Esther's Legacy

I have so much compassion for Esther.

She's become something of a poster child for fairy tales and happy endings, but did she really have one?

Define happy ending. I think we need to start there.

Esther is proof that we always have choices.

Even in a gilded cage, even in the most dire circumstances, no matter how stuck we are - there's a way out into something greater.

Something beyond ourselves. 

Birth is a perfect example.

My last 2 births were completely natural without intervention. The first time, it was not by choice. By the time the epidural would have kicked in, the baby would have been born, so I decided to brave it.

I believe that was my first initiation into an embodied, wholesome experience of womanhood.

Even though it was a while before I started this work, it opened something in me.

(That’s actually a key theme in Redemptress. How sometimes we need to be given the initial experience to know what we're working toward and hold ourselves in the bigger process. Because we know what's coming. We got a taste of it.)

Of course, when I gave birth again 5 years later, I fully chose the natural experience and prepared for it intentionally. It felt like completing a full circle.

That's what Redemption is. If you have a Jewish education background like me, you might have learned about redemption in very floaty, mystical terms. “You gotta be good and G-d will reward you with some kind of utopia. We can't give you more details but you just have to believe it's good.” Right?

What if the word Redemption actually has a completely different meaning than what you were taught? What if we can experience a taste of it within our own cycles? Within the cycles of time and the experiences we move through?

Back to Esther - would you call her experience a story of redemption? Not completely. She remained in her gilded cage while her people went free.

Where was her free choice?

What are we actually celebrating on Purim?

My natural births were very painful.

(I know - there are women who experience completely pain-free natural births. They're experiencing redemption on a next level.) 

But in the pain, in the contraction, there's nowhere to go.

There seems to be no way out.

You know what really helped me? BEING in the process. Visualizing my baby descending through the ring of fire. FEELING the pain actually made me feel it less. It didn't have to be so loud because it was already being deeply seen and heard.

Esther didn't have a way out.

But in that stuckness, she alchemized her pain.

She chose to become a vessel of Redemption.

What she did with her life became her legacy. 

I've been thinking a lot about free choice lately. The infamous rabbit hole of bechirah. 

How many women are feeling stuck in impossible situations to the point where they don't see any choice at all.

How do you reclaim your freedom of choice then?

When our ancestors were enslaved in Egypt, there was no way out. They were lost in the impossible-ness (yes, I make up words sometimes) of the situation. They didn't even know who they were - other than oppressed, helpless victims. 

When they finally remembered that they were a nation of kings, they came out of their numbness and felt the pain.

And they groaned.

That moment, redemption began. 

The Hebrew word for Egypt is Mitzrayim - constriction, contraction. 

What contractions are you moving through in your life?

Are you ready to receive the expansion? The redemption? What would that look like for you?

With every menstrual cycle, we move through a phase of contraction (menstruation) and a phase of expansion (ovulation.) How we hold ourselves in the contraction will ultimately determine our experience of the expansion. 

Womanhood carries the secrets of redemption. Learn what this means for you and bring more expansion into your life. 

Reclaim your womanhood.

Join Redemptress 

Last chance to grab the early bird!

Use code PURIM.

(I'm deleting the coupon tonight.)