The myths that keep us stuck
Remembering the truth of our being is how we heal
CARE check*: How aware are you of the Masculine and Feminine within you?
Do you know those energies?
Have you built intimacy with them and how often do you tend to them?
I hope this week’s letter will feel like a lamp torch on this journey into our inner world that has the power to heal the one we project and thereby live in.
In case this letter gets cut in the email, you can click HERE to read the full post now :)
Hi CARE friend,
Once you’ve seen it you can’t unsee it…
That’s why reading matters so much, and why true spiritual growth can only happen through relationships… Because we can’t know what we don’t know. We can’t see what we can’t see. Until we do.
When held only by our minds, this is a fact that can drive our anxiety and perfectionism to lethal activation, but when anchored into our hearts, it is a potent agent of surrender, curiosity and empowering humility…
What are the biases I can’t spot yet within myself? What are things that I have labeled as normal just because they’ve always been this way and I learned about them too young to question them?
Such important questions to ponder.
I guess this is the reason why coaching is so effective... Because we learn how to question our every thought and thereby realize that a belief is nothing more than a practiced thought. A thought we’ve thought so many times that we don’t question its validity.
Until something gives us a reason to. Until something knocks at the door of the mind and allows the heart’s light to shift what we see.
We have so much to unlearn as a society. So much fear based perspectives that keep us scared of each other. So much control based narratives that keep us small, lonely, worried and exhausted.
Because only the Masculine within us is rewarded in our modern culture, we only reward the road that leads to the sun, to the top, to the light, to spirit… but Life is Love embodied.
Life is both the ethereal and the manifested. Life is soul IN matter—only our minds could trick themselves into separating the two.
The Feminine reminds us that roots of the tree matter just as much as its highest branches and fruits. The darkness is where everything is born and reborn. The descent is how the ascent can begin AND sustain itself.
Nurturance, safety and inspiration come before actualization.
The mind can create tremendous beauty or horrendous chaos depending on the source it draws from: inner love or outward validation.
The body only knows Love. So let’s relearn the sacred language of our hearts.
We have sacrificed our relationships with the Earth and with our bodies in the name of worldly goals that can only serve if they’re grounded in reverence for Life in all its forms, first and foremost.
We have lost the natural sanctuaries that we were given to find shelter on our way home, the temple of our hearts and the embrace of Nature, and we cling to a false sense of security built in mind-based concepts that we’re just too tired and weary to question.
We’ve cut ourselves from the compass of our guts to follow maps to a so-called success that no one truly benefits from. Not on the soul level.
We’re at the tipping point and we see all of our systems collapse because without a foundation of Love, nothing endures.
I know it doesn’t look like we’re going in the right direction, but I personally believe that with our collective shadow so blatantly exposed, we are going to witness first hand that the darkness is where all stars are born.
I have been reading extensively about the effects that the patriarchy had on all of us and I am more and more convinced that it is not about men against everyone else, because those who identify as men lose just as much in this system as we “non-men” do. Not in the same way. Not necessarily at the level of form… but my goodness the inner devastation.
And I feel like I can attest to that confidently because, as Maureen Murdock explained to me in The Heroine’s Journey, I am a daughter of the patriarchy and experienced first hand how harrowing it was to live with an inflamed and inflated wounded inner Masculine and no reverence or even connection to our inner Feminine. And that is true independently of our sex and gender.
A friend of mine was surprised the other day that I would use the terms Masculine and Feminine when talking about our essence, but those are realities of Nature. And they have little to do with the flawed mind-based gender constructs that have been built from the misunderstanding of those vibrant and fluid interconnected energies.
Those fake notions of gender that create endless suffering and wars are rooted in the ego’s unconscious compulsion to rigidify what is only energetical and thereby purely ethereal, while putting everything into a box, from which it can be tamed and controled.
Because a mind that is not connected to a heart just feels too unsafe in a world where it cannot dictate how every concept is supposed to take form in the human world. (Which makes sense since the mind convinced itself that it’s in charge.)
The Masculine is part of us even if our body’s sex is female, and the Feminine is part of us even if our body’s sex is male. Both are part of us whether we identify as non-binary, woman or man.
We’re talking about archetypal energies here, not self-defining concepts. So, again, this has absolutely nothing to do with our sex nor gender!
We get to reclaim those fundamental energies and free them from the pressure of a culture in which people are cast into soul and body crushing roles that we then call “feminine” or “masculine”.
Now please use Yin and Yang—or any other word!!— that help you understand them better! We get to use language in a way that is heart-based.
In the same way, we can choose to only use the word God if it serves and leads us to the God of our understanding.
