It Starts With Us.

It's always started with us, and it can end with us too.

Dear friends,

I want to be upfront with you before you read any further: this is not my usual Lavish Well issue. There is no Pulse, no Deep Take, no From the Well. No curated wellness insight or practical tool to take into your week.

What I'm sending you today is something different — something I've not done before in this space. I'm sharing an article. Not summarizing it, not extracting the wellness lesson from it. Just sending it to you, whole, because I believe it deserves to land in your inbox rather than wait to be stumbled upon.

I don't do this lightly. Your inbox is something I treat with care, and your attention is something I never take for granted. But there are moments when the most responsible thing I can do as someone who writes to you every week about women's wellbeing, about healing, about what it means to fully inhabit your life — is to stop and say: this matters. Please read this.

This is one of those moments.

The article I am sharing with you was written by Elayne Kalila, and it arrived the way the most important things always do — without warning, and impossible to ignore.

She writes about the CNN "rape academy" story. She writes about ten thousand years of something being systematically removed from the center of human civilization. She writes about what a world looks like when it has been severed from its own source of nurturance, of protection, of the kind of love that doesn't negotiate with cruelty.

She writes about what happens when the Mother is gone.

I've been sitting with this for days. Not because it's new information — I think somewhere in our bodies, women have always known this. But because she names it with such precision and such courage that something in me that had been quietly grieving finally had language.

I want to tell you something I don't talk about in this newsletter.

I've sat with women in the emergency room after they've been assaulted. I've held the space in that deafening, palpable silence — the silence of disbelief, of shock, of a woman trying to make sense of something that will never fully make sense. I've watched a human being try to locate herself in her own body again after someone decided she wasn't a person and could take from her whatever they pleased.

This happens far too often. Far, far too often. And it doesn't start in a dark alley or a college dormitory or wherever we've been taught to be afraid. It starts in a world that forgot how to mother. That forgot what the feminine principle actually protects when it's honored, when it's whole, when it's centered in how we raise our children and build our communities and lead our institutions.

It starts with the erasure Elayne writes about. And it ends — if it ends — with us.

I'm sending this to you because you are my people. You are the high-achieving women, yes — but you are also the mothers, the daughters, the sisters, the friends. You are the women who have likely spent a lifetime being uncertain about the scale of your own power, because we were never really taught that our particular kind of power was the kind the world actually needed.

It is. It is exactly the kind the world needs. It may be the only kind that saves it.

And I'm sending this because some of you have men in your lives — partners, sons, brothers, fathers — and I believe this article belongs in their hands too. Not as an accusation. As an invitation. As evidence of what's possible when we collectively remember something we've been slowly, deliberately taught to forget.

If this cuts deep for you, as it did for me, then let them know that this is real for you. They deserve to know. They need to know.

The boys growing up right now, the teenagers, the young men trying to figure out what it means to be human in this moment — they need the dominant people in their lives to have read this. To have felt it. To know what to say when the time comes.

Read Elayne Kalila's piece here: What Happens When the World Is Motherless 

Then sit with it. Let it move through you the way important things need to move through the body before they become understanding.

Because the question she's really asking — the one underneath all of it — is who is going to do something about this. Who is going to remember what was lost and choose to bring it back. Who is going to mother the world back into wholeness.

It is us. It is I.

If something is tugging at you after you read it — a question, a grief, something you need to say out loud to someone who will actually hear it — reply to this email. I read every single one.

With love and a fierce, clear-eyed hope,
Dr. Erin Martin