For most of my life, I have been more reliant on the masculine than feminine qualities and characteristics. I’d tell myself that I need to be strong, composed and reliable. I’d favour rationality over intuition when taking decisions. I’d hide my emotions and vulnerability. And I’d like to have a plan, be in charge and feel on top of things.
We associate these characteristics with strength, but they often arise from fear. I adopted them as a child to protect myself from the hurt I was experiencing. I was often criticised, and often unjustly in my then childish and now grown-up estimation, and for some reason I didn’t want to show my parents how much they were hurting me. I’d sit stoically through dinner, when the wrongness of rather innocuous behaviours such as speaking to my friend on the phone, or playing with my neighbours, was unpicked and underlined by my father—and then I’d go sit on the stairs leading to the attic and cry.
Regardless of gender or sexuality, we all have masculine and feminine energy within us. It’s the universal duality of the yin and yang. There’s the dominant and controlling mind and the feeling and trusting heart. The rational and the intuitive. The fighter and the nurturer. The doer and the feeler.
In the traditional sense, we associate the masculine with the leader and the feminine with the follower—but they both lead, they just do it in different ways. And in fact, in some ways the feminine has the lead on the lead, as it connects us to the universal consciousness, to the beautiful organism that the universe is, whose complexity and intelligence lies far beyond what I believe our masculine singular minds could possibly conceive of.
We are at our most creative and powerful expression when we are aligned with both energies and when both our internal feminine and our internal masculine are healthy versions of themselves. A healthy masculine, for me, is one that holds and supports rather than pushes and forces. A healthy feminine is one that listens, rather than speaks; one that feels deeply and can make space for the deep messy feelings.
In the essence of who we are, we are naturally more closely aligned with one or the other. My natural disposition is more toward the masculine. I found safety and stability in it not only as a child, but also throughout most of my life, and I have been relying and developing that energy much more than the feminine. In fact, for most of my life, I’ve considered the qualities and characteristics of the feminine in me to be a liability. Vulnerability, expressiveness, going with the flow felt threatening and held the potential for suffering. I also used to think that people expected me to be strong and reliable—which were my own expectations of myself that I masqueraded as external pressure.
There’s a lot of power in tapping into our feminine as we do when we’re in a state of flow, when the lines between who we are and what we’re doing blur, the separation between thoughts, words and us disappears, and we are as much what we’re saying as what we’re saying is who we are. Normally, it’s our masculine mind that disrupts this process—clawing for control. It charges in and takes over in order to ensure safety. Aligning with our feminine energy and trusting it to guide us, in the face of all the fearful protests of our internal controlling self, is an act of profound strength and courage, and it often creates a deep sense of safety that can only be found in the absence of the search for safety.