What we misunderstand about ourselves

The Feminine and the Masculine is not what we *think*

CARE check*: What is your relationship with the Feminine and the Masculine within you?

What is your current understanding of gender?

Do you relate to your body as your home or as your identity?

Do the words Masculine and Feminine feel activating to you—and if so can you journal on how and why? Can you also let it be? And can you let it move through you now?

Those might be hard questions to ponder AND those are such foundational answers for you to not only receive from yourself but embody.

I hope this week’s letter will bring you clarity, perspective and support, and that it will feel like a loving invitation to reclaim for yourself and according to YOUR heart what it all means to YOU—as if no one else ever had a thought about any of this before and as if nobody else ever will.

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In case this letter gets cut in the email, you can click HERE to read the full post now :)

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Hi CARE friend,

Are you also feeling both lost and strangely determined at the same time right now? Like it all got so murky and unclear, and yet so vital and pure?

After all, diamonds are found in the caves of the underworld and the call to diamond up is not for the faint of heart—which is why we’re equipped with hearts that are fierce, loving and powerful beyond measures.

I’m in a strange portal at the moment.

I’m in a strange portal at the moment. SO. Many. Mixed. Signals. So many urges to go, so much inspiration! And also… so many nos, so many obstacles.

It feels sluggish and foggy. It feels tenderizing and raw. There’s no clarity… I’m meant to keep walking through the dark.

Now, I trust the darkness. I know it’s the nursery of stars. I know it’s the fertile ground where everything takes form. I know it’s the caring night that holds us all.

I know it’s our origin and I’m guessing it’s our final destination.

I don’t believe there’s a difference between the darkness and the light.

I believe there’s light we can see—and therefore love—and light we cannot grasp—and therefore fear. And I read last year that physicists are starting to go towards this conclusion too, studying how what appears dark to the human eye and mind is actually exhausted light.

I also don’t believe in right and wrong anymore, I believe in inner integrity.

I don’t believe in dogmas, I believe in inner clarity.

I heard Martha Beck remind us recently that if we’ve found someone we agree 100% of the time with, it’s amazing: we’ve entered a cult! (Was she quoting Ram Dass? I’m not sure now). She then added that if two humans agree on absolutely everything, one human is superfluous! How beautiful of a reframe… To understand that our differences are not what separate us but what make us precious and in service of Life (and one another).

When clarity leaves us…

When clarity leaves us, we’re called to surrender. Which does not mean yielding to the one person who pretends to have all the answers… No, we’re called to bow to the unknown and let it reclaim us.

And by letting it reclaim us, we reclaim ourselves.

In many ways, I’ve stopped making sense to myself again. I yearn to journal and yet it has become increasingly difficult for me to find my way to my writing desk. I’m not quite sure I understand anymore when my body is begging for movement and when it’s imploring for stillness. Music can at times feel invasive to me after being my most loyal life partner for as long as I can remember. I never sought silence before, and now there are moments when silence feels like the most trusted friend.

I’m feeling called to slow down when all I’ve ever known how to do is run.

In a nutshell, what used to work for me before is not always working for me now and what felt foreign, odd and inaccessible is starting to feel like a way of life I could adopt. I’m being reinvented but I’m not entirely sure who I’m being reinvented into.

And the funny thing is that I’m making less and less sense to my mind, but I also feel more and more myself! I guess I just don’t know who that is yet. I guess we’re always evolving, always starting over. I guess the “me” I reclaimed in 2020 was just the next inner layer under my protective shell… and I’ve deepened one or two layers more since them, so a new truth needs to emerge. And, with that, a new identity and a new understanding of my self-care.

I wonder how many times a woman is meant to reinvent herself…

I wonder how many times a woman is meant to reinvent herself and yet I suppose that’s one more thing that those of us who identify as women need to reclaim!

Because constant reinventions are not celebrated in our culture… AND we’ve exiled everything that we need at the soul level, in a patriarchal world that only reveres and acknowledges the mind and only celebrates having a body when it relates to the brain.

I’ve started reading yet another of those books that change everything for you, inside and out. Maureen Murdock’s THE HEROINE’S JOURNEY had this effect on me last September and I’m now reading another of her more recent books in awe, FATHER’S DAUGHTERS: Breaking The Ties That Bind.

It is not an easy read. It’s confronting, it’s raw, it’s deep, it’s brutiful. And I needed it so deeply to understand myself and my inner setting even more! It feels like such a timely read while I’m slowly saying goodbye to the complicated and multi-layered man who was once my hero and will always be my father.

