Art by Autumn Skye Morrison “Beloved"
“The union of feminine and masculine energies within the individual is the basis of all creation.
”
The Divine patterning of existence and how to integrate and balance the feminine and masculine principles within ourselves and within our interactions with all of creation.
In order to live a more balance and harmonised life we need to understand how the Divine Feminine and the Divine Masculine expresses and operates in our lives.
The Divine Feminine and Divine Masculine are another way of labelling the energies of “Receiving” vs “Creating”, “Being” vs “Doing”, “Allowing” vs “Acting”.
When we surrender we are accessing the Divine Feminine, so that we’re receiving and allowing the Universe to express the Divine Masculine in creating and doing whatever we’ve surrendered to it.
When we’re in that Energy of surrender it’s when we allow the Universe to take over, declaring, I may not know what to do, but you do. - Not my way, but your way Lord. Greater is He that is in me, than anything that is in the world or anything I may be confronting.
We’re allowing the Masculine energy of God - the Universe to work in us through us for us to do the doing and to act on our behalf. It’s what we often refer to as Divine Intervention.
But for most of us, most of the time, we live as masculine energy. We actively try to make life work our way. We’re the ones doing the doing. We are the ones making decisions, we’re the ones thinking we’re in control. So when we’re in the masculine energy calling the shots it’s then that the Feminine energy takes instruction and is receptive and flowing through the course of our actions. Thus, allowing us to be co-creators and Itself being the Feminine energy in this dynamic.; and allowing us to experience our free will.
We have to be aware of what energy we’re reacting and responding from; so that we can travel this journey called life as whole, integrated spiritual beings. There will be days when we’re totally in alignment with that truth and others when we’re not.
The idea is not that we beat ourselves up, but that we keep coming back to the remembrance, that this is the truth of who we are. We’re here to express the Divine Nature, the Divine Presence, the Divine Being that is us. It’s been buried under so much ‘dirt and grit’ of the world that we forget that our true essence is Light, is Love and is Power.
It is written that God did not give us the Spirit of fear, but of power, love and a sound mind; we need to use these tools of power, love and a sound mind to come back and balance and align our Masculine and Feminine energies so that we can live the life we were meant to live.
Story
Huddled at the back, left-hand corner of a large hall, me and a handful of other women would gather to take part in the Islamic Friday prayer at our university in British Columbia the early 2000s. Meanwhile at the front of the room, where light streamed in from the windows, dozens of young men stood side-by-side in rows. We recited the same prayer, but the gap in our experience was far wider than the swath of carpet separating the masculine and feminine in most Islamic religious spaces. As soon as we would say our final salams, I would dash for the door as quickly as I’d arrived.
Attending congregational prayers — where women are typically relegated to back corner, behind a partition or in a windowless room of a mosque — has always been an awkward and disheartening experience for me. The rigid segregation of religious spaces made me hyper aware of the limitations of my feminine identity, which I realized only years later were imposed on me rather than intrinsic to the tradition. That gnawing sense of discomfort made me ashamed of my girlhood, and eventually my womanhood in ways I can only now begin to articulate.
I was so immersed in patriarchy during my childhood that I assumed messages of faith could be communicated only through the masculine voice. After all, most references I encountered of God were as “He” and all the prophets in Abrahamic traditions were men.
Yet as I got older, my most intimate moments with Allah in personal sacred spaces had an entirely different quality. During early-morning prostrations before my Beloved, I had a deep sense that our connection was beyond constructions of gender and beyond my supposed inferiority. Rather, it was an exchange of energies that was deeply loving and nourishing. Something wasn’t right with the prevailing, masculine narrative of Islam, but I was unable to put my finger on why.
That changed when I became acquainted with the powerful women who have been largely erased from our spiritual histories. Their voices are muffled and faint not because they didn’t exist, but because they’ve been hidden and written out of relevance by patriarchal readings and writings of Islam.
In the past two years, I’ve attended conferences in the U.K. Lake District focused on the theme of awakening the Sacred Feminine within ourselves and the world, including inspired key note addresses by author and spiritual guide Elizabeth Anne Hin. She brought the idea of the “prophetess” alive for me in a way I’d never experienced before.
As she recounted stories of great prophets like Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon them all, I realized the versions I’d been taught severely neglected to honor the role of the feminine in bringing the Divine message to the world.
Jesus couldn’t have emerged as the grace to humanity he was without the blessed Virgin Mary’s bravery and devotion to God. The Prophet Muhammad’s wife Khadija was integral to the revelation of the Quran as she was inspired to tend to, nurture and support him so that he could bear the message of grace. “It was the two of them together who were held to receive the blessing of God,’’ Elizabeth said.
