FIRST, A DEFINITION
I’m going to tell you a story about patriarchy and the goddess—a story I’ve been living in my work as a therapist, meditation teacher, and creative for over 25 years. First however, lest I lose you at the top, let me tell you what I mean by “patriarchy.”
When I use this term, I am in no way man-bashing. I’m talking about a socio-cultural paradigm that while associated with men has nothing to do with gender.
Patriarchy is a system that ranks mind over body, thinking over feeling, doing over being, and action over stillness, conditioning us to believe that qualities we associate with the masculine are more valuable than qualities we associate with the feminine. This conditioning has been programmed into all of us for centuries. None of this is anyone’s fault. It’s just the way it’s been. All of us however are stuck with the consequences and that is what this story is about.
Patriarchy’s skewed ranking system tricks us into splitting off from our essential wholeness, causing serious damage to the ways we know and understand ourselves. A healthy system needs integration of all parts. What patriarchy offers is dissociation and fragmentation.
The masculine is our doing function. It’s the action engine that gets us out of bed in the morning and moves us through the day. The masculine is the structure of our minds, the container of everything we are. All thought and action happens through the masculine. A healthy masculine is an essential part of each and every one of us.
Problems develop however when our masculine doing function gets lost inside its own head, separating or dissociating from the anchoring wisdom of its other half, the feminine. This severing creates the pathology we know as patriarchy.
LIVING VITAL, HEALTHY, LOVING, WISE, AND FABULOUS
The problem is not the masculine. The problem has never been the masculine. The problem is the patriarchal conditioning that’s been programmed into us from time immemorial. A conditioning that cripples the true masculine, turning it into the aberration we see, for example, in far too many people with far too much power.
Unravelling this conditioning from the inside out, liberating the true masculine from the prison of patriarchy is what much of my work is about. Because, bottom line, we all have a masculine and feminine. We’re all made of both. This is, after all, a yin/yang world. And what I have come to understand over all my years of wrestling with this puzzle is that acknowledgement and integration of both parts is the magic that enables us to live vital, healthy, loving, wise, and fabulous.
Enter the goddess…
I discovered the goddess in the heady days of Second Wave Feminism. For a young woman coming of age as the eons-long narrative of male supremacy was being challenged, discovering a Great Mother right up there with God the Father was intoxicatingly empowering.
In those early days of “let’s bring down the patriarchy,” I saw the goddess as something that was only for women. I later came to realize I had this all wrong: that the goddess belongs to everyone. And that patriarchy’s compulsive drive to split us off from this essential aspect of our humanity had serious consequences for us as individuals and for planet earth.
I was still thinking globally however, seeing patriarchy as something outside of us. The final piece of my understanding came much later, when I realized that patriarchy plants itself within the structures of our consciousness. And that this internalized patriarchy—what I came to call the “inner patriarch”—is a dangerous and insidious presence, a distortion of mind inside each and every one of us.
Most of us experience the inner patriarch as an inner voice that tells us there is something wrong with us. That we need to do more, be more, own more, achieve more. It’s the king of scarcity agendas that keep us striving after that elusive something—wealth, power, celebrity, prestige, authority, attention, control—earnestly believing that if we just achieve that something, we will be happy.
This is the great lie of patriarchy.
Because no matter how many something’s we achieve, the yearning, the compulsion, the sense of “not enough” and “pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” is always there. So we keep striving, exhausting ourselves in the process, often creating huge messes that take years to clean up, never realizing that the happiness we seek is deep inside us, sitting in the outstretched arms of, you guessed it, the goddess.
If patriarchy is the disease, the goddess is the remedy.
Here’s another definition. The goddess is not a woman although the goddess is of the feminine. The goddess is an energy field, an essential stream of human consciousness, the matrix that connects us all. The goddess is the essential power of our human being-ness and here’s the gift: the goddess frees the true masculine from the suffocating control of the inner patriarch.
THE MOST MASCULINE MAN IS INTEGRATED WITH THE GODDESS
I will go so far as to say that the most masculine man is deeply and profoundly integrated with the goddess, his inner feminine. In fact, integration may be the keyword for our time.
Healthy integration of body and mind. Healthy integration of being and doing. Healthy integration of feminine and masculine.
This is not about men becoming soft or passive. Far from it. This is about men becoming whole. This is about accessing the full spectrum of human power. This is about the masculine doing function rooting itself in the feminine ground.
When we work to dismantle our patriarchal programming we don’t lose our masculine edge. We gain access to a wise, compassionate strength that is far more powerful than the brittle, defended posture that patriarchy demands.
From my perspective, this is the work of the twenty-first century. Not to topple the masculine, but to integrate it with its essential ground, the feminine. Not to silence men, but to help everyone, regardless of gender, reclaim the wholeness patriarchy has stolen.
In this moment, the bravest thing a man—and let’s face it, all of us—can do is to embrace the goddess. To marry action with wisdom, ground doing in being, let the heart inform the head.
This is what I call the goddess remedy. And this is how we grow real power. This is how we come to know ourselves. This is how we feel 100% comfortable in our own skin. This is how we live and love, fearlessly and faultlessly, embracing whatever is arising and standing firm in the ground of who and what we truly are. And this is how, if we are so inclined, work to redeem and reenchant the world.
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This post is republished on medium.com.
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Photo credit: iStock
