Ep.57/ The Divine Feminine Is Not Just For Girls
The Divine Feminine connects us with important resources for fulfillment, growth and healing that are often under valued by our culture. We all have masculine and feminine principles within us that work together to create a healthy, balanced person. Frequently we over value the masculine currents of intellect, power and material prosperity at the expense of the feminine currents of creativity, connection and emotional maturity.
The Sacred Feminine is easily accessible through the many Goddesses and aspects of divinity in female form throughout the world's great religions. Join us for an overview of the many faces of the Divine Feminine and discover what She has to offer you in your life.
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Developing a strong, healthy feminine is not just for girls. The mature well developed feminine aspects are important for creativity, fulfillment and for me, working with the divine feminine has established a ground of emotional and spiritual stability and security that was desperately missing in my life.
So, what is the divine or sacred feminine? Rather than being the opposite of masculine, feminine is actually the compliment to masculine. Masculine and feminine together form a creative whole and masculine and feminine in the way that I am talking about it are more archetypes. Their ideas, ways of being, currents of resonance or energy, or action in the world rather than what kind of genitals or gender orientation that you have.
And one of the problems with scientific rationalism and the whole Western intellectual very masculine approach to stuff is that we tend to compartmentalize things so that we can understand them. Super helpful to break things into their parts to be able to have more understanding of how they function but it is very easy to forget that the parts actually cannot exist on their own. That the masculine and feminine principles are inseparable and dividing them up can actually create pathology and difficulties.
The easiest way to understand masculine and feminine within us is that in a general way, our masculine is our intellectual rational self and our feminine is our felt experience.
The masculine principle helps us take action in the world and the feminine principle motivates us to do that and also gives us our felt experience of it.
The masculine is our breathing out and the feminine is our breathing in.
And in the western world were often highly developed intellectually and rationally, our idea of success and development is about money and property, prestige, and power or the P words. But the feminine principle is actually how we feel about those things. Our connectedness, our relationality.
I like to say the masculine builds the house and the feminine makes it into a home, fills it with love, community, joy, creativity, and beauty.
When we have an underdeveloped feminine, we may have a lot of external success, but internally we feel empty. So, when we think about things operating as a system, we might understand our brain in our neurological system as being separate from our heart, lungs, and digestive systems but in practical application, they have to all exist together or you are dead.
And so why talk about the divine Feminine? For me, Spirituality, and spiritual practice, opening to the transpersonal metaphysical Realms provides direct access to Information and wisdom and experience that may not even be accessible in other ways.
So, my own experience with the masculine and feminine principles is that I grew up with a very sick and weakly fairly manipulative mother. She is dead now, so I can say all that. And I had no role models that were of interest to me of healthy, mature, feminine empowerment. And so, I did where a lot of females do, and I basically tried to act like a guy with a vagina and like a lot of us in the Western world, I thought femininity meant pink bows and frilly skirts playing with dolls. Being weak and disempowered and disrespected, subservient. I did not want anything to do with any of that.
I thought strength meant toughness, independence, not needing anyone and a lot of the things I rejected at that earlier stage of my life like vulnerability, interdependence, unconditional love, and flexibility, I rejected most of that. I have always been interested in power and strength. And so, I developed my being an emotional stoic, and really what I was doing was shutting down a whole part of my own development as a person. And actually, depriving myself of the deeper felt experience of being a human, of connection, of resilience and character building, and this caused me a lot of suffering and I had to take a lot of drugs and drink a lot of booze to medicate that suffering. And I was very lucky to crash and burn pretty early in my life. And I had to face this kind of masculine compartmentalization that I had in my own internalized misogyny. He traded rejection of women. I was super promiscuous early in my life and I thought my acting out sexually was some expression of my femininity and it was some very superficial attempt to connection and pleasure but I kind of crashed and burned with fucking people I did not know very well either. And I was left with my own underdeveloped emotional and spiritual self. I worked in the trades I could drink with the guys, but I could not maintain a healthy relationship with other people or with myself. Had a lot of self-hatred and I got introduced to prayer and meditation as a way to open to resources for wisdom and strength and guidance beyond my own small self-resources. Which were pretty limited. I needed help.
