Inspiring Women: Stacey Curnow: Midwife

I’m grateful for Stacey especially for her 30 Days to Inner Peace which I tried earlier this year and it has motivated me to meditate and exercise every day, practices which I have seldom missed since receiving Stacey’s kind and encouraging daily prompts. In these Stacey wrote honestly about her own struggles and showing self-care and redirecting her efforts, which helped me treat myself with kindness and eventually gain some consistency that was previously lacking.

Stacey’s own stories exemplify her teaching. Her perseverance with getting accepted into a program for midwifery (it took her four tries) is a compelling story that she translates into steps for setting goals and following through, including a clear goals; steps for action broken down into small, actionable steps; not being dissuaded by misunderstanding or negative feedback from others; and getting support from sympathetic people in one’s life.

And she’s willing to take risks, once leaving a clinic where she worked as a midwife to volunteer in Mexico with Doctors Without Borders to improve her Spanish and eventually devote herself to serving the Latina population in the U.S., finding a “dream job” that also allowed her to spend time with her family. Recently, Stacey saw that she’d grown “less-than-satisfied” with her then-current job and took another leap, resigning to devote all her time to Midwife for Your Life coaching and workshops. In a related piece she describes her dialog with her “Inner Critic,” portraying as one of several potential sources of guidance. Similarly, Stacey shares this simple exercise on cultivating intuition awareness.

These are great stories. Stacey’s helped a lot of women give birth through her first midwifery practice and who knows how many she will help give birth to their dreams through her second midwifery practice.

Inspiring Women: Roxanne Krystalli: Open Hearted Traveller

Roxanne says in a video response to the question “who are you,” that she is “foreign everywhere and mispronounces everything.” Her honesty and self-effacement and joy are apparent throughout all that she shares. She was born in Greece, went to school in America, describes herself professionally as “a conflict management professional who specializes in the effects of war and conflict on women,” and in the same space as someone who is a “fervent believer in the power of storytelling.” Roxanne’s travels and work have taken her to Egypt, Jerusalem, Latin America and the Balkans, among other locales. On her site Stories of Conflict and Love and in her photo journal she documents these journeys, portraying not only “conflict and grief” but also human “resilience.”

Roxanne’s two posts on non-violent conflict here and here demonstrate both scholarship and lived experience. The first cites reports showing the relative success of strategically organized non-violent movements compared with violent confrontations. The second looks at violence itself and how it may backfire for both those in power and those who resist. While she expresses sympathy for protestors in her native land she does not agree with violent expression and points to a source where 198 alternatives to violent conflict are identified.

Roxanne has a wonderful eye for beauty in the landscapes she travels. See her post on light in Jerusalem during Hanukkah. From a walk in Greece, she shows us spiritual messages interspersed with violent and defiant graffiti. Or check out this variety from the fish on the bicycle in Cuba to the tree reflected in the soup bowl to the children playing in the street. Remarking of herself, Roxanne says she “preaches mindfulness” but frequently dwells in memory or worries about the future and that behind the camera “time stops, ” and that “photography makes me more mindful because it reminds me to really look... to search for beauty (or for surprise, incongruence, contradiction and conflict).” See also a tender post on waiting for someone special, the zenith of which is “I stare at the lily till all I see is a blushing world,” and the extraordinary pictures that follow.

Elsewhere, in her video introduction, Roxanne says, “the power of kindness to ourselves and others is one of the currencies I must believe in.” She exemplifies it through her work, her travel, her writing, her art and her joy.

Inspiring Women: Amy Oscar: Angel

Amy tells a story how she ran out of gas on a bridge on Long Island years ago and was helped by a truck driver. He refused payment or a gift, and even though she copied the phone number and the name of the company from the truck, she couldn’t locate him, the number was disconnected and the company claimed not to have a driver in that area. This was her first “angel experience,” and she writes about it in her Sea of Miracles, of which encounters with angels are just one aspect of experience of “The Universe, The Divine, All That Is.”

I suspect Amy may be an angel too.

