Women Leading the Way Together... REALLY together! - How to leave the old paradigm behind.

How far have we REALLY come as women towards working together collaboratively in a spirit of generosity and cooperation? I've been asking this question of myself over the past few weeks.

I've noticed that I still compare myself to other women, that I worry that there isn't enough to go around, that somehow I will be left in the dust while others are living the life of their dreams. Feelings of jealousy emerge when another woman is doing something that I wish I were doing or that I judge is "better" or "beyond" where I am. My intellect knows that this is ridiculous. My heart knows that I am unique and have gifts to offer the world that are unlike anyone elses. My ego still wants to be the center of attention and have people praise me for being brilliant, wise, innovative, creative and "better than" someone else. After all the "work" I've done on myself, these feelings make no logical sense and yet they energetically creep into conversations and sneakily weave their way into what otherwise would be a purely giving and loving acts. As I have revealed this to friends, most of them say that they experience these same feelings, especially when engaging with other women.

So how do we TRULY transcend this so that we can live fully in this new paradigm of women working together?

For me, the first step has been to admit that I have these feelings. My old tendency would have been to go into some deep analysis of the whys, spending hours scanning my past to find where I had felt unloved or insecure. Our world is shifting too rapidly now for us to spend much time in deep self-analysis. Knowing the cause doesn't even guarantee that our feelings and behaviors will change. If we can acknowledge our feelings without being attached to them, then we can move on. As long as we live in a human body, we will have an ego, so we might as well just let it have it's say, "thank you for sharing", perhaps even laugh at it's little games.

For women to trust each other again, I think it's also important for us to acknowledge how we have hurt each other in the past. I don't think there is a woman out there who hasn't felt betrayed or hurt by another woman. Again, there is no need to dwell in feeling bad or be overly apologetic about our history. There is something so freeing about admitting that we forgot who we are and forgot that our sisters are walking beside us and are not against us. When we take responsibility for the part we have played, without beating ourselves up for it, then our sisters hear us and feel safe to take responsibility for their own part.

This does not need to be a long, drawn out process. The world is changing so rapidly and we are being called to lead the way in the great shift that is occurring. Ultimately it is not even about women or men. We are emerging as an integrated, human species and leaving behind our limited definition of what it means to be in a male or female body. If we each ask ourselves, "what do I need to do today to leave the past behind and move forward?", then we can more gracefully expand into our newly emerging world side by side.