Queen Elizabeth I 1533 - 1603

Reflections for the Women of our Open Hand tribe:

She was one of the first truly independent and successful women in the realm of male dominated society and politics.

She helped change the society's idea of women's capabilities - planting the seeds for the empowerment of women.

She served at a time when her country was in a financial mess, due to gross mismanagement by past monarchs.

She favored a Protestant Church revival, but believed it could be achieved gradually and without bloodshed with the Catholic Church.

She was attacked and excommunicated by the Pope and Rome issued numerous decrees calling for her demise.

People of her own faith like the famous Scottish preacher John Knox attacked her for being a woman who was a leader of men.

She was disinherited by the two men she loved most, her father Henry VIII and her brother Edward VI.

She wielded her hard-won power by striking a balance between male/female characteristics, she had sensitivity, compassion, and openness to counsel and yet she was bold, decisive and as visionary as any king.

She had the heart of a King and the body and soul of a woman, she was a powerful negotiator and courageous in war.

"I have used time, which ordinarily accomplishes more than reason does."

She was content to allow her people freedom to believe what they wanted in the privacy of their own souls and turned a blind eye to those who practiced a different faith....she was tolerant!

She focused on the common ground of her people and their shared nationality to foster the beneficent idea of toleration.

She had the ability to cultivate and maintain a vast network of personal relationships... orchestrating a wide range of contacts, measuring: trust with prudence, intimacy with authority, openness with protocol.

She lived deeply and was the best informed person in her kingdom and probably all of Europe.

She nurtured personal relationships with the influential people in her sphere.

She defied stereotypes of a woman ruled by changing emotions - by setting a supreme example of integration of traditionally "masculine" and "feminine" strengths.

She showed us the benefits of balance in all relationships... with emotional intelligence.

SUMMARY

Comfortable with authority
Self-reliant
Confidential with information
Waited patiently for the right moment
Tolerant of other people's points of view
Calm in crisis
Not easily intimidated
Diligent in study
Could delegate responsibility
Sound financial manager
Strong sense of purpose
Self-aware and sensitive to others
She had a passion with a purpose!

"She always recognized that we can free ourselves from intimidation while accessing our personal power by embracing the scepter of responsibility...remembering that we are free to choose our response to any situation and that 'we teach people how to treat us.'

Go and do likewise.

Summarized by O'Steven from Discover Your Genius by Michael J. Gelb

Tending and Befriending

The Female Response to Stress: Tend and Befriend

Bunny Alexander recently forwarded this to us. Thanks Bunny!

A landmark UCLA study suggests friendships between women are special. They soothe our tumultuous inner world, fill the emotional gaps in our marriage, and help us remember who we really are. Scientists now suspect that hanging out with our friends can actually counteract the kind of stomach-quivering stress most of us experience on a daily basis. A landmark UCLA study suggests that women respond to stress with a cascade of brain chemicals that cause us to make and maintain friendships with other women. It's a stunning find that has turned five decades of stress research - most of it on men - upside down.

"Until this study was published, scientists generally believed that when people experience stress, they trigger a hormonal cascade that revs the body to either stand and fight or flee as fast as possible," explains Laura Cousino Klein,Ph.D., now an Assistant Professor of Biobehavioral Health at Penn State University and one of the study's authors. "It's an ancient survival mechanism left over from the time we were chased across the planet by saber-toothed tigers.

Now the researchers suspect that women have a larger behavioral repertoire than just "fight or flight." "In fact," says Dr. Klein, "it seems that when the hormone oxytocin is released as part of the stress responses in a woman, it buffers the "fight or flight" response and encourages her to tend children and gather with other women instead.

When she actually engages in this tending and befriending, studies suggest that more oxytocin is released, which further counters stress and produces a calming effect. "This calming response does not occur in men," says Dr. Klein, "because testosterone - which men produce in high levels of when they're under stress - seems to reduce the effects of oxytocin. Estrogen," she adds, "seems to enhance it."

The discovery that women respond to stress differently than men was made in a classic "aha!" moment shared by two women scientists who were talking one day in a lab at UCLA. "There was this joke that when the women who worked in the lab were stressed, they came in, cleaned the lab, had coffee, and bonded", says Dr. Klein. "When the men were stressed, they holed up somewhere on their own. I commented one day to fellow researcher Shelley Taylor that nearly 90% of the stress research is on males. I showed her the data from my lab, and the two of us knew instantly that we were on to something."

The women cleared their schedules and started meeting with one scientist after another from various research specialties. Very quickly, Drs. Klein and Taylor discovered that by not including women in stress research, scientists had made a huge mistake: The fact that women respond to stress differently than men has significant implications for our health.

It may take some time for new studies to reveal all the ways that oxytocin encourages us to care for children and hang out with other women, but the "tend and befriend" notion developed by Drs. Klein and Taylor may explain whay women consistently outlive men. Study after study has found that social ties reduce our risk of disease by lowering blood pressure, heart rate, and cholesterol. "There's on doubt," says Dr. Klein, "that friends are helping us live."

