Not Learning. Remembering.

Remembering.

Not learning. Not developing. Not acquiring. Remembering - implies that what we are reaching toward was already known. That something was interrupted, covered over, built on top of. And that underneath the layers is not an absence but a presence.

I notice what shifts when I use that word with women. Something relaxes. Because learning puts us in deficit - you don't have it yet, you must get it. But remembering locates the intelligence in us. In our lineage. In the collective body of women who came before us.

The question I've been sitting with, after the incredible room filled with powerful women in Kigali, after conversations that continue to move through me, is this: what have we forgotten? Not what the world has taken. What we ourselves no longer recognize as our own.

I think we have forgotten the vastness of our voice. The full scope of our boldness. The dimensions of our power and courage that don't announce themselves, don't perform, don't justify, they simply move from a place of knowing what is true.

I want to be careful here. This is not a romantic claim about innate feminine wisdom. It is a more specific observation: women who have navigated systems designed to require constant proof of worth have, over time, built an identity organized around that proving. Competent. Composed. Strategic. Essential. That identity is real. It is the result of real effort and genuine intelligence.

But it was built over something. Not instead of it. Over it.

The excavation, and I think of this work as excavation, not dismantling, is about moving below the built structure to what the ground still holds. Not destroying the building. Going beneath the foundation to where the original land carries memory.

This is what midwifery means. A midwife does not create the birth. The birth is already happening. The midwife creates conditions for what is alive to arrive safely. She attends. She witnesses. She does not rush.

I think of the work I do as this - attending what is already moving in women. Not installing something new. Being present for what is finding its way back.

In a Body Intelligence session, I am not telling a woman something she doesn't know. I am reading alongside her what her body already carries - the intelligence encoded in sensation, in posture, in where she holds and where she releases. She has always known it. She has needed a witness who is not going to move her back to strategy before she has had the chance to feel what is there.

What I believe women have forgotten, and I include myself in this, is that the vastness of our voice, our boldness, our power, our courage is not something to be built. It is something to be restored access to.

And the unique expression of it through each woman is irreplaceable. Not interchangeable. Not collectively performable. Yours. Expressed through your body, your history, your particular way of moving through the world.

That is what the collective field needs. Not more women performing strength. Women who have found their way back to their actual expression - distinct, rooted, particular and who then meet each other there.

That meeting is different from solidarity. Different from shared strategy or shared outrage. It is something older than that. Something that was known before it had to be defended.

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Where are you folding back? Or excavating? Hit reply. I read every single one, and your experience is part of how I understand this more fully.

with bliss and intention,

Anna Teresa