In describing the story of Abraham, she highlighted how he brought to the world a message of the Oneness of humanity through two women — Sarah and Hagar — each nurturing a son to bring a different faith and language to name that universal Oneness. But instead of realizing the underlying unity that Abraham’s family represented, “we created armor,” Elizabeth says. “Now the work is how do we hold the two mothers, and the father and the two boys so the weapons come down.”
In the story of Moses, three women — his birth mother, Pharaoh’s wife and his birth sister — worked together selflessly, without competition or deceit or treachery, to “hold one boy to move forward as a father of all humanity.’’ Elizabeth revealed to me the ways prophetic history is rich in descriptions of the embodiment of feminine and masculine energies in action. More importantly, though, this interplay between the Prophetess and Prophet is a metaphor for our inner experience as human beings comprising both feminine and masculine energies. I’d never really thought about how the two coalesced in me before, yet hearing it somehow made sense intrinsically.
The feminine energy is the receptive part of me, and all of us, that’s open to surrendering to what is, to being in the moment. It does not seek power or control, yet like the prophetess, it is the inspiration imbuing that which is power. The masculine is the actor that embodies the gesture generated by the feminine, the doer. When in harmony, there’s a natural ebb and flow of the feminine receiving and masculine acting.
Unfortunately, the feminine has been so devalued for centuries that a false masculinity dominates, driven by our deepest insecurities and fears. It’s that part of me that is defensive, that wants to control events and people, to accumulate possessions and that prompts those around me to put up their armor.
The devaluation of the Sacred Feminine in men and women not only damages our inner experience and relationships, it leads to the degradation of nature, war, the abuse of women, and the exclusion of the feminine from influence.
“The heroine in most people has been thirsty for a very long time,” Elizabeth said, urging men and women to “open her up to simply receive grace and then embody it. There’s a great deal of argument around the world. What I observe occurring in that argument is the incomplete understanding of how to let the Sacred Feminine move through us.’’
The Sacred Feminine is wise, creative, life-giving and in contact with her intuition and heart. When I allow her to flow through me, I am receptive, nurturing, empathetic, resilient, patient and open to receiving and embodying grace in the moment.
When she is present, the Sacred Masculine, which is guided toward qualities such as courage and honor instead of conflict and suffering, has space to unfold within me. Those around me feel secure enough to put their figurative weapons down. Arguments, defensiveness and negativity are replaced with understanding, unity and the ability to see the Divine in each other. We encourage one another to live from our highest selves, beyond competition, envy, pride and vanity.
While our shared spiritual histories have long placed a great deal of emphasis on the stories of the heros, the heroine has always been there, intrinsic and essential to the narrative. Each step I take to embody her in my life today is, for me, a step toward writing her-story back into history.
~ Daliah Merzaban
Sacred Text
Know the masculine
while you hold
to the feminine,|
and you will be
a valley to the world.
Lao Tzu describes two coinciding movements here - "knowing" and "holding to." Befitting their proper operation, it is the feminine which has as its particular task the "knowing" of the masculine. And the masculine has as its special task the "holding to" the feminine.
For the sage theses two energies occur upon the instant. There is no "first this, and then that." Occurring upon the instant, a sages' action is spontaneous. From the outside these action appears to "just happen."
"Knowing the masculine" and "holding to the feminine," is original to us, just as it is with all of nature. But unlike ourselves, in nature the relations between masculine and feminine are largely involuntary. A hallmark of humans is that we are choosers. We may choose to follow our masculine and feminine
Poem - “To Be A Woman” by Alice Walker
To be a woman
Does not mean
To Wear
A shroud;
The feminine
Is not
Dead
Nor is she
Sleeping
Angry, yes,
Seething, yes.
Biding her time; Yes.
Yes.
Science of Mind Reading
BODY MEDITATION
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PRAYER OF INTENTION
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MOVEMENT PRAYER #4
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BUDDHIST REFLECTION
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Women’s History Month; Ada Lovelace (1815 – 1852)
“That brain of mine is something more than merely mortal; as time will show.”
Ada Lovelace was an English Mathematician and the world’s first computer programmer. Lovelace was born into privilege as the daughter of a famously unstable romantic poet Lord Byron (who left her family when Ada was just 2 months old) and Lady Wentworth.
Ada was a charming woman of society was friends with people such as Charles Dickens but she is most famous for being the first person ever to publish an algorithm intended for a computer, her genius being years ahead of her time.
Lovelace died of cancer at 36, and it took nearly a century after her death for people to appreciate her notes on Babbage’s Analytical Engine, which became recognised as the first description for computer and software, ever.
Rumination
“God is never seen immaterially; and the vision of Him in (a) woman is the most perfect of all.”
Rumi