Our world is desperately out of balance and in need of a new harmony of forces. One arena of such rebalancing is in relationships between women and men, and within each person between feminine and masculine qualities. Individually and collectively we are being presented with the challenge to embody our wholeness, to incarnate spirit in flesh. This requires reclaiming the feminine.

Masculine & Feminine Polarities

Life exists only in the play of opposites, expressed in the polarity of feminine and masculine. It is beyond the scope of this article to explore or develop all the polarities listed, (see chart) Yet it is useful to consider such pairings. And to be struck by the overwhelming Western preference for the masculine side of these polarities. We value climbing high and resist falling low; we acclaim the active and ignor the passive; we reward the fast and leave the slow behind; we worship the rational and denigrate the irrational; we seek independence and fear dependence; we yearn for heaven and destroy the earth; we are lost in the worldly and mock the spiritual.

Polarities are unities of opposites. To deny or denigrate one side is inevitably to distort the expression of both. They are an inherent part of life so they cannot be ultimately displaced, but their shadow sides will rule if they are not harmonized by their complements. For example, it is part of the deep split in the Western psyche to flee the body and live in the mind, in many ways alive only above the neck. But to devalue the body is at the same time to stimulate its shadow power that then ensnares one in addictions and cravings. Resisting and fearing the body leads both to feeling trapped in it and to overly indulging its cravings. Our cultural lack of appreciation for matter paradoxically reinforces gross materialism.

These destructive splits are instructive. Mind and body, spirit and matter - all the polarities - are integrally related. Health, balance and wholeness come only from the dynamic harmony of both. It is the embracing of the denigrated side of the polarity that will allow a new expression of both to emerge.

Valuing the Feminine

In her book Woman: Earth and Spirit. Helen Luke states, "In every creative act or transformation - intellectual, emotional or physical - the male and the female, the active and the passive, are of equal importance, and real liberation from the wight of the inferior status imposed on women lies not in the reiterated assertion that women must now strive to live like men, but in the affirmation, so difficult for us, of the equal value of the specifically feminine. Nothing demonstrates more clearly the real daitiage which has been done to us by the dominance of masculinity for so many centuries as the contempt for the feminine implicit in so much of the propaganda of the women's movement." For a growing number of women this recovering and honoring of the feminine is now a deepening process.

Perhaps it bears stating that masculine and feminine qualities exist in and need to be expressed by both women and men. And for each unique individual what the particular balance and expression is will vary. Yet the viewpoint that it is simply a matter of becoming free of the distinctions between the sexes in a move toward androgyny misses the mark. To quote Helen Luke again, "The biological difference between man and woman is never a 'nothing but'; it is a fundamental difference, and it does not stop with the body but implies an equally fundamental difference of psychic nature... A woman is born to be essentially and wholly a woman."

Our cultural denigration of the feminine is so deep that to be willing to begin to embody the feminine is to have to go against strong judgments and confront deep fears. My own journey reflects this. Seven years ago I first read Robert Johnson's little books He and She. I loved He. I identified with Parcifal and his heroic adventure of the search for the Grail. I admired the spirit of brave deeds and dauntless persistence in provingoneself by attaining the goal.

The margins of my book are still testimony to my reactions to She - scribbled phrases of "drop dead"; "let your mama do it"; and "screw you"! I could not accept or relate to Psyche's responses of helplessness, passively waiting, quietly sorting, crying and collapsing, depending on outside help. I was angry to have this identified as feminine. I feared the perceived weakness of the feminine, and wanted only to prove woman's equality with men. I still fear the vulnerability of the feminine, even as I also know its power and our crying need for its gentle yielding. I can appreciate Psyche's path of growth now because it has become my own. Life has conspired to teach me the virtue of qualities such as waiting, receiving, allowing, softening, and surrendering.

Marie Louise von Franz and others have written at length on this feminine motif of helpless waiting. In fairytales it is sometimes symbolized by having the hands (means of action) cut off and having to retire from the world, perhaps to the forest (symbolic of vegetative, natural growth), to await the solution. How we wail against such helplessness in our culture. We want to do something, make it happen, move things along - now, quickly. But this is not the way of the earth. In the face of death, pain, illness, loss, or separation, resist as we will, sometimes the only recourse is acceptance and patient being with, waiting for the solution or change to come, or not come.

In our frantic pace of life, always rushing to do and accomplish, we need the balance of quietly waiting and being with, trusting a natural timing. Our action in the world can be truly fruitful only if it comes out of the centeredness and connection to our inner source that this quiet space reveals. It is the feminine energy that tends to the hearth, the inner fire.

Becoming Virgin: Healing the Whore/Madonna Split

The feminine rules matter - the body and earth. It is associated with our instinctual base, bodily passions, and sexuality. It is also the vessel which receives the seed of spirit and nurtures it -thus the association with the spiritual as opposed to worldly. These paradoxical aspects of the feminine are not recognized and honored, nor is their relationship understood. In fact they are pitted against each other, leading to the whore/Madonna, good girl/bad girl split. Healing this destructive split is an integral part of our journey.

Certainly part of the failure of relationships today is the painful sexual dysfunction that exists. I recall a therapist saying that she listens to her women client's dreams of men as murderers and rapists and to her male client's dreams of women as witches and devouring mothers and she wonders how we can live on the same planet, let alone sleep in the same bedroom! Something is deeply amiss. We have so many hurtful penises and wounded wombs, and the inverse - rigid, frigid vaginas and limp, prematurely ejaculating penises.

Yet in this painful impasse lies an incredible opportunity, if we one by one take the responsibility for the healing journey to one's own depths. Astrologically the planet Pluto governs both transformation - the abduction to the underworld for death and rebirth - and sexuality and power and control issues. Perhaps all the breakdown of relationships and lack of true intimacy in relationships is forcing us to the depths to be reborn, to become virgin, in the ancient and original meaning of "one-in-herself', depending on no other for completion and yet capable of a total giving and receiving of herself, body and soul.

