September 3, 2002
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Divine Pride, or Who Do You Think You Are?
by Nora Jamieson
Divine Pride? Like my
snake Oya when she is looking for food, everything in me
arches up, keenly focused, sensing. I am awake, right then
and there.
I have a dream...
I'm sitting in my living room, looking out across the large screened-in deck to a beautiful blue and green pond. Roughly half is blue the other green. I am sitting languidly in a regal wicker chair and there are a few men around me, one looks at me appreciatively and I feel prized. We then go up to my therapy office and sit in a circle. There are men and women now and I am in the center of the circle and between my outstretched legs I hold a beaded mandala about three or four inches in diameter. It is various shades of brown beads and quite beautiful. The bottom is lined with soft deer skin. I put the mandala on the floor between my legs, near my genitals and exclaim to the group how grateful I am for my life.
I am 52 and in two weeks I'm off to California to study Dakini practices with a beloved teacher I've known for several years. I have learned much from her but I've never done in depth work with the Dakinis. Life has been particularly hard the last two years and I need some medicine that will help me stabilize. I've always been plagued with demons about self worth and in the past few years I've had a chronic sense that I'm supposed to be living a larger life than I do, these voices have been raging inside me and wearing me out.
I arrive at my teacher's little cottage among the giant redwoods and we begin. I tell her that I am looking for self worth --still. After 20 years as a therapist, being in therapy, feminism, a loving and mirroring partner and friends, and various practices --which have all helped --I still need an antidote to the poison of crippling self doubt. I tell her of the demons of envy that can overtake me with tremendous force, squeezing my heart to near breaking with grief for what I have not accomplished, for what I have lost, for the creative urge that seems frozen. I can see only small glimpses of who I am, what I have to offer, what I have accomplished, what is of value in me. Who I think I am. In this, I'm not different from many women I meet. When I ask women why they don't live more authentically, why they don' t step into their unique selves, their fear is that they'll be met with some variation of "Who do you think you are?" to their face or behind their backs. They fear that their families, community, or friends will think them too full of pride. I've come to understand that the question is really a hidden poisonous statement "So, you think you might be somebody?"
I've thought a lot about pride --not the more diluted versions of "self esteem" or "confidence," but unabashed pride. We've learned to call prideful women any number of ugly names. And most women recoil from pride like vampires from the light. Why, I ask, do these internal and external voices protest so much? Why, 30 years after the second wave of feminism, is pride in women negative, arrogance worse, and sovereignty unheard of?
In Wise Woman therapy, symptoms are the path to deeper knowledge. So in trying to find medicine that will dilute poisonous voices and beliefs, it is my practice to look first within the toxin for it's antidote. So I listened closely to the internalized voices and found their most outstanding characteristic, besides boring repetition, was their timing and vehemence. They are the Culture Border Patrol in a woman's psychology --if she steps out they push her back into her place. But like a murder of crows flushing an owl, predatory voices can lead us to the jewel of pride. By tracking the predatory voice, it's habits and timing, we can know we're on the right path in the work of cultivating pride. But why is there a Border Patrol in the first place?
I tell my teacher I am tired of the envy, it ambushes me and my efforts to manage the grief over my loss of Self exhaust me. I can feel deep within the poisonous envy it's antidote - the seeds of my own unfolding that I can't quite sponsor in myself.
I begin to tell her about the dream in which I feel good and grateful and powerful. We play in the field of the dream within the framework of the Dakinis. She says blue and green are the colors of Yeshe Sogyal whose name means lake. Yeshe Sogyal is the founding Mother of Tibetan Buddhism, a Dakini. She suggests that perhaps I have had a dream about Her and an experience of Divine Pride and that this is the medicine for what is causing me to leak my power through self-deprecation and envy.
Divine Pride? Like my snake Oya when she is looking for food, everything in me arches up, keenly focused, sensing. I am awake, right then and there. This phrase is like seed syllables that contain vast teachings and awaken recognition. I know this is medicine, I feel it course through my spirit and I don't have the slightest intellectual understanding of what she means. But I do know these words revive my essential, unsullied self. My spine straightens and I feel radiant. Only much later do I realize that within the idea of Divine Pride lie some of the answers to why pride in women is so hated.