On the Wisdom of Being a Woman

"One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius; and the feminine situation has up to the present rendered this becoming practically impossible."
~ SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR, The Second Sex