Finding your Voice – It’s time for an unmuted life

Every woman moves through four phases in her life — The Girl, The Mother, The Cultivator, and The Oracle. With each transition requiring: a Reconnecting with self, a Reclaiming of your power and, a Rising into a new version of you. So often, during the early phases of the sacred feminine life we are faced with the challenge of remaining true to self, whilst believing we need to be who we are expected to be within the structure of family and societal norms. This can cause our original story to be lost, changing our behaviours because of others and as a result muting ourselves in our life’s expression. Our voice, gone!

Be a good girl, do as you are told. Don’t do that. Little girls should be sweet, and pretty, don’t get dirty or definitely not be too loud. Right from the word go, as a girl, we are told what we ‘should’ be like.

I’m a young girl, filled with joy, playing in the yard. The sun is shining and I have my favourite tee-shirt and skirt on, I’m singing out loud. I am totally in love with myself, feeling free, confident and strong, dancing around. But, the message I received was;

‘What are you wearing? You can’t wear that, they don’t go together, you look silly! Oh you’re singing, it’s so funny, you are so flat, you’re certainly not born a singer’ 

I’m crushed, I felt free, expressing myself and loving me, and from that point in time, as the little girl being true to her own nature, I quietly learned to connect that experience to every time when I felt the true, authentic me surfacing as being -  I wasn’t good enough and I shouldn’t express myself, because when I do, it's wrong, I don’t fit, and I’m not good enough. The inner me, my voice was hushed. Muted.

Teenage years;

“Kim, you have to make an effort and work hard, you're only average looking, so you’ll need to work harder to get attention if you want a boyfriend, you’ll have to wear make-up to look good.” 

“You can’t wear that, it's not right, you don’t want people to think you’re the town bike.”

I’m a young woman, a mother, single, and I want to do it all, raise my daughter, find my career in acting, have a loving relationship, and be praised by my parents. Playing all the roles that I am meant to play in life, and do it right, the way I have been told a woman should.

Through life’s journey as ‘The Girl’ and ‘The Mother’ I did what I thought was ‘Right’, what was expected in our socially sanctioned roles – always giving, always putting others first, being the career, thinking of others first. There is a price to pay for that, we lose who we are. Our voice is gone, we have disconnected with our true nature and lost our own identity.

Then one day we wake up and it’s just not working any more. We slowly come to the realisation that we attached ourselves to the roles we played as being our identity, who we are. The hurt and anger of not being able to connect with self, speak our truth, living a silently muted life for all these years, can no longer be contained. 

This time is when we start a new phase in our lives, I call ‘The Cultivator’. We are presented with a new choice, requiring a different question we need to ask ourselves: “Who am ‘I’ and what do ‘I’ want?” We have an opportunity in this period to reconnect with self, unmute and find our voice. If we don’t, we continue to melt away into the background of our lives, further losing ourselves in the roles we play – Or – we can begin to open up to ourselves, lean in and break through, learning to speak our truth again, as we were always meant to. It’s time to shift the narrative and upgrade the course of your life.

Let’s unpack further what ‘The Cultivator’ means for you. If we look at what a Cultivator refers to, in the context of an occupation, it plays an important role in ‘modern agriculture’ by improving crop yields, saving time and resources, eradicating weeds and erosion, and most importantly helping provide food for the world. Another beautiful expression of ‘The Cultivator’, in Chinese mythology, is a person who practices the refining of self, to achieve inner wisdom, incredible levels of strength and supernatural powers. For me this translates into our initiation as Midlife Women, the embodiment of your authentic truth, owning your sovereignty, shared back with the world, vocalised through your words, your truth. 

Up until this phase we have learned survival strategies, co-dependency, pleasing others, withdrawing, anger, appeasement, addition, self-hate, now is the time to let it all go and allow for the re-birthing of your voice.

This is what I do. I help you ‘Find your voice: Speak your truth’, not from a place of fighting to be heard, persuasion, forcefulness or defensiveness, instead from a place of grounded inner knowing, and self-love, holding space for self and for others to join you if they so choose.

A life in flow, living in heart, a remembering, returning to the true you.