Dear Women,
I have really struggled writing this post. There are many directions I could go with this, but I've settled on describing what the divine feminine looks like in relation to the divine masculine I spoke of in Dear Men.
There is certainly some level of the divine feminine and masculine that we can all tap into, but its fullest expression can only be found in a relationship between the two.
A woman needs contact with an embodied conscious man in order to fully come into and experience her femininity. She needs to experience herself in relation to an energetically powerful opposite. A clear opposite. A decisive opposite. An opposite who knows what he’s doing.
We can do many healing practices to learn self love and address past trauma and open ourselves up, but without that divine polarizing experience there will be something huge missing.
Remember, men and women are opposites for a reason. Everything functions on polarity. With no up, there is no down. With no yin there is no yang. To say that a yin doesn’t need a yang, or a yang does not need a yin is crazy. It’s all driven by “political correctness”. To a woman who says: “I don’t need a man”--yes you do! What you don’t need is a little boy. You need a man who has done his work, who understands that for your power to emerge it needs a witness. Your feminine power needs to be seen and clarified by an opposite force.
Women also need to create space for a man in her life—we need to need him. Women have become so independent, which is not all bad, but more often than not, it is not being lived in a healthy way.
Most women have no idea how to surrender, they don’t even know it's an option! We don’t have to always be strong and independent and not needy and messy. We try to be “low maintenance” and easy going, we dread being thought of as “too much” and so we hold back. We do not surrender to our feminine energy.
This is actually a source of deep pain in women, believing that being independent and stoic is the best or safest route. We’ve been lied to. Weak men(and some women) who are afraid, have lied to us because it is easier to control a woman when she is stuck in her masculine. Because the feminine is too big.
So what should a woman, who is deep in her masculine energy, do to surrender and let go? First she needs to realize that she’s not actually being strong. True feminine strength is found in her vulnerability and trust. Second, she needs healthy men in her life to lean on. She needs a healthy masculine energy in her life to help polarize her.
This is the problem and it’s difficult to speak to–A woman can’t abandon the “masculine” in herself because without a healthy man in her life, her life falls apart. As a result most women, even in long term marriages, are completely masculinized in everything they do, including sex. And it’s not even a healthy masculinity, it is a weak and unbalanced masculine energy.
Women have been taught to embrace masculine strength, completely walking away from our truest selves–our hearts. We are encouraged to be more like a man so we will be taken seriously. But real feminine strength is a woman coming back to the depths of her heart–her love, her sensuality, her intuition, her bliss, her receptivity.
A freed up woman is a phenomenally powerful and healing creature. Conversely, a woman who represses herself isn’t much fun, in life or bed!
The third thing, and perhaps the most important thing, a woman needs to do is to be willing to engage in practices that help her to feel her body and emotions again. A woman’s emotions and her ability to feel is the most powerful tool that she has access to in her life. There is nothing more powerful and transformative than for her to bring her full heart into situations. Even deeply painful and terrifying situations, if she can bring her vulnerability and stay true to her heart and feelings and be willing to express it all, even the most difficult situations can be transformed into beautiful intimate experiences.
It can be paralyzingly difficult to say to your husband: “I wish you could hold me because I am empty and hurting and I need you…because it was never meant for me to have to carry everything on my shoulders.” But we must remember that men want to be needed! They need to be needed! They want to help, ask them for it. That is not weak, that is a woman's strength–to stop resisting and allow her man to do his job in the relationship so she can rest in her femininity.
Interestingly, when I asked my husband what I should say in this post to women, he said this exact thing–Stop fighting. Stop resisting. Let your man take care of you, hold you, comfort you, protect you. Open your heart and let him in, be vulnerable and let him protect your beautiful, delicate heart. Trust him. Be soft and open to him. And if he doesn’t get it right, forgive him and communicate your pain at his failure in a way that inspires him to step into his divine masculinity even more for you. Lean on him. Need him.
There is a steep learning curve in all of this, to be sure! We are all so far out of balance at this point in time. The marriage relationship and the true nature of men and women have been under attack from the garden to this very moment in time and we are only increasing in our confusion and disconnection.
God is male and female, bound inseparably together forever as one. As God. Of course the greatest attack of the enemy will target the very heart of Godhood–marriage. If marriages can be destroyed, progression in the heavens can be halted.
We women cannot continue to blame the world for pushing us into a hyper-masculine state of being. Regardless of “who’s fault it is”, it is our responsibility to learn how to tap back into our divine feminine state as much as possible, with or without a man present.
-For a lot of women, therapy of some sort is often a good first step, because healing is extremely important.
-There MUST be some sort of daily spiritual practice that connects you to the spirit of God.
-Overall this is about detoxing your energy and your spirit, so you can have a clear connection to the spirit realm.
-Some kind of daily meditative practice will change your life, it can bring you closer to the divine and open the door to spiritual downloads.
-Sound, music, dancing, movement, energy work, pleasure–these are all feminine elements.
A woman has so much to bring to this planet once she is properly loved and supported. But we have spent history mishandling her. Raping and pillaging her resources, controlling her. Assuming she is limited. She is not limited, the feminine is completely unlimited.
At the beginning of this post I said I would describe what the feminine looks like in relation to the masculine, but I don’t feel like I’ve really done that very well. So I will close with a description of Shiva and Shakti.
This is an image of Shiva and Shakti in the posture of yabyum. It shows us the dynamic of masculine structure & stillness and feminine movement & chaos. In Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, Shiva and Shakti are the two aspects of God, the father-mother. Shiva is the masculine and Shakti the feminine sitting on his lap.
Notice what Shiva is doing. He is sitting tall, strong and still. He is “holding space” for Shakti. He is protective, attentive and strong. He isn’t moving. Shakti, on the other hand, is freely surrendering to her sensuality. She is moving. She is following wherever pleasure and ecstasy take her. She goes deeply into the chaos and mystery that is the feminine. She doesn’t have to worry about structure or stability. She is fully held by Shiva.
The more passionate she becomes, the stronger he becomes. The stronger he becomes, the wilder she is free to be.
This is a dynamic between the masculine and feminine that very few people ever fully engage in and that is a tragedy. This dynamic of masculine strength holding the feminine expression and surrender, especially in sex, is deeply nourishing and healing to a marriage relationship. It creates a bond and oneness that makes everything else in life pale in comparison.
As I started to break my own walls down and surrender to the feminine energy in my own life I started to reconsider my beliefs about “how” God is, what are they really like? What do you think God is like? Both of them? Are they an old man and woman bent over with age? Or are they forever in their prime–beautiful, passionate, powerful and dynamic? Is there an element of “Shiva and Shakti” in their characteristics?
Interestingly, wikipedia says this about the yabyum concept: "Yab-yum is generally understood to represent the primordial (or mystical) union of wisdom and compassion. In Buddhism the masculine form is active, representing the compassion and skillful means that have to be developed in order to reach enlightenment. The feminine form is passive and represents wisdom, which is also necessary to enlightenment. United, the figures symbolize the union necessary to overcome the veils of Maya, the false duality of object and subject."
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