I believe every woman (and human!) needs this book given the patriarchal conditioning we fell into and independently of her relationship with her father.

It’s a powerful reminder of the dangers of internalized patriarchy, while further highlighting that the patriarchy is not so much about men than a result of a core wound that we hold as a collective regarding our inner Masculine and Feminine.

It’s ALSO a beautiful ode to the Masculine we need to restore in the world—that Man of Heart energy that is the elevated embodiment of the Masculine Archetype.

We think oversimplifying things will make it easier…

We think oversimplifying things will make it easier for us to understand the world and thereby feel safe in it. I believe that is the foundational lie that weakens our psyche and empowers our collective tendencies to blame and/or deny, instead of relying on compassion and curiosity when we need them the most.

It’s dangerous for us to simplify what happens within and without. And nothing has been more damaging to us all (“us” not only including humans but the whole of Nature) than the overcoupling of the Feminine with the female gender and of the Masculine with the male gender.

The way I understand it now—and obviously that is constantly changing as I continue my exploration of the humaning journey—there are four levels on which Feminine and Masculine can be looked at (and as a reminder those are just words! Words that are here to serve and POINT towards the truth… Words that can be edited by your heart if they’re not doing their job).

And the problem is that we use the same definers to describe those widely different concepts and parts of Life, so we logically get very confused with their meaning and overcouple a lot of them. We get lost in translation, in a way.

So here’s my current understanding of the Feminine and of the Masculine at play:

• On the level of form or matter

• On the level of the mind

• On the level of the collective psyche

• On Soul level

On the level of form, those bodies we live in have a sex defined by our genitals and hormones. Some bodies are female, some bodies are male, and some bodies are intersex. That’s just a biological and genetic fact that needs to be separated from our meaning-making abilities and needs. Our body’s sex has physical implications that we have to contend with, including who can birth children, which hormones rule our biology, how we have sex and who menstruates or not, and even though we are NOT our bodies, we do spend our entire lives within them… so they will influence our everyday lives. That’s all our sex truly means, but on top of that we’ve added gender constructs! And that’s why our bodies’ sex tend to influence how we show up and how we are perceived in the world:

Because who we think we are, we become.

On the level of the mind—and on the level of the mind only!—exists this idea of Gender. Gender is a mental construct created by humans and in constant evolution as we grow, deepen and evolve as individuals and as a collective. This is an identity that we consciously or not endorse, abide by, or rebel against. This is an idea that we GET to shape, edit, nuance and make our own.

Genders are not a “fact” of Life, they are a DECISION the majority of us haven’t fully realized we’re—willingly or not—making. Some of us identify more with our Feminine energy, some identify with our Masculine, some identify with both equally, and some identify with none particularly. That’s the foundation of gender fluidity. In our culture, we tend to believe that our gender must align with our body and that there is a particular way to act depending on the gender assigned to you. But again, many think it’s an unquestionable fact without realizing that it is an implicit rule created by our minds, not Nature.

As we can see in Nature, biology impacts our rhythms and behaviors—at the raw level of instincts at least—whether we want it or not. However our gender will only impact us if we don’t question the internalized diktat we associate with them.

That’s when the level of the collective psyche enters the game. That’s where we meet the archetypal understanding of the Feminine and of the Masculine.

As a reminder Jung defined an archetype as universal, inherited ideas, patterns of thoughts, or images, that dance in our collective unconscious and drive our lives in a way that we can only comprehend when we make them conscious. They’re neither good or bad but they are part of our experience, whether we’re willing to admit it or not.

And as with every archetype, we can look at the engoldened translation of that energy or at its toxic expression.

Of note, I’m trying really hard to not use words such as light vs dark or elevated vs low, because those are consequences of our default pattern towards the engoldened qualities of the Masculine in comparison to the now deeply misunderstood engoldened Feminine.

Indeed, the engoldened Feminine (that some call divine or sacred or healthy!) reminds us of the fertile, enchanting, mystical and healing powers of the deep Earth and of the dark. It is dark beneath the ground, it is dark at the bottom of the ocean, it is dark within our wombs, it is dark within our hearts. And the Universe is a web of darkness too. The dark is where all Life is born, again and again and again. The dark is where Life (and light!) goes to take form.