I began my spiritual quest and very early on that path, I connected with my very first experience of the divine feminine through nature, through the wind and through the earth. And I remember feeling particularly depressed and I had this kind of spontaneous, deeply emotional experience of being held by a great mother, I called her Earth mother, and she was a great fat, huge breasted, Ebony skinned Ancient wise woman, very unlike my frail and frightened real-life mother. I felt kind of surrounded by these huge arms and held against these enormous breasts in an embrace of unconditional love, compassion, and acceptance. This was a strength I knew nothing about. And the vulnerability I felt in its presence was not scary. It was an enormous relief. It felt honest and grounded and trustworthy, and I became intrigued with what I have come to call the Great Mother, also known as the Divine Feminine. And because as humans we are an indivisible system of the rational and the non-rational, the intellectual and the intuitive, the physical and the spiritual, I have found that gathering intellectual knowledge about spiritual principles that then you can practice in felt experience creates transformation and positive change.
Ep.57/
The Divine Feminine Is Not Just For Girls
Now the divine feminine is fairly absent in most western spiritual and religious traditions. In the Old Testament we have Eve who gets blamed for all kinds of things. The origin of Western misogyny in Genesis in the Bible. Eve eating the Apple. We have Sarah and Hagar, who are the two mothers of the Children of Abraham. Sarah was Abraham's wife. They could not get pregnant, she said will want it. You impregnate my servant girl Hagar and then she got jealous when that happened, when Hagar got pregnant and they sent Hagar out into the desert to become the mother of Islam. Hagar’s son Ishmael is thought to be an ancestor of Mohammed, the founder of Islam. Sarah ultimately did get pregnant with Isaac, and then Abraham was told to kill Isaac, which he did not end up doing. But you do not actually want to be a child of Abraham because you either get sent out into the desert or he tries to kill you. I do not know. Very interesting and profound teachings around Abraham from the mythological standpoint, but Child Protective Services might have a field day with him today.
I have a Jewish client, Nonpracticing Jew who recently connected with Sarah as this incredibly wise and protective force that she is learning to work with as she accesses her own authentic power in the world. Anyway, the New Testament we have the Marys, Mary Magdalene and the Virgin Mary. I did a podcast recently that Mary is not a Virgin if you want to hear my take on that.
And so, in general the two New Testament women that we have are seen as a Madonna and a whore. And I think Jesus and Mary Magdalene are actually a very healthy tandem of that masculine-feminine compliment. I have many clients who work with the tandem of Jesus and Mary, and I myself have worked with the archetype of the Christian Mary many times in my life. She is, in fact one of the few places that the divine feminine is actually shown in form in the Western world, in statues and artwork. She is a portal. The Jesuits actually consider Mary Magdalene, one of Jesus's apostles, but in traditional Christianity she is not.
In Buddhism we have Tara and Tara comes primarily from Tibetan Buddhism and she is quite powerfully the goddess of compassion. Tara comes in lots of different colors, each of them having a different manifestation or face of the divine feminine. There is green Tara, White Tara, blue Tara.
And there is the Chinese Bodhisattva Guan Yin, which can also be seen as an androgynous god or goddess of compassion.
Now, experientially, I find the sacred feminine most easily accessible through nature. Certainly, we find the goddess readily accessible in Paganism and Wicca, which I am not going to go into right now, but from an intellectual and rational standpoint, the most highly developed system of the mature divine feminine is in Hinduism.
And although technically Hinduism is a polytheistic religion with many gods and goddesses, if you look deeply at it, the essence of all of the gods and goddesses emanate from Brahman. The One, the life force behind all creation, which to me would be very similar to the Christian and Jewish God. And in Hindu cosmology, Brahman or The One, wanted to have an experience of itself as it got bored hanging out in universal creation with nothing to do. And it split itself into two, so that it could have an experience of itself. Shiva and Shakti, the masculine and feminine principles that are indivisible from each other, inseparable. That Shiva is the essence of being and Shakti as the energy which gives it life. Shiva is the masculine. Shakti is the feminine. And there is this really amazing artwork. It is usually as a sculpture. I saw one in the Boston Museum of Art once. They are complicated and beautiful and not very common.
