Designing Woman

(This vignette compresses several hours of intensive dialogue among David, Ted and our client partner, during a Discovering Questing Session.)

Our client partner (we'll call her "Valerie") is a successful, energetic leader in her profession of helping others increase their professional effectiveness. Her work is of the highest quality. Yet she senses that something is missing—in her work and in her life.

Valerie believes that her work should speak at the "heart intelligence" level, beyond words; that it should encompass mystery and integrate healing, teaching and beauty. She has a passion for beautiful places and spaces, for form that creates meaning. Her professional efforts, while good and productive, do not give voice to her deepest passions and her highest gifts. She does not know how to release those passions and gifts.

Valerie loves quilting. It provides a vital outlet to her aesthetic energies. Her quilting workshop is a large, light-filled space above the garage. While this beautiful space beckons to Valerie, it is quite separated from her professional office in her home, and somehow feels "off limits." Valerie pours a prodigious amount of energy into her work, putting in long hours to maximize productivity and to stay on the "leading edge."

David draws a simple picture of her house on the flip chart and suggests: "Suppose you moved your quilting workshop right here smack in the middle of your office?"

The ensuing dialogue reveals that a "family of origin" event banished quilting to a peripheral, truncated role. At a deeper level, Valerie had also denied herself permission to put her full feminine, creative self—which the quilting had come to symbolize—at the center of her professional activities. As a result, Valerie realizes that both she and her professional work have been denied the full benefit of her creative energies.

Now, quilting represents to her—both concretely and metaphorically—the possibility of more fully integrating her whole self into her work. Valerie also has come to see that quilting is an act of giving, receiving, and sharing and represents for her a return to full community.

Valerie sees a new energizing task for herself: how she will weave her quilting, and her newly, more fully affirmed feminine, aesthetic self, into the fabric of her life's work.

Valerie comments: "What I have learned is that we each must lay claim to our identity and not ever see it as for sale or forfeit because of the opinions of others. I am making major changes in my life. We are moving back closer to home and family where there will be many opportunities to make friends and to re-insert myself into a living community. The area we have chosen is enormously artistic and will allow me to celebrate my artistic gifts with others. I am now being drawn into supporting women to be more who they are and to fully integrate the masculine and feminine into their work and lives. I feel that the Tarxien process really paved the way for all of the above changes to occur."

		"Yield who will to their separation my object in living is to unite my avocation and my vocation as my two eyes make one in sight. Only where love and need are one and work is play for mortal stakes is the deed ever really done for heaven and the future's sake." - Robert Frost, Two Tramps in Mudtime

Have you been able to integrate your whole self, all of your distinctive gifts into your work? Have you been able to lead your people toward the same kind of wholeness in their work? What might be holding you back? We invite you to contact us at info@tarxien.net.

Continue to Vignette #2: Becoming Clear | Back to Taste the Experience