"Where are your western women?"

The process of birth is a shattering experience. For the mother and the baby and the father if he witnesses it. But it is also?a catalyst?such as many other shattering experiences. Something new is trying to be born, to be created. There is?a need to expand, to go back to our wholeness, made of masculine and feminine energies. The same wholeness and energies needed for the spiritual creational act as well as the Big Bang. A wholeness vital for both our well-being and the well-being of our planet.

The outer focus, predominant in our modern society, is a masculine approach. An approach that we have grown more focused on, in the last 100 years, at the expense of our inner world, our feminine side. As a result, we see in the world, an imbalance of masculine and feminine.

The masculine, the light, the sun, tends towards structure, law, rules, and static. The feminine is more fluid, dynamic, and chaotic. It represents the darkness of the womb, the moon, the reflected light.

There is a clear effort to restore balance but it often seems that this effort has become corrupted by confusion of what really is masculine and what is feminine.

Author and environmentalist?John Perkins writes about the Shuar, an indigenous ethnic group of the Amazon. He describes their gender differences and how they segment their society along gender lines. The men hunt, fish, and cut down trees to build huts and canoes and the women take care of the children, and gather wild edibles. Both men and women are represented on the tribal council and there is no battle of the sexes going on. Men and women understood themselves in a larger context going through a lot of qualitative aspects of being a man and a woman. They play to each other strength rather than their weaknesses.

But?there is one job that only women can do and the survival of the tribe depend upon the woman for doing this one job.?The Shuar tribe understands that the masculine nature tends towards being goal-oriented, directed, aggressive, competitive, pedal to the medal and that woman’s nature is much more intuitive, community-oriented, grounded in relationships. Whether is the needs of the tribe or the needs of their relationship with the earth. So the?men absolutely depended upon the women to tell them when to stop.?The men will fish until there are no more fishes. They will hunt until there are no animals. The women tell them when to stop and they listen.

The shaman in the tribe asked Perkins “Why aren’t your western women telling you to stop? You are taking the world over a cliff, depleting resources. Why? Where are your women?”

We have been busy making a living, being just as aggressive as man, having no clue where the stop button is, probably more than any man. Because we have more to prove because we often feel that we have to fight for our place in the world, to get credibility and validity.

To reconnect with our wisdom we need to pause and look inside.?To see the outer shift we need to move inward. We need to heal the imbalances within and restore a state of wholeness.

It is possibly not about equality. Masculine and feminine are different and we need to respect those differences. We are meant to be different not the same. But that doesn’t mean that we are not equally valuable and important. We need to move towards embracing differences and equally valuing both masculine and feminine qualities. And that is going to start by valuing the feminine within ourselves, within all of us both women and men.

The value of the feminine is the beauty of what is inside of us. It is innate. It doesn’t require demonstration or achievement in order to be deemed worthy. It is already worthy. It is what gives us the power to birth things into the world.

We need to bring masculine and feminine energies within ourselves to balance.

Trying to be in the masculine energy all the time is depleting and makes us sick. We can clearly see an imbalance in the world around us and that is a reflection of what is happening within us.

The useful and the beautiful are equally essential. If we think only in terms of what is useful and what is not, we have to get rid of all the flowers and grow only vegetables.

The feminine needs to shift and women in particular can lead the way. How?

Practices such as yoga, meditation, breathwork, and reiki, are my?tools to shift me out of doing and relax into being. When I give myself permission to simply be:

• I am reminded that it is ok to let things unfold, instead of always trying to direct and control them.
• I am able to listen to my inner intuition beneath the chatter of the mind.
• I can deeply connect with my body and its signals.
• I nurture the feminine energy within me, its creativity, beauty, joy, passion, and power.

In the last few years, I have also been focused on exploring how to infuse the energy of being into the doing. Instead of taking time outs during the day to be and then falling back into the productivity grind, I am trying to unlearn concepts and ways of acting so ingrained in my system. I am learning to be more intentional about how I work, to be able to run a soul-centered business.

It is a continuous and fluid process. Listen to your intuition, constant trial and error, and have fun along the way!