Balancing the Masculine~Embracing our Shadows

“the masculine is an archetypal force; it is not a gender. Like the feminine, it is a creative force that lives within all men and women.”

When this masculine force within us gets out of balance, it becomes rigid and dominating. When it is wounded it is driven to hold on to its perception of reality, and becomes an inner tyrant to our feminine, our intuition, feelings, and body.

“The only way a woman can heal this imbalance within herself is to bring the light of consciousness into the darkness. She must be willing to face and name her shadow tyrant and let it go.”

“The challenge of the heroine is not one of conquest but acceptance, of accepting her nameless, unloved parts that have become tyrannical because she has left them unchecked. We can’t go through life blindly. We have to examine all of the conflicting parts of ourselves. Each one of us has dragons lurking in the shadows.”

“The challenge according to Edward Whitmont, requires ‘the strength to sustain awareness and the suffering of conflict and to be able to surrender oneself to it.’ It is the job of the heroine to enlighten the world by loving it-starting with herself.”

She continues by saying that since many of us have adopted this masculine archetypal energy as the dominating force of our psyche, we have adapted a perfectionist attitude which has little tolerance for what is less than perfect. So it makes it incredibly painful to be able to look at or even accept our shadows because of this fierce striving to be perfect.

She makes the point that perfection doesn’t allow your to embrace the whole picture, or to ever feel whole because if you are perfect you cannot be complete, because you must leave out all the imperfections of your nature. So this regimented perfectionist masculine energy which becomes dominant does not allow for the recognition of the imperfect parts of ourselves! And guess what, we all have them!

The key is gentle acceptance of all of it. Through reverence, gentleness lovingness of ourselves in our unflattering forms we shatter the illusion and regain balance and wholeness.

“The ego acknowledges itself as but a recipient and channel of a destiny flowing from a deep, mysterious ground of being which is the source of both terror and revulsion as well as the beautiful play of life.”

She also speaks of moving beyond duality because,

“f you take sides you are trying to eliminate half of reality which is impossible. It is an illusion to think you can have right without left”

In our process of growth and evolution, we must shatter “the shell of our old understanding”, as Kahlil Gibran eloquently said centuries ago. This breaking of the shell is often perceived by the dominant masculine in our psyche as painful, but it need not be so, and this understanding of the process of our evolution is crucial for healing and wholeness.

SHIFT that old way of processing and realize that we all have room to grow. Be grateful for being able to see yourself in these less than perfect moments, and acknowledge these places within yourself as places where the LIGHT must shine.

Do not be afraid of the LIGHT illuminating the darkness. We can no longer allow aspects of ourselves to live in the shadows, for in order to be whole we need to embrace ourselves in all of our totality, we must love those unloved parts that have been keep in darkness. It is the only way to move forward, with gentleness~~~~

~MM