As a young girl I was very bright. School subjects came easy to me. I excelled on standardized tests receiving straight A’s through every quarter of elementary school. Upon graduating from the 6th grade I received a medal for academic excellence. Why do I tell you this? Bear with me a moment.
I entered middle school at 12 years old. Everything changed. I remember deliberately marking test questions with the wrong answers. I did not want to be seen as smart. Coming of age in the ’70′s I somehow had an understanding that a boy would not want a girl who was smarter than he was. So I began dimming my light. Because getting a boy to like me began to rule my world.
Not only did I learn to dim my light, I also learned that my value was to be found in doing not feeling. In fact my feelings were often dismissed, denied, punished and ignored. This is how I came to hold the masculine and feminine within me, the force of the masculine held dominion over the feeling of my feminine. Feelings were something to be controlled since I came to identify them as the messy, ugly, weak and shameful parts of who I was.
This pattern continued into all my intimate relationships with men. I dimmed my own light, diminished my own power and dismissed my own needs in order to receive the love I so desperately longed for from a man. I know I could look to the relationship with my own father in all of this but I don’t see this as being solely related to my upbringing or childhood wounds. It reflects a larger paradigm of a relationship to the feminine, a relationship to power and the imbalance between these two forces that struggle not only in my heart but in the world around me.
Within my mesa (a shamanic medicine bundle) sit Pachamama and Pachapapa, two amulets representing the power of the Sacred Masculine and Feminine. If we strip the essence of these sacred aspects of who we are to their core, the masculine is our doingness, the feminine our beingness. Pachapapa has gone missing, along with most men from my life right now, yet in this falling away of the masculine in the world around me I am engulfed in an uprising of women, held and supported in ways as never before. As my relationships to men and women shapeshift around me, so too is the world within me transforming.
The action of our masculine essence is necessary, but when the mascculine takes action without regard for what the feminine may be feeling, sensing or needing, action becomes an empty clamoring of a distorted sense of power. As this pattern of operating continues, the disparity between action and feeling grows wider. Our energy is diverted to maintain the demands of a dominating masculine infrastructure suppressing the voice of a crippled feminine. Under extreme conditions, any sense of what the feminine may want, feel or need is so deeply buried, the cry has gone silent. Although the feminine may have been buried, she is far from dead. For the power of the feminine is in her endurance. Her time has come. And she is rising.
Gryphon Tarot
To bring peace to any relationship a dialogue is needed, for it is not dominion over the masculine that the feminine seeks. To create an internal harmony of our sacred duality, interdependence is needed. Our actions need to be informed by the feeling sense and intuitive power of the Divine Feminine. In order to bring balance back to our Earth, balance to our environment, we must bring balance back to the Sacred feminine within. How do we hold our own feelings in value? How deeply do we trust our intuition, the power of our felt sense of knowing? When the fundamental trust of our feminine is restored, we can allow our actions to be informed from our felt sense of rightness, or what shamans call ayni.
There are no easy answers or quick solutions to bring harmony to our world as old infrastructures of power quake in the rising reverence to the care and plight of our Earth Mother but in the words of Ghandi…We must be the change we want to see in the world.
AHO my friends! AHO!
Karen Chrappa
Author of A Structure for Spirit
www.karenchrappa.com
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