The Essential Divine Feminine
I’ve always considered myself a feminist and as a “mature” college student in the 90s I wrote a lot of feminist essays and railed against the patriarchy. While I still embody all of those beliefs and feel strongly that women’s rights are essential to the success of our human culture, I have a bit of a broader viewpoint on why it’s such an important issue. And it goes something like this.
Spirituality, or the connection with the unseen world of spirit energy, is an aspect of the divine feminine, as are compassion, emotion, intuition and empathy. It is an awareness of the heart, rather than the mind. There was a time in our history where this divine feminine nature was revered; when women were seen as wisdom-keepers and embodiments of divine truth. But the rise of patriarchy changed all that.
Fighting for the illusion of power often entails diminishing the power of others, so to ensure that masculine energy reigned supreme, the feminine needed to be demeaned and ridiculed. And while this caused women to be viewed as deserving of fewer rights as humans, it also had the devastating effect of demeaning all aspects of the feminine, including spirituality and higher awareness.
Masculinizing spirituality created religion, a dogmatic and logic-based belief system which borrowed aspects of spirituality and turned them into a set of rules overseen by men. Emotions became a sign of weakness, intuition a delusion and compassion feeble acquiescence. God was depicted as a masculine, judgmental overlord who punished those who disobeyed his rules.
Through centuries of cultural conditioning, we have learned to revere the divine masculine traits of intellectualism, logic, ego, assertiveness and mechanical thinking. And while these attributes are essential to functioning as a human, a total reliance on them obliterates a huge aspect of our awareness.
We are not just thinking beings, we are feeling beings, and those feelings are more than just emotions, although emotions play an important role in our higher awareness. We are energy, and as energy, we can connect with other forms of energy. It is a natural function of being, one that we all utilize without even having a conscious awareness of how we do so. But we are so busy emphasizing the functions of the mind that we ignore the subtleties of the spirit and cast them into the role of delusion and fantasy.
In the midst of this shift that we’re currently experiencing lies the truth; that the revival of the divine feminine is what will save us, that compassion leads to unity, that intuition is a connection to higher knowledge, that emotional expression is healing, and that bringing these truths together with the immense power of the mind, logic and intellect will move us into a new age.
We are embodiments of both masculine and feminine. Gender is not simply sexual, it is energy, and bringing unity to these aspects within ourselves will begin to pave the way toward integrating science and spirituality, matter and consciousness, thinking and sensing, and within this unity lies the greatest potential for the advancement of our species and planet.
Women don’t need rescuing and men don’t need caretakers. Let’s create an inner partnership with our own duality which we can then transcribe into the outer world. Let’s use the power of unity to create a better life for ourselves and those who will survive us. Let’s be integrated. Let’s be whole.
