Good girls need to speak up

It's time for good girls to speak up. Too many women don't say 'no' often enough and far too many say 'yes' when they mean 'no.' 

That's the good girl syndrome. But it's time for good girls to GROW UP, to be REAL women, to say what they mean and do what they love. 

Laurie Penny's article is insightful and timely.





"Most of us grew up learning that being a good girl was all about putting other people’s feelings ahead of our own. We aren’t supposed to say what we think if there’s a chance it might upset somebody else or, worse, make them angry. So we stifle our speech with apologies, caveats and soothing sounds..."  Laurie Penny. New statesman
http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/08/laurie-penny/men-sexism/

Love and laughter with Uncle Bob Randall

Sharing love and laughter with Elder Uncle Bob Randall.

As the first rays of the morning sun light up ULURU,  the heart of Australia, Bob speaks softly about LOVE for all BEINGS.

Despite being separated from his beloved family at a tender age, "re-educated"by the White man's ways, Bob speaks of LOVE and FORGIVENESS and the value of the traditional ways.

His voice is rich with the songs of his life, his heart tender and his laughter as innocent as any child's.

What a privilege to welcome the dawn with him and his beloved.

Thank you Uncle Bob and Barbara for the the love and laughter.  

Getting grounded

Some of the women from my Alice Springs Women's retreat enjoy rest and relaxation in the healing river sands.

Feeling the Earth, resting on her and letting her support you, is a powerful form of rejuvenation.

I wonder if some of the strange diseases of this century aren't a result of us being so DIS- CONNECTED from the healing magnetic forces of the planet we are living on.

High rise buildings, super highways, concrete etc blocking the Earth's energy.

We need to take every opportunity to touch the Earth and get grounded.

Indigenous elder Uncle Bob Randall

These beautiful people hosted our ULURU women's retreaters last week. Such good fortune for us. 

Thank you Uncle Bob and Barbara

http://portraitsinfaith.org/uncle-bob-randall/

Uncle Bob Randall | Portraits in Faith

portraitsinfaith.org

Uncle Bob Randall - Mutitjulu, Australia“Sometimes when we were beaten…we’d just lie on the earth and say “I’ve had it, I need you to hold me. And then she would. The mother would hold you.”Uncle Bob Randall was taken from his mother at seven and sent to a mission a thousand miles away.266102www.sim...

TIMING

I have grown to respect TIMING. Forcing things to happen may give a momentary feeling of success but when the TIMING is RIGHT the outcomes are solid, grounded and bountiful.

So imagine how sweet it was, on the last day of my women's retreat in ULURU to see that
LIVING NOW had just published this article. 

That's what I call Nice timing...  ENJOY




http://www.livingnow.com.au/advertise/articles/23-living-with-spirit/4869-the-picture-of-wholeness-and-happiness-doesnt-need-a-mirror.html

Rainbow Food

Facebook viewers love this photo of  my Rainbow Food fruit platter.

There are many more ideas in my Rainbow Food book.

It's for kids but it can change the way you think about food too.

www.rainbowfood.com.au

You can order it through my site www.denisegreenaway.com

Beauty is destroyed by anorexia

Beauty destroyed by anorexia.



http://www.minds.com/blog/view/48335/the-most-anorexic-woman-in-the-world-or-skinniest-woman-in-the-world




In my book FINDING ARTEMISIA,  the young woman suffering with anorexia shares her world through her diary (The Oracle) and provides deep insights into anorexia. The book also provides her psychologist's point of view and her experience of working with the disease.

FINDING ARTEMISIA is currently DISCOUNTED at this site
http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/Finding-Artemisia-Denise-Greenaway/9781452503844

Ageless beauty

Beauty is ageless.
As I embrace my dear friends I celebrate it.
The shy girl, yet to be initiated into womanhood, a young maiden beside her, two mothers and a grandmother.
All doing "women's business" : eating, laughing, sharing stories and love for one another.
(True) "...beauty is a joy forever. 

