Something that is often overlooked in our views of the world and our lives is the fundamental importance of weaving together various polarities within each of us, and within the world.
Humans love to pendulate–we tend to pivot from one extreme to another, and there is a bit of an all-or-nothing mentality that seems to dictate most of our decisions.
We try one thing, and if it doesn’t work for us at that moment, we completely discard it and try the opposite thing. We often feel as though we’ve failed, because what seemed to work for us before suddenly stopped working – or because something that seems (from the outside) to work for someone else isn’t working for us in the ways we want it to.
This one-extreme-to-the-other mentality limits us. It puts us into boxes that aren’t able to accommodate our needs as circumstances change in unexpected ways.
What we need is an integration, or what I call a weave, of all of these different polarities into the underlying fabric of our lives and relationships so that we can meet each moment in an integrated way.
Simultaneous integration of both the masculine and feminine
Imagine a beautiful tapestry made from that kind of integration, where both our sacred masculine and feminine are utilized and relied upon at different moments.
It’s not so much a balancing act, where certain levels of structure and flow are handled with consistency in all areas of our life; instead, it’s more of a continuous re-ordering of the threads so that sometimes, one thread, or one color, comes through more in the tapestry, and then sometimes it falls back to allow another thread to be more prominent.
This is the fundamental foundation for my perspective on a healthy relationship with both the feminine and masculine. It’s actually why I created my program, Fierce Grace, which is a container for women to truly be held in the work of learning, exploring, and expressing these polarities within themselves in healthy, powerful, and useful ways.
The truth is, that even with the ‘rise of the feminine’ in our current culture, and with so much emphasis placed on ‘honoring the feminine’, the unhealthy masculine is still culturally over-rewarded.
The elements of the wounded masculine – rigidity, power-over, control, and domination – are more highly valued in our society than the relaxation, understanding, and openness of the more healthy and evolved masculine and feminine energies. This mostly comes from the idea that if things aren’t monetizable, or quantifiable, then they aren’t valuable. This, in itself, is an expression of the unhealthy masculine.
Shifting away from “masculine vs. feminine” and towards a more nuanced perspective of “healthy vs. unhealthy”.
I intentionally distinguish above that the unhealthy masculine is what is being over-valued. Too often, we pendulate between thinking that one is better than the other, and oversimplify by swinging away from All Things Masculine, when what’s really called for is an integration of the healthy masculine to support our healthy feminine.
In fact, most women who develop such an allergic reaction to All Things Masculine, actually swing fully into their unhealthy feminine – which is just as destructive in its own way.
When we aren’t more nuanced in understanding the difference between healthy and unhealthy (in both the masculine and feminine, as well as any other polarity), we end up villainizing one or the other, which actively detracts from our ability to integrate both in a healthy and beneficial way.
In the last 10 years or so, there’s been a rise of women who have discovered the work of masculine/feminine, and realized there may be other ways of living, working, and loving that truly do honor feminine rhythm and flow. These women, in reaction to a lifetime of having rigid masculine structures forced on them, now want to ‘live their lives from the feminine. This is a deeply relatable, and also a little bit lazy approach, because we can now abdicate All Things Masculine – rather than coming into right relationship with these energies within ourselves.
What I think we as women really mean when we say this is, “I want to develop the capacity for, and learn to embody, and ultimately integrate the healthy and sacred feminine into my life”. And I AM SO HERE FOR THAT! However, what is often missing from this is the other half of the statement, which should be that we also want to learn how to actually embody and cultivate the healthy and sacred masculine into our life.
The all-or-nothing idea of a dramatic pendulation is, in and of itself, an unhealthy masculine perspective.
When women first recognize their habit of doing business and conducting their relationships from an unhealthy masculine frame, they tend to pendulate all the way to the other side and say, well now I want to do it all from the feminine. In doing this, they are using words about the feminine, but still actually coming from an unhealthy masculine perspective.
The feminine is never all-or-nothing; the feminine inherently seeks integration and union. The feminine does not value the feminine over the masculine – the unhealthy masculine does that! This kind of pendulation and better-than thinking is actually where I see the most exhaustion and frustration and confusion in women.
