Embracing the Feminine: A Leadership Necessity
Jewel on the Women and Power brochure cover 2006
Some years ago, I participated in Women and Power for the 21st Century, a one-week intensive at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Fifty women from around the globe attended to explore becoming more effective leaders to advance in positions of influence. What an incredible week of absorbing and reflecting on the collective energy, experiences, and power of these dynamic, openhearted women. The flow of information was ceaseless, the connections forged authentic, and the exchange of perspectives abundant. Every year thereafter, for the next five years I attended the reunions, met the women from that year’s class, and reveled in newfound knowledge and relationships.
Women are critical to the great forces of change; the repatterning of human nature; the regenesis of human society; the breakdown in the membrane between cultures and peoples, the breakthrough of the depths, both psychological and spiritual.
— Jean Houston
A Reunion of Energies
In The Passion of the Western Mind, author Richard Tarnas maintains that the most obvious generalization about the history of the Western mind is that it has been “an overwhelmingly masculine phenomenon.” In every aspect of Western thought and language, and in central scientific, religious, and philosophical perspectives, he intones masculinity as pervasive and fundamental. Tarnas says that this has served to evolve the autonomous human will and intellect, the independent ego, the self-determining human being. However, to do this, the feminine was repressed.
The crisis of modern man is an essentially masculine crisis, and I believe that its resolution is already now occurring in the tremendous emergence of the feminine in our culture.
—Richard Tarnas
Tarnas details the myriad ways that this emergence has taken shape—the rise of feminism; the increasing awareness of the ecological; burgeoning gender-sensitive perspectives; the accelerating collapse of long-standing political and ideological barriers separating the world’s peoples—these and more, he says, are indicative of the birth of a new reality. A new form of human existence is emerging, a “great archetypal marriage,” of which both masculine and feminine are affirmed and transcended.
Anything that requires us to “do” something, to take any sort of action, needs masculine energy. Feminine energy is one of “being”—a receptive, heart-centered mode that integrates core values like connection, collaboration, intuition, and empathy. Feminine energy allows us to be a vessel of receptivity, striving for qualitative rather than quantitative growth.
Transformation: An Intersection of Feminine & Masculine
Systems are failing—collapsing and disintegrating as they no longer serve our highest values and best visions. In this liminal space, this breakdown challenges us to dig deep and unearth a community of being. Our current evolutionary unfolding urgently needs a profound in-folding. This calls for a radical shift in consciousness.
As leadership adapts to meet the needs of our time, we must integrate the masculine and feminine energies within us. This integration will require humility and courage to enfold the feminine qualities often repressed or dismissed, as they are central to the work of transformation and rebirth.
Understanding the wisdom and transformative power of the feminine (in both men and women) is essential for us to move, individually and collectively, to a deeper awareness of our own inner nature. In my opinion, masculine and feminine energies are expressed to the degree in which a person chooses to focus their attention on issues of “I” or “We”— caring for one-self while nurturing those around us.
This is where the real act of heroism is going to be. A threshold must now be crossed, a threshold demanding an act of unflinching self-discernment. And this is the great challenge of our time, the evolutionary imperative for the masculine to see through and overcome its hubris and one-sideness, to own its unconscious shadow, to choose to enter into a fundamentally new relationship of mutuality with the feminine in all its forms. The feminine then becomes not that which must be controlled, denied, and exploited, but rather fully acknowledged, respected, and responded to for itself.
— Richard Tarnas
Note to Congressman Yoho.
Tarnas believes that that this is the challenge that “the Western mind has been slowly preparing itself to meet for its entire existence.”
Yin (Feminine, Divergent, Diffuse, Power, Love) and Yang (Masculine, Active, Convergent, Focus, Power)
In a recent article, Theory U author and MIT lecturer Otto Scharmer says that we need to move from a thinking/intellectual frame to a somatic, emotional, spiritual, social framework. He says that our blind spots are grounded in an architecture of separation: of not seeing, not feeling, and not acting. Transforming from this condition of separation will take a different social field, one grounded in an architecture of connection for:
Unconditional WITNESSING, to truly see what is going on
Unconditional LOVE, to truly hold each other
Unconditional COURAGE & CONFIDENCE, to truly support each other.
Brava to Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez for embracing her feminine Yang to harness the energy of the moment in integrity and in a spirit of collaboration to bring forth the new.