Full moon smile

What is it about full moon that enchants us?

                           makes us feel romantic?

              makes us feel connected?

  makes us stare in wonder?

Is it the magical way it paints the ordinary

       and makes it... extraordinary

                          bathing us in its light?


Or is it the comfort of having such a big round ball reflecting its glow into the darkness of our night?


I love the moon, to me it represents the Feminine, the Ruler of the tides.

I enjoy lunar celebrations, Easter and Chinese New Year.

When I look up at the shining globe, I don't see a man in the moon. I see a smile, a smile that says:

the Universe is at peace.  What do you see?

Mothers need to supported, less isolated...

In NewYork a young mother plunges to her death with her baby strapped to her.

How isolated must she have been?

Unsupported?

Undiagnosed with post natal depression perhaps.

So convinced she is a bad mother, so she writes in her  suicide note

What a tragic loss.


http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2013/03/14/Baby-survives-8-story-plunge-from-building/UPI-36981363306920/


Women need to be specially supported in the early years of motherhood.

Please check out my upcoming Uluru mother's day retreat www.denisegreenaway.com

International Women's Day

Women of the world unite for International Women's Day.

             You have nothing to lose but the false images that have been manufactured for you.  

Imagine whom you might have been had you been born into an image free world. 

I have been to such a women's world and tasted its freedom. I write about it in my book Finding Artemisia: A Journey into Ancient Women’s Business, a cross-cultural journey into the female mind and spirit.

It was in the central desert of Australia where I had the privilege of meeting  a community of women who did not define themselves by their physical appearances but rather by their valued roles as the guardians of children, the earth and each other.

These women knew their business. Do you know yours?

OR

Have you lost the core of what it means to be a woman, free from society’s definitions?

Don't you want to get back your roots, away from the images society has made?

Come celebrate your essential self at my image-free website

 www.denisegreenaway.com 

                                     where what counts is on the inside.

AND come on my desert retreats. 

Seeing the sacred...in everything

An invisible person or persons scavenge through the aftermath of the cyclonic storms and build a sacred altar.

Such seeing, such honouring, such recognition.

Storms humble humans, bringing them to their knees and it is from that they see the sacred...in all things.

Thank you, invisible one(s), for taking my attention and inviting me to worship at the altar you so lovingly created.

Blessing on you...

Your uninitiated girl

What would your life be like had you been initiated into woman hood?

Who would you be today if you had been welcomed by women who were already there?

Imagine your life without that lost girl that has led you into unsupportive relationships, subservient marriages, pleaser occupations?

Australian Aboriginal tradition mid-wifed girls into the sisterhood, the aunty hood, woman hood.

My desert retreats invite women to ask these questions and to move forward from the uninitiated girl state into the full wisdom of womanhood.

Join me www.denisegreenaway.com

or read my "Finding Artemisia: a journey into ancient women's business" on amazon

New year flowering

This exotic flower represents this New Year to me. It's open, lush, sensuous, fragrant and waiting to be dived into.

At its right sits a bud: it's still closed, without colour or fragrance. Hard to believe that this flower was once like that.

But that's how it spent a whole season, being watered with love, fertilised with intention: its nature honoured.

Same with us, we already have that flower within our self, no matter how closed and colourless we might have become.

So, rather than making harsh, self punishing resolutions this new year, why not honour, love and fertilise what is already there, and make way for the flowering of who we really are.

Blessings all, Denise

An Ode to Marilyn

In my book Finding Artemisia, Artemisia is a 14 year old girl with anorexia. She calls her collection of thoughts, drawings and poetry The Oracle. One of the most touching poems in The Oracle is her ODE TO MARILYN

If I were Marilyn Monroe, the famous beauty queen,

And you, the wise professor, with thoughts and words to preen,

I’d prance about and whimper and wait impatiently

For your wise and golden knowledge to graciously encompass me.

