Introducing the Maverick Bluestocking

Ooh, this is exciting and scary! Today sees the beginning of a new blog challenge, this time 30 days of blogging with the Spiritual Badass community. For me it is an opportunity to come out as overtly spiritual and stop pretending that what I write about is personal development, self help or health in general. My writing is all those things but first, last and in between it is spiritual. This month I shall be exploring exactly what that means and looks like.

I am English and wasn’t sure what ‘badass’ means, so I looked it up and found it is ‘a tough, uncompromising or intimidating person.’ Now, I couldn’t imagine myself as any of those things in a month of Sundays, but I do know that I have been described as tough because of various kinds of adversity that I’ve survived, and some people have said they are intimidated by my level of education. And I am beginning, these days, to refuse to compromise where my integrity or beliefs are at stake.

So I started to understand what a Spiritual Badass might be, and wondered how I could translate this into English. My personal recipe is that I come from a very intellectual, academic background, but now I talk a lot about the value of thinking less. I am training to teach meditation which cultivates an awareness of a part of us quite different from our intellect: you could call it conscious awareness, spirit, God or oneness, or whatever you like. So I thought I would use the word ‘bluestocking,’ which means an educated, intellectual woman, and in particular tends to refer to the type of woman who is less interested in appearance, finding a suitable husband or material success than in academic pursuits. I attended an all women’s college at Cambridge University in the 1980s and you wouldn’t have found anywhere on the planet a greater concentration of bluestockings! I decided to counter ‘bluestocking’ with ‘maverick’ which means an unorthodox or independent minded person, which is just right. I might seem to be on the outside a nice, well educated English lady, but I have always had an element of hippieishness and I just love to question assumptions and do things differently.

Therefore Maverick Bluestocking was named. Let’s see where the month takes us, looking at things just that bit differently, daring to imagine the unimaginable, questioning the unquestionable and finding joy in unexpected places. I hope you will join me and share your thoughts in the comments section.