Post seven of fourteen, in section About Awakening
There are many different aspects of what could be described as the masculine and feminine. In the way that I am talking about them here, every aspect of reality has a masculine and feminine aspect to it. You could imagine it like two separate threads that are weaving together to make a cloth, or like the dark and light side of the moon.
The masculine tends to have more power in our world, although in some spiritual circles this is reversed and the feminine aspect is given more power or authority.
I want to talk about how balancing the masculine and feminine within you creates a much more whole, engaged, and fulfilling sense of connection with yourself, others, and the world.
Love and Understanding
For this post, I am going to focus on the examples of love and understanding and how each of these has a masculine component and a feminine component that you can cultivate.
This is because the qualities of love and understanding (or love and truth) underlie a lot of spiritual or contemplative practice and desire.
But you can also notice how the masculine and feminine energies permeate through everything and how learning to balance them could impact every aspect of your experience.
A very simple way of understanding the masculine and feminine energies is that the masculine is about doing or giving and the feminine is about being or receiving.
The masculine element of understanding is sharing meaning or describing, and the feminine component is receiving meaning or comprehending.
The masculine element of love is to give love, and the feminine component is to hold a receptive, loving space.
In a lot of societies, the masculine elements are valued more highly; the world is understood to be something that people go out and do things to in order to create value. From a more balanced perspective, it’s possible to understand that receiving is equally as powerful and valuable.
Understanding
A typically masculine version of understanding would be writing a book explaining a concept of the world. It’s things like clarity and direction. A typically feminine version of understanding would be listening deeply to what someone has to say and getting the meaning behind it. It’s things like comprehension, resonance, and being moved.
In a balanced environment, these would be flowing freely and openly through different people at different times.
In most environments, people get stuck in one or the other, and on a societal level, it usually manifests in the masculine expression being perceived as more valuable. An example of this is the idea that science is in someway truer than more resonant, spiritual, or soulful ways of making sense of the world.
The reality is that these things are always in a dance with each other, and ideally, you want them to be in a virtuous cycle. The rational informs the intuitive informs the rational, and so on.
To get in touch with this requires people to notice how they can learn, grow, and understand equally well from listening to what resonates with them on a deep level as they can from learning about concepts.
Love
A typically masculine version of love would be to give someone something or do something for them that you hope will make them happy. A typically feminine version of love would be to hold space for someone or something – to receive them or appreciate them.
The imbalance in our society often manifests in people believing that giving is a more honourable thing to do and receiving is a passive trait that takes no skill and provides no value. Holding space for yourself and others is an active role that takes skill to learn to do well.
In order to embrace the feminine, people generally first need to feel that sense of being held and to see the huge value that that can offer. Be held can open up the possibility for people to be more directly present with the depths of their experience.
When people can be with how they feel about something, it presents a much more authentic picture of what their experience is. It also opens up an embodied experience of compassion, which is the doorway to working with difficult emotions. And finally, you are only able to feel joy or happiness if you can find and listen to these positive emotions inside of you.
If you are always focused on doing things for the world, then you lose touch with the basic feeling of being alive.
Awakening
Balancing the masculine and feminine of love and understanding within you is vital for awakening.
The more you can feel things and let the meaning of things resonate through you, the more you will be able to experience and appreciate the beauty and insight that life and practice generate.
Part of awakening is letting go of fixed ideas and concepts of the world and learning to give yourself to the moment-to-moment experience that is arising right now. If you can feel things and let the meaning of things resonate through you alongside analysing things and looking clearly at them, you will be able to experience and appreciate the full spectrum of experience.
In order to connect to the depths and breadths of life in the more intimate way that awakening is asking for, it requires this balance. Experience is always in the process of being given and received, and the more you can integrate the full expression of both the masculine and feminine within you, the more present you will be able to be with experience in each moment.