And when you finally would appear, with thoughts and words in hand,

I’d toss my hair and bare my breasts and bleat of the love you’d fanned.

You’d smile perhaps a little, but seriousness soon would grow,

As you carefully consider how I fit with what you know.

“The pleasures of the flesh I have chosen to ignore,

I seek the greater things in life, the sea, not just the shore.”

And I would smile as teardrops fell on beauty spots that cried,

“I’ll know that all too soon, my friend, for I’m about to die.

You’ve failed to see my beauty; you’ve been blinded by your eye.

Your mind is crammed with things you know,

And your heart’s afraid to fly.”

So now the world does mourn me, and all the ghosts do sigh.

But you once had your chance, and you sooner had me die.

Finding Artemisia: a journey into ancient women's business. p36 www.findingartemisia.com

After the election.. the anxiety continues

The American elections took up a lot of air space in Australia as well other countries concerned about  the effects on Wall St and the international monetary systems. Anxiety about money seems to be the order of the day. And anxiety belongs to situations that are out of one's control. (I know, I see a lot of anxious people. Im a psychologist.) Sometimes such anxious people are known as the worried well, because they're not really unwell, they just don't feel safe about the future or even the present.  Even after the election they still have the jitters as does Wall St. And why wouldn't they? Their money, their future is the hands of people who are proving themselves to be incompetent, amoral and driven by self interest. So what about taking our power back. One country has shed its national debt. Iceland. But maybe America/ Europe/Australia are more complicated. So what can we do as individuals?
1 stop repeating the same mistakes
2 stop investing in systems that rob the poor to pay the rich
3 stop expecting governments to bail out failing systems
4 start acting locally in our community
5 rely less on money, begin to trade, exchange and recycle
6 build community networks that are supportive and sustainable
7 get creative about ways to obtain income

BUT MOST IMPORTANTLY STOP EXPECTING GOVERNMENTS TO SAVE US. THEY CAN'T. THEY KNOW IT. AND IT'S ABOUT TIME WE DID TOO

After the storm

Storms are a natural part of the growling, tempestuous earth on which we live. Perhaps global warming has contributed to their intensity, but many ancient peoples have recorded big winds and high waters. The Australian Aboriginal people lived through over 40,000 years of climactic changes and in their wisdom often moved out of harm's way, at the first signs of trouble to come. Their adjustment to Mother Nature's moods was not hampered by the sort of infra structures that industrial nations have since built. Aboriginal people had no sky scrapers, undergrounds or cities balancing on reclaimed lands.  They lived with the Earth, feeling her movement, reading her signs. When the big flood hit Brisbane not long ago, the waters reached right through the centre  of Australia as they had done before, many times. And so as we watch tsunamis sweep into Japan destabilising nuclear reactors, and cities like New York being washed by the sea, we realise how much faith man has in his own creations and yet how little connection to the seasons of the earth.  The earth is ancient and modern man, but a pup. Perhaps the engineers need to have a longer conversation with the people who have walked upon the Earth for eons.  Perhaps we need to remind them.

Lady Gaga’s Image Free Zone

Lady Gaga has a broad fan base and is encouraging them to bare their bodies as a way of uniting them against the constant onslaught of the media and the image makers. Supported by her mother, she invites her fans to bare all.

She announced her new campaign with this thought-provoking announcement on her website:

What a good idea! It’s only when women and girls get to see each other’s bodies do they realize the variety of body types that exist. And why wouldn’t there be? Why do we think we have to aspire to one particular body type, one definition of beauty per se. Because the image makers have very little imagination. The same old stereotypes glare at us from magazines and television shows. And then we, alone, and often in isolation, compare ourselves to these images and of course we are nothing like them. We are round, short, small, tall, big, freckled, hairy, bumpy, smooth, black, white, etc etc AND we don’t get to see each other’s bits.