Taylor, S. E., Klein, L. C., Lewis, B. P., Gruenewald, T. L., Gurung, R. A. R. & Updegraff, J. A.
Femaile Response to Stress: Tend and Befriend, Not Fight or Flight

Womenomics - Make More Money

Women Rule

New studies indicate that the female business management style is:

1.) Lucrative (not soft), transformational and essential for success
2.) Produces 1/3 higher returns on equities (companies with women in senior management)
3.) More cautious than men with a focus on long term (men take more risk/short term focus)
4.) Less competitive - consensus builders, conciliators, collaborators

Transformational leadership style = heavily engaged, motivational, and extremely well suited for the emerging, less hierarchical workplace of tomorrow.

Work world is evolving into a more fluid, more virtual structure with more demand from female management skills involving essential emotional intelligence skills.

WOMEN ON TOP: (education levels, purchasing clout, management style)

a. they receive more college and advanced degrees then men
b. they control over 80% of all consumer spending (electronics, health care, cars)
c. they know how to market to other women

Pioneering OPEN HAND Women - Create a female friendly working environment, in which the focus is on results, not on time spent in the office, efficiency (not schmoozing), getting the job done = however that happens best = in a 3 day week, at night after the kids go to bed, from Starbucks

FREEDOM & FLEXIBILITY - women know that giving employees freedom and flexibility increases productivity - allowing everyone to make more money.

Key to the Future = HIRE MORE WOMEN

Jesus and the women

Jesus tomb is secured to guarantee that he who had died should stay dead....but there is an earthquake, and a numinous being appears, and the guards at the tomb swoon in fright....it is they who become as dead men, telling us that if we seal ourselves up against renewal it will come anyway, but frighteningly, as a shaking of the earth we stand upon, of the very foundations of what supports us...if w want to guarantee that our God is dead and hold that, then we will become as dead guardians at the empty tomb, holding fast to our emptiness......

Open for transformation - the women at the tomb are not sealed up against renewal...so it is that we are opened to transformation of the flesh by the females among us, or symbolically the sacred feminine within us....this capacity can stand for "fear and joy" that the angel's announcement brings...

Apostles - the women at the tomb run to tell the others, acting as apostles to the apostles...and there is initial disbelief among the men....showing how hard it is to recognize old truths in new forms....and with what distrust we receive the wisdom of the resurrected body...we are endlessly uneasy with those modes of being in us that are simply open to God.

Sharing - God comes to us across the gap, bringing the capacity to let be what is before us, to look at it and take it in, and then respond to it...this showing off of the new and transformed that comes so unexpectedly brings an impetus, indeed a necessity, to tell others, to share it, to give it away....this we cannot receive without sharing.....this is not a private showing, but a breaking into the lives of all of us.....

Ordinary tasks of life - Jesus has been doing this always, appearing in the ordinary tasks of life...when John and Peter are fishing, Jesus tells them where to find their catch; he reveals himself when they break bread together...the literal taking in of food for the body opens the soul to its nourishment, to taking in transformed values, old truths made new...the life of the soul is always rooted in the body...the sacraments are always directed to enter the body...

Community - when Jesus comes to his disciples as a new community made up of those who have seen his new form, the coming to them entails their going to others in the body...Jesus tells them to Go, teach, preach, feed, forgive, show visible signs of the invisible, God coming across the gap to us brings us the power to see and to receive and sends us on to others to share the transformation now taking up residence in our own bodies....

Holy Spirit - that is what it means for Jesus to breathe on the disciples and say, Receive the Holy Spirit...the new value is personal and it is special for the soul and the body of humanity in the world...it enters history as well as the psyche; it changes individuals as well as society...we can't have it for one without the other....to receive is to give, to give is to share, to share is to join in a new Being that comes across the gap between our finite images of God's infinite mystery to make us a new creation...
Amen
Ann and Barry Ulanov

German Words of Wisdom

"I faked it until I believed it !"
Evelyn

powerful women

Hey Hey Tribe:

I have recently been amazed by Ann as she has faced several random 16,000 Volt jolts of REACTIVITY out the blue....and with a classic non-anxious PRESENCE, let it run through (without shocking her) and exiting at a more manageable 110 Volts. She has more balls than most professional bull fighters.

Friedman would be proud...and I can only hope that I would respond like Martin Luther or Ben Franklin (both great at self-definition and self-regulation and connection for their time and cultural context)...instead of merely cooperating with the mindless reactivity and essentially amplifying it by throwing punches or wrestling about on the ground with fire brands.

She does appear to have more golden/blonde highlights in her gray mane recently - probably a combination of grace and harnessing of quantum amounts of energy absorbed from the process of transforming so much emotional radiation / reactivity.

What was it that Friedman said about our response being more powerful than the pathogen / trauma that strikes us from time to time???

My socks have been knocked off, and I stand amazed at the power of our women in the Open Hand tribe....amen!

Still trying to enjoy the challenge,
O'