POEM: The Knowing Place
This piece was originally written for a group of women I met who were chronic migraine sufferers. In talking to them for several days during a pharmaceutical marketing summit in 2016, I realized how thoroughly they’d been stripped of their intuitive sense of their bodies and healing needs. Most of them had received professional care, but had suffered humiliating indignities along the way; mocked, ignored, and disempowered by a medical system that doesn’t honor women’s bodies or feminine ways of knowing.
The pain of their condition was oppressive and the failure of science frustrating, I felt them searching for something—not medical answers, but a deeper understanding: “WHY?! What is the meaning?”
In my own journey, I’ve found that conceiving of a geography of the body has helped me locate and “travel to” areas I need when I seek a deeper understanding of my experience: Are these feet on the ground? What does my gut tell me about this situation? What creativity is brewing in my womb? Can I tenderly hold the distressed child who lays curled up under my right ribs? The Knowing Place emerged for them as a name for the deepest part of the soul where healing is possible. For me, this is a place I go when I am confused about what I need or want, about my boundaries, or about big decisions. It appears to me as a garden that lies somewhere behind my heart, illuminated by the light from my crown and third eye. It is a channel perhaps, more than a place.
On our last morning together I read this aloud to the room of 25 women. There were tears of recognition, remembrance, and familiarity; also of yearning. One woman said to me wistfully, “I want a Knowing Place…” And of course, I reassured her, “ You have one.”
We all do.
The Knowing Place 2016 Most women spend a lifetime looking outside themselves for certainty, and never find it. They’re looking in the wrong place. Inside every woman there is a Knowing Place. No one has access to this precious garden but her; not her mother, not her lover, not her children... The gates open only to her touch, with her key, at her command. Inside this fortress, (Which rumor has it lies in the vicinity of the heart and hasn't much to do with the head.) she finds the answers to all life's questions. Inside, all mysteries are revealed, confusions calmed, anxieties alleviated… Because this place contains all the medicine she needs to see her through the seasons of her life; to carry her across the turbulent waters. When a woman is in her Knowing Place nothing can shake her certainty and conviction. Not a single "fact," no "data point," no well-reasoned argument. She cannot be swayed when she is safe inside this sacred spot because she is standing on solid ground. What "makes sense" is of no interest; there is no "figuring it out." Here she is in her knowing. When a woman is in her Knowing Place she can whisper her worries into the wind or throw her frustrations into the fire. From this vantage point she sees the path clearly, she hears a response to all of life's laments, the why me's, the what if's, and what now’s that plague her. The answers come on the breeze and she must be very still to hear them. Sometimes she waits for hours, days, years. Because time is irrelevant here and answers come when they have been earned or when they are needed most. Mercy is here, along with Grace. Sometimes there are visions. She is shown the way by her own highest self, and then re-emerges into the world rid of her overwhelm and blocked vision; rid of self pity and self hatred. Heaving sighs of relief and conviction; she wipes her tears and lifts her head and moves ever onward, ever upward. What's sad is that most women have forgotten the way to their Knowing Place. (Indeed, many women aren't even aware it exists.) We are all born with this gift, but it is slowly taken away from us by the doubts and denials of others, by a culture crippled by reason and a fear of all that makes a woman a wild and magical creature. Some intrepid seekers recover their Knowing Place before it is completely eroded. And though it can be sad to encounter a once-splendid-place in a state of ruin or atrophy… Take heart! It can always be restored. Nature’s healing power is unleashed in the light of awareness. Here is a secret, sisters… Your pain is the gateway. Stop numbing it, for it is the source. It is a lucky woman who is sent searching inside herself for this forgotten treasure. No doctor, no teacher, no sage can tell a woman where to find it. She must venture in on her own because all else outside has failed. The motivation can be severe: heartbreak, grief, despair, pain. Something about which others will say, "Oh, I'm so sorry!" and "That's just awful!" But, they don't understand that what she's been given in that lost love, that last goodbye, that diagnosis, is a key-- the key to a world of knowing once again what she needs and how she wants to be cared for. It's the key to healing and the alchemy that transforms suffering into pure light. Because The Knowing Place composts even the gravest doubts. It transforms this food into tolerance, resilience, forbearance and acceptance. It transforms her from what others want her to be into what she has always known she is. This is why a woman retreats when she is in pain... not to hide, not to unburden the world, but to seek that place of solace and beauty inside where she knows how to heal and hold it all.