Dear Wise Women,
I lovingly share with you the various readings and sharing of today (and some that I did not share) so that you may integrate them at a deeper level, should doing so speak to you.
BALANCING THE MASCULINE AND FEMININE IN YOU
(re-sharing…just because it feels so important)
“We each have within us both masculine and feminine energies. While your sex indicates what energies you chose to focus on in this life, we still embody both.
As we are coming out of 5000 years of patriarchy, where the unbalanced masculine has been the focus, it is important to note that the unbalanced feminine can be just as destructive.
Just as the sacred feminine’s anger has been silenced through patriarchy, the sacred masculine’s ability to express emotion and recognize his divinity has too.
As we recover from patriarchy, it is important not to aspire to its polar opposite - patriarchy to matriarchy. Rather, let’s bring the sacred masculine and sacred feminine energies back into balance. As the sacred feminine rises, may the sacred masculine rise along with Her.”
To further our understanding of the balancing of Feminine and Masculine, let us explore the basic laws of nature and the workings of the one original energy, the Tao.
We Are Made of the Life Energy Signal - Chi
“Each one of us is endowed with a piece of the one original energy, the Tao. This energy, through a series of transformations, becomes our Chi.
Our body is made of dust (material), which is amassed and propelled by the invisible force and activities of Chi. When you see the physical form of a friend, you are not seeing the real her, but only the material from which she is made.
Have you had the experience of attending a funeral or wake? If you were able to gaze upon the corpse of the person you once knew, you could easily see that “they” were no longer there. The force that animated their body held the real person you knew, not the lifeless material in the casket.
Similarly, you might claim to have seen a tornado either in real life or on television. But actually, you did not “see” the tornado. What you saw was merely the debris that the tornado churned up and held together in form. The actual force we call a tornado was the invisible part you could not see that held the whirling debris together and gave it power.
Similarly, it is our Chi that holds us together, animates us, and makes us who were really are. It is our true self. It is the source of consciousness, awareness, and life. Without it, nothing lives.
While our invisible life force signal, Chi, is in orderly action, life thrives and well-being abounds. Conversely, when this signal of the life force, Chi, is in decay, becoming weak, or in the process of disintegrating, the “life” of the material body is in a chaotic state. When Chi deteriorates, suffering predominates, even leading to death.
Since this life energy signal is composed of the memory of the cosmic force, it can behave only according to the law of its nature: it is always in motion, transient, and dynamically playful. These are the same characteristics of the one universal energy from which your Chi came.
Because of its likeness and affinity to the original cosmic force, our life energy signal is capable of harmonizing with that original cosmic force. Our life energy can tune into the signal of the original natural force and follow its direction. It can harmonize with the One-chi in order to continue, to multiply, to adjust to changes, to fine-tune itself, to adapt, and to “survive”.
Your Chi will always seek to harmonize itself and will always seek balance as best it can. It will cause you to take action that will bring harmony and balance to your life and body. The degree to which your Chi signal can maintain its integrity and clear reception of the original One-chi signal is the extent to which your Chi is able to succeed in maintaining harmony and the force of life within your body. The degree to which your Chi signal is confused, weakened, and off-balance is due to factors that muffle and block the signal from the One-chi.
One of the biggest factors leading towards Chi imbalance is the use of our mind. When Chi, the life energy signal, converts into a mental signal, it is gradually depleted and weakened. ”
It is not the mind itself that is the problem, it is the activity of the identified and trapped mind, or what Micheal Singer calls the voice in our head. This negative and destructive voice in our head is the single most destructive factor leading towards Chi imbalance. Given this, many of us have been inclined to try to stop our mind from thinking or certainly to rid ourselves of negative thoughts. If you’ve ever tried this you can attest that this approach, especially when motivated by control, never works! But there is another way. When we view our thoughts with COMPASSION, gently WITNESS them, and SOFTEN to them an inner alchemy occurs. Loving-kindness and benevolent curiosity has the power to restore harmony and return any imbalance to its true nature.
Who better to guide us to compassion and mercy than Kuan Yin?
