In this section, I will be interviewing some amazing women and sharing their stories with you.  Sierra Bender, founder of Bootcamp for Goddesses (see Resources), taught us at Bootcamp, that we, as women, all have our own medicine.  We all have that one thing we excel at and we should share that with other women.  Native tribes relied on women and their various "medicines' in order to help the tribe function through every day life.  Some women were better sewers, so they sewed.  Some were better at cooking, so they cooked.  What a beautiful example for us to follow. 

In our society, we tend to look at other women and be threatened by them.  There is an underlying competition that exists among women.  Not all women, but many.  We all want to be the prettiest in the room, we all want to be the one with the best behaved children, we all want to be the one with the most attentive and reliable husband, we all want to be the one with the cleanest house and so on.  God forbid should we fail at any of these.  We look at other women, those who seemingly have it all, and we are jealous, or, worse, we feel we cannot measure up and are not good enough.  What a disrespect to ourselves and to each other.  Instead of being afraid of other women, we need to rely on each other.  When we can see women as equal and as teachers, it sure eases up the pressure on ourselves to be "perfect". 

Women often have a story to tell about their lives.  There are reasons we are where we are; some stories are incredible and some are very simple.  I feel that all women have a "medicine" to share with us....and that we need to honor and respect each other's medicine.  I plan on sharing their stories and their medicine with you.  Please let me know of any woman you know who may inspire others to go within and to push beyond their "limitations (self-imposed) and do what they need to do to find their "medicine".  We all have a medicine....let's help each other to find it. 

My first incredible feature here is about one of my Goddess Sisters...Joyce.  I am so grateful to her for being willing to share her story.  I met Joyce at Bootcamp for Goddesses and I fell in love not only with her accent, but with her vitality, her eyes and her infectious laugh.  Her story is one many can relate to, in terms of how we seem to fall into a comfortable way of life without much thought of how our lifestyle will affect us in the future.  She has also been through a difficult relationship and openly shares the pain that relationship caused.  As she mentions, she found her medicine, her serenity, her healing and her life through cycling. Please meet my beautiful friend Joyce......



                                      CYCLING AS MEDICINE

Riding saved my life. Not as in “my bike gave me mouth to mouth resuscitation” or like Lassie “my bike went and got help when I fell down the well” but as in my bike saved my sanity, it gave me a way out.

First let me say that I was never really athletic. I started smoking when I was 15. Being raised in the south, my mom – bless her heart – fried pretty much everything and if it wasn’t fried it was cooked until it was dead anyway. Donuts, coffee, and nicotine. And when I was old enough, rum and cokes. What a lovely lovely path I was headed down.

And you can do that in your teens and twenties. That’s the really sad pathetic thing about it all – is that your body is so full of vigorous, blooming life that it simply overwhelms all the bad crap we do to it. But it will catch up to you. My mother had a stroke at 52 and ended up in a wheel chair paralyzed on her left side. That was my wake up call. Either check that box for long term disability insurance or start taking care of myself.

I quit smoking at 32. Took 5 tries but I did it. I started walking and joined a gym. I could keep myself going for a few months but then a new season of Friends would start and I would be back to eating Kraft Macaroni and Cheese on the couch. In here somewhere I fell in love and got married. We moved from Houston to Seattle to Washington DC. It was good and bad but mostly good. Until the day, 14 years in, that I realized that we hadn’t slept together in a really long while. And then realized that chances were I wasn’t in a two person
relationship anymore.

I won’t go into the details. Those of you who have been there already know the story and those of you who haven’t don’t really want to hear it. Let’s just say it hurts. It hurts a lot. You have to give up not only the idea of the life you thought you had but also any dreams you might have had about what the future would be like. It’s really really hard.

So where does the bike come in?, you ask. Here is where the bike comes in; I had been doing spin classes, loving the sweat, the loud pounding music, the camaraderie. But suddenly it wasn’t enough. I couldn’t sit still. I was constantly agitated. I needed to move. One of my interns had given me a free crap hybrid bike. It sucked but I rode it anyway. Once I got my finances in order I bought a road bike. She was beautiful. I rode for hours. I rode to work, I rode to the grocery store, I rode out to dinner. I rode and cried. I rode and argued with God. I rode and sang every sad heartbreak song, every “fuck you and the horse you rode in on” song. I yelled and screamed and rode some more. Fury seeped out of my pores. Pain glistened in my sweat. Loss and Grief finally let go and fell by the wayside.

What was left was a big old empty space inside. I didn’t know where to go or what to do – so I rode across the country: Virginia to Oregon. In Kremmling, Colorado I knew I had found a home. I came back and tried a couple of different little Colorado towns until I met a man who convinced me Fort Collins was the best place to start over. I still ride almost every day. Horsetooth Dam sits in my backyard and is my favorite – you work hard to climb it and then scream down the other side. This reminds me that there always *is* another side.

Riding heals me. It makes me whole. I could tell you it is the sweat, or the focus, or the endorphins but it really isn’t any of those things. It is grace. It is glory. It lets me touch God.

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