In a world that has been taught to worship the Masculine only, we constantly seek elevation and light. We bow to the spirit only. But the grace of Life is never found in the extremes. Enlightened elevation will only create Love if deeply rooted in the center of the Earth. Love is spirit embodied.

The “LOW” is just as sacred as the “HIGH” is divine. And the darkness is just as enchanting as the light is magical. Too much light has the same effect as too much darkness, they both render us blind! AND we must descend to truly ascend. So in both cases, we need both. We need harmony... We need BALANCE.

• The distorted Masculine falls into patterns of domination, of righteousness, of separation. It attacks, placates, drains, pushes, destroys, rushes, and plays mind games. It only bows to our thoughts and never lets our emotions show us which thoughts are true or not. It sacrifices empathy at the altar of a logic that can become ruthless to the point of dehumanization and killing. It puts the individual on a throne built on the shoulders and health of the collective.

• The repressed Feminine falls into patterns of fragility, of emotional fogginess, of enmeshment. It disempowers itself, claims victimhood, shrinks, hides, denies, freezes, and uses emotional blackmails. It drowns itself into emotions without letting us study the stories creating them to check whether they serve or not. It confuses kindness and niceness and mistakes self-denial with service and compassion. It puts the collective above all, throwing the individual in a cave without water, nurturance or oxygen to breathe.

When we talk of the patriarchy, we’re not talking about human beings in a male body, we’re talking about a world where distorted Masculine and repressed Feminine are the norms—and for some the ideal. We all need to unlearn this by rooting within ourselves to reclaim and heal those potent and inescapable energies.

Because what we need now are the engoldened qualities of each.

• The engoldened Feminine nurtures, flows, creates, inspires, alchemizes all our feelings into Love and allows us to deeply root within our bodies, senses, intuition and on Earth. It connects us to all that is and to each other. It cares.

• The engoldened Masculine protects, maps out, builds, empowers, edits our thoughts in the service of Love and allows us to grow beyond our limitations and the physical limits of this world. It connects us to ourselves. It serves.

And when they merge, they LEAD. From and into Love.

Finally, on the level of Soul, those energies that we call Feminine and Masculine that fueled the archetypes, impact our understanding of our biology, and somewhat inform our gender constructs, exist in a gorgeous continuum—not as separate or opposed energies but in extensions of one another and mutual service.

Only on the level of form can separation exist. On the level of Soul, oneness is the underlying principle.

It’s those sacred Yin and Yang principles that allow the world to be. Two polarities of the same energetic source that are beautiful, potent, and life affirming on their own and that ALSO balance, empower and serve each other. Together they’re more than the sum of their parts.

They’re both born in each other as spirit and matter merge to come to Life. An idea only exists in the world after taking form and the form is only born because the idea arose. The embodied and the ethereal, concrete hand in a figurative one (and vice versa) allowing the endless cycles of creativity and creation to morph, inform and evolve each other.

The beauty of the night is revealed by the beauty of the light. The beauty of the light is revealed by the beauty of the night. The Feminine is the inspiration and the Masculine is the idea... The Masculine is the creation and the Feminine is the Art. One cannot be without the other and the other cannot be without the one. ALL in Nature (including us) is imbued by those two sacred forces and that is why we live in this awe-inspiring world.

The Soul Feminine and the Soul Masculine are on one end of the spectrum, in the purely ethereal and the male body and the female body are on the other end, in the fully manifested. Those are the foundations that Nature gave us and that pertains to all that is, all that ever was and all that is to come.

And then, in the middle, there is the “human drama”: this beautiful, gut wrenching, at times, heart opening always, story that we tell each other about who we are and who we are not.

The good news is that this story is just a story and one that we get to discover, edit, deepen, expand, transform and surrender back to Love over and over and over again.

And if we want peace among humans, we need to create peace within ourselves first and foremost… Understanding where we come from, the energies we’re made of, and the deeper call from our inner wisdom that knows that there is another way to see and therefore exist in the world. The way of Love.

I hope you know…

I hope you know how precious, needed and cared for you are. I hope you know it from the inside out. I hope that you will let both your inner Feminine and your inner Masculine diamond you up into the gift you’re here to receive and share with all of us.

I hope we call all remember soon that we are not who we are urged to fear we are… and that we can reclaim the essence of Nature and the sacredness of our bodies to redefine what it is to be human.

A redefinition summarized in the world LOVE.

Sending you kindness, love and warmth—knowing that all three are born in the sacred darkness that we do not fear anymore.

leo