What’s the Feminine? What does it mean for her to be rising?

Why, I’m so glad you asked my friend!

The Feminine is what was taken from us when witches were burned, the Spanish ran their murderous Inquisition, and the men of the enlightenment decided that reason and rationality were God.

As emotion and intuition were deemed unreliable and unmanageable, her gifts were stolen from our heritage. When progressive industrial revolutions took us away from the land, stripped us of our rhythmical way of being, and distanced us from our bodies, we became disconnected from her most precious wisdom.

She became more and more distant from our lives when people started believing that electric light was superior to sunlight, that conditioned air was more convenient than fresh air, that convenience should trump all else, that births should be controlled by men in white coats, that vegetables should be sprayed with pesticides, and that in the name of efficiency, individuals should stop growing their own food.

When the Feminine was suppressed, men stopped respecting women and started treating them as possessions, as objects, as beings to appropriate. Women were burned and drowned. Women who represented the Feminine principle. Women who carried her wisdom within their wombs and worked with her creative power.

Women were removed from positions of authority and written out of the history books. We were raped and beaten, infantilised and silenced.

And because the unhealthy Masculine refuses to be challenged, he blamed the rapes and the beatings on women. He told us we were asking for it. We wanted it. Even when we were unconscious, he told us we wanted it.

He also created a new story about the Feminine. One which painted her as weak. As compliant, as important only insofar as she propped him up.

Of course women weren’t the only ones to suffer. When the Feminine was suppressed, the Masculine lost his balance. He forgot about union and cooperation. He thought he was all. He thought himself the only one.

And he imposed that one way on all.

A white, Christian, capitalist, heteronormative, colonising monoculture which favoured the physically strong.

Anything else was deemed a weakness or an aberration. Anything else was seen as a threat. Anything else was eradicated, eliminated, massacred, absorbed, bred out.

Nothing has thrived under the gaze of the unbalanced, unhealthy Masculine. 

The white culture it puts forward as the most advanced civilisation of all time has become a devouring capitalist machine that wreaks havoc on every culture it comes in contact with. The damage caused by white culture on all others is incalculable.

And white culture isn’t thriving under the gaze of the Masculine either. It has become a ghost. A body robbed of its vibrance and vitality. White culture is infected with a virus. It’s been supplanted by a ravaging system from which no one is immune.

The Feminine is not femininity and it’s not femaleness. The Masculine is not masculinity and it’s not maleness.

The Feminine and the Masculine are the energetic underpinnings of the world in which we live. They’re states of being. They’re the yin and the yang. The Moon and the Sun. Allowing and controlling. Creativity and constraint. Emotions and Thoughts. Shakti and Shiva.

We all have the Feminine and the Masculine within. We all have a part to play in addressing the imbalance.

The Feminine is re-emerging. She’s been suppressed for too long. The body of the planet and the bodies of her inhabitants are all suffering from her loss. People with chronic and fatal illnesses, others deeply disconnected from their bodies, rivers polluted, species extinct, water undrinkable, icecaps melting.

This my friends, is the background to our work together. This is what we are dismantling. 

It’s more than the patriarchy. It’s more than white colonising power and supremacy. It’s more than heteronormative, cis, able bodied preferencing. It’s more than the destruction of the environment and it’s more than corrupt economic systems.

It’s the whole lot.

And while each of us is out of balance within ourselves, we enable the system itself. We cannot eradicate oppression while each of us carries the unhealthy Masculine within our cells. We cannot eradicate oppression while the Feminine remains silenced and suppressed.

While the imbalance exists, we invariably preference masculine values of push and hustle over allowing and resting, reason and logic over emotion and intuition, exclusion over inclusion, transaction over relationship, convenience over sustainability, speed over savouring.

Dismantling the system and redressing the imbalance is what’s needed now. It’s time to bring the world back to wholeness.

To do that we must look within ourselves. We must locate the Feminine within.

All of us.

We must face and dismantle the unhealthy Masculine. We must raise up the oppressed and eradicate the oppressor.

As within, so without.

All who can speak her name must speak up. Find their voice. Share their message. All who are connected to their healthy Feminine must show the way for the rest.

This is our time. This is our task.

Will you join me?