Several years ago I heard Ilarion Merculieff speak about this new balance point we, as humans, are undergoing. Coming out of 6,000 years of patriarchy we are now, according to global indiginous elders Merculieff gathers with, arriving at a balance point. Neither matriarchy nor patriarchy, a balance between the two. The gathering I attended set the stage for many years of personal meditation on this topic. Merculieff said it would be most challenging for women to release the pain and anger that comes from inhabiting a millennia old system which routinely has failed to presence women with value. My point is not to rehash this imbalance. Rather, my own personal quest in the years since I sat in circle with Merculieff has been to find out what balance looks like in my own life.
There is not a straight forward answer. This is not a linear process. And I imagine for every human who might decide to explore this idea, whether you are male bodied or female bodied, your inquiry will yield very personal results. There are some individuals who are living without the use of masculine and feminine to define any attributes they may possess. Speaking with those who identify as 'they' I have found my own sense of humanity reshaped. How can any characteristics or actions be so narrowly defined to be either feminine or masculine? It is not that simple. Nor is it that complex. It could be that the balance point means we simply are, as is, perhaps best without definition. But better with understanding.
I have spent a lot of the last year in particularly deep inquiry around exploring where my ideas about masculine and feminine arise from. One venue that has been helpful for me has been the Ecology of Leadership class at Regenerative Design Institute. Their work facilitates personal exploration regardless of the area of inquiry, so their work, per se, is not about this topic. What this class has provided are useful tools for a method of personal inquiry which has allowed me to dive deeply into my own history, the history of my family and even further into cultural history, global history.
These last few months I have been able to see the pain and anger not only that I have felt, but also as a more universal human response to imbalance. In a recent fire ceremony I specifically spoke the intention to release the pain and anger of the imbalance between masculine and feminine and to seek balance. Less than a week later I broke my left wrist in five places. I have since read that sometimes when we are breaking large patterns an actual physical break down can occur, even must occur, to facilitate the repatterning. The broken arm unexpectedly created an opening in me and a flooding of new ways of seeing, hearing, feeling has come, quite viscerally, into my own masculine and feminine selves. I may write more about this later. But for now I am in deep gratitude for the many gifts, practical exercises, tools and insights that came to me and are serving the slow regeneration of some very new ways of becoming an alive human in a female body.
There is not a straight forward answer. This is not a linear process. And I imagine for every human who might decide to explore this idea, whether you are male bodied or female bodied, your inquiry will yield very personal results. There are some individuals who are living without the use of masculine and feminine to define any attributes they may possess. Speaking with those who identify as 'they' I have found my own sense of humanity reshaped. How can any characteristics or actions be so narrowly defined to be either feminine or masculine? It is not that simple. Nor is it that complex. It could be that the balance point means we simply are, as is, perhaps best without definition. But better with understanding.
I have spent a lot of the last year in particularly deep inquiry around exploring where my ideas about masculine and feminine arise from. One venue that has been helpful for me has been the Ecology of Leadership class at Regenerative Design Institute. Their work facilitates personal exploration regardless of the area of inquiry, so their work, per se, is not about this topic. What this class has provided are useful tools for a method of personal inquiry which has allowed me to dive deeply into my own history, the history of my family and even further into cultural history, global history.
These last few months I have been able to see the pain and anger not only that I have felt, but also as a more universal human response to imbalance. In a recent fire ceremony I specifically spoke the intention to release the pain and anger of the imbalance between masculine and feminine and to seek balance. Less than a week later I broke my left wrist in five places. I have since read that sometimes when we are breaking large patterns an actual physical break down can occur, even must occur, to facilitate the repatterning. The broken arm unexpectedly created an opening in me and a flooding of new ways of seeing, hearing, feeling has come, quite viscerally, into my own masculine and feminine selves. I may write more about this later. But for now I am in deep gratitude for the many gifts, practical exercises, tools and insights that came to me and are serving the slow regeneration of some very new ways of becoming an alive human in a female body.
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