*Warning this post contains graphic content that may be disturbing to some readers.

The first life I was ever regressed to was lived several hundred years ago. I never received an exact date, only the scene of my last breath. I was in China, living in a house with paper screens. The roof of my home was thatched, and I was waiting inside. I wore a red kimono-like dress with a hat. My face was painted white. I knew the men were coming for me…

I didn’t have to relive the rape, or the dismemberment of my body. That was a knowing, and the lingering of the sensations of violation that had reincarnated into the cells of my current body. The feeling of being choked…of being torn apart… I saw only the pieces of self left behind as my spirit rose from my broken body.

I was a forbidden woman.  A keeper of secrets. I was murdered when my value to the men who violated me had passed its keep. But that was hundreds of years ago, so why remember, why write this post?

It’s the year 2017, and yesterday I received a video in my Facebook feed. The title, “Human Trafficker Admits to Killing Over 400 Children in Video Confession.” Watch at your own discretion. It is highly disturbing. Why am I sharing it? Because it is the year 2017, and we are still allowing our girls, our children, the women in our world, to be abused. To be objectified. To be killed for sexual gratification.

What are we doing to our  girls? What are we doing to our women? Ourselves?

We are still, in the collective sea of our existence, in which we all dip our consciousness (or unconsciousness depending upon how you choose to view it), allowing ourselves to ignore, to deny, to look away, and to allow. Even to condone, this abuse or our girls, our women, ourselves.

Thousands of years ago, it was not thought absurd to revere the divine feminine. Instead, the goddess was worshiped in the form of multiple names. Names that are still, somewhat present, in our culture: Gaia, Tara, Quan Yin, Sarasvati, Kali, Durga, Isis…to name a few. Goddess names that are mostly associated with “New Age” groups, or misused by terrorists groups who desire to oppress the divine feminine.

It is the year 2017 and we have elected a president of the United States who openly disparages women. Who has sexually exploited women, and aims to oppress their rights in his position of “power.” Women voted for him, along with men. Women support him, along with men. Women and men with daughters of their own.

What are we doing to our girls? What are we doing to our women? What are we doing to ourselves?

I recently read the book American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers by Nancy Jo Sales, because my thirteen-year-old daughter was being harassed by a boy on social media. How did I find out? Two young women told the school administration. The book is as disturbing as the video I shared above. Yet, it takes place in present time. In the year 2017, girls are being raped and reduced to mere objects of sexual pleasure by their peers. Young women are being slut-shamed and denigrated by young men who sing songs about rape at Ivy League fraternities. It is the year 2017, where young men can gang rape our daughters and get a pat on the back. It is the year 2017, where beautiful girls as young as nine-years-of-age are being kidnapped and sold to the highest bidder so that they can be tortured and raped by horny men. If they try to escape, they are killed.

This is what we are doing to our girls. To our young women. To our daughters. To our sisters. To ourselves.

Over the course of hundreds of years, we have allowed the sacred woman to be replaced by an objectified body, in the name of sexual gratification and power, which still, very much pervades our culture. We cannot look away. Today, in the year 2017, a young woman cannot walk in the beauty of the sacred vessel of her body without being reduced to an object of sex. Her body, once revered, is considered a toy by boys too young to be called men. We can blame the pervasive culture of porn, or we can look within and see what is broken?

What are we doing to ourselves? What are we doing to each other? What are we doing collectively? 

We can also look without. We can broaden our gaze and see the horizon that stretches beyond our sight. We can look to the vessel of life that we call home, a planet once honored and revered as a sacred giver of life, and realize how we have, collectively, raped and exploited her as an object. A commodity. A giver of life that is worthy of little more than our greed.

And we can look within, and ask, where do I harbor darkness? What do I choose to hide and ignore? In 2009, The Dalai Lama said the “world will be saved by the western woman,” during a peace summit in Vancouver. Perhaps this is true. Certainly, I believe, she will help lead the way. What about the western man? What about all men? What about the divine masculine merged with the divine feminine, that is as much within a man, as it is within a woman. We must, I believe, get to the point where we realize how much we are alike, than we are different. That the light that exists within “you,” also exists within “me,” just as the darkness that exists within one person, also resides in you, and me. And, we must walk together, as one.