The process of becoming virgin requires reclaiming our bodies, our trust in instinctual passions, our ability to be in the body, to allow spontaneity and movement. It requires getting in touch with our fear of penetration and our deeper desire to be penetrated. As we get in touch with the fear, we can allow the wound from centuries of literal and symbolic rape to heal. We can begin to soften. We can begin to trust enough to surrender to penetration, physically and spiritually, thus healing the split between ourselves as sexual beings and spiritual vessels. Thus we become truly virgin, one-in-ourself, and from this deep trust in our own beingness able to receive life.

The healing of sexual dysfunction can not come from technique or trying or bravado. But perhaps it can come from differentiating the true feminine and masculine. Perhaps as we confront and heal women's fear of being penetrated and men's fear of being devoured a healthy repolarization can emerge: men connecting to their gentle masculine strength so that the feminine has a safe strength to surrender to; women connecting with our strong gentleness so that the masculine has a soft, open, yielding reception. Thus the two poles dance in one joyous surrendering to life -one receptively active, one actively receptive, responding to one another from a deep trust in one's own being, able to consummate the Divine Marriage.

MOVING TOWARD SPIRITUAL PARTNERSHIP

Perhaps at this point it is useful to clarify that to simply blame the masculine, or even patriarchy, does not delve deeply enough into the dynamics of the problems that beset us. Both matriarchy and patriarchy have destructive shadow sides. Both women and men have fallen prey to those shadows. Marion Woodman goes so far as to state, "The patriarchy that has become women's whipping post is based on an archetype of masculinity which is still in service to the Great Mother - sons who are not related in an individual way to themselves or to their feminine partners. ...the power-principled matriarchy ... produces an adolescent patriarchy."

It is beyond the scope of mis article to fully develop these insights, but such issues must be fully faced to do justice to the difficult circumstances both men and women find ourselves in. My belief is that our evolutionary development requires a moving beyond both matriarchy and patriarchy to the divine marriage and spiritual partnership between individuated women and men. Such devotion to the principle of relationship is the strength of the feminine. And to realize such conscious relationship between two separate individuals requires confronting the shadow of the feminine.

Distinquishing Eros and Co-Dependency

The feminine journey toward wholeness is through relationships. Psyche's entire ordeal is in response to her love for Eros. Persephone separates from her mother only by becoming Hade's bride. Feminine power is loving power, eros, devotion to relatedness. But the shadow side of this orientation to others is both needy, clinging dependency and the unrecognized power drive of the devouring mother. It is difficult to embody the truth of Eros rather than its cheap imitations. To be devoted to the feminine principle of relationship without coming from the needy, clinging dependency of the wounded child or slipping into the power drive to control and manipulate in defense and retaliation requires a deep process of growth indeed!

Any bookstore section on women now includes an assortment of books such as Co-Dependent No More. TheCinderella Complex and Women Who Love Too Much. These are important books which help to extricate all the knots and tangles we create in our inability to express true feminine relatedness before having become virgin. As Luke states, "No woman has found a true relationship with a man or the real meaning of motherhood until she has also to some degree found herself consciously as virgin - "one-in-herself." Only this prevents the potential despairing failure of the feminine, the unlived life of trying to live through and for others.

In the book Women Who Love Too Much the fairy tale "Beauty and the Beast" is discussed as an example of how the essentially spiritual truth about the feminine power of eros is distorted by our fears and unconscious drive for power into something that reinforces the cultural bias. Thus the story seems to support the lie that if a woman loves a man enough she can change him into a Prince who will make her happy ever after...This is the co-dependent trap, the shadow of the feminine posing as love.

As author Robin Norwood writes, "Women who love too much make these choices out of driving need to control those closest to them. That need to control others originates in a childhood during which many overwhelming emotions are frequently experienced: fear, anger, unbearable tension, guilt, shame, pity for others and for self. A child growing up in such an environment would be wracked by these emotions to the point of being unable to function unless she developed ways to protect herself. Always, her tools for self-protection include a powerful defense mechanism, denial, and an equally powerful subconscious motivation, control."

The true meaning of the "Beauty and the Beast" is acceptance. Acceptance is the antithesis of denial and control. It is the ability to see the present reality (no denial) and allow it to be without trying to change it (surrendering control.) Only a virgin, one not looking to a man or relationship to complete her, is able to accept the beast (symbolic of our own shadow side as well as outer relationships). This loving acceptance, not loving in order to change, is what allows the transformation. Nothing can change until we accept what is. This unconditional, loving acceptance is the gift of the Divine Mother. It is a gift we desparately need to receive.

Following.Our Hearts

There is no going back. The old, rigidly defined sexual roles have failed. We are in the midst of a great rebalancing. WTiat the outcome will be is unclear. We have no real choice but to persist in the process. We need the feminine qualities of slow, patient tending to the inner growth, the gestation that occurs in the dark and silence, perhaps unnoticed, with its own natural timing. We need to be with ourselves with deep acceptance, listening to our bodies and souls as never before. We need to ponder the unity of spirit and matter and become the virgin who can give birth to the Divine through the embrace of our bodiliness and our surrender to the penetration of spirit.

To bring these beautiful images down to every day realities, it seems we must choose to take the time, create the space, to be with ourselves. To allow healing by embracing and accepting our woundedness. To be patient with ourselves and others. To be gentle. To be less frantic. To center. To clear the mind and feel with the body. To open the heart. To soften the belly. To return again and again to being with our experience moment by moment. To trust ourselves and follow our hearts. This is the way of the feminine.