Occupation:
Author and educator
Interviewer:
Berry Liberman
Location:
Southern Highlands, NSW
Date:
March 2023
A former midwife, Jane Hardwicke Collings works in the realm of women’s leadership, personal development and community-building through her workshops at the School of Shamanic Womancraft. It sounds counter-cultural, but as I explore new systems, all roads lead to understanding natural cycles and inhabiting our own bodies. Everybody talks about female leadership, equal opportunity and the rising crisis of poor mental health and suicide in young women, but what are the solutions? That question led me to Jane’s work with women who have arrived at a clarifying awareness - that we need new understanding of what it takes to lead, of how to honour the feminine in our world and that any thriving future for humanity will elevate the female experience to one of reverence and sacredness.
In a roaming conversation, Jane shares with me her thinking about feminine archetypes as guides and that the arc of a woman’s menstrual cycle is key to understanding female leadership: how we might govern ourselves better and honour the Earth by honouring our bodies and our cycles. This work is so important, not because it is counter-cultural, but its omission from systems design is how we got here in the first place. Ideas of rest, shared power, embodiment, caring, gentleness, reverence, compassion, awareness, aliveness are all central to how we create the Next Economy and a regenerative future for human life on Earth. That older women should not be invisible but instead should guide communities from their place of earned wisdom and experience. Youth-obsessed, power-obsessed, money-obsessed extractive systems are killing us all. Through the privilege of growing older as a woman, I continue to learn and grow.
What does it mean to lead when you are a woman? To inhabit a woman’s body and life journey in a world driven Women have been so oppressed because of our biological imperatives: maybe the key to healing our systems is to listen to that biological rhythm and honour it.
