I am always grateful, sometimes embarrassed or even horrified to discover a truth that I had left unconsidered. That has been the case for me around the issue of circumcision.
Recently I attended an international symposium called Genital Autonomy: Whole Bodies, Whole Selves, Activating Social Change.
I was asked by the organizers to present two workshops there. The intention of my workshops would be to help ease and transform the anguish that parents can feel when they find themselves reconsidering their circumcision decision.
I began to contemplate the energy patterns of guilt and regret, and how I could bring tapping and other helpful and powerful energy methods that I have at my finger tips, to assist people to resolve those feelings. I called my sessions “I am sorry, my beautiful child.”
Before I was invited to present, I confess that I hadn’t really been thinking very deeply about circumcision itself, except for my natural intuitive inclination against it, and my willingness to support finding a way through the feelings that circumcision generated in people, including for some clients I had worked with.
I am the mother of daughters, so I hadn’t had to deal with the issue directly in my life. I am sure (I hope I am sure) that I would not have agreed to this procedure if they had been boys. But I do have a grandson now, and I had to find the place in me where I could stand with love and support for my daughter and her husband and my beautiful grandson himself, in the decisions that they made for him, no matter what they were.
At the Symposium I heard three days’ worth of speakers. It was powerful and overwhelming.
As another attendee put it:
“Words fail to describe the simplicity and the profoundness of spending a few days with moms, dads, physicians, scholars, nurses, ethicists, survivors, pioneers, doulas, activists, film makers, physicists, authors, and more from all corners of the globe who understand that is really mean to forcibly cut people…male, female, or intersex.”
One of the many exceptional speakers was a blogger on motherhood and family issues, Jennifer Andersen. I have read her blog. She is a very clear and heartful speaker and writer, including sharing her personal experience with this powerfully moving subject that many people, including me, have not paused to really think about.
Jennifer Andersen says:
I first learned the truth of circumcision online, during the Genital Integrity Awareness Week of 2010…. The time period after this was intense for me, because my own son, four at the time, is circumcised….
I am not sure why I was able to accept the truth fully and quickly, but I was. I am an intelligent and self-reflective person, and I believe it is valuable to share with other parents the truth about circumcision, so that they know in time.
I am a child advocate and it has been on my heart for the last two years to speak publicly as a circumcision-regret mother. I come from a place of compassion and directness. By holding myself accountable, others can see the error of my ways, so that it is not the error of theirs. My story of moving through circumcision regret:
http://www.ourmuddyboots.com/circumcision-regret/
I (Rue) have decades of history in my life of taking a strong public stand on some controversial issues, starting with voters’ rights in the 1960’s, the Vietnam war, the women’s and gay rights movements, racial equality, economic oppression, alternative approaches to education, marriage equality. I didn’t have any trouble following the clear, intuitive truth that I felt in my heart.
There is something in me that is somehow shy, though, about being so outspoken about the issue of circumcision, especially in the context of my work, where the very essence of what I do is to hold an open and accepting space for whatever is presenting itself, always looking for and supporting the positive intention.
But as I immersed myself in researching circumcision to acquire a basis for my presentations at the Symposium, and then as I attended the Symposium itself, I continually found myself deeply moved. Now I know that I want to speak more openly in support of parents who choose to leave their sons intact, perfect the way they were born, and offer help to those parents who made a different decision and who are now in deep pain because of it.
I am slowly finding my way into the wide variety of notes in the conversational symphony around all genital cutting—male, female, intersex. Some of the sounds are loud and discordant, full of pain and rage, as always happens when humans are in the throes of changing our minds about something that has been deeply and unconsciously held over a long time. (We seem to be doing that a lot lately…)
My own understanding of how I personally can hold and share this issue is emerging through my deep sense of spirituality. I work with, and am ordained as a minister/priest in Incarnational Spirituality . I deeply and completely embrace its honoring of the wholeness of the human spirit as it incarnates in the earth as us humans, seeing the body and all the material realm as the distillation of soul, and of the Sacred itself.
I believe that our mission as humans is to learn how to create and restore wholeness in everything we do, touch, and say.
In this context, circumcision feels like a violation of wholeness.
I sent many of these thoughts to my soul sister friend Wendy before I went off to the Symposium. She wrote back with a kind of prayer/poem. I added to it, and offer our collaboration here:
No Cutting
It starts with the sacred sovereignty of the human body and life…
I drop deeply into my Self
I trust myself, my instincts, my inner knowing
I trust myself enough to stand for what I know is true,
…Even if I must stand against the beliefs of my tribe, my culture, my religion, my husband, wife, partner
I feel the birthright of wholeness for my child
And for myself
I honor my knowing
I feel the rightness
I feel my responsibility to alleviate pain and trauma when my child is young and vulnerable
I trust my child to learn to stand in Him or Her Self.
Wendy said: “When a parent can open to connecting with the wholeness of this wee being, and really feel what the cutting would be like for him or her, no mother or father could sanctify it.”
I will be sharing more about all this as time goes on. The contemplation of it is very alive in me. I really welcome your thoughts and feelings—I hope you will share in the comments section below.
With love and blessing from Rue
