Developing a consciousness based on the feminine is not about balance. It is about chosing life over death
The feminine has become a much-talked-about subject. Concepts and ideas, such as ‘the empowering of the feminine’ or ‘the feminine needs to come to the fore’ are thrown into conversations and feminine leadership, feminine ways of working, feminine structures, values and attitudes are topics discussed from the alternative scenes to the boardrooms.
The rise of the feminine seems well under way. It will be a long and exciting journey - not without obstacles, not without resistance from those who would like to turn the clock back, not without certain scenes trying to make it 'fluffy and nice', and certainly not without the interference of market forces, trying to press this diverse movement into formats that ensure its adaptation to the existing structures and thinking.
Nevertheless, as the current global crisis is rooted in humanity’s loss of ‘heart, soul and connection to the wider field’ - all domains of the feminine - which have been replaced by a materialistic view of the world, by lateral thinking, greed and self-centredness, the journey of the feminine will continue. The more we wake up and accept that this loss has brought with it immense destruction in place of the nurturing qualities all of life so urgently needs, the more we will be forced to explore the feminine and work towards its emergence on every level of our existence.
The feminine debate ties in with the consciousness debate and the exploration of the ‘mind and matter interaction’. This is because, in the final analysis, it is a matter of ‘how we think about the world, our planet and human evolution within it’ that shapes the direction we will take as a species. This thinking about the world is changing and, with our growing understanding of the interconnectedness of all of life (on an underlying level), we increasingly realize that our one-sided materialistic and patriarchal ways cannot be sustained.
The Essence of the Feminine
When we try to define ‘the feminine’, we enter hazy waters. It has, after all, been hiding behind the veil, trying to escape the belittling, denying, devaluing and abusive treatment it has suffered through millennia of patriarchal thinking, structures and values. Importantly, it cannot be explored easily when we are stuck in a mind-set that restricts us to the rational and material. Nevertheless, feminine attributes and principles, such as love, nurturing, caring, connectedness, gestating, intuition, natural wildness, embodiment and more are not only named now, but longed for. Whilst this process is ongoing, I feel that it is necessary to begin by distilling the essence of the feminine: the life creating, life gestating and life sustaining force. This aspect lies at the heart of the matter and it needs to break through the hazy veil and come to the fore, needs to penetrate all our thoughts, ideas, values and morals and guide our actions. Without it we cannot love, nurture, care and connect. Without it we cannot achieve a shift in paradigm.
What does this mean? Well, not long ago I went to a talk by an indigenous female teacher, who addressed this subject quite forcefully with focus on our current economic systems, defining them as being rooted in ‘death’ instead of ‘life’. After thinking about this for a while, I couldn’t help but agree with her wholeheartedly. In contrast to all other life forms, which have ‘thriving’ at their core, our world-wide accepted system of production and consumption, is, at its very core, based on 'destruction of life' rather than on 'sustaining of life'. Global capitalism and global consumerism only thrive if we innovate, produce and sell faster and more. To keep up this level of production, we have to plunder our earth for resources, wrecking it in the process, produce and slaughter disturbing numbers of animals, throw away perfectly good products, consume increasingly unnecessary goods, conquer and destroy countries and kill people so that we can seize new markets, produce more weapons and rebuild what we have destroyed.