Mapping the Great Journey: The Hero, Antihero, and Heroine’s Journeys, Part Eight

Part 8: Healing, then Unifying, the Masculine/Feminine Split

Click here to start with Part One of the Hero, Antihero, and Heroine’s Journeys.

In my mid-20’s, I once stood on a dining room table and screamed at my boyfriend, trying to get him to listen to something vitally important I was trying to say. I simply could not find another way to get his attention. I was quickly told that I was acting wild, unruly, and uncultured. He was shocked at my overreacting, completely unaware that I was only one more thwarted conversation away from leaving him (I did).

He might have been right according to culture’s depiction of ladylike behavior, or even common civil behavior, but today I could say the same things about nature. Wildfires with an apocalyptic view covering the West coast at this very moment? Out of control, don’t you think? Hurricanes and tornadoes in all the wrong places, escalating in severity and at a ramped-up speed? Unruly, to be sure. COVID-19, for crying out loud—rather, wailing, especially if you have lost someone—shutting down the world as we know it? Uncultured to the extreme. I do not mean to say that nature is literally acting human. I do mean to say that an imbalance in nature is out of control and we are not listening. 

There is no way to over-emphasize our need to heal what the heroine’s journey calls the mother-daughter split, which is also and more profoundly the earth-human split. We have gone far beyond the time for playing by the norm. Without provocation, will anyone hear? Escalation in the conversation is mandatory and does not need to look pretty. Do we expect the frog in boiling water to remain silent when the situation becomes dire? 

If the masculine (in us all) will not hear the feminine (in us all), rage will result. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. So while I have long ago learned to channel my anger/rage/sadness (or whatever emotion de jour arises) into creative processes, I have also learned to cry out when crying out is needed. 

These words are not metaphors. We need to literally cry. To get angry, if not furious. We can do so without destruction, but only if we employ our creativity and forgo the cultural norms that are meant to act as roadblocks to change. We need to be willing to break the rules and stand on the tabletops if we know that’s our last chance at survival. 

As the Chinese blessing-and-curse goes: May you live in interesting times. 

But we are way beyond interesting now. We are in the deep end of the evolutionary jump from who we have been to who we will be. Which is to say, we are in chaos. Like my boyfriend back then, many are critically unaware that we are a hair’s breadth from running out of time. According to a good many great minds, this is not speculation. This is a given, a done deal, a sure thing. 

Because all change starts at home—to put it another way, from within—we can return to Maureen Murdock’s map of the heroine’s journey for guidance. Once we have followed our deep desire to reconnect with the feminine, which means we have reconnected to our emotions, passions, and generative creativity, we are ready to heal the imbalances that have come from the many masculine-inflicted wounds that have received little or no attention. 

To the beginner, this seems daunting. In fact, it need not be. However strong the fear, this healing is a natural progression that, once started, follows a predictable course. Just as naturally as a two-year-old becomes a three-year-old and then a four-year-old, so we who attend to our wounds and needs will find ourselves feeling better, and most often better than ever. Once surrendered to the process, we can follow our instincts (even or especially the ones that feel like great confusion at first) and let nature take her course. As with any growing consciousness, so long as we do not intentionally choose to return to a shut-down and unavailable state, it will happen of its own accord. 

Healing the mother/daughter and earth/human split is something any of us can begin right now. 

The instructions are clear, even if neither easy nor fast. Nothing the feminine does is quick—that’s the masculine value, and that’s been part of the problem for as long as any of us can remember. We became machines, and machines are deemed more valuable only if they are fast, efficient, and run without complaint. Returning to our human truths means turning our back on this urgent egoic insistence. We need to take a long breath, and then another, and then another. 

(As a side note, please let me assure readers of any gender that when I say masculine, I am pointing at all of us. Not only do we all have masculine and feminine qualities within, be they dormant or active, but we were also all born into and raised up by a masculine dominant culture. It has hurt all genders, even if in different ways. In fact, our next step will be to heal what Murdock calls the wounded masculine. My point is that I am no man-hater. In fact, I love the masculine aspects of myself and others, sometimes a little too much.)

To heal, we must understand the nature of this split, call it mother-daughter, mother-child, or earth-human. We must understand the extent to which we have created a separation between our brains and our bodies, our rational and our intuitive processes, our thinking and our feeling, our mechanistic functioning and our spiritual inner workings. When we allow these to come into balance, we create a new unified self from within. 

For now, though, we simply need to acknowledge how deeply we’ve split ourselves. 

