Many women in mid-life begin feeling an urge to create a more meaningful, authentic life. Bodies and roles are changing in unsettling ways.  Activities, interests and even careers that were once fulfilling, may begin to feel stale.  A desire to know oneself better, and more deeply connect to something greater than oneself often sparks a spiritual quest to find the answer to the question:  Who am I becoming?  

In her first column for WomenBloom, Rebecca Hamm, MA, LPC, therapist and Master Sufi Teacher, shares with us her views of what it means to live fully into our special gifts...

What would it mean to be a powerful and spiritual WomenBloomer in 2008?  A woman who knows herself and as a result, knows those around her in a more meaningful and intimate way?  Don’t most of us want to feel confident, soulful, and connected to everything and everyone around us?  On some level, we all seek to have this awareness and truth, right?

Some of us love to garden or, as some have shared with me, “attend therapy or do meditation every Saturday morning in the backyard.”  Others simply find this connection in the service of their work, in watching their children laugh at the most preposterous things, or in being activists for the greater good of our humanity.  No matter what path we ultimately take, now more than ever, I believe women are collectively looking for something reflective and significant in their lives.

I believe women are amazing manifestations of what many for thousands of years have called or termed divine presence.  This term means many things to many people; let me explain what it means to me.  Divine presence, at its core, is Love. Whether or not the expression, or receipt, of this love is from another’s heart, from seeing the beauty of an ocean at sunset, or from appreciating a painting at the Rodin Museum, presence simply matters.  Love moves us and it impacts our psyche in ways few have ever been able to qualify or quantify.  When we feel or experience this divine presence, we all encounter a deep or funny kind of mysterious intensity in our hearts.  We all want it, and we all need it to survive.

Therefore, women have a choice:  the choice to give love, to be present and ‘be’ the Love…or to withhold it and deny themselves and others a more authentic presence. 

Women naturally carry sacred qualities such as peace, consistency, strength, beauty, and truth to name a few.  Within peace are the qualities of mercy and compassion, within consistency is the ability to make order out of chaos, within strength lies the holy gift of childbearing, within beauty exists the quality and nature of love (not as portrayed by outside societal pictures of beauty), And finaly, within truth lives the real meaning of being a vessel for this divine presence of which we are speaking.

In other words, to know the truth is to unequivocally recognize when one is ‘pushing’ in life versus moving in it from a surrendered place. Or, as Cynthia Bourgeault wrote in her book The Wisdom Way of Knowing, “Be in the world but not of it.” And anyone who has read a book, a newspaper, or even scrutinized a typical website in the past year would, if honest, ‘fess up to the fact that much of what our culture tells us about these qualities is nothing more than another additive or preservative in our mainstream culture.  Our society is not always a trustworthy arbiter of these attributes.