You Can Run For Election, You Can Vote...If You Can Get There

You Can Run For Election, You Can Vote...If You Can Get There
By Christine Agro
The Metaphysical Feminist

When I read the news that women in Saudi Arabia had been given the right to both run for election and vote without the approval of a male guardian, I was at first excited and then I felt like I was revisiting that famous Seinfeld episode with the rental car. “You know how to take the reservation. You just don’t know how to hold the reservation.”

Saudi Arabian King Abdullah has lifted the ban on women being able to run for election as well as the ban on women voting, but women are still not allowed to travel, work, study abroad, marry, get divorced or gain admittance to a public hospital without permission from a male guardian.

Hence my Seinfeldian experience. Unless the woman who runs for office actually has the support of the men in her life she can run, but how will she actually hold office? She can’t drive, travel or work for that matter. And Saudi Arabian women have been given the right to vote, but if voting takes place a step outside their doors, unless a man gives permission to travel, they will not be able to exercise this right.

The King might as well have given women the right to fly to the moon. I’m all for ‘something is better than nothing’ but I just can’t see the silver lining in this. King Abdullah has pushed for changes in women’s right, but this seems like a hollow gesture, unless he has a master-mind plan of easing women’s rights slowly into their culture so that it creates limited friction among the ultra conservative.  Maybe the case as the lifting of the ban doesn't go into effect until 2015.

I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

In the meantime – congratulations to the women of Saudia Arabia for winning the right to run for office as well as winning the right to vote. I hope you can freely exercise both.

Redefining Resolution

Redefining Resolution
By Christine Agro
The Metaphysical Feminist

It’s that time of year again – New Year’s Resolution time. Although studies vary, with a range between 75% and 98%, the general consensus is the majority of us fail at fulfilling our New Year’s Resolutions. The same studies lay blame on process, intention, self-help gurus, but maybe the reason we don’t succeed has nothing to do with any of these things. Maybe, our inability to stick with our resolutions has to do with the word itself.

The world resolve has two meanings. As a verb it means to settle or find a solution to a distasteful situation. As a noun it means to have a firm determination to do something. As someone who is always interested in the energy behind words – if you ‘RESOLVE’ (in its verb form) you are sitting in some pretty negative energy. You are resolving to find a solution to an otherwise unpleasant situation. If you have a RESOLVE (in its noun form) to accomplish something – it’s a much more powerful energy. You are committed even determined to manifest what you have set out to do.

So you see, there are two totally different energies for the exact same word. When I hear someone speak of New Year’s Resolutions – almost always what I hear is “I’m resigned that this will always be like this.” Rarely do I hear people speak of resolutions with an impassioned determination to create change in their life. When I do, they undoubtedly succeed.

As with all change in our life, it doesn’t come easy or free. We have to want it and demonstrate that we are willing to do the work to get it. Creating change in our lives is connected to conscious living. If you live unconsciously you eat unconsciously, you speak unconsciously, you work unconsciously and your statements of resolution are words not intentions.  When you live consciously everything you do from the food you choose to the words you use to the friends you surround yourself with, everything, becomes a conscious choice.

As we sit at the brink of a new year, what are you determined to change? What do you have a RESOLVE to do this year?

Join Christine Agro For A New Year's Day Meditation

Set The Stage 

2012 Meditation

Join Christine Agro on Sunday, January 1, 2012 at 9 am ET for an hour long meditation and energy work session to help you set the stage for the year ahead.

Christine will incorporate the information she has gathered about the year ahead, to help you move into the new year in harmony and alignment.

Meeting via Tele-conference.  After you register you will receive information about how to join the call.

Your regular long-distance charges will apply.

You MAY use SKYPE for this call.

Register now! $12.00 USD 

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Live Your Life – Sometimes Easy To Say, But Not To Do

As women we can be confronted with many blocks to living a fully empowered life and please remember I’m not just talking about women in North America. This is women around the world. Laws, religion, culture, society and family all offer blocks for women to live their own life. I call these blocks ‘symptoms of our dis-empowerment’. They are the situations, experiences and beliefs that keep us from truly living our life.