She says in another angel-themed story: “ Every encounter is an opportunity for Grace. Open your mind; open your eyes, your ears and your heart to what comes.”

Similarly, Amy writes in a solstice-themed passage “the light you seek is within.”

Like Marjory, she says give us your gift: “The real you knows:

• you are encoded with a genius only you can deliver, a puzzle piece that we need to complete the picture of the world. This genius is calling you onward, upward – home; to a destiny that will fill you with purpose, fullness and joy.
• you are meant to engage with life – to drop into the mine of the self and, using your own particular tools, figure out how to carry your gold to the surface… to be shared with others.”

And offers the opportunity as exemplified in her generosity towards other writers in the Spring Awakening series and in her weekly #SoulCall on Twitter.

And two of the tools Amy offers for creating a vision for one’s life are the More of This list and her Rules for a Good Life, with emphasis on silence in #9 and prayer and angels in #10.

Amy has a deep sense of the miraculous and the limitless possibilities of life and encourages others towards a like pursuit and awareness and appreciation.

Inspiring Women: Marjory Mejia: Flow

Marjory’s background is in landscape architecture, and her work helps others unleash flow and creative energy in the spaces where they live and inside themselves. “My canvas is space. My gift is flow,” she writes on her site.

Like Julie Daley, she speaks of the sacred feminine and the awesomeness of a woman's power and connection with the earth, with emphasis on flow and movement, especially in this post on blood which stands traditional taboos on their head.

I love Marjory’s poem that expresses both flow and rootedness:

i am

daughter of river, sea and wind

every drop of my soul

held in the waters of life

She writes eloquently of another cyclical expression of flow, sharing one's gifts:

"that it is a gift only if you share it.

like the honey of a flower keeping not to itself but unfurling and flowing to sweeten the world..like the heart song of a bird singing itself to expansion and delight..like the sun beaming its warms rays received by the earth in ecstasy..like the love cradled inside our soul radiating those silent pauses breathing us alive in this space drawing us closer and closer”

or by opening one’s heart, or through one’s personal story.

What Marjory shares through her site is a compelling experience of flow, particularly in this catalog of art images on the soul of a woman, or through her Pinterest collections.

And let others tell you through their testimonials what Marjory has brought to their lives.

Inspiring Women: Jessica Kristie: Journey through poetry

I’ve read Jessica’s blog and poems for a while now and what inspires me is the life journey that she records and transforms through her writing and with many voices.

Jessica’s motto is: “Poetry is my heart, anchors my soul, and documents my journey.” Next to these words on her site is the following cluster: “Learn Forgive Grow Hope Remember Love.” Quite a constellation of life directions, isn’t it? Or again in Jessica’s words, confronted with death, “Living – is where we find our verse.”

Especially facing painful memories:

"The sounds of each letter find their way to a piece of me –
I have been trying to forget." (Shades of You and Me)

"I beg for revolving doors.
Pain in: my journey in life.
Pain out: to grow and change." (Love Letter)

At the same time, appreciation for connection with others in pain:

"In an instant you breathe hope

while standing still in this suffocation.

Restoring my soul

and making me

intimately whole.

With no hesitation you breathe love.

Bringing back my estranged comfort.

Reminding me of who I can be."

(Hidden Hero)

When pain seems unending and change seems impossible:

“When I get up from this bed – all the pain,
it will,

still be there.”

(Empty)

“Change becomes the expectation
When reality plays out

It is only the exception”

(A Day Like Any Other)

Then there is the realization that change must come from within and through action:

“We Walk on Water”

"Down on bended knee, as my bluest aqua blue,

reminds me of a bitter truth -

I must change."

“Tragedy’s Room”

"Today I want to put skin around my words,

turn sentences into limbs,

and reach across the seas."

Also from “We Walk on Water”

"What a masterpiece I have created in my soul’s foliage.

It is shaped of stars with scented breezes."

"Today is the day you make a mark. Change. Years go by in moments and death replaces life. Today is the day you fix this. There is an expiration date that for this moment has been delayed, but someday, we will be out of appeals. Live. Now."