We must realize that with these splits, we have become lonely for a more authentic connection to each other and the world. Ambition and the rewards offered by society have made us gamers and adrenaline junkies, and like all junkies, we have become single-minded in our pursuit of the next fix. Actually arriving at a finish line of success, then sitting down to celebrate with a beautiful meal among friends, has become strangely uncomfortable, even if this is exactly what we tell people we want. It’s easier to take a call or return a text than to sit still in the beautiful moment, taking it all in.  

The aspects of us that experience this discomfort will want to wiggle out of anything that brings up our inner powder keg of feelings—after all, we trained ourselves to shove our emotions away so as not to slow down or muddy our pursuit. They are not gone but sitting in wait. We fear they have gained velocity and power. We then justify ourselves, saying that what we passionately long for (if we can remember any deep passions at all) is too small, too dumb, too weak. Just as we joke we can sleep when we die and shove away anyone trying to bring a sensible balance to us. 

When split, we override our body, ignore our deeper needs, pillage the planet, and trade love for sex and relationships for status. 

Again, if someone points this out (it will surely be someone more comfortable in their feminine aspect), we make them wrong, often quickly and harshly. They, then, become in our estimation too small, too dumb, too weak. See how the world grows to be full of small, dumb, weak people? Should they go so far as to stand on the tabletop screaming, we will only further invalidate them as too angry, too dangerous, too something we are not even sure what. But what we really mean is too feminine. If they keep on screaming, we will shut down the connection entirely. We will label them depressed or crazy (or both) and walk away, even if we sleep next to them every night. 

While it may be true that men have been more apt to do this to women throughout the last few thousand years, at some point women took up the same stick and began to hit ourselves with it. We allow ourselves no time to incubate, no trust in what we feel, no self-validation that we are on the right path (and have been all along) whenever we stray from toeing the line. 

Enjoy life? Allow love? Empower the nurturer? Trust the self? Enable our natural generosity of spirit? Stand for our human needs? Only after I have proven myself worthy. After I have hit my competitive numbers, be they financial, carb counts or body weight. After I’m living the equality I say I am after, which is not the free equality of equal and different, but the bound equality of the masculine-same. It will all be after, after, after… As for the present moment? What’s that? I’ve heard of it, but if it is not going to serve me right now, I’ll save it for later. 

This is, of course, changing in both men and women. And at least for the K-curve fortunate, COVID-19 is helping.

Which is why things are decidedly murky right now, in business and at home. This healing reverses how things are and have been, and COVID has been an unknowing conspirator in that. We are not out in the world, hustling, we are inside the house, backyard or garden, being. We are cooking instead of ordering. I used to joke that I had a kitchen because it came with the house. Now I can make a lovely pan of oven-baked green beans and onions—and feel unduly proud of myself for it. 

We are playing cards with the family instead of going to the game. We are forced into this, but so long as our basic needs are being met (and to be clear, not everyone has this great luxury), we find we don’t actually mind our confinement as much as we thought. Yes, it is making us a bit stir crazy at times, especially for those who are alone or in a bad relationship. But we find a part of ourselves relieved to have the time and pacing conducive to looking at ourselves, our lives, our true values, our partners, our children, our parents. Instead of ordering 20 meals for the freezer, we shop at the farmer’s market, seek out food from the ground, prep it and cook it and eat it and remember the natural miracle that all this entails. We are nurtured in ways that many do not even recognize as feminine or healing. Knowingly or not, it does its magic. 

This healing is critical to the future, yet can only happen in the present.

So we play, we loaf, we cry at the burning world, we catch a spark of inspiration that has nothing to do with getting ahead (and if it does, we instinctively protect it from any masculine-leaning co-opting). We feel our feelings, spend time talking about them, make life revisions. We stop fighting our life, pushing our future, and start allowing time to go slow, and even stop for moments on the dime of that magical present we once heard about. 

We make love like we mean it—like love actually has something to do with it. We drink coffee not to stay awake but to feel the connection to the beans, the aroma, the earth. We watch babies breathe and wonder how flowers grow and stay out under the sky until the stars come out. We see colors and shapes, smell the rough wine and the dirty sweet potatoes, feel the slight breeze that happens upon our bare shoulders. We taste in depth and on multiple layers, no longer inhaling our food in time for the next thing or to stuff down our disappointment at how things are. We pick up clay for the potter’s wheel or our old guitar or a pen and real paper. 

Again, through all of this, we heal. We come closer to the earth that is our home. We remember ourselves as kids and pick up the dreams that we loved. We tap into our creativity to figure out how to make that real for ourselves when we venture back to the “real world.” We wallow in the unknowing. We are uncomfortable but also unwilling to interrupt whatever is happening within us because it is, well, kind of beautiful. 

We wake up one day and realize that life is, quite surprisingly, good. Even more surprising, this new brand of good registers within us as good enough. We have let the trusty plow horse in our psyche out to run the wide open fields. Even though we don’t know exactly how we’ll get by without the control we once insisted upon, we trust we’ll find a way. As the Josh Grobin song “Let Me Fall” states, “the one I will become will catch me.”

When this is complete, we know it because we feel it. 

When this happens, the urge toward the masculine expression returns, but in a new way. We are looking for a way to be what the Grail legends call a man with heart. We cannot go back to the office, or the rat race, or the meaningless work. We respect ourselves too much for that. But we’ll need to find a new way.

We tell the tumbling boy inside us it’s okay to feel and to play and to care and to build for the sake of making something. We take our talents, of which there are so many, and put them to good use, or rather, toward the use of good. 

We are now healing the wounded masculine, which has its own texture and pace. We see clearly how we had become cold, combative, and destructive, even with those we said we loved. We recognize the never-enough that ran unchecked through our veins and our lives, and we use our power—once squandered on the relentless pursuit—to reel it back in. We dominate only ourselves and our drive toward imbalance. We notice when we are again becoming unrelated to life, to the earth, and to those we care about and love. We turn our drive around to chase back to those very things. 

In the quest for the holy grail, the much-needed question Percival must ask is “What ails thee?” 

Until we ask that question, we can turn back to what we desire, but we can’t finally heal our inner masculine. When the question is at last asked, what we will find most often is a litany of regret. 

That our masculine did not succeed quite enough is only on the surface. Below that is all that we have ignored and taken advantage of. Our greed, our desecration, our arrogance, our denial of our humanity and that of others. We face our fears of aging, our infirmities and illnesses, our lack of friendship and connection. We go back even further and see our pain at our mad-men fathers, our abuse, our bewilderment, our agreeing to things we did not want to agree to. 

In doing so, we rise again, now unwilling to do this to others. Unable to play along with the games that hurt us and others, we come full circle. We unbind ourselves to find the boils pussing over. We lance those boils, filled with dark pain, and release the pit of our stomach, the very thing that has been trying to get our attention for so long.

We recognize our human limitations and gifts and deem them sufficient to the day. In doing so, we stop measuring and comparing and berating ourselves for not living up to some idealized masculine image and a success that, even if achieved, could never make us happy. We let our hair down, our guard down, and even dare to let our old selves down. It’s okay, a new self has arrived. 

And then we laugh. At it all. At the absurdity. At the crazy thing we call life. 

The heaviness lifts, our spirits inflate, our souls feel satisfied, and we recognise ourselves as whole. The wasteland becomes fresh and green. We put our feet in the grass and know life to be right here, right now. We have found our grail and it was within, just like the myths have always said. It is nothing like what we expected but everything we wanted. We make a toast to wholeness even if half (or more) of the crowd has no idea what we are talking about. 

Finally, we unite our inner king and inner queen. Now whole, or at least whole enough (remember the movie title As Good As It Gets?—it’s like that), we recreate the world. We make things that are good for us, good for others, and good for the planet. We convene differently. We stand up for the disenfranchised. We look at the burning fires and ask, where can I help? We reach back to those walking a step behind us and offer them a leg up. 

In unifying our opposites, as with any boy-meets-girl, with enough time the conception of something new is a pretty sure thing. Soon enough, that union creates a wholly new self and a new way forward. With all our masculine and feminine gifts intact, we trust we’ll know just what to do just when we need to do it. 

For those who lead…

If you are reading this far, it is likely you know something of what I write. Even if you are not at the inner union you desire, you can be assured you are on your way. As with all learning, it helps to help others who are a few steps behind. I love the saying that a master is five steps ahead with a lantern. To help, that’s all you need to be. Here are a few things we can consider in our leadership now: 

• Replace the language around work-life balance with that of the masculine-feminine balance. Language is one of the greatest building blocks of culture. Consider how this language can liberate not only the women and the feminine-leaning, but also the men and masculine-leaning.  
• Look for those who exhibit feminine leadership and those who are masculine, but with heart. Learn from them, share your respect for them, help them be accepted for the wholeness that rejects the machine, and give them a greater platform than they might have without you.
• Read up on, practice, and share the ways of servant leadership. It has inherent masculine-feminine qualities in its processes. 
• Celebrate those who are bucking the very system you wish you could. They may be under you in the hierarchy, but beyond you in wisdom. The more you celebrate them, the more the culture will listen to them. 
• Watch for the table-standing antics of the feminine among you before it is too late. They have something to say, and however angry or unruly, they are not crazy. They are simply trying to get your attention. 

I'm Robin Rice, a senior advisor in conscious leadership for individuals and organizations. I lead, mentor and teach at the intersection of work, personal relationships, and social impact. I invite you to connect with me here on LinkedIn or through my website at RobinRice.com.

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