Take a woman living in India - her culture, her family even her religion may say her role, her purpose is to marry. Take a woman living in Jerusalem -her society, her religion tells her she must sit at the back of the bus. Take a woman living in Egypt -her society and laws tell her she cannot vote. Take a woman living in Saudi Arabia - her society and laws say she cannot drive.

Yet in each of these countries woman are claiming their right to live their lives. How do I define ‘right’? I define it as our ability to see within ourselves and within others innate personal value. The ability to not buy into a notion of less, lacking or limit based on gender, race, religion or sexual orientation. To see that laws, rules, guidelines and acceptable mores are subjective based on the influence of those who ultimately benefit by what is established and followed as the truth.

Hottest Woman of All Time Perpetuates Measuring Stick Mentality

[caption id="attachment_1157" align="alignleft" width="212" caption="Jennifer Aniston was chosen Hottest Woman of All Time by MensHealth.com. / DIMITRIOS KAMBOURIS/GETTY IMAGES"][/caption]

Hottest Woman of All Time Perpetuates Measuring Stick Mentality
By Christine Agro

Men’s Health Magazine recently named Jennifer Aniston The Hottest Woman of All Time based on a reader’s poll. That’s quite an…um…honor?
Don’t get me wrong, where I do find Jennifer Aniston a beautiful women; she’s fit, she’s funny, she carries herself with a great deal of confidence and she’s smart; I’m just not so sure about this ‘honor’. Hottest Woman of All Time- it makes me think of that line in Two Weeks Notice where Sandra Bullock tells Hugh Grant that he’s the worst human being on the planet and he responds “Have you met all the human beings on the planet?”

I get it, it’s a subjective poll and I’m not incensed by the poll itself. I’m frustrated by our society’s need to instill in women a measuring stick mentality. By honoring Jennifer Aniston as The Hottest Woman of All Time it perpetuates a dynamic where we – both men and women- measure ourselves and others against the hotness, or richness, or sexiness of someone else. Although we all do it, it’s with women that this dynamic really concerns me. My generation was taught to do this by our mothers, and we teach our daughters to do this and they teach their daughters. . We teach it because whether we actually participate or we fail to address this dynamic we are condoning the measuring stick.

I call this the divide and conquer method of dis-empowerment. It is dis-empowering because it implies that our worth and our value is held by someone outside of our own self. It keeps us striving to be someone we can’t be which feeds into self-image issues. Let’s face it, we can only be who we are. I know it sounds like a ‘one-hand-clapping-in-the-wind’ statement, but it’s true. We are who we are – round, robust, flat, skinny, tall, short – it’s who we are. But this striving to be like ‘The Hottest’ has women in Japan undergoing surgery to make their eyes more round; women in India beaching their skin to make it more white; women in China undergoing painful surgery to implant metal rods so they can be taller and women in the United States changing just about everything and anything about themselves.

We talk about equality for women – in the work place, in the family unit, in government – but as long as we, as women, continue to buy into the measuring stick mentality and then sell it to our daughters, our equality will always be something that someone else has to give to us.
This is my call to all women to drop the measuring stick and instead turn your focus in and begin to recognize how amazing and powerful we each are – in our own right. By all means celebrate the awesomeness of the women around you. I absolutely celebrate Jennifer Aniston, but I don’t need to use her as a measuring stick for what I have and don’t have.

I truly believe that women are powerful beyond what we know. But it is this divide and conquer dynamic that keeps us ever so lightly scratching the surface of how powerful we truly are. Imagine if instead of measuring ourselves against others, each of us embraced who we are, celebrated ourselves and each other and recognized that at the core we, women, come from the same tribe – the Tribe of Woman.

Christine Agro is The Metaphysical Feminist. She is the Founder of FEMSocial.com a unique social networking site for women that offers both a community and experiential classes and courses that help empower women. Christine is also curating the on-line project Symptoms of Dis-Empowerment and hosts Fully Empowered – a live talk radio show heard on A2Zen.FM