When I was visiting the Aboriginal women in the centre of Australia, I was amazed to see soooooo many different breast shapes for a start compared to the standard tennis ball look being sold by plastic surgeons. Of course the Aboriginal women didn’t have mirrors, magazines or TV so they have never been told that they are not good looking enough, or that their looks could be improved. Imagine that. Just taste the freedom in that!   That’s what I want women to imagine…how free they could be, if they could just get out of the body image/ beauty trap.

In the words of Naomi Wolf: “'Beauty' is a currency system like the gold standard. Like any economy, it is determined by politics, and in the modern age in the West it is the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact.”

The tragic thing is that women are allowing it and modeling it for the girls that grow up in their care and company. So come women: Let’s unite against the BODY IMAGE trap.

The road to “Finding Artemisia”

After my first visit to a community of traditional Aboriginal women in the middle of the Australian desert, I couldn’t stop thinking about how different the women were to modern women.

I’m a psychologist, specializing in anorexia and it occurred to me that these Aboriginal women had never heard of eating disorders, or psychology for that matter. 

At the time I was also facilitating workshops in New York State and people were asking me about the Aboriginal culture and as I began talking about how different it was, I thought I should write about my time there, as well as my professional experiences with eating disorders.

Because they were such extreme opposites I wanted to put them together somehow, and that’s how “Finding Artemisia: A Journey into Ancient Women’s Business” began.

It’s an inspirational book, in that takes the reader into an image free world where women value each other for who they are and not what they look like. Not like the modern world of women: booby-trapped by the dieting, plastic surgery and body shaping industries.

It’s not an academic book, (there are already many on the subject of eating disorders), but it is an experience, a transformational and nourishing journey for women and their families, because its about its about matters that deeply affect them: food, sexuality, body image, and relationships. It’s a journey book that takes readers into a world they would otherwise not experience, that of ancient women’s culture. It also takes them into the hidden world of anorexia. 

AND it honors the special relationship between mother and daughter. No matter how difficult that relationship might be, all women have mothers, and if they can’t be at peace with that relationship, they will rarely find peace within themselves. 

Welcome to an IMAGE FREE ZONE

I am an Australian psychologist, mother and educator and I am so excited to be able blog and start a conversation about some of the issues that fire me up: women’s bodies, minds and relationships.  What is great about a cyber blog is that it can reach women all over the world. And I have had many wonderful opportunities to talk with women from many different cultures and in many different places, in jails, refuges, board meetings, schools, universities and remote indigenous communities. And whether it be on an indigenous reserve in Arizona, a New York prison, an Australian Aboriginal community or a suburban neighborhood,  I have found that women talk about the same things: their rights, their body and self image, their food and weight issues, their kids and families, their relationships, their futures and that of the planet.

And what I sense in all of them is a frustration that they are not being seen and heard for who they are. And that they are tired of being objects of desire, second class citizens, victims of violence and subjugation.  So I would like to start a conversation with women about these things so that we can find another way of seeing each other, so that we stop competing with each other and judging ourselves and each other by criteria set by those who do not have our best interests at heart.

As a psychologist, I see many girls and women whose lives are destroyed by their negative self beliefs, their hateful self images and their fears of not being good enough. But psychology happens in a closed room, in isolation. And if there is no change outside the room then there is no support for the healing process.

And if women do not begin to change the way they see and think about themselves then it is almost impossible for girls to grow into their full potential. So it is my wish to create a better world for girls that drives me to appeal to all women, to start to change the way we see ourselves.

When I traveled to the Australian desert to stay with a community of Aboriginal women and met women who did not define themselves by their physical appearances, I realized I was in an image free zone for the first time in my life.  It was liberating to be with women who were not at all conscious of how they looked, because it began to rub off on me. After days without make-up and mirrors I let myself be seen by these women whom I knew were not judging me by my looks but by a very different set of criteria. And these women had a wisdom and connection to with each other that is rarely found in modern women’s relationships.  They are so inspiring, I want to share their wisdom, their networking and connection. And I can’t think of a better launching pad than cyber space to propel modern women into an IMAGE FREE ZONE.