Yab-Yum is Shanti and Shakti connected in sexual union. She is sitting on his lap and his erect phallus is inside of her. They are actually separable in a really well constructed one and their divine union, their ecstatic dance, their desire for each other is the essence of all creation. It is the primordial Union of Wisdom and compassion in Inter penetration. The masculine represents skillful means, and the female represents insight in life energy. And when we have healthy masculine, and feminine within us, when we are able to put out in the world and receive, not only do we have internal balance and fulfillment, we can experience that joyful creative flow moving in and out of us. And this is the kind of empowerment I am talking about.
And from my perspective, each of the many goddesses in Hindu tradition represents a different face of the divine.
Because we are actually little pieces of divinity, we are all little aspects of cosmic cosmology expressing ourselves in our own little unique configuration of quirky, broken and brilliance in the world.
We have access to that larger field of knowing and being and that is for me the practical application of spiritual practice.
And so, I can look at my own deficits, places I need to grow, strengths and qualities I'd like to acquire and develop, and by connecting with specific Deities or forms that have those skill sets, I can practice them with in my own life, have access to that power and energy. And today I understand the empowered feminine as a source of wisdom and resilience, fearlessness, and compassion that's absolutely imperative to my healthy functioning in the world.
There's a fabulous book on the Hindu gods and goddesses called Awakening Shakti by a modern teacher, Sally Kempton. The transformative power of the goddesses of yoga. So, in the Awakening Shakti book, Sally Kempton introduced me to Lakshmi, the goddess of prosperity and beauty. Saraswati, the goddess of clarity, communication, and intuition. Parvati, The Good Wife, awakening creativity and the capacity to love and my personal favorite, Kali the bringer of strength, Fierce love, and untamed freedom.
Kali is an aspect of what's often called the Dark feminine and she is the creator, the sustainer, but she's also the destroyer. She reminds us that all form is impermanent and she's a fierce and wild looking being. She's naked, which I really like. I like being naked. And she carries a knife of wisdom which destroys illusion, scissors which cut through attachment. She carries a severed head representing the release of the Rational Mind and Ego, and she carries a Lotus of fulfillment. She's often wearing a skirt made out of severed arms at her waist, representing action without attachment to outcome. A state of true freedom and power. She's often dancing on a couple engaged in sex. The cosmic couple whose desire brings all creation into being.
I was in an ashram once and we were doing chanting and they asked if anybody had any requests and I said can we chant Kali and she said Oh no we don't chant Kali in here. And I said, why not? And she said, oh, it's too unpredictable. And I love unpredictable. So, I'm all in for Kali.
And being introduced to this deeply empowered, constructive destructive life force that's rooted in compassion and selflessness, has opened a whole new paradigm of the divine feminine and how feminine attributes can be practical, grounded and mature within all of us men and women.
I did a weeklong shamanic retreat on the Big Island of Hawaii, and we worked a lot with Pele, the volcano goddess. Not unlike Kali, a force of profound creativity and destruction, Pele is the creator of the Hawaiian Islands, and her eruptions constantly remind people that there are forces at work here way beyond our control. And I like that because we can trust those forces and they are way more powerful than anything humanity can dream up no matter what we think.
So, the divine feminine is available to us, within us and in our larger consciousness system, and there are many who believe that the imbalances in our world of patriarchy, of consumerism, of war, points to the imbalance of masculine and feminine.
According to Hindu cosmology, we're now living in the age of Kali and the Kali energy is what moves through us in times of tremendous change when we face the essential impermanence of life and learn to let go. That this energy is what's moving through our world today as we face the consequences of suppressing the sacred feminine. And the divine feminine calls us to let our old selves and our old habit patterns die, and that when we let the old ways of being fall away, we find ourselves and the world transformed, and we can fulfill our true potential.
And I'm going to end with my favorite Kali prayer:
