Natural Rhythms Women: Reflections on "Promising Young Women"

Through the lens of Communication as Art, We are the Artists 

Through the lens of Sisterhood 
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Through the lens of Expanded Consciousness

​Through the lens of Intimacy

IMPORTANT: SPOILER ALERTS AND THIS TOUCHES ON TRAUMA

Before I move into the lenses I would like to offer the following



Through these lenses, if you have seen the movie and or know what it's about: it’s going to appear as if I’m minimizing and skipping over critical parts of the story. 

That’s because I AM.

This isn’t an intent to dismiss the writer or anyone’s trauma or the pain they may be in or the residue feelings anyone may have come up for them. I don’t ever know what will come up for anyone. At the end of this post I’m going to share what came up for me. It will be a story from many moons ago. A story that holds no negative charge. It’s just a story. I wanted to be clear about that too  because for some reason, any time a woman shares a story because she understands stories help other women-there can be this mindset that she’s carrying her own story with all this emotional charge.

It’s like we can’t even talk about the truth of our own lives or our own previous experiences without someone showing up trying to tell us how we feel about this or that and or why we are sharing ourselves. Without psycho analyzing us or getting on our case about being stuck in the past.

But what many of us women know from decades of being in sisterhood circles is that it’s just what we do to help and heal ourselves and help and heal one another.

We also know if we can share our stories with others without shame or without our story making us cry or making us feel bad about ourselves...it allows us to see how far we’ve come. How amazing we are. It allows us to remember we got this or perhaps we can get whatever comes next.

This is why I believe it’s just so important to ask a woman and not tell her what is true for her. You never ever know when a woman is sharing something, a meme or otherwise for someone other than herself.  This movie touches on that as well. 


Anyway,  I wanted to at least make an offering before I go into these lenses in a short concise way..... 

Here is a link to an earlier post about caring safely. Caring about yourself or others as it is a training regarding how to stay out of compassion fatigue. Or from my perspective and the bar I like to hold myself to: How to stay inside compassion satisfaction. 

Caring Safely: Women's Natural Rhythms - Love Affair with Thyself

It’s a post from last May because I have previous experience with adrenal fatigue. Therefore, I understand my own inner sensations as it relates to what drains me.  I like to nip that as quickly as I can. I wish to serve but not at the expense of my own well-being because I’ve already done that. 

That’s what eventually led me most naturally to Āyurveda. My souls exhaustion for caring too much about others at the expense of my own life force. 

Here is a link to the Self & Āyurveda page. 

There are three amazing under 13 minutes Yoga videos for any sensations anyone may be experiencing inside their body/mind at the bottom of the page. 

Self & Ayurveda 101 - Love Affair with Thyself

These caring short yoga videos also connects very well to being able to use The Woman’s Guide To Understanding Your Own Natural Rhythm (or the guide for those who love us) when thoughts feelings or sensations take over inside of us. 

It’s incredible how quickly a person can return to center or restore their body/mind (resilience) just by caring about themselves enough to take less than 13 minutes toward self care. If you know you’re angry, the pitta sequence is for you, if you know you’re lethargic the Kapha sequence is for you. If you know you’re coming out of your skin with anxiety, the Vata sequence is for you. 

I also selected these three yoga videos because of the soothing voices and cues to truly take care and not worry about being able to do these moves the way these women are able to do them. I often end up looking pretty ridiculous, not being able to do everything or anything close to what the women are able to do while laughing at myself. Sometimes the intention and breath alone is enough to change our emotional state at any given time.

Promising Young Woman 

Through the lens of Communication as Art, We are the Artists 

Context: We have one week left within our Happy Writers Camp with Madam Nicole. We've been connecting and enhancing one another's worlds just one week shy of two entire months. Movies begin with someone writing a script. Typically, I'm engaged with any creative work at that level, in the same way I love music and I'm engaged with the lyrics.  I watched this movie Saturday afternoon before the Academy Awards because it is the only movie I saw listed that I had not seen yet. The opening scene is where the story began in such a way, I was fully invested from a "this is capturing my attention," already therefore I am all in. I had just enough time to watch this movie seconds before it was time to go into what I have endearingly called "The writing room."  

I was still feeling the incredible power of this movie through the above lens when our meeting in the writing room began. One might say, I was deeply touched, moved and inspired through many different lenses through this female writers capacity to write so well. 

Through the lens of Sisterhood 

This is where the spoiler alert comes in, really it's just a part of the story as it unfolded... there is more than this, depending on the lens in which the viewer is watching through.  The writers who wrote this since it's considered a dark comedy use the word revenge, yet what I witnessed was a very smart woman who was traumatized, blamed herself and needed to do her own research and as far as I could see -for most of the movie, it was more her teaching these "Nice Guys" that it isn't what it means to be a nice guy to take advantage of a woman who was too drunk to even stand.

In addition to that, she said no and she also said other things that indicated very clearly she did not want what was being done to her to be done to her. Even before she decided to stop pretending and show her actual true sober self. 

These words below (a part of the plot)  have a lot of impact through a lot of lenses, yet I'm going to stick with the the lenses that touched me. 



PART OF THE PLOT: 

Cassie Thomas, a 30-year-old medical school dropout, lives with her parents. Years earlier, her best friend, Nina Fisher, was raped by their classmate, Al Monroe. Despite Nina reporting the crime, there were no consequences for Al from the school or legal system, and it's implied she eventually committed suicide. Now Cassie spends her nights feigning drunkenness in clubs and bars, allowing men to take her to their homes, and revealing her sobriety when they attempt to rape her in order to frighten them from doing it again.
At her workplace, a coffee shop, Cassie is asked out by former classmate Ryan Cooper. On their date, he mentions Al is getting married. Upon hearing this, Cassie begins a plan to exact revenge on those she holds responsible for Nina's rape and suicide. She meets Madison McPhee for lunch, another classmate and old friend who did not believe Nina was raped; Cassie gets her drunk and hires a man to take Madison to a hotel room. She subsequently ignores Madison's calls asking what happened after their lunch.
​

Through the lens of Expanded Consciousness

Expanded consciousness would be that space where something opens up for us that wasn't there before. Perhaps we were unconscious about something we were doing yet once that thing is brought into the light and we see ourselves more clearly, that provides us with an opportunity to make new choices. In this way, these scenes with these "nice guys" seem really important. 

One of the reactions you see being played out all throughout the movie was the deep unconscious and the absolute unwillingness to acknowledge this happened. Cassie was brilliant as it relates to her mental capacity- to not put anyone in real danger while also.. making her point very clear.

There is an important scene where she goes back to the dean of the school who embodies that good ole boys wrong attitude.... until Cassie mentioned the dean's daughter.

You see in these moments how true it is, how meaningless a woman's life is unless that woman's life is someone we love.

The depth of the story line, the plot twists and how this story unfolds is very powerful and absolutely necessary.

It shouldn't be "poor guy" as it relates to holding your shape and owning your space and when a woman says no, you are truly one of those nice guys who actually listens.

No matter how drunk she appears to be to you and in fact, especially if she can't even walk. I think it's a little weird to be sexually attracted to someone who can't even walk or put a sentence together but that's just me. If you want to own being the nice guy, being conscious about that and owning it fully by not taking advantage of a woman in that state is an excellent start. 

That shouldn't offend anyone. At least that is how I feel and I wouldn't want anyone teaching my own son otherwise, but you know...that locker room thing....That man code thing...

This is interwoven and can easily bend back to Through The Lens of Sisterhood 

THROUGH THE LENS OF INTIMACY 

Through the lens of intimacy or "lack-there-of," when the person you fall in love with, or grow in love with or the person you are going to spend the rest of your life with knows the truth of your history, before you have grown into who you are now... that one thing alone can have a serious positive impact on preventing a lot of unnecessary "I can not tell the truth so I will screw, rape, blame, abuse or even kill anyone who tries to tell my truth for me. 

I love this below from OSHO'S BOOK: 

"When two lovers are really open to each other, when they are not afraid of each other and not hiding anything from each other, that is intimacy. When they can say each and everything without any fear that the other will be offended or hurt.… If the lover thinks the other will be offended, then the intimacy is not yet deep enough. Then it is a kind of arrangement, which can be broken by anything. But when two lovers start feeling that there is nothing to hide and everything can be said, and the trust has come to such a depth where even if you don’t say it the other is going to know, then they start becoming one."

Osho, Intimacy: Trusting Oneself and the Other

What many of us old (er) people understand is that everyone has a past, everyone has a story, everyone made mistakes within their childhood or coming of age time of life and sometimes even longer than that. Personally, I believe that's due to a lack of education in how strong and how important hormones are as they usher in, however that's because I created this journal for people and I would like to see it offered in schools about 5th grade when bodies begin to change or perhaps earlier before body's change. I would also like to see multi-generational small mastermind groups where seniors and coming of age people can work within the journal to help each other. Therefore I do have my own agenda. 

Here's what I know to be true for myself at this stage of my life game. A man being able to feel safe with me can not be something that is more important than my own sense of what it means to feel safe in the space between us. There are scenes in this movie that tickle me because there have been times, where a layer of unconsciousness arrives and I find myself being a straight shooter with some men and it seems to me in being that honest, they rise up.

There is this one scene in the movie where when she drops pretending she is drunk and shows her sober self and as the scene continues, she asks the guy "Do you still want to F**K me?" His response was "No thank you ma'am" and she lets him know "Hmm, no one ever does." This is where the comedy is not lost on me. He's all high and not paying any real attention to her in any real way. Not listening to her cues which are actually really clear. "I don't feel well, I need to go home."  There isn't anything more clear than the words "I need to go home." 

These type of scenes allow room for subtlety and nuance to be seen, felt and experienced. If everyone wants connection, better quality sex and to feel the experience of being fully alive... It just makes logical sense to be open to growing into your next best experiences intimacy wise. 

What came up for me after watching this movie: was an experience many moons ago where I went out to a club with a friend who was excited for me to meet her other friends. We all meant a lot to her and sadly, the high quality cool club we selected had a bit of a reputation for men slipping drugs into women's drinks but we wouldn't know that because it wasn't our thing to go there. Someone had slipped something into my drink that I barely touched because dancing was more my thing. Sadly, I blacked out, woke up in the bus we took to the club, woke up again in my friends home. My friend had the wrong attitude as far as I was concerned. She was mad at me for being drugged. She was embarrassed regarding my behavior and she was upset that I humiliated her in front of her other friend whose opinion seemed to matter to her a great deal more than the fact that I was drugged. I recall this vividly because I recall my self-expression and what seemed really off to me. I thanked her for taking me home while also being clear, something is off here. Instead of caring about my well-being or how I was drugged all she seemed to care about was the fact that I made her look bad somehow. I'm like, Okay, thanks for trying to shame me for being drugged by someone." I'm like this shit is weird and twisty. Someone drugs me and then I'm the one who gets shamed about it?" At the same time I understood her desire to invite me and have me connect with the woman who meant so much to her and that she trusted me to be a quality woman whom everyone can have a great time with. That part wasn't lost on me either. I disappointed her because she knew I can be trusted at the club. But the truth was they put me on the bus where I was safe while they continued to have a really good time so I didn't really ruin their evening as much as I didn't get to experience the fun or the joy or create memories with them. I lost out too. We did work that whole thing out but I do remember that. Women remember things and it's really important to realize.... women remember things LOL

My experience of this movie is that it has the power to help people see more clearly, make new choices, perhaps consider what it means to be a "nice guy," and a lot of other expanded consciousness types of things. 

Then the very next day, the female screen play writer won the Academy Award...that was really cool