I have a lot of religion wounding myself and I go back and forth between using this word from my heart, as a connector to the origin and essence of all that is… and needing to call God “Life”, “Love” or “the Universe” instead, so that my mind remembers that we’re not talking about a mean grudgy old white man with a beard, judging us from the comfort of the sky while we pay for the crime of being human on Earth.
What matters here is for us to reconnect with the truth of our beings. A truth that no one, not even ourselves, can dictate.
And understanding those forces within us changes everything. It allows us to understand what we truly need to heal, because it shows us where the imbalances within us lie and how to love what is wounded and leaky back into wholeness .
The distorted Masculine attacks, dominates, drains, pushes, destroys, and plays mind games.
The repressed Feminine disempowers itself, claims victimhood, shrinks, hides, denies, and uses emotional blackmails.
Funny how, in a patriarchal culture, we’ve learned to somewhat accept the former while demonizing the latter right? But in truth none of those serve, and more importantly none of those are reflections of our Nature, they’re a reflection of our disconnection to who we truly are.
They’re signs of (reversible) arrested development in parts of our psyche, not of our inner flaws. They’re calls for maturation, not vilification.
Transmuting our wounds into gold is not only our salvation, it’s our calling and privilege as human souls. And it’s also both the greatest reward we’ll ever receive and the treasure we’re here to bring into the world. It’s our most sacred responsibility.
Because what the true Masculine drives us to do is build, protect, empower and lead… and what the true Feminine allows us to do is nurture, understand, inspire and create.
And when they’re in harmony within us, we will know how to both expand AND root.
We’ll REMEMBER how to care about sustainability, compassion, and our interconnectedness with each other and all that is as much as we care about meeting our full potential as individuals and as a species.
Following Joseph Campbell’s map to the Hero’s Journey allows us to heal the Masculine inside, finding our inner strength and wisdom and learning how to turn our personal dreams into offerings that serve the entire world. It leads us from the individual to the collective because that’s what our inner Masculine needs to expand into.
Healing the Masculine within us is how we step out of the toxicity of a patriarchal culture—but that’s obviously not enough. Because we need to step out of the patriarchy altogether.
We CANNOT rely only on our inner Masculine any longer, it is literally killing us.
Which is why the Heroine’s Journey is the call that we’re ready to receive… and it’s long overdue. It’s how we allow our inner Feminine to heal, finding our inner power and compassion, so that we can nurture ourselves into the gift that we are for the Earth while nurturing all that nurtures us in return. It allows us to care deeply about the collective while reclaiming our selfhood, because that’s what our inner Feminine needs to re-member and bring forth.
It is time for a humanarchy. And one fully surrendered to and reverent of what created us: Nature and Love.
So, yes, we have a lot of unlearning to do. As a society of course, but also as individuals, because collective liberation always starts within each and everyone of us.
What prompted this essay was a show I went to see last week on Broadway.
I wanted to love it with all my heart. Smash is a TV show that I cherish and that fueled my New York and Broadway dreams at a time I had forgotten they even existed. The songs are soaring and witnessing the creation of a musical from scratch—no matter how ridiculously romanticized and dramatic they had made it—felt so needed and inspiring.
Seeing then this show about the creation of a musical becoming the foundation of an actual musical about the creation of a musical was just so enticing! I wanted to love it. I wanted to be awed and inspired… or at the very least I wanted to feel pleasantly nostalgic and entertained.
Instead I left the show puzzled, saddened and frustrated.
So many talents were there and there was such a beautiful story to tell... But it feels like this was written by engineers and marketers instead of the artists that I know were behind the scenes.
We all wish it could never happen in the Art, but it does happen right? When we try to create while working in a Fear driven industry, obsessed with numbers (numbers of good reviews, number of dollars, number of Tonys…).
And it didn’t only feel superficial and performative to me, there was another strikingly disappointing aspect: this story was a reflection of all the deepest unconscious myths of the patriarchy.
Because please brace yourself…
The entire premise of the story is the idea that if a soft, sweet, bubbly, accommodating blond white woman reads a book (YES: Reads. A. Book) everything will fall apart.
And there is no subtlety involved in the telling of that story whatsoever, just in case you were wondering:
The heroine and lead songstress, Ivy, is given a book by Tracy, the show’s lyricist, which leads her to a female acting coach that some men in the show call “Death” and other “Witch”. Because obviously, as an older unmarried woman, this acting coach could only be a maniac set to destroy our poor innocent brilliant gay director’s dreams while turning our beautiful ingenue into a psychopathic bitch who then drives one man (the composer, Jerry) to alcoholism and the other (the director, Nigel) to be wrongfully terminated. And, yes, that terrible old witch is of course dressed as such.
