a strong call for cultivating the feminine

The first time I was introduced to the idea of the feminine with enough gusto to wake me up was while working with a shaman a handful of years ago. After watching me throughout a night of ceremony, he said,

“Katie, you even move like a soldier. How can you access the feminine?”

Since then the idea of the feminine has been on my radar. Like learning a new word and then hearing it repeatedly and wondering how you’d never heard it before, I started to see the hyper-masculine and lack of feminine everywhere in our culture, including in myself. I began to notice my ingrained masculine determination to strive, achieve and produce fueled further with the dangerous and seemingly feminine desires to perform, perfect and please. This was the perfect storm for creating all sorts of detrimental habits that I am now slowly shifting.

Though I was made aware of my tendencies and began making intentions to cultivate feminine traits such as creativity, receptivity and intuition, the behaviors I’ve seen at home lately, coupled with the election results last week, feel as powerful as the shaman’s wake up words four years ago. I now feel called more strongly than ever to focus my attention on the feminine. Both the microcosm of my home and the macrocosm of our country are screaming to connect. They are ranting and raving for rest and respite and begging to feel safe and secure. We all want this, but we have lost the ability to quiet, to slow and to reflect. We don’t remember how to listen. We have forgotten the art of conversation and dialogue. We have let ourselves become distracted and depleted and have been blinded to the imbalance of our masculine-dominated culture. We want something different, but we don’t know what or how because we’ve become disconnected from ourselves and from each other and perhaps from something deeper.

Our elected leader is not only the champion of tall buildings, the super-star of the media and the world’s most well- known real estate monger, but he also is the voice and stereo-type of masculinity at its worst. He name calls and catcalls. He attacks and assaults. He asserts his power with ugly and reactive words.

How do we, as individuals and as a nation, respond?

My friend at circle this morning quoted, “we just make the next right decision”. I think she’s right on, and I think that in order to do this we must individually still ourselves and listen to discover what that is before we collectively engage in dialogue. As we still and listen, and be instead of do, we may hear messages that we are not going to find on Facebook or the nightly news. We might tap into inner wisdom that the world is so desperate for right now. And as we practice listening to our inner selves, we develop skills we can use when dialoguing with others, for we must not only take time to listen and to know ourselves, we must also actively cultivate time and space to listen to and know each other.

My outside and inside worlds are colliding and the message is getting louder and more frequent:

The time is NOW to quiet and listen, and the time is NOW to mindfully converse.

Perhaps in this way we will more collectively know the next right action, and we will feel connection.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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