Becoming a lineage of liberation.

I’m standing on a bridge in the old part of Canterbury, about 20 mins into a walking tour of the city. (Yep, I’m a big geek!) 

The tour guide has stopped us here to look at a replica of the medieval ducking stool that that was used in the city for centuries. 

Ducking was a form of punishment - by means of social humiliation, used mostly against women between 13th and 17th century. 

A woman would be strapped in her underwear to this chair, and repeatedly dunked in to the filth polluted water in front of jeering, abusive crowds. 

I’m told it wasn’t usually used to test for witchcraft, that was a separate process.

No, ducking was used to punish a woman for ‘talking too much’ or being a ‘common scold’ - which usually meant having been critical of those is power, whether that be her husband or other men. 

In truth, it was a way to silence all women.

Looking at the stool, I begin to feel my own throat tighten. 

Talking is a form of collective power building. (Hello ‘me too’ movement) 

Therefore, the ducking stool was intended to frighten women into silence. 

If you silence one woman in that very public way, you silence all women.

I feel queasy, an ancient contraction ripples through my body, accompanied by a hot rage,

but the guide is laughing and joking, “and here is where unruly women would be punished … ha ha ha”

WTF? This is entertainment? Still? 

The laughter stings my ears, as all the amazing women I work with flash into my mind. 

Brilliant, talented, wise women. 

Most of whom experience terrible fear when it comes to being more visible. 

Whether it’s sharing about their business on social media, speaking up in a work meeting, offering their opinions or even just singing for fun of it. 

They all experience a full bodied clamping down in response to being more seen. 

And I know it well myself… 

The tightness in the throat, the knot of fear, the flood of adrenaline, the painful self-consciousness. 

The shutdown. 

Often accompanied by huge frustration which gets turned inwards as self-hatred: 

“What the hell is wrong with me?”

In moments like this, it’s vital we remember our shared history as women and the collective wound we carry around using our voices. 

The woman being ducked and the women watching from the river bank feeling furious, frightened and powerless. 

These women are our ancestors. 

The fear we feel in our bodies today as we go to raise our voice and visibility, didn’t start in us.

It is an inheritance from generations past, and an attempt to keep us safe from harm. 

If we can remember this, we can step free of feeling like it's a personal failing, stop self-blaming and open into new, more creative possibilities. 

~

Cut to a few days later in the week. 

I’m stood outside the mid-terrace house where my mum was born and raised. 

There is a heart shaped wreath on the door. “The street hasn’t changed at all” she’s telling me with amazement. 

My mum grew up living next door to her grandparents: my great-Nanny and Pop. 

Next door to them was her great-uncle. 

And two doors down was Nanny’s mum and dad, so that would be my great-great-grandparents. 

This is my first time here as an adult. 

Waves of pleasurable sensations run through me, as I standing here, in the place where at least four generations of my maternal line have lived their lives.

It’s as though I can feel them all around me, brushing past me as they go about their ordinary daily lives.

I see them running across the road to the corner shop, playing in the street, heading off to work, calling in at one another’s homes. 

Ordinary, everyday lives.

And something deep inside me remembers, relaxes, rests back, opens up. 

I feel weightier upon the earth somehow, more able to claim my place.

It is the embodied opposite of what I felt on that bridge: an inheritance of love, resilience and laughter.

Mum runs her fingers around a hole in the garden wall. “Pop knocked this hole out over 60 odd years ago” she smiles. 

Why? 

To thread a pole, that would balance a scaffolding board, and in doing so, create a see-saw for my mum, his other grandchildren and their friends. 

“Sometimes it’s the hole isn’t it?” I think. 

The part that’s no longer there. 

The place of absence.

Where so much love is able to dwell. 

And now I am travelling home, and pondering on these two experiences of ancestry, lineage and inheritance. 

There are lineages of fear & oppression and lineages of love & liberation. 

We all inherit both. 

We all contain both.

Our bodies are laced through with both. 

~

But, our current culture, has so impoverished us of our sense of time. 

Its instant gratification has eroded our ability to orientate inside of our histories. 

Today, we find ourselves reduced down to isolated individuals, disembodied from this vast web of conditions that shape our daily experience of life,

And therefore unable to navigate them well.

~

I see this play out, especially in the coaching and entrepreneurial space, as often the complete ignorance of social, cultural and historical context.

Shared, collective issues being approached through an individual lens, which does more damage than good. 

Examples like: “you have a limited mindset, overcome your self-sabotaging, stop getting in your own way” and “just do it” can be a recipe for frying your nervous system and immobilising possibility. 

Even innocuous stuff such as “you need to build your confidence”, which may in one sense be true, but without a broader understanding of why someone’s confidence has historically been suppressed, it is simply ‘double-billing women for their own oppression’ (h/t Kelly Diels). 

And let’s be clear, there is a whole multibillion dollar industry built on doing exactly this.

Call it ‘empowerment’ all you like, but if it comes without cultural-contextual critique, it’s far from it. 

In fact, in my experience, this individualised approach can often exacerbate shame and stuckness in women, because:

It locates the problem in the wrong place. 

Inside of the woman, not the culture. 

And even the best medicine, when applied incorrectly, becomes a poison.

Therefore the correct diagnosis is vital.

For me, that will always be “there is nothing wrong with you, there is something wrong with the culture”.

A woman is not the problem to be fixed. 

So, when I’m working with a woman who feels stuck in fear, shame or old unhelpful patterns, the first two things I’ll invite them to do are: 

1) Remember the historical, cultural context and locate themselves in the bigger picture. 

Understand that there is a lineage of oppression at work in their personal struggles today, which didn't start with them. 

This gets them out of shame and away from believing it's a personal failing, that they are broken and in need of fixing. 

When this clicks it is usually accompanied by a huge, unburdening relief and the freeing up of a great deal of positive energy. 

2) Map their lineages of love and lean into the support they offer. 

This could be literal family bloodlines and the healthy ancestors (hopefully we all have at least a few). 

And/or it could be spiritual, friendship, practice-based, place-based, culturally positive lineages of strength, support and love. 

This connects them to unseen sources of power.

They’re no longer alone, they’re reconnected their inherited wealth, they are beloved. And it doesn’t end with them. 

On the basis of this foundation, relocated and well resourced: we are then well placed to go deeper into the embodied work that creates new possibilities.

We can begin the exhilarating process of consciously shaping and transforming the lineages we’ve inherited, as they traverse through our bodies and into those of the future.

And as we learn to unbind our bodies from the inheritance of fear and oppression, we become the stewards of a lineage of liberation.