Balancing Inner Masculine and Feminine Energies on the Way to Inner Union
Pat’s and Gary’s Coffee Time – Wednesday, 1/15/14
Gary: Let’s pick up from where we left off yesterday. Pat: Yes. I said I wanted more of your Life Force present in our relationship and you spoke of the fear that comes up in you at the mere thought of bringing your Life Force, with all of its spontaneous creativity and energy, into our relationship. I acknowledged that of course this was true because my killer energy was right there to annihilate your Life Force if it showed up. I could feel my killer energy that arises in me and comes out toward you, toward us, and toward my own self, killing the Life Force wherever it shows up. You called this “Killer of the Life Force” energy emasculating energy, and that word “emasculating” triggered me. That’s where we left off.
Gary: I’m assuming you are associating emasculating with “killing the sexual masculine.” This is not what I mean. Let me explain what I mean by emasculating energy. I am not using this word to mean the killing off my masculine sexual energy. I see the Life Force, in its broadest sense, as the Erotic force, the way the Pathwork lectures speak of Eros and the Life Force being one energy. So I see this Erotic force as the energy motivates all creativity and manifestation, not just sexual creativity and manifestation.
Gary (continued): So I say, for example, that I feel emasculated by the church when the church does not welcome my unique and powerful spiritual energy. I feel judged a heretic when I deviate from strict fundamentalist Christian dogma and that judgment causes me to shut down my spiritual curiosity and development when I am in the presence of conservative Christians. I feel like an outsider and not understood or welcomed.
Gary (continued): The issue in this case is not the energy coming at me but rather my lack of courage in facing such killer energy. I say I want the Church to encourage my spiritual development, but when the Church can’t do this because of its adherence to strict orthodoxy then I walk away, tail between my legs. Rather I need to have my inner courage and continue my pursuit of my spiritual development on my own – which I have done these past 20 years – rather than look to the Church to provide encouragement from the outside. Yes, I walk away, but not with my tail between my legs in humiliation. I need masculine positive aggression to pursue my spiritual Call from within and not be intimidated by the Church or other outside influences.
Gary (continued): This is true when I was in the Mid-Atlantic Pathwork organization as well. I did not sense that my vision and approaches were welcomed, and instead of standing strong behind my sense of things I would collapse. Of course part of this was laziness on my part as well. In this situation with MAP, too, as with church, I was succumbing to emasculating forces coming at me. In this case, in my weariness, I resigned because I did not feel adequately aligned with where we were going organizationally. I continue to be a strong Pathworker, just not one able to be in leadership in MAP at this time. I would say I left the Church for the same reason – I just did not feel aligned with where it was going organizationally or, in this case, doctrinally. So today I am free of organizational influences on my spiritual growth. I’ve created my own motivation and spiritual development program. Increasingly I can feel OK in having done this. It has been a late but necessary time of individuation, of finding and following my bliss, as Joseph Campbell would say.
Gary (continued): So this is the broader sense in which I am using the word “emasculating” when I describe the “Killer Energy” coming toward me in the sexual aspects of our relationship. But again, this is not your issue. It is my issue to stand strong in the presence of such killer energy. I think that here we have found a life issue for me: identifying and dissolving the patterns, images, wrong conclusions, and other blocks to my Life Force so that I can stand strong in my own positive aggression and manifest life from within my Essence.
Pat: In my feminine body I was torn to shreds at a very young age, my feminine Life Force was arrested at age four or five. Today the masculine and feminine in me are out of whack. Sometimes we say I have too much masculine and that my masculine and feminine are out of balance. But what does this “out-of-balance” mean? I need to know this if I am to move toward balance. Only as I come to balance within myself and you come into balance within yourself can WE come into balance as a couple – the balanced masculine and feminine in each of us separately coming into Union.
Pat (continued): In my spiritual practice we call the Mind of Awareness the highest level of consciousness – the Christ consciousness or Buddha nature. Mind of Awareness is each of us in our Essence. But before we reach this state we must deal with the balance and union of the masculine and feminine within us. Gary: Yes, Pathwork suggests that the male/female split within us is the final split that must be healed if we are to come into inner Union. Pat: So we have practices for this balancing of the masculine and feminine within us in order to build the capacity of our vessel to hold the bright white light of Union. Without going into these practices per se (they are esoteric) I think it is helpful to look at how some of this is languaged.
As inner male and inner female we each have outer qualities and inner qualities that arise from our inner male and female aspects. From our inner female aspect outer qualities of Wisdom and Sensitivity arise energetically from inner qualities of Compassion and Power. From our inner male aspect it is just the opposite: outer qualities of Compassion and Power arise energetically from inner qualities of Wisdom and Sensitivity. When our female aspects are out of balance because of dualistic perceptions, we are weak, aimless, and subject to manipulation. When our male aspects are out of balance because of dualistic perceptions, we are aggressive, intolerant, and manipulative. It takes years of work with these practices to approach balancing some of these energies, but this is the idea and I think we can see some of that playing here in our relationship.
Gary: So the distorted masculine and feminine energies are the killer energies of the Life Force. Pat: Right. Gary: I can see my killer energies arising from my distorted masculine as my self-will (negative aggression), ranting (intolerance of anything that stands in the way of what I think is “right”), and seduction to get my way no matter what (manipulation). And my killer energies arising from my distorted feminine include laziness (weakness), ambivalence (aimlessness), and weary indifference (subject to manipulation by others). And I can see the consequences of these distortions prevalent throughout my life – in school, social relating, intimate relating with women, career, church, many organizations in which I was involved, and in my own spiritual development.
Pat: I can feel the killer energy that arises in me to kill the Life Force in you. It’s got to be my masculine distortion – negative aggression toward the male arising in me in part out of childhood incidents I can identify – older boys stealing my bike, for example, and so on. Gary: The distorted feminine in me feels the killer energy coming at her and feels weak, aimless and subject to manipulation. And also the distorted masculine in me kills the Life Force in me.
Pat: Quite a bit to sit with here – plenty in the field. At the end of our coffee time here when we’ve been allowed to enter a deeper dimension and explore and investigate what’s here – we just have to take a few minutes to hold in our hearts kindness and mercy towards ourselves and towards all beings suffering in this arena. We are doing this work to free ourselves and all sentient beings. (While putting out the candle on our altar…) We are the Christ Light. Gary: As was Jessica whose funeral we attended Saturday – the Christ Light while she was here on the planet.
Shared in love, Gary