Similarly, not only changing moving forward but changing the past and how we see it, “What we think we know will halt us in our tracks, but when we move in the water as smooth as dolphins – our history can change.” (Eyes Wide Open)

Jessica’s dramatic and heartfelt first poetry collection, Dreaming in Darkness, will soon be followed by a second, Threads of Life, evidently exploring dysfunctional relationships. Jessica’s generosity to fellow artists and writers on parallel journeys is also evident from her Inspiring Ink series the open mic poetry reading she’s hosting.

Keep writing, Beautiful Butterfly, you’re something else.

Inspiring Women: Lindsey Mead: Awareness

Awareness seems scarcely sufficient to describe the gifts Lindsey presents through her A Design So Vast. Cosmic consciousness may be a more apt description.

It is this appreciation of the moment in every day, in spite of change, pain and at times loneliness, (and what they teach her,) that is so delightful and transformational about Lindsey’s work, through which I could go, to borrow the words of Randall Jarrell, “shouting and pointing.”

However, today I want to focus on consciousness and awareness and what Lindsey teaches me. Quoting Miriam Gates “Bravery is about being conscious of all life,” Lindsey goes on to write “Bravery is staring into the sun, even when the brightness of life – and the brightness is precisely because life’s minutes are burning in front of us – is painful. Bravery is not flinching and not looking away, even when the emotion of a moment overwhelms us. Bravery is not hiding, in a thousand ways little and big, from our own lives.”

Of appreciation of everyday moments of life and phenomena, Lindsey writes: “The most mundane of things, our very own life-scarred hands, are equally as transcendent as the most ornate and soaring cathedral. There is as much power and as much wonder in the simple human hand as in a grandiose cathedral.”

The awareness of the fleeting quality of life runs through Lindsey’s writing, that we are living and dying at the same time. Or, similarly here, where she emphasizes: “My every conscious moment is filtered through this prism of my piercing awareness of how fleeting it is.” She speaks of choice, a willingness to remain aware in spite of difficulty and heartbreak. And how she passes this appreciation on to her children, vastness and imagination, what she sees in an apparently bleak season of winter, as well as the solstice.

This awareness and imagination generate appreciation and endurance, and joy. Through it all, Lindsey, like others I’ve profiled this month, has a remarkable sense of the journey she is on and shares her gifts generously and profoundly.

Inspiring Women: Sharon Hayes: Putting the Social in Social Media

For many, Sharon Hayes needs no introduction, having been profiled for her social media savvy in publications such as The Huffington Post I've found that her daily interactions and positive messages on Twitter, Sharon shows how to use social media to good advantage because she gives so much through the medium. I remember Sharon tweeting about welcoming everyone we encounter on Twitter because all of us were new once. She doesn’t like direct messages via Twitter but prefers to engage in conversations via her stream and also offers a lot of strategies for getting optimum usage out of Twitter.

However, most influential for me is Sharon’s concept of “snacking.” Social media and our multitasking, technology-driven culture embodies a condition Sharon aptly calls “relationship snacking.” (Another woman I admire used the phrase “treating others like fast food.”) And this is possible not only with an uncountable number of Facebook friends or Twitter connections but in every day encounters among family and analog friends. Not giving the time of day and not being equal to the relationship, I see this for myself so often. Sharon acknowledges her own difficulties, neglecting friendships over time and feeling resentful when others multitask in her presence. That’s why her Twitter usage is so striking, inviting others into conversation, sustaining the interchange and showing genuine concern.

I’m also drawn to Sharon’s words on information snacking: “We skim and get the general idea of information rather than absorbing and understanding it.” I’m especially guilty of this activity. Sharon suggests filtering, taking the time to understand what’s relevant to us, and “take action.” It reminds me a quote from Hesse, “only the thinking we act on has any value,” and the distinction between information and knowledge explained to me by a teacher “knowledge is what you have after all the notebooks have been burned.”

Sharon has two intriguing books scheduled for publication in 2012, My Paradigm Shift, which is about her own personal growth, and another highlighting others' success stories, Don't Tell Me I Can't.

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