Also, just in case you missed it, the message is clearly highlighted by Nigel who yells at Tracy: “and all of this happened because YOU GAVE HER A BOOK”. A crime he fustigated her for in the first scene of the musical, seconds after watching Tracy hand out that dreaded weapon of mass destruction to Ivy. (The audacity, right? Did she want the musical to be ruined?)
So we have all the elements of a typical patriarchal fairy tale as a foundation for the show. Women need to be protected from knowledge or a demoniac crone will come and destroy her… And all older women ARE demoniacal crones. Because older women in fairy tales are always dead, dying or deadly.
Indeed a good fairy tale woman knows to make her exit during her prime and always makes sure to die before wrinkling—explaining why most of those princesses and damsel-in-distress-to-be are raised by mourning fathers.
In a patriarchal tale, women who are not blossoming mothers or budding maiden are either dead, insignificant or evil. And we wonder why women have trouble with aging in this culture.
Now, this is far from being the only limit of the show… Almost every line feels caricatural or fakely woke.
Women turn on each other—as we disloyal creatures are supposed to do—and the show pretends to defend body positivity, while only casting the fittest dancers and making sure that that woman “who doesn’t look the part” gets one chance to sing center stage “because only talent matters” BUT reminding her (and us) quickly that talent doesn’t matter for more than a scene as she’s sent back behind the scene promptly.
In parallel, it was very pleasing to witness that the producer of the show is a strong and beautiful black woman, but of course we’re also told that she “was once considered a slut for sleeping with the choreographer when she was a dancer.” After all, empowered or not, women are only meant to be objectified and we should always wonder if they slept their way to the top.
The performers are all extraordinarily skilled and talented and find ways to humanize the stereotypical roles they’re asked to play, but it still felt gut wrenching to witness that this could sound like a good plot in 2025.
Which brings me back to my very first point… Because I wouldn’t have been able to see all of this play out before studying the work of the pioneers of Myth analysis such as Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Maureen Murdock, or Clarissa Pinko Estes.
They reclaimed fairy tales as roadmaps to our unconscious and shadow land. And Murdock and Pinko Estes—among many others—also showed how the patriarchy heavily impacted those myths’s story arcs over time.
This show’s plot might even have seemed slightly plausible to me a few years ago! After all, when our wounded Masculine and our wounded Feminine run the shows, those are the cliches we start to embody… And so it becomes almost “normal” to watch cynical, coldhearted, disillusioned men live alongside manipulative, brainless, irrational women.
And this is why we women in particular need to reclaim our archetypal journey of maturation from Child into Maiden and then Mother and finally Crone. So that we can heal the young women trapped within our disgraced bodies and re-embody the Mother energy of the Earth. So that we can be the steward of our hearts—the only true power that serves—and of the Land.
And so that we can become the elders we were always meant to be. The elders that Humanity desperately needs right now. Wise, vibrant and vital Medicine women here to weave the Earth and its inhabitants back in a circle of nourishing creativity and empowering creations.
Our lives do not end when we turn 30, it truly begins as Jung said when we turn 40.
Mother energy is so much more than the ability to have children and doesn’t require that we have any. Many women trapped in Maiden mentality have grown children that call them Mom, and many Mothers have never birthed a child. In parallel, Crones are magnificent women such as Maya Angelou that redefined what Courage, Decency and Love meant… not terrifying hags that are trying to pervert the young in search of their long lost beauty! (Nor are they those cute but irrelevant grandma busy being either invisible or making cookies in a Hallmark movies).
What we need is to remember who we are.
I feel like Humanity has an identity crisis.
We convinced ourselves that we’re sinful egoistical separate entities that have no real use for our bodies and who are in charge of the world. Based on this, it makes sense that we would behave like immature, angry, fearful, small minded, controlling, disembodied tormentors.
But who we are has nothing to do with our wounds, who we are is the Love that can heal them. We are the children of the sky and Earth, conscious stardust, loving creators, artistic souls, widely intelligent and inventive creatures with kind, compassionate, wise and powerful embodied hearts.
Knowing that who we think we are determines who we become, we need to reclaim this truth that our soul energy has encrypted into our bones.
The answer to our world’s ailment is not to finally be who we are not, it is about remembering who we’ve been from the start.
We do not need to come up with an abstract complicated solution that no one has ever heard of yet! All we need is to return home to our center and let ourselves be the solution that we were born being.
And THAT gives me so much hope. How about you?
Sending you kindness, love and warmth—knowing that all three are born in the sacred darkness that we do not fear anymore.
leo