We’ve all definitely seen this – we know in ourselves that we’ve been here. Maybe for the entire first half of our life, we tried to make a lot of money, or create a successful life, a certain way, and we got exhausted, burned out, or lost touch with our sense of connection to source or spirit, and then one day we decided to start working in flow and trust and intuition. So we sort of found the way that everything went sideways, and we jumped ship and started doing the complete opposite.
This is all-or-nothing polarized thinking and acting, without taking the time to fully integrate all the places in the mid-range.
This shift from the unhealthy masculine into what we call the feminine, without really taking the time to learn to cultivate and embody either the healthy and sacred masculine or feminine, is an allergic reaction rather than a choice. And in that allergic reaction, there’s a rejection of anything remotely feeling or appearing masculine. What this leads to is a rejection of all structure, a rejection of all goals, a rejection of all tracking, or a rejection of all frameworks. We are only following the whim of what ‘feels good’,or we feel ‘inspired to do’ – and only in the moment.
This is more of an unhealthy feminine reactionary response, rather than the deep, healthy, sacred feminine that’s anchored in what we are most deeply devoted to.
In deep sacred feminine we aren’t swayed by the whims of instant gratification, or ‘not feeling good’ in the moment.
A lot of us have experienced the exhaustion, frustration, and hopelessness that comes with feeling like there’s either no forward momentum, or no building.
When we’re trying to do it all from this shallow definition of the ‘feminine’, we waste time, energy, and money treading water.
I see a lot of women who want to do things all from the feminine spend money on something that they hope will handle All Things Masculine for them. I’m not saying that you have to do it all yourself, or that you should never outsource anything, or that nobody else can ever hold any structure or masculine for you, but when we have not cultivated our own healthy masculine capacity, or when we don’t have facility in that area at all, then to only outsource it becomes an enormous waste of money. It is also deeply unsatisfying – but that’s a Purpose post for another time.
Weaving the threads and polarities of our lives
The solution is to find a beautiful weave, or a true partnership, of the masculine and feminine within ourselves. Both can be felt, expressed, and worked with and woven together at the same time; this is our full blossoming as whole human beings. This is where the masculine and feminine within each of us are in service to each other – not at war. This is where life and creativity come from, and what actually allows life to flow and feel easy.
This doesn’t mean everything is easy, or that we never work hard again, but it actually makes life feel easy. Creating this weave is a very patient activity. It does take time, and the willingness to stay connected to all parts of ourselves.
This is deeply feeling work. It requires a willingness to work with complexity and hold nuance. In this way, it is actually deeply feminine work. The most beautiful weave is different for each of us, in different areas of our life, at different times, so the ultimate solution is to develop our capacity to see, feel, learn, and understand, so that we can choose the correct structure for ourselves throughout our life.
When these polarities are deeply integrated within ourselves, these polarities actually serve each other.
To truly honor the feminine is to recognize the sneaky ways that the unhealthy masculine wants to keep dominating, and to not allow ourselves to be trapped by that.
This is part of what can allow for the complexity of our expression to weave together in the most beautiful way, and in a way that most encourages, supports, and is devoted to us thriving. It will never be all-or-nothing; it will always be the light woven with the dark, the soft woven with the hard, stillness woven with movement, silence woven with sound, the masculine intertwined with the feminine in an extraordinary dance.
It’s not about equal balance; instead, it is the integration of the polarities that enables us to walk our own unique path of correct structure and correct flow.
If this is something you want to explore more deeply in an embodied way, check out the Fierce Grace Incubator. In Fierce Grace I hold and guide an intimate group of 12 women on this journey of working with these polarities in their real lives, relationships, and work in the world. You’ll learn how to discover for yourself not just what your unique weave is, but how you can develop your own relationship with your own weaving process, so that you will know for the rest of your life how to draw from these different pieces and polarities in order to create the weave that’s right for you, right now.
My deepest desire is for all humans, and especially women, to truly know how to walk this path, and to develop their own self-trust in order to guide themselves in these ways.
Check out this link for more information, or to apply for The Fierce Grace Incubator.