“To know Kuan Yin we need to let go of all that is unloved, judged, forged from old mind clingings. She is the unconditional love beyond the conditioned mind”
- Steven Levine
SOFTENING INTO PAIN
“It is said that nothing is true until we have experienced it, so as an experiment in sending healing into an area where fear has displaced acceptance, we use the occasion of moderate pain to test the truth of softening and the power of mercy to cultivate a lifeline to healing.
As an experiment in compassion and the cultivation of mercy, one might consider focusing one’s attention on a slight wound or burn, softening about it and sending loving-kindness into the injury. Note any thought hindrances that arise to limit such an exercise. These are the wrathful deities in angel’s garb misguiding us to defend ourselves against such absurd ideas as sending love into pain. The wrong-headed guardians of our pain that maintain hopelessness and helplessness, isolating discomfort from the sympathetic incursion of a healing mercy.
Notice the changes that go on in the synaptic field, softening, releasing the tightening, breathing mercy into the pain, opening the conduit to the heart, making us wonder how love turned up in a place like this!
Comparing the healing of an injury into which mercy was sent with a similar one left to its own devices, which healed faster?
Approaching the calcified ring of resistance around our pain, which limits the penetration of healing, we soften to the fear that congregates around difficulty. Releasing the tightening that intensifies pain before it recedes further into its suffering.
Softening reveals our inherent capacity for mercy, the very personal relief from the teachings in compassion.
The heart whispers, “May I get the most out of this as possible. May we be freed from the grasping around our pain as mercy gradually infiltrates our pain?”
Recognizing that this working with physical pain parallels the healing of mental discomfort, we release the tension (aversion/resistance) around such fulminations, softening from the edge inward. Trust and patience blossoming in our merciful consciousness. Courage entering further.
Softening is a physical trigger for the mental state of letting go.
We cultivate this softening in the belly in the moment-to-moment letting go of what hinders the heart. When fear, pride, or doubt, aversion or anger, reflections of a lifetime of holding rise in a merciful consciousness, it mindfully and heart fully watches these afflictive thoughts dissipate into the eternity from which they came.”
THE BELLY OF COMPASSION
“Bring your attention into the sensation in the body. Just feel what sits here. Feel this body you were born into. Allow awareness to come to the level of sensation in the body.
Gradually allow your attention to drop into the abdomen. And begin to soften to the sensations in the belly. Softening the belly to receive the breath. Softening the belly to receive life. Softening to any resistance. no holding. No grasping in soft belly. Letting go of the hardness in the belly. Practicing “merciful belly”.
Moment to moment softening the belly. Moment to moment making room for your life.
Don’t try to grasp or trap the breath, to shape or control it. Just let it be.
Surrender to the breath, softening the belly from moment to moment.
In soft belly is the release of the posturing of a lifetime. All the grief hidden hard in the belly. Have mercy. Letting the hardness float in the belly.
Levels and levels of softening. Levels and levels of letting go. Levels and levels of letting be.
The belly fatigued with its holding, with its mercilessness to itself. Have mercy. Just for this moment at least, soften to this ancient clinging. In a new mercy. In a new willingness to heal. Have mercy on this mercilessness.
Each in breath, belly rising. Each out breath, belly falling. Rising and falling, let your breath breathe itself. Letting go of control, trust the breath to breathe all by itself.
Each breath breathing itself in soft belly. In soft belly we have room for it all. Even room for our pain. Room to get born, room even to die in soft belly, in merciful belly.
Levels and levels of softening. Levels and levels of letting go.”
Todays movement practice was all about softening and allowing the natural harmonization of the opposites, the masculine and feminine, in our emotional and physical body.
A note about our defences (paraphrased from Pamela Wilson):
“Our defences (the body guards) think they’re protecting us from contrasts and shocks and in doing so they limit our experience of love. But these defences don’t really work, we still feel the same pain the same. And its exhausting. TO MAINTAIN CONTRACTION IN A WORLD OF EXPANSION IS EXHAUSTING.
So as you notice yourself contracting (or notice evidence of contraction such as tightness or anxiety) you can simply THANK the defences and report back to them that you are “SAFE”.
Remember that the defences true nature is rooted strength and they long to return to their true nature. ”
With love,
Patti